Gift Economy: "A gift economy is a system of exchange where valuables are given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards."
Any ideas for how these could be expanded to help frens or people in general?
An example might be this forum or Wikipedia: lots of anons volunteer info that they freely share, and people also freely share valuable info they can find - there's a kind of give and take that's kind of "freely done" (besides hosting costs)
A material example that comes to mind is those little free libraries, where people freely pick up and drop off books for people to read.
It's not really a "captialist" or "Communist" idea, kind of independent of an economic system.
Any thoughts on gift economies or how we might mutually give-and-take to build better things in the world?
Charity: freely giving something to someone in need (one direction)
Barter: trading a thing for a thing
gift economy: can kind of be a mix of the above? I give you a gift, you feel a reciprocal "obligation / desire" to give back, but you don't have to. you could though, but it's not like it was a barter trade of a thing-for-a-thing.
But without exchanging money and without being explicit, I can't get past the flaw of not knowing if what you're exchanging is subjectively valuable to the other person.
A single homeless man may desperately want food while exchanging handmade wind-chimes for a wheelchair, polished river stones and oil change vouchers.
I don't find such an economy viable because everyone would reject exchanging something valuable for something subjectively worthless. Everyone would say no.
And all it would take is one greedy fuck to start exchanging ordinary tree leaves for legitimate items - it would fail as quickly as communism when the workers realize there's no benefit in work hard.
[They could exchange the items they don't value in the hope of getting food, but that's just bartering with extra steps.](https://a.pinatafarm.com/1258x710/6f4d8d3bd2/rick-and-morty-extra-steps.jpg)