For the holiday season, some goodies this weekend:

• First up, some music for the season: the blogger Lirone, of Words That Sing, in collaboration with William Morris, composer in residence at the British Humanist Association (did you know the British Humanist Association had a composer in residence? me neither!), has written a humanist carol, Gathering Round the Fire. It's 99 cents on iTunes, and all profits will go to the BHA. I downloaded and listened to it, and I enjoyed it greatly. Check it out, support a good cause, and lend a little bit of humanist cheer to your holiday gathering!

• Next, CNN has a surprisingly sympathetic interview with Richard Dawkins on evolution and atheist advocacy.

• The Daily Mail's Andrew Alexander offers a "heartfelt plea for atheism", an eloquent essay only slightly marred by an ignorant passage about climate change.

• Hanna Rosin asks whether the prosperity gospel contributed to the economic crash.

• On Daily Kos, it's a shameful day for the Irish Catholic Church, as a long-awaited report is released about the complicity of the bishops in sex abuse by predator priests.

• And finally, from Time, an unsparing essay about the subjugation and abuse of women in Islamic countries. (Did you know a Saudi Arabian woman has no legal proof of her existence besides her name on her husband's ID card? I didn't.) This is the kind of thing that the New Atheists get called "shrill" and "strident" when we write.

Also, you may have noticed that posts on Daylight Atheism are now classified by tag in addition to the six major categories (also, there's a tag cloud). I implemented this as a result of suggestions in the reader feedback thread, and I've been working my way backwards tagging older posts. Before I go further with that, I'm interested if people have any opinions on it. Too many tags? Too few? Are some missing that you'd like to see included? Personally, I'm still considering whether to add the "Science" tag to the posts on Lee Strobel.

Since I've endorsed Kiva in the past (and I stand by that endorsement), for transparency's sake it's worth linking to this post from David Roodman (see also the related article from the Times).

The quick summary is that the connection between Kiva lenders and loan recipients isn't as direct as you might have thought. Although the individuals listed on the site are real and their business proposals are genuine, their loan requests don't necessarily sit in limbo until they're funded by Kiva users. (This would, as the article rightly notes, be both demeaning and inefficient.) Instead, Kiva's partner MFIs often make the loans out of their own funds, then post the information on Kiva's site so that users who donate money end up reimbursing them for that amount. This wasn't exactly a secret - Kiva does say that loans may be disbursed before they're fully funded by users - but it also wasn't being made as clear as it could have been. I can personally attest to this, as it took me by surprise.

That said, this knowledge doesn't disturb me. There's really no reason why it should: after all, money is fungible. It doesn't make any difference whether I'm donating money directly to an entrepreneur in the developing world, or giving it to an MFI that's funding that entrepreneur, thus freeing up an equivalent amount of capital for that MFI to make other loans. If the amount being given is the same and the end recipients are the same, then the outcomes are identical. (One thing that did surprise me is that MFIs will sometimes repay lenders out of their own pocket when a loan recipient defaults - but this is just good business practice, and there's certainly no reason for us lenders to object.)

This news doesn't make any difference to my intent to continue lending through Kiva, but since I've invited other atheists to do likewise, I thought it worth passing on. If it matters to you, please take this into account.

There are couple of news items this week that I thought merited a brief mention.

First, in the New Yorker, James Wood provides another piece of evidence for my theory that the only kind of atheists considered "respectable" are the ones who wish they were religious:

What is needed is neither the overweening rationalism of a Dawkins nor the rarefied religious belief of an Eagleton but a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief.

And while we're on the topic of concern trolling, here's a superb example from the masters of the tactic, the Discovery Institute:

Coyne is an evolutionary biologist of the first rank, but that is where his competence ends. His arguments against the existence of God are embarrassing, and, like the arguments of Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists, are eliciting a backlash among intellectuals who have at least a modicum of philosophical and theological education.

...The damage that Coyne and other New Atheists are doing to their own atheist cause is incalculable.

One would think that if we New Atheists are hurting our own cause so much, creationist kooks like this one would stay quiet and let us self-destruct, rather than issuing us dire warnings about how we're ruining the cause of atheism by being all outspoken and passionate and articulate and such. It's a fairly safe bet that whatever ID advocates urge us not to do, that's the thing we should be doing more of.

Lastly, this made my day - an article from the New Republic about Ayn Rand and her cultish right-wing political philosophy. I recommend reading the whole thing if you have the time, but here are some highlights to give you a taste:

The young, especially young men, thrill to Rand's black-and-white ethics and her veneration of the alienated outsider, shunned by a world that does not understand his gifts.

She wrote of one of the protagonists of her stories that "he does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people"; and she meant this as praise.

Her political worldview began to crystallize during the New Deal, which she immediately interpreted as a straight imitation of Bolshevism. Rand threw herself into advocacy for Wendell Wilkie, the Republican presidential nominee in 1940, and after Wilkie's defeat she bitterly predicted "a Totalitarian America, a world of slavery, of starvation, of concentration camps and of firing squads." [Editor's Note: Does this remind you of anything in the news lately?]

Rand's inner circle turned quickly and viciously on their former superior. Alan Greenspan, a cherished Rand confidant, signed a letter eschewing any future contact with Branden or his wife. Objectivist students were forced to sign loyalty oaths, which included the promise never to contact Branden, or to buy his forthcoming book or any future books that he might write. Rand's loyalists expelled those who refused these orders, and also expelled anyone who complained about the tactics used against dissidents.

Rand held up her own meteoric rise from penniless immigrant to wealthy author as a case study of the individualist ethos. "No one helped me," she wrote, "nor did I think at any time that it was anyone's duty to help me."

But this was false. Rand spent her first months in this country subsisting on loans from relatives in Chicago, which she promised to repay lavishly when she struck it rich. (She reneged, never speaking to her Chicago family again.)

and a pitch-perfect summation of the whole movement:

Ultimately the Objectivist movement failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence.

Last month, the U.S. government-funded National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine released a study which found that Americans spent $34 billion annually on alternative medicine. Although this is just 1.5% of total health care spending in the country, it represents over 11% of all out-of-pocket expenditures. The report estimates that about 38 million adults visited alternative practitioners in 2007.

Unusually for a mainstream media outlet, the Boston Globe offers a much-welcomed skeptical perspective on this news, via a quote from Public Citizen which points out the important fact that most of these therapies are untested and largely unregulated:

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, who leads Public Citizen's health research, has long criticized the government for what he considers lax regulation of prescription drugs and mainstream medicine. Yet, he also sees problems with the widespread use of dietary supplements.

"People think they are cleared" by the Food and Drug Administration, he said, when in fact they do not need proof of safety or effectiveness to go on the market.

"Mainly, they're ineffective," he said.

According to the NCCAM study, most alternative medicine spending goes to dietary supplements. Though supplements like fish oil and echinacea are massively popular, few of them have any clinically demonstrated effect, and even the ones that do contain active ingredients can vary dramatically in dosage and potency - which is, after all, what you'd expect from raw natural ingredients. The ability to isolate and purify the active ingredients found in nature, to deliver controlled doses at known potency, is the entire point of scientific medicine.

After supplements, some of the other alternative treatments mentioned in the study include acupuncture and homeopathy, both of which are useless placebos based on sympathetic magic and pseudoscientific theories about how the human body works. Another kind is massage therapy and chiropractic, which can be useful for some kinds of physical ailments but have nothing like the universal efficacy claimed by their more fanatical practitioners. Other therapies mentioned by the study include chelation, ayurvedic medicine, and "energy-healing therapy".

I can only view these figures as a massive missed opportunity. Not just a missed opportunity to educate the public about why we should rely on evidence-based medicine, although it's certainly that. But more than that, it's a societal failure: a misallocation of society's resources on an enormous scale. Just think what that $34 billion could have done if it were put toward genuine scientific and medical research - how many promising studies could have been funded, how many discoveries made, how many diseases potentially cured! (For comparison, the entire 2010 budget request of the National Science Foundation is only $7 billion.)

Obviously, there's no direct tradeoff here. Even if all Americans decided to reject alternative medicine, these funds wouldn't necessarily have gone to scientific research. Much spending on alternative medicine is for conditions that are still poorly understood or that have no effective treatment, since these are always the areas where pseudoscience springs up. What we're seeing here is an opportunity cost: the price we, as a society, pay for the decisions we collectively make about how to allocate our resources. Money that we spend on alternative medicine and other pseudosciences is money that we can't spend on areas that might genuinely improve our lives.

I've been following, with some incredulity, a battle brewing in Congress over a military-spending bill and whether it will include money to buy more F-22 Raptors, a jet fighter used by the Air Force during the Cold War. Even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates insists that these planes are not needed, a contingent of Congresspeople are bent on putting that spending back into the budget - forcing the military to take these planes against their will!

Bizarre as this sounds, it's a classic example of how the military-industrial complex operates in America. Major military firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which make most of their profit from multibillion-dollar government contracts, deliberately spread out their operations over as many states as possible - ensuring that senators and representatives from those states will vote for their programs, to ensure the steady flow of government cash that creates jobs in their districts. This pork is like a drug, and Congress, for the most part, is hopelessly addicted.

Stories like this one explain why the amount of money that the U.S. spends on the military is so staggering. Our 2009 base military budget, plus supplementals to paay for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, is about $650 billion. When all military-related spending is counted, the total sum may be closer to $1 trillion. This is just about as much as every other country in the world spends, combined. (See also.)

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, America has not had an adversary that poses us any realistic military threat. And in a world increasingly interconnected by trade, great-power conflicts like those of the 20th century seem less and less likely to happen again. The wars of the future are far more likely to be the kind we've seen in recent years - peacekeeping operations in failed states and asymmetric conflicts with non-state actors like al-Qaeda - for which large conventional weapons systems are useless. Even if we were expecting to fight more wars like those of the past, our spending vastly outstrips any plausible enemy. How, then, can we possibly give a moral justification for such massive, reckless spending on weapons that, in all likelihood, we will never need? (The F-22, for example, has never been used in combat.)

America needs to relearn the concept of opportunity cost. This idea has been ignored by posturing elected officials who huff that "no price is too high to pay for security". But this is obviously false: every dollar we spend on the military is a dollar we can't spend on something else. And there are countless actual, urgent issues our country is facing where that money could be spent to make a major positive difference right now, as opposed to the entirely theoretical possibility of a distant future war that might require these weapons.

Consider how much good that trillion dollars could do if spent in other areas. We could rebuild the entire nation's energy grid with clean alternative power, ending global warming and severing the dependence on foreign oil that poses a significant threat to our security in and of itself. We could enshrine universal healthcare and create an educational system that would make Americans the healthiest, best-educated, most secure people on the planet and an envy of the other nations. We could even apply it to areas of legitimate security concern, like inspecting more of the shipping and transit that passes through our ports - a plausible target of major terrorist attacks, and an area where our current precautions are woefully inadequate. Yet all these grand plans are viewed as too expensive, too "socialist", too unlikely to yield a benefit, by the same elected officials who think nothing of handing out hundreds of billions of dollars each year to well-connected lobbyists and corporations.

The easy excuse is to blame the politicians and assume that wealthy corporations have hopelessly rigged the system in their own favor. But this is too simplistic.

As debased as it is, America is still a democracy, and we still have the power to vote out any politician who offends us. The real problem is how we, the voters, evaluate risk and hold our government to account. Politicians assume, usually correctly, that any vote against the military budget will be used against them in attack ads. Wealthy lobbyists supply the cash needed to run expensive modern campaigns. And voters who would otherwise take their representatives to task for waste and corruption will cheer on almost any spending, no matter how frivolous, if it's justified by repeating the words "national security".

These attitudes create an environment that favors candidates who will vote for massive, wasteful military budgets instead of spending to address real needs. When the voters see the senselessness of this, when we're willing to vote for politicians who pledge to slash the military budget to only what is genuinely necessary for defense, we can dismantle the military-industrial complex and divert that spending into areas where it will truly benefit all of us.

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...

Back in 2007, I wrote a post on optimistic populism, or how free markets can be a force for good: by spurring efficiency and innovation, they increase the total amount of wealth in the world, making it possible to raise the standard of living for all people. I also noted the irony that libertarians, the fiercest defenders of the free market, so often misunderstand this. In their jeremiads against taxation, they're implicitly buying into the view that wealth cannot be created and that the economy is a zero-sum game where the only way to help some people is to harm others.

Today, I want to talk some more about how markets can be harnessed as a power for good. But first, consider the scope of the problem:

According to the CIA Factbook, the world's GDP was estimated at $69.5 trillion in 2008. If divided by the current world population of around 6.7 billion, that would yield a global per capita income of just over $10,300. This doesn't seem like much, but it would actually be a vast improvement - the World Bank estimates that in 2001, 2.7 billion people lived on less than $2 a day. (This number has undoubtedly gone down somewhat with the rise of China and India, but is still substantial.)

Of course, achieving this level of income equality would require pooling all the world's wealth and then redistributing it equally to every person - a proposal which is unlikely ever to be implemented, for a wide variety of reasons. But there's a bright side to this as well: the fact that billions of people eke out a living on so little means that total income equalization is not necessary. Even a small degree of redistribution would be enough to produce a drastic improvement in the standard of living for the world's poorest and most desperate.

"Redistribution" is a dirty word in the minds of libertarians and conservatives, who think of it solely as direct aid to developing nations funded by taxation. But that's an incomplete definition. Any program, public or private, that results in money flowing from the world's wealthy nations to the developing ones is a form of redistribution. Kiva is one example, a microfinance organization that makes loans to entrepreneurs and businesses in the developing world, which it funds with donations from citizens of wealthy nations.

Wealth-creating free markets have enormous potential to improve the lives of the world's poor. But billions of people who need those benefits most are unable to tap into them, because poverty is self-perpetuating. People in poor countries can't access the credit and lack the infrastructure that are needed to create successful businesses. Meanwhile, most of the wealth that's created in the industrialized world stays in that world, circulating among a small pool of rich stockholders and investors. The U.N.'s target for a meager 0.7% of GDP to be given as aid has been consistently missed by almost all rich nations. Private giving improves these numbers somewhat, but the amount that the rich nations give, compared to what we could give, is still pitifully small - and the wealth gap between rich and poor continues to widen.

To make real progress in ending poverty, we need a different vision of capitalism. We need businesses with a different mission: not to enrich the already wealthy, but to redistribute their profits in beneficial ways. I'm not talking about non-profit foundations that subsist on charity, but real businesses, making a profit by selling goods and services that people need, competing with each other for market share, just as we have now. These businesses would, however, make it a part of their charter to donate all or part of their profits to some worthy cause. Even pledging to donate as little as 10% or 20%, from a large corporation, could be a significant sum.

We already have exemplar companies, like Newman's Own, which donates all profits to charitable causes. But rather than just a few companies out of many doing this, it should be the norm. Why doesn't every business have a designated cause which they support? Why isn't philanthropy part of the core mission of every company, rather than a side pursuit engaged in mainly for the favorable publicity?

In last August's post "Spread the Wealth", I talked about the justifications for redistributive taxation. I felt that some of the issues raised in the comments deserved to be revisited - and since it's tax time here in the U.S., it's worth a reminder of why we pay them and what we get out of it.

The centerpiece of the libertarian rhetorical strategy is to refer to taxation as theft, robbery, slavery. I've heard these epithets and others like them many times. It's easy to see what purpose this serves: to make your concerns seem more important, it helps to refer to them not as bloodless policy differences, but as raw issues of justice. "The government is stealing from innocent people!" is a lot punchier and packs more emotional heft than any proposal, no matter how passionately worded, to simplify unnecessary regulations and cut down on bureaucratic red tape.

But this overheated claim is being asked to bear far more weight than it can possibly support. Of all the libertarian policy proposals out there (many others of which I agree with), the equation of taxation with theft is the least defensible. The fallacies in this should be obvious to a moment's thought, but some people seem unwilling to take that moment, so I'll go over them again in this post.

Libertarians say that taxation is like theft because it takes property from the unwilling. What they ignore, time and time again, is the crucial role of democratic consent. Taxes are not arbitrary impositions decreed by a faceless government. Rather, taxes are the dues we pay in exchange for membership in a society and access to all the services it offers.

The situation can be compared to a private club that charges a membership fee in exchange for providing benefits and amenities to its members. Obviously, the club is within its rights to charge whatever price it believes fair in exchange for this. If you believe the price is too high, you're free to renounce your membership and leave the club. What you're not free to do is to refuse to pay, but demand that you still be allowed to sit in the club and use its facilities. Nor are you free, if the club doesn't offer this option, to decide that you only use some of its services - only the swimming pool, say, but not the sauna or the tennis courts - and should therefore have the right to pay a prorated membership fee. But these options, clearly absurd in this thought experiment, are the same ones libertarians claim they have a right to exercise in the real world.

The analogy of the club can be transferred in a precise way to society as a whole. Society is the club, and taxes are the membership dues we pay in exchange for the services it provides. If you don't want to pay, if you dislike its terms, you can leave that society and seek another one. But you are not free to unilaterally demand that society rewrite its terms to favor your particular preferences.

Going hand-in-hand with the fallacious equation of taxation to theft is another libertarian fallacy: the belief that a free market is the natural state of affairs and will spontaneously arise if only the economy is left to itself. This is wrong. A free market is a kind of infrastructure, and like all other infrastructure, it requires investment to create and effort to maintain.

As centuries of history show, the natural state of an unregulated economy is not free competition, but stifled and constrained competition. Large, established powers, if given the chance, will do everything they can to suppress competition - whether through means fair or foul. From medieval guilds to industrial robber barons, the tactics are always the same: seizing the distribution channels, the infrastructure, the intellectual property, or the sources of raw material. Governments want to control vital resources in the name of national security; industry groups may take a hand in designing regulations that make it all but impossible for new players to enter the field. Outright intimidation, fraud and violence are often used against those who refuse to play along. Even the staunchly libertarian Cato Institute admits this:

It is no surprise, then, that throughout U.S. history corporations have been overwhelmingly hostile to the free market.

To maintain the preferable state of a free market, we need structure and regulation from the government. Taxation provides, among other things, the resources that are necessary to keep the free market running.

In my experience, most libertarians concede that some regulation is needed, but argue that they should only be taxed for services that benefit them directly. This is like demanding that businesses sell their goods to you for exactly what it cost to make them and no more. Just like any business, the government is entitled to "turn a profit" on the services it provides. Just as with a business, these proceeds can be reinvested, resulting in greater productivity and efficiency that ultimately benefit all members of society.

Of course, elected governments can spend tax money unwisely, on pork or boondoggles, and we as citizens have every right to complain about this and to oust officeholders who abuse the public trust. But the solution is not to abolish taxation, just as the solution to corporate fraud and malfeasance is not to ban all corporations. Any power can be abused, but that is not a reason to get rid of all power, which is impossible in any case. If taxes are spent unwisely or wasted, the answer is to elect better politicians or put in place more stringent legislative safeguards.

An accusation that's often leveled against atheists is that we lack charitable impulses, that faith-based organizations do the hard work of caring for the needy and atheism only promotes selfishness. This is a hateful slur, and to counter it, I've discussed outstanding acts of charity by individual atheists in the past. Evidence like this shows that, as a group, we do not lack compassion. On the contrary, we know that this life is the only one we'll ever have, which gives us the strongest possible motive to improve the welfare of our fellow human beings in the here and now.

Another rejoinder to this accusation is that, if there's any discrepancy between atheist and religious charitable works, it's because many theists donate to explicitly religious organizations, making their contributions highly visible and easy to tally up, whereas atheists generally just give to secular charities and feel less need to advertise their acts of philanthropy as specifically arising from their atheism. But while this is true, it feels unsatisfying. It would be better if there were a way to count just those contributions made by atheists, so we could present definite evidence of how we measure up.

Well, I'm happy to report that such a way has come to my attention. This evidence comes by way of Kiva, a philanthropic organization that helps impoverished communities in developing nations. Kiva does good through "microfinance", a strategy which consists of making small loans, typically $1000 or less, to local entrepreneurs who use the money to launch or expand a business. These business plans can be as simple as buying livestock, so that rural farmers can add meat, milk, eggs or skins to their marketable commodities; or they can go toward the purchase of tools or machines so local people can start a machine shop or a clothing store. (Another microfinance organization you may have heard of is Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, whose founder, Mohammed Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.) When intelligently targeted, microfinance can help impoverished communities break the cycle of poverty and become self-sufficient.

On Kiva, anyone can sign up to be a lender and give to entrepreneurs listed on the site. If they're asking for more than one person can give, multiple lenders can join together to fully fund a proposal. If the business plan is successful, your seed money is repaid. Kiva has already loaned out over $24 million and claims a default rate of just 2.2%.

What does this have to do with atheism? Only this: Kiva's volunteers can join together into lending teams, keeping track of the total amounts that everyone on a team has given out. And when you view all the teams, the largest - with the most members, the largest number of loans, and the largest total amount of money loaned - is a team named "Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious", with over 3,000 members and over $300,000 loaned so far. This is a potent counterexample to any claim that atheists lack concern for the common good. (This was originally posted by 2[Y] and came to my attention via Lynet, who submitted it to the next Humanist Symposium. I hate to steal the host's thunder, but this was too good to not report on sooner!)

This is a great achievement, but we can do better. I've joined Kiva and become a member of the atheists' lending team. With my first donation, I've supplied the last piece to fully fund a loan request from a grocery store owner in Tajikistan. Kiva makes the process easy: donations can be as small as $25, and there's a reasonable expectation that your money will be repaid. If you're a nonbeliever who cares about the welfare of the world, join me there and let's do some good!

"Atheism and communism always seem to go hand in hand," begins a letter to the editor I recently found through a Google alert. And though the fear of communism has died down since the crumbling of the Soviet Union, the prejudice that this writer was parroting has affected our politics for decades.

In the Cold War, when anti-communist fear and paranoia were rampant, we sought to differentiate ourselves from the enemy in every way possible. It was this fear that spurred the U.S. government to stamp religious slogans on our money and our national oaths, in an attempt to set us apart from "godless communists". The ultimate result was that the things which we thought made us unique became linked together in our minds: right-wing politics, Christianity, and red-blooded American capitalism. The effects of that linkage are still visible today, with bizarre consequences like avowedly Christian organizations who make it a major part of their mission to slash social welfare programs and give tax cuts to the rich. Conversely, even after all this time, outspoken atheists are still smeared with guilt by association, regardless of whether or not we have any association with or sympathy for the fallen communist regimes.

But the merger of Christianity with predatory capitalism was not always the case. In fact, the first Christians believed something very different, as we see from a little-known Bible verse.

In the Book of Acts, chapter 2, verses 44 to 45, we hear a bit about how the first Christians lived following the departure of Jesus:

"And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need."

This is communism in a nutshell - common ownership, no private property, redistribution of resources based only on need. The first Christians were communists.

This verse probably wasn't heard from the pulpits too often during the McCarthy era. Indeed, most of the Bible's clear teachings about social welfare (another one is Deuteronomy 15:7-8, which commands believers to give the poor whatever they need) have been ignored by the Christian right, which embraces social Darwinism in the policy arena even as they denounce Darwin's theory of evolution.

Some Christians did recognize this - C.S. Lewis, for example, says that the ideal Christian society would in many ways be leftist, and there are plenty of liberal churches that emphasize social justice. But even today, hardly any advocate the socialist, communist ideal that is plainly envisioned by the Bible itself.

Other posts in this series:

• Little-Known Bible Verses

Earlier this month, I wrote about how Hanukkah's prominence was the plan of reformist rabbis, seeking to create a Jewish holiday to compete with Christmas just as Christmas was created to compete with pagan solstice festivals. In an ironic sense, this campaign has been both a success and a failure: although the cause of Hanukkah was eagerly taken up by marketers, it failed to dislodge Christmas from public consciousness and has simply contributed further to the commercialization of the holiday season.

And that commercialization is spreading and growing beyond all sanity. People have been injured in retail-outlet crushes before, but this year brought the crowning shame of holiday ugliness: a part-time Wal-Mart worker who was trampled to death by a frenzied mob of shoppers. By many accounts, people continued streaming into the store around the paramedics as they worked on the unfortunate man, and became angry and hostile when police closed the store down after the death.

But incidents like that one are just the most visible outbreaks of an attitude that's taken wider root in our society, and that's led to the current economic crisis: an attitude which holds that every person is entitled to every material luxury, regardless of their income, and that it's perfectly all right to get deeper and deeper into debt to obtain them. To an extent, this attitude flows from the top - from a president who told Americans that the most important thing we could do after 9/11 was to go shopping, and a Congress that financed a ruinous foreign war on borrowed money. But it's also partly intrinsic to capitalism, which by nature rewards greed and rapaciousness. When those tendencies grow out of control rather than being held in check, the result is the market collapse and financial meltdown we're now living through.

All of these attitudes come from the same source, the view that happiness and satisfaction in life is secured through the accumulation of wealth and possessions. This belief is false, and I laid out an alternative in "Down to Earth": an ethic of rich simplicity that takes joy in the ordinary pleasures of life, rather than grasping after luxuries.

What does this ethic have to say about gift-giving? I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing. There's nothing wrong in giving a person something that they need or can make use of (as I've said earlier, you can never have too many books). I think it's better that it be small, however. Large and ostentatious gifts, feel too much like trying to buy the recipient's affection, or else put them in the position of owing a debt they can't pay back. But small gifts, especially if they're handmade, are a genuine way of conveying, rather than attempting to purchase, good feelings toward those for whom we feel friendship and affection. (If you're not a craftsperson, I also favor consumable gifts - soap, candles, wine or chocolate, for instance.)

But best of all is the idea of agreeing, with friends and family, to make donations to charity in each other's name instead of exchanging gifts. After all, for most of us First World citizens, we don't need these gifts: we are comfortable, well-fed and well-clothed and well-housed; we enjoy living standards that are inconceivable to most of humanity. There are places in the world that need assistance far more than most of us ever will, people for whom even a small gift - say, a mosquito net or a vaccination - could represent a genuine improvement in their life and not just a token of affection. If the real purpose of gift-giving is to create happiness for the recipient, acknowledging and addressing the world's need would be a far worthier and more powerful way of doing so.