Seven Oaks Magazine.

Ex-millionaire Zell Kravinsky is a revolutionary and a hero. He is also “clearly nuts,” “morally bankrupt,” and “self-loathing,” according to a swarm of eloquent letter writers who were outraged at his portrayal as the millionaire who gave it all away... and then some in the August 2nd edition of the New Yorker. In 1994, at the age of forty and having abandoned a career in academia, Kravinsky dove into a numbers game – the real estate market – and, over the course of eight years, used his love of numbers, ratios, and probabilities to accumulate over 45 million dollars in assets.

He then gave all of it away.

But that wasn’t enough: Kravinsky needed to give more. On July 22, 2003, Kravinsky snuck out of his house, and against the express wishes of his wife, crept down to the Albert Einstein Medical Centre in Philadelphia and proffered his right kidney to a stranger.

For Kravinsky, the choice to give his kidney was all about numbers too. He reasoned that he had a one in four thousand chance of dying due to the kidney-removal operation while the recipient was facing a one-in-one chance of dying from kidney failure. In an interview with The New Yorker, Kravinsky stated that for him, “the reasons for giving a little are the reasons for giving a lot and the reasons for giving a lot are the reasons for giving more.”

And if you look carefully around your neighbourhood at present, you may find evidence of more and more people belonging to Kravinsky’s genus: the pathologically generous.

Generosity has become fashionable. ‘Giving’ is no longer an act of charity, a grand gesture to be measured in post-dated cheques and telethon-smiles. ‘Giving’ is now a political act. Passing around ‘free stuff’ has become a way to undermine production and subterfuge in a capitalist economic system; it is a way to be anarchic and mainstream; it is a cerebral ecological response to the mounds of dustbin-bound material each of us herds from residence to residence. Simply ‘giving’ stuff away has become a way to fool our friends into thinking we’re somehow efficient. It is hip.

Under the banner of “ecology, economy, and consumer efficiency” the freecycle (free + recycle) movement has infected our little Southwestern corner of Canada, extending its sweet succulent tendrils to caress even the most un-needy, cheap Vancouverite. Based in virtual-land, freecyclers post “offer,” “wanted,” and “taken,” emails – around twenty a day, or so – to a mail list. After a sharp surge of 600 new memberships following a Vancouver Sun profile at the end of July, the Vancouver City freecycle group presently boasts over 1600 members.

Freecycling is a concept that combines recycling and garage-sale enthusiasm, with the strict rule of permitting no outright economic exchange, i.e. no bartering. Anyone with access to the Internet and enough online savvy can join a Freecycle Yahoo Group for their city – most major North American cities have groups now – and post or receive emails about free stuff, and even attempt to meet up to exchange this “free stuff,” which could be anything from canning jars to a talking Franklin the Turtle doll to plums (still on the tree in the backyard) to “anything orange” for Camp Orange at the Burning Man festival.

Everything works smooth as clockwork until people stop showing up at agreed-upon times and places to exchange stuff. Then a woman posts a “wanted” ad for baby clothes, and gets replies only from people offering to sell baby clothes. Later, a man with grammatical deficiencies and spelling mistakes in his email is barked at. As time goes by, a few members start noticing that a particular man – a reseller – is trolling the list, attempting to snap up anything of value as it becomes available, and becoming aggressive when he is denied the “free stuff.” (When he was contacted by individuals asking if he has stuff for sale, he claims he can hook anyone up with pretty much anything: “cash only, no receipts”.)

A “free store” set up on Labour Day in Grandview Park was another recent experiment in giving in Vancouver. Part of the Momentum Magazine and Work Less Party sponsored “Fun for Free” day party, the free store was an improvised three-table garage ‘sale’ with an ever-changing inventory. Throughout the day, over a dozen Lower Mainland residents brought together over $700 worth of amazing-quality clothes, gifts, house wares, and toys that they just felt they didn’t need. Most of the givers couldn’t be bothered with a garage sale: they just wanted to see the stuff disappear as fast as possible. Some givers, on the other hand, wanted to see their cherished – but unneeded – clothes and possessions bring pleasure to others instead.

In terms of efficiency, environmentalism, and economics, the free store, in its limited scope helped stem the flow of a small stream of “junk” on its journey from factory to trash. Additionally, some of those who found items they truly needed, not just wanted, at the free store no longer had to invest money in buying similar “junk” elsewhere.

One online Freecycle member was concerned about the ‘economic’ realities of the free store. He felt that the free store was violating a fundamental cost-benefit law of economics:

The one problem with giving the items away for completely free, in a garage sale format, is that you cannot be sure that the person actually needs the goods... By affixing some positive cost to an item, you can be surer that they will consider their need. The cost could be monetary or, in the case of the freecycle group, the cost is the effort to pick up the item.

What this critic perhaps failed to understand is that some of the ‘givers’ at the free store, in the freecycle group, and even in Philadelphia, are pathological. They give because they are obsessed with making sense; not cents. They dream of efficiency.

Economists (or at least those who insist on the need for economic theories to invade everything) fail to see how catchy ‘giving’ might become once all vestigial traces of economics – all costs – are erased. Giving then becomes romantic, untraceable, un-quantifiable, and most of all desirable.

Zell Kravinsky is perhaps a bit too romantic in his giving: he has sometimes thought that he ought to sacrifice his own one life so that his harvested organs - once divided - could rescue at least four others. And that’s the danger of involving economics – costs, benefits, and numbers – into the theory of giving. Economics, applied dangerously, liberally, or just-plain-wrongly, can make the worst ideas seem amazing, and the best ideas seem absurd.