Only the Pronoid Survive

The Gift Economy

"Doing what's immediately good for oneself has been understood by Darwinists for a long time," Cronin says. "But what hasn't been understood until recently is that you can actually do better for yourself by being cooperative and altruistic than you can by selfishly refusing to cooperate with others. It's not that you do as well. You actually do better -- and all of you do better than if you had gone off on your own and refused to help others."

At the conference in Davos, Cronin illustrated her point about the power of altruism with an example of the new Darwinism: "In Britain, blood is given free of charge. Donors are proud to be known as good, altruistic people. There is never a shortage, and the quality of blood is very high because the healthiest people give blood. In America, it's the opposite. People are frequently paid to give blood, and so you've got two big problems: The quality of blood is bad, because drug addicts and the poor have an incentive to donate, and there tend to be many shortages of blood.

"Two years ago, there was talk in Britain about selling blood to make money for the new blood-donor service. Immediately, there was an uproar. People didn't want to give blood, even though that money was to go back into the blood-donor service. People felt it was no longer a gift relationship.

"The number of people giving blood dropped dramatically in the weeks following that decision. The currency changed. Therefore, the emotions changed. When someone gives you money, you don't feel the same emotions that you feel when someone demonstrates a kindness. We are too quick to interpret everything as marginal that does not fit our economic model," says Cronin. But the elements of the story of the British blood bank and the essential factors of altruism are starting to show up everywhere in the new economy.

The paranoid are having a hard time with this new rule: The more you give away, the more you have. Yet America Online is about to give away computers. The Linux operating system is readily available and free. Meanwhile, eFax.com offers free faxing services. Also, a recent meeting between two potential Internet partners, Inktomi Corp. and venture capitalist CMGI, began by each throwing down the gauntlet -- of openness: In seeking grounds for cooperation, the two sides would compete only to see who would do a better job of telling all. "The deal is that we agree to tell each other everything; otherwise, there is no meeting," is how one participant described the understanding that prefaced the session. "We acknowledge that we can't create something new by ourselves. In the past, people would be secretive. You'd have to get drunk to open up and tell the truth."

Generosity, not greed, is a strategic good. Don Norman, author of "The Design of Everyday Things," left Hewlett-Packard in 1998 to work solo. He claims that his most significant asset is the list of 10,000 names in his PalmPilot. Similar to the way that Britons give blood for the common good, Norman puts people in touch with other people for everyone's mutual benefit. The more Norman gives of his time and his contacts, the more business flows back to him. The formula is not tit for tat. Rather, it's another rule that the paranoid can hardly fathom: "What goes around comes around." By putting people in contact with one another, Norman helps new businesses begin, the pie gets bigger for everyone, and sooner or later Norman benefits. It's a new law -- not of diminishing returns or of increasing returns, but of exponential returns.

This is the gift economy, where money is meaningless and gifts are the new currency. The more a business or an individual worker gives away, the more that everyone has. This is a vision of a new economic model, a new evolutionary order that poet Lewis Hyde has captured in his 1983 underground classic, "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property," in which he points out that these two very different marketplaces -- gift and greed -- exist side by side, and increasingly they converge.

What is the gift economy? It's based on tribal notions that a gift is meant as currency, not property. A gift must be circulated; it must be passed around. The old phrase of shame -- "Indian giver" -- paradoxically exemplifies the story behind the gift economy. When Indians gave white settlers a gift, they expected one in return. Instead of keeping gifts in circulation, the settlers would put their peace pipes, which they had received from the Indians as gifts, on their mantles. The Indians believed that gifts were meant to be kept in circulation, so when they didn't get something in return, they asked for their gifts back. This shocked the settlers and their traditional notions of property. The whites faulted the Indians for their bad manners, but to the Indians, it was just good economics.