The legal practitioner and social innovator Edgar Cahn proposed that the currency of our ‘core economy’ was, quite simply, time – the precious, finite resource that we invest into our families, friends and communities – a concept which he dubbed the ‘Time Dollar’. He set up the Time Dollar Institute in the 1980s, which pioneered the use of time dollars in the areas of youth justice and legal aid, wherein recipients of legal advice paid in time dollars, accumulated by spending time on projects that were of benefit to the neighbourhoods surrounding the law school.