Feminism and Economics

On lazy critiques of Economics

By Lars Harhoff Andersen

The famous activist and public intellectual Emma Holten has spent the past few years touring with the lecture "What Are We Worth – On Feminist Economics." The purpose of the lecture is to show how the field of economics is created by and helps create a worldview that systematically devalues women and their contributions to society.

The lecture series has been seen by thousands of people and has attracted significant media attention. It is encouraging that a lecture on economics can garner such attention. Economics as a science has a tremendous impact on our society, and it is incredibly important that the public is economically literate so they can understand and be critical of the ideas professed by economists.

Unfortunately, Holten is so focused on understanding economics as a result of ideology, ignorance, and sexism, that the lecture does not end up being a nuanced discussion of the blind spots in economics, but rather a two-hour character assassination of the subject and its founders.

Although I am personally sympathetic to some of her ideas, she is a great example of how lazy critiques of economics can lead to a less informed and more partisan public. As the name suggests Holten’s lectures are about the science of economics, how we measure value, and how this relates to feminism and women’s role in society. The lecture is divided into two parts, the first concerning the theoretical history of the field of economics, and the latter diving more directly into what we should consider valuable as a society. However, Holten does not seriously engage with modern economics beyond newspaper clippings and insists on the most uncharitable reading of the sources she does use, ignoring virtually any historical or scientific backdrop that can't be reduced to ad hominem attack on economists

A Shortcut to Mushrooms

Holten’s dissection of economic theory doesn’t start with an economist but with the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whom she, in a manner that will set the tone for the rest of the lecture, attacks for proposing the idea that society consists of independent individuals. She quotes him for saying the following:

”To return once again to the natural state and to look at men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other”.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

This, she contrasts with the following quote from his contemporary, the feminist philosopher Mary Astell:

"How I lament my Stars it was not my good Fortune to Live in those Happy Days when Men spring up like so many Mushrooms or Terrae Filii, without Father or Mother or any sort of dependency!"

Holten follows up this quote by saying that she wished that she could tell us that Mary Astell was a famous philosopher, and Thomas Hobbes was forgotten, but the sad fact is that the reverse is the case. Holtens implication seemed to be that Hobbes literally thought that men emerged from the earth like mushrooms, and that Mary Astell deserved to be remembered to this day for the great discovery that they were not. A more intellectually curious approach would be to oneself why Hobbes would choose to use this metaphor, ask us to imagine that we are born without obligations? One explanation, courtesy of intellectual historian Paul Sager, goes like this:

“The insistence that men be considered like mushrooms was no arbitrary stipulation or minor expository device, nor was it an off-hand allusion to the Lucretian postulate that men had sprung fully-formed from the earth, [..]. Hobbes was concerned to do without any appeal to patriarchalist theories which explained sovereign power in terms of the relations men bore to their fathers, drawing analogies between kings and their subjects, or tracing patrimonial descent from Adam. Aside from the sheer historical implausibility of the latter sort of account, Hobbes consistently maintained that sovereignty was necessarily founded in the consent of the ruled, and understood accordingly in purely natural terms. This emphasis on consent was not merely absent from, but actively denied by, patriarchal theories of sovereignty, making them anathema to Hobbes.”

The idea was in other words not aimed at diminishing the role of women, but rather a weapon against the patriarchal idea that we are born with obligations to serve those that are above us in the social hierarchy. Human beings should not be forced to do something that they do not consent to, something I think Holten with her admirable history of consent-activism would agree with. On the other hand, I am not sure that she would agree with Mary Astell that it is better to “endure the unreasonableness, injustice or oppression of a parent, a master etc. than that the established rule of order and good government should be superseded”.

Mary Astell (1666 – 1731)

Mary Astell’s critique comes both from a place of feminism, as Holten points out, but also from a place of conservative deference to hierarchies. This might be seen as contradictory, but could also be seen as pointing to some large and interesting questions. It could be that the liberal insistence on personal autonomy that Hobbes uses as a weapon against the divine right of Kings, could lead to the idea that man is an island devoid of responsibility to those around him. It could also be that the idea of moral obligations to other people that Astell has could lead to the acceptance of subjection. Maybe there is an interesting tension between these ideas that cannot be reduced to ignorance on the part of Hobbes? Sadly, in a pattern that repeats itself for the rest of the lecture, it is so important for Holten to show that the ideas of Hobbes are a reflection of his ignorance and sexism that she fails to engage with the substance of his ideas.

Marginal Value of Economics

After a detour into the works of John Locke, where we learn that his philosophy was motivated by a wish to defend colonialism on the one hand and a wish to justify the privileges of the rich on the other, we finally arrive at is an actual economist: Adam Smith.

Holten begins her discussion of Adam Smith with his the famous example of the pin factory that starts the Wealth of Nations, in which Smith discusses the effects of the division of labor. According to Holten, the reason Smith was interested in the division of labor was that it became much easier to give a concrete number to the productivity of each worker, when they work in assembly lines.

This reading doesn’t make sense for two reasons. The first is that the passage is explicitly not about individual contribution, but about collective productivity. In the passage, Smith argues that while one man can make approximately one pin everyday if he works alone, ten men can, if they divide the tasks between them- make up to 48.000 thousand per day. This is supposed to illustrate his central point that society can become much richer by increasing the division of labor. It is not supposed to say anything about the different contributions of people individually. Secondly, the division of labor is exactly what makes it hard to tell who contributes what to society, which – if your goal alone were to measure this – would make you dislike it! When each man makes his own pin, it is just a matter of counting the pin made by each man, but if 10 people on different parts of the process it becomes very hard to measure or even define who contributed the most.

The second paragraph Holten discusses in her lecture is arguably the most famous in the works of Smith:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”

Holten juxtaposes this passage with tales of how Smith was taken care of by his mother until she died at the old age of 90. She draws the implication that even though he was taken care of by his old mother, he could not see that much of the economy was not characterized by self-interest, but by familial bonds and the work of women in the home.

Adam Smiths mother

But Adam Smith quite explicitly did not think that self-interest was the only human motivation. While there are many different opinions on how Smith saw the precise relationship between self-interest and benevolence, there is no doubt that Smith thought that humans were capable of both. The very first sentence of his other great work, the theory of moral sentiments, goes like this:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

The reason Adam Smith is interesting is not that he tried to explain everything as egotism, but rather (among other things) because he attempted to explain how it was possible that self-interested behavior could be beneficial to others. According to the Historian of Economic thought Robert Heilbroner, it was this novel paradox that economics was invented to explain, and “until the idea of the market system itself had gained acceptance, there was no puzzle to explain”.[1] The reason he writes about the butcher and the baker, rather than the mother and the father, is that it is the contribution of the former that needed explanation. It is not hard to understand what motivates a subsistence farmer to feed his family, a peasant to pay his feudal dues, or a slave to work for his master. But how a system where each person thinks only of their own self-interest can lead to cooperation and prosperity is a genuine puzzle worthy of explanation.

Adam Smith (1723-1790)

The next economic topic to be put under Holten’s microscope was the marginal revolution (which she refers to as the “microeconomic revolution”). According to Holten, the marginal revolution was when economists came to the conclusion that the value of something was completely reducible to its price. Once again Holten is missing important context to the story she is trying to tell. In the early 1870s three economists; Menger, Jevons, and Walras; independently concluded that the way economists so far had thought about economic value was insufficient. Before the marginal revolution, the classical economists (most importantly Smith, Ricardo and Marx) had attempted to define the true value of goods, mostly built around the labor theory of value. With the marginal value, economists stopped trying to find the objective value of goods and instead began to argue that the price reflected the marginal subjective value of goods. A diamond is not inherently more valuable than a glass of water, but in the current market, someone is willing to pay more for it thus giving it a higher “value” on the market. Thus, the price does not reflect the true value of something, but how much the buyer personally values it. While marginalism still carried with its remnants of a moral theory (through the idea of cardinal utility), it was if anything a step away from the idea that it is the role of economists to judge the moral value of people and things.

What are we worth?

While it is arguably with the marginal revolution that modern economics really begins, this is more or less where Holten stops her history of economics, with only a few comments about later developments. Thus, in the second part of her lecture, she leaps almost 150 years forward in the history of economics and begins discussing the modern economics and its use. However, in this second part, she doesn’t actually refer to any works of economics but instead seems to build her entire case on clippings from Danish newspapers.

The main story of the second part of her lecture is that economists tend to measure value in ways that undercount the contributions to the economy by women. Among other things, she gives the example that GDP only counts economic activities that are sold on the market thereby not counting the extra work women do in the home and she mentions a newspaper article that says that women contribute less to the public finances than men.

Her whole argument rests on the premise that economists only think things have value if it contributes to GDP or the state budget, but this is of course not what economists think. Fundamentally, her confusion seems to come from the fact that economists use “value” both to denote something that has a high price, but that value in normal language refers to something that is intrinsically or morally good. In a similar vein, she fails to realize that if an economist says that women contribute less to the public finances on a net basis than men do, this is not a statement of moral worth, but one of financial accounting. This of course doesn’t mean that the broad public might not share her misunderstanding and that this might have negative effects. I think this is actually quite likely. But because her understanding of modern economics is based solely on its discussion in the press she ends up arguing against an academic straw man.

In some ways, the caricature of economics that Holten presents is actually closer to her own opinions than it is to those of economists. Holten criticizes the idea that human value should be reduced to economical contribution, but her solution seems to be that we should do it even more. In the later parts of the lecture, she seems to be suggesting that we should start including the “care work” we do in private into our models of economics. But is this really the route we want to go down? While the idea that caring for family and friends is its own reward can be used as a justification of unequal workloads between the sexes, the alternative of seeing human caring as an economic exchange is rather dystopic.

Towards the end of the lecture, she tells a story where she seems to imply that she would be a better friend if a good friendship was somehow included in GDP calculations. Instead of freeing us from the idea that only formal economic activity has value, she seems to want to reduce all human interactions to economic exchanges that need to be measured and counted. This is doubling down on the worst aspects of economic theory rather than a liberation from them. It is a morally bankrupt society where social connection needs economic justification rather than the other way around.

There are many problems with economic theory, and she is right when she argues that economic theory has many blind spots, but by reducing economics to a question of ideology, she fails convince anybody with whom she is not already in agreement. When I left her lecture, I had a feeling that those who had entered without prior knowledge of economics would leave convinced that they no longer needed to worry the ideas of economists and that those who had entered without prior knowledge of feminism would think the same about the ideas of feminists. If this is the case, I fear the only results of her lectures will be greater polarization and deeper antagonisms.

I think that economics and feminism both deserve better than that.

Lars Harhoff Andersen is the editor of Unreasonable Doubt, where he writes about Culture, Politics, and Philosophy. Lars is a Ph.D. fellow at the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen where his research centers on Economic History and the impact of culture on societal development.

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[1] Heilbroner, R.L., 2011. The worldly philosophers: The lives, times and ideas of the great economic thinkers. Simon and Schuster. page 21