The Economics of Christmas Gifts
Every Christmas raises the same annoying question for me: how can I minimize the economic waste of my Christmas gift exchanges?
Here is the deal. When is the last time you received a gift that was exactly what you would have purchased yourself? Or a gift that is even better than what you would have chosen for yourself at the same price? Putting aside instances where you told the giftor what to get you, the answer probably is: very rarely.
The unfortunate fact is, gifts are usually a net economic waste for the parties involved. To illustrate: Your friend, without any guidance from you, buys you a blue sweater for $60. "It's nice," you might think to yourself, but chances are you wouldn't have spent $60 of your own to buy yourself that same sweater. Of all the $60 sweaters and objects out there, you probably would have spent $60 on something that, unlike the blue sweater, you believe is worth $60 to you.
How much would you buy that sweater for? You wouldn't pay $60, yet you would almost certainly pay $1 for it. So the answer for most of us is somewhere in between. Say the most you would be willing to pay for the sweater is $35. If that's the case, then there has been a waste of $25. Your friend spent $60 for something that you value at $35. Chances are, something similar happened with your gift to him. In fact, one economist has set the "deadweight loss" of Christmas at about 10-30% of the value of all gifts. How sad.
Of course, you don't have to think of it in dense economic terms to arrive at the same conclusion. My family began to acknowledge this problem a few years back when we realized that a lot of the gifts we were getting each other went unused or far less appreciated than hoped. So in the last couple of years we decided to write down lists of items that we would actually enjoy and use if received as a present (similar to the logical concept of a wedding registry). We did this in several ways, and a couple of us have set up Amazon wish lists containing items that we personally value at or near their posted price. That has worked fine, except that we lost the element of surprise when we unwrapped our gifts on Christmas Eve.
So, really, neither of our options makes much sense. We might as well be exchanging cash to purchase gifts with, which if we considered, would quickly make us realize that an even better solution is not to exchange gifts at all (children aside, of course). Yet surely, if that happened, we would feel nostalgic and lose some excitement about Christmas.
But there is a solution for this too: hey, why don't you each buy Christmas gifts for yourselves? This would eliminate the waste of today's system and would keep you excited about this element of Christmas. You would lose the element of surprise, but this loss is outweighed by the fact that you will positively love every one of your gifts under that Christmas tree. Besides, it's not like the "surprise" you currently experience is always a nice one.
Do what you will - just throwin' it out there.
Paul Ibrahim
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That's funny. My husband and I have kind of "morphed" into buying our own gifts. This year I'll wrap some exotic power tool that he bought, and he'll wrap a couple of handbags that I bought. Some years we buy a joint gift like a TV. Of course, we get inexpensive "stocking stuffer" surprise gifts for each other also. It seems to work.
I think your article perfectly illustrates the fallacy of applying rigid economic rules to every aspect of human life, as a full, satisfying life is multifaceted and should not be conformed to simple numbers.
On a larger scale, I see this as an argument against untremmeled laissez-faire capitalism.
Untrammeled. Pardon the typo.
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