What's the rational motivation to work?

So, on to the first of the two big challenges for a non-reciprocal gifting economy: would people work and gift the product of their labour? It does not matter how neatly the other parts of the economy fit together to produce beneficial outcomes in theory if people would not actually participate in such an economy. A lot of discussion regarding the success of liberal market economies is that it appeals to the basic human nature that practically everyone shares: rational self-interest, perhaps interpreted as selfishness or greed. To try and build a system that requires any other sort of human nature would fall apart - at least, so the story goes. The story is that the exchange economy is in line with human nature, and as a best fit, it is the best economic model we could have.

Mainstream economists largely build on this model in one fashion or another - at the heart of all economic models are theories of human nature or human behaviour that simplify it to suggest that humans will behave in a particular way, and for modern mainstream economists this is the homo economicus, the rationally self-interested person. People are motivated to work in an exchange economy because they are paid, and they can use that pay to buy survival or luxury goods, satisfying their self-interest and making it rational to work. Without pay, work would not satisfy those interests, and therefore people would not be rationally motivated to do it. The same goes for exchanging versus gifting: people can be motivated to exchange because they will gain out of it, but not to gift, because they will not.

I disagree. Part of the disagreement is empirical: people give non-reciprocal gifts all the time, privately, communally, institutionally, and they do so to override the direction that the market is taking things - especially to solve poverty and disadvantage. People in exchange economies do act a little greedily - but the structural motivation of the exchange economy is to accrue exchange capacity. So, set people into a different economic structure and they will have different structural motivations. I would go even further: the structural motivations of the exchange are in opposition to much of the behaviour motivated by other factors, which is the cause of a lot of tension (and stress), while in a non-reciprocal gifting economy this isn't the case.

But I don't just disagree empirically. I think that even if we take the basic logic of mainstream economics regarding human behaviour, we can still end up with a rational motivation for people to work and gift in a non-reciprocal gifting economy. We don't need to reinterpret or reinvent a model of human behaviour (even though the mainstream economic model could be considered incomplete or oversimplified) - we can reason through how a rationally self-interested person would behave in a non-reciprocal gifting economy, and the conclusion is that they would be motivated to work and gift the products of their labour.

There is a complication to this, called the "free rider problem", which I will get to soon, because it deserves some particular attention. But here I will be laying out the more general groundwork that motivates work and gifting.

An orchard scenario

To explore the motivations for work I'm going to set up a little toy economy and examine what happens in it, and then suggest that these basic principles are applicable more broadly. The toy economy has only two people in it, Alic and Beth, and an orchard. Both Alice and Beth need to eat food every day in order to live, and either or both of them can work in the orchard to produce food - the longer they work, the more food they produce.

To simplify the economy even more, let's start by saying that there are not other people, no other sources of food, no possible people to trade with, and that the food spoils and rots if not eaten the same day or so. Clearly this situation is not reflective of the real world, but it is a starting place to consider what might happen.

In this situation, if enough work is not completed every day, then Alice and Beth could starve to death. There is, therefore, an incentive for each of them to work.

If their motivation to work is the same, then it could be the case that Alice and Beth work equal hours and that each of them would produce just enough food for themselves. They could come to some arrangement to distribute those hours in any way they want (for example, each has a day on and a day off), but the principle would be the same.

But what if Beth doesn't want to work? She could say that she's not going to work, and if Alice believes her she is faced with the following question: should she work enough to produce enough food for Beth, and gift that food to Beth so that Beth survives?

Alice's values

The answer depends on Alice's values. If Alice values Beth's life, then she might want to work and feed Beth even if Beth is not motivated to work. If she doesn't value Beth's life, then she might not produce enough for Beth, and Beth could die. (Of course, people are more complicated than this, but this shows that there are at least two very distinct options.) So the first point is that we cannot automatically assume what Alice's values are and that she is the sort of person who would let Beth die.

If that is the case, then the resolution is fairly straightforward: Alice would work and feed Beth. She is motivated to gift, and a gifting economy would work. But what about the scenario where Alice is rather apathetic. Does that mean that Alice is likely to abandon Beth and leave her to starve?

Alice's survival self-interest

Let's say that Alice is convinced that Beth will not work, and Alice is rather apathetic about Beth's life. To some extent it may or may not matter whether Beth really intends not to work, as long as Alice believes it. For example, it might not be the case that Beth is more willing to die than work, and instead simply be that she is convincing Alice of this in order to manipulate her to do all the work. In this case, Beth could be risking death, unless Alice has some other motivation to keep Beth alive, so Beth would probably only employ this strategy if she believed that Alice had some motivation to keep her alive.

And Alice does have another motivation to keep Beth alive. Her motivation is that if she, Alice, falls ill, she will be unable to work. If that happens, she won't be able to get herself food, and she would die. It would be useful for her if there were another potential worker who could get food for her, and that potential worker is Beth. So Alice has a vested interest in keeping Beth alive.

The next question is then if Beth is likely to work to keep herself or Alice alive if Alice were to fall ill. It is very likely that she would work to keep herself alive, now that Alice isn't working. She could do that and let Alice starve. But she is probably interested in having Alice get back to full health, because Alice has been very useful in getting Beth food without Beth having to work, and Beth would like to go back to that situation. So Beth is likely to work enough to gift food to Alice.

Now we have a situation where, even if Alice and Beth are not particularly interested in the life of the other in any moral or altruistic sense, they are motivated to work and gift to each other in order to benefit themselves.

But is it gifting?

I think that, classically, the above scenario might have been considered as a type of exchange: Alice and Beth have an understanding with each other that they will look after each other in certain conditions. And to some extent this is justified, because it is a type of generalised exchange, or diffuse reciprocity. But I would be hesitant to call it an actual exchange, or an exchange of the sort I have been critiquing, because it is lacking several of the clearest aspects that an exchange has: that the two parties voluntarily agree to the entire arrangement, that there is an agreement about the value being traded being sufficiently equitable in the subjective opinion of each party, that it is contractual in some sense, and that there is recourse if one end of the agreement is not kept.

For example, Alice could sit down with Beth and say, "I will work and gift you fruit while you sit here, but only on the condition that if I am ever sick that you will do the same for me for the duration of my sickness." Beth could then negotiate terms in response, and the two could strike an agreement. I think this would definitely qualify as an exchange.

But in the above scenario this doesn't need to happen. Alice is motivated to offer the gift of fruit to Beth, and Beth to accept, without making a specific contract. Then Beth is motivated to do the same for Alice, and Alice to accept, without making a specific contract. And the result is similar to if Alice and Beth had made the contract described above.

In the way this is presented, formal exchanges and the diffuse reciprocity of non-reciprocal gifting look similar or identical. This doesn't indicate that one is more preferable than the other, but it should start to suggest that non-reciprocal gifting is at least as viable, and that people would be motivated to do it.

In the next article I'll go through a few variation and extra details about this main idea.