Is the "time bank" the antidote to the difficulty of old-age care? Side effects are great: tragedy of the commons, intergenerational damage

Under the trend of aging, the time bank must not be able to make ends meet in the intergenerational level. In fact, there is this problem in the old-age security system of all countries. (ICphoto/Photo)

A few days ago, the Red Cross Foundation of China and the Institute of Population Research of Peking University jointly released the "Research Report on the Development of China Time Bank", which selected 54 time banking institutions in 20 provinces in China as research cases.

The advocate of the time bank is the American Edgar Kahn, who volunteers to participate in public service, keeping "service time in the bank", and when you encounter difficulties, you can exchange the time bank for time to be served by others. This model links "time" and "good" and advocates that community members actively use their spare time to help those in need.

Time Bank has appeared in more than thirty countries, and there are more than a thousand different organizations or institutions called "Time Bank" around the world. China's aging degree is deepening, many people have high hopes for the time bank, hoping to set up a time bank to serve the elderly in the community, advocate the concept of "serving today, enjoy tomorrow", so that young people, prospective elderly and healthy elderly people can use leisure time to provide necessary services for the elderly in exchange for others to serve themselves in the future.

At present, in China, the time bank has not yet formed a scale, and there are only a few areas where there is a time bank, and it is independent, and the "account" cannot be deposited and exchanged. China's urban population turnover rate is high, and after serving the elderly for a few hours in one place, there is no point in checking the time bank to other places. This is also a problem with the time banks of various countries. The "Volunteer Labor Time Bank" that first introduced the concept of time bank into Taiwan was established for more than ten years, and there were only 11 "extractions", the main reason being that the volunteer stations were not dense enough.

But the bigger challenge is that the labor of time bank "storage" is non-standardized and difficult to convert.

In the time bank, should labor distinguish between types and nobles? According to the concept of time banking, it seems that there should be no distinction, and everyone's working hours are equal. In fact, some time banks now provide each volunteer with a check indicating the payment of time. Offer help to someone else yourself and accept a check. In turn, others help themselves by paying a check to others themselves. Such checks do not distinguish between labor.

However, the labor structure in the time bank will obviously be limited by the social post structure, that is, there is more simple labor and less complex labor. Can a person exchange the time spent helping an elderly person wash dishes for more scarce teaching time? When 100 workers who provide dishwashing services need the services of 1 professor, who decides who should get the services?

If in the time bank, labor is divided into types and nobles, then how many hours of one-hour medical service can be exchanged for several hours of dishwashing service? Who decides this ratio? If all labor were equal, there would be people who would exchange inferior services for high-quality services.

None of this has happened yet, perhaps in part because the time bank is not large enough. The first people who entered the Time Bank were people with a strong sense of public welfare or a high level of economy and education. As banks grew larger over time, tragedies in the commons and the expulsion of good money by bad money were inevitable.

This is only the current labor exchange problem, considering that the pension is the interchange of labor on the scale of 30 years, and the aging will become more and more serious, and this uncertainty is even greater.

There are relatively many young people today, and through mobilization to stimulate people's hearts and minds, as well as the inducement of "services that can be extracted in the future", young people can be persuaded to provide services for the elderly and obtain "checks" for future withdrawal. But in another 30 years, when these young people become older, fewer will be able to provide services. The amount of labor that such a cheque can actually extract is greatly impaired.

For example, there are 1,000 people in the community, of which the elderly account for 10%, the young account for 60%, and the children account for 30%. Young people provide 10 hours of service per person, and the elderly can get more services, a total of 6,000 hours. 30 years later, because of aging, the first generation of the elderly passed away, when young people became old, accounting for 60%, the proportion of young people fell to 30%, and only 10% of children. At this time, the elderly asked to withdraw the 6,000 hours of service they had saved that year, but the young people each provided 10 hours of service, a total of only 3,000 hours. This is equivalent to a discount on a check. Today's young people, with an hour of labor, can only be exchanged for half an hour in 30 years. Only the first generation of the elderly, who only enjoyed service and did not pay labor, took advantage.

This model is relatively simple, and the reality is that the storage and extraction of labor is uninterrupted, and the loss is continuous, gradual, and occurs on a long-term scale. As long as the trend of population aging does not change, everyone except the first generation will be discounted in labor. This is true of a community's time bank, and it is also true of a country's time bank.

Therefore, under the trend of aging, the time bank must not be able to make ends meet in the intergenerational level. In fact, there is this problem in the old-age security system of all countries. For the old-age security system based on national credit, the state will take various ways to free up and repair. But with a voluntary-based time bank, this space will be much smaller.

So, if Time Bank can successfully replicate on a large scale, which is a successful business model in itself, there will be a large platform covering the whole country with amazing valuations. Conversely, if the kindness of the participants is relied upon alone, the time bank will not have the possibility of large-scale success.

Of course, within the community, based on the kindness of people, mutual help, and even the mentality of not asking for returns, time banks still have positive significance on a small scale. To a certain extent, it can be used as an important platform and tool for community governance and coping with population aging, but it should be understood that it does not have the self-consistent logic of large-scale operation.

(The author is a researcher at Shanghai Academy of Finance and Law)

(This article is only the author's personal opinion and does not represent the position of this newspaper)

Liu Yuanju