When the Giving Is Good
MANSFIELD, HARVEY
When the Giving Is Good Saving Christmas from the economists. BY HARVEY MANSFIELD The wrappings are off and the Christmas gifts stand exposed to the light of day. Did you get what you wanted?...
...Thus economics has an honorable role in the service of generosity, a role more useful, hence more economical, than attacking generosity...
...Preferences” imply priority, one thing preferred to another...
...The commonest form of slavery is slavery to money, and generosity is a kind of liberation as well as utility for yourself...
...Now, if we can look at Christmas from the standpoint of economics, why not look at economics from the standpoint of Christmas...
...The sovereignty of individual preferences also helps economics by freeing it from having to understand human nature...
...And let us not forget the advantage of generosity to liberty...
...Economists as ambitious as they are cagey—perhaps bored with economics in its usual confines—have become critical of the frenzy of Christmas gift-making...
...In this aspect economics is not a means to any end you may think up but itself an end, a way of life—the life of effi ciency and frugality...
...Christmas is under attack not only for materialism, not only for multicultural failure, but now also for lack of utility...
...The gist of what they say: Christmas is a highly inefficient way of connecting consumers with goods...
...Most of the time economists these days do not care to pass judgment on the things people buy or sell...
...This life is bourgeois, middle-class, and opposed to your wasting your money on whims, as do rich aristocrats...
...Here, too, is the connection we expect between economics and learning to be economical and to economize...
...But still such thinking makes us decidedly uneasy...
...they are givens from which economists take their start...
...As for the economy as a whole, the analysis continues, it would be better off without the surge in sales of Christmas gifts at the end of the year, if only businesses could be sure that the same sales would be spread out more evenly...
...On the other hand is the utility aspect of economics, revealed in the critique of Christmas giving as less useful than it could be...
...The fundamental incoherence in economics is that it wants to pinch pennies (utility) but has no reason to stop you if you don’t (liberty...
...In The Wealth of Nations he contrasts the waste and vain display of aristocratic hospitality (the ancestor of the free lunch) with the productive, profi t-seeking frugality of the commercial class...
...Or is it against our liberty to feel compelled to give at all...
...It could not have been given if we as a people were not devoted to economics, more so than to what is sacred in Christmas...
...Economists never say, Listen to me...
...Here economics does pass judgment on preferences, preferring those that are useful over useless whims...
...They always say, Listen to me if you want to know what I have to say...
...Adam Smith praised the free market as “the system of natural liberty,” but he also deplored spending on “trinkets of frivolous utility,” which are naturally bought and sold under that system...
...In the history of economics there is a movement from objective utility to free, subjective preferences, but from the fi rst, economics was divided between utility and liberty...
...Instead of damning a commercial society for being materialistic, instead of despising Christmas giving for not being properly materialistic, you can do your part to soften our materialism and make it more intelligent...
...The economists’ critique of Christmas giving exposes a characteristic dilemma in their thinking about utility and liberty...
...With the aid of a little feudalism lingering in our democratic, materialist age you can have the two great goods economics wants you to have but does not know how to achieve on its own...
...These are “preferences” not examined within economics...
...A country gentleman generous with his rustic hospitality had a better inkling of that liberation than Adam Smith with all his studied devotion to natural liberty...
...Thus, however nice it is to receive presents, it is against the general utility that we feel compelled to give them at one time...
...You can then crown these goods by taking a reasonable measure of pride for having spent your money well...
...To justify Christmas giving we need to look past the hasty confusion of the “consumer,” so described by economics, to the soul of the giver and see how it is improved by the virtue of generosity...
...The individual can want what he wants, not what he ought to want or, in someone else’s analysis, is naturally inclined to want...
...That is why economics is always important but never decisive...
...For having a generous soul saves one from living in the relentless anxiety of never knowing whether one has enough for oneself...
...That confi dent description of Christmas, full of boyish impudence and gleeful irreverence, tells us something about the nature of economics...
...Economists can make mathematical models of behavior without considering whether their mathematics describes actual human beings accurately...
...Economic analysis says that consumers would be better off making their own purchases, buying things they know they want, rather than trying to get the benefi t out of gifts bought ignorantly for them by others...
...Not passing judgment in any way leaves individuals free to make their own choices without being frowned on by moralists...
...Of course, to be generous one must calculate what one can afford, and one must observe the chosen recipient carefully to see, not merely what he wants, but what good thing he can be induced to enjoy...
...Economics, no longer conHarvey Mansfi eld is professor of government at Harvard and research fellow in liberty and virtue at the Hoover Institution...
...Worse than ignorance is the imposition of the giver’s own taste or views, as when a conservative woman I know kept giving her liberal sister the gift of a subscription to a magazine her sister did not want to read...
...fi ned to a particular subject—namely, money—can expand into other fi elds such as psychology, sociology, and political science...
...Perhaps it might be better to call them whims, not necessarily implying any set preferences but in principle open to sudden change without reason or explanation...
...This is the liberty aspect of economics, and its premise is the sovereignty of the individual...
...The benefi t of giving is more to the giver than to the receiver—a paradox better known to common sense and the Bible than to economics...
...Christmas offers compelling opportunity to the human temptation to improve one’s friends and relatives...
Vol. 13 • January 2008 • No. 17
