Work and free riders: a summary

In this section I've tried to flesh out the main ideas about work and free riders, because these are some of the most common objections that come up when discussing a non-reciprocal gifting economy.

The main objection is that not enough people would want to work. If people did not have to work to receive resources, why wouldn't they just sit around and receive resources without working? Doesn't the exchange encourage more people to work? Won't that improve quality of life? Isn't it more just that way?

I think that these are reasonable questions, but I also think that a non-reciprocal gifting economy would actually do better than an exchange economy. I've tried to work through this thinking bit by bit in the previous pages, but I'll lay out a brief summary here.

People have a rationally self-interested reason to work and gift. If we take the assumptions of the rationally self-interested person from neoclassical economics, people would still be motivated to work and gift because of diffuse reciprocity: it helps them have a society that sustains the quality of life they want to have, and it keeps alive and healthy replacement workers in case of illness.

People are generally motivated to work. There are a variety of reasons that people are motivated to work, including moral concern, self-actualisation, interest, joy, self-betterment, community, and more. People aren't just motivated by death and poverty, but because work - in different capacities for different people - is not always an ends to a good life, but part of a good life.

There'll be an equilibrium of free riders and workers. People will be motivated to work at least until they meet an acceptable quality of life, which will mean that at any one time there will be people working and people not working forming a stable economy. Society won't fall into a death spiral of people not working.

An exchange economy is less efficient. If society reaches an equilibrium of workers and non-workers, motivating more people to work will be inefficient: it will add costs to implement and enforce the system of motivation, it will create busy jobs, and it will likely lower quality of life. Trying to pressure the system to do more won't make it more productive, even though it takes more effort.

It's difficult to tell who is capable of work and who is not. We don't mind people who can't work not contributing, but it is difficult to discern who truly can't work - and each time we learn more about humans, we learn more about some of the previously invisible difficulties that people face.

It's not always clear what counts as work. Some jobs are productive, and some aren't. Some of the things that people do in their everyday life are productive and some aren't. Drawing the line is tricky, but that means that it is tricky to complain that someone is a free rider.

It's not fair to those who work. An exchange economy encourages everyone to work, but a non-reciprocal gifting economy might mean that some people work and some don't. Apart from the ambiguities raised above, there are some other things to consider about this point. One is to consider what fairness and justice mean. I'll be getting to that in a later section.

Overall, I don't believe that a non-reciprocal gifting economy would perform worse than an exchange economy, and there is reason to believe that it would perform better. I'll explore some of the particulars of that reasoning when I talk about employer-employee relations, business motivations and several other things in the next section.