When I was preparing to write my piece on the gift economy for the Dictionary of Ethical Politics, I read a few essays by others but quickly abandoned that approach to ensuring that I was fully up-to-speed on the current thinking. As I explained with my customary lack of sensitivity, diplomacy, and fairness:

Unsurprisingly, [the gift economy] is a topic that appeals to well-meaning, good-natured, spiritually curious people. Unfortunately, this results in treatments that are often long on fuzzy-headed feel-good and short on rigor. I’m sure there are some very good essays on the gift economy to be found with a simple Google search; but I really had no stomach for a needle-in-haystack exercise that would subject me to the level of penetrating analysis found in the average Hallmark greeting card.

After I published my synopsis of the gift economy, I received a superb essay from my good friend, Manoj Pavithran, with a very different approach to the subject. Manoj is that rare and spectacular combination of deeply thoughtful and utterly brilliant; and his careful analysis is constructed with the considerable philosophical rigor one might expect from him. It represents a significant contribution to the growing, evolving appreciation of the gift economy.

Manoj is not simply a theorist of the gift economy; he is a practitioner. He lives in Auroville, a community founded, in part, on both collectivist and cooperativist gift economy ideals. He also played a direct and influential role in the gift economization of two significant product initiatives of Upasana Design Studio: the Tsunamika dolls and the Small Steps cloth shopping bags.

With his permission, I offer Manoj’s essay for your consumption and reflection.

GIFT ECONOMY
Joy of Giving, Abundance, and Bonds of Love
By Manoj Pavithran

At the heart of immensely complex economic systems move the fundamental generative dynamics of demand and supply – the complementary opposites, the two poles of a single force field. Understanding this dual force in its various levels of evolution is essential for gaining insight into the nature of Gift Economy.

Transactions

No individual or organisation can exist in isolation; there is always exchange of goods and services among individuals or organisations or with the surrounding environment in general. Everything is embedded in the force field of demand and supply and an evolving individual or group has to interact with the force field through unending series of transactions. However all exchanges or transactions are not of the same nature; they undergo fundamental qualitative change with the growth of individual or organisation and this growth has three distinct stages which can be called: Receiver, Trader, and Giver.

Receiver

This is the first stage of transactions, the childhood, of an individual or organisation in which the entity is primarily in need of goods and services but at the same time it is not capable of giving something in return. Every individual or organisation goes through this stage. A new born child is in need of receiving nourishments for its growth and there is nothing much a child can give in return. Parents take care of the child. So is someone who is crippled by age or disease who should be taken care. Similarly a new organisation that is taking birth requires lots of investment to get it going before it stands on its own feet. There is a childhood stage where an entity is primarily a receiver.

If a childhood stage prolongs then even when physically outgrown the entity will continue to remain as a receiver and fail to become an adult who is capable of independence. It can also be a result of psychological distortions as in the case of someone who is selfish or miser and is unwilling to give anything in return to others. When this stage turns dark we get the thief or the exploiter who intentionally live like a parasite. There are people and organisations that live like parasites; they do not give anything in return for what they take. This is the receiver stage that has become diseased and dark.

The focus of awareness during this stage is in receiving or taking.

Trader

This is the second stage of the growth of an individual or organisation, the adulthood, in which the entity becomes productive and actively engages in trade with other individuals or organisations to create wealth. This phase brings economic freedom and greater independence to engage in activities that are mutually enriching. But the characteristic feature of the act of giving something to someone during this stage is the demand for return in equal measure. In fact the focus is more on the returns and the individual or organisation involved in trade is engaging in it for the sake of returns it brings. One-to-one return for every investment is a key factor during this stage. If there is no possibility of getting something back from someone or a group, nothing will be given to them.

This stage is largely animated by reason at the best. A fair trade market operates on this basis making sure that all those who are involved in trade are receiving returns in fair measure. An individual or organisation in this stage of their growth will always make sure that the people with whom they engage in trade are getting what they deserve and sharing is fair on both sides of the equation.

Often trade is animated by greed in which one gives as little as possible but takes as maximum as possible. When trade is animated by greed one is closer to a thief, the darker side of first stage, than a genuine trader in the second stage. Not all trades are fair trades; there is a tug of war and bargain which can be driven by force of greed or reason. When driven by reason we get fair trade and when driven by greed we get parasites.

Act of giving bound to returns breeds trader-hood, the second stage of growth.

Giver

This is the third stage of the growth of an individual or organization, the parenthood, which brings to focus the joy in the very act of giving itself. Joy of giving is often discovered when you fall in love and discover the sheer joy of giving a gift to someone you love dearly. Giving is a means to express your love and not a means to get something in return. This is the stage of parenthood or lover-hood in which one takes responsibility over people, organisations or situations that requires support and does so for the joy of doing it. It is largely animated by love. Parents taking care of their children are a typical example of this stage; organisations involved in charity, social work, environmental protection are some of the common examples of organisations that operate in the third stage.

It is not so much the outer form of action that determines the stage of growth but the inner quality of giving. For example if a parent is supporting the child for the sake of future returns then it is still a trade relation, similarly charity work done with hidden agendas to spread a particular religion or philosophy is still a trader consciousness in disguise of a giver. The purity of giver-hood is in the purity of giving; only an unconditional giving for the very joy of giving qualifies one to be in the third stage.

The magic of gift economy starts only at this stage when you discover that all acts of unconditional giving brings back returns of abundance beyond your imagination.

Transaction matrix

All the three stages of transactions simultaneously exist in every individual or organisation in varying proportions. No one is entirely locked up in a single level. You may be a receiver in one transaction, a trader in another or a giver in yet another transaction. It is a dynamic quality that changes in every interaction. For example you receive a gift from someone who loves you and you would not spoil the quality of that transaction by insisting that you should pay for it. On the other hand you go to market and buy something and make sure that you pay them properly. The same item you bought as a trading transaction you may give to someone as a gift to express your love. There is a greater joy in receiving a gift as well as giving a gift. We engage in such a mode of transaction only with those whom we love where as with strangers we prefer to engage in trade. Every interaction is qualitatively different; we are receiving, trading or giving all the time. We are dynamically changing and taking roles in every interaction and since there are three roles possible we get six possible combinations of transaction matrix.

With this transaction matrix it is easy to see that all our daily interactions neatly fall into one or other category and we are constantly in flux.

There are enriching transactions and there are depleting transactions. Those few transactions that bring us greater joy and inner satisfaction (not necessarily material or financial benefits) are the ones in which you have received something unconditionally as a gift or you have given something unconditionally as a gift, as an expression of your love. By observing our daily transactions it is relatively easy to find our dominant mode of transactions and take steps to bring necessary balance or to evolve to higher modes of transactions.

While America ties itself in knots in a farcical debate whether it will make health care available to all its citizens, here in Canada I am enrolled in the Medical Service Plan, which covers all my basic health needs: emergent, urgent, preventative, and elective care. It costs $48 per month. Paperwork? My doctor’s office simply swipes my Care Card when I arrive, hands it back to me, and we’re done. Ask a Canadian what a deductible or co-pay is; they’ll just look at you with a blank stare.

And lucky thing I’m covered. Just look at that gash on my forehead!

Actually, that was another freebie, hand-painted at Friday night’s FUSE event at the Vancouver Art Gallery by professional make-up artist Katheryn Sainsbury. Kat’s normal gigs involve high-fashion photo shoots; but like the other make-up artists at the museum last night, she was working in a more ghoulish mode.

While this paint job was considerably less extensive than my last touch-up, it was seen by way more people. One woman, catching sight of my “wound” as I left the restaurant at which we dined after the gallery event, became quite distressed and looked as though she was about to be violently ill. My friends calmed her down, telling her it was just make-up. But had they not stepped-in to relieve her — had she fainted, fallen to the ground, and split-open her noggin so that we were effectively twins — she still would have been okay in the end.

Because she is Canadian and has health care.

My second-most-favorite magazine of all time is Clinical Chemistry. Like my first-most-favorite magazine, I pretend to read it for the excellent articles, but mostly only look at the pictures.

If that’s not entirely true, it’s only because the images in Playboy (do they still publish Playboy?) are considerably more interesting than those in Clinical Chemistry, which tend to run toward crazy-shit-complicated graphs and conceptual layouts of brain-melting science. So, alas, I do struggle through the articles — which take me several hours for six to eight hard-won pages — with a Googleload of reference help.

No one will ever adjudge the literary merits of Clinical Chemistry to be on a par with, say, Granta, or the quality and usefulness of the science it contains to rival that of, say, Cooks Illustrated. Still, the rag has its own nerdy charm.

Imagine my delight, then, when Clinical Chemistry finally published something that not only covers my favorite subject in all of science, but that I could read without feeling like a third-grader: a profile of Carl Wittwer.

In truth, it’s not a fabulous article; it is a half-assed article about a fabulous person. An astonishingly wonderful, mind-blowingly brilliant, down-deep lovely, just-nice-to-be-in-the-same-room-with person.

Carl would be one of the great people on this earth to know, even if he were not a renowned innovator and leading light in the esoteric field of molecular diagnostic instrumentation and technique. (In other words, Carl figures out ways of getting a meaningful peek at the ways genetic materials and other chemical structures in our cells might cause, define, or predict illness, wellness, and the transitions between those two states. He runs a world-famous laboratory at the University of Utah, where he is on the Med School faculty in the Department of Pathology, is a Director of Advanced Study at ARUP Laboratories, and pioneered quantitative PCR and many other techniques that have changed the face of diagnostic medicine and medical research.) He is one of those rare people whose natural humility, deceptively understated humor, and clear-eyed take on the world elevate non-scientific conversation to a deeply satisfying experience.

Of all the amazing details of Carl’s professional life, there are none more jaw-dropping than this: over the last couple years, Carl has been my mentor in all-things-molecular-biology. I’m hardly a deserving disciple. Until very recently, I knew so little about the life sciences I couldn’t have given a competent definition of a cell. And yet, the same guy who teaches a class in “The Mathematics of RNA” (Can you imagine! No you cannot.) will sit with my dumb ass and patiently, meticulously make sensible the most complicated workings of medical science.

Because some of you may not have been keeping up with recent issues of Clinical Chemistry as conscientiously as you should (I guess they do still publish Playboy), here’s a link to a PDF copy of the article. I only wish that the journal had followed its normal editorial policy of requiring peer review before running this piece. Had it done so, the glowing testimonials and compelling stories would have filled an entire issue. Scientific rigor requires nothing less.

What’s in it for me?

That’s the way Americans debate health care, just as it is the way we debate everything these days. What will it cost me? What will be my options? What will be the effect on my taxes? This is not an entirely absurd or venal approach. Self-interest is an appropriate prism through which to evaluate public policy. But this narrowness and solipsism illustrates the way in which America has personalized, and thereby stunted, what used to be called the American Dream.

The American Dream represented the idea that the United States was a place where any person could accede to whatever life their talent, ambition, and diligence would allow. It was about universal, common opportunity. Today, it is about my opportunities. It is the notion that I can succeed, I can acquire; and it’s every dog for themselves.

The practical difference between these visions is subtle. Either way, success or failure is largely predicated on the desire and drive – yes, on the pointedly self-interested ambitions – of the individuals who strive to better their lives. But the recasting of the national narrative as one of individual privilege and away from common, communitarian ideals is a radical shift, which undermines the opportunities on which both conceptions tacitly depend. As Bill Clinton admonished in the 1991 speech announcing his candidacy for the Presidency, “We need a new spirit of community, a sense that we are all in this together, or the American Dream will continue to wither. Our [personal] destiny is bound up with the destiny of every other American.” America has only moved further from this sense of shared fortune in the intervening years. The fact that we all desire more comfortable lives hardly makes that aspiration a collective experience.

Today, the question before America is whether to reform its atrociously dysfunctional health care system to ensure the availability of coverage for all Americans, including the 46 million who have no health insurance whatsoever. Those whose voices are raised most loudly, most angrily in this debate are those with health care insurance, who do not want a change in their present options (although this has never been a part of any proposed reform) and who do not wish “to pay for the health care of others.” Tax dollars (My tax dollars!) supporting a low-cost, government run insurance program is somehow an uglier form of socialism than, say, the corporate welfare and Wall Street bailouts to which Americans are all too accustomed.

The Obama administration has been tepid and confused in support of its own proposals, and unwisely ceded responsibility for drafting the legislation to Congress, one of the least effective legislative bodies in the history of democracy. Just as damagingly, it has also relinquished the terms of debate, allowing the focus to center on the financial consequences of reform rather than the moral imperatives. The issue of universal coverage is rarely cast in terms of economic justice; and the case is far too seldom made that a country that makes health care available to all its citizens is exactly the kind of country we wish to call our own.

Were it not so pathetic, it would almost be funny that those who would kill health care reform in the U.S. point to the Canadian system as a principal bogeyman. As someone who has shifted his residence to Canada in large part because of the availability of universal health care, I am dumbfounded this argument gets any traction whatsoever. The cherry-picked, anecdotal horror stories about Canadians who endured long waits for access to treatment utterly misrepresent the promptness of emergent and urgent care and the comprehensiveness of preventive, non-urgent, and elective medicine. That Canadians and their government pay only 55% of what Americans pay on a per capita basis and have substantially lower morbidity and mortality rates than Americans certainly recommends the system, even in innumerate, jingoistic America. The supreme irony of the American hullabaloo over Canadian health care, of course, is that adoption of a Canadian-like system is not even under consideration in the United States Congress.

Canada does, however, have something important to teach us about the vast reach of the social benefits of universal health care. The distinguished Canadian science fiction writer Robert Sawyer was recently asked why there are so many world-class writers hailing from Canada. “The answer,” he said, “is that all of us in the arts in Canada are blessed with this thing the Americans are terrified of right now, which is socialized medicine, universal healthcare. I’ve been a full-time professional since I was 23 years old; but so many of my colleagues south-of-the-border are shackled to pretty meaningless nine-to-five jobs, not doing what they want to do with their lives because, for that basic necessity of their health and well-being, they have to have a regular job. Set aside the Canada Arts Council and all the provincial arts councils; the number-one best thing Canada ever gave to the arts was our universal health care system.”

Americans must once-again imagine their country as a place where all can prosper and all can contribute to the richness of the national experience. Until then, America itself is but a superfluous, marginal aspect of the American Dream, nothing more than a fungible setting for fantasies of wealth accumulation.

The health care debate illustrates with nauseating clarity the epidemic narcissism that has infected and crippled the American Dream. Will this noble and globally celebrated ideal survive the small-mindedness of its present custodians? It is difficult not to despair. As George Carlin famously said, “They call it the ‘American Dream’ because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Julius Schulman, the preeminent photographer of American modernist architecture, died on Wednesday at his home in the Los Angeles hills at the age of 98. I was lucky enough to spend two days with him at that home – one he commissioned Rafael Soriano to design for him in 1947.

I met Julius quite by accident, and it was love at first sight.

On Monday, 10 September 2001, I received a panicked call from Glenna Kyle, Assistant General Counsel of Exxon Corporation – or, more to the point, of the newly merged Exxon-Mobil – giving me an urgent assignment. The habitually scrambling Exxon Law Department was even more upside-down than usual, having inherited an enormous docket of impossibly mishandled cases from the chronically fucked-up Mobil Law Department, which the merger had, at least, finally put out of its misery. Mobil had a case set for trial the following Monday in San Francisco which had received little or no preparation. Glenna’s first call was to fire Mobil’s lawyer in San Francisco; her second was to advise me that I was going to trial in less than a week in a case neither of us could know much about. (This, incidentally, was not the last insane, eleventh-hour trial assignment I was to receive during the Exxon-Mobil transition.)

The case was of a type: one of the tens-of-thousands filed by construction tradesmen throughout the United States, alleging lung injuries as a consequence of work with asbestos containing materials over the course of their careers. The plaintiff had worked for decades as a union painter, allegedly cheek-by-jowl with drywallers installing asbestos containing sheetrock and asbestos-containing joint compounds at construction sites throughout Southern California. The companies that mined, milled, and manufactured the offending products – often in full knowledge and conscious disregard of the health implications for those who would be using them – were long-since bankrupted by the litigation; so this plaintiff, who would eventually die of a lung cancer having everything to do with his lifelong cigarette habit and nothing to do with his occupational asbestos exposure, was suing the owners of the buildings into which asbestos-containing products had been installed.

One such building, it was claimed, was the former Mobil Oil Building in downtown Los Angeles, built in 1952 as the company’s West Coast headquarters. My task was to learn as much about the building as humanly possible in less than a week and, by some alchemy I couldn’t quite foresee, turn that information into admissible evidence.

I called the Los Angeles Building Department for advice. Where was I going to get hold of drawings for this building that Mobil no longer owned? The woman with whom I spoke had an idea: the architecture library at UCLA contains considerable documentation concerning the development of the city, including its downtown. She suggested that I make that my first stop. I booked my airline ticket for the following afternoon, and would spend all of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday doing spadework.

As it turned out, planes weren’t flying anywhere in America on Tuesday afternoon, or on Wednesday morning, for that matter. With my time running desperately short, I drove to LA.

The UCLA Architecture Library was, indeed, a good place to start. As it happens, the Mobil Building was historically noteworthy, at least for students of urban development: it was the first high-rise office building to incorporate its own parking structure. The reference librarian had an idea where I might find old photographs of the building: the rare book and manuscript library. Gaining admittance to this facility is no mean feat, even armed with a note of introduction from the architecture reference librarian. I was divested of my worldly possessions (writing implements and cameras being the biggest no-nos – and, of course, I had both) and fitted with sterile, white cotton gloves and escorted to a carrel where two folders of photographs were delivered. Eureka. There was not only a beautifully statuesque shot of the recently finished building, there were also a couple of the building taken during construction. I immediately inquired about obtaining high-resolution copies. “That’s no problem,” advised the librarian, “assuming you can get permission from the copyright holder.” Surely whoever took the photos in the early 1950s would be dead-and-gone by now, I thought. The librarian flipped-over the photos. “Oh,” he said, “These were taken by Julius Schulman. He’s still around. He lives here in Los Angeles.” I stepped outside the library, dialed 411 on my cell phone, and, two minutes later, Julius and I were speaking; and within another five minutes, I had an appointment to meet him at his home the next morning.

We spent hours over the better part of two days pouring through boxes in Julius’s studio, all stuffed with prints, negatives, and magazines containing his work. Julius seemed mystified by his own filing system, and in absolutely no hurry to unearth the correct box. I too was in no rush, notwithstanding my need to get back to San Francisco and to figure out how to spin the little information I’d obtained into some kind of legal defense. Each box had a story; and every story was worth hearing. Many of the boxes contained images of iconic buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Mies Van Der Rohe, Raphael Soriano, Pierre Keonig, John Lautner, Charles Eames, and others.

We spent two days talking architecture, and life, and photography. I told Julius of my childhood fascination with modern architecture, nurtured by my library of books about Frank Lloyd Wright buildings (from my mother) and my cherished eleventh birthday present (from Rae Paddock): LeCorbusier’s Toward a New Architecture. Julius told me that he knew even less about modern architecture than he did about photography when he started shooting houses for Richard Neutra. But he was thoughtful and meticulous about the work; and eventually he developed both a command of photographic technique and an intuitive approach to explicating the idioms and gestures of the modern vernacular.

Julius saw himself as an advocate for the architecture. Specifically, he aimed to portray not only the paradoxical richness of its formal austerity, but also to dispel the meme that the buildings were unlivable. Julius explained that he composed two kinds of photographs: one displaying the sculptural qualities of a building and another demonstrating the way in which the structures accommodated the contemporary, middle class lifestyle, particularly as it was evolving within the West Coast imagination. His most successful photographs did both.

By Saturday afternoon, my time was well-and-truly up. I needed to get back to San Francisco to ready myself for court on Monday. I told Julius that, if we could not find his original photographs of the Mobil Building, I could simply obtain copies of the prints from the UCLA Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Naturally, the next box in which we looked contained the treasure we sought. Julius remembered the building well, though not fondly. In addition to the photographs I’d seen at the library, there were a number of other interesting shots, along with a copy of the magazine in which they were published. Of particular interest to me was a photograph depicting the installation of a new, modular system of hanging demising walls between interior office spaces, which incorporated wooden paneling. This meant, of course, that there had been relatively little sheetrock work in the building.

I had a story around which to build a defense. I had a photograph. And best of all, I had a witness.

Although I couldn’t be sure of the exact schedule the trial would follow or when I would need Julius to come to San Francisco to testify, we agreed that he would arrive a day early, would stay with me and Yoo-Mi, and would photograph our house on Telegraph Hill, which we’d designed with help of our friend Orlando Diaz-Azcuy. The house had been photographed for several magazine spreads and one hard-cover book; but what a supreme honor it would be to have it photographed by Julius!

As I departed, Julius gave me a special gift: two of his books – Julius Schulman: Architecture and Its Photography and a new large-format collection of his photographs of Neutra’s houses – inscribed.

Back in San Francisco, Mobil was dismissed from the lawsuit before opening statements, following our disclosure to the court that we had both documentary evidence and a witness from which to argue that plaintiff had no asbestos exposure at the Mobil Building, and plaintiff had identified no witnesses to supplement his own lack of recollection. I called Julius to tell him he would not need to come to San Francisco to testify. We wished each other well; and I never saw or spoke to him again. That was my loss. Now, Julius is lost to all of us.

I received an interesting assignment a couple weeks ago: write an explanation of the gift economy. Since the request came from my dear friend Nipun Mehta, to whom I can refuse nothing, I agreed; but I knew from the outset how challenging this seemingly straightforward task would be. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously observed about pornography, some things are easy to recognize and yet quite difficult to define.

The essay, now completed, is included in a new online reference, The Dictionary of Ethical Politics, a joint project of Resurgence and openDemocracy.

I have thought long-and-hard about the gift economy over the past five years, since my friend and colleague John Silliphant first introduced me to the concept. It was John who developed the Seva Café model to nurture and teach about the gift economy and to provide a space to promote and celebrate service within the everyday world. I was fortunate to be on the team that helped John and his angelic enablers, Jayeshbhai and Anarben Patel, launch the project in Ahmedabad. One of my tasks at that time was to write an explanation of the gift economy ideal for Seva Café customers.

I have also been privileged to witness the birth and success of two brilliant gift economy projects by Uma Prajapati’s Upasana Design Studio. In the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Tsunamika dolls, made from scrap cloth by women from devastated fishing villages, quickly gained international recognition as both an important livelihood rehabilitation project and a poignant reminder of the resilience of the human spirit. The subsequent Small Steps project applied gift economy principles to high-fashion environmental activism to serve as a vital reminder of the complex, often-subtle consequences of our patterns of material consumption. Not surprisingly, Upasana Design Studio met with considerable consumer incomprehension when it decided to distribute its Small Steps shopping bags under a price-free model. Once again, I was in the right place at the right time: Uma allowed me to write a short piece (which was later incorporated in the website FAQs) that would introduce people to the pay-it-forward ideal and to understand the ethical and practical consequences of engaging in this gift economy transaction.

And then there is my beloved CharityFocus, which for ten years has been in the forefront of developing creative ways for people to play in the space of service. CF has of-late been working on a number of projects designed to bring attention to the gift economy. These include publication of Works & Conversations magazine and operating Karma Kitchen, CF’s take on the Seva Café concept. Indeed, everything CharityFocus has ever done is, in one way or another, an exercise in gift economy transaction.

So, I agreed to take a shot at producing a short essay. It would be an opportunity to see if I could synthesize anything of value from my considerable exposure to such high-practitioners of the gift economy art.

Difficult as the assignment might be, there was one extremely liberating aspect: The Dictionary of Ethical Politics is a wiki. Those with superior insight will, eventually, correct whatever errors and omissions might find their way into my attempt to explain the gift economy. Accordingly, I decided to approach this “definition” as a sui generis think-piece, devoid of any research or background reading. I wanted to try to compose rules-of-recognition from scratch, without allowing my ideas about the gift economy to be colored by the conceptions of others.

And there was another reason to stay away from prior work. Over the years, I have come across a number of short essays on the gift economy – and have been impressed with none of them. Unsurprisingly, it is a topic that appeals to well-meaning, good-natured, spiritually curious people. Unfortunately, this results in treatments that are often long on fuzzy-headed feel-good and short on rigor. I’m sure there are some very good essays on the gift economy to be found with a simple Google search; but I really had no stomach for a needle-in-haystack exercise that would subject me to the level of penetrating analysis found in the average Hallmark greeting card.

So, here’s my take on the gift economy. To watch as my essay morphs over time, as others improve it, read it online at The Dictionary of Ethical Politics.

******

GIFT ECONOMY

In its simplest form, the gift economy is not hard to comprehend: it is an arrangement for the transfer of goods or services without an agreed method of quid pro quo. Indeed, there may be no expectation or mechanism of exchange whatsoever; hence, the “gift” aspect of the interaction.

But things get complicated quickly. Application of gift economy principles varies widely; and there is, perhaps, considerable disagreement about what constitutes a gift economy transaction. Is every act of generosity, in effect, a gift economy transaction? Does every transfer of goods and services that lacks a predetermined price or definitive method of exchange qualify? The assessment is sometimes complicated and confounding.

Essential Elements of a Gift Economy Transaction

There are three essential features to any gift economy transaction. The first is that there is an act of selflessness on the part of the producer of the goods or services. This does not necessarily mean that they intend to confer the benefit without remuneration, though that is often the case; but there must be some element of altruism that transcends calculations of self-interest as judged within the narrow perspective of the transaction itself.

The second element of a gift economy transaction is that it entails an element of “free play” in the transactional structure – particularly in opposition to the dominant modes of exchange in the prevailing market economy – which fundamentally alters the way in which the giver and the recipient measure value. Thus, while in the market economy prices are usually established by the provider of the goods or services, in the gift economy the roles are often reversed, with the recipient shouldering the responsibility to place a value on the benefit. Most importantly, the gift economy calls into consideration larger social objectives extending beyond the intrinsic value of the goods or services. Market-based exchange tends to focus on the inherent value of the product – measured by the material conditions of production, relative functionality or emotional satisfaction, and relative abundance or scarcity – and therefore tends to externalize both the true social costs and instrumental social benefits associated with consumption. By contrast, the producer in the gift economy is motivated by a systemic faith that giving freely strengthens the basic social fabric, benefiting everyone, even if the transaction is quite limited, specific, and without any broad, overtly social purpose.

The final component is, perhaps, more aspirational than actualized. Ideally, a gift economy transaction is not a single transaction at all; it aims to be a vector of giftings and re-giftings. Whereas market economy transactions tend to be bound within a single, reciprocal exchange, gift economy transactions involve catalyzing a process of selfless giving which induces the recipient of the benefits to, in turn, confer a benefit selflessly on another. This chain-reaction quality of the gift economy is commonly referred to by the phrase, “Pay it forward,” meaning that the moral obligation of the recipient is not to remunerate the giver, but rather to become the giver in an ongoing altruistic process.

Illustrations of Gift Economy Activity

There are a number of transaction models that are said to fall within the gift economy. How well do they fare against the rules of recognition described above?

Charitable Donation: unreciprocated philanthropic gifts of money, goods, or service. This mode displays the purest of altruism and a clear conferring of economic (or economically measurable) benefit. Donations of time or resources are clearly gift economy transactions. Ironically, these transactions generally evoke the gift economy ethos in less overt ways than the more contrived, innovative modes.

Collectivism: the common pooling of the society’s resources, redistributed without regard to contribution. Early collectivist hunter-gatherer societies are sometimes considered gift economies, but these forms of sharing are probably best described as embracing socialist ideals, rather than gift economy principles. Some collectivism falls nicely within the gift economy model, however; for example, the North American First Nations Potlach tradition or its modern, culturally agnostic, role-reversed namesake, the potluck dinner party. The differing levels of contribution people make to these collaborations reflect their differing assessment of the value of the events as well as differing decisions about how they will participate within the social networks.

Cooperativism: where individuals (rather than the entire social network, as in Collectivism) conspire to create things of social value, made openly available and free-of-charge. Famous examples include the open-source software movement, wikis like Wikipedia (and this site), citizen journalism portals, and collective volunteerism projects like charityfocus.org.

Donation Requested: where goods or services are ostensibly gifted, but come with moral suasion for remuneration. Does this mode more closely resemble Charitable Donation, Pay It Forward, or Pay As You Will? A case-by-case assessment would be required to pass judgment.

Pay As You Will: where the buyer, not the seller, sets the price of exchange. While this mode of establishing value may have an element of “free play” about it, this alone does not bring it within the gift economy. The expectation of exchange nullifies the gifting quality of the transfer and the focus remains on the intrinsic value of the goods or services, not on broader social utility. And not all Pay As You Will systems are transgressive of the market economy. Consider, for example, the common practice of tipping.

Pay It Forward: where the consumer receives a benefit with the tacit understanding that payment to the producer will be applied to the giving of similar benefits to others in the future. There can be legitimate debate about whether this conceit carriers a transaction beyond the Pay As You Will model. In cases where meaningful social contribution is significant factor in the valuation exercise and the activity involves systemic participation rather than transactional participation, this mode is an archetype of the gift economy. Where the communitarian intention of the producer, the instrumental social value in the mind of the recipient, and the incentives or inspiration to carry the gifting forward are weaker, the gift economy bona fides are also weaker and the antithetical element of simple exchange is difficult to overlook.

Portion of Proceeds Donated: where the seller pledges to donate only a part of the proceeds of the sale, usually some or all of the profit margin. This model demonstrates the difficulty of identifying gift economy transactions. Is the gift component of the transaction simply a marketing ploy to increase the volume of sales, presently or in the future, or does it represent genuine philanthropy? Variants on this mode include such things as the difference between socially progressive retooling of production or distribution methods to achieve meaningful environmental sustainability and greenmail, the exploiting of token environmentalism as an advertising gimmick. Whether a transaction under this model qualifies as gift economy depends on the true selfless intent of the producer, which be may difficult for the purchaser to divine.

Proceeds of Sale Donated: where the seller gifts both their capital contribution and profit to a charitable or social cause. This presents a fascinating example because, although it is clearly an exchange-based interaction between buyer and seller, it meets all the criteria of a gift economy transaction.

Lessons of the Gift Economy

The common thread among the various modes of gift economy transactions is that the giver of good or services contributes as much to a systemic appreciation of communitarianism and interdependence as to the individual recipient of the benefit.

The gift economy represents an optimistic perspective, engendering attitudes of compassion and generosity, favoring a outlook of relative abundance over relative scarcity, and based on faith that others will also be motivated to favor the common good over individual advantage, at least from time-to-time and in ways that are socially significant.

The gift economy shifts perspective in another important way, forcing a reappraisal of the manner in which we think about and measure value. This awareness can carry-over into to normal market transactions as well, sparking consideration of the consequential costs and benefits of specific acts of material consumption which are otherwise externalized from the price.

Finally, the gift economy reminds us of the interconnection of our lives to other human lives, to non-human lives, and to the non-living world. It offers a broader perspective on the ripple effects of our other-regarding actions, even if the specific consequences remain mostly invisible to us. It demonstrates, transaction-by-transaction, that each of us has the power to positively influence collective behavior within our communities and throughout the world.

At long-last, I joined the club: I made my first loaf of the sensational no-knead bread, from the Jim Lahey technique popularized by Mark Bittman in the New York Times a couple years ago.

I have always been a little shy about baking. It always seemed like hard science, and I have always seen myself as more of a poet, better suited to the no-measure, dash-of-this-dash-of-that of cooking. In truth, I greatly enjoy science and have been avoiding the oven all these years more from laziness than anything.

Thanks to Lahey and Bittman, however, even laziness is an unworthy excuse. The entire “active” part of the process takes five minutes, if done with absurd deliberation – maybe eight minutes if one adds in the washing-up time. It takes me longer to ride the five kilometers and back to fetch a loaf of exquisite Transylvania Bakery peasant bread than to make one of my own, leaving aside the time the dough is doing its own thing, with no help from me – fermenting, resting, rising, or baking. Way longer.

The no-knead methodology is based on two simple ideas. The first is that, by combining a relatively wet, sloppy dough and a long-ass fermentation opportunity, you get a wonderfully moist, open-structured crumb. The second involves doing the first two-thirds of the high temperature bake within an enclosed dutch oven. Patterned after the ancient French technique of baking within a cloche (clay pot), the dutch oven method traps the steam from the baking bread, providing sufficient humidity within the baking vessel to yield a loaf with a thick, crunchy crust.

There has never been a justification for eating crap bread. But now, there seems little reason to regularly spend $5-8 on decent bread when you can make better-than-decent bread for a tenth of that, with no more effort than it takes to purchase it.

All aboard!

I love train journeys. In India, where I reside half of each year, I make long-distance rail trips whenever I’m not pressed for time, generally snoozing-away most of the miles from a top berth in a second class bogey. I’d never traveled long distance by train in North America, however, until this week. On Thursday night, Yoo-Mi and I boarded Amtrak’s Coast Starlight Express at Oakland’s Jack London Station and headed north to Seattle, from which we’d jump the border to Vancouver on a connecting bus.

As a Canadian resident, I am prohibited from driving a U.S.-plated vehicle across into Canuckistan without formally importing and registering it, and paying a nice chunk of tax. Onerous as all that sounds, it’s mostly a moot point. I haven’t owned a car in seven years and don’t foresee owning one in the near future. Those kind enough to lend me their vehicles for hefty or distant errands are unlikely to want their wheels exported (and expropriated) like this.

So, public transportation it was; and Amtrak seemed a relatively comfortable way to go. Although private compartments with sleepers are available, we traveled “coach”, in reasonably broad seats that reclined almost deeply enough. The drive from San Francisco to Vancouver usually takes us about 16 hours; Amtrak takes nearly twice as long, delivering us not-exactly-door-to-door in 30 hours. The big difference, of course, is that those are hours spent reading, sleeping, or moving about, rather than stuck mercilessly behind the wheel, willing oneself to stay awake through the insistent ache of fatigue.

If there was one downside to Amtrak it was the chattiness of our fellow passengers. Not that they were talking to me – they were just talking. Loudly, incessantly, and about a whole-lot-of-nothing. And done in that peculiar middle-American accent that shreds any background noise, pierces the ears, and cuts to the bone.

All are bored!

Mother’s Day — that annual festival of last-minute teleflorism — is once again upon our sorry selves. It is not the worst Hallmark Holiday of the year, of course. That honor would go to Father’s Day, for which there is not even an accepted, go-to, eleventh-hour gift alternative. Still, it is a celebration we’d do well to drop from the calendar.

I’m sure there are a few mothers deserving of praise for their efforts, including (I grudgingly admit) the one pictured above. Probably some fathers too, at least hypothetically. Still, I’ve been to too many confessional dinner parties with people claiming to be children of parents to believe that there are so many truly outstanding (or even passably competent) child-rearers as to justify a whole day (and a prime spring weekend slot, to boot!) in their collective honor.

Which puts me in mind of a favorite joke. A guy says to his psychiatrist, “I made a horrible Freudian slip this morning at breakfast.” What was it? “My father asked me to pass the coffee, and I accidentally replied: ‘You fucked-up my whole life you son-of-a-bitch!’”

But bad parents are not really the problem. Having them allows us to participate in the nearly-universal kvetch that is so central to the American cultural myth of the self-made child. To have loving parents who offered generally sound adult supervision and served as half-decent role models is to be excluded from the mainstream of American thought and a substantial amount of intra-generational conversation. And that’s not even the worst of it.

Good parents generally make for bad children. Not awful in every respect, of course; but under-appreciative of their parents in a morally reprehensible way. The better the parents, the more necessarily inadequate the filial piety. This model doesn’t hold in every culture, mind you. In lots of places, kids are obsequiously reverential of even the most abominable parents. But in America, sucking-up to your parents isn’t cool. It’s enough to get you beat-up on the playground or dinner-for-one in front of the TV on prom night. It just isn’t done.

Which brings me to my own mother, by all accounts a superstar of the genre. Her last Mother’s Day gift was probably a card I drew in crayon. This is the woman I taunt with claims that I’m searching-out “my true biological mother, who is very rich and misses me very much.” Whose every illness is met with my differential diagnosis of insanity. Who has to make her own breakfast on Mother’s Day morning. This year she was determined to receive at least token recognition of the fact that she fed, sheltered, and otherwise raised me. She gave me a task: for Mother’s Day, I was to compose a list of all the reasons she had been a good mother.

Naturally, I protested mightily against the injustice of this assignment. Mother’s Day is not like Christmas, where you sit on Santa’s knee and get to say what you want for a present. You smile and take the flowers — or, if you are lucky, half-decent chocolates. Shamelessly, she stuck to her demand, leaving me in a predicament somewhere between Oedipus and Elisabeth Barrett Browning. O mother, how do I love thee, let me count the ways.

Reluctantly, I pulled-out a pencil and stared at the blank page, willing my list into existence. Hell, it didn’t even have to be all that accurate! If I wrote that she was the model of decorum and taught me beautiful manners, was she really going to remind anyone that it was she who taught me to swear like a longshoreman? (What-the-fuck is it with those longshoremen, anyway?) And I very nearly wrote the thing; until something more meaningful came up, like checking the European football scores. Wouldn’t any good mother want her son to know who won when Real Madrid visited Valencia?

Besides, I still harbor hopes of someday getting a date to the prom.

Puducherry’s wonderful Lieutenant Governor, Govind Singh Gurjar, died yesterday of a heart attack. This is a tragic day. To understand just how awful — in its civic dimension, and not just on a personal level — consider how impossibly rare it is for an Indian politician to be plausibly garlanded with the epithet “wonderful”.

In a system where corruption, narcissism, laziness, ignorance, and incompetence are the sine qua non of political life, Govind Singh Gurjar was an astonishment: a politician whose greatest joy seemed to be doing well for the people in whose trust he served. He worked tirelessly to understand the nuance and complexity of the issues before him and, having decided on a course of action, would set the machinery of his administration in motion without temporizing. In the venal cesspool of Pondicherry government, the LG had but one aim: to help the Union Territory fulfill its obvious, abundant promise. Sadly, he leaves us at a time when that objective looks to be effectively, and perhaps irrevocably, snuffed by the greed and thoughtlessness of political-business-as-usual.

Puducherry is not a state; its four, tiny noncontiguous regions, representing former French holdings in India, are aggregated as a Union Territory, under the direct administrative control of the federal government in Delhi. The LG is Delhi’s top-dog in Puducherry, and never a Puducherry native. Govind Singh Gujar, for example, hailed from Rajasthan. This outsider status is double-edged sword. On the one hand, the LG is not a product of Puducherry’s horrific, inbred political corruption. He neither owes patronage within the local parties, nor is enmeshed with the monied interests whom have long-since bought-and-paid-for our politicians and government bureaucrats. On the other hand, most LGs couldn’t have cared less for Puducherry. Between 2006 and 2008, for example, the office was held by the appallingly apathetic Mukut Mithi of Assam. He spent little time in the Governor’s Palace in Pondicherry and, by all accounts, was utterly disengaged from his official responsibilities. He quickly became frustrated with the relative lack of opportunities for graft — that market having been effectively locked-up by then Chief Minister N. Rangaswami — and ultimately resigned in order to pursue more lucrative political office in his native state. Govind Singh Gujar was, once again, exceptional. He loved Pondicherry town, seeing both its vestigial exquisiteness and the ways in which sleaze, greed, and ineptitude were destroying what remained of its remarkable natural and cultural legacies. He studied Tamil language to feel more a part of the place, engaging a private tutor every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. He funded initiatives to preserve and promote the disappearing architectural vernacular of Pondicherry, re-engaging with UNESCO, whose overtures to make Pondicherry a World Heritage Site had been systematically ignored by local politicians who feared that such recognition would interfere with their ability to push-through ruinous development projects for personal gain. He rewarded the work of NGOs and volunteers who labored to make Puducherry great, often against the grain of the political establishment.

I had the very great privilege of meeting and working with the LG on a number of occasions and never ceased to be impressed by his warmth, humor, intellect, clarity of vision, steadfastness, and personal integrity. It is distressingly fair to predict that Puducherry will not see his like again in the foreseeable future.