Sharing Is Good: How to Save Money, Time and Resources Through Collaborative Consumption (3 page)

for a treat — by connecting the separate parts and opening the door for the reader into a thriving ecosystem that forms the basis for this new, inspiring economy, Buczynski demonstrates that sharing is

what will save our planet, providing the means by which we’ll not only see ourselves as explorers in the country we call the future, but we’ll create the future. To share is to win.

Benita Matofska, Chief Sharer, The People Who Share,

Brighton, England 2013.

Benita Matofska, a former TV executive and media entrepreneur

is a global leading expert on the Sharing Economy, the creator of The People Who Share, Global Sharing Day, Compare and Share,

the Global Sharing Economy Network, Crowdshare and Sharing

Economy TV.

She lives in Brighton England with her graphic designer husband

Lee, children Maia and Sol and rescued Cairn terrier, Buster.

For my family.

And for all those who want to ‘be the change’

but aren’t sure where to start.

Chapter 1

History of Sharing

Guess what? Sharing isn’t new, you’re probably already

doing it!

Sharing isn’t complicated. It means giving others access to what

we have so that they can fill a need. Simple as that. So, does something as obvious as sharing even have a history? Haven’t we always known that it’s nice to share what we have? Well, yes and no. It turns out that sharing is deeply intertwined with successful evolution. Lots of animals cooperate to share resources, work, and relationships.

Think about beehives or ant hills, where tasks are divided among

different members of the community so the entire population can

grow and thrive. Lions and other predators hunt prey as a group so the entire pack can eat. We, too, are programmed to share, but as a society, we’ve worked hard to forget it.

Despite the modern normalization of selfish behaviors, our

natural inclination for sharing has endured in not-so-obvious ways.

Although you may have picked up this book to learn more about

collaborative consumption and how or why you should participate

in it, sharing is probably already an important part of your life. If 1

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Sharing is Good

you’ve ever borrowed a book from the library, washed your clothes at a laundromat, rented a movie from Redbox, or leased an apartment, you’re already familiar with the benefits of shared resources.

So why is everyone from Forbes to Fast Company touting collab-

orative consumption as “the next big thing”? Because, as we’ll explore in the chapters to follow, new technologies and cultural networks now allow us to share in ways and on a scale that has never been

possible before. “I definitely think the recent trend towards sharing can be attributed, almost entirely, to the current state of technology,”

says Meg Murray of Getaround. “The sharing economy wouldn’t be

possible without the mobile phones we carry or our ability to access the Internet wherever we are.”1

These new mechanisms eliminate many of the inefficiencies that

caused ancient cultures to move away from sharing as a way of life.

Sharing isn’t new, but the way we’re doing it now is unlike anything we’ve attempted in the past. Of course, in order to appreciate the significance of these changes — and what they mean for us and future generations — it’s important to understand how we got to this point.

Cooperation = Evolution

Biologists and sociologists agree that humans have been sharing and cooperating since the early days of our species. What they disagree on is
why
early humans chose to cooperate in the ways that they did.

In his book,
Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Cooperation
, Mark Pagel argues that there are three things that distinguish us History of Sharing

3

from other living species: 1) capacity for speech, 2) social organization, and 3) culture and technology. Although these characteristics made human cooperation more sophisticated than what’s displayed

by other animals, there is disagreement about whether it’s cooperation or competition that drives evolutionary change.

“Humans became a cooperative species because our distinctive

livelihoods made cooperation within a group highly beneficial to

its members and, exceptionally among animals, we developed the

cognitive, linguistic and other capacities to structure our social interactions in ways that allowed altruistic cooperators to prolifer-ate,” writes Pagel in the chapter, “Origins of Human Cooperation.”

Humans became aware of the benefits of cooperation and placed

value on those who facilitated it. The recent rise of collaborative consumption is proof that we are rediscovering sharing as a desirable behavior — something to be supported, celebrated, and emulated.

When it comes to human cooperation, experts say the inclina-

tion to share is just as innate for us as it is for the animal kingdom, but execution is often more complicated when humans get involved.

Obviously, the motivation and methods of organization have evolved and changed over time, but the fact remains that cooperation and

sharing are behaviors that come naturally to us. Our quest for survival as individuals led us to acknowledge the importance of the species as a whole. Even with their limited brain capacity, early humans figured out that in order to guarantee the safety of future generations, they had to work together. They saw that cooperating and sharing

were beneficial for both the sharer and the recipient, increasing the odds that both would survive to hunt and gather another day.

“By sharing resources, a division of labor can be reached, be-

tween mates, parents and offspring, and other kin,” writes Peter J.

Richerson in his book,
Principles of Human Ecology
. “This was probably especially important for hunting large game, and for sharing resources in times of drought, defeat in war, etc. Hunter-gatherer bands and ethno-linguistic units seem to act like insurance pools, 4

Sharing is Good

enabling people to adopt strategies with high average rewards, but high variation in success. An active, able hunter will often go many days without making a significant kill, but he can depend upon meat for himself and his family because other hunters will get lucky and share the meat from their kills.”

Cooperation wasn’t always easy in a world where you could be

eaten by a larger predator at any moment. But cheating and other

selfish behaviors cause problems and stir up strife. Early humans learned that the best chance for full bellies and safe offspring was to work together; a community could be depended on for fulfillment of basic needs as well as companionship and affection.

Early societies learned that the benefits of cooperative behaviors relative to costs were substantial, and that evolution favored populations with larger numbers of cooperators. So our ancestors shared the work of hunting, gathering, creating tools, and looking after the babies. Individuals could thus share the spoils of someone else’s hunt or foraging efforts even if their own had not been successful. A tribe mentality led to decision-making about where to go and how to act based on what would be best for everyone. As we emerged from a

hunter-gatherer mindset and the size and structure of our society became more complicated, humans continued to rely on the success

of their natural inclination to cooperate.

Bartering, Trading, and Swapping throughout

Early Civilizations

You probably don’t hunt or garden enough to keep your family from going hungry. It’s also highly unlikely that walking is your only mode of transport or that your home is a handmade shelter. As humans

have grown and evolved, we’ve created a different way of acquiring food, transportation, and shelter: we buy it.

Centuries ago, humans didn’t have credit cards or banks or, in the very early days, even physical money. So how did they gain access to things they needed but didn’t have and couldn’t make or grow?

History of Sharing

5

The answer was bartering and trading, methods of meeting needs

through the exchange of resources that already exist.

When a person barters, they trade something they have for

something they need. The earliest historical accounts of bartering appear around 9000 BCE, right about the time humans started do-mesticating and keeping herds of cattle. Cows, sheep, camels, and goats were extremely valuable resources. Cattle or their by-products could be transformed into food, clothing, transportation, and even fuel. Different types of cattle were even arranged in hierarchies of value in a precursor to our current money system. There was a whole set of equivalencies: five chickens were worth one goat, two goats were worth one cow, and so on. Then, as cities formed and populations expanded, our needs moved beyond basic subsistence. What if coyotes came around at night, picking off members of your valuable herd? You might decide that you need a spear or slingshot to eliminate the predator, but you don’t own a weapon of any kind. Instead, you might take one of your best sheep down to a friend who owns

or knows how to make a weapon, and offer it as a trade. If he agreed, you would get a means for protecting the rest of your flock, and your friend would get a good dinner or a valuable asset that he could then use in a future trade.

Bartering was an effective way to get what you needed, and it

still is. Like sharing in general, humans seem to be born with an innate knowledge of how bartering works, and can employ it almost

auto matically. Think back to grade school: we traded with friends to upgrade a boring lunch, or offered to clean up our brother’s messy room in exchange for his silence about who broke the cookie jar.

These are barters. However, bartering isn’t a perfect system, and, as our ancestors discovered, there are sometimes when it’s more trou-ble than it’s worth.

Successful bartering depends on an agreement of value. In order

for you to strike an effective trade with your neighbor, you both have to agree that one sheep is worth one coyote-fighting weapon. If you 6

Sharing is Good

don’t agree on the sheep’s value, it’s going to be hard to make a trade.

Bartering also depends on what economists call a
double coincidence
of wants.
The system is most successful when you and a second person both want/need what the other has, at the same moment in time. But what if that’s not the case? What if your neighbor isn’t in the market for more sheep? Maybe his pressing need is a new blanket to keep his baby warm. This complicates things. In order to make the trade, you’d first have to find someone who is willing to trade a blanket for your sheep. Then, you’d turn around and trade the blanket for the weapon.

This method of indirect trading is clumsy and more time-intensive, but it can work if everyone agrees on the value of all items involved.

As society became more complex, however, the drawbacks of

using animals as units of trade became more obvious: cattle require maintenance to keep them healthy (no one trades for a sick cow),

and, when trading for particularly large things, like a house or tract of land, it became necessary to bring along many head of cattle at once. What humans needed, writes Jerry Howell in
The Complete
Idiot’s Guide to Barter and Trade Exchanges
, “was some way to represent the value of the trades you had in a form that was easy to exchange for other goods — and easy to carry in your purse.”

For people living in China around 1200 BCE, that thing was the

cowrie shell. Uniquely beautiful and featuring a highly glossy exte-rior, cowrie shells have been prized by humans for centuries. They’ve been found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs and their likeness has been discovered in prehistoric cave art. Two hundred cowrie shells were a whole lot easier to carry around than 200 head of cattle, so the Chinese adopted it as one of the first forms of currency.