gift-theft economies

Publishers seem to believe that economics explains almost 'everything', but what would the rational choice brigade make of this incident? Ideally I would put this on a wiki, so that the mini-Stephen Levitt's could annotate it, explaining just what the fuck was going on.

On Friday, as I was leaving the British Library, I sat down near the Information Desk briefly, and put my Moleskin notebook and smart new hardback copy of The Birth of Biopolitics down on the seat next to me. The latter I am especially excited by at the moment, but the former contained a rather more valuable month's-worth of notes. I left for the underground, and realised two stops down the Northern Line that I had left the books behind.

Safe in the knowledge that the British Library is a sealed enclave of social and cultural capital (creating utilitarian and normative bases for cooperation respectively) into which the public is rarely permitted entry, I was reasonably assured that my books would either be still where I'd left them, or in the hands of a friendly staff member. They were neither, and I left in a blind rage against British Library users that put me in half a mind to head for the nearest polling station and bloody well vote for Boris Johnson. By Tuesday morning, they still hadn't been handed in. Somebody had stolen my Birth of Biopolitics and Moleskin notebook, and with them, a month of notes.

Then I received the following email:

Hi there,
i`ve found your noticebook. If U need that, we could meet thursday (08 May) at 6pm in Tavistock Square Garden behind the sculpture (i will in white hat).
Cheers, Peter

He claimed to have picked it up, sans Foucault, from the cafe (the plot thickens). I was also aware that, invited to by the template of Moleskin's title page, I had scrawled $50 as a reward. Bastard! Rather than simply hand it over to the member of staff who was right there, this man had made off with it in order to extort money from me (albeit money that I was apparently ready to have extorted), and no doubt flog the brand new Birth of Biopolitics down some dodgy post-structuralist pub. Not only that, he was proposing a meeting in a park, where he would presumably threaten/blackmale/rob me. I replied, saying we could meet on Tuesday, at the same time and place.

To return to questions that David Stark poses in this paper [pdf], what is the notebook worth? There can be no price, because both the seller and the buyer hold a monopoly (he is the only possible seller, and I am the only possible buyer). In this respect, the situation is not unlike the MOD buying weapons off BAE, with my notebook as the long-range nuclear warhead (don't snigger). According to the classical labour theory of value, however, perhaps the notebook has a quantity of value invested in it by the quantity of hours of my work. For Adam Smith, this value is whatever the labour mark stipulates; Marx disagrees (but how then do we work out what the value of a month of my time is?).

The neo-classical solution, in which the value is derived from my psychology as potential consumer, is undermined by the lack of choice in all of this. And all of it is entirely undermined by the fact that it is my frigging notebook and he should have handed it in in the first place.

So I went to Tavistock Square last night (with £60 in my pocket, in case it was needed), and hung around the statue in dark glasses like a spy, and sure enough, at 6pm, a scruffy-looking man in a white hat wandered over clutching the ambiguously-valued Moleskin. 'Peter' held out the notebook, as I braced myself for some further injustice to be enacted. I took the notebook, thanked him, and then waited. We stared at each other for a few seconds, aware that we had entered some type of parallel economic universe, in which the rules of transactions were unrecognisable. I still wanted to punch, hug and pay him, all at the same time.

In the end, we both walked off in opposite directions, me to re-bond with my lost child, him to dream up new acts of criminal-charity (like Robin Hood, only he steals from the bourgeosie, only to give back to them four days later).

As I was leaving the park, my conscience then had to complicate a complicated situation further, commanding me to go back (better to do this asap, rather than leave it until 4am; history indicates that the latter would have resulted in me and my priceless notebook being chased around motels by a psychopathic Javier Bardem). I walked back to my robber-saviour. "There was a reward offered in the front of $50, and you didn't ask for money", I said. If he'd asked for the money, I would have done my damnedest not to give it to him, but he hadn't. "I live in the street", he replied. For reasons that would probably result in Stephen Levitt's brain suffering a total meltdown, I then handed him two twenty pound notes.

So there you have it: £40. The going rate, apparently, for what happens when a homeless guy wanders into a library, picks up a PhD student's notebook with one month's work and a $50 reward offer in it, chooses not to hand it in, then arranges a rendez-vous in a public park to give it back without asking for money.

Comments

[Harry]

Poor bastard was just doing what the notebook told him to!

[stet]

Great story. Here is a random but not completely unrelated quote from John Dewey's Theory of Valuation:

"If a person, for example, finds after due investigation that an immense amount of effort is required to procure the conditions that are the means required for realization of desire (including perhaps sacrifice of other end-values that might be obtained by the same expenditure of effort), does that fact react to modify his original desire and hence, by definition, his valuation? A survey of what takes place in any deliberate activity provides an affirmative answer to that question."

[Neil]

If I find myself in that situation, I will now know how much to pony up!

[Will Davies]

Harry - it didn't tell him to do anything. It had my email address in it, $50 next to the (printed) heading 'reward'. If he could make sense of that, he might have made sense of the words 'Information Desk' or 'Lost Property'. Granted, someone else might have already made off with the book, but there was definitely some abuse of my property going on.

[Lee Bryant]

LOL

Haven't you worked out yet that your propensity to theorise and rationalise everyday urban problems and minor crimes is why they keep happening to you? It's a special case of 'be careful what you wish for'. Next time, just swear, make vague and unsupported threats of violence and seek no theoretical explanation. That will break the cycle.

[Phil]

I can't decide whether you did or didn't break the frame, to be phenomenological about it.

A related story, which I saw in the local paper and which therefore must be true: guy gets stopped in the street by scary person and asked for money. Hands over a couple of quid.

Scary: What's this?
Guy: Oh, you're *mugging* me! I'm terribly sorry, I thought you were a beggar.
Scary: Do I *look* like a beggar?

Oh, the embarrassment.

[max]

Hum. I'm glad you got your notebook back, after our IM paranoia session the other day ... But now I can't decide whether you're more annoyed about a) the theft b) offering a reward in the first place c) handing over a different amount of money for obscure, but probably worthy reasons.

Also, do you think it's possible he's stolen your ideas? Keep a look out for them in Prospect over the next few months ...

[Ben Ayers]

Fantastic. You did the right thing in my book, well, from what I remember it said in my book. I lost it about four years ago in the V and A.

[Duncan O'Leary]

Dan Ariely (http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/) would tell you that the problem is that you replaced a social norm with a market norm. i.e when you put a price on something, people (including you when you met him in the park) immediately view the situation as a market transaction rather than a social interraction.

He argues, for example, that this expains why fines may even exacerbate illegal behaviour, because they put a price on it, possibly making it social acceptable.

I'm making my way through his book (http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?page_id=129) at the moment - i'll let you know if it's any good...and if there are any other money-saving tips in there.

[Will Davies]

Nice point. I'm not sure a 'reward' is quite the same thing as a 'price', although I appreciate that the distinction is too subtle to make a great deal of difference. There is some separate normativity at work here, in which the reward represents some sort of gift in recognition of help (of course gift-giving and exchange are two ends of a single spectrum, as Marcel Mauss teaches us). You give a reward because you recognise that somebody has done more than was expected of them. In this instance, the man has done considerably less than was expected of him - he has actually picked up an item of my property and taken it home with him. That behaviour doesn't deserve a reward. And now I want my forty quid back...

[Richard]

Hurrah for the British Library - an unexpected source of bridging, as well as bonding social capital...