I'm reading now in preparation for a small-group colloquium on the work of Kenneth Boulding on the concept of the grants economy. Found this pregnant paragraph, that seems to shed some light on what I've meant to be up to in this space from time to time:
The pathology of exchange is familiar--depressions, inflation, unemployment, maldistribution of income, inadequate public goods, and so on. The pathology of the grants economy is less familiar because we have not thought about it so much in these terms. Nevertheless, it is equally relevant . . . . Our evaluation of the relative merits and the relative proportions of grants and exchange in the total system will depend a great deal on our evaluation of the relative efficiencies and the relative proneness to pathological states of the two systems. The absence of any theoretical vision of the grants sector of the economy as a system in its own right has distorted opinion and, in some degree, has prevented the resolution of this dispute. We are highly conscious of the nature and the pathologies of the exchange economy. Because we are much less conscious of the nature and pathologies of the grants economy, the grants economy has had an unfair advantage in this dispute. It is only as we come to see the exchange economy and the grants economy as equal partners in the total social enterprise that we can properly determine the role that should be assigned to each. (The Economy of Love and Fear, Ch 1)