Gift economy
From Wikinfo
A gift economy is an economic system in which participants give away things of value to the shared benefit of the community.
Gift economies were first formally recognized in the potlatch rituals of Native American societies in the Pacific Northwest. Leaders would give away large amounts of perishable goods to their followers.
The tradition of scientific research is an example of a gift economy. A scientist produces research papers and gives them away to other scientists, through journals and conferences. The other scientists are free to refer to the first scientist's papers. The more citations the scientist has, the more prestige and respect he has, which can attract funding and positions. All of the scientists benefit from an increased pool of knowledge.
The concept of a gift economy is also important in Chinese social relations and guanxi. People in Chinese societies will exchange gifts in order to cement social relationships.
A gift economy is an important cornerstone of the annual Burning Man festival.
Information is particularly suited to gift economics, as a given piece of information can be copied and transmitted indefinitely at practically no cost.
The open source software community can be thought of as an example of an information gift economy. Programmers make their source code available to the programming community, and anyone can modify and improve the code. Individual programmers gain prestige and respect, and the community as a whole benefits from better software.
Jordan Hubbard, writing in Queue magazine ("Open Source to the Core", p.24--31, May 2004) while referring to open source as a "barter economy," describes it in terms much more relevant to a gift economy: "The volunteer software engineers in the open source software community are far more likely to help those who have demonstrated their commitment to the success of the overall open source software development process." [op. cit., p. 29] In other words, reciprocity is seen as a broad community matter rather than one of explicit quid pro quo.
Anarcho-communism uses a gift economy, as there is no money or market. Products are given away and freely distributed.
Gift economies can co-exist with command economies, market economies and barter economies.
External links
References
- Marcel Mauss: The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Originally published as Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'�change dans les soci�t�s archa�ques in 1925, modern English edition: ISBN 039332043X.
- Lewis Hyde: The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, 1983 (ISBN 0394715195), especially part I, "A Theory of Gifts", part of which was originally published as "The Gift Must Always Move" in Co-Evolution Quarterly No. 35, Fall 1982.
[[pl:Ekonomia dar�w]]
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Gift_economy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
