Care Cycle 102: The Economics of the Care Cycle
What can the Care Cycle possibly have to do with Economics? Care has to do with giving help to others when they need it and being connected interpersonally!
What is the purpose of being connected with others in the first place? Whether we like to admit it or not in our highly individualistic culture, the purpose of connection is to have others to lean on when you can’t do it all yourself. This isn’t weakness or dependency, it’s just socially efficient. (Bear with me.)
If we had to do everything to sustain our lives on our own, we probably wouldn’t have made it past the hunter-gatherer stage of evolution. There wouldn’t be much time to do anything else after we’d secured our basic needs of food and shelter.
Luckily, we decided to work together so that we could each focus on doing what we are best at, and to rely on others to do the things we’re less good at, but that still need doing. Rather than having to be a jack-of-all-trades, people could focus on being a butcher, a baker, or a candlestick maker; then as a group everyone would have better meat, better bread, and better candles than if each person had to do it all for themselves. Specialization was needed for us to make progress, and this is only possible when we work cooperatively with each other. (Now it’s really starting to sound like economics.)
Let’s fast-forward to today’s society, accepting that relying on each other so that all of our communal needs are met is a good and beneficial thing for everyone. Yes, you can use money as a currency with which to exchange goods and services, but life is also about being there for each other when we need emotional or more informal types of support – we humans are social creatures, after all – and you can’t always buy that with money.
The Care Cycle is a way to describe how we can support each other in a healthy, mutually-beneficial way. Remember, the Care Cycle is initiated when someone asks for help (the recipient) and another person offers to help willingly (the giver). When the giver meets the recipient’s needs, the recipient repays the giver with gratitude.
Gratitude as Currency
What can I do with gratitude? We posited in our previous post that gratitude is the emotional currency which you can exchange for care when you need it. When a person gives you gratitude, they’re basically acknowledging that you can call in a favor when you need one. But since this is a Care Cycle economy, you can’t force anyone to do anything they aren’t willing to do, so it’s a little squishier than cold hard cash.
The idea of gratitude as currency didn’t sit easily with me at first. After all, this made something that sounded so lovely – caring for someone – sound so transactional (yuck). Then I remembered the Chinese concept of guanxi (pronounced /gwan shee/), which is a term used to describe someone’s social network of mutually beneficial relationships. You can call on this network when you need something done, and having a lot of connections widens your influence. How do you go about building this network? Using the Care Cycle. Helping people. Collecting gratitude.
There’s nothing nefarious or underhanded about guanxi, especially when you play by the rules of the Care Cycle (no violence!). The more you give, the more you get. The more Care Cycles you participate in, the stronger your social network becomes. You become rich in social currency.
The Care Cycle Economy in Action
I just watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the first time this holiday season, and it is an amazing example of how the Care Cycle works for one man in his community (I’d give another **spoiler alert** warning here, but I think I’m the last adult in the country to have watched this movie). George Bailey (played by James Stewart) runs the town’s Building and Loan, a company that makes home loans to people in the community, usually those who are deemed high credit risks and can’t get approved for a loan from the bank.
George makes huge personal sacrifices to make sure the Building and Loan stays in business after the untimely death of his father, its founder. He forgoes college, gives up his dreams of traveling the world, and even uses his honeymoon money to pay back investors when there’s a bank run. Over the years, George establishes a housing development that provides quality housing for the community.
George is faced with a financial crisis when $8,000 of the company’s money goes missing. While the mistake wasn’t his, he was prepared to go to jail over the missing money. Then word of his dilemma spread throughout the community, and everyone rallied behind George. People pitched in what money they could, and the community raised more than enough to replace the missing $8,000 in just one night.
George, who’d spent his entire life helping the members of his community, was repaid for all his help and good citizenship by the people of his town. There were no contracts between George and his neighbors, no formal agreements, just loads of gratitude being repaid.
Conclusion
When the Care Cycle works – whether it’s balanced between two individuals or throughout communities – everyone benefits. The outstanding credits of gratitude work as the glue of society; having favors out there acts as a safety net such that, when you need help, you have a network of people to support you. With enough connections, and enough partners that you participate in healthy Care Cycles with, you are able to develop the happiness of belonging to a community and the safety of knowing your needs will be met.
