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

[Ryan Lanham]

Paul,

There are a number of very good college research programs on philanthropy,
civil society, volunteering and related topics that regularly debate these
issues.  Notable ones include Boston College, Indiana, Tufts, and USC but
there are many others.

Civicus is a key NGO looking at what they call the Civil Society Index which
is a measure of non-governmental social involvment.  I personally would
consider most commons efforts to be part of civil society as an
academic disciplinary home.  Civil society is often a research topic in
planning, community development, public administration or even Divinity
studies.  I am less certain where it falls internationally (e.g. in Europe)
but I would expect similar areas.  The US gives mostly through foundations,
and Europe, I believe tends to see more individual volunteers.  I don't know
about Asia or other continents.  Most philanthropy is of course associated
with churches.  The Catholic Church, I believe, is still by far the largest
philanthropic entity on earth...serves more AIDS patients, etc. The US gives
more in total dollars than anyone and is very high in total gifts as a
percentage of income, but the numbers are always debated and argued.
Clearly the US is not as active as a volunteer nation as many others,
particularly if faith-based organizations are excluded.

Most major universities have a department in charge of facilitating Peace
Corps volunteers in the US, and that's the department that is usually
researching philanthropy, volunteering, etc.

ARNOVA <http://www.arnova.org/> is the big research group of academics, and
it is a good one.  It has a number of conferences, a big international one,
and lots of supporting information on the sorts of issues you are raising
here.

Ryan



On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 7:43 AM, Paul D. Fernhout <
pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:

> 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/
>
>
>
>
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