Both our economic and political systems need to be founded on the natural laws that govern life and our universe. The rotation of the Earth around its axis and the orbiting around the Sun will constrain how much solar energy plants can capture at a specific location in a given time period. This means that the amount of physical energy or life force our planet receives from the Sun is both finite and regenerative and can be measured as a function of time.

Defining what time actually is continues to confound humanity, as no single operable or exhaustive explanation for it exists. Curious as it may seem, time is something that we can both experience and measure, but its existence cannot be conclusively proven by physics. Our perspective, perched on this constantly moving planet, is probably the reason we even experience the passage of time in the first place.

According to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, time is relative. As our speed increases, time slows down to the extent that at the speed of light, time stops. This means that from the perspective of the photon that travels from the Sun to the Earth in 8 minutes and 20 seconds, this journey happens instantaneously. The very moment the photon is born, it hits the Earth.

Time is bound together with the three other dimensions, width, height and depth, as spacetime. Yet time, this so-called fourth dimension, differs from all the other dimensions in a fundamental way, as we can seemingly only travel it in one direction, from the present into the future, but not back again. A fundamental reason for this irreversibility is entropy. An ice cube can spontaneously melt in a glass but never reconstitute itself spontaneously.

What makes time so confounding is that while physics constantly uses time as a fundamental measuring unit to make its calculations, the laws of physics are “time reversible,” which means that all laws of physics would still hold true even if the arrow of time could move backward, from the future to the past. Some quantum physicists even argue that time is just an illusion, created by human experience and our specific position in the solar system.

Be that as it may, time is a highly useful measuring unit, and a fundamental feature of the universe as we experience it. The flow of time is the same for everybody. On planet Earth, it can’t be twisted, broken or manipulated by anybody. Time is perhaps the most useful universal measurement that we can use as an anchor for the shared rules we create. Time is a valuable commodity, and all of us have exactly the same amount of it in a day, a week and a year. Within our ecosystem, time is unchanged and eternal.

As a commodity, time is also highly egalitarian. It is both scarce and abundant at the same time. These qualities just happen to correspond to the attributes we seek in a solid monetary system. To ward off inflation, our money supply has to be scarce, but to provide abundance for its users, it also has to be regenerative.

By anchoring our monetary system in time, we create the basis for a successful economic system. When every citizen is granted the exact same amount of time and money in a week, we have achieved something that all good systems should be based on: equality of opportunity.

The question then becomes, what do you do with the equal time and the equal money that you are given? Do you spend your time to earn more money, or do you save your time, settle for what the basic income provides, and pursue immaterial interests instead? With this basic question, a simple marketplace will emerge, where some individuals choose to hold onto their time while others trade it for natural resources in the form of additional goods and services.

In a finite world where our ecological footprint should be reduced, it makes perfect sense to award the right to consume more natural resources to those who serve others with their labor. Conversely, those who abstain from consuming additional natural resources can rightfully be awarded more time to pursue their immaterial interests.

One of the main objections against a universal basic income has always been the claim that if people are given money for free, they will not want to work. But in a world where our task is to reduce our material footprint, idleness is better than doing wrong things. By reorienting our economy, the hope is that many of the trivial and destructive endeavors will be brought to an end. This is a good thing.

Time plays an important part in structuring our system. Specific units of time are used to anchor essential elements of the economy to physical reality. Designed correctly, this will help make the system easy to use and understand. When the rules are simple and ironclad, it is also much harder to cheat or appropriate other people’s productivity. As designers of our new system, we have to choose the most appropriate units of time as our anchors for every given situation.

As the Sun follows a daily and a yearly cycle, the hour and the week seem to be the most useful units to plan our economy. Every week starts on Monday, ends on Sunday and has seven days. As an economic unit, a week is concrete and makes planning straightforward. A week can easily be broken into days and hours or added up into a year.

Since time, the Sun’s energy and our new currency are all finite and regenerative at the same time, we can spend them in different ways every day. Even if we spend all our time, energy and money today, there is more of everything coming regularly for the rest of our lives.

That sounds like a great blessing.

What’s remarkable about the system we are designing is that all the complexity contained in our economic and political system can actually be condensed into the interactions of four enduring elements: