Ask an Academic: Feminist Economics Might Just Save Us All
Feminist economist Nancy Folbre graciously answers my questions about capitalism, care work, and why this is all so hard
Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life. I’m currently thinking about and exploring capitalism and economics as they relate to feminism, so I spoke with a legendary feminist economist, Nancy Folbre, to ask her all my non-academic questions. She was extremely patient and lovely.
As always: I do encourage you to feel free to share your own thoughts on the texts or topics in the comments. Conversation (that remains respectful) is encouraged. Thanks for joining me on this journey.
Love,
Maggie
Recently, I have been experimenting with Reels and TikTok1 in order to expand my reach a bit on social media. No, I don’t want to be an influencer, I just want to sell books. And really, I want to sell books because I do a lot of research into interesting shit and I want more people to know about what I’ve learned, OK? I also would love to make a living at my job. (Wow, now this is feeling meta.)
So when all of the news came out last week about how Caitlin Clark’s rookie salary in the WNBA was making headlines ALL OVER THE PLACE (including many many magazines that I have tried to place stories about financial inequality in women’s sports for YEARS unsuccessfully!) I had to have a little rant.
The point was, obviously, that WNBA salaries are terrible and have always been terrible and are literally 0.05% of what men’s professional basketball salaries are, and this kind of gender inequity is not good! Perhaps I should have foreseen that the comments I would get on this video, and in my DMS and on other posts I’ve made once I turned comments off, were men explaining how “basic economics” works to me. (And suggesting I don’t watch the WNBA, which is hilarious, for anyone who has ever spoken to me.)
What these men are choosing to ignore is that “basic economics” were a tool of the patriarchy to keep women subservient to their husbands. Anyway, somehow this all relates to the fact that I interviewed an absolute icon of feminist economics: Nancy Folbre for this week’s newsletter. Folbre is a Professor Emerita at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has devoted her career to measuring the value of unpaid care work.2 This topic fascinates me, because I am personally frustrated by the way the economy simply does not work for so many of us or reflect the work that we actually do. And I see the frustrations of so many of my parent friends, and mother friends in particular, who are struggling financially because daycare is so expensive, and yet, childcare providers often live in poverty, and yet, if we stay home with our children we don’t get paid a thing. It feels like an unsolvable problem economically — kind of like how the bros tell me the WNBA players can’t possibly make more money because their league makes so much less than the NBA. As if all of this isn’t somehow rigged against women to begin with!
For more on the patriarchal roots of economics (and capitalism’s inevitable demise!), our conversation, which is not at all about sports, but actually about me trying to figure out whether, and how, to burn capitalism down is edited and condensed for clarity, below.
MAGGIE MERTENS: Maybe we can just start with how it was that you came to the particular focus that you did: this idea of feminist economics?
NANCY FOLBRE: That's my least favorite question of all the questions. I can't really remember! Like, I'm 71 years old. I've been doing it a long time.
MM: How about this: What do you think the the field of feminist economics looks like today, compared to when you started?
NF: Oh, well, it's hugely advanced. It's much more diverse. It's much more international. You know, I've been a part of the International Association for Feminist Economics, it's really consolidated. It's now a really big international organization with a lot of financial support.
MM: Sometimes we think about feminism and gender studies, and you think about literature and sociology and those fields. But that intersection with economics, it seems like such an obvious one when you think about the struggles of feminism and gender inequality. Why aren’t they more closely connected as fields of study?
NF: I mean, it was hard. And I think, it's still not really integrated into women's studies. The field is still very much influenced by literature and communications and discourse, and so forth, and so on. And that's just part of the fragmentation of academia. Economics itself, developed in a very patriarchal environment. So it's not surprising that we produced some very major gender asymmetries and that the field still clings to them.
MM: I'd love to speak a little bit about the undervaluing of care work and how from the feminist side of things, I think people are finally kind of coming around to seeing this as as a major societal issue. Can you explain a little bit about about the economic impact of that actual undervaluing?
NF: Well, it just means that we're flying blind, basically. I mean, we pretend that we have this measure of output and efficiency, right? But it's all based on the market and the market—paid work—represents about half of all work that's being done. So, you know, it's like playing a game with a wrong scorecard. So it distorts policies in a lot of ways. And I think one way it distorts them is we kind of celebrate the production of luxury goods, and we kind of ignore basic necessities like health and education and social services.
MM: Do you feel like since you started looking at this simple idea that care work should be more highly valued, has ideology changed around that?
NF: Yes and no. I think it's complicated because it's not just a matter of: do you count it or not? A lot of it has to do with what is the meaning of using a market metric to measure something that's really not a market commodity? One of the reasons that I got really interested in unpaid work is because I felt like a lot of feminists in the social sciences were all like, ‘Oh, women need to get more paid employment. And if we just got women into employment, everything would be alright.’ They didn't really ask the question: who's gonna take care of the stuff that women are taking care of right now? It was as though it wasn't an issue, as though women were just at home laying on the couch watching soap operas, so getting them into employment would be a huge increase in efficiency and output. That's what I mean by the wrong scorecard. In fact, they weren't doing that. Women who were doing primarily unpaid work are generally working 40 hours a week.
Now, it's really clear now that we're really effing stressed out because we don't have enough time! Plus, there's a lot of rebellion, especially with young people, against the traditional gender binary. Plus, birth rates are below replacement, and that's really scaring a lot of social scientists. So, I think that the concept of care shortage, care crisis, care pressure, care problems, that's what's creating more space to recognize the value of unpaid care. Just like with the environment, what does it take to get people to realize that pollution is costly? Well, it takes a lot of hurricanes and floods and forest fires, and then they begin to go, ‘Oh, yeah this is a resource that needs to be protected.’ The positive spin is: We're figuring it out. We're figuring out very gradually that there are a lot of unpriced assets, and unpriced services that we really depend on. And the question is, will we figure it out in time?
MM: I have young kids and so I talk a lot with other mothers of young children. It almost feels like a paradox that we're in: Sure we could go get these jobs that pay us outside of the house, but we want our kids cared for well, and we want our kids’ care workers to be paid well, and those mothers who do take care of them, want to see that honored as work, and we want our domestic labor honored and it almost feels like an unsolvable problem in some ways.
NF: It's not unsolvable ... maybe it's intractable.
MM: Tell me about that.
NF: I really try to persuade people to think about the analogies between the climate crisis and the care crisis. Because in both cases, what's wrong is that we've paid too much attention to the wrong things. And we've kind of idolized things that are bought and sold at the expense of things that can't be bought and sold, without realizing that the things that are bought and sold really depend on the things that can't be bought and sold. So I think there's actually a lot of economic pressure to change course, because it's not sustainable. And it's just a matter of persuading people that it's really a high priority. And that's why journalists and writers are so really very important to the whole thing. Have you watched any of this series: 3 Body Problem?
MM: No.
NF: Okay, well, I really like science fiction. And 3 Body Problem is based on a famous trilogy by a Chinese writer, named Cixin Liu. And it's also a Netflix series that just came out. The series is fine. It's not a great. I'm not trying to talk you into seeing it, but the reason it's relevant is it's a really interesting film about despair. It starts out with a Chinese woman who sees her father tortured and killed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and she just gives up on humanity and says we need help, we just can't solve these problems ourselves. She's a physicist, and she works in an astronomy lab, and she sends a message into outer space. And she basically ends up contacting an alien civilization and telling them please come and fix things.
But then it turns out, all these people put their faith in the idea that these aliens are going to come and save us. And then it becomes apparent that they might actually be pretty sinister and villainous, and might actually be on their way to completely destroy us. And this significant conflict breaks out between those who are afraid of, and those who are welcoming of, another civilization. Anyway, I do think people have this feeling like, we need help.
MM: I think some of it too, is that era in which the feminist solution was women go get paid work and become CEOs. And I think we've seen that that's clearly not going to fix everything.
NF: Wait a minute, in all fairness, there have always been feminists who have had a much more socialist orientation. It's just that liberal feminism, in the US, in particular, liberal feminism got all the bandwidth.
MM: Absolutely. I think you're correct. So that's where a lot of people do get stuck, too is that it feels like, do we all need to become socialists and burn down capitalism entirely just for us to solve this crisis of care and this problem that feels so rooted in gender?
NF: I have kind of worked with the Marxian-influenced political economy framework my whole career. But honestly, I think the capitalism-socialism thing is just hanging us up. I think the categories are kind of out of date. It's not just about class, it's about needing a better social contract that provides really adequate support for producing and developing people's capabilities. And that kind of goes against capitalist logic. But it goes against a lot of socialist logic, too. I mean, the socialist vision has been just as crippled by its obsession with economic growth as the capitalist one has been. So in fact, I just saw some really interesting figures from a recent Pew Research Center poll, that show how much dissatisfaction there is with capitalism in the U.S., and it varies a lot by gender, and by age. But there's not really much enthusiasm for socialism. It's really not capitalism versus socialism. It's the need for a new way of thinking about the economy.
MM: Have you spent time kind of thinking about that, like what is next? Or is it just about making this this system work the best for as many people as we can?
NF: I don't think those two are at odds. I think that you can believe in evolution, right? And still recognize that sometimes in an evolutionary process, there are big discontinuities and revolutions. But in the long run, what we're talking about is a social species that is trying to evolve in a sustainable way. I haven't really thought very much about what exactly it would look like but I've thought a lot about what are the obstacles to developing the kind of coalition that is necessary, and one of the really big obstacles is inequality. Because if people are in very unequal positions, they don't have much incentive to cooperate. To me, that's the the sense in which we might be in kind of a death trap: that in order to implement the kind of policies that we need to reduce inequality, we'd have to be more equal.
MM: I've actually been thinking about that a lot, that in order to value care work, I think there's something that also needs to be done about about the gendering of care work. And that's like an ideological shift, as much as it is a financial one or an economic or like a societal one.
NF: It is very much. I agree.
MM: I was recently in a class on Silvia Federici's work3, and we were discussing at one point the lack of value of care work because it’s seen as women’s work, and could we just fix this by giving a universal basic income or paying daycare workers six-figures out the door? And I don't think so because we would still come up against this idea that it's women's work! Or something else would be unpaid because that would be women's work.
NF: There are a lot of things I really love about Silvia Federici's work, but I think she's often like, ‘Oh end capitalism and we will all be free.’ And, hello. I think it's just too simple.
MM: I liked what you've said about, there's an obstacle to get over, let's focus on the next step. I also really loved the framing of your book: Greed Lust and Gender: A history of Economic Ideas. It does make me think about the obstacle of how does feminism come up against male greed being kind of the thing most prized above all in capitalism? And how do we ever kind of let go of the idea that the goal we should all be striving for is to make as much money as possible?
NF: Let me first say that, because I am trained as an economist, I tend to think in terms of efficiency. I became an economist because I gave up on arguing with people about what I thought was good and bad. And I thought I would be better at arguing about what was efficient and inefficient. And I mean, this is so on our side, because capitalism is really inefficient. It's destroying itself. I guess my main point is, it's just not sustainable. Sometimes there are evolutionary dead ends. And the idea that you can give a large share of your output to a tiny minority of people who justify their immense wealth by promising ever greater levels of wealth in the future. I think at one point in human history, there was probably an upside to that bargain. Like, 'Well, okay, we don't mind paying you really extravagant profits, if you're going to help us get going in a way that improves our standard of living.' That's not a preposterous trade off. But now, it's clearly not a sustainable trade off. So I think we have to rewrite it. But it is really hard. I agree with you about that.
MM: I know you've done work on the decreasing birth rate as being representative of not valuing things that aren't material. And, I know that's happening. I see it among my peers, just saying they don't want kids, because of the expense, and the detriment to the rest of their lives because the system is so unforgiving. And parenting just seems so hard now. What's the economic solution there?
NF: Well, first of all, I don't think it's a bad thing if we stay at below replacement rates for a while, because I think that — obviously it's not the most important driver of ecological disruption — but it is one driver. And I think it's also forcing us to rethink what we mean by families and by communities. But hopefully, if we can use this opportunity to successfully reconfigure our priorities, we'll come back to a sustainable equilibrium population by creating a social order where people are effectively able to combine paid and unpaid work in a sustainable way.
MM: I wonder too, if an increase in women who don’t have children, too, might have an impact on the ideologies of care work and what women's ‘natural’ roles are or whatnot?
NF: Yeah. And I'm also a little bit of an optimist about men participating more in carework. We are seeing that happening to some extent. I mean, it does have a lot of intrinsic rewards. And I think we need to be careful to talk about those and not just about the cost time.
MM: The other thing I wanted to ask about was the more recent discussion of and acceptance of the idea in the U.S. about ideas like a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Is that something that you see as a way to pay for care work?
NF: No. But I do think it can help, especially if there was a universal basic income for kids as well as adults. And this is a big problem, in my view, in the Universal Basic Income literature, is that a lot of times people kind of assume that every adult would get X amount of money. Well, that would still leave parents in a very bad position. So I think it's really important that a Universal Basic Income has to include an amount per child, as well as per adult. And I do think it would just reduce some of the pressure on especially low market income households in a good way and increase their bargaining power. But I don't think it solves the problem that women still do most of the unpaid care work. That has to come from elsewhere.
MM: Is there anything else on your on your mind on these topics that you wanted to share?
NF: You know, we're talking about these all these big, lofty things. And actually, I spend a lot of my time just trying to persuade economists to pay more attention. That's the primary value of these pedestrian studies that estimate the value of unpaid work. It's not so much that the numbers matter. It's that we should think about what's the labor supply? Economists are always worried about the labor supply, but when they say labor supply, they're thinking about the labor supply to paid work. Well, the labor supply to unpaid work is also really important! And I'm just explaining that I'm just trying to chip away at things.
Find Me Elsewhere!
Book Tour Dates
Book tour for BETTER FASTER FARTHER is rapidly approaching! If you’re on the West coast this June, come find me!
Tuesday, June 18
Seattle, WA - Elliott Bay Book Company, talk & signing, in-conversation with Elise Hooper, author of Fast Girls
Thursday, June 20
Bellingham, WA - Village Books, talk & signing, in-conversation with Megan Burbank
Monday, June 24
Portland, OR - Powell’s Books, talk & signing, in-conversation with Sarah Marshall, of You’re Wrong About
Tuesday, June 25
Corte Madera, CA - Book Passage, talk & signing, in-conversation with Rahawa Haile
Wednesday, June 26
West Hollywood, CA - Book Soup, talk & signing, in-conversation with Liza Mundy, author of The Sisterhood
Thursday, June 27
La Jolla, CA - Warwick’s, talk & signing, in conversation with Olympian and Track and Field coach, Shelia Burrell
Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a weekly newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.
You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens
Pre-order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books, June 18, 2024) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick pre-order button from Bookshop.org
If you TikTok, you can find me here, I have no idea what I’m doing there but maybe someday I will.
To read more of Nancy Folbre’s work, you can check out all of her books, here. And her blog Care Talk.
Thank you, this is an excellent interview that distills complex ideas really well
I’m digging deeply into Sonia Johnson and Mary Daly books now. 🤯 I’ve started thinking that maybe the reason Capitalism and Socialism haven’t worked for everyone, throughout history is because… Women haven’t had the chance to run the whole machine.