The invisible heart

Just another post from your friendly neighbourhood feminist.

One of the reasons why I love economics is because I think it is a very misunderstood field, and nothing gets me riled up more than going against the status quo. When people say economics is a science I scoff (maybe, internally). Economics is inexac. It makes sweeping assumptions about rationality so we can easily study the effects of aggregate behaviour. Computationally, when things get too hard we linearise it all and just feed some matrices into Matlab.

That's all ok if people (and some economists) recognise the limits of economics - models are just models after all. They don't explain everything and don't always hold up to reality and nor should they. Nor is economics normative - it's not there to tell society what it should do. But with the decline of pretty much every institution over the last few centuries (governments, families, church) , the prevailing institution that stands to replace them all (and yet is so thin when it comes to what it can offer by way of moral guidance and interpersonal obligations) is markets - bolstered by a good dose of neoclassical economics, whose axioms and conclusions have been lauded to be just as objective and undeniable as the laws of physical science.

So much so, that the idea that self-interest brings about the greater good is as it should be. A selfish individual is no longer despicable, they are just rational. And yet, for the most part it was only men who were allowed to be selfish. Because only men participated in the economy. Gradually, with the happy marriage of liberalism and capitalism, any historically oppressed group can now access power in at least one domain - the market. And now that markets have become the predominant way society organises itself, power in the market has become power in general. There is no identity that confers more privilege, more wealth and more power than being rich.

The proliferation of markets in all areas of life, and the somehow popularised notion that economics is a science presenting irrefutable claims, has lead to the dominance of self-interest as the key and justifiable motivation for behaviour (whether in or outside markets), and a valuation of self that does not consider the individual in relation to others (and what obligations and compassion we should have for ourself and others), but rather our individual prestige in the market and our right to consume whatever goods, and invest in whatever capital, we want.

Economics will benefit from its more 'fringe' fields that are finally starting to unwind its less-than-robust assumptions. Behavioural economics is doing away with the rational agent, and gender economics is touching on all those more altruistic labours (household, caring, childrearing) that markets, and by extension society, are at a loss to value.

What I want is a more caring, kind world. Yet if everyone (women included) starts behaving like rational agents optimising a thin idea of lifetime utility (where your utility is only defined by your own consumption and not the wellbeing of others etc.), and worse starts believing that that is the moral imperative of our time, then I can't see it bringing about the greater good. We have never lived in a world where everyone only cares about themselves. In the past, markets may have legitimised that behaviour for those who were lucky enough to have economic agency, but they were supported by a whole class of people outside the market (women, family), whose virtue was defined separate from the market and whose role was to supply society with the kind of care work that markets couldn't value yet depended on.

This. This. This. An excerpt from Nancy Folbre's book - The Invisible Heart:

As the scope for individual choice expanded, philosophers began to argue that selfishness served the greater good. Adam Smith is best known to us for offering, in The Wealth of Nations, the first systematic explanation of "trickle-down" theory. Encouraging men to pursue their own self-interest would, Smith argued, promote economic growth that would benefit everyone, and provide for those in need. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner," he wrote, "but from regard to their self-interest."

    Just a minute. It is not usually the butcher, the brewer, or the baker who fixes dinner, but his wife or mother. Does she act out of self-interest too? Smith would have been horrified by the very idea. Self-interest was appropriate only to the impersonal world of the market. The moral sentiments, he believed, were firmly rooted in the family and the home. Smith considered all forms of labor that provided services to other people to be unproductive (though certainly not unimportant).

    Thomas Robert Malthus was even less interested in the work that went into rearing the next generation and far more worried about the possibility of overpopulation. Like Smith, he was a great believer in the redemptive power of self-interest. Indeed, he went beyond Smith to argue that benevolence and charity toward others could have destructive effects. Specifically, he maintained that provision of public assistance to poor people would make them worse off, because this would prompt them to marry earlier and have—God help us all—more children. In the long run, the resulting increase in the supply of labor would push wages down and make poor families worse off. Men, he argued, should pursue their self-interest by delaying marriage.

    But, Malthus argued, any effort to avoid births by using "the improper arts" would be unnatural and immoral. His injunctions against birth control applied nominally to both men and women but whether married or unmarried, men of Malthus's day had recourse to prostitutes and therefore a means of separating sex from reproduction. And women, of course (whether prostitutes or not), were left with the responsibility for children if they became pregnant out of wedlock. The sexual double standard both reflected and reinforced the line drawn between the male world of self-interest and the female world of responsibility for care.

    Some of Malthus's contemporaries bravely risked public censure by advocating birth control. But those who advocated forms of contraception that women could use, such as the vaginal sponge, faced particularly strong prosecution. At the age of seventeen, John Stuart Mill was arrested for handing out handbills on this subject. Later, inspired by the convictions of his deceased wife, Harriet Taylor, Mill wrote the most famous feminist tract of the nineteenth century, "On the Subjection of Women." In it, he argued not only that women were being deprived of equal rights, but also that they were being forced to assume disproportionate moral and economic responsibility for care:

If women are better than men in anything, it surely is in individual self-sacrifice for those of their own family. But I lay little stress on this, so long as they are universally taught that they are born and created for self-sacrifice. I believe that equality of rights would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character, and that a good woman would not be more self-sacrificing than the best man: but on the other hand, men would be much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at present, because they would no longer be taught to worship their own will as such a grand thing that it is actually the law for another rational being.

    Mill was naive to think that such a transformation would automatically ensue; it never occurred to him that overall levels of self-sacrifice might decline. But he clearly recognized the links between gender, subordination, and restrictions on self-interest. Though he failed to convince his contemporaries that women should be given equal rights, he laid a strong foundation for later, more successful efforts. And he certainly encouraged many women to be clever as well as good.