There is a book, called 'The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World' that is popular in author circles. It's about the gift economy and how it's different than capitalism and how creative endeavours are really part of the gift economy, not the cash economy proper.
I honestly got a bit bored of reading it and stopped, but the idea stays with me. This essay captures some of that idea - why you can't pay for a gift, how gifts work differently. They are a form of capital in that gift givers get social credit or something, but it's a very different system, a more traditional one than capitalism.
Does the book talk about one among the dangling questions the author posed but didn't answer: how simultaneously, whole promising branches of the "gift economy" structure have never been explored.?
I honestly got a bit bored of reading it and stopped, but the idea stays with me. This essay captures some of that idea - why you can't pay for a gift, how gifts work differently. They are a form of capital in that gift givers get social credit or something, but it's a very different system, a more traditional one than capitalism.