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Gifts the starter motor of civilization?
Seth Roberts argues that gifts furthered civilization by deepening the division of labor and increasing skills even when such skills were not at a first practical, i.e. today's gift is tomorrow's technology.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on December 26, 2006 at 07:20 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
Can you retool the post? I think there were supposed to be pictures or something, right?
Posted by: vlad at Dec 26, 2006 10:31:48 AM
Two images have the wrong URI:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/file:///C:/DOCUME~1/Monique/LOCALS~1/Temp/moz-screenshot-2.jpg
"file://" URIs are never a good sign.
Who's "Monique"? :-)
Posted by: Gabriel M. at Dec 26, 2006 10:53:14 AM
Hmm, I could see gift giving being a small part of the drive to specialization, but only that, a small part.
A possibly larger role in gift giving's sub-history would be the nearly ubiquitous practice of exchanging cultural items between different soceities throughout history. One culture would always be eager to impress the other, and thus give them a taste of whatever they felt made them superior (thought not enough of course to give up the "secret").
This would have the effect of convincing the rulers to set aside people and/or funds strictly for research at a time when a primitive agrarian society wouldn't have yet made room for such specialization.
Posted by: Ray G at Dec 26, 2006 11:08:03 AM
I think John Hicks said something similar about gift giving in his book "A Theory of Economic History." The following link has some discussion of this:
http://www.ecn.ulaval.ca/pages/Professeurs/docs/lsserev.pdf
It is called
"On the Emergence and Evolution of Economic Complexity" by
Bernard C. Beaudreau
Department of Economics
Universit¶e Laval
Qu¶ebec, Canada
Posted by: Cyril Morong at Dec 26, 2006 1:35:33 PM
Are gifts unique in this respect, or are they just an instance of signalling? I like this idea, but I think the novelty/early adopter aspect matters more than whether something was given or purchased. I don't think anyone gave Ben Franklin his kite, but I'm sure he'd be buying himself lots of cool toy robots if he were alive today.
Posted by: DK at Dec 26, 2006 2:10:52 PM
Isn't this argument a variant of the broken window fallacy?
Posted by: Law Student at Dec 26, 2006 2:11:36 PM
AFAIR the Japanese are eager to pay a premium for unusual gadgets. This creates a market for the production of short series and development of new technology.
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