Andrew Yang is a politician, an entrepreneur, an author. We've had him on the show a

few times, most recently to talk about voting reform in an episode called Why Don't We Have Better Candidates for President.

He is enthusiastic about voting reform, especially open primaries and ranked choice voting.

He's also enthusiastic about the idea of a universal basic income, which he brought to mainstream

attention when he ran for president in 2020. Yang is enthusiastic about a lot of interesting ideas, which is a big reason

I like speaking with him. One of these ideas is something that I'm enthusiastic about too. This idea has been around for a while, but it's still pretty

obscure. So today on Freakingomics radio, we would like to give it a bit of exposure and maybe it'll catch fire. This idea has a variety of

names so I asked Andrew Yang what he likes to call it. I've been using multi-variate economy but that is sexy yeah

multi-variate economy okay but we can use time banking it's probably the most

popular time banking can also be banking it's probably the most popular.

Time banking can also be known as time dollars or human dollars or labor certificates.

The idea is pretty straightforward. You set up a system in which people agree to use

time as a measure of value, not replacing money, but creating a parallel human-centered economy.

You can imagine it being a time barter system on steroids enabled by modern technology.

Talk about the mechanics of it, how it would actually work. Maybe just give one example, how this

human dollar, let's call it, gets spent and shared. What are the tasks that create the value?

So I put myself out there and say, hey guys, I'm not good at a lot of things. But I am good at

tutoring kids in middle school math and reading. So if anyone needs a tutor for this I'm going to be your person.

And you say I'm offering X number of hours a week?

Yes, I'm offering X number of hours a week here's where I'm located if you

take me up on this and then I show up and then you sign off and say yes he

actually did show up and he did a good job and here's a picture of him with my

...