Economies of Scarcity and Acquisition, Economies of Gift and Thanksgiving

Economies of Scarcity and Acquisition, Economies of Gift and Thanksgiving:

Lessons from Cultural Anthropology

by Kenneth W. Stikkers (Department of Philosophy, Southern IllinoisUniversityCarbondale)

So much of the now stale debate between “capitalism” and “socialism,” begun already in the early nineteenth century, hinged on contradictory claims about “human nature.” Is it competitive, or is it cooperative? Acquisitive or sharing? Egoistic or altruistic? Indeed, it was out of this debate and a desire to settle empirically once and for all what had largely been a battle of opposing, merely speculative assertions, that the science of cultural anthropology in large measure was born.

Contemporary cultural anthropologists largely consider now the debate over “human nature” a red herring. Humans have no simple, single “nature” but from infancy exhibit complex, conflicting biological impulses and tendencies, and so the real issues are: which tendencies will be encouraged and reinforced and which will be discouraged by the society? In what contexts, if any, is competition to be encouraged? What limits is the culture to place upon it? The debate that undergirds the capitalist-communist divide, though, is no simple empirical matter: it is an ethical one. Which of the competing tendencies found in humans ought the culture nurture, and in what circumstances? Which tendencies ought it discourage and when?

Mainstream economics has long prided itself on being not only an empirical science but even the most empirical and most scientifically rigorous of the social sciences. Yet, it continues to assert and assume unequivocally, as some of its most foundational premises, anthropological claims, especially regarding “human nature,” that are flatly contradicted by more than a century of empirical findings by cultural anthropology and other social sciences. Karl Polanyi made this point over 60 years ago and is widely hailed as the founder of economic anthropology, that sub-discipline that critically examines the empirical anthropological claims and presuppositions underlying economic theories. He boldly concluded:

The nineteenth century attempted to establish a self-regulating economic system on the motive of individual gain. We maintain that such a venture was in the very nature of things impossible. Here we are merely concerned with the distorted view of life and society implied in such an approach. Nineteenth-century thinkers assumed, for instance, that to behave like a trader in the market was “natural,” and any other mode of behavior being artificial economic behavior—the result of interferences with human instincts; that markets would spontaneously arise, if only men were let alone; that whatever the desirability of such a society on moral grounds, its practicality, at least was founded on the immutable characteristics of the race, and so on. Almost exactly the opposite of these assertions is implied in the testimony of modern research in various fields of social science such as social anthropology, primitive economics, the history of early civilization, and general economic history. Indeed, there is hardly an anthropological or sociological assumption—whether explicit or implicit—contained in the philosophy of economic liberalism that has not been [empirically] refuted.[1]

Other anthropological assumptions that Polanyi identifies as commonly held by orthodox economists but refuted by empirical anthropological evidence, include the notions that the motive of personal gain is “natural,” that people “naturally” expect payment for labor, and that people “naturally” seek “to restrict labor to the unavoidable minimum.”

It is the contention of this paper that empirical studies in economic anthropology, such as Polanyi’s, do much to challenge the philosophical assumptions that undergird orthodox economic theory and thereby open a space wherein economy can be thought anew, beyond the stale false dichotomies, assumed by professional economists and public policy-makers alike, and which currently stifle economic thinking and hence undermine our ability to address pressing economic issues in fresh and creative ways.

Numerous more recent studies have confirmed the conclusions in Polanyi’s pioneer work. One is Marshall Sahlins’s now-classic work, Stone Age Economics, which demonstrates how virtually all the assumptions that had been made, particularly by economists, about hunter-gatherer economies, especially as they are contrasted unfavorably to modern market economies, are wrong. For example, economists commonly and unquestioningly have followed Thomas Hobbes in characterizing stone-age life as one of unrelenting toil and virtually without leisure. Furthermore, anthropologists and economists alike simply assumed, prior to Sahlins’s study, that hunting and gathering peoples did not stockpile food, to safeguard against the presumably constant threat of starvation, because they lacked technological know-how for doing so, and such a presumed lack in turn was used as evidence of their primitiveness. Sahlins‘s research, and research following it, reveals, however, that stone-age people did not stockpile because they generally had no need for doing so: such societies seldom knew hunger—certainly not of the chronic, prolonged sort that so many experience in our world today. Hunger was a great rarity rather than the norm. Furthermore, such people enjoyed significant amounts of leisure time, more than do most in modern industrial societies. Indeed, Sahlins terms them “the original affluent society.”[2]

Robert Heilbroner, too, drawing from the findings of economic anthropologists, demonstrates how the “universal” laws of the market that mainstream economists presume, pertain to only a very small slice of human history and cultures: the bulk of economic production takes place according to patterns of custom and tradition and structures of command, and market systems are always “embedded” in such patterns and structures.[3] In these and so many other ways, the empirical findings of economic anthropologists flat-out contradict the presuppositions of orthodox economists about human and social behavior.

A sound philosophical anthropology, that is, a coherent theory of human nature and fulfillment and account of what Hannah Arendt termed “the human condition,” informed by the most current empirical findings of cultural anthropology, is prerequisite for sound economic theory and a healthy economy: indeed, no economic theory can be any more sound than the philosophical assumptions upon which it rests. Economic theories based upon a “distorted view of [human] life and society” cannot succeed in contributing much of lasting value to human learning, life, and society, and an economy resting upon a twisted understanding of human nature, fulfillment, and society can promote only twisted human beings and societies. The importance of sound philosophical anthropology for economic theory can perhaps best be seen in what are two of the most fundamental premises of modern economics, the second one following from the first: first is the assumption that desire for unlimited material gain is “natural,” and second is that the human condition to be addressed by economics and economic institutions is irreducibly one of scarcity. Such scarcity then, in turn, is part of the basis for assuming competition to be constitutive of the human condition.

Indeed, economics textbooks, following Lionel Robbins, commonly include “scarcity” in their definitions of the discipline: they describe scarcity as “the problem” of economics, and economics is defined as the management of scarcity, the study of the production and distribution of goods and services under conditions of scarcity.[4] As Sahlins puts it, “Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest people.”[5] “Scarcity,” though, has both an absolute and relative use. Classical and neo-classical economic theorists often describe the necessities of life, in what they imagine as the state of nature, as absolutely scarce: as in Hobbes’s famous account, the human state of nature is imagined as presocial, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In 1930 John Maynard Keynes imagined at least the industrial West, despite its impending Great Depression, to be on the verge of solving at last the problem of absolute scarcity: “the economic problem may be solved, or at least in sight of solution, within a hundred years,” he boldly and optimistically proclaimed.[6]

Largely in light of modern affluence, which for some confirms Keynes’s prediction, orthodox economists tend to describe scarcity as relative to what they unquestioningly take to be unlimited human desires: the problem of scarcity will never be solved, they claim, because human desires, being unlimited, will always run ahead of an economy’s ability to provide. As Sahlins writes, the modern West “erected a shrine to the Unattainable: Infinite Needs,”[7] and it is before this shrine that modern economists kneel in worship. The logical response to such presumed scarcity is to acquire and amass competitively as much as possible without waste as a bulwark against insecurity—the more, the better. As Harvard economist Stephen Marglin describes, “In mainstream economics, it is axiomatic that wants are unbounded. Unbounded wants are the root of scarcity, and scarcity is the keystone of economics. Scarcity in turn causes rivalry--division of the [economic] pies is normally treated as my blood or thine rather than as a moral issue.”[8] In Marglin’s observation we see how scarcity forms part of the wedge that divides economics from ethics: in a world of cut-throat competition over scarce goods, morality appears as a luxury that we cannot afford. Such, however, would be the case under only absolute, not relative, scarcity, because, after all, could not someone learn to moderate his or her superfluous wants in order to provide for another’s necessities? But there is, of course, much more to the story.

In his 1932 Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, Robbins rejected the then-common definition of economics as the study of wealth, its creation and distribution--what he termed the “materialist” definition--in favor of a “scarcity” one, citing Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises: “Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”[9] Economics is thus reduced to the study of opportunity costs, a science purely of means, divorced from any concern for ends, which Robbins took as merely “subjective,” hence “arbitrary,” and thus outside the domain of “science.” It becomes, in effect, the efficient manager of misery. Economists, according to Robbins, should thus stop concerning themselves with wealth altogether, because wealth is merely relative to “subjective,” “arbitrary” human ends. Moreover, Robbins’s definition transforms economy from one domain of human activity into a universal feature encompassing allof human life: after all, does not every human action entail opportunity costs, the preferring of one thing over another, the forgoing of something in order to do something else?

Here we are, sentient creatures with bundles of desires and aspirations, with masses of instinctive tendencies all urging us in different ways to action. But the time in which these tendencies can be expressed is limited. The external world does not offer full opportunities for their complete achievement. Life is short. Nature is niggardly.[10]

Robbins thus enshrined “scarcity” as the most foundational principle of economy and economics.

Modern economies, with modern technologies as their handmaidens, conceive their task as one of extracting from a begrudging, “niggardly” nature the means to satisfy human desires, “consumer demand,” again, assumed to be unlimited: the task is thus an impossible one. Modern theories of property, such as John Locke’s, take it as the natural right of humans to appropriate from nature whatever they find useful in satisfying their personal wants, and Adam Smith illustrates how deeply entrenched is the assumption that the satisfaction of consumer wants is the principle aim of economic activity:

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the economy. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it.[11]

Keynes wholeheartedly concurs: “All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.”[12] That the aim of economy is to satisfy consumer wants, assumed to be unlimited and thus creating the condition of at least relative scarcity, is a central dogma of most modern economics, capitalist and socialist alike. What follows from such an assumption is that the exchange of goods and services occurs only so that individuals can more effectually satisfy their own desires. As Smith famously asserts, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests.”[13] He goes on to assume that the desire for acquisition is the universal basis for the distribution of goods, underlying the supply-and-demand principles of the "invisible hand."

Standing in sharp contrast to modern Western economics’ assumptions regarding the unlimited character of human desire to consume and the scarcity of nature, are those economies based upon opposite assumptions of gift and thanksgiving. Many, perhaps the great majority of human cultures throughout history, have experienced nature not as “niggardly” but as abundant and overflowing, and such a feeling for the world moderates one’s desires: if one experiences nature as bountiful and generous, it would be difficult to bemoan that one does not enjoy more. As a Native American elder expressed to me, “Today is a gift. Who am I to begrudge the fact that I might not have tomorrow?” Archaic peoples tend to see Western economists’ description of human wants as unlimited to be bizarre: they simply do not recognize the supposedly universal human condition assumed by mainstream economics. The problem of economy for them is not, what is to be done about our natural condition of scarcity? but, what is the proper response to nature’s, or her Creator’s, generosity, to her abundance? The most obvious response might be to express gratitude and to honor the giver—nature, the Great Spirit, the gods—by in turn acting generously towards others, other members of one’s community, but also strangers, and not to demand and to acquire more endlessly and selfishly.

Marcel Mauss’s classic study, The Gift, well demonstrates how goods and services in archaic economies effectively circulate according to principles of giving, rather than principles of acquisition, and thus complements Polanyi’s work in radically questioning modern economy’s assumptions about the self-interestedness and acquisitiveness of “human nature.” Through giving, one participates in and celebrates the Sacred. By the “Sacred” we mean here the organic interconnectedness of all creation and of the bountifulness of being, or, as Georges Bataille, following Mauss, describes it, “the sense of … divine continuity of living beings with the world,”[14] which engenders a feeling of the plentitude, the bountifulness of Being, of life constantly overflowing itself—“excess energy, translated into the effervescence of life.”[15] Mauss describes the matter thusly: “everything is there for passing on….Everything passes to and fro as if there were a constant exchange of spiritual matter.”[16] The Navajo characterize this circulating spiritual matter as a “Holy Wind,” or niłch’i, which, “Suffusing all of nature, … gives life, thought, speech, and the power of motion to all living things, and serves as the means of communication between all elements of the living world….[B]y this concept the Navajo Soul is linked to the immanent powers of the universe.”[17]

Exchanges of gifts might resemble, when viewed from the outside, the buying and selling of goods found in modern market economies, but, Mauss cautions, exchanges of “presents do not serve the same purpose as commerce and exchange in [modern economies]. The goal is above all a moral one, the object being to foster friendly feelings between the two persons in question,”[18] rather than the mutual optimization of personal utility. The taking and consuming of goods, for example, food, is not the mere utilitarian satisfaction of some want but participation in the cosmic circulation of spiritual energy which binds together the whole of Creation—human and non-human, present and past generations alike—and engenders a profound sense of gratitude for being. Mauss’s study focuses largely on the Trobriand Islanders and the tribes of Pacific NorthwestAmerica, but historian Nathan Huggins well illustrates Mauss’s point in his descriptions of traditional African communities, thereby demonstrating the extensiveness of this primal feeling of abundance and gratitude throughout a wide array of archaic economies.[19]

The value of goods in archaic economies thus comes not simply from the utility derived by personal consumption, as modern economic theories tend to assume, but foremost from how goods solidify relationships through their circulation. Food not only provides nourishment for the individual but, even more importantly, when generously shared, promotes friendly feelings, necessary for food’s continued cooperative procurement: without strong communal solidarity, nurtured by sharing and generosity, food cannot be effectively produced. Indeed, once objects become removed from sacred circulation, becoming, through selfishness or greed, objects of private possession and hence divisiveness, rather than for sharing and the strengthening of relationships, they cease to be “goods” but now become “evils” or “poison,” and might even need to be destroyed. Traditional African and Native American cultures provide abundant examples of this relationalist notion of value, but Mauss offers an especially pointed example from traditional Hindu economy: