[p2p-research] Mali's Gift Economy — YES! Magazine

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
> In 2005, people in the U.S. gave 
> $260.28 billion to non-profits and charities, and 61.2 million 
> volunteered, with each person giving a median of 52 hours per year. ...

I've been reflecting on this figure of time "volunteered", and I think it is 
biased low in a way. It may be accurate in terms of time formally 
volunteered to non-profits and charities, but the gift giving landscape is 
larger than that.

If you consider time parents spend with children as a "gift" the children 
will then pay forward into time with their children someday, then the gift 
economy in that sense is much larger.

Likewise, if you included time people spend taking care of older relatives 
as gift time, that volunteer time is much larger too.

Also, if you include time spent giving friends or neighbors advice in the 
course of conversation (advice about anything from gardening to 
relationships), then that figure for time volunteered is larger too. 
Granted, some of that advice giving is sometimes eventually reciprocal, but 
rarely on a one-to-one per comment basis.

And then there are the growing movevements for free and open source 
software, blogs, and wikis, which are all gifts in a way.

And, to turn an aspect of industrial capitalism on its head, you could even 
argue all the time spent in schools or in front of advertisements is 
volunteer time that people are spending to make the system work in 
supporting its corrupt and unpleasant way. :-) Also, since intellectual 
labor is hard to quantify, and many services can be performed at varying 
levels of quality without people noticing or changing their payments (how 
many inventions a salaried researcher produces at a big company, how clean 
tables or toilets are in restaurants, how helpful salaried sales clerks 
are), there are other aspects of the formal economy that are essentially 
gifts to customers by individual employees on a day-to-day basis with any 
long term benefits hard to quantify.

So, I think that 52 hours a year per person spent "volunteering" in the USA 
is way too low.

I'd suggest, that if you consider all of the above (especially parent-child 
time) as gifts, the gift economy in the USA may be much larger than the 
money economy in terms of time and energy spent in it.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/