ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses certain social costs arising from the wastes, shortages, inefficiencies, unethical practices and hazards involved in the American commercial blood market. It discusses that the gift of blood had attributes which distinguished it from many other forms of gift and in a series of propositions. M. Mauss was eventually led to see modern forms of social security, expressing 'solicitude or cooperation', as a renaissance of 'the theme of the gift'. The social and economic aspects of gift-exchange as a universal phenomenon offer material, as Levi-Strauss has said, for 'inexhaustible sociological reflection'. Welfare propositions in economic theory rest to a large extent on an often unexpressed ethical proposition – the 'Paretian optimum', any change is for the better as long as nobody is worse off and at least one person is better off, each in his own estimation. Gift transactions of the type between strangers – at present unpriced in non-market situations – are by no means unilateral transfers.
