"Gift Economy" is Misleading

There are a growing number of proponents of a gift economy as being a desirable alternative to our status quo monetary economy.  According to Wikipedia:

"a gift economy or gift culture is a mode of exchange where valuables are not traded or sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards."

I like the concept of gift economies and I fully appreciate the advantages that they convey.  However, it is difficult to find modern examples of viable gift economies that make any sense.  Most examples of gift cultures are dated and decidedly anthropological.  Such ideals are never going to be broadly adopted so long as people believe that the alternative to an economic life where you simply buy things with money is an economy where everything is given for free - that is entirely impractical and quite impossible for people to wrap their heads around.

One also finds that more pragmatic descriptions of alternative economic systems go well beyond gifts.  I propose that gift economies are simply one manifestation of a much better alternative paradigm: qualitative economies.

What are Qualitative Economies?

My research is devoted to exploring the differences and consequential impacts of quantitative versus qualitative values.  A quantitative (or number-based) value system is one where, by definition, more is always worth more.  The modern status quo economy is a quantitative economy, in that it uses quantitative values (overwhelmingly, money) to measure its success.  A qualitative economy (a term which I'm essentially creating here) is one measured by qualitative values, such as satisfaction, product longevity and reliability, and the relationships formed between people.  (This is not to be confused with qualitative economics, which is apparently a term in quantitative theory when actual measurements are unavailable - a decidedly inferior appropriation of the term.)  Let's look at some examples:

Gifts - As I said, a gift economy is but one of multiple facets of qualitative economies.  Gifts create joy for both giver and recipient.  They also create desirable social obligations which strengthen human relationships, and furthermore motivate recipients to become givers to new recipients (as well as possibly reciprocating the original gift).

Pay-What-You-Choose - Some entrepreneurs and self-employed service providers prefer a less rigid form of transactions whereby the recipient of the service pays what they believe the service to be worth.  This opens up services to a wider market and allows compensation to be influenced by available wealth as well as quality of work, relationship, etc.  Variations on this model are more common than one might think.

Libraries/Sharing - These days, the term "libraries" extends beyond books into tools, seeds, bicycles, cars - any resources which are shared within a community at little or no charge.  (To be sure, it does NOT include Uber, AirBnB, and other access economy corporations that simply monetize your possessions and are the antithesis of sharing!)  Sharing can also include interest-free loans - money is not forbidden in qualitative economies.

Donations - Donations come in many forms, including volunteerism, charitable giving of funds, unwanted household items going to thrift shops, and even free or open source software.  Wikipedia, for example, is part of a qualitative economy, where many thousands of people donate time, knowledge, and editing skills in order to provide the resource free to everyone on the internet.

Refocused Traditional - For those who still struggle with the above examples, I maintain that simply by shifting the focus of value, one can achieve qualitative economics in what might appear to be a traditional monetary transaction.  The key is to emphasize qualitative values such as longevity, environmental friendliness, and aesthetics over price and market share.  Examples include one-of-a-kind craftsmanship, original artwork transactions, community-sponsored agriculture, and local economies which emphasize relationship over cost.

Barter - Because most barter is unique to each transaction and relationship, and barter is often a win-win where the value on both sides goes up, it could probably be included as yet another facet of a qualitative economy.  (One must take care that it does not get redefined in monetary terms.)

What Distinguishes Quantitative and Qualitative Economies?

Attributes	Quantitative Economy	Qualitative Economy
Value measured by:	Quantity – more is always worth more	Quality – longevity, aesthetics, relationship-building
Basis:	Dead relationship between items in transaction	Living relationship between people in transaction
Key to increasing value:	Scarcity, minimizing investment in individual items, ownership	Abundance, maximizing investment in individual items, sharing
Values after transfer:	Won & lost – zero-sum game	Win-win – transactions build value on both sides
Amounts ('price') determined by:	Seller/Receiver	Buyer/Giver
Motivations:	Enjoying the end result (but unreachable maximum)	Enjoying the journey (but not always positive)
Global measures:	GDP (Gross Domestic Product)	GWI (Genuine Wellness Index), or GNH (Gross National Happiness)
Examples:	Purchases, theft (note how theft fits all of the attributes in this column and none in the other)	Barter, gifts, pay-what-you-choose, donations, libraries, craftsmanship
Benefits:	Massive scalability, accelerated progress, easily mathematized	Sustainability, repairability, open source, satisfies human needs
Disadvantages:	Dissatisfaction, ecological destruction, proprietary	Slower, limited scope, trust-based
End results:	Objective comparisons, inequity, oppression, deception rewarded, monetize and consume global resources, dismissal of human values, race to the bottom	Subjective comparisons, cooperation, deception punished, honours interconnectedness of all things, promotes joy and well-being

In Summary

It should be clear that altering our perception of how our economies must work is not all about giving everything away, trusting in the inherent generosity of strangers, and singing Kumbaya around a communal campfire.  The advantages of qualitative economies are things that we all want: Quality, repairable, aesthetically-pleasing products, in abundance, and with joyful relationships.  And, perhaps most importantly, we don't have to replace our status quo monetary economies across the board.  It is entirely feasible and practical to have both styles of economic activity exist simultaneously within the same population - they do so now!

The key is to allow both value systems equal weight so that money does not always trump human qualities, and also to re-examine the role of single-track entities, such as commercial corporations, which are unable to operate in qualitative economies, and are thus incapable of being part of a balanced society.

The Mystery of the Uncomfortable Barter

One of the truly wonderful things about The Value Crisis discussion groups and speaking engagements is that my perspective gets challenged by intelligent people struggling to apply the concepts to everyday life.  One such magical moment arose this week, when a participant in our chapter-by-chapter exploration of the book gave us a perplexing anecdote to puzzle out.  Let me first set up the context...

We were discussing Chapter 3 (Money - The Number Culture), which includes a brief history of money, from the days of barter through to today's banking databases.  One of the propositions of that chapter is that the barter of goods or services between two willing participants is always a win-win transaction.  Both sides are getting something they want, and either employing a skill that they already have or giving something that they want less - hence the net value of both sides goes up.  Such an exchange feels quite different when you instead look at two separate transactions that use money to quantify the value.

Barter actually capitalizes on the concept of marginal value.  This economics term is used to convey the idea that the 'value' of a particular thing (to us) depends on the quantity of that thing that we already have.  If I have hundreds of arrowheads, their marginal value to me is low, but if I have no baskets, the marginal value to me of a needed basket would be quite high.  I would be very willing to trade a few arrowheads for a basket.  Barter works when I find someone with many baskets (each therefore having a low marginal value for them), who needs an arrowhead or two.

So back to our story.  The reader who shared the anecdote is an organic hobby farmer of sorts.  She keeps a variety of livestock and is an enthusiastic promoter of permaculture practices.  As she relates it, she had an experience where the long hours of back-breaking farm work had taken its toll and she wanted to get a massage.  She had met a masseuse who was open to providing such a service in barter for some of the meat that the farmer raised on her land.  Learning that the typical price for the service was $80, she gathered up $80 worth of organic beef and went in for the relaxing treatment.

Alas, afterwards, she was disappointed by how she felt about the transaction.  Perhaps while in the midst of having the knots removed from her back, she was thinking about all the hours of work that had put them there: looking after her stock day after day, mucking out stalls, and hauling buckets of food for the grain-fed beef.  And, in exchange for a significant portion of the end gains, she was getting perhaps less than an hour on a massage table.  It didn't feel right.

This struck a chord with me.  In a later chapter (Ch. 5 - The Value of Time), I talk about how difficult it was for me, as a newly self-employed person, to set a billable value for my time.  I might do a day's work with community not-for-profits for $100, and then do the same work for a large corporation and bill more than ten times that amount.  So what was the true value of my time?  What should I bill clients who fell in between those extremes?  Was it right that the client's budget always determine my fee?  How could I determine if a particular project remuneration was "worth my time"?

My ultimate solution was how I felt about my contribution and corresponding compensation.  If I felt I was being taken advantage of (or was taking advantage of someone else) I felt bad.  Otherwise, I would consider the project a fair transaction.  The numbers played no direct role.  Now here was this woman voicing a familiar reaction:  the massage-for-beef transaction didn't feel right.  But this was barter!  So what went wrong?

Most people initially see the disconnect in terms of the time differences.  Farmers work long hard hours to grow, maintain, harvest, and prepare their produce for consumption.  And here was my friend, trading a chunk of that for a service that was provided in a tiny fraction of that time.  I agree that this would certainly be an influence.  However, quantifying time and worth is full of all kinds of pitfalls.  There are so many added variables.  A dentist charges not just for the half-hour of teeth work, but also the training, capital costs of the office, etc.  Part of a masseuse's fee has to take into account that they don't usually work full 8-hour days.  Nor can they leverage economies-of-scale to massage more than one client at a time, the way a farmer might be able to double their herd with minimal additional effort and overhead.

No, upon reflection, I think something much more interesting happened to this transaction.  The clue is the $80 value.  The reader had looked up the posted value of the massage and then tried to put together a package of food that had the same monetary value.  To me, that is not really barter.  That is simply a transaction, using prices on both sides, that happens to use meat as a currency.  Marginal value was no longer a key component of the feelings of value and worth.  Instead, both players reverted to the quantified market value, which completely alters the quality of the relationship.  As soon as the numbers come in, the barter doesn't even have to take place for the farmer to feel disappointed.  She could simply contemplate how she had just paid $80 for a massage and then later think about how much work had gone into a totally separate sale of $80 worth of beef.

That's the thing about numbers and number-based values.  They allow us to do things like instantly compare our salary to that of our spouse or a co-worker or a professional baseball player.  Or compare a season of livestock management to a spa treatment.  Such pursuits often to lead to bad feelings, no?