What is a non-reciprocal gift?

Here I want to elaborate on what a non-reciprocal gift is. Non-reciprocal gifting is at the core of a non-reciprocal gifting economy, and so it is worth spending a little time getting to know them well.

The main idea is simple enough - people just give each other things. But it is also worth exploring the language-use here to ensure we are all on the same page, and to look at some of the more confusing and potentially liminal cases in order to see how it behaves.

No obligations

The first and perhaps most obvious thing is that a non-reciprocal gift creates no obligations in the recipient. I earlier said that it creates no obligations "to reciprocate", but it is probably easier and more accurate to say that it creates no obligations whatsoever. We can think of this in two different ways: first, it creates no contractual obligations, and second, it creates no social expectations.

No contractual obligations is the most straightforward. If a person gives a gift to a recipient, they may do so in the hope that the recipient uses it in a particular way, or because it will enable them to later perform a particular action, or some other thing. However, in a non-reciprocal gift the transfer of resources contains no contractual obligation on the recipient, and so even if the gifter hopes that they will behave a certain way after receiving the gift, they are under no obligation to do so and there is nothing that the gifter can do about it. For example, someone might give another person food in the hope that when they are fed they will work to improve society, but a non-reciprocal gift contains no mechanism to contractually obligate the recipient to do so (in fact, if that were included, it would no longer be a gift but an exchange).

Removing contractual obligations is conceptually easier than adding them. To make a contractual obligation meaningful, there needs to be some system of arbitration or enforcement to make it work - that is, if someone doesn't hold up their end of the contract (such as paying a bill), there needs to be a court that determines impartially if this was the case, and enforcement to ensure that the evidence of the matter is fairly brought to and represented in court and that any consequences can be applied, such as garnishing salary, mandating community service, or prison. On the other hand, a lack of contractual obligation means that none of those things are required.

In a non-reciprocal gifting economy the gifter is, of course, aware of this. They know that their gift could be used in a manner they are not overly happy with. But, given that they know there is also no resource, they give the gift of the understanding that the recipient is free to do with it as they please.

There might be some concern here that this sounds structureless or non-viable - I will return to this in a few articles when I speak about the motivations within a non-reciprocal gifting economy.

The other type of obligation that is lacking is a social expectation. Social expectation is represented by something intangible, such as social status, social capital or trust. This is the type of non-enforceable obligation that is created in a traditional gifting economy. For example, in a traditional gifting economy, giving a gift can have an intangible benefit on the gifter, such as receiving increased social status, or a store of social capital that they can use to request other gifts. The recipient may also have a perceived level of trust, considered in some manner like a social debt, where receiving a gift increases the social debt, and gifting resources to someone else discharges the debt and increases trust (and where failing to discharge the debt would reduce trust).

Because these are intangible aspects, there is no way to ensure that they are enforced - that is, there is no way to ensure that gifting will increase status or social capital, or that not reciprocating will decrease trust. That does not mean that people would not take those aspects seriously. The core concept of a non-reciprocal gift, however, is that they should not be relevant. Adding in these aspects prevents the gift from being a "true gift" and instead transforms the action into a type of exchange.

Conditions

So a gift does not create an obligation. However, this does not mean that a gift will be given out under simply any circumstances whatsoever. While the gifter cannot guarantee any circumstances after the recipient has received the gift, they can still consider the circumstances under which they would like to give a gift and the conditions that would need to be met for any particular gift to be given.

Some of these would be very straightforward: a person might given food to someone else on the condition that they are hungry, or a textbook to a person on the condition that they are a student in a particular course. These conditions are barriers to receive the gift in the first place. However, given that gifting comes with no obligations, the hungry person is under no obligation to eat the apple and the student is under no obligation to continue the course. The gifter, of course, has no recourse to retrieve the gift if the condition is no longer met after the gift is received - if the student drops out of the course, the gifter cannot obligate them to return the book.

It might feel like there is a loophole here where a condition can be placed on the recipient that is the equivalent of an exchange - for example, that a person will only gift a car after they have received a boat, or something similar. Of course, if both parties negotiate and agree to what the mutual conditions are, then it is an exchange rather than a gift.

But placing conditions on gifting are important, for two reasons. First, it makes the gifting voluntary, because it allows the gifter to choose when and if they give a gift. And second, it allows the gifter to use their discretion regarding the allocation of resources. If a gifter has a house that they were willing to gift, for example, they may choose to gift it to someone on the condition that the recipient does not already own a house. The conditions of gifting are what allows gifting to be a process of rational consideration regarding resource allocation.

Voluntary transfers

To constitute a non-reciprocal gift, the transfer of resources must also be voluntary, both for the gifter and the recipient. For a look at what happens when it is only voluntary for one party, I have made a brief analysis of different economic transfer types - the result is that transfers that are involuntary for one party are problematic and usually unstable and incoherent.

The voluntary action of the gifter is determined by the fact that the gifter can decide when and if to gift a resource, usually on the basis of some considered condition. The same applies to the recipient, as well, who will only receive the gift if they so desire. This can be useful for the recipient to prevent them from getting burdened with something that does not have a use-value for them, including irrelevant resources, duplicate resources, and low-quality resources.

The most efficient way for a non-reciprocal gift to work, then, is not to have the recipient be offered the resource and then accept or reject it, in which case they could be offered an endless array of resources they need to reject and no resources that they want to accept, but to have the potential recipient request the resource. The request is the primary way in which potential recipients signal to the economy that there is something that they need, and it stems from the voluntary criterion of the act of gifting.