Richard Titmuss

Richard Titmuss was a British social researcher and the founding figure of academic social administration and social policy, holding the first chair in the subject at the London School of Economics. His best-known book, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (1970), compared the voluntary, unpaid blood donation system in Britain with the commercialized blood market in the United States, arguing that paying donors could crowd out altruistic motivation, reduce the quality and supply of blood, and erode the wider ethic of gift-giving on which a good society depends. The book became a foundational text for later work on motivation crowding theory and on the moral limits of markets in areas such as health and welfare.