- Despite Santa’s longstanding popularity and unmatched contributions to world progeny, there are growing whispers that he has unfairly snagged all of the fame and glory of his workshop’s wonders. Focus has increasingly shifted to his workers, diminutive elves who always seem to be wearing green.
Pretty facile, even for a member of the Freakonomics posse. Specialists in intensive labor are often sequestered far from major cultural or economic centers - one need only think of the scientists of Los Alamos, the rocketeers of Peenemunde or your average offshore drilling rig worker. Discussing the absence of travel options while simultaneously mentioning a vehicle capable of carrying a half billion toys at six million miles an hour is disingenuous at best. David Graeber has argued that the birth of currency was related to slavery, which was the practice of decontextualizing a human being such that they had no kin or friends to count on and thus were outside the favor economy of most civilizations. Graeber would likely argue that the existence of a skilled artisanal class, combined with the (questionable, from a canonical standpoint) familial evidence presented in Elf, indicates that the elves are not decontextualized in such a way as to indicate slavery. One wonders why the authors did not consider the 1982 ethnographic study by Alden Perkes, which recounts the tale of a tribe of elves native to border region between the Canadian rockies and tundra whom were left homeless after a forest fire and were, through the "gifting" of Santa Claus, provided a new home from which the lead clan elected to serve in Santa's workshop as thanks for the whole of the tribe. While the evidence is single-point anecdotal (much like Elf), it would indicate that the avocation of "Santa's Helper" to be more spiritual in nature than economical.