Counting for Nothing

This basically shifted my entire worldview. HA!

I've been deep in economics world for a long time. I do love it. I've said (for 15+ years now) that I “married economics, but have regular affairs with other topics”. I am/was so, so, SO deeply ingrained in the typical economist worldview that, e.g., Kim Stanley Robinson's critiques of economics in Ministry for the Future - that it's basically politics in disguise - made me roll my eyes and chortle and go, “Oh, silly KSR, no it's not, it's objective. It's as scientific as a social science can get!!”

Well, now those foundations have cracked. Because... “YEAH WTF!!!?!” to everything Marilyn Waring pointed out (in the 1980s!!!). And everything that Kuznets (and other enlightened economists have always implicitly KNOWN/complained about) said!!! Basically, yes, economics is a simplified model of the world... but what it chooses to abstract and not abstract are socio-political choices that have had and ARE HAVING enormous policy implications. The big/gigantic one being that anything typically counted as women's work - childcare, elder care, housework, etc - is... just not counted. And it's not about it being “hard to measure”, or “not traded on the market” - two flimsy excuses indeed, given that (a) there IS a market for care work (and you can certainly argue that its prices are still biased downwards since the market under values it)... but anyway, there's your numbers! And (b) the (predominantly male) economics profession has definitely worked pretty hard to e.g. count “underground”/”not formal” market activities like... organized crime. Also, Waring's historical analysis of how GDP (and thus our entire policy frameworks) is directly tied to the military-industrial complex. Tldr: War is good for the economy (all those tanks are pricey to make! $$$ for our GDP) while care work is NOT (since it counts for nothing).

Anyway, this book gave me the vocabulary to name a LOT of the stressors in my own life, as a working mom in America. Now, whenever the kids or husband ask me for anything, I simply exclaim, WELL ARE YOU PAYING? Wonderful.

I am now absolutely HUNGERING for more analysis in this direction: especially, e.g. how the Covid quarantines exposed the care economy's absolutely fundamental role in holding up the market economy.

Oh yeah, and Waring wrote with a ton of spicy fire - I loved her being like “this stupid statistician/economist told me XYZ and so I said no you're stupid” (I paraphrase).