Links (end): I read this and thought how little do most of outside China comprehend, at all, the Chinese way of life. ⭐ I think about protest. What sparks change? I have also ruminated previously on the importance of hair (when I started to lose mine). And especially to women. Current events in Iran weave all of this together. ⭐ Understanding this is one way to understand what it means to be British and why we have the obsessions we have… in this case marmalade. ⭐ A long read on someone thinking about sleep, her diary and her chats with sleep experts. ⭐ Why Brussel Sprouts are less bitter now ⭐ Some universal aspects of morality ⭐ Aarathi Kirshnan’s key note on what a better future might look like ⭐ Thinking on my chat about meta science ⭐ Quiz: What is 3TG?
I have to admit there is a part of being a “sustainability leader” which is boring. I judge this is an important part of the de-growth ideas problem. An agenda of abundance and choice and techno-stuff is easier. Of course, being circular and shopping second hand, and going by train rather than plane should NOT be boring, yet the perception (and sometimes the reality) is that it is.
I know very few people, and basically no one I’ve ever met, who matches the personal sustainability of Greta or a George Monbiot.
Myself. I've bought almost no clothes this year. My ever ready, cheap and bedraggled red bag is still going strong. My son has crimped my phone with a bazillion train and hand dryer images, and the right choice is to look for a second hand phone.
It’s not just the workers in China close to the modern slavery line who assemble the phones….
…workers vented about how they were never sure if they would get meals while in quarantine or over inadequate curbs to contain an outbreak. "Foxconn never treats humans as humans," said one person. (Reuters article, 23 Nov on COVID-zero, riot video)
Question: How many of you know what 3TG stands for? (Answer end)
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…or the energy needed to make and ship. The whole cycle of consumer advertising makes me feel good about a new phone and the vast majority of people I know - who aren’t on a budget - don’t think too much about falling into simply buying a new one.
My first instinct still is to think of a new phone - it’s exciting! Apple tells me so - and then “boringly” I turn to eBay or AskLoma (a second hand aggregator I support). It’s a chore (and it’s harder to do)
I appreciate there is a small shift to think about slow food, slow travel, pre loved and second hand but it really isn’t the most dominant strand even when it is cheaper (and sometimes preloved or repairing is more expensive, and the true sustainability credentials can be hard to untangle) and I’m unsure it will ever be.
Still, at the margin we still need to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. Will let you know if my eBay bids are ever successful! But in all honesty, I can’t help but feel a bit bored.
Happy Thanksgiving. This day of giving thanks now coincides with the largest day of consumerism in the West (there is a very large day in China which rivals it) somehow known as Black Friday. I think the only way you will escape knowledge of Black Friday in the US is by being dead.
It is believed by many that the term Black Friday derives from the concept that businesses operate at a financial loss, or are “in the red,” until the day after Thanksgiving, when massive sales finally allow them to turn a profit, or put them “in the black.” However, this is untrue.
A more accurate explanation of the term dates back to the early 1960s, when police officers in Philadelphia began using the phrase “Black Friday” to describe the chaos that resulted when large numbers of suburban tourists came into the city to begin their holiday shopping and, in some years, attend Saturday’s annual Army-Navy football game. The huge crowds created a headache for the police, who worked longer shifts than usual as they dealt with traffic jams, accidents, shoplifting, and other issues.
Within a few years, the term Black Friday had taken root in Philadelphia. City merchants attempted to put a prettier face on the day by calling it “Big Friday.”
The phrase “Black Friday” to signify a positive boost in retail sales didn’t grow nationwide until the late 1980s, when merchants started to spread the red-to-black profit narrative. Black Friday was described as the day stores began to turn a profit for the year and as the biggest shopping day in the United States. In truth, most stores saw their largest sales on the Saturday before Christmas.
Historically, Black Friday has yet another connotation, one unrelated to shopping. In 1869 Wall Street financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk attempted to corner the nation’s gold market at the New York Gold Exchange by buying as much of the precious metal as they could, with the intent of sending prices skyrocketing. On Friday, September 24, intervention by President Ulysses S. Grant caused their plan to fall apart. The stock market instantly plummeted, sending thousands of Americans into bankruptcy.
I thought I would have a look again at my ideas of giving but this time through the lens of stories and maxims.
I advocate mostly created experiences or items over bought ones, but the ideas behind it have quite a lot of nuances.
Summary: For most of us this will be a gift of making. I describe what economists wrongly assume. The obligations of giving and reciprocity and why you need to think in someone else’s shoes over your own.
Time + Unique + You = Priceless a gift of time and attention and thought.
Poetry/Writing: Write them a poem. Write them out your favourite poem. Record a video or audio of you reading a poem (or short story) to your loved one.
Even for the young child who has everything, they won't have a video of you reading their favourite book.
Write a letter about a time together or why they are important to you.
Recipes: Collect recipes from friends and write them in a book. A short story about their importance is a welcome touch.
If you take the time to create/make/cook some thing, this has “positive value” both economically and socially. There are many items in the read/eat/drink category that most people enjoy.
Cook some thing, make a cake; confit a duck leg (recipe here, keeps for 6 months); order some green coffee beans, roast them yourself for a coffee lover, present them with roasted beans (worth over 10x the green bean value plus 30 minutes or so roasting time, I’ve done it in a pan similar to this). You can brew your own gin, ginger ale, make lemonade.
You can make simple jewelry, with a little more time you could learn to knit or something to actually make a garment, though I appreciate that is probably above what can be easily achieved.
You can make them a mix tape / CD / on line mix -- with personal commentary. The mix tape was a teenage rite of love in decades past.
Busy parents might appreciate a "voucher" for baby sitting time offered by the gifter. We value experiences more than objects when it comes to happiness.
One final note, for those who mostly have what they want. A charitable donation to the receivers’ favourite charities - most countries, you gain some tax back, could also be a positive return.
This was in response to… Economists argue that buying presents is a value loss as recipients do not value the gifts at the same value as bought.
These economists suggest cash is the best gift as economic value is not destroyed.
Tim Harford in the FT (Link here, behind paywall) in 2016 looked at Joel Waldfogel’s notorious research paper, The Deadweight Loss of Christmas, Waldfogel showed that gifts typically destroy value, in the sense that the giver had to pay more to buy the gift than the recipient would ever have been willing to spend on it.
I’ve thought more about the underlying principles of this. In particular how gifts are viewed in drama stories but also applied to real life.
Consider these maxims / guides:
Maximise/increase the pleasure/utility of the recipient
Give what the recipient understands to be valuable to you
Give what shows maximum/strong understanding of the recipient
Give what shows understanding only in a language that both of you share but understand (2).
Give where reciprocity can be viewed as equal (also note Lewis Hyde) or think circular giving
Consider experience or the lasting of memory and time.
Consider rarity or uniqueness
Assume:
A) Co-operation over coercion
B) Hierarchy is respected not abused
Now let’s look at some “bad” gifts in a story:
There is a rich business women who has a poorer actor boyfriend. She gives him an expensive gym membership/personal training gift.
In a story, in an average situation, this is a manipulative gift. She is giving what she has a lot of… money. It’s a gift that may not last, and it might be saying something about what she values in her boyfriend. His looks.
Compare this to a mix tape, with songs chosen to reflect important moments together. She places this mix tape on an expensive iPad. Here she gives him something expensive he lacks, but she also puts a unique experience - songs - using something valuable to her - her time - in a language only they understand - song moments.
Or,
Consider a father waiting. Every day he quilts for 30 minutes. After a year, he has a quilted blanket. Each patch chosen to tell a story of his day.
How extraordinary does that gift seem even if the pure cash put into it would be smaller than an ipad’s cash value in many ways.
In the first decades of 1800s, flowers had a langauge. Letters had a particular value in different times and different places, and often came along with gifts; for instance, in the time of Sei Shonagon in the Japanese Royal Court around the late AD 900s.
These hint at the social values and stories we tell along with our gifts.
The underlying money is a thing but, for instance, younger children tend not to care - they have learnt what money signals - they are happy playing in the wrapping or the large cardboard boxes. They are making experience, they value the unique moments of time from their loved ones.
Sure, gaining a desired gift, can show an understanding of the recipient and this is highly valued. However for middle class and therefore richer people the value of an experience that lives on in the memory is often more than listed price of an object.
Aside, from gift giving rituals such as Christmas there is a notion we feel - culturally learned I think - on the reciprocity of gifts. We feel uncomfortable when a gift is too large for us to bear. In part that’s why an extraordinary gift of time can be wondrous and more acceptable than an extraordinary gift of money.
A blanket woven over a year, 30 minutes of time a day. Is richer and more bearable than £500,000 pounds. The blanket embodies uniqueness, love and time. It may speak in a unique language. It probably won’t (or maybe it would be) be a burden, although I imagine some blankets are.
When it comes to giving every situation will be unique. The relationship, the understandings, the language. But, I still think if you have the time and thought of it, for many of us, it will be something made and crafted through time and care rather than money and the internet.
How does a utilitarian think about gifts? And what does expected utility suggest ?
One of my default answers is the same as the economist. The default hurdle to overcome is a straight cash gift. In the giving world, this has a distant equivalent in direct cash transfer to the world’s poor. Any gift has to be better than cash and the recipients choice ? I suppose a strict utilitarian or consequentialist would think gifts to middle class friends as ineffective and a waste; better to give to effective charities (which I note in the list above).
I think this case of gift giving highlights some of the human challenges to expected utility theory. Considering my guideline maxims. The first is a utility theory idea - maximise the recipient’s utility or the giver’s utility perhaps - but ideas 2 to 7 come from sociology and anthropology.
You can argue that ”uniqueness” or rarity has some utility and can fudge it into the calculus, but I think really it shows that you can not do gift giving by mathematics in much the same way you can not make moral and ethical choices by maths alone either. (Again, I refer you to my conversation with moral philosopher Larry Temkin) And in that, it harks back to my blog on the implosion of FTX.
I will end on a circle… I was told once…
…gift giving for Maoris was reciprocal, if you gave there was a circle so you would give back. This is called Koha (The koha reflects the mana of both the giver and the recipient, reflecting what the giver is able to give, and the esteem they hold of the person they are making the gift to - and hence plays an important part in cementing good relations, and is taken very seriously).
"Circular giving differs from reciprocal giving in several ways. First, when the gift moves in a circle no one ever receives it from the same person he gives it to...When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.” (Lewis Hyde)
I’m in Spain for PRI conference next week (IYKYK) . Say hello if you are there.
My friend Chi is doing this:
A new and exciting event showcasing short films featuring actors that have British East & Southeast Asian heritage, hosted by MilkTea; supported by Film Hub London, Film London, BFI Film Audiences Network & the National Lottery.
I think about protest. What sparks change? I have also ruminated previously on the importance of hair (when I started to lose mine). And especially to women. This weaves all of that together in Iran.
Backmarket will sort out your phone problem. It aggregates businesses that refurbishes phones and ensures that there’s some consistency around warranties etc. https://www.backmarket.co.uk/en-gb
If you want to buy gifts for your love ones, go to https://www.laptopoutlet.co.uk/, where you can buy affordable mobile phones, laptops and accessories.
Backmarket will sort out your phone problem. It aggregates businesses that refurbishes phones and ensures that there’s some consistency around warranties etc. https://www.backmarket.co.uk/en-gb
If you want to buy gifts for your love ones, go to https://www.laptopoutlet.co.uk/, where you can buy affordable mobile phones, laptops and accessories.