Gift Economies

The dominant influence of money is so pervasive in today’s World that it’s easy for people to forget that the economy has not always operated using money and markets. It’s important to look at the history of exchange and consider how older human societies operated. People have always expressed their relationships with one another through exchanges of goods and services. More tellingly, such exchanges reflect the underlying socio-political structure. A good case can be made in fact that in hunter-gatherer societies people actually worked less than we do today and enjoyed more leisure time.

Anthropological evidence suggests that for most of human history social organization has been primarily orchestrated through mutual aid. This is also called a gift economy where goods and services are provided freely without an explicit agreement of future compensation, they are asynchronous. Whereas economics is generally concerned with how resources should be allocated by a society, gift economies are not primarily concerned with resource allocation as such egalitarian societies are typically self-sustaining in life-supporting goods. Patriarchy then, is inconsistent with the goals of a gifting society. Gift cultures are more concerned about social bonding, the act of giving is itself a reward of social recognition, relationship and trust which creates a domino effect through the obligation of paying it forward. The beauty of this then is that gifts are open-ended and cement relationships, they cannot be hoarded like commoditised exchanges, they are erotic and must flow. Therefore in a gift economy the only ones who lose are those who don’t give freely.

From an evolutionary biologist perspective, such mutualism can be understood as an effective survival strategy in the form of reciprocal altruism. The idea being that co-operation between individuals increases their evolutionary fitness and thus by giving something freely to another when they need it, the recipient is more likely to return the favour. Such co-operative behaviour derives a synergetic effect which promotes a state of abundance (i.e. non-zero sum). In contrast, competitive behaviour is reductive and promotes scarcity (i.e. zero sum).

Much of the biological diversity that we see in the World has been driven by mutualism and the co-evolution of species. Gift economies can therefore been seen as a sustainable form of human ecology. Furthermore the success of co-operation can be mathematically proven through the highly effective tit for tat strategy in game theory. Tit for tat encompasses the game logic of reciprocal altruism, put simply unless provoked the player will always co-operate. The caveat to the effectiveness is that if negotiations are seeded on bad terms for several rounds then co-operation completely breaks down. For example, if I trust you but you cheat on me then I may be quick to forgive, but if you cheat on me again then I’ll become increasingly unlikely to trust you and will instead compete against you.

We are all born as helpless infants entirely dependent on our carers to nurture us. Life itself is a gift that is given to each of us, our very existence informs a deep sense of gratitude for all life. Phylogenetically, human beings are a non-predatory species, we only act out competitive behaviours because of environmental stresses from unnatural living conditions. Consequently, many people have marred Darwinistic views of human beings as inherently competitive. Alienated from ourselves, we enter into a vicious cycle of destructive, dominating and lustful behaviours which underpin our civilization.