Just as the theory of labor supply is a special case of the theory of exchange, the motivation to make a donation of labor, like that of any other donation, may be threefold. There may be personal satisfaction simply in carrying out the operation, a motivation that is likely to be more significant in a donation of labor than in a donation of a commodity or money, simply because the activity itself may be meaningful and interesting to the person performing it and therefore preferable to mere idleness and boredom.
Another motivation, which we have already examined, is benevolence; that is, identification with the welfare of the party benefiting from the donation of labor. In this sense, providing a service is not very different from giving money, especially if it involves a sacrifice of earnings on the part of the giver and an increase in welfare for the recipient.
Like all grants, donations of labor will be made if the “perceived utility terms of trade” are greater than one; that is, if the utility derived from the activity itself, plus the contemplation of the benefits for those with whom the giver identifies and toward whom the giver feels benevolent, exceeds the utility cost involved in sacrificing alternative uses of time and its product.
The total amount of voluntary labor supplied, therefore, will be that for which one additional “hour” of labor provides the supplier with less, in terms of additional satisfaction, either from the activity itself or from contemplating its benefits for others, than it costs in terms of the unpleasantness of the activity and the contemplation of alternative uses of time.
There will therefore be more voluntary labor the more pleasant the activity itself is, the more it is perceived as effective in increasing the welfare of others, the higher the rate of benevolence, and the lower the value of alternative uses of time.
Donations of labor show a certain parallel with tribute, as in the type of taxation involved in conscription or forced enlistment, insofar as conscription forces people to take jobs they would not normally take, at wages lower than those that would otherwise attract them. The difference between the wage that would attract them and the wage actually paid is an implicit tax and, therefore, once again, may properly be considered part of the grants economy.
There have been attempts to estimate the implicit tax paid by conscripts when drafted under these conditions in the United States. For now, of course, any exact measurement is impossible, but the amount must be around one billion.
Forced labor of any kind, such as the corvée of medieval France, the so-called “slave camps” of the Soviet Union and chain-gang prison labor in Georgia, are examples of this type of “tribute labor.”
Compulsory education is another example. In the case of minors, it could be argued that this use of coercion is carried out through benevolence, and that we force children into compulsory education because at that stage of life they are not capable of calculating the advantages and disadvantages of being students. It is difficult to deny the theoretical validity of this claim, although one may be skeptical about its application in particular cases.
An extremely interesting application of the principle of voluntary action has been studied by Professor Titmuss of the London School of Economics with regard to blood donors. In the United Kingdom, the supply of blood for medical purposes is almost entirely voluntary. In the United States and the Soviet Union, it is largely included in the exchange system, and human blood is mainly a marketable commodity.
Titmuss presents with great skill the consequences of these two different policies, especially with regard to the quality of the blood supplied, which tends to deteriorate under market conditions, following a kind of generalized Gresham’s Law: in the absence of quality differentiation, bad blood drives out good blood.
A very interesting question in the field of social policy is the nature of adjustment when there is a danger that the supply of voluntary labor will be inadequate to perform a necessary function. Should we move toward increasing the supply of voluntary labor for services, which seems to have been done in Britain with regard to blood donation, or should we enter the market and begin paying for the service, in which case there may be a change in the quality of the service itself?
A church faces the same problem when it moves from a lay ministry to a professional one, just as any charitable organization, professional society or club does when it moves toward professional administration.
Paid labor may be more efficient in the technical sense, but something is lost in the integrative system when we move from voluntary labor, which tends to create integrative relationships, to paid labor, where the integrative relationship is almost inevitably weaker.
