In Chapter 14 of East of Eden, Steinbeck gives us a beautiful portrait of his mother, Olive. There is warmth and admiration in his description of her, but there is economics there as well.
In addition to being a schoolteacher, Olive’s goodwill extends primarily to her family, then to her neighbors, and, on special occasions, perhaps as far as the county line. Her social concern moves outward in concentric circles, but eventually it stops.
Until her neighbor, Martin Hopps, is killed in World War I.
His death awakens something different in her. Olive throws herself into the work of selling Liberty Bonds. Her motivation is clearly not greed, even if she may have been compensated for selling the bonds—a detail Steinbeck does not specify. Something in her orientation has changed. The death of a young neighbor has altered the way she sees her relationship to the larger community, and her actions follow from that change.
Her bond-selling becomes almost a personal mission. Eventually, she receives recognition in the form of an airplane ride in an Army plane. But the recognition is almost beside the point. The economic activity came first. The transaction was the vehicle through which her particular concern could be expressed.
This is a useful reminder that economic outcomes do not begin with prices. They begin with people, situated in relationships and institutions, acting from particular orientations. The same market opportunity can produce very different actions depending upon what an individual values, whom they feel connected to, what obligations they recognize, and what has happened in their lives.
Olive’s story is therefore more than an example of altruism. It is an example of institutional clearing: a personal experience, a relationship with a neighbor, a national event, a market mechanism, and a particular individual orientation come together to produce an economic action.
Economic outcomes can be driven by many fuels. Price is one of them. But so are memory, obligation, affection, loyalty, recognition, identity, and a sense of contribution. To understand the outcome, we have to look not only at the transaction, but at the person and the institutional world through which that transaction is being cleared.
This version makes Steinbeck do some of the theoretical work for you rather than turning the passage into a generic “people aren’t motivated by money” argument.
