a tiny peek at Christmas economics 

When I bring this up with my wife she calls me a Grinch 😂

I'm going to send this video to everyone who gives me bicycle-themed junk for Christmas.

The gift on the podcast of their own book was clearly the best one. She might not have said it, but I’m sure she went home thinking about how great the exposure for her book was on that episode. Plus, she earned $0.10 on royalties for that purchase.

I feel so seen. Anyway, I don't know if it's a "my family thing" or whatever, but at least in experience cash gifts aren't really that big a taboo, at least to the point where they're chosen over gift cards. The issue then becomes that I'd feel incredibly silly receiving a crisp 100$ bill from my aunt, only to 5 minutes later hand her a different 100$ bill...

My complaint in calling Economics a “hard science” is that it treats people as if they are just variables in an equation, or beings whose behavior is perfectly rational and predictable. Reducing human behavior down to complex math equations doesn’t make sense. Like, foundational ideas like “barter economies” have been proven to be myths, and yet they still serve as the rationale for modern economic theory.

convincing a parent not to give me trash (clothing) was one of my biggest achievements of the past decade it usually goes like this: trash -> money instead of trash -> nothing at all

"Are we against economics now" friggin kinda🤣🙃

Another reason, IMO, why Christmas gifts always kinda suck, is that alot of the sentimental value gets sucked out of the gift just by the obligatory nature of a Christmas present. At any other time of year, there's the quiet little fact that the gift *occurred* to them pulling at your heart strings. Like, maybe they saw it and it reminded them of you, in the same way it's fun to get tagged in a meme even if you've seen it a hundred times already. During the holidays (and birthdays), that's not really there. They got you that thing at least partly out of social obligation, and it takes some of the wind out of it.

one year my brother and i got anniversary gifts for my parents. my mom is really easy to choose things for-she loves practical things or really expensive shit and always tells us about the things she wants or needs at any time, so i have an amazing blueprint for her. but when it comes to my dad, i genuinely can’t figure out what i’d get him. he’s a chill guy, doesn’t really have many material wants or needs. but i know he’s an intellectual man and that he was a fan of Obama, especially as a person, so i thought i’d get him his book. I knew he didn’t read much but thought hey maybe he’ll find this interesting. i mean, he watches a lot of TV, but he’s also a busy man, books are relaxing, seems like a good time. bro didn’t even crack that book open! it was sad. so i’ve decided my gift from now on is gonna be like money or something idfk

Angela should be the only RU-vid physicist who makes videos on economics, *Sabine*

Gift Card factoids: Gift cards to sole businesses are no longer allowed to charge inactivity fees. The cards are ostensibly usable forever (though in reality software changes could make really old cards unusable). A gift card that's usable anywhere such as a Visa gift card (which is owned by a bank) is allowed to have inactivity fees, maintenance fees, and many other types of fees (even fees to call in and check the balance, which will charge you after you thought you got the right balance, meaning you'll call back and hear a slightly lower balance and be very confused as to what's going on). While in theory, Visa gift cards are great, in practice you're more likely to use all of the money on a gift card to buy things you want if the card is to a specific place. I always recommend cards to places you know your friends will be buying from.

I just watched Susie Dent define “toecover” - from a memoir by Betty McDonald > Toecover is a family name for a useless gift. A crocheted napkin ring is a toecover. So are embroidered book marks, large figurines of a near-together-eyed shepherdess, pin-cushion covers done in French knots, a satin case for snapfasteners …

I used to be really into economics. I think for me what became kind of gross about it for me (and maybe others) is how powerful people warped conclusions from it to justify the gross excesses of capitalism and to argue against needed interventions. Now that doesn't come directly from the discipline. (at least mostly) Every economics class I've taken has been very upfront about acknowledging how these are models, which while useful for certain analyses, are not actually true. In the same vein as the spherical cow joke from physics. If you try to apply models that assume perfect competition to real life where there are power imbalances in many transactions you end up with "the government shouldn't regulate this market with like 2 giant companies because the free market is efficient." Or more dangerously "The free market can solve climate change! If people really want to live they'll buy greener products and companies will innovate to meet demand!" Again though, these aren't valid conclusions from the study of economics. There is plenty of research that goes into market failures, externalities, information asymmetry, monopolies, etc. But that's not what gets trotted out by big corporations, their think tanks, or the governments they have in their pockets.

Personally I think the best way to guarantee that gifts are meaningful is to always ask people before you give them a particular gift, at least if you are not 100% sure. Most of the time, the value of it being a surprise is just not worth the risk of getting something they don't want!

Typically, I buy things for other people when I see gifts they may like, no matter the time of year. But yes, only for people I actually know well, and obviously I have in my mind.

leave it to the economist to spend multiple hours on background research and tracking down an item, just to come up with a snarky paternalistic gift, and have him come away with the conclusion that "hey, see, anyone can do this after all! i'm right on a technicality!"

My family gives books only! It requires a good amount of thought and ideas and almost guarantees finding something they wouldn’t have found themselves, along with providing an activity for the rest of the year!!

So charming you haven’t totally given up on Christmas, but another ten years should take care of that.

Oh, then there's me with a closet full of things I've bought all throughout the year for people just waiting for me to wrap them... If I see it and it makes her think of you, I'm probably buying it and putting it in the closet ... This only seems like a solution, what actually happens is when I go to unpack that closet, I find that I've completely missed some people or have enough gifts for my sister for Christmas, her birthday, probably Easter, Halloween, teacher appreciation Day, NEXT Christmas, etc. and meanwhile I never found anything I thought my brother would like...

counter point I get to talk to my friends about their interests and then I go and research their interest and then now I have a new thing to talk to my friend about. It is a lot more work but it makes life a little more interesting

My parents always say I'm hard to buy gifts for because I don't want anything. I always respond that that makes me VERY EASY to buy gifts for, because they can get me NOTHING and I'll be happy. That's what I think they should have done for Kenny Malone in the podcast episode: the one thing we know for sure about Kenny Malone is that he thinks Christmas gifts are bad, so getting him nothing would show that we understand him and know what he values.

“Isn’t it cute how silly little humans behave” is literally my entire discipline of Anthropology summed up.

This kinda happened without any planning, but I found out one of my colleagues at work had the same birthday as me. We were pretty close for co-workers and shared a lot of the same sense of humor and interests in things. Somehow, we hit on a tradition where I would just buy something for myself that I wanted, and bring it to work and thank him for it, and he'd do the same. He got new boots he liked, and I got a cool pair of expensive sunglasses I wanted. This went on for a few years. It was hilarious. I think this is one of your funniest videos yet. Thanks for what you do.

I was really tickled at Tolkien for coining a word needed for societies with semi-voluntary gift giving. The kind of gift you generally got was a "mathom." A mathom is a gift that is useless or useless to you that you really can't get rid of except as a regift. He goes on to tie this into a tongue in cheek just so story about the invention of the museum (or, in the Shire -- Mathom House).

You are so spot on about the 'being the _____ guy' trope. Mine wasnt star wars, but socks. One time I was one of the groomsmen for a friend of mines wedding. The gift he gave the groomsmen were the cool mint green/blue argyle socks that went with the full ensemble, so I'd wear them from time to time since the socks meant a lot to me and reminded me of my friend. That somehow translated into be being a "socks guy" and now I get argyle and rick and morty socks every year....

I came to this conclusion way back 15 years ago. I decided that in obligatory gift giving situations (family Christmas gatherings) that I would make food for everyone. A common one I did was bake baklava and give it to everyone to take home. This accomplishes several things- it’s more impressive than the effort that I spent time on it bc it seems like it’s really difficult to make (but it’s not), it’s something that everyone in my family likes so there’s economy in time to decide, it’s relatively inexpensive, and it gets used (bc they eat it) so it’s not wasteful.

I've preempted bad gifts from my students by telling them I only want food. I'm down to only one untouched mug a year now!

My partner and I have stopped giving each other holiday specific gifts (yes, including birthdays) years ago. We just do nice things for each other throughout the year and that's good enough. We get weird looks and awkward convos when discussing this with other people though. I do appreciate my mom who, since my childhood, has asked for a specific gift list. My family and I won't be surprised, but then we'll actually get what we want. She's also been buying us more 'experiences' (tickets to events or plays, etc.) which can often be better than a gift too, with less potential waste. I don't mind not being blown away by a surprising perfect gift if it means way less trash.

"Sometimes you have 40 peoples to buy for." What? Ok, we're clearly in completely different cultures here. I have to buy for 3 people and I have already no idea what to buy.

I find all sorts of gift-giving in general to be stressful. When I was a kid, it was good, and it was able to introduce me to new things-I was a kid! Most things were new to me. Civilization IV was, in terms of the amount of enjoyment I got, one of the best gifts ever. Now, though, I doubt anything could come close to that, because... I already know what I like. And now I also need to reciprocate, which is incredibly stressful.

I think another reason why Christmas gifts are bad is that we ask people for their Christmas Lists. I mean, you even did it when you asked what would make us jump for joy. But what really makes you jump for joy is the surprise of getting the perfect gift that you never even considered. And when we spend more time making christmas lists, we end up spending more time trying to figure out what we want than the people who get us the gift spend, which leads to a loss in happiness.

My wife and I buy our own gifts and then pretend it was given. She has given me a new Kayak, a new osciliscope, MSVC compiler, a 3D printer ... and she always know exactly what I want :) She is awesome ;)

As a man who can't grow beard at all, receiving a beard trimming kit wouldn't be just a bad gift, it would be a personal attack 😅. But more seriously, December stresses me out, the anxiety of choosing gifts and the cost... I'd rather we just all put a little bit of money to get an extra good feast on Christmas eve and that's it.

The ten thousand dollar gift is acceptable because it automatically comes without the expectation of anything in return, or at least without the expectation of anything that can bought from a store for that amount of money. Such a large gift is almost always really a. A form of generational wealth transfer b. An act of charity c. A bribe d. Some combination of the above 😊

huge factor missing in the gift value equation is the anxiety and energy spent on figuring out what gift to give and worrying about whether it'll be good and what reaction it'll have sure some people enjoy that, but for others this vastly outweighs any value that could be gained from gifts and shaming people for not giving or not "putting in enough effort" is exactly the cause of the problem

As a "generic man" the only gift I want for Christmas, New Years, birthday, whatever gift giving occasion... is socks. Seriously, just buy me socks. I don't want mall ninja crap, tacti-cool beard trimmers, scented anything, I just want goddamn socks. I don't care what they look like, they can have floral patterns, squares, triangles, tartan, they can be with cats, dogs, capybaras, blue, green, black, gray, I don't care, buy me socks. I don't care what thickness they are, if they're thick winter ones I'll put them on immediately, if they're light summer ones, I can wait till summer. Just buy me socks.

This is why I love my secret santa exchange with my friends, where all of the gifts are so intimately picked out for comedy value that you're basically paying $20 to make them laugh hysterically rather than picking something generic from a list based on a small thing they like. For example, one year I got "The Monolith", an 8 foot tall construction of lumber and aluminum foil that was the most unwieldy abomination, but we were all crying laughing for 10 minutes as it was presented to me.

The way I've personally tried to solve this problem is "give a gift that has use value" and that's pretty much the only marker. I just want someone to get a thing they're going to use. Easier for kids when I know their hobbies and I can get them something they can't get themselves (because they don't have money and would have to ask their parents), but for adults I look for things that have use value. A nice towel, consumables like tea are always killer because if its good tea hey they'll drink it every once in a while and then it's gone and they'll enjoy it, cool socks (be it comfy or just high quality) and always make sure it's a small amount of thing. A single nice towel, 8 cups of tea worth of tea, 1 pair of socks, etc. So far I've had a lot of success with this type of gift, though not perfect success. But if we're going to keep giving gifts, I feel like this is a good heuristic to go off of. General gift that person would kind of like and also use.

Calling gift giving inefficient is *exactly* why people dislike economics. For all the complex math, it's understanding of society and humans is fundamentally flawed. Not everything has to be efficient. A fully efficient society according to economists would be an utter dystopia for most people even if all material needs were met.

I steal everything I gift to other people so the store gets paid from the insurance and if the person recieving the 2 lbs of brown rice doesn't like it and throws it away nothing is lost . 100 % efficiency achieved .

In my social circle, we reached the same conclusion years ago. Now, we only get gifts for the kids, and our dearest loved ones. We get to spend more time enjoying each other's company, instead of stressing over holiday shopping. I would also like to add that IMO secret santa is one of the worst forms of "holiday waste". It usually involves cheap gifts, selected with little care or knowledge. Most of the stuff goes straight into the trash. But some people actually enjoy the silliness, despite the egregious waste.

we're not against economics, however, economics is usually regarded as a social science because it's ultimately about human behavior. --signed, a psychologist

You put into words what I've been feeling for so long. There's a wood toy and a book that have been sitting still wrapped on my shelf for more than one christmas. The only person who got me gifts I end up using is my sister, who got me socks with my cats faces on them and glasses that are slightly larger than the ones I used before. It also took me 10 years to finally get my family to understand that I wasn't into Star Wars anymore

I may be very Northern European™ but I do believe that if you're giving a gift, either it has to be either: 1) on the recipient's public wishlist 2) liquid assets. Gift cards and cash fit in envelopes, people. Nobody ever got mad about recieving a "here's 100€, buy yourself something nice." Also, all social subsidies programs that don't give out cash are fundamentally paternalistic and disrespectful of the autonomy of poor people.

Socks. Who doesn't need socks? Warm, wooly socks, thin dressy socks, everyone loves socks for Christmas.

Loved what you said bout federal financial assistance programs. Its so crazy that they’re inefficient because of some fucked up concept of “deserving” it or not??? The economics of “deserving” is real and lowkey insane lmao 😭😭

Re start of video: Economics is the science of using fancy math to justify your existing preconceptions.

Not only a waste of money, the cost of producing these unwanted items only for them to wind up in a landfill.

the internet having ruined Christmas is something that's frustrated me for years and it is so vindicating to hear it discussed in such detail. Thank you Dr. Collier

Personally, for a long time I've thought waiting to do (almost obligatory) gift giving until christmas was silly. I much prefer the idea of if I happen to see something while I'm doing whatever shopping that makes a certain person come to mind so strongly that I know I have to get this thing for them, and give it to them the next time I see them. I think little random gifts throughout the year like that can mean more because it's not done out of a feeling of social obligation. I also think of it as sporadic potential pick-me-ups because we all have stuff going on generally and it's nice to know that someone's reminded of you by something.

My family stopped doing Christmas gifts a few years back and the holidays have been so much more fun. When we stopped, I was still living at home while I got through college, and that meant I was an adult with just a bed room, so I had no space for random stuff I didn't need or wasn't exactly the object I needed. Aside from making it hard to shop for me, actually it made receiving gifts stressful. Now I either needed to decline to dispose of it or find a spot for it, and the only socially acceptable one took up valuable space I didn't have. My sister in law did that thing at their wedding where they showered everyone in tchotchkes commemorating the day, which is a much more important day for them than me, I'm just a guest there. But it's also stuff I mostly still have because it's got my name on it, literally, and it's faux pas to throw it out. And that's annoying: I didn't need it, I was perfectly happy just showing up and having food and company. I guess in the end I'm just saying that a bad gift can literally have negative value, and good gifts don't happen on a calendar schedule.

A video specifically for me, what a lovely christmas gift :) I thought I hated gifts for a long time, but I've learned that giving on my own terms when I can actually afford to put thought into it massively changes the playing field for me, and I've been able to give some damn good gifts in the last year or two. My current favorite is a bottle of authentic balsamic vinegar that I got for my dad, which is not something anyone else would have gotten for him, including himself.

For an example of a great Christmas present I got as an adult, several years ago my sister-in-law scrolled through my Pinterest pages and found a pin I’d saved to my stuff I love board that was a cool scarf I saw on Etsy that looked like a fox curled up on its tail. She crocheted me her own version of it. I was stunned and so excited when I opened it. I still wear it all the time.

So good! I even love your reaction to the pro-gifter’s arguments - he is not extrapolating to the practice of gift giving as a whole, he has instead contrived a very deliberately “outlier” gift-giving event (spending no doubt far more time and thought on this one than any others that he gives routinely) to argue his point, misrepresenting the practice of Christmastime gift-giving. I do have a coworker who surprises our small night shift crew every year with the most unbelievably thoughtful gifts. Like ancient Roman coins for a history buff and a portrait of Tecumseh for our guy who is obsessed with him. (that second gift, if I’m being cold as ice, I would never say is a “good gift” - as you said, decor is HIGHLY personal and wall space is limited. There is so little chance of another person’s choice being what you would ideally prefer for your shared living space). That said, I’m the only woman on the shift, with main interests of history and science, but I got a stack of end-cap pop books on gardening. 🤷‍♀️ I like gardening, but I had to downsize to a small apartment - so, no garden, and I also used to have a spare room as a “library” and now I don’t, so I just have an assload of books I have no space for. So there’s an example of a THOUGHTFUL gift, but showing how he couldn’t necessarily know the circumstances that make this gift not only impractical but a bit of a burden (sitting in a teetering stack that gives me anxiety, waiting to be sold). And to your point, books which interest me, I have hundreds saved in wish lists, and most of the books I’d care to actually read that are gardening-adjacent, I already own. (soil culture, mycelium layer, creating vernal pools - things I can’t do in an apartment but which interest me aspirationally, and much like any other non-fiction read might). The point is, it was thoughtful yes, and I appreciated it. But, it did sorta have the net effect of making me feel yet again “othered” as a woman working among all men, treated as not being able to like “boy things” (which means anything smart or cool 🤷‍♀️). They got cool history stuff, I got pop culture picture books on gardening. His gifts to them excelled partly bc he thought he would like them himself, but for me, he bought for me “as a woman,” and these books all definitely felt like end-cap Barnes & Noble “gifts for her” purchases. It’s a bummer that every night we’re avidly discussing all of the same things and yet I alone am given gifts which are simpler and woman-centric. I wasn’t angry, it just happened to be a bummer, a very small blip of “same ole same ole” finding out how men can still tend to have a reductive view of me as a woman even after sharing hundreds of hours of conversation that show our interests are staggeringly similar.

If the metric for "bad" gifts is the procurement of economic inefficiencies and waste, then nearly every consumer transaction under capitalism is "bad." There's horrible inefficiencies with labor relations in the production of goods, in extraction of wealth from non-capitalists, and the necessity of overproduction (including forced obsolescence) causing the majority of produced goods to be discarded early or entirely unused. Economics is a bunk science for a lot of reason, but the assumption that "the economy" is something we should value, is at the heart of the bunk. The framework necessary to consider economics a science is the problem, in the same way that phrenology can be internally consistent and reproduceable, by ignoring the societal, systemic factors of slavery.

The internet didn't ruin gift giving to me, it was ruined for me long before the internet. Family and the social mandatory need to make you get everyone a gift regardless whether you can afford it or have the time for it instead of getting someone a gift because I genuinely think they'll like a thing is why gift giving was ruined for me

Food stamps don't disappear at the end of the month. I knew someone on them, and when he finally didn't need them anymore, he had something like $750 left over in his account. He spent every penny after his benefits expired. Therefore, no, food stamps are waste-free.

32:58 But that IS gift giving! At least in my family. Everyone makes a wishlist about 1-2 month before christmas and we've got groupchats for each person where we (everyone except the person whose wishlist we're discussing) communicate, who bought / made what for the person. That way we only give things that are actually wanted and we don't accidentally give double gifts. Unfortunately our extended family isn't in on that and they do sometimes get us gifts that aren't particularly liked, but in that case, trading is explicitly allowed and encouraged. Why do gifts NEED to be surprises? Is this some american culture thing that I don't get?

I've always thought that the dollar value of christmas gifts you got as a kid was equivalent to the amount of money you managed to obtain as a kid per year.... I doubt many kids prior to early teens gets more than a few hundred dollars a year they can spend on their own. The magic of christmas would be re-experienced as an adult if you got gifts equal to your annual earnings each December 25th! :)

It looks to me like the problem isn’t that Christmas gifts are being given, it’s that the threshold for “knows person enough to get them a gift” is WAY too low. If it were only a handful of people, the gifts could be much better.

in my late teens i started telling people i wanted nothing. in my 20s i told people "if you really want to get me what i want for christmas, you'll get me nothing" and people really did stop giving me stuff. i have a rule that i don't get other people gifts for special calendar days. if there's a great gift for them at christmas time, i'll buy it and hold onto it until after christmas is over and there's no gift-giving calendar day. if you get them a gift when there's no expectation for you to, then it's more real.

we live in a society of bourbon smelling star wars tie wearers

Thank you for making this video. Now I can succinctly describe why I really hate gift giving. I'm definitely the person who just buys what they want and who's hard to buy gifts for. And I hate trying to figure out what to buy others -- so some of my gifts have been a bit paternalistic. It's so true that all gifts are just to try and reach the heights of giving gifts to kids.

I hate buying gifts and the older people get the trickier they are to buy for and don't even get me started on secret Santa!!

The really horrible thing is children having to buy gifts for their parents. Every year my brother and I would buy my dad an engraved pen until I heard my dad say that The Shadows were a decent band and then, suddenly, all his gifts were Shadows albums, which is awkward because they weren't making new albums so it was always the same songs. Basically my dad can't express an interest in anything or that becomes all his gifts. Like last month when my nephews bought him a Billy Connolly book and he just added it to his stack of Billy Connolly books (before that it was Spike Milligan)

The secret to gift giving is buying those $15 galaxy lamps at Walmart. Every time there is a secret santa thing going on, people end up fighting over the damn lamp.

I've told people to stop buying me gifts because (a) I am a grown up and if I want something I can either afford to buy it for myself, or it's too expensive for anyone I know to buy it as a gift; (ii) most gifts I receive I don't want; and (iii) getting rid of stuff I don't want (even giving it to charity or selling on eBay) makes me feel bad.

Every so often I think "I could use a beard grooming kit" and then I remember that I own two of them, both of which I used once, lost an essential piece immediately, and shoved into the back of the cabinet.

Reciprocal gift giving is core to so many human cultures since time immemorial. It isn’t people being irrational and inefficient that is the problem, and trying to turn it into an equation based on dollar values is a hilarious exercise in missing the point. Relentless commodification to the point where everything is reduced to mere exchange value is what ruins gift giving more than anything.

I went through a phase of being extremely cynical about christmas gifts, but I've mellowed on it in the past few years. While I agree with a lot of what you say, and I generally fall into the camp of believing we should all buy a lot less junk in general, I also think that the whole practice of exchanging gifts is just as much a ritual as it is an economics formula about value. And rituals are usually never rational, or efficient, or practical. Like when ancient cultures burnt the animals they'd hunted to offer them up to the gods - nobody was fed from that practice, all the effort put into that hunt was in a literal sense completely wasted. But the ritual mattered in a way that transcended whether the value of those animal carcasses was maximized. It created bonds between people - and feelings of connection between those people and the world around them - that are hard to quantify. That's how I think about gift-giving, now. I tell my family I don't want any gifts, just to spend time with them. They always buy me something anyway. And I think that's sweet, because it's just an attempt by them to be close to me by sharing this ritual. So even if it's some dumb beard kit that I'm just going to re-sell on the internet in January, the act still means something and the connection it creates is still real.

This is why I just make my gifts every year, durable hand-made things. This year I'm making stone mortar and pestle sets. Carved from literal rocks I pull from the river.

Perspective is important. As a child, I was fortunate enough to interview my great grandmother who was born in 1912. I still have the recording. She was one of 9 children, and they lived in a 2 room (not two bedroom) apartment. Her oldest siblings had to drop out of school in 8th grade to get jobs. Anyway. She talked about how spoiled everyone is today (using the word "spendthrift" as an insult). She said she remembered her favorite Christmas present. An orange. I guess my point is that to someone who is poor, socks can be an amazing Christmas present. I saw a video where most homeless shelters say their number one need in winter is quality socks.

In my family for decades only kids get gifts .the adults gather and have dinner . that is all. It is a nice tradition. When i started living in North America for the first time i saw adults get gifts on christimas .it was really weird .

God, I just realized I have been so autistic I truly ignored every social rule about gift giving in order to give gifts as effectively as possible

I have a master's in economics and know we disagree on a lot of economics. This was very well done and thought out. I want to quibble mildly with your equation. You put time and effort of the gift giver as value to add to the gift, those are actually costs that are added to the gift which make them more expensive not more valuable. What you are missing is the value the gift giver gets in the act of researching and presenting a good gift. There is non-intrinsic value both for the gift giver and receiver and for their relationship which generally is worth more than the time effort and physical value of the gift itself. Also, you're right, I only get gifts for my kids and significant others and make all of my family just give me money so I can get gifts for my kids and put their names on them because I'm a dirty economist who doesn't trust them to not buy a bunch of junk to fill my house with. Great job!

Economics IS a hard science. It is also a pseudo-science infested with crackpots because the last 150 years of economic thought have consisted of ignoring the most important breakthroughs in the field. Also, it has NOT been this way for hundreds of years (the gift giving). I remember when I came to the US as a teenage kid from an ex-socialist country that suffered from a counter-revolution. My hosts took me Christmas shopping fairly soon after my arrival. I was under the impression that they expected me to be dazzled by the richness and variety of all these shiny items on display in supermarkets and shopping malls. All I saw was a mountain of trash. Just junk. Piles and piles of plastic junk that no one really wants and no one really needs. The Americans have these spending rituals throughout the year. Every month is something-season it seems. The whole process of gift-giving developed as a bonding ritual in medieval communities that produced everything among themselves and for themselves. Capitalism retained the form, but entirely changed the function from community bonding to guilt-pressuring people into spending money on literal trash. Gift-giving is nonsensical under a production mode where the product is not appropriated by the person who made it.

Thank you acollierastro, I am now buying my wife a beard trimming kit this Christmas 👍 my marriage has been saved

You're missing a _huge_ part of the formula of gift giving, and I feel your conclusion is deeply flawed as a result. It's a fact that many people find gift giving rewarding in itself, or in other words, gift-givers also gain value from the act of gifting, not just the recipient. Additionally, the fact an item was gifted can increase its value to the recipient depending on the gift's meaningfulness (in your example, the person who got the mug might be reminded of the fact you were looking out for them and feel reassured every time they use it). This can easily even out the equation in favor of gifting - for the mug, if the recipient would have valued the mug at $22, the giver feels emotionally rewarded by $7.50, and the gift's meaningfulness is also $7.50, that brings the total up to ~$37 in the mug example, evening out entirely with your estimate. Obviously, this doesn't swing the equation in favor of gifting all the time (especially since Christmas gifts tend to be lower in meaningfulness than random voluntary gifts), but it's definitely not true that all Christmas gifts, or even *all* gifts, are bad.

On the topic of men's gifts. As a man, LEGO is the perfect man's gift. Hell it is the perfect gift in general for any gender. They target some sets towards adults, you use your brain just enough for it to be fun, you can take it apart and make something new later, they look good on a shelf, and the resale value almost always goes up because people love LEGO. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

That myopic economic formula sounds more like a love letter to capitalist philosophy. We live in a capitalist society that exrudes value from labor, effort, and everything else. The system encourages us to consume not just for ourselves, but for others. The purpose of the altruistic gift in society is not for it to be analyzed as a line item for its economic value, it is not meant to be a commodity. The purpose of the altruistic gift is to reinforce social bonds within society, not to reinforce transactional relationships. Capitalism utilizes this in order to create more "value" from things that aren't necessarily ethical to commodify. You might find the book The Gift by Marcel Mauss of interest. So yes I agree, don't buy people stuff that is ultimately going in the trash. Anti-consumption is a good thing. But so is not being an ass-Scrooge towards your relations because you're keen on acting smart.

The issue with calling economics a hard science is that it models human behavior in a way that contradicts most of what we know from anthropology and history.

Concerning your tangent about how foodstamps and other non-fungible forms of aid should be replaced with money: No. If the government just gives all aid to poor people in the form of raw money, the landlords and grocery stores and so on will immediately go: _"Oh yeah, gimme a slice of that free pie!"_ And temporarily or permanently jack up the prices they charge, so they can get a disproportional amount of the aid that was meant for the poor. That's one of the reasons why UBI is kinda bad too.

i dont know, i've been able to get that jump-for-joy type feeling and reaction as an adult giving gifts to other adults. i mean, they dont usually literally jump, but the feeling is the same. the important thing here is the gifts are usually not just objects. things like personally annotated books we can discuss, hand-painted keychains each of us has, watercolor paintings of pictures we took, a homemade meal inspired by a series we both like, etc. with the exception of the annotated books, all of them take a few hours max. im not saying nothing in this is right, just that that gift giving feeling is very much possible is as an adult without much free time

I may be a weird person, but I grew up with “wasted gifts” and they became a weird connection years later. I remember my grandmother never used her foot bath with massage and heater, but I did after I realized no one used it and decided to use it. That goes for weird unopened cds, exercise equipment (bands no one used), or the weird jewelry box I later used to store screws for projects. My grandpa bought my grandma a stereo photograph kit and the only thing that survived when I was around where the cards. I ended up using eBay to find a stereoscope and it was a weird moment. I think the gift was decontextualized from the original experience and gained something new (due to the novelty of a no longer used technology). I like those things, they will be the leftovers of society much like the leftovers we sometimes find in the current day. The Atari ET game survived longer than most games because in terms of archival because it was the gift left in its packaging and tossed but became the subject of a lot of people trying to find the landfill with ER games. I think sometimes there is an underestimation of the knock on effects of bad gifts. They may not be realized right away, but I think a lot of ET kid owners got satisfaction over the years as their most hated video game had a weird story that a lot of people wanted to hear. People and their quirks are more interesting than ways that can be tracked by asking a person their opinion. I think a central part of gift giving is the understanding that sometimes it will find a weird new home (island of misfit toys).

The best gifts are handmade, the second best gifts are consumables

I feel like this ignoring the emotional value of gift giving/recieving, or at least misinterpreting it. Yeah the studies take into account the (emotional) value of the gift by asking how much it's worth to them, but that's like saying a vacation is worth as much as the souvenir you took home from the trip. Gifts are not about the value of the item, the item itself is entirely pointless. It's the act of thinking about a person, getting to know them to get them a gift, finding out how well somebody knows you, handing out thoughtful gifts, getting surprised, surprising others, making people happy, sharing a moment. Also and that's probably a slightly hurtful point, this smells like bad science. It very much feels like the conclusion existed before the hypothesis.

BTW my son in law is a bourbon snob and has won many beard contest, yes there are beard contest so thanks for the ideas.

I feel like the economic example, and thus your inequality is flawed because the assumption is that the utility of the gift is extracted by the recipient. The utility is extracted from the giver. To go back to the sweater example, a handmade sweater is hundreds of dollars in labor and often more hundreds of dollars in quality yarn. Nobody would buy a handmade sweater as a gift, it would be too lavish for even your closest family members. Yet, people knit sweaters and hats and gloves and plush toys as gifts for friends and family every year, when clearly they could be more efficient with their time working a minimum wage job and just giving the money they earned as a gift, right? No, of course not, value isn't infinitely fungible. Every time they knit that article of clothing, they're thinking about their loved ones, and how when that loved one wears the clothing, they'll feel that connection to the person who gave it to them. There is no way the recipient can accept and know the true value of the article of clothing, and the person making it knows that.

merry chrysler

We've been doing secret santa between the adult members in the family (9 people) for a few years and it's made gift giving much better, because when it's just the one person that you know pretty well it's easy to get a gift that makes some sense, and you can spend a bit more time or money than if you were getting something for everyone. There's a wish list so you can get the specific thing requested or something else if you have a good idea. We tried a year of no gifts for adults but at least I missed it, because the gift exchange is really the only tradition we have left.

Stuff like this is why anthropologists hate economists lol

a vast amount of economics is just right wing guys congratulating each other on how their ideology of free market fundamentalism is definitely the ultimate truth of reality. that being said, there are people who are trying to do serious work in the field.

I love your disclaimer. I also always preface everything with "I'm barely an expert in my field, so take this next thing I'm about to say about this broader, unrelated topic with a grain of salt."

I hate when economists talk about social safety nets considering a majority of them have never had to use them. lol

Five years ago I picked up online chess as a hobby so, that Christmas, I received 5 different chess boards as gifts. I was left with two options to use these gifts: 1) regularly rotate which board I display in my tiny apartment (lame); 2) train my memory every day for 10 years and hold a mandatory-attendance blindfolded simultaneous exhibition match against everybody that bought me board So far I've done neither but at least I have 5 years left on option 2

Make a clips channel with the wildest things you say in these videos but taken out of context. 100% will go viral on youtube shorts

havent watched the entire video but i think that if gift giving is bad for the economy maybe the economy is not very good for us

happy crimbus

Wait, do people in other countries not ask their friends and family what they want gifted???? Like, of course you're getting bad gifts if people gift stuff without asking what you want, that's absolutely insane as an idea

I'd say any pushback you get against referring to economics is the way it literally exists to justify capitalism. So from a political philosophy perspective, modern economics tends to ignore the underlying problems with capitalism that Marx laid out and have yet to be refuted.