by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Why We Argue (And How We Should) is centrally concerned to elucidate the concept of a dialectical fallacy. This concept deserves comment. “Fallacy” is the name given to especially common and attractive failures of reasoning. Works in logic and critical thinking typically distinguish between formal and informal fallacies.

Formal fallacies are pervasive errors of formal inferences. Consider the argument:

If Bill is a carpenter, then Bill is handy.

Bill is handy.

Therefore, Bill is a carpenter.

This argument fails because the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion: the first premise states that being a carpenter is sufficient for being handy; it does not claim that all and only handy people are carpenters. After all, Bill could be a handy car mechanic who has never cut a piece of wood. We call this error the fallacy of affirming the consequent. This error gets its own name because we are especially prone to this kind of mistake. Once one is trained to spot it, one will find that this fallacy is committed frequently.

By contrast, informal fallacies are pervasive errors in informalinferences. Informal inferences differ from formal ones in that the latter propose to demonstrate the truth of their conclusions whereas the former aspire only to show that their conclusions are most likely true. A familiar informal fallacy is the ad populum fallacy. Consider:

Most people think that Joe is guilty.

Therefore, Joe is guilty.

This argument fails because it appeals simply to what “most people” think, without any regard for questions concerning the level to which “most people” are informed of the relevant facts of Joe's case. The mere fact that “most people” agree about some claim is no evidence at all for its truth.

The important thing about fallacies is that they are attractive and so pervasive errors of reasoning. Part of what accounts for their popularity is the way in which they mimic or ride piggyback on proper inferences. The fallacy of affirming the consequent is a mimic of the obviously successful inference known as modus ponens:

If Bill is a carpenter, then Bill is handy.

Bill is a carpenter.

Therefore, Bill is handy.

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

The Autocomplete function of Google Search is both annoying and fascinating. When you start typing in the first letters or words of your search into the Google search box, Autocomplete takes a guess at what you are looking for and “completes” the search phrase by offering you multiple query phrases. The queries offered by Autocomplete are “a reflection of the search activity of users and the content of web pages indexed by Google“. Considering the fact that more than five billion Google searches are conducted on an average day, the Google Autocomplete function has a huge database of search information that it can reference. This also means that the Autocomplete suggestions are quite dynamic and can vary over time. A popular new song lyric, the name of a viral video or a recent movie quote can catapult itself to the top of the Autocomplete suggestion list within a matter of hours or days if millions of users start search for that specific phrase. Autocomplete may also take a user's browsing history or location into account, which explains why it may offer a varying set of suggestions to different users.

Autocomplete can be quite annoying because the suggested lists of queries are based on their web popularity and can thus consist of bizarre combinations which are not at all related to one's intended searches. On the other hand, Autocomplete is also a fascinating tool to provide a window into the Zeitgeist of web users, revealing what kinds of phrases are most commonly used on the web, and by inference, what contemporary ideas are currently associated with the entered keywords. The Google Zeitgeist website reveals the most widely searched terms to help identify cultural trends – based on the frequency of Google search engine queries – during any given year.

The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) recently used the Google Search Autocomplete function in an ad campaign to highlight the extent of misogyny on the web. Searching for “women should…” or “women need to…” was autocompleted to phrases such as “women should be slaves” or “women need to be put in their place”. The fact that Autocomplete suggested these phrases means that probably hundreds of thousands of internet users have used these phrases in their search queries or on web pages indexed by Google – a reminder of how much gender injustice still exists in our world.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“And if you can't bear the thought of messing up
your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up the
whole idea of life, and become a saint.”

~ John Osborne, “Look Back in Anger”

As the paeans for Nelson Mandela rolled in last week, observers might have been forgiven for thinking that it was not a single human being had passed, but rather an astonishing confabulation of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa. The narrative can be encapsulated thusly: a despicable regime unjustly imprisons a passionate activist for 27 years, who upon his release goes on to lead his nation into peaceful democracy and becomes an avuncular elder statesman, unconditionally loved and respected by all. But this narrative tells us little about who Mandela actually was, and why he acted in the world in the way he did. A brief examination of Mandela's involvement in the ending of non-violence and the initiation of armed struggle in the early 1960s serves to illustrate some of this nuance.

The perpetuation of the saccharine narrative is enabled by, among other things, the cherry-picking of Mandela's own words. One endlessly quoted passage has been the end of Mandela's opening statement at the start of his trial on charges of sabotage, at the Supreme Court of South Africa, on April 20^th, 1964:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

This is stirring stuff, and worthy of being engraved into the marble of a monument, but only if you bother to read the preceding 10,000 words. In a far-reaching statement notable for its pellucidity, Mandela lays out the circumstances and philosophy that resulted in armed struggle against the regime.

I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto [we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC]. I, and the others who started the organisation, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalise and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

Without this context, Mandela's lofty concluding paragraph is as cheap as a Hallmark card. It's now clear to the reader exactly the lengths to which Mandela would be willing to go to die for his beliefs – not as a lamb to slaughter, but as a fiery revolutionary. It is difficult to conceive of Gandhi initiating such actions. But why was Mandela prepared at that point to resort to violence?

Read more »

by Madhu Kaza

During the month or so that my father spent in an Intensive Care Unit in a hospital in suburban Detroit, my travel habits changed in peculiar ways. Not knowing ahead of time the duration of my stay in Detroit nor how long I would be back home in New York before being called again to the Midwest, I was hardly able to pack anything at all. Yet I could not help but take luggage with me, so more than once I travelled with an empty suitcase, which brought to mind the image of an out-of-work businessman who still carries his briefcase everywhere. What I did pack were vegetables. I found myself regularly transporting produce from one state to the other. If I had lettuce in my fridge in New York I would carry it with me on the flight to Detroit imagining the salad I would make at my parents' house. One time, I took two carrots from my mother's fridge and put them in my vacant suitcase so that I could use them in a lentil soup I planned to make when I returned to New York. Suddenly, using an airline carrier to transport the ingredients I had gathered for the day's lunch or dinner not only made sense, but also seemed vital to my well-being. I think it allowed me to feel a kind of continuity between morning in the ICU with my father in Michigan and early evening alone in my apartment in New York at a time when I felt quite dislocated from the routines of my life. During this same period of time there was another odd development, which I understood far less: I became a person who felt compelled to take a fifteen hour train journey instead of a routine one and a half hour flight.

I bought my ticket for the Lake Shore Limited departing from New York on September 21^st. The #49 train departs daily from New York Penn Station at 3:40pm and reaches its final destination, Chicago's Union Station at 9:59 the following morning. Another section of the Lake Shore Limited departs from Boston. In Albany, the New York and Boston trains are hitched together for the journey to the Midwest. I would be getting off in Toledo, OH around 5:55am and would continue by car for another hour to Detroit.

I had enough experience on Amtrak's well-trafficked Northeast Corridor routes to not be romantic about American train travel. But I also knew that the railroads had been fundamental to the (often mythologized) American past. 19^th century railroads, including those regional lines that were consolidated into the powerful New York Central Railroad, facilitated the economic development and westward expansion of the country. Given the proliferation of railroad companies in the 19^th century, many ventures bankrupted investors and owners. On the other hand, the success of the New York Central Railroad made the Vanderbilt fortune.

Read more »

by Asif Faiz

There has been a flurry of doomsday scenarios in US political circles predicting the collapse of the Afghan regime following the US/NATO withdrawal and grim consequences for Pakistan if it continues to pursue its Great Game policies of the last three decades. However, few of these dire predictions take cognizance of Afghanistan’s turbulent history and the long, uneasy relationship, first between British India and Afghanistan and after 1947, between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is the internal ethnic divisions of Afghanistan that have prevented the emergence of an Afghan nation state and no foreign intervention or assistance can remedy that.

One needs to view the Afghan- Pakistan relationship through the prism of history. There have been over a dozen changes of monarchial ,republican and emirate regimes, mostly violent, in Afghanistan since 1901. The cavalcade of Afghan flags over this period (see here) is a testament to the political volatility of the country and the forces that have influenced its recent history. Pakistan was unilaterally involved (with military and financial support) in just one of those regime changes, i.e. the installation of the Taliban emirate in 1996; in another two it served as a US proxy, and in the bargain brought violence, instability, and mayhem to its borderlands and now its urban centers. What foreign intervention does in Afghanistan is unite the Afghans temporarily against a perceived common enemy and once the foreign intervention is over, they go back to their internal squabbling and scramble for power.

Overlay on this historical background, the mosaic of Pashtun tribes and clans, artificially split by the Durand Line. British India had the strategic depth to treat the Frontier as a borderland buffer to protect
its political and commercial interests in the context of the Great Game. Pakistan unwittingly has followed the same colonial policies to this day, notwithstanding the fact that the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line have a common heritage, culture, language and history. Any mischief or turmoil on either side of the Durand Line invariably spills over to the other, with Peshawar and Quetta (and now Karachi) absorbing the shocks of instability and displacement in eastern and southern Afghanistan.

Read more »

Picking the World Apart

When Lao Tzu
(or the composite of poets grouped under his name)
talked of Tao, The Way, he said,

“If you talk about it, it’s not Tao.
If you name it, it’s something else”

I don’t think he was being metaphysical

He suggested something practical which,
if taken at face value, ought to be paid attention to
you scientist, you theologian

Lao Tzu says,

“When you speak its name
it’s not there. That’s not it.

That right there, which you’ve just named
is nothing split.”

And, as if to cover the old poet’s back,
Buddha said, “Nothing in the world
is created. Nothing is created.”
(the last three words of which
is an oxymoron of enormous proportions)

Finally, the Hebrews said, “Never speak the name
of the Lord.”

All three bits of advice are invaluable
to have and take to heart
for any scientist or theologian
who sets out to pick nothing apart

by Jim Culleny, 11/25/13

by Tom Jacobs

I have been thinking about memory quite a bit lately. More specifically, my memory and the objects of its interest and desires, and the ways that it fails or warps or enables me to see/hear/re-experience what actually happened in the past, whatever that phrase might actually mean.

I mean, whatever actually happened was obviously filtered through my body and mind, and so it’s always going to be incomplete, partial, and aggravatingly not quite the whole story. But all of that is fine to some extent. I understand it and I accept that these are the limitations that each of us face. It’s our condition. What aggravates me is that I want to fling myself carelessly and sometimes with full deliberation into the future, but the past always, always, seems to pull me back in some way, to weigh me down, to fuck up every attempt to experience the bliss of casting oneself thoughtlessly into the future. The past makes everything difficult. Nostalgia, the longing for what’s gone does too.

These are not bad things, or at least not exactly. We’re all hamstrung by the past. There are clear patterns and predictable outcomes that over time become ever more clear and predictable. It’s never too late, that’s true, but there is the sobering and unhappy bromide that, say, if you haven’t done what you really want to do by the time you’re 40, you’ll probably never do it. I think this is bullshit, but there is the faint ring of truth there. Most of us succumb to the quiet understanding that we’re not geniuses, that we will never quite arrive at the spot in the future that we had thought or hoped we might occupy, and then we go about our work accordingly, in whatever small way we know how.

And how do we know where to begin? How do we begin the project of remembering even as we seek to waft away the fog and smoke of the present?

I have such great hopes. But I am over forty now and because it hasn’t worked out just yet and I can see the patterns and repetitions in the rug of my life’s bedraggled course, it seems unlikely that it ever will. I can see it and there are no two ways about it. That’s just the way it is if one looks at it correctly. But who knows?

Read more »

by Mara Jebsen

Every once in a while, a book comes out about the Dulles family. It is in the interests of the writers, of course, to remind the world who the Dulles’ were, because the world has mostly forgotten. There’s the airport, but not that many people know the fellow it is named after. At one time the Dulles’ hobnobbed with the Rockefellers, and were even compared to the Kennedys, but now they aren’t–and nobody minds. Few of their progeny carry the name, and in many ways, the Dulles’ have disappeared. However, every once in a while, historians and political scientists and writers of spy novels like to conjure them, as they get taken with the tales of a forgotten American family, one that included three secretaries of state, a director of the CIA, the head of the Germany desk, and cardinal.

I hate to disappoint, because of course the story of these political men (and one woman) and what they did, and what they meant, is what is most sexy and most scary and most pertinent to most people—but the truth is, I have very little knowledge about it and if I did, I wouldn’t share it. In fact, I am much less interested in Allen Dulles, Director of CIA and John Foster Dulles, secretary of state, than I am in Allen’s wife, Clover (hostess, mother and poet.)

This is largely because I am a woman, and because heredity and legacy, and the randomness of the traces our lives leave behind, is a topic that has always mystified me. Clover Todd Dulles was my great-grandmother, and though I’ve never met her, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at this photograph, trying to read this particular expression.

The picture makes me ask: What kind of person is this and what is it like to be marrying the future director of the CIA under Eisenhower–someone who, some say, will be one of the most powerful men in the world? By most accounts, it is difficult.But no one bothers to make accounts that are even close to complete, because the wives of famous and infamous men are not really of interest. And anyone's marriage is difficult to describe, and thier own business, anyway.

Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi

Mónica was introduced to me, by her sister Isabel, on the kind of clear October day, when a sense of beauty, mirrors its temporal nature. She appeared into my conscience, just as Isabel and I walked past the Old Executive Building, past the White House, past museums and other buildings housing law firms, foundations, security agencies and lobby firms: past their plush and well-appointed interiors and past their very busy, busy staff in the heart of the city.

Isabel and I used to work together; frantically trying to meet deadlines to get things done against timelines and schedules spanning several time zones and trying to secure funding for social safety nets and cash transfers to the poorest people in a country in Africa. There hadn't been a moment to talk about anything else. In fact till about midnight of a date last year—we were doing just this in two separate locations working on our computers, when she was cut off from where I was logged on to. She had retired that day and at midnight, as was the procedure, she was no longer part of the system.

Then, a few weeks ago, Isabel sent me an email and wondered if her book group could read one of my books: On Air. I knew she would have a hard time finding copies on Amazon and so when we met over lunch, I brought along a few copies of another one: Stay With Me.

As we walked to lunch she told me about how she was now working as a human rights activist in Argentina with the institution which her father, a celebrated human rights activist, had founded. I had no idea about this. “I consider myself a human rights activist, but you know how it is. I could not work with Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) before now because I had this job but in reality I had been supporting them in the past on a volunteer basis.”

“Wow,” I said, “Good for you!”

Then she told me about her sister, Mónica María Candelaria Mignone. Her sister worked in the slums of Argentina in 1976 with Catholic priests, nuns and several young adults to organize the poor. Her sister Mónica had been disappeared by the Military Junta on May 14, 1976. Mónica in 1976 was 24 years old. She became one of the 30,000 desaparecidos: the disappeared ones.

Read more »

MOTHER’S SCRIBE

TO HER HUSBAND’S NEW WIFE

I rule an urge to jump in the sea. No
one taught me how to swim, and if
someone had I would be diving

in the Atlantic now lapping the sea
wall around my son’s home in New
York. A rogue assaults my senses,

flouting even American laws, digging
deeper to find more than gold. Spineless
like his father, my son is scared to seize

the rogue. Don’t treat me like a child
I tell Giselle, the maid from Haiti, who
is her own asylum as she wraps a bib

around my neck. How long more must
I bear this circus? My son has promised
to fix my departure date for Kashmir, but

I know he is only teasing, “Stay, now that
you are here,” he says, “No one to care
for you there in deep winter, no power, no

water, no heat, Dal Lake iced over, army
everywhere?” But my heart yearns to walk
under almond trees blossoming, sip noon

chai poured from a samovar at the Shalimar,
receive kisses from my great, great grandchildren,
one at a time on both cheeks. I hope you will

repaint my room, install modern sanitary fittings,
for I am still the head of our household despite
what the rogue whispers, always the whispers.

by Rafiq Kathwari, the first non-Irish winner of the Patrick Kavanagh 2013 Poetry Award

by Debra Morris

The 1953 French thriller Wages of Fear, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, would seem an odd pick for Family Movie Night. But there we sat, side-by-side one Saturday night, to watch a movie I had bought based on the cover photograph and some vague sense of its cinematic status, its reputation as the kind of bold art film that “stays news.” This is the story: after an oil well located in a South American country catches fire, its American owners hire four European men, all down on their luck and effectively stranded in the country, to drive two trucks over mountainous dirt roads, carrying the nitroglycerine needed to explode and thereby cap the well. The first hour, roughly, was high on dialogue and character exposition, exploring the desperation that might lead these men to undertake a suicidal mission, and it was brilliant and gripping to the adults on the couch but our daughter was ready to renounce the film and the evening's experiment: “When is something going to happen?”

The film brought Clouzot international fame. Even sixty years later, in 2010, Empire magazine ranked it #9 among the “100 Best Films of World Cinema.” And it is a masterwork of suspense, one all the more painful for there being hardly any glimmer of redemption throughout the film: at times it is just very difficult to believe that any of the four men will survive. The film refuses, even during that psychological first hour, to show us the hero among them. If it did, this might explain the film's suspense—explain, that is, our willingness to enter into the manifest dangers on the screen, so that we felt and believed them more fully than if we were certain no one would survive. A hero could transform suspense into a more tolerable, if still fraught, anticipation.

Read more »

by Monica Westin

The Way of the Shovel, an ambitious group show focused on artistic production as a mode of “history, archaeology, and archival research” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago last month. Much of the work in the show takes the form of documentary photographs and films that attempt to create alternative historical narratives, filling out our everyday understandings of the world and its pasts. In my interview with him last month, curator Dieter Roelstraete noted that the show, based on his previous e-flux essay of the same name, grew out of his observation that

“in the last ten to fifteen years the rhetoric of art has been rephrased in broad terms using the language of research…I really appreciate the ambition of artists to think of themselves as not just working with forms and ornaments, but also with information…. But while I'm interested in the critical charge of art's claim to be some kind of research, the whole discussion of artistic research is a huge one that is also based in the academization of art in recent years. There's increasing pressure on students to present what they do as some kind of intellectual enterprise, which has its own advantages and disadvantages.”

Roelstraete's salient point is that artists are encouraged to frame their work as research at a time when discourses surrounding art are increasingly influenced by science and other academic disciplines. But what practices should “count” as research, and which are just part of the process of art-making?

Mark Dion, Concerning the Dig, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Installation view, The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, MCA Chicago November 9, 2013 – March 9, 2014.

In the western tradition, we have historically understood artists' contributions to social consciousness as generally either representing/preserving images of the world as it is, or imagining ways it might be otherwise. For the ancient Greeks, art was exclusively concerned with mimesis, or the direct copying of nature, and ancient art criticism judged successful art as that which depicted its subject with the most realism. It wasn't until the second century AD that the sophist Philostratus first argued, in his biography of the mystic Apollonius, that phantasia, or creative imagination, was a more important quality in the artist than mimesis. (And it arguably took centuries after that before western artists themselves began to make this argument for their work and to break from imitation in their practices.) The western history of art can often largely be read as a tension between changing technologies of mimetic representative realism (increasing understanding of perspective in the Renaissance, the invention of the photograph) and intellectual movements towards new modes of phantasia or reaching for that which is beyond the skills of technological reproduction (Mannerism as a reaction to the Renaissance, Impressionism as a reaction to photography).

Read more »

by Dave Maier

Most philosophical chestnuts leave me cold. Their standard formulations usually have some confusion or preconception or equivocation in there somewhere, so that even when the original puzzle makes sense, the real philosophical action has moved on, often to places unrecognizable to the layman (for good or ill). Take the one about whether, when a tree falls in the forest with no one around to hear, it makes a sound. (According to a recent TV ad, yes, to wit: “Aaaagh! [*wham*] … little help? Anyone? Hello?”) My answer: it depends on what you mean by “sound”; in one sense, yes, in another, no. Both uses of the term are perfectly well established – you just can't use them interchangeably. There are of course some live philosophical questions about perception and reality to keep us busy; this just isn't one of them.

Naturally this isn't enough for some people. The answer is “merely semantic,” and doesn't engage the real mystery of subjects in an objective world. The other questions about perception I mentioned – where for my money the “real action” is – don't give us that same buzz. They're boring, technical, overly analytic. Worse, their focus is disappointingly narrow. Whatever the fate of, say, the doctrine of epistemological disjunctivism, we're a long way from the wonder in which philosophy supposedly begins. Whatever happened, these people ask, to the quest for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful?

My own response to this is that if we just keep our eyes on the true (in inquiry), the good (in action), and the beautiful (in lots of places), then the all-caps TGB (whatever, if anything, they turn out to be) can take care of themselves. But other philosophers – let's call them “naturalists” – take a more actively deflationary line against what they see as mystical obscurantism. If there are any mysteries here, they are scientific mysteries, best answered with the no-nonsense tools of empiricial science; and philosophy's task is not to try to deal with these questions itself, but just to clear the way for science. To do otherwise, according to naturalists, leads to metaphysics – or worse, theology.

If we get all that from just the tree in the forest, imagine what happens when our question is the greatest chestnut of them all: why is there anything at all, instead of nothing? Here a theological answer is so close you can taste it – and whether that taste be yummy or foul, that tends to be what underlies the more contentious answers to our question. To the main combatants, who think it of such monumental importance, there doesn't seem to be any room between naturalism and metaphysics.

I bring this up today not because I have suddenly developed a philosophical interest in this question (that is, the chestnut itself), but instead because I have just begun physicist Lawrence Krauss's 2012 book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, which comes down firmly on the naturalist side, and I'm already not appreciating the characteristic naturalist tendency to run together resistance to naturalism, on the one hand, with creationism/theology/metaphysics (along with right-wing politics and who knows what else) on the other. (Nor do I accept the converse identification, made by the TGB brigade, of resistance to their metaphysical project, on the one hand, with a nihilistic “scientism” on the other.) My kind of philosopher tends to ignore this particular chestnut completely, so it's not surprising that our sensibility is not well represented in these discussions, but I'd like to get a couple of cents in if I may.

Read more »

by Ben Schreckinger

At the end of the week, in the predawn hours that most of us will spend sleeping off turkey and pumpkin pie, millions of Americans will gather in the dark to kick off Black Friday, the annual day-long frenzy of bargain-hunting that marks the beginning of the holiday season. Many economists wish they wouldn't.

Not because Black Friday, in which shoppers literally climb over each other to get at plastic toys and electronic gadgets, is an affront to human dignity. Not because it perpetuates crass materialism. But because, according to an influential strain of economic thinking, the act of gift-giving creates a dead-weight loss.

The seminal paper in this vein is Joel Waldfogel's “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas,” which goes so far as to estimate — based on interviews of Yale undergrads — that Christmas gifts represent a waste of many billions of dollars annually. Waldfogel's indictment of Christmas presents reads like a wonkier cousin of Jonathan Swift's modest proposal that the Irish eat their own babies — but it's totally sincere.

It was published just in time for Christmas in 1993. The Soviet Union had dissolved on Boxing Day only two years earlier. The market had kicked central planning's butt, which was great news for Americans, and especially great news for American economists. But it turned out to be bad news for Santa, because according to the logic of the market, Christmas is an obstacle to maximum efficiency.

That logic is straightforward: A person has a very good idea of her own needs, and given $100 to spend on herself, she'll spend that money on the things she wants most. But someone else spending $100 on a gift for that person probably has inferior knowledge of that person's preferences, and will buy them something they value less. The better option, then, is to give the recipient $100 and let her spend it for herself.

In 2001, The Economist reexamined the case against gifts and came up with a somewhat more nuanced conclusion. Their analysis elaborates on special cases where a giver might be able to make more efficient use of the money — by giving the recipient what he really wants but won't buy for himself, for example — a possibility that Waldfogel acknowledges. It also stumbles upon the insight that gift-giving itself can give an item sentimental value. In the way that it can sometimes read like The Alien's Guide to Being Human, the magazine advises readers to “Try hard to guess the preferences of each person on your list and then choose a gift that will have a high sentimental value.”

On this line of thinking, indifference curves still offer a useful tool for understanding gift-giving: If we add sentimental value to our model and run the figures again, we might be able to save Christmas after all. But in reality, dead-weight loss and Christmas just don't belong in the same sentence. To understand why, it's helpful to look to the work of UCLA anthropologist Alan Fiske, who's observed that human relationships follow four basic models that correspond to four sets of values: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing.

Read more »