Towards Gift Economy

Gift Economy is term used for the economic system where people exchange goods and services like gifts. There is no so called agreement for the deals. Instead people work for mutual benefit.The system is reciprocal in nature, if you are doing good to some one and this is in the system then from some route you are destined to get paid back. It is not quite like conventional monetary economy where people buy goods and services for money. There money determines the fitness of individual, here nothing like fitness exists. In gift economy people do what they are best at, and co operate with others for the mutual good. Its not a one-one relationship, but an all-all relationship, where all work for good of all.

Internet is an excellent example of the gift economy. A tremendously big infrastructure is developed and maintained seemingly without any monetary intentions but for public good. There are many services being provided by different players like mailing, sharing , chatting etc free of cost. These services in turn are helping people to do things in better ways. People are working in open source domain. They are helping each other. The old term synergy comes very handy here. Its the synergy of people working in open source that pace of development in this domain has sky rocketed. With in a decade we can see it. Linux now seen as a potential threat to Windows is the best example.

Now look at the example of Google. Google has revolutionized the Internet. Google is ubiquitous in online world. They provide a whole lot of services for no cost to general people. They come up with a new product every month or two and distribute it free. The case of Sun microsystems is not much different. Take the instance of J2EE. It has provided the standard for providing enterprise services. Its also available for free. They have also made Solaris open source. Now every player in market is thinking in these terms. Standards are developed and are adhered to.

In day to day life we also see instances of gift economy. The relation between parents and children is one of these. Parents bring up their children and provide them education. These children later serve parents and others in society. This way the cycle goes on. Charitable trusts are also a good instance of it. People contribute there and people take their benefits.

Crux of the topic is instead of competition based systems where each player in the market is competing with others, and hence most of the time duplication of efforts happen, a more comprehensive co operative policy will do good, as seen in above examples. Many believe that in gift economy with out competition there will be no incentive for people to work hard. And slowly the performance will degrade. This may be true but for gift economy we require an educated and sensible society, which understands its responsibilities like in case of IT industry. And then we can see the magic of term "gift economy".