Macrodose Free Gifts w/ Alyssa Battistoni
Mar 5, 2026
Alyssa Battistoni, a political theorist at Barnard who studies climate, political economy, and feminist thought, explores how capitalism treats nature and unpaid labor as 'free gifts'. She discusses how markets hide consequences, the limits of pricing ecological harm, and rethinking freedom as collective decision making in a finite world.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Free Gift As A Capitalist Social Form
- The free gift is a capitalist social form for things that have effects but no exchange value.
- Alyssa Battistoni argues nature appears inside capitalism as useful but unpriced, shaping production without becoming a commodity.
Markets Separate Intent From Consequence
- Market action divorces intent from consequence so consumers aren't meant to track downstream harms.
- Battistoni explains markets are designed to aggregate choices by price, making individual moral responsibility for supply-chain effects perverse.
Externalities Are Political Valuation Battles
- Externalities are another expression of free gifts: material harms that don't appear as prices.
- Battistoni traces economic responses from Pigou's taxes to Coase's property-right bargaining and reframes costs as political struggles over valuation.
