Having
recently learned that Adam Smith divided income into wages, profits, and rents, I asked to myself: What about gifts? Well, I suppose they aren’t income; but gifts and gifting have been enormously important in human life. Nina Paley’s been arguing that
gifting is the fundamental social dynamic of art, but it’s more general than that.
The first step toward a sustainable sense of success is taking pride in the value of our contributions to others rather than taking pride in the value of our possessions. By extension this means striving for quality in the use of whatever power we have rather than working to get more power over others as an end in itself. In this view, profit and wealth may help us to contribute, but they do not themselves constitute business success.
After mentioning the potlatches of Pacific Northwest peoples, and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: The Erotic Life of Property (a Paley favorite), Pinchot talks about chemical-giant DuPont:
Companies that use sulfuric acid end up with a hazardous waste. DuPont, instead of distancing itself from the hazardous waste generated by its customers, saw this problem as an opportunity to differentiate its offering in one of the most basic of commodities. The company took back the spent sulfuric acid, purified it, and resold it. This was good business because once DuPont got good at it, recycling turned out to be cheaper than creating from scratch. It also gained the company market share and margins in what had become to others a low-profit, uninteresting commodity. In this case, DuPont does well by doing good, thus winning both the exchange and gift paradigms.
The sign of excellence in a new world of the larger self is not vast profit or possessions, but sufficient material success to allow large and thoughtful contributions to society.
In a world where business success increasingly depends on highly skilled employees
Employers must curry the favor of their talented employees who increasingly have an ethical agenda. Employees who can easily find work elsewhere are refusing to work on projects or for companies that offend their values, even if they would be well paid to do so. As this trend increases, as people take a stand for sustainability in choosing their work, even public corporations seeking the favor of bloodless institutional investors will find that sustainable companies have the best future because they have the best talent. In fields where creativity counts, sustainability is a competitive weapon.
He concludes by arguing that “The real game in the business world of the ecological age is running a business or a career so as to make a contribution to the community, the nation, and even to the planet as a whole.” And that required that we once again making gifting central to our economic life.