On Tuesday, A Day For Nation Building
The American people are not just electing a president and an economic platform; they are determining and defining the very character of their society.
Throughout this American presidential campaign, there has been a strong tendency to conflate the economy with the deluge of quantitative economic indicators that purport to represent it. To the American voter, this process of abstraction seems nearly complete. The economy has effectively been replaced by a dizzying array of statistics: unemployment rates, GDP growth rates, budget deficits, trade deficits, and the national debt. We act as if ‘the economy’ were some measurable exogenous variable that voters convert algorithmically into political outcomes. But the direction of causality, crucially, points both ways: through our political decisions on the economy, we literally define and determine the character of our society.
In the 1970s, Marshall Sahlins, a pioneering economic anthropologist, delineated a typology of economic modes that is particularly useful for understanding the role of the economy in the current U.S. presidential election. Sahlins identified three general forms of reciprocity that characterize economic norms and behaviors in social relationships.
In the first type of reciprocity called “generalized reciprocity,” people do things for each other but do not necessarily expect anything concrete in return. The paradigmatic example is that of the family: a parent may invest heavily in their child in terms of time, energy, and financial resources and expect nothing more than perhaps general appreciation and love, if even that. In the second type of reciprocity which Sahlins calls “balanced reciprocity,” people do things for each other with the expectation of a commensurate reciprocating act. For example, a friend might buy you a drink or pay for a meal with the expectation that you will do something similar for them at a later point in time. Finally, in what Sahlins calls “negative reciprocity,” each party seeks to extract as much as possible for themselves at expense of all other parties. For example, in the negotiation of a corporate merger, both buyer and seller will likely seek to aggressively maximize their own benefits, sometimes to the extent of employing exploitative tactics. This most closely resembles the core model of neoclassical economics where market actors engage in an absolute zero-sum competition over profits or the distribution of a limited good.
These forms of reciprocity are not static. When a friendship disintegrates in the middle of a tough business negotiation or a marriage breaks down, economic behavior changes accordingly. But economic behavior is not merely a passive characteristic of social relationships; it also determines and defines the social relationship itself. A friend who starts to demand immediate and exact remuneration for every favor transforms the very nature of that friendship. A family member who is fit and capable but deliberately seeks to contribute as minimally as possible transforms the very nature of his or her relationship with the rest of the family.