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The results were startling, validating the housing first model and showing that the cost of housing the homeless was far less than the cost of the emergency services needed by the homeless while they were living on the street.“The reduction in days in jail alone pays for the program,” said Jaime Rogers, a Medicine Hat housing official. She cited studies that said the average homeless person costs taxpayers 120,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $91,600, in services, while it costs just 18,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $13,740, to house someone and provide the necessary retention support.That kind of evidence persuaded the conservative government of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper to pursue housing first as a national policy.

If it works, then why in the world are we not basing our whole economy on the finite construct of “time”? It would nearly be infallible, versus the legacy commodities model, which is full of holes and reject-able logic.A “time based economy” can be used with any nation state, group, or community based economics model. To make it simple, the value at the transaction would be time dollars in the form of a digital debit.

In the time based economy, each person enrolled, anywhere in the world would have an online account which is controlled by the debit card (not a citizenship card).

The time based economy primarily functions through the education, civics, and knowledge sector.

There is scope, in better delivery of work support, to challenge the atomisation and isolation of workers and the loss of social capital and networks of new working models. The precarity of insecure work needs to be addressed, rather than exacerbated, by the systems set up to support people through their working lives. In roles where working hours are flexible or unpredictable, the division between private and public lives can be complex. The interaction between the individual and the state needs to understand that complexity and support people to navigate through their working lives rather than leaving them without a compass or adequate map.

The only thing that still holds us equal as humans is our available time to spend in this world — money can’t really buy that. There is a day / night cycle, we all need 8 hours of sleep etc, there cannot be a dramatic contrast between how much one person engages with certain products over the next person. Surely then, our economy should be based precisely on that.

In this model, statistics of usage would be recorded, money owed for electricity gets calculated in proportion as to what gadgets were used and therefore how much of it goes to the maker. Within certain devices there could be fractional sub-charges for the software used in them that would go straight to the developers and so on.For any individual, this allows them to find the perfect equilibrium in their working vs. leisure/care time as the more they work the less time/capital they have to spend for certain items and the other way around.