An und für sich

I’ve long been extremely skeptical about the use of “gift” language in much contemporary theology — particularly of the claim that life would somehow be better if we were to implement a gift economy. Jodi Dean’s recent post helped to clarify some of that suspicion for me, because it made it clear that we are already living in a gift economy.

Beyond the notion that we should all always be “grateful” for a job — rather than regarding gainful employment as a basic part of what it means to be a member of a human society — there are also, as Jodi points out, many situations where the rewards of one’s labor are presented as a kind of gift rather than a straightforward reward. She uses the example of “crowdsourcing” contests where a corporation will mobilize hundreds if not thousands of people to produce free work for them, simply for the chance to be the “lucky winner” who actually gets paid (and indeed, gets paid much, much less than they would normally pay someone for the same work).

I would also point out the many situations where unpaid or underpaid work is presented as a “great opportunity” that will give one an edge in the continual battle for paid work. (Meanwhile, no one seems to do the math and say, “Wait, if I’m doing this for free now, and if others will be willing to do it for free after me, why do I ever expect to get paid for doing it?”) In creative fields, the rewards of such labor are supposed to be “exposure,” which is of course yet another entry into a kind of lottery — by “getting your stuff out there,” you might wind up being the lucky person who hits it big.

Everyone who does wind up getting a reasonable wage doing something like what they want to do necessarily winds up feeling a kind of survivor’s guilt, knowing that it wasn’t strictly one’s own merit that led to the job (after all, many hundreds of equally qualified people were passed over… “there but for the grace of God…”).

What would a gift economy look like if not this? And why on earth would anyone choose this over capitalism? I am not a fan of capitalism, as my readers know, but one must acknowledge that it has aspects that are appealling — for instance, the clear expectations introduced by contracts, most notably the clear expectation that everyone was doing everything for their own benefit and therefore contracts exist for (at least perceived) mutual benefit. Obviously it didn’t play out that way in practice most of the time, but at least it allowed for some kind of clear standard so that you’d know when the ideal was being betrayed.

The “gift economy” version obscures everything. It obscures the fact that workers produce value for firms, for example — working is something that helps a company, not some huge privilege that the gods of meritocracy have deigned to bestow upon you. Reasonable compensation isn’t something you should be grateful for, it’s something you deserve. Now such a position has its flaws, of course, and it would need to be complicated and nuanced to create a truly just society, but it’s a much more productive starting point than any misty-eyed sentimentality about “the gift.”

We learned in 2008 that many of the mortgage-backed securities that caused the financial crisis were based on mortgages that were obtained under false pretenses. Examples include the infamous “liar loans” that didn’t require verification of any information, or loan applications where the originator filled in the paperwork with false numbers so the borrower would qualify. There were also widespread instances of people being given subprime loans when they would have qualified for a prime loan, due to the higher interest rates and profits associated with subprime.

Furthermore, we also know that many of these subprime mortgages were not really mortgages in the traditional sense of a long-term loan that is paid off through steady installments — rather, the intention from the ground up was for them to be periodically refinanced. Hence the bizarre structures where the payments would suddenly balloon up after a few years, or where you could pay interest-only for a while, or where you could even negatively amortize the home by paying less than the interest accrued.

From the borrower’s side, these mortgages were structured more like credit cards, whose usurious rates make them into more of a means of sucking as much money out of the borrower as possible rather than collecting the debt as such (the original amount of the loan is usually paid many times over through high interest rates once someone becomes delinquent). From the lender’s side, these mortgages were a vehicle whereby they could take a cut of rising housing prices each time the borrower refinanced — in a sense, the mortgage existed as a way for the bank to speculate on the housing market.

Securitization adds another wrinkle, as many originators simply wanted to produce loans that they could then sell off to be securitized, making collection, etc., into someone else’s problem and encouraging things like the “liar’s loan” that would be insane from the perspective of a company that was directly lending the funds.

So we have mortgages based on lies that were not intendend for the purposes normally associated with mortgage lending. Now we’re learning that the legal processes necessary to carry out the securitization process was in many — perhaps even most — cases not actually followed. The transfer of property rights that lies at the basis of a form of security that has wrought massive destruction may never have happened, meaning that mortgage-based securities, which nearly brought down the financial system and triggered a near-depression that has ruined countless lives, may not technically exist.

In short: Mortgages that weren’t really intended as mortgages were often given to people based on lies, and were then not legally passed onto the financial intermediaries for which the whole system existed. If ever there was a real-world example of the theological notion of evil as a pure absence, this is it — this massive series of gaps has created and almost certainly will continue to create hugely destructive real effects. One even begins to suspect that the story of the Fall was a kind of prophecy of our current situation, with the devil selling the first couple an apple he didn’t own, in order to gain dominion over them in the guise of empowering them.