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.
Consider these passages from an old (1995) article by Gifford Pinchot:
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.
DuPont is a very unfortunate example to choose. Their overall record is poor to horrible, if I'm not mistaken.
ReplyDeleteSahlin's "Stone Age Economy" is a better book than Hyde's.
My reading of it is that the rise of capitalism consisted of the transformation of personal gift relationships to impersonal exchange relationships, while at the same time destroying traditional and customary communities which discouraged greed and, in effect, required gift-giving. There's been an enormous amount of damage done, and competition works to the disadvantage of gift-givers, so I think that Pinchot far underestimates the problem.
Government, among other things, tries to replace the community in tempering greed and protecting the weak against the strong, but during the last 30 years or more these functions of government have been under ferocious assault globally.
Gregory's "Gifts and Commodities" describes the effects on a traditional gift economy of the global exchange economy. I suspect that Gregory is too optimistic; in general when the two kinds of economy come into contact, the exchange economy sucks the gift economy dry and destroys it, or at least puts it into servitude.
When I was in Taiwan in 1983 the tradition gift economy was still there. Gifts there are often in cash, and people seem to have spent a considerable part of their incomes in family gifts at new years and at every important occasion. (I don't know the number, but I'd guess 10-20%, maybe more in some cases. I'd love to see a study). However, that kind of gift economy doesn't translate to public spirit at all.
However, that kind of gift economy doesn't translate to public spirit at all.
ReplyDeleteBut, I rather doubt that "public spirit" is a straightforward natural phenomenon. It's created though institutions, which are ultimately grounded in human behavioral biology. There's reason to believe that that behavioral biology has various ways of regulating relationships. So the question is whether or not we can create new "gifting" relationships and institutions.
There's a big problem translating either instinctive or cultural habits of relating to people which were developed within face-to-face groups to a larger context. That didn't use to be as significant a problem as it is now, though it could lead to murderous warfare and enslavement, but by now a high proportion of our interactions (invisible to us because distant) are mediated by huge organizations -- the Federal reserve, the global market, international relations, the military balance of power, corporate employers, etc.
ReplyDeleteMy observation of conservative Republicans, some of them real crazies, is that many of them are exemplary people face-to-face but have a toxic and basically self-serving misunderstanding of the greater world.
The world religions all dealt with this kind of thing, as did docialism, pacifism, anti-slavery, etc. But for the last thirty years we've been going backward with regard to trying to form a decent large-scale world.
Yes, forming a large-scale world, that IS a deep and challenging problem. My old buddy is arguing that we live in, are headed to, a world of virtual feudalism:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.metamanager.net/virtual/feudalism/
Information technologies are degrading our large-scale organizations without replacing them with anything.