The Gift Economy
Dave Pollard,
How to Save the World,
Apr 20, 2005
Dave Pollard writes, "The Gift Economy offers us a means to learn, to understand, to take charge, and to change our world. It is a natural economy, steeped in millions of years of pre-civilization human culture and the culture of all life on Earth. If enough of us embraced it, the modern 'market' economy, built on the faulty and inhuman foundations of inequality, scarcity, false quantification of value, and acquisition, could not survive." In this thus far I agree, and in what follows he provides a pretty good overview. But. I'm unhappy with this: "In a 'market' economy, says Hyde, the highest status belongs to those who have acquired the most. In a Gift Economy, the highest status belongs to those who have given the most." Money, status, power - the gift economy always seems to be presented in terms of how a giver can, after all, get something in return for the gift. I have not been immune to this myself. But it leaves me with a certain dissatisfaction, the sort of dissatisfaction I might feel with my wealth in the last days of life. Maybe that's just me, though.
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