[evanwarfel]

There's a difference between re-defining one's local monetary system to use 'chunks of time' instead of money, and variably pricing select goods and services in terms of 'how much money you make in an hour.'

The former scheme is hard because time, as the Ithaca HOURS currency experiment shows, isn't exactly fungible in the same way that money is. Being able to redeem 'an hour' assumes that all people can do the same level of work at all tasks.

The latter, however, requires a different way of thinking about pricing.

For instance, service providers might set their rates as multiples of one's hourly wage: a tennis teacher might charge 1x, a pro-tennis teacher might charge 3x, and a low-income psychotherapist might charge .85x... Such a scheme could work with a sufficient number of clients -- essentially one is sampling from the income distribution -- but the system is more equitable to income differences.

From this point, one can think of more complex schemes, like a non-linear mapping function that can prevent high-income individuals for paying drastically more than others.

Yes, one big issue is one of trust and verification of income... but if it were a culturally accepted practice, it could work. The other issue is the incentive to only target high-income people. Perhaps there could be a set of tax breaks for those whose distribution of client's incomes met some basic requirements.

[freeone3000]

The second one we've decided is called "dollars", and is the usual mechanism of exchange in a society.