An Economy of Giving

digiday.com

The economic principle I’m exploring is “People generally respond to incentives in predictable ways” and “Institutions are the “rules of the game” that influence choices.”

My research question to help me study the economic principle is “What kind of incentive structure would there be in a Libertarian Socialist society?”

The article published in inthesetimes.com by David Graeber titled “Give It Away” demonstrates this economic principle because it shows the finding of gift economies and how they differ from Capitalist economies. 

The article talks about "Pioneering French anthropologist Marcel Mauss" and how he "studied “gift economies” like those of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia." Mauss was a "revolutionary socialist" but, as Graber explains, he was on the libertarian side of socialism. Graeber compares him to anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Mauss realized that "revolutionaries were going to have to start thinking a lot more seriously about what this “market” actually was, where it came from, and what a viable alternative to it might actually be like," so he began his research. He found that "almost everything that “economic science” had to say on the subject of economic history turned out to be entirely untrue;" that societies based on bartering weren't the first societies to exist. Capitalists think of these as a sort of predecessor to Capitalism, but "Mauss was quick to note [that] there is no reason to believe a society based on barter has ever existed." This is where the gift economy is discovered. Anthropologists were discovering "societies where economic life was based on utterly different principles, and most objects moved back and forth as gifts and almost everything we would call “economic” behavior was based on a pretense of pure generosity and a refusal to calculate exactly who had given what to whom." This is entirely different than Capitalism, a system that works off of selfishness.

According to the article, Mauss argued that "In gift economies, exchanges do not have the impersonal qualities of the capitalist marketplace: In fact, even when objects of great value change hands, what really matters is the relations between the people; exchange is about creating friendships, or working out rivalries, or obligations." This differs from the market economy where "Transactions are seen simply as ways of getting one’s hands on useful things." Mauss believed that there was an "inevitability of some kind of market," which shows that he is not as radical as Marx and Engels were. However, his findings are relevant in the study of economic history. The fact that gift economies existed should be more well known as they show that an altruistic society can function.