When I bring this up with my wife she calls me a Grinch 😂

I'm going to send this video to everyone who gives me bicycle-themed junk for Christmas.

“Isn’t it cute how silly little humans behave” is literally my entire discipline of Anthropology summed up.

This kinda happened without any planning, but I found out one of my colleagues at work had the same birthday as me. We were pretty close for co-workers and shared a lot of the same sense of humor and interests in things. Somehow, we hit on a tradition where I would just buy something for myself that I wanted, and bring it to work and thank him for it, and he'd do the same. He got new boots he liked, and I got a cool pair of expensive sunglasses I wanted. This went on for a few years. It was hilarious. I think this is one of your funniest videos yet. Thanks for what you do.

My parents always say I'm hard to buy gifts for because I don't want anything. I always respond that that makes me VERY EASY to buy gifts for, because they can get me NOTHING and I'll be happy. That's what I think they should have done for Kenny Malone in the podcast episode: the one thing we know for sure about Kenny Malone is that he thinks Christmas gifts are bad, so getting him nothing would show that we understand him and know what he values.

"Sometimes you have 40 peoples to buy for." What? Ok, we're clearly in completely different cultures here. I have to buy for 3 people and I have already no idea what to buy.

I was really tickled at Tolkien for coining a word needed for societies with semi-voluntary gift giving. The kind of gift you generally got was a "mathom." A mathom is a gift that is useless or useless to you that you really can't get rid of except as a regift. He goes on to tie this into a tongue in cheek just so story about the invention of the museum (or, in the Shire -- Mathom House).

I came to this conclusion way back 15 years ago. I decided that in obligatory gift giving situations (family Christmas gatherings) that I would make food for everyone. A common one I did was bake baklava and give it to everyone to take home. This accomplishes several things- it’s more impressive than the effort that I spent time on it bc it seems like it’s really difficult to make (but it’s not), it’s something that everyone in my family likes so there’s economy in time to decide, it’s relatively inexpensive, and it gets used (bc they eat it) so it’s not wasteful.

You are so spot on about the 'being the _____ guy' trope. Mine wasnt star wars, but socks. One time I was one of the groomsmen for a friend of mines wedding. The gift he gave the groomsmen were the cool mint green/blue argyle socks that went with the full ensemble, so I'd wear them from time to time since the socks meant a lot to me and reminded me of my friend. That somehow translated into be being a "socks guy" and now I get argyle and rick and morty socks every year....

My wife and I buy our own gifts and then pretend it was given. She has given me a new Kayak, a new osciliscope, MSVC compiler, a 3D printer ... and she always know exactly what I want :) She is awesome ;)

This is why I love my secret santa exchange with my friends, where all of the gifts are so intimately picked out for comedy value that you're basically paying $20 to make them laugh hysterically rather than picking something generic from a list based on a small thing they like. For example, one year I got "The Monolith", an 8 foot tall construction of lumber and aluminum foil that was the most unwieldy abomination, but we were all crying laughing for 10 minutes as it was presented to me.

The gift on the podcast of their own book was clearly the best one. She might not have said it, but I’m sure she went home thinking about how great the exposure for her book was on that episode. Plus, she earned $0.10 on royalties for that purchase.

I've preempted bad gifts from my students by telling them I only want food. I'm down to only one untouched mug a year now!

The ten thousand dollar gift is acceptable because it automatically comes without the expectation of anything in return, or at least without the expectation of anything that can bought from a store for that amount of money. Such a large gift is almost always really a. A form of generational wealth transfer b. An act of charity c. A bribe d. Some combination of the above 😊

My partner and I have stopped giving each other holiday specific gifts (yes, including birthdays) years ago. We just do nice things for each other throughout the year and that's good enough. We get weird looks and awkward convos when discussing this with other people though. I do appreciate my mom who, since my childhood, has asked for a specific gift list. My family and I won't be surprised, but then we'll actually get what we want. She's also been buying us more 'experiences' (tickets to events or plays, etc.) which can often be better than a gift too, with less potential waste. I don't mind not being blown away by a surprising perfect gift if it means way less trash.

huge factor missing in the gift value equation is the anxiety and energy spent on figuring out what gift to give and worrying about whether it'll be good and what reaction it'll have sure some people enjoy that, but for others this vastly outweighs any value that could be gained from gifts and shaming people for not giving or not "putting in enough effort" is exactly the cause of the problem

I may be very Northern European™ but I do believe that if you're giving a gift, either it has to be either: 1) on the recipient's public wishlist 2) liquid assets. Gift cards and cash fit in envelopes, people. Nobody ever got mad about recieving a "here's 100€, buy yourself something nice." Also, all social subsidies programs that don't give out cash are fundamentally paternalistic and disrespectful of the autonomy of poor people.

I steal everything I gift to other people so the store gets paid from the insurance and if the person recieving the 2 lbs of brown rice doesn't like it and throws it away nothing is lost . 100 % efficiency achieved .

I think another reason why Christmas gifts are bad is that we ask people for their Christmas Lists. I mean, you even did it when you asked what would make us jump for joy. But what really makes you jump for joy is the surprise of getting the perfect gift that you never even considered. And when we spend more time making christmas lists, we end up spending more time trying to figure out what we want than the people who get us the gift spend, which leads to a loss in happiness.

the internet having ruined Christmas is something that's frustrated me for years and it is so vindicating to hear it discussed in such detail. Thank you Dr. Collier

The way I've personally tried to solve this problem is "give a gift that has use value" and that's pretty much the only marker. I just want someone to get a thing they're going to use. Easier for kids when I know their hobbies and I can get them something they can't get themselves (because they don't have money and would have to ask their parents), but for adults I look for things that have use value. A nice towel, consumables like tea are always killer because if its good tea hey they'll drink it every once in a while and then it's gone and they'll enjoy it, cool socks (be it comfy or just high quality) and always make sure it's a small amount of thing. A single nice towel, 8 cups of tea worth of tea, 1 pair of socks, etc. So far I've had a lot of success with this type of gift, though not perfect success. But if we're going to keep giving gifts, I feel like this is a good heuristic to go off of. General gift that person would kind of like and also use.

As a "generic man" the only gift I want for Christmas, New Years, birthday, whatever gift giving occasion... is socks. Seriously, just buy me socks. I don't want mall ninja crap, tacti-cool beard trimmers, scented anything, I just want goddamn socks. I don't care what they look like, they can have floral patterns, squares, triangles, tartan, they can be with cats, dogs, capybaras, blue, green, black, gray, I don't care, buy me socks. I don't care what thickness they are, if they're thick winter ones I'll put them on immediately, if they're light summer ones, I can wait till summer. Just buy me socks.

I find all sorts of gift-giving in general to be stressful. When I was a kid, it was good, and it was able to introduce me to new things-I was a kid! Most things were new to me. Civilization IV was, in terms of the amount of enjoyment I got, one of the best gifts ever. Now, though, I doubt anything could come close to that, because... I already know what I like. And now I also need to reciprocate, which is incredibly stressful.

My family stopped doing Christmas gifts a few years back and the holidays have been so much more fun. When we stopped, I was still living at home while I got through college, and that meant I was an adult with just a bed room, so I had no space for random stuff I didn't need or wasn't exactly the object I needed. Aside from making it hard to shop for me, actually it made receiving gifts stressful. Now I either needed to decline to dispose of it or find a spot for it, and the only socially acceptable one took up valuable space I didn't have. My sister in law did that thing at their wedding where they showered everyone in tchotchkes commemorating the day, which is a much more important day for them than me, I'm just a guest there. But it's also stuff I mostly still have because it's got my name on it, literally, and it's faux pas to throw it out. And that's annoying: I didn't need it, I was perfectly happy just showing up and having food and company. I guess in the end I'm just saying that a bad gift can literally have negative value, and good gifts don't happen on a calendar schedule.

we're not against economics, however, economics is usually regarded as a social science because it's ultimately about human behavior. --signed, a psychologist

Not only a waste of money, the cost of producing these unwanted items only for them to wind up in a landfill.

You put into words what I've been feeling for so long. There's a wood toy and a book that have been sitting still wrapped on my shelf for more than one christmas. The only person who got me gifts I end up using is my sister, who got me socks with my cats faces on them and glasses that are slightly larger than the ones I used before. It also took me 10 years to finally get my family to understand that I wasn't into Star Wars anymore

It looks to me like the problem isn’t that Christmas gifts are being given, it’s that the threshold for “knows person enough to get them a gift” is WAY too low. If it were only a handful of people, the gifts could be much better.

Loved what you said bout federal financial assistance programs. Its so crazy that they’re inefficient because of some fucked up concept of “deserving” it or not??? The economics of “deserving” is real and lowkey insane lmao 😭😭

Personally, for a long time I've thought waiting to do (almost obligatory) gift giving until christmas was silly. I much prefer the idea of if I happen to see something while I'm doing whatever shopping that makes a certain person come to mind so strongly that I know I have to get this thing for them, and give it to them the next time I see them. I think little random gifts throughout the year like that can mean more because it's not done out of a feeling of social obligation. I also think of it as sporadic potential pick-me-ups because we all have stuff going on generally and it's nice to know that someone's reminded of you by something.

For an example of a great Christmas present I got as an adult, several years ago my sister-in-law scrolled through my Pinterest pages and found a pin I’d saved to my stuff I love board that was a cool scarf I saw on Etsy that looked like a fox curled up on its tail. She crocheted me her own version of it. I was stunned and so excited when I opened it. I still wear it all the time.

In my social circle, we reached the same conclusion years ago. Now, we only get gifts for the kids, and our dearest loved ones. We get to spend more time enjoying each other's company, instead of stressing over holiday shopping. I would also like to add that IMO secret santa is one of the worst forms of "holiday waste". It usually involves cheap gifts, selected with little care or knowledge. Most of the stuff goes straight into the trash. But some people actually enjoy the silliness, despite the egregious waste.

I have a master's in economics and know we disagree on a lot of economics. This was very well done and thought out. I want to quibble mildly with your equation. You put time and effort of the gift giver as value to add to the gift, those are actually costs that are added to the gift which make them more expensive not more valuable. What you are missing is the value the gift giver gets in the act of researching and presenting a good gift. There is non-intrinsic value both for the gift giver and receiver and for their relationship which generally is worth more than the time effort and physical value of the gift itself. Also, you're right, I only get gifts for my kids and significant others and make all of my family just give me money so I can get gifts for my kids and put their names on them because I'm a dirty economist who doesn't trust them to not buy a bunch of junk to fill my house with. Great job!

A video specifically for me, what a lovely christmas gift :) I thought I hated gifts for a long time, but I've learned that giving on my own terms when I can actually afford to put thought into it massively changes the playing field for me, and I've been able to give some damn good gifts in the last year or two. My current favorite is a bottle of authentic balsamic vinegar that I got for my dad, which is not something anyone else would have gotten for him, including himself.

As a man who can't grow beard at all, receiving a beard trimming kit wouldn't be just a bad gift, it would be a personal attack 😅. But more seriously, December stresses me out, the anxiety of choosing gifts and the cost... I'd rather we just all put a little bit of money to get an extra good feast on Christmas eve and that's it.

Calling gift giving inefficient is *exactly* why people dislike economics. For all the complex math, it's understanding of society and humans is fundamentally flawed. Not everything has to be efficient. A fully efficient society according to economists would be an utter dystopia for most people even if all material needs were met.

I've told people to stop buying me gifts because (a) I am a grown up and if I want something I can either afford to buy it for myself, or it's too expensive for anyone I know to buy it as a gift; (ii) most gifts I receive I don't want; and (iii) getting rid of stuff I don't want (even giving it to charity or selling on eBay) makes me feel bad.

The internet didn't ruin gift giving to me, it was ruined for me long before the internet. Family and the social mandatory need to make you get everyone a gift regardless whether you can afford it or have the time for it instead of getting someone a gift because I genuinely think they'll like a thing is why gift giving was ruined for me

Gift giving isn’t, like "a weird human quirk", it's about pack-bonding. I encourage people to look to anthropological and sociological literature on this. Many of the critiques of specific gifts and how we give gifts in late stage capitalism are valid, but when the economists here venture into hypothesizing why people behave the way they do it's painfully off base.

in my late teens i started telling people i wanted nothing. in my 20s i told people "if you really want to get me what i want for christmas, you'll get me nothing" and people really did stop giving me stuff. i have a rule that i don't get other people gifts for special calendar days. if there's a great gift for them at christmas time, i'll buy it and hold onto it until after christmas is over and there's no gift-giving calendar day. if you get them a gift when there's no expectation for you to, then it's more real.

I went through a phase of being extremely cynical about christmas gifts, but I've mellowed on it in the past few years. While I agree with a lot of what you say, and I generally fall into the camp of believing we should all buy a lot less junk in general, I also think that the whole practice of exchanging gifts is just as much a ritual as it is an economics formula about value. And rituals are usually never rational, or efficient, or practical. Like when ancient cultures burnt the animals they'd hunted to offer them up to the gods - nobody was fed from that practice, all the effort put into that hunt was in a literal sense completely wasted. But the ritual mattered in a way that transcended whether the value of those animal carcasses was maximized. It created bonds between people - and feelings of connection between those people and the world around them - that are hard to quantify. That's how I think about gift-giving, now. I tell my family I don't want any gifts, just to spend time with them. They always buy me something anyway. And I think that's sweet, because it's just an attempt by them to be close to me by sharing this ritual. So even if it's some dumb beard kit that I'm just going to re-sell on the internet in January, the act still means something and the connection it creates is still real.

God, I just realized I have been so autistic I truly ignored every social rule about gift giving in order to give gifts as effectively as possible

Socks. Who doesn't need socks? Warm, wooly socks, thin dressy socks, everyone loves socks for Christmas.

Perspective is important. As a child, I was fortunate enough to interview my great grandmother who was born in 1912. I still have the recording. She was one of 9 children, and they lived in a 2 room (not two bedroom) apartment. Her oldest siblings had to drop out of school in 8th grade to get jobs. Anyway. She talked about how spoiled everyone is today (using the word "spendthrift" as an insult). She said she remembered her favorite Christmas present. An orange. I guess my point is that to someone who is poor, socks can be an amazing Christmas present. I saw a video where most homeless shelters say their number one need in winter is quality socks.

So good! I even love your reaction to the pro-gifter’s arguments - he is not extrapolating to the practice of gift giving as a whole, he has instead contrived a very deliberately “outlier” gift-giving event (spending no doubt far more time and thought on this one than any others that he gives routinely) to argue his point, misrepresenting the practice of Christmastime gift-giving. I do have a coworker who surprises our small night shift crew every year with the most unbelievably thoughtful gifts. Like ancient Roman coins for a history buff and a portrait of Tecumseh for our guy who is obsessed with him. (that second gift, if I’m being cold as ice, I would never say is a “good gift” - as you said, decor is HIGHLY personal and wall space is limited. There is so little chance of another person’s choice being what you would ideally prefer for your shared living space). That said, I’m the only woman on the shift, with main interests of history and science, but I got a stack of end-cap pop books on gardening. 🤷‍♀️ I like gardening, but I had to downsize to a small apartment - so, no garden, and I also used to have a spare room as a “library” and now I don’t, so I just have an assload of books I have no space for. So there’s an example of a THOUGHTFUL gift, but showing how he couldn’t necessarily know the circumstances that make this gift not only impractical but a bit of a burden (sitting in a teetering stack that gives me anxiety, waiting to be sold). And to your point, books which interest me, I have hundreds saved in wish lists, and most of the books I’d care to actually read that are gardening-adjacent, I already own. (soil culture, mycelium layer, creating vernal pools - things I can’t do in an apartment but which interest me aspirationally, and much like any other non-fiction read might). The point is, it was thoughtful yes, and I appreciated it. But, it did sorta have the net effect of making me feel yet again “othered” as a woman working among all men, treated as not being able to like “boy things” (which means anything smart or cool 🤷‍♀️). They got cool history stuff, I got pop culture picture books on gardening. His gifts to them excelled partly bc he thought he would like them himself, but for me, he bought for me “as a woman,” and these books all definitely felt like end-cap Barnes & Noble “gifts for her” purchases. It’s a bummer that every night we’re avidly discussing all of the same things and yet I alone am given gifts which are simpler and woman-centric. I wasn’t angry, it just happened to be a bummer, a very small blip of “same ole same ole” finding out how men can still tend to have a reductive view of me as a woman even after sharing hundreds of hours of conversation that show our interests are staggeringly similar.

The secret to gift giving is buying those $15 galaxy lamps at Walmart. Every time there is a secret santa thing going on, people end up fighting over the damn lamp.

On the topic of men's gifts. As a man, LEGO is the perfect man's gift. Hell it is the perfect gift in general for any gender. They target some sets towards adults, you use your brain just enough for it to be fun, you can take it apart and make something new later, they look good on a shelf, and the resale value almost always goes up because people love LEGO. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

The really horrible thing is children having to buy gifts for their parents. Every year my brother and I would buy my dad an engraved pen until I heard my dad say that The Shadows were a decent band and then, suddenly, all his gifts were Shadows albums, which is awkward because they weren't making new albums so it was always the same songs. Basically my dad can't express an interest in anything or that becomes all his gifts. Like last month when my nephews bought him a Billy Connolly book and he just added it to his stack of Billy Connolly books (before that it was Spike Milligan)

BABE WAKE UP ANOTHER DR. COLLIER VIDEO

i dont know, i've been able to get that jump-for-joy type feeling and reaction as an adult giving gifts to other adults. i mean, they dont usually literally jump, but the feeling is the same. the important thing here is the gifts are usually not just objects. things like personally annotated books we can discuss, hand-painted keychains each of us has, watercolor paintings of pictures we took, a homemade meal inspired by a series we both like, etc. with the exception of the annotated books, all of them take a few hours max. im not saying nothing in this is right, just that that gift giving feeling is very much possible is as an adult without much free time

we live in a society of bourbon smelling star wars tie wearers

Thank you for making this video. Now I can succinctly describe why I really hate gift giving. I'm definitely the person who just buys what they want and who's hard to buy gifts for. And I hate trying to figure out what to buy others -- so some of my gifts have been a bit paternalistic. It's so true that all gifts are just to try and reach the heights of giving gifts to kids.

This is why I just make my gifts every year, durable hand-made things. This year I'm making stone mortar and pestle sets. Carved from literal rocks I pull from the river.

I love your disclaimer. I also always preface everything with "I'm barely an expert in my field, so take this next thing I'm about to say about this broader, unrelated topic with a grain of salt."

I may be a weird person, but I grew up with “wasted gifts” and they became a weird connection years later. I remember my grandmother never used her foot bath with massage and heater, but I did after I realized no one used it and decided to use it. That goes for weird unopened cds, exercise equipment (bands no one used), or the weird jewelry box I later used to store screws for projects. My grandpa bought my grandma a stereo photograph kit and the only thing that survived when I was around where the cards. I ended up using eBay to find a stereoscope and it was a weird moment. I think the gift was decontextualized from the original experience and gained something new (due to the novelty of a no longer used technology). I like those things, they will be the leftovers of society much like the leftovers we sometimes find in the current day. The Atari ET game survived longer than most games because in terms of archival because it was the gift left in its packaging and tossed but became the subject of a lot of people trying to find the landfill with ER games. I think sometimes there is an underestimation of the knock on effects of bad gifts. They may not be realized right away, but I think a lot of ET kid owners got satisfaction over the years as their most hated video game had a weird story that a lot of people wanted to hear. People and their quirks are more interesting than ways that can be tracked by asking a person their opinion. I think a central part of gift giving is the understanding that sometimes it will find a weird new home (island of misfit toys).

Every so often I think "I could use a beard grooming kit" and then I remember that I own two of them, both of which I used once, lost an essential piece immediately, and shoved into the back of the cabinet.

In my family for decades only kids get gifts .the adults gather and have dinner . that is all. It is a nice tradition. When i started living in North America for the first time i saw adults get gifts on christimas .it was really weird .

My complaint in calling Economics a “hard science” is that it treats people as if they are just variables in an equation, or beings whose behavior is perfectly rational and predictable. Reducing human behavior down to complex math equations doesn’t make sense. Like, foundational ideas like “barter economies” have been proven to be myths, and yet they still serve as the rationale for modern economic theory.

My Swedish family (I'm American) all buy and wrap one gift that we would like. 1) We put them on table. 2) We sit around the table. 3) 1 person roles a dice. -) If it's a 6 you pick a gift on the table to open. -) If it's a 1 you steal a gift. 4) We move counterclockwise around the table until all the gifts are gone. The gift giving becomes secondary to the tradition but when someone does get a good gift it has a story behind it. It adds a fun version of the trading element. It also allows people to spend significantly less while still keeping in the holiday spirit.

We've been doing secret santa between the adult members in the family (9 people) for a few years and it's made gift giving much better, because when it's just the one person that you know pretty well it's easy to get a gift that makes some sense, and you can spend a bit more time or money than if you were getting something for everyone. There's a wish list so you can get the specific thing requested or something else if you have a good idea. We tried a year of no gifts for adults but at least I missed it, because the gift exchange is really the only tradition we have left.

I hate buying gifts and the older people get the trickier they are to buy for and don't even get me started on secret Santa!!

Another banger this video is so good. I really do love the physics videos but I'm a data scientist by trade and really about 70% of it realistically flies over my head so these videos where you introduce us all to like the base level of something else you're interested in is always so entertaining. One of my favourite channels on youtube!!

I've always thought that the dollar value of christmas gifts you got as a kid was equivalent to the amount of money you managed to obtain as a kid per year.... I doubt many kids prior to early teens gets more than a few hundred dollars a year they can spend on their own. The magic of christmas would be re-experienced as an adult if you got gifts equal to your annual earnings each December 25th! :)

In my close family, we never give gifts. We have a meal together, sometimes go for pizza, sometimes a movie. Essentially, we just enjoy our time together.

The best gifts are handmade, the second best gifts are consumables

32:58 But that IS gift giving! At least in my family. Everyone makes a wishlist about 1-2 month before christmas and we've got groupchats for each person where we (everyone except the person whose wishlist we're discussing) communicate, who bought / made what for the person. That way we only give things that are actually wanted and we don't accidentally give double gifts. Unfortunately our extended family isn't in on that and they do sometimes get us gifts that aren't particularly liked, but in that case, trading is explicitly allowed and encouraged. Why do gifts NEED to be surprises? Is this some american culture thing that I don't get?

Thank you acollierastro, I am now buying my wife a beard trimming kit this Christmas 👍 my marriage has been saved

Angela, you are so right! In fact I have been refusing to participate in Christmas for about thirty years now, for the very reasons you’re talking about. I really love the reactions that I get when I say to people “oh, I don’t do Christmas.”

years ago a rift formed in my student house over whether this is too rediculous of a way to do christmas presents. My housemate wanted some new jeans. He went to the shops, tried some on, bought them, brought them home, gave them to his parents, they gave him cash for them, then his parents wrapped them up, and then he upwrapped them on christmas day.

The best gift Is a lava lamp. It's cheap, somewhat useful, quirky, interesting, can be catered to the personality like a hot pink one for a girl or a black one for a guy, and its collectable so it works even if someone has one already. I only gift lavalamps. Doesn't matter who, nothing but lava lamps, all the time, forever. Nobody has noticed yet.

I remember specifically asking for plain socks on Christmas from my aunt when I was in my late teens/early twenties. I can use socks. I wear socks every day, some of them get holes so I need more. Socks were a great gift for me. I also remember hearing "Well, I can't always get you socks, what kind of present is that?". It would've been a good one. But we can't have that, can we.

I love this video. My family and extended family know that I don’t buy gifts for birthdays and Christmas… but I do periodically find just the right gift for someone, and give it to them on whatever random day is convenient. They always appreciate that special and thoughtful gift given from only love rather than obligation. THAT gift has real value.

I got out of the buying cycle by taking up ceramics as a hobby. At the end of the year, I always had more pieces than I needed, and I would enjoy matching my quirky, not-so-professional mugs and dinnerware with the people in my life who appreciate handmade things.

merry chrysler

Once I had my first full time job if there was something that I wanted which was less than $100 then I would buy it. At that point I asked people to stop buying me gifts. Took a long time for everyone to get on board with it. My mother was the final holdout and continued gifting me things I didn't want or need well into my thirties.

My favorite aunt just asked us what we wanted when we were little, it was great. Eventually she just started sending us checks. Zero waste. She gets me exactly what I want every single year, she's at the top of the gift accuracy leaderboard and it's not even close

Five years ago I picked up online chess as a hobby so, that Christmas, I received 5 different chess boards as gifts. I was left with two options to use these gifts: 1) regularly rotate which board I display in my tiny apartment (lame); 2) train my memory every day for 10 years and hold a mandatory-attendance blindfolded simultaneous exhibition match against everybody that bought me board So far I've done neither but at least I have 5 years left on option 2

My family has determined that we will buy ourselves our own gift to open, and play random board games. You have accentuated arguments to show this is a superior way. Everyone gets something that they will actually use, and we spend fun active time together.

This is why I’m such a huge advocate of food gifts. “That’s not a gift” you say, “you’re just grocery shopping for people” not if you do it right! There’s so many cooking ingredients and food items that I’d love to have but just cannot justify the cost of without an occasion. Fancy olive oil, fancy cheese, saffron, rare spices, all great gifts to me. This also has the problem of only working well for people you know pretty well, but I think it at least mitigates some waste.

Reciprocal gift giving is core to so many human cultures since time immemorial. It isn’t people being irrational and inefficient that is the problem, and trying to turn it into an equation based on dollar values is a hilarious exercise in missing the point. Relentless commodification to the point where everything is reduced to mere exchange value is what ruins gift giving more than anything.

BTW my son in law is a bourbon snob and has won many beard contest, yes there are beard contest so thanks for the ideas.

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved watching my sister freak out whenever she sees a spider. As an adult, one time my sister was coming to visit, and I saw a spider on the wall. I decided not to kill it and was filled with the excited anticipation that my sister will soon see it and freak out. I realized that this anticipation, and the payoff of seeing my sister freak out if she saw it (unfortunately, it turned out that she did not see the spider) would give me way more joy than virtually any Christmas present I've ever received. Therefore, spiders are better than Christmas presents I've told that at a few open mic comedy nights, and it always totally bombs, but I thought maybe you an your fans might understand

If the metric for "bad" gifts is the procurement of economic inefficiencies and waste, then nearly every consumer transaction under capitalism is "bad." There's horrible inefficiencies with labor relations in the production of goods, in extraction of wealth from non-capitalists, and the necessity of overproduction (including forced obsolescence) causing the majority of produced goods to be discarded early or entirely unused. Economics is a bunk science for a lot of reason, but the assumption that "the economy" is something we should value, is at the heart of the bunk. The framework necessary to consider economics a science is the problem, in the same way that phrenology can be internally consistent and reproduceable, by ignoring the societal, systemic factors of slavery.

Gifting Tip: consumables like local beers, wines, cheeses, tea, chocolate or candles are nice to get. They are things people often don't go out of their way to get for themselves. Not because they don't want them but because it's easier to not go to a local farmers market or specialist store for something nice when you're just going groceries shopping. And if they don't like as much as other ones they've tried they at least got the value of trying something.

Stuff like this is why anthropologists hate economists lol

To save money, I buy a big bag of chocolate raisins and wrap them individually in small pieces of toilet paper (no need for expensive wrap). Watching friends and family unwrap the toilet paper to discover my little brown gift always brings me joy. Often they melt, but I can't help that.

Brilliant, thank you! This video is why I'm so wild about your channel. It's been a long time since I've been in such enthusiastic agreement with someone, watching and thinking yes, yes, YES! Edited to add: As other commenters have said, this video is such a gift! Perfect and completely unexpected!

At Christmas, I usually focus on two or three people to get really thoughtful gifts that I probably got in July because it was so perfect for them when I saw it, and then get useful things for everyone else. My go to is gourmet or luxury cooking things that they love but never can justify splurging on. And I try to rotate who gets the extra attention each year. One of my favorite gifts I gave was 5 years ago or so. My niece really loved slime, and it helped with her sensory issues. I put together a massive slime making kit, I’m talking gallons of the PVC glue, the styrofoam balls, a crapload of mica colors, scents, storage containers, and recipes, etc. it was fun for me to research and she was ecstatic and it took like two years for her to use it all up.

I’ve noticed in the progress of your video so far is that the essence of the quality of emotion attached to the gifts is tied far more to the time given than the currency spent. 25:43 my grandmother was a painter on porcelain and she made dolls for the girls in the family and I was the only boy for a long time and she painted a China plate for me and put on images of all the things I liked that she painted and she put on all the things from an era a generation before mine so it looked kinda wrong but she made it into a clock and that’s a cool gift I got at probably age 10

If you want to get out of the bad gift cycles, may I recommend getting together with your loved ones and all chipping in for a special shared experience? We all contribute to a Christmas vacation fund yearly and use the money to do something together. Examples include going to an ice skating rink, laser tag, theme park, maybe traveling to the tropics. Whatever your budget is, it should be tailored to how much you money raise in the family. You get to create lasting memories doing something you normally don't do because of time or money. You bugget food into the experince too, so everyone gets good nutrition for that event. And no one has to figure out what to do with junk.

i love this channel because it reinforces the opinions i already have

Home made gifts are the best. My favorite gift this year was an embroidered version of The Pale Blue Dot my sister made for me.

The issue with calling economics a hard science is that it models human behavior in a way that contradicts most of what we know from anthropology and history.

This video was the only gift I needed. Thank you. 😊

I think there's a happy medium between asking someone what they want and giving it to them and guessing a gift based on experience, and that's just asking for a wish list. When giving a guft based on a wish list, the gift you give still feels like a gift because the receiver has no idea what thing(s) on the list you're going to choose. Things on the list often are vague too, so it's still your job to determine which version of a thing is right for their needs. In addition, you don't have to strictly follow the list. You can also notice a pattern and find something similar. As for the question of "why doesn't the receiver buy things for themselves", the answer is that people are more likely to spend extra for gifts than they are for things for themselves. For example, I think music on vinyl is really neat, but I can never justify to myself paying extra when I can listen to the same music digitally. However, I still feel like that would be a meaningful gift to me, so I put it on my wishlist. I agree that we shouldn't feel obligated to give gifts to 40 people, though. Getting a gift from a cousin or something kind of sucks because they're always kind of generic and then I feel bad for not giving them anything.

Hot Take: Gift giving is great if you have friends with expertise you don’t. For instance, I know almost nothing about painting but kinda enjoyed watercoloring once or twice. Asked for water color supplies and my mother in law (who has been recreationally painting for the better part of a decade) knew exactly what to get with no work on my part! Plus, this opens the door for bonding as that invites the gifter to introduce the giftee to the hobby!

For creative types, if one has the time, handmade gifts are the cheapest and most effective gifts one can give someone. Otherwise, the best thing to do is to think about the person closest to oneself to give a good gift.

The coolest gift that i ever got as an adult was my aunt who sends all of the family pottery sent me a greedy/pathagorean coffee cup within the handle of the cup and i had to call her immediately and thank her profusely for it and ask her how it was made it was so sick.

About 15 or 20 years ago, I started feeling the high degree of stress around the Christmas gift thing and even about going into department stores at that time of year. So I decided to ask my friends, the close ones that I would've bought a gift for, if we could just do something together. Go for a holiday tea or special meal, go to the art museum, go to a movie, drive around and see the Christmas lights - but something where we were spending time together. And these days, isn't our time just about the most valuable thing we can give each other?

Yeah I agree with where I think you're aiming here (I'm 33 minutes in), we should measure the value of gifts from the perspective of the giver, not the receiver. And in most cases I think you're getting your money's worth in the satisfaction of giving, whether it's selfless or selfish. There's basically no risk or uncertainty, I buy a $10 gift, I get $10 worth of satisfaction of giving it to them.