This series is the introduction to contributism. We think you’ll find it entertaining, enlightening, and concise — in all, it should take about an hour or two to read. If you’d like to receive it in your email inbox in serial form, subscribe to the Contributist Reader for free.

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For those in a hurry: reading just entries 2, 4, 10, and 12 will give you a summary of the ideas that make up contributism in as short a time-frame as possible.

By reading this introduction, you’ll come to understand the contributist lens, and by the end of the journey — just by being here — you’ll be a part of our community.

Transforming the Social Ecosystem

So far, we have been primarily concerned with developing an understanding of the contributist act — the individual’s assertion of their right to give. But if contributism is a social theory, and not just a personal lifestyle choice, then it must be able to extend beyond the realm of individual acts, and into the realm of social structures.

In other words, we have seen the contributist act — can we see the contributist society?

In order to see the contributist society, we have to first understand what we mean when we say that a society is capitalist, or socialist, or even contributist. For this purpose, I find great value in Erik Olin Wright’s description of the capitalist society in his 2019 book How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century:

Consider capitalism. No economy has ever been—or ever could be—purely capitalist. . . . Existing economic systems combine capitalism with a host of other ways of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services: directly by states; within the intimate relations of families to meet the needs of their members; through community-based networks and organizations in what is often called the social and solidarity economy; by cooperatives owned and governed democratically by their members; though nonprofit market-oriented organizations; through peer-to-peer networks engaged in collaborative production processes; and many other possibilities. Some of these ways of organizing economic activities can be thought of as hybrids, combining capitalist and noncapitalist elements; some are entirely noncapitalist; and some are anticapitalist. . . . We call such a complex economic system “capitalist” when it is the case that capitalism is dominant in determining the economic conditions of life and access to a livelihood for most people.

In Wright’s description, we consider American society to be a capitalist society because capitalism is the dominant organizing form here, not the only organizing form. This is intuitively obvious when we consider that many essential elements of our society are not capitalist at all, and some are even best described as socialist. These include, among others: public libraries, public schools, public infrastructure, the Social Security program, and police and firefighter departments. Or consider that capitalist economies are often described as having three sectors — public, private, and non-profit — and only one of these sectors operates according to capitalist principles. A capitalist society is not a society that is only capitalist; it is a society in which capitalism is dominant.

But what does it mean for capitalism to be dominant? Wright goes on to explain this by way of a metaphor that I consider to be one of the most useful that I have encountered:

Think of a lake. A lake consists of water in a landscape, with particular kinds of soil, terrain, water sources and climate. An array of fish and other creatures live in its water and various kinds of plants grow in and around it. Collectively, all of these elements constitute the natural ecosystem of the lake. This is a “system” in that everything affects everything else within it, but it is not like the system of a single organism in which all of the parts are functionally connected in a coherent, tightly integrated whole. Social systems, in general, are better thought of as ecosystems of loosely connected interacting parts rather than as organisms in which all of the parts serve a function.

In this way, we can see a capitalist society as a complex ecosystem in which the dominant species — the apex predator — is capitalism. In any ecosystem, there is a diversity of needs to be met, and various species find their place in the ecosystem by meeting some of those needs while asserting their own. What makes the apex predator unique is that its presence dominates the ecosystem — when any other species comes into conflict with the apex predator, the apex predator almost always wins. Because of this, the apex predator bends the whole system towards itself; every other element of the ecosystem must take pains to accommodate the needs of the apex predator.

This apex predator role is the role capitalism plays in our society. This is why it is overly simplistic to say that we have capitalism rather than socialism in American society. You can find both, and many other organizing values and approaches as well. The key detail is that, in American society, capitalism is strongest, and we will take every pain to ensure that its needs are always met. When, for example, I read about the ways that private equity firms have been quietly cannibalizing the news media — a pillar of democratic society that once strongly resisted pure capitalism — I am reminded of the way that orca whales (the apex predator of the high seas) have recently begun to massacre sharks off the coast of South Africa, having discovered that their livers are full of valuable nutrients. Though capitalism can generally co-exist peacefully with other “species” of organizing thought in our society, when the time comes that they enter into conflict, capitalism almost always wins.

To those who have grown weary of capitalism’s reign, this picture might be more than a bit depressing. But Wright actually uses the ecosystem metaphor to describe a vision of how capitalism might one day be unseated:

In such an ecosystem, it is possible to introduce an alien species of fish not “naturally” found in the lake. Some alien species will instantly get gobbled up. Others may survive in some small niche in the lake, but not change much about daily life in the ecosystem. But occasionally an alien species may thrive and eventually displace the dominant species. The strategic vision of eroding capitalism imagines introducing the most vigorous varieties of emancipatory species of noncapitalist economic activity into the ecosystem of capitalism, nurturing their development by protecting their niches and figuring out ways of expanding their habitats. The ultimate hope is that eventually these alien species can spill out of their narrow niches and transform the character of the ecosystem as a whole.

What if, Wright asks, we began to look for new species to replace the old? Not the same ones which have already found their place in this ecosystem — the ones which we have repeatedly seen challenge capitalism on these lands, on this soil, in this climate, and be thrashed — but new ones which capitalism has not yet seen and prevailed against? What if we reached beyond the economic systems that we know, and instead grasped hold of new values and principles by which to organize ourselves — ones that strike us as unfamiliar yet promising, imaginative yet intuitive, reassuring yet bold?

This is, in essence, the strategic theory underlying the case for contributism. The contributist society is not one in which capitalism is erased, but one in which contributism replaces capitalism as the dominant organizing form — not one in which the right to give is our only right, but one in which the right to give is prioritized over the right to own and capitalize property.

And the path towards a contributist society is not one of revolutionary overthrow, but one of revolutionary erosion. Rather than imagining some great coup in which we round up all of the capitalists and throw them into the Mississippi river, imagine a gradual but intentional introduction of contributist policy, organization, rhetoric, and action into society. Imagine that the contributist policies work more effectively in improving society than their capitalist counterparts, and that the contributist organizations have happier employees and create better outcomes for the communities they inhabit. Imagine that the capitalists lose ground not because they have been forced out at gunpoint, but because their way has been made obsolete — squeezed on all sides (by policy, competition, and public opinion) by something that we can all see simply works better for us.

In other words, if contributism can thrive on these lands, on this soil, in this climate, then simply by its own thriving, it will begin to challenge capitalism’s chokehold — and it will begin to “transform the character” of our society. And if the contributist ethos is truly a better fit for our ecosystem, then when it inevitably comes into direct conflict with the apex predator, we will find that contributism, not capitalism, almost always wins.

The Contributist Society

So, then, to understand what the contributist society might look like, we do not have to imagine a world in which every aspect of society is run by contributist principles. That would be like trying to imagine a capitalist society without any public services. Instead, we should try to understand a world in which contributism is simply dominant — in which more people would say that their livelihood and day-to-day life are characterized by contributism than by capitalism.

This is the world that I, Pablo Parabola, am eager to share with you — to describe it to you in writing, yes, but also to invite you to inhabit it with me. And while I can tell you in no uncertain terms that it is a better world than the one we live in today, I must also confess that it would be impossible for me to show you this world in just a few paragraphs, or even just a few entries. And indeed, it would be senseless for any one writer to attempt to show it to you alone, because the contributist society is not one writer’s society, but a society made up of many individuals, each with their own unique means and style of contribution.

That is why I am not one writer, but an idea carried forward jointly by many minds, and this publication is not one work, but a collection penned by the hands of many contributors. The goal of the Contributist Reader is to serve as the first consciously contributist act — by inviting all humanity to help build out the vision of the contributist society, we simultaneously provide and assert the right to give, as we challenge one another to begin to live lives characterized by dignity and fulfillment.

With these first twelve entries, we have set the basic foundation of contributism — now it is time to extrapolate. From this point forward, entries in the Reader will become more experimental in style and in scope. We will sketch out new ideas and explore new directions, never too certain of ourselves, and always inviting discussion. We will paint in broad and narrow strokes of every color, each entry helping us to see from a new angle, bringing the full picture of contributism into clearer focus.

You, too, are a member of this project. By simply reading, you engage your inner contributist — you assert the right to give us your time, and you perhaps carry our ideas forward into your corner of the world. But you are also invited to contribute more fully, if you are willing, by engaging in discussion with us — challenging, questioning, or extending the ideas you read — and perhaps even to become Pablo Parabola with us, by submitting entries of your own.

And so the contributist society begins with the contributist act — a community defines itself by giving.

Pablo’s Note: This piece is very long, and though it outlines the beginnings of the economic argument for contributism, it is not necessary for the casual reader. If you are more interested in society than in economics, or simply in a hurry, I recommend moving on to entry #12 and returning to this piece later.

Laila is the chief policy director of what has become one of the largest tutoring organizations in the state of California. The organization has partnerships with over a third of all high schools in the Bay Area, and employs over one hundred full-time tutors.

Laila has shaped the organization’s approach to grant-seeking from the beginning, and this is in large part what has fueled their expansion over the last ten years. She is a charismatic presence and an excellent storyteller, which has made her one of the most effective grant-seekers in education.

These traits and her success as a networker are also what led to her being asked to present the keynote speech at a conference hosted by an esteemed local public policy organization. There are hundreds of attendees, including a few state legislators, as well as top executives from several well-known businesses and nonprofits. Knowing that these big names are in the audience, she’s a bit nervous when she strides onto the stage, but she’s never been the type to hold back or defer to authority — that’s part of what people find so charming about her. She is also a woman of ideology, and very smart — that’s what makes people stop and listen when she speaks. The title of her speech is: The Capitalist’s Secret: How Organizations Win.

Laila The Capitalist

“Good evening. I am the founder and policy director of Laila’s Touch, which I am proud to say is the largest and most successful tutoring organization in the Bay Area. This is in no small part thanks to the contribution and partnership of many of you present in the audience today. So please, give a round of applause to the legislators, donors, and collaborators who have helped make our vision possible.

Let me tell you a story. Ten years ago, I was a tutor in Fremont, working at a small business with only three employees. The founder was a phenomenal tutor and a kind woman, but her ambition was greater than her capacity to lead. She had scaled up too quickly, and the business contracted after COVID. Within months, its income dried up, and I was laid off from the company.

This stung of course, but it was not the first time I had been laid off. Before becoming a tutor, I worked as a policy analyst at a small housing non-profit. That organization relied on government grants for most of its income. This worked for some time, but they were caught off guard one year when the government’s funding priorities shifted, and the grants which sustained their work were no longer on the table. As I learned afterwards, the organization did no lobbying; they didn’t even know about the new funding bill until after it was passed. Whether this was because of understaffing, or just naïveté — an unwillingness to “get their hands dirty” — I don’t know.  What I do know is that their cash quickly ran out, and the organization fell apart within a year.

These experiences taught me an important lesson — capital, like God himself, is no respecter of persons. Whether you are a business or a non-profit, you cannot win unless you are first and foremost a good capitalist. What leads an organization to success or failure is not its good intentions, its ethics, or even the quality of its product. An organization lives or dies by its economics. Today, reflecting on my early failures and later successes, I can tell you that I have learned the secret to success as a modern capitalist. So, let me tell you about economics, and how organizations win.

The great philosopher Adam Smith, who originated the field of economics and with it the theory of capitalism, famously recognized that the capitalist works only in his or her own self-interest, and that this is not a flaw in our humanity, but a strength. By recognizing us for who we are, Smith, and the economists that came after him, taught us how to harness this fundamental self-interest for the good of our whole society. In Smith’s words, 

By directing [his] industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, [the capitalist] intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

It is with this context in mind, with the knowledge that we can in fact be better members of society when we act in our self-interest than we are when we attempt to act in the interest of others, that I will speak to you tonight about how we have become better capitalists in the two hundred and fifty years since Adam Smith wrote those words, and how the best organizations today are, indeed, still the best capitalists.

A common understanding of capitalism is that it operates like Darwin’s natural selection — a sort of “survival of the fittest” process in which government sets the rules of the game, and the organizations which play within those rules most efficiently and effectively rise to the top, while less efficient and less effective organizations die out. We like to believe in this story, because it means that anyone can succeed, no matter how small, simply by creating a better product or a more efficient process than their competitors.

But the capitalist’s secret is that no part of this story has ever really been true, and it has become less and less true as our economies grow in scale. The best capitalist is not the one with the most efficient process, the most effective product, or even the one who best plays by the rules of the game. The best capitalist is the one who best pursues his own interest, the one who, as Adam Smith wrote, “intends only his own gain.” By pursuing self-interest, the capitalist increases his own wealth and power, and this is what makes him able to outmatch his competition.

And it is this, the capitalist’s ability to accumulate wealth, not her efficiency, which increases the net wealth of the society of which she is a part. It was John F. Kennedy who first remarked that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and despite the recent grumblings of under-informed populists and socialists, the aphorism remains unquestionably true. When the capitalist wins, so does her country. This is why we reward those capitalist organizations which understand that their job is not to be efficient, effective, or to play by the rules, but to win.

But what can I mean by this? Aren’t efficient and effective organizations more successful than those that are not? And don’t organizations have to follow the laws set forth by government? These are intuitive assumptions, yes, but the great march of capitalism and American enterprise over the last two and a half centuries has been due precisely to the ability of the greatest capitalists to see past and overturn these assumptions. The modern capitalist understands that the most successful organizations are those which have learned that the basic rules of economics work differently in economies of scale.

The modern capitalist sees that the winner is not, in fact, the organization which is most efficient in its production. In theory, the market favors the most efficient organization, because it can undercut its competitors by offering its goods at a lower price. But the modern capitalist has realized that efficiency is not the only, or even the most effective, way to undercut one’s competitors. In fact, we have found that there is a better way — a method which turns out to be a far more rapid and effective tool than improving one’s efficiency: pure capital investment.

Upfront capital investment has always been a core element of capitalist success, despite most capitalists’ anxious desire to downplay it. Even in the early days of capitalism, one simply could not access the efficiency gains of a factory line without first fronting the significant cost of building the factory and hiring its employees. This means that, since the beginning, the capitalist class has almost exclusively consisted of those who were already wealthy, or those who could first acquire significant capital investment by other means (usually the patronage of one or more wealthy investors). In other words, you have nearly always needed to have money to make money.

But while the early capitalists saw capital investment as only an important step towards creating an efficient organization, we have realized over time that the capital investment itself is far more powerful than we first believed — even more powerful than the factory line. 

The strategy of defeating competition through the sheer power of investment, far beyond any claim to operational efficiency, has grown and developed over time. It was perhaps first perfected by Rockefeller, whose immense capitalist success made him the richest man in the world, and reshaped U.S. antitrust law in the process. Today, the strategy has come to define modern capitalism.

What does this strategy look like? In its plainest variation, an organization simply sells its product at a loss. That is, it offers its product at a price lower than the cost of its production. Increased efficiency is a way to lower prices, but it can only lower prices so much. Any such advantage can be immediately outpaced by the wealthier competitor who is willing to simply take a capital loss on every transaction.

Uber is perhaps the most famous success story of this strategy. Founded in 2010, they became quickly ubiquitous for their impossibly low-priced private transit. How did they get their prices so low? Not by operational efficiency — instead, they pooled together investor capital and simply allowed their costs to far exceed their income. They spent over $100 billion before they ever turned a profit. And in doing so, they defeated dozens of less cash-flush competitors, as well as the entire taxi industry.

It is not just Uber — the strategy of capital over efficiency is the new capitalism. These days, most companies compete with each other on operational efficiency only on the margins and secondarily; outside of a small number of highly-technical fields like the production of semiconductors and batteries, the primary locus of competition has shifted away from how efficient a company’s production is to how much capital a company can raise and then spend.

We see this in ways large and small. Even tactics as commonplace as offering a free trial are variations of this strategy — the trial allows the company to gain market share not by having a better product or more efficient production, but because smaller competitors cannot afford to give away their product for free. Decades ago, AOL spent hundreds of millions of dollars flooding the country with free trial CDs, and by doing so became the world’s largest dial-up internet provider. Since then, it has become the norm in the tech industry for a company to spend its first few years operating at a loss, because burning capital has proven to be a much more effective competitive strategy than focusing on operational efficiency.

In fact, in the strategy’s most ideal form, the organization manages to provide their product entirely free of charge, effectively erasing the market advantage of efficiency by making it impossible for anyone to compete with them on price. Google famously began as a free search engine, and now, a quarter century later, is one of the wealthiest companies in the world, with nine free products that are relied on by over a billion people every month. Products like these are commonly understood to be funded primarily by advertising revenue, and while this is partially true, the ads are a diversion from the true business model. The dominance of the product is not due to ad revenue, but to the upfront capital investment that enabled its initial development and spread. Ad revenue always trails market share — it comes only after an organization has already captured a share of the market. These “free” products are the achievement of capital investment, and demonstrate that a focus on efficiency is almost always a losing strategy in today’s capitalist landscape.

I expect that the sharpest minds in the audience already understand that the same is true of a focus on the effectiveness of the product. Even the capitalists of old knew that efficiency would always beat effectiveness in the long run; that as long as the cheaply-constructed and mass-produced shoe met some minimum bar of quality, it would eventually put most makers of hand-crafted shoes out of business, leaving only the highest end of the market — the most exclusive, expensive hand-crafted shoes — untouched.

Since efficiency beats effectiveness in the market by undercutting it in this way, and capital investment undercuts efficiency, we can see by the transitive property that effectiveness succumbs to capital investment even more heavily. And the most industrious capitalist sees in this an important opportunity. By lowering the price of the product beyond what efficiency could ever do, capital investment allows us to push the minimum bar of quality that the consumer will accept even lower. This allows the capitalist to reduce their production costs even further by creating an even lower-quality product. If the shoe costs pennies on the dollar, who can complain about the quality of its fit?

To be clear to any would-be detractors, this downward spiral in quality should not be understood as detrimental to the consumer, because it is accompanied by a downward spiral in price. Quality may decrease, but production and affordability increase — now, even the poorest citizen can afford to buy shoes, even if they won’t last quite as long as the shoes of yesteryear. (And thankfully, the market of exquisite hand-crafted shoes will always remain untouched and safely available to the wealthy capitalists.) This is how the capitalist’s rising tide lifts all boats. The capitalist’s self-interest leads them to direct their wealth to artificially lower the cost of goods in order to choke out their competition, and the result is that the working class gets more stuff at a lower cost.

And while it is true that the wise capitalist will always raise their prices once their competitors have been effectively tamed (and never increase quality), it is also true that this price increase is only temporary. It is only a matter of time before an even wealthier capitalist comes in and begins the cycle anew, lowering quality and price even further than before.

This is how wealth begets wealth, and size begets size. In any and every modern capitalist race, the favored competitor — and indeed, the one who nearly always wins — is not the one with the best product or process, but simply the one who can flood the race with the most capital, drowning their competition.

And it is worth noting that, although in many cases this is the wealthiest competitor, it is not always so. The largest pool of capital usually comes not from a single wealthy individual or organization, but from the alliance of a team of very wealthy individuals and organizations, either in the form of direct investment or coordinated oligopoly. It is good to be wealthy — it is far better to have wealthy friends.

So we see that the best capitalists — the winners — have long ago put aside the naïve notion that efficiency or effectiveness are the path to success in a capitalist environment, or even that these traits are worth pursuing on their own merit. The capitalist improves their society not by improving the quality of products or processes, but by increasing the overall sum of its production and its wealth.

Perhaps you are beginning to see why I, the policy director of a non-profit organization which relies on grants for much of its funding, have such an interest in capitalism. If capitalism has become about dominating through raising and spending capital, then the operations of the for-profit organization, which raises funds primarily from investors, and the non-profit organization, which raises funds primarily from donors and grants, are not so different.

In fact, the term “non-profit” has always been a bit of a misnomer. One of the great misunderstandings of non-profit organizations is that they do not seek to make a profit, and are therefore not capitalist. To the contrary, it is a basic rule of finance that every business must be profitable, or else it cannot survive. The difference between a non-profit organization and a for-profit organization is only that the non-profit carries certain restrictions on how it distributes its profits to its owners, and in exchange of this, it receives a series of advantages from the tax code, and is more often eligible for all types of grants.

This understanding is what leads us to the final, and most consequential, part of the capitalist’s secret. We must put aside the silly notion that the for-profit company is the true self-made capitalist, and the non-profit organization is some socialist endeavor reliant on government handouts. This is important not just as a personal point of pride, but because it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the capitalist’s success. In reality, the capitalist attains success not by eschewing government support, but by finding ways to make the rule of law work in their own favor. And the very best capitalist — the one who wins — is not the one who simply follows the rules of the law as written, but the one who is able to bend those rules, and the entire government, in their favor.

I learned this acutely when I lost my first job at the hands of a government funding bill. Though the non-profit is unique in its access to government grants, for-profit organizations should make no mistake: it is ultimately the government which shapes all of our economic fortunes. Last decade, a study found that the two hundred most politically active for-profit corporations in the U.S. spent a combined 5.8 billion dollars on federal lobbying and campaign contributions over a five year period, and received in return 4.4 trillion dollars in government contracts and support, a 760 times return on investment. And this is just at the federal level. When we take into account the contributions of state and local government, as well as lobbyist successes in reducing the effective tax rates that corporations and corporate investors pay to levels far below those paid by ordinary citizens, it may well be the case that the assertion of government influence is the primary source of capital for for-profit organizations.

But the importance of government influence goes even further than capital. The reality of capitalism is that, regardless of how much capital one accrues, the government has immense influence on the operation of every industry, and no one can be successful unless the law allows them to be so. But the inverse of this is also true — if you can get the government on your side, you can stack the deck so neatly in your favor that it becomes nearly impossible to lose.

We became most familiar with this idea after the 2008 financial crash. The resulting notion that some banks are “Too Big to Fail” was not a fundamental truth about economics or capitalism — it was an acknowledgement that, if these organizations prove incapable of succeeding on their own merit, the government will always step in with new funding or legislation to reshape the economic situation in their favor  — changing the rules on their behalf so that, no matter how ineffective they are as market participants, they cannot lose.

It is incumbent upon all capitalist organizations to use the government in their own self-interest in this way. And indeed, all of the most successful capitalist organizations do, to some degree, even if they cannot attain the total immunity that the big banks have achieved by wielding a stranglehold on our financial systems. Over the past century, capitalist interests have reshaped all sorts of laws in their favor, effectively repurposing the government’s power of enforcement — a public resource — into a private service to use against their opponents. Intellectual copyright and patent law has been transformed from a tool designed to protect innovation into one of the most effective strategies for wielding the government as an enforcer to seize and maintain control of a market. Arbitration law has been quietly reshaped to prevent most consumers and employees from filing lawsuits accusing corporations of misbehavior. Property law has always been structured to reinforce the strength of existing power holders, while erecting barriers to entry for newcomers. I have said that it is good to have wealthy friends, but it is far better to be friends with the government — to have influence over those who write the rules.

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This is how Laila’s Touch has attained success. We have devoted the bulk of our efforts to our capitalist mission — not efficiency or efficacy, but success. We have found favor with a bevy of wealthy donors and clients, many of whom are in the room today. We have worked with government to ensure that funding laws favor us heavily over our competitors. We have amassed and expended capital, ensuring through high availability and low prices that our under-resourced competition cannot meaningfully compete with us. And where we have resources left over, of course, we use them to help the kids.

This is the capitalist’s secret, and how organizations win. Despite what we like to tell ourselves and others, the story of capitalism is not the story of the efficient and effective defeating the lazy and incompetent. It is the story of those with capital — the wealthy — defeating those without it. It is not the story of the success of those who can best play by the rules as written, but the story of the success of those who can ensure that the rules are always written and rewritten in their favor.

And although this is a very different picture than the one we prefer to paint for ourselves, there is a courage in honesty, and a beauty in truth. The capitalist pursuit of self-interest produces a most effective system, one that is, as Adam Smith recognized, far more productive than any attempt to work altruistically. We must understand that, though the mechanisms of capitalism may at times seem brutal or unfair, they move us always towards a more prosperous future.”

Laila The Contributist

“Good evening. I am the policy director of Strong Minds, which I am proud to say is the largest and most successful tutoring organization in the Bay Area. This is in no small part thanks to the contribution and partnership of many of you present in the audience today. So please, give a round of applause to the legislators, donors, and collaborators who have helped make our vision possible.

Let me tell you a story. Ten years ago, I joined Strong Minds as a disillusioned and restless young adult. I had just been laid off from a policy analyst role at a housing non-profit, and I chose to pivot into tutoring because I had grown jaded about the power of policy advocacy to impact real people’s lives — I wanted to do some direct good for once.

A year into this position, a couple of things came to a head at once. First, I was beginning to realize that, despite my best intentions, I was really not cut out for tutoring. Those kids were damn smart, but boy, could they play dumb, and I loved them to death but I did not have the patience. God bless every one of the Strong Minds tutors for what they put up with on a day-to-day basis to get these kids to the opportunities they deserve.

But more importantly, the business was at a crisis point. Profits were down, and the organization could no longer afford to keep all three of its employees. And as the worst tutor of the three, I could read the writing on the wall as clear as day — the organization could no longer afford to keep me. My boss Olivia had always been direct with us, so I just asked her plainly — was I going to be laid off? I was already having flashbacks to a year prior, when my entire team had been let go by my prior employer with no warning; we had barely had enough time to clear our desks and say tearful goodbyes.

But what Olivia said next surprised me. She told us that her priority was not protecting the business at all costs, but protecting our ability to do the work that we cared so much about. She communicated to us that, while capital mattered as a means to an end, she saw in us something more than the capital value we provided to the business, and that what mattered to her most was protecting our right to give.

In that moment, something in my mind clicked together, and a lot of things that had been muddled became surprisingly clear.

It began with the realization that, up until that moment, I had feared Olivia. This wasn’t any special or acute kind of fear; I only feared her in the background way that most people fear their bosses — like a dictator, she had an ultimate power over me that she could wield at any moment, and although we got along well, I knew in my heart that when it came down to it, our goals were not fully aligned. Even if we shared the ostensible goal of helping the kids of our community, this goal was always secondary to capital. For her, this meant protecting the business’s capital at all costs. And for me, it meant protecting my own capital income at all costs, by ensuring that my capital value to the organization was never in question. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but this underlying adversarial tension was stifling both my capabilities and my imagination. How could I be free to find the best way to contribute to our shared goal of helping the kids in our community, if I was always busy carrying the anxiety driven by my primary goal — my constant attempt to prove my capital value by asserting that I was great at my job?

But when it became clear that Olivia’s true goals were actually aligned with mine — and with my well-being — we were suddenly no longer adversaries. She had extended not just an invitation to a truce, but an actual peace treaty. I felt a weight lifted. Rather than fear her as a dictator, I became free to respect her as a partner and leader. And I became free to loosen my capital-first mindset as well. Instead of seeking first to protect myself, I was free to do whatever I could to help advance our shared goal. This shifted the dynamic within our organization so greatly that Markus, my co-tutor at the time and the purest soul I’ve ever met, even offered to give up a portion of his income to help stabilize the business. I was not yet so trusting, or so selfless, but I couldn’t deny feeling a new sense of security and devotion to the organization and its mission. And this improved focus is what gave me the idea — and the courage — to ask Olivia soon afterward to allow me to pivot out of tutoring entirely and into policy and grant-writing.

But all of this got me thinking even further. I began to realize that the fear that I once had of Olivia was not just one individual’s fear of her individual boss, but a culturally pervasive fear of bosses in general — or more specifically, a normative adversarial relationship with the capitalist employer, who wields power over her employees but whose capital-first goals are fundamentally mis-aligned with their well-being. And as my specific fear was stifling to me — preventing me from doing my most effective work — so I realized that this general fear was acting to stifle the effectiveness and quality of output of all employees of capitalist employers in general.

And it was at precisely that moment that the scales fell away from my eyes, and I saw the capitalist’s secret — a truth which, once seen, cannot be unseen. It became clear to me that capitalism is not as strong as we have believed. To the contrary, the capitalist organization hampers its own efficiency and effectiveness, takes a trajectory that is in many ways self-defeating, and can only succeed when propped up by significant government favoritism. It is this recognition, the discovery of the capitalist’s secret, which has led to the considerable success of our organization, and which I believe is of great importance to our whole society.

Because if my individual fear of Olivia could be dismantled, then this means that this general fear too can be dismantled — that it is not in fact a necessary or unavoidable fear, but a contingent one. The fear exists because of a particular counter-productive and adversarial relationship between the employer and her employee — between the entrepreneur and the worker. A relationship defined by their underlying economic warfare, not by their humanity and shared goals; a relationship that actively works to reduce both parties from humans — individuals capable of morals, passion, commitment, and imagination — to mere economic actors.

But if we can restore to both the worker and the entrepreneur their humanity, then we can create not just better lives, but stronger organizations, and a more prosperous nation. I will describe how this can be done, how we can transition to a dynamic better and more effective than economic warfare, but in order to do so, I must first explain to you the capitalist’s secret.

In 1776, the philosopher Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, his magnum opus, which many credit as having originated the modern field of economics, and the theory of capitalism. It is a large book, spanning many subjects, and one that is quoted with confidence by far more capitalists than have actually taken the time to read it. But it is worth understanding the scope and thrust of Smith’s argument, if we want to understand the scope and trajectory of capitalism.

Smith frames his book as an inquiry, and so he begins it by asking a simple question — why do some nations have a great deal of wealth, while other nations have very little? The rest of his book aims to answer this question, and his argument can be boiled down into three main points. First, that worker specialization — the division of labor — multiplies our productivity. Second, that when everyone works in their own self-interest, markets arise that are more productive than those created by altruistic cooperation. And third, that the role of government policy is to encourage rather than stifle market competition. These three ideas make up the fundamental idea of capitalism: that when entrepreneurs are free to direct the labor of specialized workers to the production of goods for their own profit, the ensuing market competition increases the productivity of the entire society.

Notice three things about this argument, and you will begin to understand the capitalist’s secret. First, notice that the scope of Smith’s leading question is limited to wealth, that it says nothing of human thriving. And this has been the rarely-mentioned limitation of economic theory ever since — a good economic system is understood as one that most increases our wealth. Any impact that such a system has on human dignity or happiness is incidental and, despite the warnings littered throughout conventional wisdom — “Money can’t buy happiness,” “you can’t take it with you,” “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil,” etc. — the economists always seem to assume that the impact is unquestionably positive.

Second, notice that the scope of capitalism’s success is measured in total output — productivity — rather than quality of output — effectiveness. These measures are related, but not equivalent. As we know from the rise of fast food, fast fashion, and social media, a vast increase in output does not necessarily correlate with an overall increase in quality, and can sometimes mask a decline in effectiveness. But capitalism specializes in increasing productivity, not effectiveness, and so that is what we primarily measure and seek to improve. 

These first two observations are why America’s gross domestic product (GDP) has always towered over that of every other nation, but in every life quality measure — happiness, life expectancy, leisure time, etc. — our performance is middling. We are a nation of capitalists, and so we excel at increasing our wealth and productivity, but this comes at a cost of quality of goods and human thriving.

The final observation, and the hardest to notice, is that there is an inherent tension between the second and third points of Smith’s argument. If everyone is working in their own self-interest, it actually becomes very difficult to maintain government policy that encourages rather than stifles competition. This is because every rational capitalist will attempt to skew government policy in their own favor to the detriment of their competitors — otherwise they would not be working in their own self-interest; they would not be capitalists. No self-interested actor is pro-their-own-competition; and as capitalist actors become more and more wealthy, they have more and more power, and can only be expected to use that power to influence government policy.

And indeed, this is what we have seen over time. Government policy has become increasingly aligned with the interests of the wealthiest corporations, to the point that the wealthiest corporations are both more dependent on and more influential in government policy than perhaps any other group.

Combined, these three observations tell a different story about capitalism than the one we often believe. The capitalist’s success comes not from producing a better product more efficiently, but from their ability to use their wealth to mass-produce, and to seize power over markets. The impact of capitalism on society is not necessarily an improvement in the quality of goods and human thriving, but an increase in overall production and wealth. And the trajectory of capitalism is not to bend society towards more competitiveness, but towards consolidation of power into the hands of the wealthiest capitalists.

And this is the capitalist’s secret. It is of paramount importance to the capitalist that the focus of our measurement remains on production and wealth, because when measured by these specific metrics, the capitalist is quite successful. But when measured by any other metrics, especially the metrics that really matter — the efficiency and quality of their output, their impact on human thriving, and even their basic ability to win by merit — the capitalist organization is actually far from optimal. Measured by any of these metrics, the capitalist impulse is instead seen as a form of self-defeating gluttony — the natural trajectory of the capitalist organization is to become wasteful, uncooperative, and distracted by its own greed.

This may sound essentially identical to what Marx and the socialists identified. They would argue that capitalism’s greatest success is its persuasiveness as a story told by the wealthy to the public to justify the status quo. Like all successful aristocracies before them, the wealthiest members of American society maintain their power not by being more worthy than the rest of society, but by ensuring that we believe that they are. And as long as they can preserve this belief, we will even support them in maintaining their position above us, revering them only because we cannot see past the story that they have told us — because we have learned not to see possibilities beyond those that they have constructed.

But while socialism has correctly understood capitalism’s flaws, socialists have historically failed to see the root and extent of them. Marx believed that capitalism’s inherent contradictions would inevitably spur a workers’ revolution, because eventually the workers would see that capitalism is simply a disguise for class warfare. The workers, seeing capitalism’s inherent imbalance in favor of the wealthy, would rise up violently against their capitalist overlords, seize control of society, and bring about a system of equality.

The problem with this socialist theory of change is that it fails to recognize that, although capitalism favors the wealthy, the capitalist spirit is not limited to the wealthy, nor is it rooted in class dynamics. The fundamental idea and spirit of capitalism is egalitarian, even if its outcomes are not. The socialist worker who wants to see a fairer distribution of wealth may very well still be a capitalist in spirit, and in fact, is usually so. What makes someone a capitalist is not their interest in upholding the economic status quo, but their self-interested efforts in directing labor towards their own profit. A socialist who works to advance socialism because she sees how it would work better in her favor than the current capitalist oligarchy which works against her, is simply a shrewd capitalist. This is why the socialist revolution always ends up collapsing in on itself — because both the socialist and the aristocrat she aims to overthrow are usually operating from the same spirit of self-interested labor, of capitalism.

If we want to move beyond capitalism, we must address and replace it at its motivational root. The dysfunctional relationship between the capitalist employer and her employee is capitalist on both sides — both employer and employee are working in self-interest, aiming to direct labor to their own profit. If we simply act to strengthen the employee’s position against the employer, we have not actually introduced an alternative to capitalism, we have only shifted power from one capitalist to another. It is taboo in some circles to say it, but this is one reason why unions have a sour reputation in America, despite the mountain of good that they do for the unionized employee. They serve as a powerful corrective force to corporate self-interest, but when they grow too strong, they too have been notorious for corruption, and have been known to stifle innovation. The status quo capitalist is correct when they point out that strengthening the worker’s position over the employer does not always strengthen the organization, and at times may in fact weaken it.

This is what the socialists usually miss. Though they correctly challenge the capitalist oligarchy, they rarely challenge the spirit of capitalism itself and in fact, they usually encourage it in their followers. By advocating for class warfare as their solution — whether violent or just political — they condemn the capitalist spirit in the upper class while affirming the capitalist spirit in the lower. They exhort the poor to act in their own self-interest, while simultaneously telling the rich not to. In doing so, they fail to take heed to Audre Lorde’s wisdom: "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” Ultimately, they have still failed to see beyond the possibilities that the capitalist has constructed.

But what would it look like to see past the possibilities that the capitalist has constructed? What would it mean to advocate not for more rounds of the endless capitalist warfare, but for lasting peace? Allow me to tell you the story of Strong Minds’ success, and of our spirit of contributism.

A decade ago, when the three of us left that crisis room, we were all freshly oriented towards our shared goal — contributing to our community as effectively as possible through our tutoring business. As I noted earlier, it turned out that my most effective contribution was not actually tutoring, but grant-writing.

Strong Minds was originally incorporated as an LLC, but I convinced Olivia to convert it to a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Doing so didn’t change the operation of the business in any noteworthy way, but the non-profit designation saved us money on taxes, and enabled us to apply for a wider variety of grants. Perhaps a capitalist CEO would not have made this decision, because the biggest consequence was that it made it harder for Olivia to extract profit for herself beyond a reasonable salary. But Olivia was a contributist, not a capitalist, so she was not concerned about extracting profits for herself; she was concerned about giving to her community most effectively. This decision — to commit to allow the profit of the business to be reinvested into the shared goals of the organization rather than her own pockets — made the business more efficient.

If Olivia had fired me, she would have saved the business some expense, but she would never have known what she lost — in that first year, I was able to secure grants worth thirty-thousand dollars, which, in addition to the tax savings from our re-incorporation as a non-profit, far outweighed our existing deficit. This came because Olivia refused to fire me unless all other options were exhausted, because she placed a strong priority on my ability to contribute.

But that was just the beginning of our success. Because Olivia had, from the beginning, been unwilling to compromise her focus on contributing to her community, she had worked with parents and students to develop a tutoring model that was both more efficient and effective than her competitors. The kids especially loved the group tutoring sessions, because they built community while staying small enough to allow for learning. The consequence of this was that our organization was not just competitive on price, but notably more impactful than our competitors by a number of metrics.

This measurable impact was what allowed me to expand the scope of our fundraising. I began to make inroads in state and local government, convincingly arguing that the government should shift its funding criteria to prioritize organizations that were effective in the measures that mattered most to the community (which turned out to be increasing college enrollment rates, lifting students’ grades, and reducing their involvement in crime), rather than those who spent the most on lobbying. Not only did this work heavily in the favor of our organization, since we were effective on merit, it also encouraged our competitors to shift towards our tutoring model.

A capitalist might see this type of emulation as a threat, but we saw it as a success. Because of our actions, our competitors became better givers — more effective contributors to our shared community. This meant that more students were being served effectively, and our community became stronger than if we had been working alone. What the capitalist often fails to see is that, outside of capital, success is never zero-sum. When goals and incentives align to promote effective contribution, collaboration between competitors becomes a breeding ground for innovation. Rather than attempting to beat out our competitors by stifling their growth, we see the value of healthy competition and import ideas from them as often as they learn from us. And in many cases, we have actively collaborated with them — with their help we were able to successfully advocate for an overall increased allocation for tutoring in the state budget.

Soon, we began to partner with schools, and this allowed us to hire more tutors. We pay them well, but I suspect that our total staffing costs are still lower than nearly any of our competitors, because we have an extremely low turnover rate. We have one of the highest employee satisfaction rates in the state, despite having a lean HR department, because our employees are mission-aligned. They are less prone to burnout, and when they do find themselves approaching their limits, we find them better roles. We make it our priority to give to them as much as we are able, and they give back to us.

Our culture has not been wrong to believe that the strongest organizations will prevail; but we have been wrong to believe that the strongest organizations are capitalist. Capitalists have only been so successful because we have ceded all power to them for so long.

We are more efficient than the capitalist. Our workers are motivated, loyal, and flexible, while the capitalist organization is at silent war with their workers, and attempts to compensate for this with inflated salaries and lukewarm HR maneuvers.

We are more effective than the capitalist, because our ultimate measure of success is the impact we have, not our profits. The capitalists, on the other hand, are distracted by their greed, taking every opportunity they have to funnel wealth away from their product and into their pockets.

And we are able to win by merit, while they cannot succeed without the state creating and enforcing laws in their benefit. Rather than working to rig the game in favor of ourselves, we have worked hard to unravel the capitalist’s unearned advantages. We have advocated for government grants, spending, and favorable tax policy to go to the most effective organizations, not to the best lobbyists or the too-big-to-fail. And ultimately, we have bested the capitalists at the game that they pretend to have perfected, by playing by a better strategy than they are capable of even attempting.

Our capitalist oligarchy is showing its age. The historians have already begun to call our modern era late stage capitalism, because it is plain to see that we are butting up against the unpleasant end of the capitalist trajectory. As capitalist industry consolidates into the hands of fewer and fewer organizations, for whom capital is king and efficiency and effectiveness are merely afterthoughts, the world’s political order is changing — America’s dominance on the international stage is being challenged on all ends by countries whose innovation is not as stifled by capitalist greed. We once maintained our position atop the global economy by the efficiency and quality of our production; now the extent of our imagination with regard to global competitiveness has been reduced to debate about how steep our tariffs on imports should be, a hapless attempt to delay the rise of more efficient international competitors. And where America once stood out for our optimism and the sheer power of our collective spirit; we are now increasingly known for our cynical and divisive politics and our collective disillusionment — the stubbornness of our inequalities and our fundamental inability to get along. We can only expect this decline to continue if we do not escape our trajectory, if we refuse to change course. We must be ready to see and move beyond capitalism not just because we want to win as individual organizations, but because we care about the success of our nation.

It is better for our nation when our organizations have real positive impact on our communities. It is better for our nation when our employees are fulfilled, motivated, and efficient. And it is better for our nation when our organizations don’t need the rules to be rigged in their favor to be successful — when we are capable of winning by merit. Let us have our capital, but let us also put it to productive use. Let us become contributors rather than leeches; let us be givers rather than hoarders. Let us design our policy in ways that rebuke the capitalist’s solipsistic individualism while affirming her will to innovate and participate. Let us restore to her, and to all of ourselves, the right to give.

This is not some far-fetched utopian vision. I am not advocating for a revolution, but a restoration — a reanimation of ourselves as humans, a re-evaluation of our goals as organizations, and a reorientation in our approach to policy. The shift from capitalism to contributism can occur in an individual in an instant, in an organization in a day, and in a society within our lifetimes. It simply requires that we have the courage to take on a new lens through which to see and a new approach to our labor, to take off the old mantle of capitalism, and to move forward to something better — the courage, in a word, to call ourselves contributists.”

What makes some acts of giving better than others? Or, in other words, how can the quality of one act of giving be measured against another?

This is a complex question, because giving is a complex and multifaceted subject. There are many different types of giving — the giving of gifts, the giving of time, philanthropy, giving back vs. paying forward, etc. We also value gifts in different ways — Some acts of giving are valued because of the sacrifice they entail, some for their rarity or monetary value, while others come at no great expense (a heartfelt hand-written card, for example), but are considered valuable all the same. Giving also impacts various parties — the giver, the receiver, and the outside observer — and has various types of impact — some gifts transfer material resources (capital value), some carry emotional weight, and some especially powerful acts of giving can affect change at the very core of our selves, re-shaping the way we see and interact with the world.

With all of this in mind, one might wonder whether the quality of an act of giving can be measured at all. Perhaps the concept of giving is so broad in scope that there is no way that any two gifts can be fairly compared. Perhaps like beauty, we must simply say that giving is “in the eye of the beholder” — that it is unreasonable to claim that one act of giving is better than another.

I think this conclusion is overhasty, for a few reasons. First, we seem to carry around with us an intuitive scale by which we make moral judgments about acts of giving all the time. We consider some gifts to be deeply laudable (e.g., an anonymous kidney donation), some gifts to be morally reprehensible (e.g., a bribe given to a Supreme Court justice), and other gifts to be somewhere in between. We wouldn’t be able to attach strong, bi-directional moral feelings to gifts in this way unless we believed in some sense by which gifts can be placed on a comparative scale.

Second, we would do well to understand what makes for good giving, if we would like to become better givers. If we choose to claim that there can be no true comparison, then we forgo the opportunity to learn to give well.

Finally, the contributist is uniquely invested in understanding the metrics of giving, because the goal of contributism is to ensure that everyone has the right to give. If we were to concede that there is no way to compare two acts of giving, then we would face a problem: we would be unable to distinguish between better and worse forms of giving, and thus unable to endorse some types of giving over others. We could not, for example, claim that one should have the right to donate their kidney but not to bribe the supreme court, or argue that a policy that incentivizes giving to the poor is better than one that incentivizes giving to the rich. Or, to take the problem to its most extreme end, we would not be able to say that it is better to volunteer one’s labor than to be forced into slavery.

On the other hand, if we can understand what makes for good giving, we can hone our understanding of the right to give, and aim to enable people to give in the best way possible.

So how can we go about trying to understand what makes for good giving?

One way of approaching the question is to take a practical, quantitative approach: we can identify the qualities that are present in the best acts of giving (and to what degree they are present), and those that are present in the worst. If we do this carefully, referencing many acts of giving, we can begin to categorize the qualities that are consistently associated with good giving, and those that are consistently associated with bad giving. Then, we can say that acts of giving are better when they have the good qualities in greater measure, and worse when they have the bad qualities in greater measure. For example, we know intuitively that slavery is bad and volunteering is good, and the key difference between the two is that volunteering is done freely, while slavery is forced. This leads us to believe that the more free an act of giving is, the better it is.

A more philosophical way to approach the question of the quality of giving is to think in terms of Plato’s forms. If one can strive to imagine the “ideal act of giving,” then one can think about the ways in which any particular act of giving deviates from that ideal. The “quality” of an act of giving can then be measured in terms of how many detrimental features or constraints are present in a particular act of giving (bogging it down and away from the ideal), and in what measure. For example, if we believe that the purest form of giving is devoid of all coercion, we can say that slavery is worse than volunteering because it involves more coercion.

I will note that this philosophical way of thinking dovetails particularly well with the contributist understanding of the right to give. The contributist believes in the right to give because the act of giving humanizes — that is, it increases dignity, connection, and fulfillment. But to the degree that any particular act deviates from the ideal form of giving, it becomes something other than pure giving, and thus is less effective at humanizing. It becomes clear, then, that the contributist’s goal is to provide the right to give in as ideal a form as possible.

Either approach is reasonable, and, done properly, both should arrive at similar conclusions. Because of this, the most effective approach would actually be to combine the two approaches — to begin with one approach, and then use the other to evaluate the conclusions of the first.

I have spent considerable time thinking through the question of “measuring giving” using both methodological approaches, but as a writer and communicator, I am conscious that you as a reader are perhaps best served if I take an altogether separate approach in the course of this essay: something I call the get to the point already method. In order to save your time, I will work backwards, first presenting to you the results of my investigation, then describing each measure through philosophy and example. I will then leave it to you to check my work, so to speak, with your own practical or philosophical analysis, if you are interested.

Now, to get to the point. I have come to understand that there are four essential measures of giving. The best acts of giving are free, active, valued, and effective. No act of giving is ever perfect by any of these measures, but an act of giving is always made better when it is improved by one of these measures, and always made worse when its quality by one of these measures is reduced. All four measures matter — no measure can be simply ignored — but excellence in one measure may outweigh a deficit in another, and by the same coin, negligence in one measure can outweigh abundance in another.

Free

The first measure of giving is the most obvious, but it is also a bit more complex than the others, because the word free has multiple layers of meaning. Giving should be free in all senses of the word: free of coercion, freely chosen, and free of charge. In other words, the act of giving is purest when we give of our own free will, when we give what, how, when, where, and to whom we want, and when we give without expectation that we will receive something in return.

When we give out of coercion — because we are forced to — we usually don’t think of it as giving at all. Instead, we think that we have had something taken from us. Slavery is the most extreme example of coerced giving, but there is a wide spectrum of coercion, and it is not all so bad. Sometimes we are coerced by authority, as when a parent tells a child to apologize to their sibling. Sometimes we are coerced by social or moral pressure, as when we are shown pictures of starving children and then asked to donate to a cause. Sometimes we are coerced by incentives, as when our charitable donations are deducted from our taxable income. At times, these tactics are justified — sometimes a bit of “carrot or stick” prompting is what it takes to lead us into decisions that we are ultimately glad to have made. But even still, we intuitively feel that coercion operates in inverse relation to the quality of the act of giving — the heavier the coercion, the less pure the act of giving.

Restrictions on how we give are also a type of coercion. When we are given limited choices, the choice we do make becomes less meaningful than if we had been given a fuller set of options. As a salient recent example, under a wave of calls to step down from the 2024 presidential race due to concerns about his re-electability, President Biden took to asserting that he should remain the nominee because 14 million people voted for him in the primary race. What he failed to mention is that he ran virtually uncontested in the primary race — for the vast majority of voters in the primary, his name was the only recognizable name on the ballot. I’m not saying that his 14 million votes mean nothing. But the fact that 14 million voters chose to give their vote to him would have been far more meaningful if those voters had been presented with more than one viable option. The more options we have, the more meaningful and important our choice becomes — we become agents, rather than pawns, able to claim dignity through our role as givers.

Finally, when we give something in the expectation of receiving something in return, we usually don’t call this giving either; we call it a trade or a transaction. Technically, it still is a form of giving — that is, one party gives something to the other, and the other party gives something in return — but we tend to avoid the word giving because the expectation of receiving something in return all but erases the moral value of the act. But keep in mind that there are degrees of “expecting return.” The more we expect in return, the less pure the act of giving, and vice versa. If, for example, someone chose to sell you a luxury car for a hundred dollars, you would say that they “all but gave” it to you. On the other hand, if they tricked you into paying twice its value, you would say not just that you engaged in a trade, but that you were “stolen” from.

Remember, no act of giving is ever perfect by any measure. But the more free the act of giving is — the less coercion, restriction, or charge involved — the closer it is to the ideal.

Active

This second measure of giving is perhaps the least obvious, but is still, like the others, in some way intuitive to us. We assess the quality of an act of giving by how active it is — that is, how much time, effort, and attention it requires. And we feel this way as both the giver and the receiver. As a giver, we feel that we have given more when we spend a day volunteering with Habitat for Humanity than we feel when we donate a day’s wages to the same organization. And as a receiver, we are more grateful to a friend who takes the time to write a hand-written birthday card than the friend who simply buys one from CVS on the way to the party, even if the sentiment of the cards is the same. When two gifts are of equal monetary value, but one requires more time, effort, or attention from the giver, we consider the active gift to be the better act of giving.

To be clear, this is not to say that we see no “activity” in a monetary gift. To the contrary, we intuitively understand a gift’s monetary value precisely in terms of the time and effort it must have taken the giver to attain that sum. Seen purely as capital, money seems fungible — a hundred dollars is a hundred dollars is a hundred dollars. But to the rich man — who is repaid that sum in an hour of desk work — a hundred dollars has a very different meaning than it does to the poor man, for whom it represents the sweat of dozens of hours of toil, if it can be attained at all.

For this reason, a day of volunteering is not equivalent to a specific monetary sum, but is roughly equivalent to a day’s worth of the giver’s wages. (This is assuming that the effort required by the giver’s day job is roughly equal to the effort involved in the volunteer work.) But even still, the one who gives a day of volunteering wins out in terms of activity, because in addition to the time and effort expended, the volunteer also gives a day of their attention to the cause, while the donor only gives the few minutes of attention it takes to write the check.

Famously, Jesus once watched a poor widow give two small coins into a temple offering after some wealthy temple-goers had thrown in large sums of money. He remarked to his followers that she gave far more than the others had, because “they all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.” Understanding the value of money, Jesus was pointing out that her giving was purer than theirs because it was more active.

Valued

There is a reason why a teen is often much more excited by a birthday card that has been hastily stuffed with a couple of twenty-dollar bills than one with a heartfelt handwritten note, and why a parent would be much more pleased to receive a heartfelt handwritten note from their teen than a couple of twenty-dollar bills. An act of giving is better when what is given is what the receiver values. For the teen, money provides a form of autonomy — something that is desperately wanted and hard to come by — so the money is a very valuable gift. For the parent, who has invested so much in their child, genuine words of affirmation can mean the world.

But the act of giving what is valued is not only — or even primarily — beneficial for the receiver. The sense of being of value is perhaps the most profound effect the act of giving can have on the giver. When an audience applauds an artist, when a patient thanks their physician, when a child hugs their parent — these are all signals sent back from receivers to givers to indicate gratitude for what the giver has provided. When we feel that we are valued by others, we feel that we belong — and the feeling of belonging is correlated with many aspects of well-being. In fact, it is such an enormously good feeling that many people spend much of their lives seeking it.

Of course, on the other side of the power of belonging is a danger — sometimes we come to feel that we can only belong if we continue to give to our community in a very particular way, and then the weight of belonging begins to feel oppressive. In this case, our giving is valued, but it has ceased to be free from coercion — we no longer give because we want to; instead, we give out of obligation. This is why no one measure of giving can be ignored in favor of another; our giving can only affirm us when it is both free and valued.

Effective

Finally, a gift is measured by the amount and quality of the change that it effects for the receiver. This one is perhaps nearly as obvious as free, though it is important to point out that it should not be confused with valued. An act of giving can be deeply effective but undervalued (as is acutely understood by any social worker, or by the parents of any teen who does not respond to their caretaking with hugs or handwritten cards), and an act of giving can be overvalued but low in effectiveness (as, I am told, is the case with much of the philanthropy that targets the Global South). In some cases, an act of giving that is ineffective might still be laudable in spite of this fact — as in the case of a child who tries to help with cleaning but ends up making a worse mess of things — but never because of it. Ineffectiveness makes an act of giving less than ideal.

And it is important to recognize that effectiveness is not just about scale, but also about direction: if an act of giving effects major change, but the change is actually harmful rather than helpful, then it is worse than having no effect at all. This is why we condemn members of vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan rather than praising them for selflessly volunteering their time. If someone’s version of “giving” involves anything like acts of racist violence, then its effectiveness dives deep into the negative, and it becomes about as far from a pure act of giving as is imaginable.

What it means to be truly helpful is, of course, a topic that is often debated. Is it more effective to give someone a dollar now, or to give them two dollars tomorrow? Is it more effective to increase happiness by some measure or to decrease sadness by an equivalent measure? I cannot answer these questions, and perhaps there is no one right answer. But each observer has his or her own understanding of effectiveness, and it is by this standard that the observer will decide if one act of giving is better than another. To the contributist, the most helpful impact one can have — the most effective change one can make — is to provide for another the right to give, and to thereby connect them with their own humanity.

As I understand it, these four measures combine to represent the entire spectrum of quality of giving.¹ The better an act of giving is across these measures, the purer it is — that is, the closer it is to the Platonic form of giving.

And as I noted earlier, since contributism asserts that giving is the humanizing act, the contributist also believes that the purer the giving is, the better it humanizes. This means that part of the work of the contributist is to always try to seek to improve the quality of giving. Sometimes this is as simple as making improvements in one metric, but often it means wading into the complexity of comparing trade-offs and trying to choose the overall good. For example, maybe you would like to donate your time to Habitat for Humanity, but you're recovering from knee surgery, so you wouldn’t be very helpful as a volunteer. So you choose to donate money instead. Here, you are choosing a less active act of giving, but you believe the increase in effectiveness makes it an overall better act of giving.

Or here’s a policy example. From a contributist perspective, it is a fundamental good for people to be free to give money to political campaigns. But the rich give too much, causing a profoundly negative effect on our political system overall (and lessening the effectiveness of the political donations of the working class). Plus, the poorest are denied the right to give outright, because they don’t have enough excess money to give to politicians. In order to solve this problem, some politicians and policy researchers have advocated for a voucher system, in which campaign donations are heavily restricted, and in their place, donation vouchers are provided to every citizen, allowing them to allocate a fixed amount of money to their preferred candidates. This is essentially a wonky, contributist idea — it asserts and expands the right to give, while adding corrective restrictions in places where the right to give is, as is, deeply impure. In 2017, Seattle implemented a voucher program based on this idea, and one study found that it increased voter turnout by 4.9% and made political candidates more reliant on small-dollar donations.

When we can measure giving, we gain the language and framework to improve our own giving, and to better advance the right to give throughout society.

Now, at the time that Alexander the Great ascended to the throne, there was an unusual man named Diogenes of Sinope living in the city of Corinth. This Diogenes had developed some notoriety throughout Greece for his amusing witticisms and his memorably outlandish behavior as a cynic — a controversial class of philosopher who chose to live like a street dog and lob criticisms at all social conventions, and especially the pursuit of power and wealth.

Alexander and his army were traveling towards the Peloponnese, with the goal of asserting his authority over every part of his newly-acquired kingdom, when they stopped in the city to address the League of Corinth and make preparations for his coming war against Persia. It was here where Alexander and Diogenes met for the first and only time.

—

Striding one afternoon through the marketplace with a small company of guards and servants, Alexander notices Diogenes, sitting naked in the sun, his eyes closed, his legs stretched out before him, and his back against the large barrel that he calls his home. Nudging one of his companions, Alexander asks who this strange fellow might be, and is told that he is the famous Diogenes.

Intrigued, Alexander walks up to Diogenes and addresses him. “Before you stands Alexander III, King of Macedon, Hegemon of the League of Corinth. Rise and address me.”

Opening one eye, Diogenes glances briefly at Alexander and the men behind him. He promptly shuts the eye again.

Alexander clears his throat and begins again. “Before you stands Alexander III, King of Macedon—”

Diogenes interrupts loudly, eyes still shut. “Before you sits Diogenes the dog, occupant of this barrel, once at peace, now devoid of all hope.”

“Devoid of all hope?”

“Hope that if I ignored you for long enough, you might choose some other man to be addressed by. Or that you might at least choose to sit down, for you are blocking my sunlight.” Diogenes opens his eyes. “Alas.”

“Will you refuse to rise and address me?” Alexander asks, placing his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“What reason is there for me to rise and address you now, when we are already in conversation?”

Alexander pauses in disbelief, his hand still resting on his sword. “It is simply the custom of the land, and your role in it. To stand and bow when spoken to is a gift paid by all men to their superiors.”

Diogenes frowns and glances at the sword. “How can it be a gift if it is not freely given? If I bow to you now, by threat of sword, then I do not fulfill my role, but that of a slave, for you wrest the bow from me against my will. I may be a dog, but I am no man’s slave. I should like to give you my bow as a gift, but I cannot give it to you unless I give it freely.”

Alexander hears this with amusement, as he remembers that he is talking to the infamous cynic. He takes his hand off of his sword. “All right, I am engaged. What could compel you to bow to me freely?”

“To compel me to give freely — an oxymoron for sure, but I suppose nothing is precise. And since you seem unlikely to leave otherwise . . .” He strokes his dirty beard for a moment, appearing pensive. “I can find motive within myself to give you the free gift of my bow, if you first give to me something equal to it in measure.”

“But that is ridiculous,” Alexander argues. “If I must first give you a gift to earn your gift, then your gift is not a free gift at all — we have merely engaged in a transaction.”

“A transaction?” Diogenes scoffs. “You come to me with men and swords, making clear that you can take all you want from me. What manner of trade is it if any attempt to bargain or barter with you could be the death of me? No, your gift to me is proof, not payment — by the gift you show me honor, and improve my opinion of you. This is the only way you can create in me the will to give freely in return. Where there is no good will, all is simply taken. It is true that we may never eliminate all coercion, but freedom is one of the fundamental measures of giving; unless you give me room for some amount of freedom, I cannot give to you at all.”

“I can see that you are just like the Sophists,” Alexander replies. “You use complexity and twists of logic with the aim to confuse, so that you can ultimately fleece me. But you are lucky, and have found me in good spirits today. You will see that I own so much that I can give generously without it being of any matter to me. Now here,” he says, beckoning a servant forward with a finger, his eyes remaining fixed on Diogenes. “What does the great Diogenes want me to give to him? Two dozen oxen?”

“What is it with you kings and your love of your own voice?” Diogenes sighs, closing his eyes again. “You cannot see that you have offered me nothing but your words. It is your man here who will run to execute your order — he gives me his energy. No doubt, other servants will find the oxen, untie them, and lead them to me — they give me their time. Those who fed and trained the oxen from their birth give me the fruit of their skilled labor. Even the oxen as they walk to me give me more than you have, who simply whisper a command and believe yourself to have done the work that makes it so. This is the second fundamental measure of giving — its activity. That is, how much of your own self you offer —the effort of your body and the attention of your spirit. I asked you for a gift equal in measure to my bow, and you have offered me only the gift of others’ attention and effort; you only mistake it for your own because of your power and wealth. You wonder why I live like a dog, but I swear by your father’s bones that a dog is more of a man than any king I have met. The more riches your lot swing around, the less intelligent you always seem to become.”

At this, an audible chuckle escapes from the servant next to Alexander. The king’s jaw tightens, but he chooses not to reveal his anger — he will not lose this battle of wits. “Fine,” he says. “But you underestimate my intelligence. I trained under Aristotle, and I can see that while you excel in rhetoric, you lack in virtue. You ask me for such an active gift, but what you give in return is barely anything at all — surely to stand and bow requires little more effort than a whisper.”

“Oh — You don’t have my back or my legs,” Diogenes whimpers. “Anyway, you are right. My gift is not much either, no, but it is more than what you offer, and that is my point. Small or large, if you respected me, you would be willing to give in at least the same measure that you ask.”

“Ah, now I finally see the game,” says Alexander, smiling again. “You want me to bow to you. You would find perverse amusement in seeing a king, in his fine raiment, bowing low to a naked dog.”

Diogenes snorts in surprise, then leans to the side and spits on the ground next to himself. “I assure you, I do not find you to be an amusing person at all, and a slight shift in your posture will do nothing to change that. I have no desire to see you bow, and so a bow will not satisfy me. Look here, this is the third and final fundamental measure of giving — giving is no gift if what is given is not valued. Perhaps a bow from a king would bring delight to some other man, but what gift is your bow to me, if I am not that man? A gift that is not valued is an effort wasted doubly — first, it does not give me what I want, and second, it does nothing to improve our relation: my opinion of you is left, at best, unchanged and, at worst, somewhat soured. Do not bow to me, for if you do, we will both be worse off: you will be humiliated, and I will be bored. You want my bow — and I will give it — but I do not want yours, so you will have to give me something else.”

“Then what do you want from me?” Alexander snaps, nearly growling with anger at this point. “Speak plainly now; I am growing impatient.”

Diogenes squints up at him. “I want you to stop blocking my sunlight.”

For a few moments, Alexander stands silently, as his anger withers into confusion, until he turns his head and squints up at the sun behind him. He turns back to Diogenes, who is lying in his shadow, and begins to shake his head. “Naked in a barrel, and that is all you want from a king?” He lets out a sharp laugh as he takes a few steps to the side. “Verily,” he announces to his men, “if I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes.”

Satisfied, Diogenes bends his knees and gingerly rises to his feet, replying with a smirk, “If I were not Diogenes, I should also wish to be Diogenes.” He bows to the king.

Alexander smiles at first, but his smile gradually lowers into a frown. “Hold on,” he says slowly, thinking. “I gave you a gift that met yours, by all three measures. By standing aside from your sunlight, I gave you a gift that was, in good measure, free, active, and valued. And in return, your bow to me was free, active, and valued, in the same measure. And yet, I feel that something is missing. Having received your bow, I now see that what is useful in a bow is its display of respect, and I can tell that you do not respect me at all.

“My gift effected a useful change — you received both my gift, and the sunlight. But in lacking respect, your gift effected no useful change — I received your gift, and nothing more. While the gifts were equal by your measures, it appears that there is one more measure which you have missed — a gift is better if it is effective, and worse if it is not. A gift is no gift if it doesn’t work. Thus, I, Alexander, have given to the dog more than the dog could give to me.”

At this, Diogenes looks Alexander for the first time directly in the eyes. He claps his hands together and begins to laugh gaily. “Ah! You are right — a fourth measure! You have taught an old dog something new, and to believe that I have wanted for it for so long!” he cries. “Have what is yours, in full measure!” He bows again and again, fully seven times before stopping to rest. Breathing heavily, he then retreats into his barrel and begins to scratch what he has learned into an old strip of leather with a fingernail, seeming to have completely forgotten the presence of Alexander and his men.

Alexander marvels at all of this and turns toward his servant, saying, “I can feel that something inward of me has shifted today, and perhaps all the world with it. I have paid and been paid gifts of great monetary value, but none like these gifts I have just exchanged with Diogenes the dog. Indeed, I have conquered lands and I shall soon conquer more, and men will remember me for these accomplishments and many others. But I believe that, on the day that I die, I shall remember what Diogenes gave to me, and what I gave Diogenes.”

—

It is widely reported that Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great died on the same day in 323 BCE, thirteen years after their meeting in Corinth. Alexander, having conquered many lands, died after drinking gifted wine poisoned with water from the river Styx, and Diogenes died of holding his own breath.

Word spreads rather quickly, and Olivia’s tutoring services have become so sought after that she can’t keep up with the demand. So, she decides it’s time to scale up. She gives her business a name (Strong Minds, LLC) and hires and trains two employees, Laila and Markus, to take on additional clients. They prove to be reliable and effective tutors; although they don’t have as much experience as she does, they receive generally positive reviews from their clients. The business is so successful that she’s finally able to breathe a bit; she’s cut back her own hours to spend more time with her daughter, and she’s making more money than she ever expected to, even putting aside some savings for the first time.

But over a couple of years, a worrying trend begins and then accelerates. The need for private tutoring, which boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic, is declining as schooling returns to normalcy and inflation makes everyone more conscious of spending. As old students graduate, new ones don’t take their places as quickly as they used to. Once again, the business is under dire financial strain. But this time, she’s not worried about her ability to support her own income — instead, it’s become clear that the business is no longer making enough to be able to support the salaries of its three employees.

Olivia The Capitalist

The capitalist Olivia is primarily concerned with her business’s ability to succeed in this difficult economic climate. And, having spent years teaching AP Calculus, she can read the financial picture as well as anyone. No amount of workload-balancing, rate adjustment, or penny-pinching will fix this problem — there’s simply not enough demand for their services, and no way that the business can support the income of both of her employees. She realizes that she’s going to have to make the hard, but ultimately necessary choice: one of the employees will have to be laid off.

Since they’re both paid the same salary and were hired at the same time, she decides to make the decision purely based on performance. She calls up Laila (whose performance ratings were lower than Markus’) that Friday evening, and tells her the bad news. Then she calls Markus, and tells him as well. He’s stunned and saddened by the loss of a close coworker, but grateful to still have a job. Olivia weakly congratulates him for his strong performance, and hangs up the phone. She sighs and pours herself a glass of whisky, confident that she made the right choice, but hoping to never have to do something like that again.

Olivia The Contributist

The contributist Olivia is worried about her business’s success, but she doesn’t see success as purely financial. Financial solvency is important only because it is necessary to enable what she sees as true success for the business — the continued protection of her and her employees’ right to contribute to their community.

But she’s looked at the numbers every way and it’s clear that it’s just not possible to support all three of their salaries in this economic climate. She calls a meeting with her employees and explains the grim financial picture in detail. She tells them that her primary goal is to ensure that they can all continue to do this work, but that even if they cut every possible expense, they’ll still be running at a $20,000 deficit this year. In just a few months, there won’t be enough money in the bank to support their paychecks.

There’s silence for a few moments after she finishes her presentation.

“Does this mean you’re going to lay one of us off?” Laila asks directly. She tries not to show it, but her heart is sinking. She knows she’s going to be the one to go — Markus is simply the better tutor.

“I can’t pretend I haven’t thought about that,” replies Olivia with a grimace. “But I know that you two care about this community and these kids just as much as I do. I want to do everything I can to protect that — to make sure that we can all continue to participate in this work. But I just can’t find a way to make the numbers add up. I’m just — I’m stuck. That’s why I wanted to bring you two into the conversation.”

There’s another long silence.

“What if we . . . reduce our salaries this year?” Markus asks quietly.

“I’ve thought about that, too,” replies Olivia glumly. “But there’s not much there to reduce. You and Laila are already barely making a living wage, and I have a kid to feed; I can’t take a twenty thousand dollar pay cut.”

“It’s not twenty thousand, though, right?” Markus says. “I can’t speak for Laila, but I’ve got savings — I could stand to lose a few thousand this year and still be alright. I mean, what are our other options? I love this job.” He takes a sharp breath. “Anyway, if Laila and I each take a pay cut of, say, five thousand, then that leaves ten thousand, not twenty.”

Laila speaks up. “I, um, I don’t know how to say this, but I don’t think I can afford a pay cut,” she says, her eyes fixed on the table in front of her. There’s another long silence.

Suddenly, Laila’s face lights up. “At my last job, we used to rely a lot on grants from the government and nonprofits. I know this is nerdy, but I used to love grant-writing. It was a different field, but there have to be some education grants we could apply for. I still have a couple of friends in that space; I could try making some calls and see if anything turns up.”

Olivia had thought about this, but at the time, she had dismissed it. Writing was never her strong suit, and she knew almost nothing about the byzantine grant-writing process — except that even if they could find something, it would take months for any money to materialize. That had originally seemed like too long to wait — but maybe not if they could buy themselves some time by cutting back their salaries.

She closes her eyes for a moment, as she does some quick math in her head. She could maybe stand to lower her salary by five thousand this year, but the other ten? That would mean draining all of her savings.

She opens her eyes. “Markus, you can really take a five thousand dollar pay cut this year? Don’t bullshit me, I need to know that you can afford it.”

Markus nods.

“And Laila, how do you feel about shifting your time into doing some grant research? Markus can pick up some of your students, since his schedule’s been a bit light anyway.”

Laila nods vigorously. She would never say it because she loves her students to death, but she had privately been starting to doubt if she was really cut out for tutoring anyway. She can’t help but feel that this opportunity to pivot back into something she excels at is heaven-sent — she can practically feel her fear melting into excitement.

“Okay,” Olivia says, finally. “You guys are the best. The most important thing is that we get to keep serving these kids; I appreciate both of you for being willing to adjust. Laila, I need you to get started on this grant research yesterday — start reaching out to your friends and see what you can find. And Markus, I promise you that these salary cuts that you and I are taking are only temporary. Once we get our financial situation figured out, we’re all getting a raise.”

The meeting soon ends, and they all get started on their work. And by the end of the day, despite the bad financial news, each one of them goes home feeling somehow better — both more energized, more grateful, and more connected to their coworkers.

In political philosophy and economics, we often apply a reductionist lens to human behavior, mistaking humans for “economic actors,” and interactions for “transactions.” Economic actors are beings who operate in a world of capital; they have needs and desires that can be fulfilled through the generation or exchange of things with capital value (currency, goods, or services). Transaction can be described as an act of mutual taking: two parties with differing needs meet, then leave having each gained and lost something of capital value. Under this economic lens, we can explain, model, and predict all sorts of patterns of behavior. We can even speak of intangible concepts like justice and fairness — in an “unjust” transaction, one party is exploited, having received significantly less than they gained. Aided by such language, we build complex theories of human behavior and governance upon a foundation of economic principles, and use those theories to write policy, assess the rationality of actors, and even judge and govern our own behavior.

But the economic lens, while convenient for neat theorizing, captures only a thin sliver of what an actual human values or experiences in any interaction, even a mostly economic one. Workers will often remain in an underpaid role for years (even an entire career) because they like their coworkers or enjoy the labor, and others will leave a well-paid role because they can’t stand their boss or feel that the work somehow taxes their soul. Restaurant patrons will leave a larger tip (literally pay extra for the same service) because of the way a server’s smile made them feel. We regularly give capital away for free to those less fortunate than ourselves, simply because we care. And as anyone who has ever negotiated for anything knows, when we barter, what matters to us in the end is not truly the amount of value we extracted, but how we feel we and our opponent conducted ourselves with regard to our personal principles and self-image (Did I win? Was I made a fool? Were they mean-spirited? was I the asshole?, etc.).

In recent decades, we have become increasingly willing to acknowledge this incongruity, and have dedicated mountains of research to finding explanations and solutions for this deviant and “unpredictable” human behavior. But from our economic lens, we continue to see each of the above examples of human behavior as a type of minor self-sabotage, a charming but ultimately suboptimal approach to the game of life. Incredibly, there remains a wholly pervasive impulse within economic theory to see the pure economic actor as normative and “rational,” and human deviance from this norm as “irrational” behavior.

This is akin to calling the ocean irrational because it is not always blue like it is in our drawings and paintings. A disparity between a man-made model and the thing it depicts should always be first interpreted as a shortcoming of the model, not a shortcoming of the thing itself. No clear-minded person would argue that the ocean ought to behave more like it does in the paintings, and similarly, no clear-minded person would argue that humans ought to behave more like economic actors, unless it is clear that it would go better for them (as individuals or as a society) if they did so.

Here is the point: if we want to be truly effective strategic actors — to make decisions that give us a shot at “winning the game of life” — we must be careful to first ask ourselves if we know what it means to win. I fear that we have proven quite capable of forgetting ourselves in this regard. Our capitalist milieu quietly guides us to see the world through an economic lens — to equate the attainment of capital value with success and its loss with failure. But to imagine ourselves as economic actors in this way is to unintentionally lobotomize ourselves, reducing ourselves to something less than fully human. Consider: How many of us have sacrificed love or community for economic gain, and yet come to regret it? How many of us have sacrificed economic gain in favor of a person or community that we cared for, and yet counted it as joy? And how many of us can truly say that the happiest times in our lives — the best times — were the times when we hewed closest to the concept of the rational economic actor? For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Many of us already recognize this — we give to the less fortunate; we tip generously; we keep the pleasant, if underpaid, job. Yet still, our milieu beckons us, and many of us choose every day, in ways large and small, to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of economic “rationality,” ignoring our lived experience (the joy of giving freely, how drained we can feel serving mammon) because we trust the model we invented more than we trust our own selves. We tell ourselves that the unhappiness is somehow false, or else we dream towards our retirement as a sort of economic Valhalla: a glorious final rest earned by throwing ourselves upon the capitalist sword.

Enough of this. We want good lives, not just good endings. Economics matter, yes, but let us stop pretending that we must — or even can — see ourselves or our interactions in purely economic terms. If we want to build good lives, we must see beyond capital — we must integrate economics into a holistic picture of human thriving. The trouble with the economic lens is not that it is wrong, but that it is far too constrictive to serve as a guiding model for our behavior, as individuals or as a society. Certainly, there are ways in which we act irrationally, economically or otherwise; but one such way is by calling ourselves economic actors. The success of a society cannot be understood primarily by its gross domestic product, and the success of an individual cannot be understood primarily by the wealth or capital they own.

The contributist’s orientation towards giving is surprising only to those who have accepted the belief that they are economic actors — the amoral and unfeeling creatures of myth who populate the charts and formulae of economists. By contrast, it is not surprising to the parent (who would give their life for their child), to the altruist (who gives their capital to the needy), to the volunteer or social worker (who gives their time to their cause), or to the patriot (who would give their life for their country). It is not surprising even to the feudal lord, whose rule was legitimated and maintained not by what he owned, but by what and how he gave to his vassals. The claim of the contributist is that the 250-year effort of the economic discipline to sever our behavior from our morals, our emotions, and our well-being — indeed, our very human selves — has not helped us to see more clearly, but has instead made us more blind.

The Three Types of Social Participation

What does it look like to be a contributist?

Broadly, I find it helpful to think about any individual as functioning in their society on three levels: as a personal actor, as a community actor, and as a societal actor. As a personal actor, the individual is concerned with their own needs and desires — how should I act in order to live the life I want to live? As a community actor, the individual thinks about how their actions impact those around them — how should I act in order to be a good member of my community? And as a societal actor, the individual looks beyond themselves, and considers how the societal system should operate as a whole — what rules, systems, and incentives should we establish to improve the overall health of the society? Every one of us functions on all three levels, though we vary in where we choose to spend our energy, and how much influence we are able to exert.

We are familiar with how the capitalist operates on these three levels. As a personal actor, the capitalist asks, how can I improve my standing by making more money? As a community actor, the capitalist asks, how can I employ, exploit, trade, or compete with others, to make more money? (By design, the capitalist acts only in self-interest — oh, the wonders of the invisible hand!) As a societal actor, the capitalist asks, how can our society be more business-friendly and encourage market competition?

The contributist also operates on all three of these levels. As a personal actor, the contributist asks, how can I further humanize myself by giving? As a community actor, the contributist asks, how can I help those around me to assert their right to give? And as a societal actor, the contributist asks, how can our society help individuals to assert their right to give?

To be clear, no person is purely a capitalist, or purely a contributist. Just like our societies, we each contain multitudes, and we often shift between various modes in the span of a day. An average individual might inhabit the mentality of a capitalist while working on a side hustle in the morning before work, a loyal employee from nine till noon, a Democrat at lunch while watching clips of the late night shows, a union rep at a late afternoon meeting, a father at home in the evening, a husband when the kids have gone to bed, and finally, an anti-work anarchist while scrolling through Reddit in bed.

But we are capitalists insofar as we choose to let the concerns of capitalism guide our behavior. And we are contributists insofar as we choose to be guided by the concerns of contributism.

It should be noted that these are not always in conflict. Sometimes contributism and capitalism lead to similar behavior — the simple act of employing others is both contributist and capitalist, for example. But the two frameworks guide us by very different hands, and when they do come into conflict, we must choose what we prioritize. It is these moments that offer a glimpse into what sort of people we choose to be, and what sort of society we choose to help build.

Olivia’s Dilemma

Olivia spent a decade working as a high school math teacher in Oakland, but burnt out from the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, she decided to leave her job and shift into private tutoring. Now she provides college prep tutoring for high school students in her community, some of whom she used to teach in school. She keeps her rates low, because her community is low-income. She knows she could charge twice as much tutoring richer kids in nearby communities, but she’s not interested; she prefers to serve the kids in her community, who might not make it to college without her help. Besides, she makes enough to support herself. Or, at least, she used to. She’s about to have her first child, and the childcare costs are more than her current income can support. How does she increase her income to ensure she can support herself and her child?

Olivia The Capitalist

The capitalist Olivia is primarily concerned about her financial circumstance — the question at the top of her mind is how can I make more money to support myself? Sure, tutoring the students in her community has made her feel good, but it’s clear that this is no longer financially feasible. She picks up her phone and powers through a series of tough conversations — explaining to the parents of each of her current students that her rate will double at the end of the semester. She loses over half of her clients, and she winces when she thinks about the financial strain she’s putting on the others.

She feels a bit better when she starts to make some calls in Fremont, a nearby community where she has some connections. There, she finds plenty of new clients — wealthy parents eager to pay whatever it takes to get their kids into the top schools. But she can’t fully shake the creeping feeling that she has become a bit more alienated — both from her community and her own self.

Olivia The Contributist

The contributist Olivia’s primary concern is maintaining her right to give to her community by offering her tutoring services. Her new financial concern exists in the context of this primary concern — it is a challenge to her right to give. So the idea of doubling her rates — and pricing out her community — strikes her as plainly counterproductive. Sure, she’d have enough money to support herself, but this would come at no small cost to her humanity; she would no longer be the person she wants to be. So, she recognizes that she has to think more creatively.

After talking extensively with her clients (both the parents and the students) about her dilemma, and considering a variety of their suggestions, she lands on a solution that suits everyone’s needs. She begins to offer group tutoring sessions. She offers these sessions at a lower rate than that of her individual sessions, but she teaches up to five students at a time, meaning that she makes about three times as much from one of these sessions as she does from her individual sessions. Finally, she raises her individual tutoring rate by about ten percent; an amount that works for nearly all of her current clients.

With this plan, she is now making enough to support her own family, and has also improved her ability to give to her community — though the group sessions are lower impact than one-on-one sessions, the increased capacity and lower cost of entry has enabled her to reach even more students than before. By targeting her right to give rather than her right to capitalize her resources, she has managed to come to a stronger solution than she would have been led to by self-interest alone — a solution that affirms both herself and her community.

The distinction between the right to give, the obligation to give, and the right not to give is critical to the contributist lens, but it is subtle and can perhaps be felt more easily than it is understood. So let’s take a moment to explore the three through a close study of the feelings involved when we tip a cashier.

Many of us complain about the proliferance of “tipping culture” in recent years. It has become increasingly commonplace to feel socially pressured to give a tip even in circumstances where we don’t think tipping is fully justified, like when paying a cashier a fixed price for a pre-packaged snack at a café or a bakery. Often, when we tip due to this social pressure, we leave feeling disoriented and upset, because we have given against our own will. In fact, giving against your own will is not giving at all — it is having something taken from you.

It isn’t wrong for us to feel upset at being forced to “give” in this way. This sort of practice upsets us so deeply precisely because there is a special joy in tipping, when it is done properly. When we choose to give a tip, of our own accord, there is a grand elixir of positive feelings that courses through us: we feel the towering independence that comes with recognizing that we truly do have more than we need, the sublime humility that comes with having seen and seen to another, and the reassurance that we as humans really can transcend all of the nonsense sometimes and simply be good to one another. By our generosity, we remind ourselves of our humanity.

This is why a coerced tip feels worse to us than ​​it would have felt if an extra fee was included in the base price. A coerced tip promises the joy of giving, but is quickly recognized to be a scam, the act of giving distorted beyond recognition. Take note of this feeling — the biting sense of exploitation that comes when we tip unwillingly. This is not the right to give — it is the feeling that comes from the obligation to give.

But let us put that feeling aside for a moment. Consider instead that, when the underpaid cashier turns the point-of-sale machine around towards you — mumbling that “it’s going to ask you a couple of questions first” — this time, you select the “No thanks” option, choosing not to give a tip at all. In this case, you have successfully asserted your right not to give. But while you don’t quite feel exploited, because you have managed not to give, this is not a wholly positive experience either. You feel, in varying measures, depending on your disposition and financial circumstances: relieved, because you have not been forced to pay more than you wanted to; justified, because you have resisted what you see as an attempted act of injustice; annoyed, because you just experienced what you see as an attempted act of injustice; disoriented, because you just had an awkward encounter; and a bit sheepish, having saved yourself perhaps at some expense to that underpaid cashier.

In this way, the right not to give is a qualified good — it certainly prevents you from being exploited, but asserting it doesn’t leave you any better off than it found you, and often leaves you feeling a little bit worse. Yes, this is partially because it accompanies a close call with the obligation to give. But it is also because the act of asserting the right not to give stirs up within us the opposite of all of the feelings I mentioned above that make tipping feel so good. To be protective of your resources is to admit insecurity rather than independence — it is to acknowledge that you are afraid of loss. And rather than basking in “the sublime humility of seeing and seeing to another,” refusing to give forces you to navel-gaze and self-justify — to defend yourself against the creeping feeling that you may have acted in selfishness. Finally, rather than feeling reassured that we can transcend all of the nonsense and be good to one another, you have reinforced the idea that we must protect ourselves from one another, and thus you feel more distrustful and more socially constrained. These feelings may take place in small measure, but the result is that you are not more connected to your humanity, but more estranged from it. Take note of this feeling — it is the feeling that comes from asserting the right not to give.

But let us now imagine one last attempt at this tipping situation. Try to clear from your mind the feeling of asserting the right not to give, and try instead for a moment to put yourself into the mind of that unusual person who we know must exist, who, upon the dreaded turn-around of the point-of-sale system, chooses to tap not the lowest suggested tip, but the highest. What fresh insanity might be going on in this person’s mind?

The generous tipper may seem unhinged, but she is not — there is a logic to her choice. You may think that she is oblivious, but allow, for a moment, the possibility that she is not. Imagine that she, too, notices the coercion of the situation, and is disturbed by it. But by choosing to give even more than is expected of her, she oversteps the coercion — calling its bluff, so to speak — showing that her own will extends beyond its power to control. In doing so, she is essentially declaring herself unexploitable, triumphing over the obligation to give by forcefully reasserting for herself the right to give. While the rest of us stand bewildered by her behavior, she actually finds herself better off than any of us. Because in the place of the various frustrations that the rest of us feel, she has instead reclaimed for herself that aforementioned warm elixir of giving — she has demonstrated her independence (see how much she has to give!), seen and seen to another, and proven herself capable of transcendence and humanity. Take note of the feeling that she feels — this is the feeling of asserting the right to give.

To be clear, I am not arguing that anyone should feel obligated to tip generously — that would simply be asserting the obligation to give, and defeat the point entirely. I am only trying to point out that there is a clear and notable difference between the right to give, the obligation to give, and the right not to give, and that this difference is of immense importance — it is the difference between the right to affirmation and the right to oppression, between what is humanizing and what is dehumanizing. At the heart of contributism is the recognition of this distinction, and the decision to settle for nothing less than the right to give.

There is much left to say about contributism, but the true coherence of all that follows can only be seen when one understands this point: that the contributist’s goal is to ensure that all of the members of society can affirm and humanize themselves by asserting the right to give.

And if this is the contributist’s goal, then it is important to note that there are three preconditions to the generous tipper’s circumstance that made it possible for her to assert her right to give, and that these are the three conditions that the contributist aims to ensure are in place for all.

First, she has the opportunity to give. This one is the most obvious, but it is worth noting nonetheless. If, for example, she had skipped the counter altogether and ordered what she needed on Amazon, splayed out on the couch in her pajamas — the entire transaction facilitated end-to-end by online, automated processes and all human interaction abstracted away — then there would be no cashier, and no opportunity to give. And worse, she would have rightly marveled at the convenience of the transaction, the obfuscation of technology having rendered her incapable of knowing what she had truly paid for it. There are many places where the opportunity to give can be found — and many ways that we can be robbed of it.

Second, she has enough to give. If she could not afford to pay beyond what she felt obligated to, choosing to assert her right to give would not have been an option for her. She would instead have had to choose between being lightly exploited (by succumbing to the obligation to give) or being lightly estranged from her humanity (by asserting the right not to give). For this reason, the contributist is determined to ensure that everyone has enough resources that they are able to take advantage of opportunities to give.

Third, she is capable of generosity. This is often the hardest for us to grasp. It is easy to understand that sometimes we just can’t afford to give. But if we are honest, there are many times when we have enough to give, but still choose not to, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps we are in a hurry, or too flustered in the moment to make a generous choice. Perhaps we are angry at what we see as an attempt at exploitation and we don’t want to dignify or encourage it with our generosity. Perhaps we are afraid that being generous now will prevent us from being generous later. Whatever the reason, the result is that we are constrained in a way that the generous tipper is not. And ultimately, this means that she is free to assert the right to give and experience the many human benefits that this brings, and we are not.

Under the contributist lens, we see that this incapability is just as much an infringement on the right to give as being under-resourced is. Because if we are too hurried, flustered, angry, or afraid to give, and these things constrain us such that we are ultimately not able to give, then we haven’t really been afforded the right to give at all; we only truly have the right not to give. Rather than settle for shaming the one incapable of generosity, the true contributist is determined to find productive strategies to erase all barriers, and ensure that everyone has what they need to become capable of giving.

In other words, the contributist sees A Christmas Carol’s Ebeneezer Scrooge as a man badly damaged — lacking the right to give and in need of its restoration — and the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future as wise contributist agents of change, providing him with exactly the service he needs to be restored his right. And crucially, the contributist sees the world at the end of the story, in which Scrooge regains the right to give and is thus reconciled to his community, as a more just outcome than any world in which he goes to his grave still unable to give.

Hopefully, it is clear to you at this point that the contributist’s task is complex, and requires a different way of thinking — a different lens — than we are used to. It is essentially the same lens that the generous tipper uses, except that the true contributist is not only interested in her own right to give, but in ensuring that this right is provided to all.

Like the generous tipper, the contributist is willing to look beyond the usual options, and sometimes acts in ways that others might see as ill-considered, or even foolish. But this is only because she is able to operate by a more expansive logic, seeking what is fulfilling and humanizing rather than what is sensible (or even fair) from a limited economic point of view. And in doing so, she gains access to a way of life that is not just better, but more joyful — promoting and experiencing a higher class of success, and reconnecting herself to her humanity.

My mother likes to tell a story about a time when she was playing a children’s card game with a few of my siblings. Each card had an ability, and the object of the game was to use your cards' abilities to attack your opponents' cards until they lost their hand. There was one type of card that was particularly valuable, because it made its holder temporarily invulnerable to attack. For this reason, any player who got their hands on one of these cards would treasure it above all else. But one of my sisters played differently. Whenever she came across one of these cards, she found a way to give it away to whichever opponent she thought most needed it.

This strategy mortified my mother. She tried repeatedly to explain the rules of the game to her daughter, to point out to her that she was only sabotaging herself by giving her most valuable cards away. But my sister didn't care; she understood the rules, but she simply liked giving the cards away. She found the way everyone else played the game to be a bit too zero-sum, so she chose to play in her own way. Whether or not the game’s rules crowned her the winner, she would be happy, because she found joy in the way she played the game.

In the end, my sister won the game. When my mother tells this story, she kind of just ends it there, with an incredulous expression ("Can you believe it?"). She remains mystified by her daughter's play-style, but you can tell that she was somehow affected by it, because she keeps telling the story. And every time she tells it, she's beaming with pride.

“It is better to give than to receive” because human dignity is found in the act of giving. To give at once asserts one’s true independence and one’s desire to co-relate — one’s capacity to love. This is, perhaps, the central and only point — we must remember that, at our core, we find fulfillment not just in being loved, but in the act of loving.

From this idea directly follows a second, which is just as consequential. If we find fulfillment through orienting ourselves toward others, then all anti-social desires (the desire to cut oneself off from others, to cut others off from oneself, to hoard, and to leech) are thus actually disorders, which are harmful not only to others, but to the self. The contributist position is that those with such disorders can and should be healed of them, and so reconciled. When we speak of the right to give, rather than the obligation to give, we are speaking about this human right to be healed, to be reconciled.

In this way, contributism shifts us towards a more holistic and rigorous understanding of success and health than capitalism’s economic lens provides, on both a personal level and a societal level. The contributist’s measure of a human’s well-being is not simply their net worth, but their ability to contribute and participate — a human who cannot give is a human in need of rehabilitation. And the sign of a society in decline is not a low GDP (otherwise, we would all see America as the pinnacle of societal health), but when it cannot adequately provide its members with the right to give — to contribute constructively to their community. This means that the contributist sees the economic lens as not wrong, but limited — analogous to the perspective of a doctor whose knowledge and practice is limited to one part of the body. If the actors within a society cannot see its health beyond its economic condition — if they can only articulate its health in terms of the riches of its production, the force of its commerce, and the self-interest of its members — then they are in danger of missing important diagnoses, prescribing the wrong treatments, and ultimately, looking on helplessly as the health of their society swiftly declines.

Ironically, capitalism and socialism are each often denounced by their opponents for the same reason: the hoarding of resources (the capitalist’s aim) and subsistence on charity (the socialist’s shame) are both criticized because they represent an actor’s failure to play their fundamental role as a participant in interdependent community. What often goes unnoticed by critics and supporters alike is that both systems unknowingly produce the “tragedy of the commons” that they aim to avoid, because they assert and protect their participants’ right to take. The contributist understands that a society (and an individual) can only truly affirm itself when it instead asserts and protects the right to give.

As we will discuss, by diagnosing and addressing the human in their full humanity, rather than reducing them to their role as an economic actor, contributism can be seen as a more caring and careful doctor, one who chooses to take a “view from above” — seeing and addressing in whole where these other social systems only see and address in part. And with this broader lens comes not only new theory, but also new strategy: new ways of acting that can lead to more fulfilled lives, and new approaches to policy that can lead to more fulfilled societies.

The Contributist Reader is an experiment, both in substance and in form.

In substance, it is almost inexcusably bold in both its scope and its implication. It aims to trace the contours of a social philosophy that we believe to be a worthy successor to capitalism, as well as the path towards its widespread adoption. We have come to call this idea contributism, and I hope that you will find it compelling enough that you will come to excuse its boldness. Like capitalism, it is a thing too complex to define in a sentence or two, but if pressed, we choose to describe it by its primary emphasis: it is the right of all humanity to give. This reader aims to make plain what contributism is and why I am certain that you should be aware of it.

In form, this reader is experimental because it is not simply an intellectual pursuit, but an artistic one. When developing the ideas behind contributism, it became clear that the primary task of any attempt to see beyond capitalism is to remember what it is to see beyond capitalism. Among many things, capitalism is a learned normative lens — a way of seeing the world which colors our perspective and teaches us to make value judgments about ways of being (“everyone should graduate high school,” “this proposed law on parental leave is unfair,“ etc.). If we ever hope to see a world beyond capitalism, we must be able to take off this lens, at least momentarily, and gaze, blinking, into a new one — one through which light filters differently, and familiar sights and colors take on curious and surprisingly untested hues.

This work — the work of training the eye to see, unsee, and see anew — is not generally the work of journalists and essayists. It is perhaps more naturally the work of storytellers — of painters, bards, and poets. And so this reader does not aim to be a single work, but a collection of works, spanning many forms. Picture everything that follows as a series of gradually expanding concentric circles, the same central idea captured again and again, but in a diversity of forms — parable, poem, story, essay, etc. — each layer providing a new perspective, not better than, but more and differently detailed than, the last. The final picture will be, like capitalism, an amalgamation of things, but one that you will hopefully agree is a clearer lens through which to see, and a better system by which to organize ourselves, towards a good society.

Finally, in the spirit of contributism, this reader is a collective effort with a unified vision (e pluribus unum), and has not one author, but many. It is written in the tradition of the reader: an anthology intended to teach the audience, through example, the workings of a new language. The goal of a reader is to impart upon its audience the ability not only to read the language, but also to speak it and to write it. This is our goal as well, which means that we are always eager to accept and publish reader contributions, credited or anonymous, though by convention, all works in the reader are formally authored by our collective pseudonym, Pablo Parabola. In this way, The Contributist Reader is a continuous document, a lighthouse built, like anything worthwhile, by many ardent hands, brick by brick.

The trouble with describing capitalism is that capitalism is not just one thing, but an amalgamation of things. It is a social system — a set of rules designed to dictate and incentivize the behavior of actors within a society. It is a practice — a collection of individual behaviors which all follow roughly the same logic. It is a social milieu — the unspoken (and perhaps unspeakable) orientation of a society, which invisibly guides and informs the behavior of all of its participants. It is an economic theory — a set of ideas and principles which both interpret and inform social relations, societal rules, and individual practice. And it is, most importantly, a normative lens — a way of seeing the world which colors our perspective and teaches us to make value judgments about ways of being. Any shorthand description of capitalism is not necessarily wrong, but it is necessarily incomplete, as it must choose an emphasis and therefore de-emphasize some crucial elements of how it operates on and through its participants.

What’s worse, in all of this, capitalism is constantly shifting: new theory informs new practice informs new rules informs new theory informs new orientation informs new value judgments informs new rules, and so on. As such, what counts as capitalism is under constant debate, and there is no clear arbiter to decide who is right and who is hopelessly misguided (the markets, perhaps? Wikipedia?).

The goal of this reader is not to describe capitalism, but to describe an alternative to it. And if that alternative — which I will call contributism — is to be understood as at all similar in scope to capitalism, then we must unfortunately also recognize that any shorthand description of it will be necessarily incomplete, too selective in its emphasis to serve general purpose.

However, I have found that nuance in communication works a bit like fine cologne: applied strategically, it enhances the overall presentation immensely, but add a few too many spritzes, and your audience starts to quietly inch away. And if you insist on pouring on the whole bottle at once, what was meant to add clarity becomes a suffocating muddle, and most people begin to look for polite excuses to avoid your company altogether. So, to keep your company and avoid causing offense — olfactory or otherwise — I will begin with the simplest explanation, and add nuance in layers over time rather than all at once.

What is contributism, plainly? Capitalism is often described in terms of its primary emphasis on private ownership of capital: it is the right of men to own and capitalize property. Private ownership of the means of production births competition, which spurs production and generates plenty.

In these terms, contributism’s primary emphasis is participation through contribution: it is the right of all humanity to give. Participatory contribution towards common value births collaboration, which humanizes, spurs production, constrains excess, and distributes wealth.

In a word, contributism is the lens, practice, theory, orientation, and social system which structures itself around the fundamental right to find fulfillment and belonging through participatory contribution.