Tuesday, August 7, 2012

the neighbourhood gift economy


In a recent video posted on the Guardian's website, self-titled 'de-growth theorist' Charles Eisenstein provides an overview of his vision of the 'gift economy' - a model for an economy that could function within a locally-embedded community, which encourages neighbours to share common resources and to perform services for one another. Click here to watch the video, which is just a few minutes long.

What I like about Eisenstein's notion of the gift economy is that it is based on some different assumptions about what drives us as human beings. Far from the 'self-interested' rational economic man that underpins mainstream economic theory, Eisenstein paints a human nature characterised by service and altruism. This gives rise to a conception of the neighbourhood as a community of people who naturally care about one another, who want to help each other out, and who can rely on that support from others. 

Building an economy on these assumptions can include exchange models that don't depend exclusively on money - he gives examples of local trading schemes and 'time banking.' It can also imply pooling some resources instead of each individual family needing to own them, such as public cars or shared power tools. Not only do such schemes reinforce the value of community, but as Eisenstein points out, they compel us to rethink the current economic model, whose dependence on unbridled consumption is clearly at odds with these more sustainable, more affordable, more gratifying, and more natural notions of sharing. 

This also got me thinking how in order for endless consumption to work, it needs us to think a certain way about who we are, what motivates us, and how we relate to our neighbours. Eisenstein's view is at odds with the well-known idiom "keeping up with the Joneses", which assumes that our neighbours actually form the benchmarks against which we measure our own social status. The theory goes that our notions of 'rich' and 'poor' are relative, depending on the status of our neighbours, marked of course by their material possessions (and most often the car they drive, as the ultimate status symbol). According to the theory then, one's own non-stop acquisition of goods is a race to outdo the neighbours. 

Thankfully, the notion of sharing expensive goods like cars does away with society's obsession with possessing luxury goods, thereby restoring the car to its rightful function - to get us from A to B, while ensuring that our neighbours are no longer perceived as competitors, but as friends and co-workers.

We could say that the current economy functions by thriving off our lower nature - that part of us driven by our ego, which can be easily lured into the trap of competition. Eisenstein's gift economy, on the other hand, is built on - and in turn helps develop - our higher nature, that nobility within us that seeks expression through acts of kindness, love and generosity. 

Eisenstein's vision of work is also based on the assumption of these qualities in man. Freed from the demands of the consumer economy, work can take on its true meaning - as Eisenstein notes, "an expression of our gifts," producing goods and services "called forth by needs." He also criticises the perversion of a system that can reward acts of injustice while often leaving humanity's most noble acts uncompensated. Money, which has become an end in itself, does not repay someone according to the value of their work. This also implies that our notions of wealth accumulation need to change, from a strictly material conception to one that incorporates spiritual dimensions too. As Eisenstein notes:
In the gift culture, the more you give, the richer you are. Which is kind of opposite to the money culture. 
A geographic community - a neighbourhood - is the perfect setting for such an economy. Not only because of convenience (sharing a car or power tools would only make sense if these things were easily accessible), but because the notion of looking out for one another as the basis of an economy implies a network of relationships. It implies interaction, and it implies vicinity. 

This vision of the neighbourhood has implications for planning, too. Eisenstein feels that humanity's best planning and logic and technological solutions have led us to the disaster we're in. His musings on the shortcomings of humanity's best planning efforts brought to mind another thinker on the relationships between members within a locality: French sociologist Henri Lefebvre, whose text The Right to the City (Le Droit à la Ville) provides insight into how different approaches to planning affect the way cities are conceived and created - and ultimately the way we relate to one another within them. 



According to Lefebvre, one approach to planning is that of 'developers' - those who plan cities with the market and profit generation in mind (and hence extend the consumer model described above). In Lefebvre's view, such planners cater their designs towards a consumer society:
They will build not only commercial centres, but also centres of privileged consumption: the renewed city. They will be making 'legible' an ideology of happiness through consumption, joy by planning adapted to its new mission. This planning programmes a daily life generating satisfactions...A programmed and computerised consumption will become the role and the norm for the whole society.
This 'planned' and systematised consumption gets to the core of the 'norms' that Eisenstein seeks to overcome, particularly in the milieu of the community, including the superficial notion of 'happiness' that Lefebvre describes ironically. This would be replaced with the more powerful, genuine sentiment of gratitude, where members of a community experience true happiness through the gift of helping each other out, based on the principal of reciprocity.

Ultimately, the structures of our societies need to embody those higher aspects of human nature that we want to nurture and develop, the ones that reveal our innate nobility. In doing so, they won't only reflect these virtues but will become systems through which we can further develop them. We need more thinkers like Eisenstein who can find the simple logic in models that harness man's capacity for nobility.





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