The Serviceberry

Process

	Status	Items
Highlights	Done	See section below
Claims	None
Questions	None
Output	None

Highlights

Page 29

What is economics for anyway? The answer to that question depends a lot on who you ask. On their website, the American Economic Association says, “It’s the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives.”
My son-in-law Dave teaches high school economics, and the first principle his students learn is that economics is about decision making in the face of scarcity. Anything and everything in a market is implicitly defined as scarce. With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services.

✏️ Economics is taught as dealing with scarcity. We’re taught that resources are limited and we need to gather and hoard and conserve.
📖 (Page 29)

Page 32

The hunter was puzzled by the question-store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn’t the hunter store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.
“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.

✏️ Hunter gatherer society in Brazilian rainforest.. The cultural value of sharing, not storing.
An example of gift economy, of “organizing ourselves to sustain life”. Abundance means to share.
Also, understanding nature as giving us gifts, not resources, makes us realize they’re not for hoarding but to be given and shared, generating sufficiency for all.
📖 (Page 32)

Page 33

Scientist and philosopher Marshall Sahlins names generalized reciprocity as the heart of a gift economy, which functions most effectively in small, close-knit communities. Those who have give to those who don’t so that everyone in the system has what they need. It is not regulated from above but derives from a collective sense of equity in “enoughness” and accountability in distributing the gifts of the Earth.

✏️ The size of the community matters, and arises here.. You can do this small but things are harder at scale.
📖 (Page 33)

Page 34

In a gift economy, the currency in circulation is gratitude and connection rather than goods or money. A gift economy includes a system of social and moral agreements for indirect reciprocity, rather than a direct exchange So, the hunter who shared the feast with you today could well anticipate that you would share from a full fishnet or offer your labor in repairing a boat in the future.
The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods.

✏️ What I’m trying to grasp is how one delineates between pure reciprocity and a sense of obligation.
Even here it’s said the hunter will anticipate receiving something from the others..
When does that anticipation turn into expectation and obligation?
📖 (Page 34)

Page 91

Anthropologists who study gift economies note that they function well in small, tightly knit communities. You might rightly observe that we no longer live in small, close-knit societies, where generosity and mutual esteem structure our relations. But we could. It is within our power to create such webs of interdependence, quite outside the market economy. Maybe that is how we extract ourselves from a cannibal economy. Intentional communities of mutual self-reliance and reciprocity are the wave of the future, and their currency is sharing

✏️ Back to the size matters thing. It works in small communities and that’s what we should aim for.
📖 (Page 91)

Page 92

After all, what we crave is not trickle-down, faceless profits but reciprocal, face-to-face relationships, which are naturally abundant but made scarce by the anonymity of large-scale economics.

✏️ What scale brings, especially in capitalism, is a sense of scarcity for all, and competition amongst individuals. Why is bigger better at all? This is an argument for going small again.
📖 (Page 92)