THE GIFT OF TIME
Spend time with your loved ones this holiday season and beyond
Every holiday season, I come across the line that gifts are a terrible idea. Some years it’s a confident-sounding man trying to impress a social crowd with his neoclassical economics. At other times, the argument pops up in places like the Financial Times or Vox.
Essentially, the idea is that you know best what to do with the money that’s spent on the gift bought for you, and as such, everyone will be better off without gifts — give cash if the ‘non-optional social convention of gift’ holds in your life:
According to one estimate*, the deadweight loss from Christmas gift giving in the US could have amounted to between US$4 and US$13 billion in 1992 — inflating that by the US CPI and converting to AUD yields a range of A$13-42 billion in today’s prices. That’s big bucks indeed.
So, should we give each other cash?
Of course, looking for pareto improvement in O’Henry shows just how clueless some male economists (oh, such types, in my experience, are always men) can be. They don’t realise that gifts are as much about you-the-giver as you-the-receiver. What you give to whom tells everyone about the who/what/how of your values. Buying the shiniest, largest toy, without regards to the recipient’s feelings — well, that says a lot, though perhaps not favourably of the giver.
These anti-gift economists also forget the first, and perhaps the most important, concept taught in economics —that of the opportunity cost. And what is the ultimate metric by which to judge the opportunity cost but time?
The most precious thing you can give your loved ones is the gift of time. Spend your time with them and on them. Contra Mick, time is not on your side.
Happy 2024.
* Waldfogel, J. (1993). The Deadweight Loss of Christmas. The American Economic Review, 83(5), 1328–1336. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2117564
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