Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (52 page)

I use a similar model in my public speaking. When I am asked my speaker’s fee, I say that I do not charge a fee. Usually I request that my travel expenses be covered; beyond that, I say something like, “It is up to you. Give me whatever amount, or none at all, that leaves you with a feeling of clearness, balance, and appropriateness, an amount that reflects your gratitude for my coming to be with you.” This is not a formula, it is a spirit that adapts itself to each unique situation. If they have a standard speaker’s honorarium, I
won’t necessarily insist on an exception for myself. Moreover, sometimes an up-front offer communicates to me how much they desire what I have to offer. I want to give my gifts where they are wanted, and money is one of several ways to communicate that desire.

It is important not to make “living in the gift” into a fetish, or into a standard of virtue. Don’t do it in order to be good. Do it in order to feel good. If you find yourself rejoicing (as I do) over a big fat check, that is OK! We humans are delighted to receive big gifts. Even if you find yourself (again, as I sometimes do) feeling miserly, resentful, and grasping, simply take note of that as well. The road back to the gift is a long one, so distanced from it we have become. I see myself as one of many explorers of a new (and ancient) territory, learning from the discoveries of others and from my own mistakes.

When I lead retreats, I charge only for room and board and other out-of-pocket expenses, and invite gifts.
²
It has taken some time for me to enter a state of consciousness where this model actually “works.” If I resent those who give nothing, if I intend, through the enunciation of high-sounding principles, to coerce or manipulate people into giving beyond what genuine gratitude dictates, or if I subtly “guilt” people into giving by hinting at my hardship, sacrifice, or entitlement by virtue of poverty, then I am not living in the spirit of the gift at all. I am living instead in a subtle kind of scarcity mentality or beggary, and, as if to mirror that state, the flow of gifts dries up almost immediately. Not only do people refrain from giving, but my own wellspring of gifts dries up as well.

As long as my gift intention is authentic, I find that the inflow of gifts matches or exceeds the outflow. Sometimes the vehicle of the return gift is mysterious, indirectly traceable or not traceable at all to anything I have given, yet somehow, when it comes, it carries something of the spirit of the original offering. Sometimes only an exiguous trail of synchronicity and symbol connects the gift I have received with the gift I have given. The rational mind says the return gift has nothing at all to do with what I gave—“I would have received that anyway”—but the heart knows otherwise.

Because the return gift comes later, as we step into gift-based livelihood we live for a time in faith. With no assurance of return, we learn whether we really mean it. The ego struggles and thrashes, trying to find an assured benefit. If not money, maybe I can advertise my generosity to receive praise. Maybe I can secretly congratulate myself and feel superior to those who are less in the gift than I am. In my experience, each new step into the gift is scary. The letting go has to be real, or there will be no return.

Now let us apply this model to other kinds of businesses. There are already a number of enterprises today that are implementing gift economics in creative ways. I don’t uphold my own model as the best or only way of living in the gift. We are pioneering a new kind of economy, and it is going to take some trial and error to get it right. I’ll offer a few examples of people doing business according to one or both of the key principles of the gift I have discussed: (1) The recipient, and not the giver, determines the “price” (the return gift); (2) The return gift is chosen after the initial gift has been received, not before.

In Berkeley, California, the Karma Clinic has been treating people with holistic medicine on a gift basis for two years. After the consultation or treatment, the client receives a “bill” that reads,

“Your consultation is a generous gift from someone that came before you. If you would like to gift-forward in that spirit, you can do so however you choose. Monetary or other gifts may be left in the gift box in the Karma Clinic office or mailed to …” In Ashland, Oregon, another gift-based clinic called the Gifting Tree has formed. There are doubtless many more around the country, and they appear to be quite sustainable: the Victoria Attunement Center operated purely on a donation basis from 1982 to 1988 and, according to its founder Will Wilkinson, was completely self-supporting with over 300 client visits per month.

The gift model has also been applied to restaurants. The One World restaurant in Salt Lake City, in operation since 2003; the SAME (So All May Eat) Cafe in Denver, in operation since 2008; A Better World Cafe in New Jersey, which opened in 2009; the Karma Kitchen in Berkeley; and many more operate on a donation-only basis—and many of them serve organic food to boot.

Recently the idea entered the mainstream when the national restaurant chain Panera Bread opened a pay-what-you-want store in St. Louis, Missouri. The menu is exactly the same as at its other stories, but the prices are guidelines only. Patrons are asked to pay whatever feels right: the sign at the counter says, “Take what you need, leave your fair share.” If this experiment works, the company plans to expand the model to locations around the country. I wonder if they realize that they are pioneering not just a model of civic virtue, but also a model of business for the future.

On the internet, of course, an enormous gift economy thrives. Versions of all major types of productivity software are available at
no charge. For example, the office suite OpenOffice, a collaborative effort by hundreds of volunteer programmers, is available at no charge. I am hesitant to use the phrase “for free” here, because those words imply almost a repudiation of any return gift. The OpenOffice organization does accept donations and encourages those who have downloaded the software to contribute in various ways.

Lots of bands offer their music “for free” online as well. The most notable pioneer of the gift business model for recorded music was Radiohead, which offered its 2007
In Rainbows
album on a pay-what-you-will basis. Although nearly two-thirds of downloaders chose to pay nothing, hundreds of thousands did choose to pay a few dollars for it, and millions more copies were purchased on iTunes, as CDs, and through other channels. Critics dismissed this success as an anomaly made possible by Radiohead’s iconic status, yet the basic model continues to proliferate, especially in the music industry as traditional distribution channels becomes increasingly impractical for most bands.

Astonishingly, there is even a law firm that has incorporated a pay-what-you-will element into its business. The Valorem Law Group, a trial law firm based in Chicago, has added a “value adjustment line” feature to its bills. At the bottom of the bill, above an empty “Total due” box, is a box labeled “Value adjustment.” The client writes a positive or negative number there and adjusts the final fee accordingly. I am full of admiration for this firm, because from a legalistic point of view this feature is quite insane. Someone could “adjust” the bill by the full amount and pay nothing, and the firm would probably have no legal recourse.

Now let’s generalize these examples into a broadly applicable business model. The fundamentals are quite simple. The first guideline is to charge money only to cover your own direct costs. This
includes marginal costs and apportioned fixed costs, but not sunk costs. So, for example, if you install plumbing for someone, you would charge for materials (with zero markup), fuel to reach the site, and perhaps half a day’s worth of your current payments on capital equipment (e.g., your truck loan, business loan, etc.). You would make it clear to the recipient that your time, labor, and expertise are a gift. The bill might have the total costs, and then a blank line labeled “gift,” and then the line labeled “total” underneath it.

A variant of this model is to follow Valorem and display a normal fee that reflects the market price with a line under it labeled “value adjustment” or “gratitude adjustment.” Most people will probably just pay the market price, but you can explain that they can adjust it if they are especially satisfied or dissatisfied with the work.

Another variant is not to charge anything at all but to delineate various line items such as “cost of materials,” “apportioned cost of business expenses,” “hours of labor,” “market price for this service,” and so on. That way the recipient can choose to pay nothing at all, not even for materials, but at least she has this information. This information, like the note in the Karma Clinic, is “the story of the gift” referenced earlier. Traditionally, gifts were often accompanied by stories that helped the receiver appreciate their value.

The gift business model is actually not as far from standard business practice as you might think. Today, a common negotiating tactic is to say, “Look, here are my costs; I can’t go any lower than that.”
³
It is not such a huge shift of perspective to say, “Here are my costs. You can pay me more according to the value you believe you have received.” Often the customer will have a pretty good
idea of the market price of the goods or services you are offering and, if there is any genuine humanity at all in the business relationship, will probably pay close to that. If he or she does pay a premium above the base cost, you can interpret that as indicating the presence of gratitude. If someone is grateful for what you have given, you will desire to give more. If someone is ungrateful, you know that the gift is not being fully received, and you will probably choose not to give to that person again.

Translated into a business relationship, what this means is that you will choose not to do business again with someone who pays you little or nothing above cost, and you will preferentially do business with someone who, using money as token, communicates her high degree of gratitude. This is as it should be. Some people need our gifts more than others. If you have bread, you want to give it to the hungry person. Displays of gratitude help to orient us toward the best expression of our gifts. So, just as today, a business will tend to do business with those who pay the most money (although nonmonetary expressions of gratitude may also come into play). This is different from tending to do business with those who offer the best price. The difference is key. In keeping with the spirit of the gift, the price is not offered ahead of time. The gift is offered first, and only after it is received is a return gift made.

I cannot help but notice a parallel between this approach and various game-theoretic studies of altruism and iterated prisoner’s dilemma problems. Look up “tit-for-tat” in Wikipedia for some background on this topic. Essentially, in many situations where there are repeated interactions among discrete entities with varying payoffs for cooperation and betrayal, the optimal strategy is to cooperate first and retaliate only against someone who didn’t cooperate last time. Analogous reasoning leads me to think that
the business model I have outlined can actually be more financially successful over time than the standard model.
⁴

Because gift mentality is so alien to us today, doing business in the gift sometimes requires a bit of education. I’ve found that if I advertise an event as “by donation,” people sometimes treat it as a throwaway, thinking, “It must not be very valuable or very important if he isn’t charging for it.” They’ll come late or not at all, or they’ll come with low expectations. Paying a fee is a kind of ritual that sends a message to the unconscious that “this is something valuable” or “I am doing this for real.” I and many others are still experimenting to find better ways to invoke the benefits of payment while staying true to the spirit of the gift. We are at the beginning of a new era, so it is going to take some practice and experimentation.

Obviously, at the time of this writing most corporations and business owners are not ready to step into a gift-based business model. That’s OK—you can give them a little push! Simply implement it unilaterally by “stealing” their products, for example by illegally downloading or copying digital content like songs, movies, software, and so on. Then, if you feel grateful to the creators of it, send them some money. I would be quite happy if you did the same with this book. It will be hard to do it illegally, though, since I don’t claim standard copyrights (I bet you didn’t read the copyright page carefully, but it isn’t the usual verbiage), and the content
is available online without charge. Nonetheless, if you do manage to “steal” this book, I will be pleased to receive an amount from you that reflects your gratitude—as opposed to the amount that I or the publisher presumes reflects its value to you. Each person’s experience of reading it is unique: for some it may be a waste of time, for others it might be life-changing. Isn’t it absurd to receive an identical return gift from everyone?

The gift model comes especially naturally for professions in which the value delivered is something intangible. Musicians, artists, prostitutes, healers, counselors, and teachers all offer gifts that are debased when we assign them a price. When what we offer is sacred to us, then the only honorable way to offer it is as a gift.
⁵
No price can be high enough to reflect the sacredness of the infinite. By asking for a specific speaker’s fee, I make less of my gift. If you are a member of one of the above professions, you might consider experimenting with a gift model of business—but remember, if you apply that model as a more clever means to “get paid,” it won’t work. People can detect a phony gift, a gift that isn’t a gift but carries an agenda of gain.

In all of the above professions, the intangible rides the vehicle of something tangible, and it is the former, unquantifiable, that naturally wants to abide in the realm of the gift. This is actually true
of every profession. Always, something is present that is beyond quantification, beyond commodity, and thus beyond price. Every profession is therefore potentially sacred. Consider the example of farming. What makes food—something tangible—a vehicle for the sacred?