Posted by Tim Harford

https://timharford.com/2025/12/cautionary-questions-they-fall-behind-and-are-slowly-crushed-board-games-and-economics-with-richard-garfield/

https://timharford.com/?p=9818

Christmas is the time of year to worry about two things: running out of money, and playing board games. To mark the festive season,  Tim is joined by creator of Magic: The Gathering, Richard Garfield, for a special Q&A about economics and game design.

How should you go about designing a game? Will Magic ever be made into a movie? Why was there an intentional crash of the Magic stock market?  Why do so many people hate monopoly? Plus, Richard has a bone to pick with Tim about a previous episode of Cautionary Questions. 

For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, our monthly newsletter and behind-the-scenes conversations with members of the Cautionary Tales production team, consider joining the Cautionary Club.

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https://timharford.com/2025/12/cautionary-questions-they-fall-behind-and-are-slowly-crushed-board-games-and-economics-with-richard-garfield/

https://timharford.com/?p=9818

Posted by Tim Harford

https://timharford.com/2025/12/santa-claus-is-still-a-woman/

https://timharford.com/?p=9775

The first line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents”, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 short story The Good Fairy is about Christmas presents and, specifically, women trying to help each other figure out how best to navigate the task of choosing them. It is a mark of your columnist’s slow wits, then, that after 20 years of writing columns about the economics of Christmas, he has only just noticed the connection between Christmas gifts and women.

The classic study of this topic was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 1990 by Eileen Fischer and Stephen J Arnold. Fischer and Arnold interviewed almost 300 people about their seasonal gift-giving attitudes and behaviours. Many men refused to answer, suggesting that they didn’t know anything about the subject and that the researchers really should interview their wives instead.

The men who did answer the questions were presumably more progressive than those who refused, but even so the results were stark: women bought gifts for a larger number of people (more than half as many again) and started shopping earlier. They also took more care, spending more time per person, spending less money and, as far as we can tell, giving fewer gifts that needed to be returned or exchanged. Buying, choosing and wrapping Christmas gifts was widely regarded as women’s work.

(A subsequent study, published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing by Michel Laroche and colleagues, also concluded that women started shopping for Christmas gifts much earlier in the year, were more diligent in gathering information about what products were available, and finished the task earlier.)

Men, meanwhile, had a tendency to buy gifts that were as much for their own pleasure as anyone else’s. Any woman whose boyfriend or husband has thoughtfully given them elaborate yet impractical lingerie will no doubt nod in recognition, but these “self gifts” also include toys for the children that dad thinks might be fun to play with.

For men, Christmas gifts are either somebody else’s problem, or they are frivolous and fun. Many women may not see them quite like that.

In 1984, the sociologist Theodore Caplow published an ethnographic study of Christmas rituals in Muncie, Indiana. Caplow described a complex set of unwritten rules, to which most households adhered even though nobody had ever quite seen them articulated. Several of these rules concerned the role of women: “Women were much more active as gift givers than men, and did nearly all of the gift wrapping”; and another bombshell, “Although married women were largely responsible for Christmas gift giving, they did not favor their own relatives over their husbands’.”

In other words, many a wife was responsible for buying the gifts not only for her parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, but for those of her husband too. Caplow added that 57 per cent of women were solely responsible for wrapping gifts, but only 16 per cent of men. In a slightly earlier study, Caplow also concluded that women were responsible, either solely or jointly with someone else, for 84 per cent of all gifts. One suspects that most of the “joint” gifts from married couples were in fact arranged by the wives, but even excluding joint gifts, women were responsible for more than twice as many gifts as men.

How seriously should we take studies of gender roles that are decades old? After all, as Corinne Low describes in her new book Femonomics, a lot has changed in the past few decades. By 2015, US women aged 25-45 were averaging about 10 hours a week more paid market work than in 1975, and about 10 hours a week less housework. Shouldn’t we expect these old attitudes to Christmas organisation to evaporate?

Perhaps not. Low notes that women also spend six hours a week more time on childcare. (Men’s contribution to childcare has increased, but less and from a much lower base.) And housework contributions are stubbornly unrelated to economic incentives: “A man who earns only 20 per cent of the household income does about the same amount of housework as a man who earns 80 per cent!” writes Low.

In any case, argues economist Bernd Stauss in his 2023 book chapter “Gifts and Gender: Santa Claus is a Woman”, there is something particularly stubborn about gender roles at Christmas. Stauss reviews the literature and concludes that women still seem to be the ones buying the joint gifts and wrapping all the presents. Why? Perhaps because many gifts, particularly those bought by women, are about maintaining relationships with the extended family. (Or, as sociologists call it, “kin keeping”.) All year round it is often the women making the phone calls and arranging the family visits, and at Christmas that extends to writing the Christmas cards and co-ordinating the round of hosting and visiting — and, naturally, to dealing with the Christmas gifts.

As Caplow points out, the unwritten rules governing these gifts are surprisingly intricate. Gifts are supposed to match the (also unwritten) value of the relationship. A son-in-law or daughter-in-law is supposed to get the same value of gift as the blood relative they married; it would be extremely awkward to give a more valuable gift to a niece than to a daughter, or to give very different gifts to two of one’s own offspring; parents are allowed to give cash to their offspring, but never vice versa, even if everyone is an adult. These rules represent a social minefield, and accidental detonations are not uncommon. Frivolous and fun it is not.

This is not to deny that some people enjoy the whole business. (Despite my annual warnings against wasteful gift-giving at Christmas, I confess a fondness for the task.) But the point is that choosing and wrapping Christmas gifts is a job that seems optional for men, whereas for women social pressures make it all but compulsory.

Women chafing under this unequal responsibility have some scorched-earth tactics available, including flat refusal or, the path chosen by Corinne Low, divorcing hubby and marrying a woman instead. If that seems radical, there is always the option of a frank conversation and a his-and-hers checklist.

Or just grin and bear it. Fischer and Arnold interviewed several women who “described their shopping in terms that indicated that, in their minds, it was real work that had to be carried out efficiently and effectively”.

An efficient and effective Christmas! That sounds like a job for an economist — and for my next column.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 27 November 2025.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

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