Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [47]
Economies, Gift and Otherwise
Think about two economies, familiar to anyone, which we might call, taking a lead from Lewis Hyde, a gift economy and an exchange economy.55
A gift economy is a series of exchanges between two or more souls who never pretend to equate one exchange to another, but who also don’t pretend that reciprocating is unimportant—an economy in the sense that it marks repeated interactions over time, but a gift economy in the sense that it doesn’t liquidate the relationships in terms of cash. Indeed, relationships, not cash, are the currency within these economies. These relationships import obligations. And the exchanges that happen within gift economies try to hide their character as exchanges by tying so much of the exchange to the relationship. I give you a birthday present. It is a good present not so much because it is expensive, but because it expresses well my understanding of you. In that gift, I expect something in return. But I would be insulted if on my birthday, you gave me a cash voucher equivalent to the value of the gift I gave you, or even two times the amount I gave you. Gift giving in relationship-based economies is a way to express and build relationships. It’s not a system to transfer wealth.
The gift economy is thus the relationship of friends, or family, or different people trying to build an alliance. It was the way of Native Americans completely misunderstood by their invading “friends.” “An Indian gift,” Thomas Hutchinson told his readers in 1764, “is a proverbial expression signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected.”56 But the equivalence could never be demanded. And the equation could never be transparent.
An “exchange economy,” by contrast, is clearer and in many ways simpler. It is the quid pro quo economy. The transactional economy. The this-for-that economy. It is the economy of a gas station, or a vending machine at a baseball park. In exchange for this bit of cash, you will give me that thing/service/promise. Cash is the currency in this economy, and as many of the terms of the relationship as possible get converted, or liquidated, into cash. It is the economy of commodification. It is an economy within which we live much of our lives.
As I’ve written elsewhere,57 following the work of Yochai Benkler, Hyde, and others, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with commodification. Indeed, there’s lots that’s great about it. As Lewis Hyde puts it,
It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don’t want to be bothered. If the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I’ll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade.58
There’s plenty that’s good about leaving important and large parts of your life simplified because commodified. The more bits that are simplified, the more time you have for relationships within the gift economies in which we all (hopefully!) live.
For in both economies, then, reciprocity is the norm. The difference is the transparency of that reciprocity. Gifts in this sense are not selfless acts to another. Gifts are moves in a game; they oblige others. In the economies that Hyde describes, the game in part is to obscure the extent of that obligation, but without extinguishing it. No one is so crass as to say, “I gave you a box of pearls; you need to give me something of equal value in return.” Yet everyone within such an economy is monitoring the gifts given and the gifts in return. And anytime a significant gap develops,