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RE: The Reason You Don't Understand Steemit: It's Like A Gift Economy Not A Commodity Economy

in #gifteconomy8 years ago

Great post. I'd like to extend it a little further and comment on how we currently measure "value" in our society via flawed GDP and other statistical models. Things such as unpaid work, environmental quality, family and leisure time etc. are excluded because they do not have an assigned monetary value. These things do not involve resource scarcity, meaning one person has to miss out so another person can benefit.

Our current economic system says that the more scarce something is, the more valuable it becomes, and this is easy for economists to measure. So "caring for others" goes unrecognised despite being highly valuable and important to our wellbeing and quality of life. I think your post is a fantastic example of how - through cryptocurrencies - we can show that these types of actions and activities are highly valued by many people, even though there's no guaranteed personal financial incentive for this kind of behaviour.