Go Ahead, Exchange Gifts. Forget the much time with economists around this time of year, and you will, eventually, get around to hearing about the dreadful inefficiency of exchanging gifts. You desperately wrack your brains for something, and then buy a supply of scented bath oil for someone who has only got a shower; they return the favor by giving you three books you already had. This is, an economist will solemnly point out, an extreme waste of resources, because each of you would have been happier taking the same amount of cash to buy something for yourself.
This observation is frequently greeted with cries of “Scrooge!” And yet on one level, it’s obviously true, as attested by the vast stocks of unused scented bath sets accumulated by mothers, grandmothers and aunts in their linen closets. And yet, on another level it’s just as obviously false: Even if you are the sort of rational calculating machine who shows up in economics models as Homo economicus. There is a higher logic to the gift economy, a metarationality, that mandates we keep giving and receiving objects of dubious value rather than giving one another money or just abstaining from the exchange of gifts.
