🎁 The $859 billion question this Christmas 🎅🏻🎄
Happy holidays, gift givers
Climate solutions // I S S U E # 6 1 // G I F T S
☠️ “Killing wealth” this holiday ☠️
By Michael Coren
I first came across the concept of potlatch as a freshman in college, in an anthropology classroom on campus. Used by Indigenous groups along the Pacific coast of North America, potlatch roughly translates into English as “to give,” or, more poetically, “to nourish.”
Even in their most basic form, potlatches were ritual gift-giving ceremonies where great wealth was transferred, sometimes even ritually destroyed. Communities might save up for months, or even years, to throw a potlatch for their neighbors. Huge feasts were piled high with food and gifts; perishable items, like baskets of smoked salmon, might be passed around and eaten or offered to neighbors. Other potlatches might consist of burning houses or tossing ceremonial objects into the sea. The Haida tribe on the islands off the coast of British Columbia call their feast “killing wealth.”
The gifts’ purpose was strengthening the ties between the people it touched by moving from one person or group to the next, never as a personal possession. In this traditional sense, gifts were precluded from turning into capital (that is, an asset a person could possess or sell). The idea that a gift must keep changing hands was incomprehensible to most early Europeans (and the source of the derogatory phrase “Indian giver”).
But it’s actually a sentiment common around the ancient world, according to Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift. From the Scottish highlands to Papua New Guinea, gifts circulated, rather than accumulated. Converting gifts to personal possessions, on the other hand, spelled disaster, an unraveling of the social fabric. “If the object is a gift,” writes Hyde, “it keeps moving.”
Anthropologists have even tracked this. In the South Pacific, researchers traced the lineage of families and clans by the counter-clockwise passage of their gifts sailing from one island to the next, one kingdom to another, over dozens or hundreds of years. At any given time, a large portion of a group’s material wealth could be circulating as gifts. This procession cemented social hierarchies, strengthened kin ties, and served as a bond between kingdoms. Gifts signaled wealth; hoarding revealed poverty, even weakness.
What’s your plan this year? We’ll share gift-giving results next week! 🎄 🕎
Santa came early. 🤶🏼 Gifts are wrapped, hidden, and ready to go. 🎁
🤫 I'm regifting the fruitcake/vacuum/slippers from 2019. Recycling FTW!
Getting myself a quiet couch, nice hot toddy, and watching Die Hard
As Christmas crescendos this winter, what are you going to give this holiday season? It’s an $859 billion question. The average American will spend about $648 on gifts for family, friends, and coworkers, and another $231 on everything from greeting cards to decorations, estimate retailers.
And much of it will go to waste.
Not just thrown away (although that happens). It’s that most people don’t really want the material things we believe will bestow happiness on loved ones this December. About a quarter of Christmas gifts are unwanted, writes Joel Waldfogel, an economics professor at the University of Minnesota, in his book Scroogenomics. In fact, when people are asked about the value of gifts they receive, on average they value them about 25 cents on the dollar paid at the store.
This annual Christmas gift exchange, Waldfogel contends, is an “orgy of wealth destruction” because our modern gifts do a terrible job at delivering happiness, or “matching products with users,” as he memorably calls it. But Scroogenomics’s solution is quintessentially modern as well: giving cash instead of gifts, allegedly a far more efficient way to maximize happiness (young children, mercifully, are given a pass).
So if gift-giving is wildly inefficient, why don’t we all just write checks instead of exchanging bathrobes and baubles this Christmas and Hanukkah?
One reason is we’re hopelessly addicted to our stuff. After people meet their material needs, we buy for status. The US in particular has embarked on an unchecked acquisition spree since the 1960s as incomes rose, and prices fell. “The lives of most Americans have become so intermeshed with acts of consumption that they tend to gain their feelings of significance in life from these acts of consumption rather than from their meditations, achievements, inquiries, personal worth, and service to others,” writes Vance Packard in his book, The Wastemakers.
On our decades-long Fear and Loathing road trip to the shopping mall, some strange things have happened. Even as the average American home has nearly doubled in size over the last half-century, the area devoted to storing all that stuff outside the home—self-storage units—has increased by more than a factor of 10 (and remain one of the fastest-growing segments of commercial real estate). Self-storage renters, formerly dominated by those in the middle of a move, are now just people who have more stuff than they know where to put it.
Today, we’ve strayed far from what gift-giving is really about. Gifts appear primarily as physical objects. Or a token of how we feel about someone. That’s almost right. But it’s an impoverished definition.
Social scientists call gift-giving a total social phenomenon: an act of “economic, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythological” significance. Think of it as sacred commerce. Gifts act as a sort of currency of connection between ourselves and the world, something that outlives its material existence. “When the gift is used,'' writes Hyde, “it is not used up.” Hence, the generosity (and destruction) of the potlatch. It is always about reinforcing one’s connection with each other and the wider world. And throwing a great party.
So, this holiday season, how do we give as a form of connection versus consumption?
That’s what we’ll tackle this month: gift-giving. There’s no shortage of gift guides around. Almost every version imaginable exists online: Vogue’s Tennis Lover’s Gift Guide, The hyperspecific gift guides of TikTok, and, of course, the many, many variations on 33 Eco-Friendly Gifts to Give Right Now.
But most of these focus on things for their own sake. What if we focused on things (and experiences) that forged a connection?
That’s why we’ll produce two climate gift guides. The first is for friends and family. We’re researching gifts that are not just “less bad”—slightly less plastic, slightly less stuff—but actively good for the gifter, the giftee, and the climate—from the tree to the presents beneath it. The second is a gift guide for the climate itself. We’re reviewing the hard evidence for the most effective climate philanthropy, and giving you the final verdict.
Finally, we’ll end the month with a gift from us to you, one we hope will be passed from one person to the next. Thanks for joining and happy holidays.
🌳🎄🎄🌲🌳🌲🎄🌲🎄🎄🌳🌲🎄🌳🌳🎄🎄🌳🌲🎄🌳🎄🌲🌲🌲🌳🌲🌲🌲
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