Dear friend,
When my partner, Joe, asked what I wanted for Christmas, I said a tree. Our front garden looks shabby – the baby oak we planted last year snapped in half during a storm. Joe said, “No, that’s not something just for you, though!”
His sentiment is sweet, but a gift for all – me, him, the neighborhood, the birds, the planet, would be all the more precious for its exponentiality.
In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay, “The Gift of Strawberries,” she talks about the practice of a gift economy.
When she was a child, she and her siblings gathered wild strawberries from the fields behind their house. Red and “dimpled with seeds,” the strawberries were gifts from the earth. For Father’s Day, the kids picked jars of berries to make their dad a strawberry shortcake - a gift from a gift. Kimmerer also instinctually weeded the patches of land where she knew the strawberries would root, caring for them as they cared for her, both contributing to each other’s flourishing. A gift for a gift.
She writes, “The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.”
I’m moved by the ways gift economies live on, even in our more overarching wage economy.
Our neighbors bring us beer back from their travels. We drop cupcakes off at their house. Our other neighbors mow our lawn and don’t even tell us they did. Friends give us extra eggs from their chickens. We give them rosemary from the bush that the past resident of our house planted. The great writer and editor Toni Morrison said that anytime she got unexpected money, she used it to support her friends’ needs or their art. I strive to do the same.
It’s obvious that I’m critical of the way we do capitalism in the US.
I wrote about internalized capitalism last week, time poverty September 29, and consumer culture September 15. I think so often, we clump our economic systems into unshakeable categories. Capitalism vs. communism. Wage economy vs. gift economy. But Jacqueline Novogratz, author of Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, suggests another way –
“We will flourish only if we move to “both-and” thinking, integrating purpose and profit, generosity and accountability, the community and the individual.”
As someone from the US with years of experience working with and for the global poor, Novogratz sees the benefits of capitalism, but also the dangers if it goes unchecked.
Benefit:
“Markets give people control over their own lives rather than leaving them to the whims of government or charitable benefactors.”
Danger:
When capitalism “overlooks or exploits those who cannot afford to pay; insufficiently considers the well-being of employees; and does not integrate into the balance sheets the cost of poorly utilizing the earth’s precious resources.”
Novogratz calls for moral imagination.
So here are today’s questions - for me, you, and all of us -
What would ethical capitalism look like?
Is there a way that our markets, workplaces, and systems like healthcare can consider values beyond profits? Values like human dignity and well-being, care for the earth, meaningful work, connection and community?
How can employers better protect and care for their employees? Can they see employees as human beings, not resources that come at a cost?
Can we incorporate the rules of the gift economy - reciprocity and responsibility - into the ways we do business?
I hope, I dream, I imagine.
Until next time,
A
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The exponential nature of a great gift... Great post!