Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
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Kind: captions Language: en um so ninety years later they’re once again printing their own wooden dollars to pass out to members of the community [Music] everyone this is Zach here with Mike waters he’s our newest writer at the hustle and Michael this week you wrote a really interesting Sunday story about this small town in Washington that created its own currency tell me a little bit about this place and why they started doing this yeah so the town is called to 9 o laughington it’s out in the woods it was known as like this big lumber hub in the early 1900s and one of its claims to fame in the world and especially in the u.s. is the fact that during the Great Depression it had started its own currency and they printed be sort of like fake dollar bills that were on slick thin wooden blocks and they pass it out to members of the community in the early 1930s after one of their only town banks closed down and so people were out of money people were desperate and so they basically started up their own currency back in the 1930s and it was a huge hit to the point where people still collect these like wooden to nine o dollars that are not like legal currency in the federal sense and now though I mean we’re facing another unprecedented like economic catastrophe this town they know their history very well in the mayor of this town is basically trying to bring back that program for 2020 so ninety years later they’re once again printing their own wooden dollars to pass out to them to the community and they were even using like the same reason like a hundred and thirty year old printer as their mint right yeah yeah in the 1930s it was originally printed on this like newspaper printer from 1890 so even then it was kind of old and and they’re using the same exact mint right now to print their currency basically and one reason for that is just the like historical value and the other reason is like even the best forger is probably not gonna do a great job of forging something printed like on an 1890 newspaper printer so it’s a little proof so they’re starting with a first printing of around $10,000 what’s kind of their general plan for for distributing this what’s their vision and who is he gonna help exactly yeah so this money again is gonna be distributed not using like US federal dollars but using this like own local wooden currency so the idea behind that first of all is that because this currency only is really like accepted in tune I know you can’t go off spending that money anywhere like Amazon is not gonna take your wooden dollars from tonight oh so it’s a way to keep the money local and they are targeting especially with this initial ten thousand dollar printing they’re targeting low-income residents who’ve been affected by the pandemic so to qualify you have to prove that you’re below the poverty line and that you’ve been affected in some way by these last few months um and they’re pretty they’re pretty open to how that latter part of like whether you’ve been affected is defined and so if you qualify you get a stipend from within the ten thousand dollars and I should also I should also clarify here that this is a town of like eighteen hundred people so ten thousand dollars does go a long way and if it’s only targeting a certain population within this community um so although it might not seem much on the scale of a larger city it does mean a lot in a town like this and yeah and basically every business in town is locally run and so almost every business has signed up to accept this money and so people who are given out the wooden dollars can spend it anywhere in town and like I said because it’s not official US dollars it’s a way to ensure that the money stays local in is boosting local businesses who have also been impacted by the pandemic sure so it’s got this kind of twofold effect of helping these businesses that have kind of been beleaguered by the pandemic but also helping provide some kind of recourse for low-income residents right exactly and um you also touched on on a number of other you found tons of examples of other towns doing this internationally which which I thought were really interesting what what is the is this something that might be used in effectively in other towns like I know there’s been a little bit of research done on on the effectiveness of local currencies you touch on that a little bit yeah um the research as it stands is a little bit complicated it is really hard to find like exact cause and effects with something like this because there’s so many factors at play it’s hard to measure exactly to what extent local currencies like this help economic recoveries which is especially what they were designed for but the evidence from research see it seems to be cautiously positive ID probably summarize it which is to say that there are in about like half of the cases there are signs that local currencies have some sort of positive impact on local businesses and on getting people spending and then another half of cases according to one study are kind of inconclusive and it’s certainly something that has worked in different places more than others around the world there are plenty of stories especially from the great depression of local currencies like dramatically cutting jobless rates in a certain region while like in the larger country for instance jobless rates might go up and so I mean again it’s it’s hard to tease out exactly links sometimes but there’s plenty of evidence the evidence is like I said cautiously positive I would say sure sure well this is a really interesting story and if you guys want to read it be sure to check out our email on Sunday thanks a lot Michael preciate your time yeah thank you [Applause]