Smith argued that the baker and butcher didn't give bread and meat out of the goodness of their hearts. It's an ironic point of view coming from a bachelor who lived with his mother for most of his life — a woman who cooked his dinner every night.
One of the great myths of what passes for economics is Economic Man (Homo Economicus), devoted exclusively to rational pursuit of profit, while completely excluding women and children. Unpaid work is ipso facto worthless, according to the dogma of Friedmanite Market Fundamentalism that the market always prices everything correctly, aka The Efficient Market Hypothesis. Similarly, if women earn less, that is because they are worth less. Misogyny is impossible in a rational market. Likewise racism and colonialism and White privilege.
Bull puckey.
Woman of the day suffragist and women’s rights advocate Josephine Butler born OTD 1828 in Milfield, Northumberland. She campaigned for women’s suffrage, better education for women, the end of coverture in British law (the legal view that married women were simply chattels - the property - of their husbands and not persons in their own right), the abolition of child prostitution and an end to the human trafficking of young women and girls into European prostitution.
There are two themes in Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, by Katrine Marçal.
- Misogynistic economics and its consequences
Little do they know how little they know of the little they do know.
Spike Milligan, The Goon Show
How feminism, for its many successes, has not yet properly addressed theme 1.
For example, we are still stuck in the companion myth of Having It All by doing it all, thus.
Muppet Songs: Raquel Welch and Miss Piggy - I'm a Woman (from 1962)
Boosting Biden has been on hiatus due to the Gaza disaster, but resumes on Monday because Biden stepped up the pressure on Netanyahu from diplomacy to action.
Why I Am Restarting Boosting Biden
Then we can talk about the Violence Against Women Act, and
Eight Ways Dark Brandon Has Lowered Health Care Costs: Boosting Biden Day 38
Dark Brandon Is Helping States Reduce Gun Violence: Boosting Biden Day 39
Dark Brandon Brought Diversity to the Judicial Branch: Boosting Biden Day 42
Dark Brandon is increasing access to birth control: Boosting Biden Day 43
President Biden's Secret Plan to Get Better Judges: Boosting Biden Day 51
President Biden Is Fighting Human Trafficking: Boosting Biden Day 59
President Biden Protects Victims of Domestic Abuse! Boosting Biden Day 64
Here is another version of the same old problem:
I am woman, hear me roar!
in the sweetest, gentlest, most feminine tones imaginable.
I am not going to rehash the argument about the fundamental misogyny of almost all economics, made vastly worse in Friedman’s Chicago school. We know that. I can recommend that you take note of who said what when, as laid out in the book, to produce this level of delusion, if you want to get at the root of our current problems.
This is not a failure of feminism, but a failure of economics.
Gary Becker’s theory about racial discrimination is their best-known attempt. Becker asserted that racial discrimination happened because certain people quite simply preferred to not mix with black people. If all people were rational and discrimination occurred, then even discrimination must be rational.
It’s one thing to discuss what makes a work of art economically valuable: why one work is worth 12 million and another 100 million. It’s a completely different thing to say, as did Charles Gray, co-author of The Economics of Art and Culture: ‘We all want to believe that there is something special about the arts, but I don’t buy that there is a difference between artistic and economic value.’
‘Just between you and me,’ wrote Summers, ‘shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]?’ He continued: ‘I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted ... I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.’
‘Your reasoning is perfectly logical but completely insane,’ José Lutzenberger, then Brazil’s Secretary of the Environment, wrote to Lawrence Summers.
The efficient market hypothesis has been called ‘the biggest mistake in the history of finance’: the statement is sometimes credited to Larry Summers and sometimes to Robert Shiller.
In the book Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes, Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson promise to improve our romantic relationships with the help of economic principles.
Waring, Marilyn, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, University of Toronto Press, 1999.
and so on. More recent work in behavioral economics and feminist economics and other non-traditional approaches is much better on these problems.
- Barker, Drucilla K. and Feiner, Susan F., Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work and Globalization, University of Michigan Press, 2004.
- Brockway, George P., The End of Economic Man: Principles of Any Future Economics, W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.
- Ferber, Marianne A. and Nelson, Julie, Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, Chicago University Press, 1993.
Folbre, Nancy, Greed, Lust and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Folbre, Nancy, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, New Press, 2001.
Graycar, Regina and Morgan, Jenny, The Hidden Gender of Law, Federation Press, 1990.
Hewitson, Gillian, Feminist Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, 1999.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell and Ehrenreich, Barbara, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, Henry Holt, 2002.
Marglin, Stephen A., The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, Harvard University Press, 2008.
McCloskey, Deirdre, How to be Human*: *Though an Economist, University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Nelson, Robert H., Economics As Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond, Pennsylvania State University, 2002.
Read, Jason, A Genealogy of Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Foucault Studies, no. 6, 2009.
Sen, Amartya, ‘More than 100 Million Women are Missing’, New York Review of Books, 20 December 1990.
United Nations Publications, The Inequality Predicament: Report on the World Social Situation, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), 2005.
Wolf, Alison, The XX Factor: How Working Women Are Creating A New Society, Profile Books, 2013
We’ve barely gotten started.
Re-Humanize Yourself
Who Won the Week
on The ReidOut.
Molly Jong-Fast: Kamala Harris. She has been everywhere, and this week people finally got it.
Jay Jurden: women’s college basketball, SC Gamecocks, Caitlyn Clark + the moon
Joy Reid: Beyoncé came close, as the first Black woman to have a Billboard #1 Country album, but Americans who have gotten student debt relief are her winners, notably including teachers and others who don’t get the highest pay in our society.
We are no longer in the era when
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
was a cigarette commercial.