In 2020 Emma Holten read an article in the Danish press that argued that over the course of their lifetimes, women took more from the public purse than they gave. This made them a net deficit to society. Holten took umbrage at the idea, quite rightly, and borrowed the word as the title of her book.
It’s not exactly news that women don’t contribute the same amount to the treasury as men, but to imply that women are a drain on resources is to undervalue what it is women are doing while they’re not in paid work. Women take career breaks to have children, and are more likely to work part time in order to provide care. This is of course a vital contribution to society, and only the peculiarly one-eyed world of economics would see this as a deficit.
Raising children, caring for elderly relatives or running a household are not paid tasks. They generate no financial wealth or taxes. In our economic system, things without a price on them have no value. Care work is thus invisible to maintream economics. Since women do more care, their contribution is systematically overlooked.
There have been a couple of responses to this from early feminists, and from economists keen to resolve the disparity. One is to argue that housework and care should be paid. This values those tasks and brings them into the formal economy, although who pays for that is an open question and as far as I know no country has ever attempted it (this is one of the arguments for a basic income). Another response is to call for a rebalancing of care and housework, getting men to do more unpaid work on the one hand, and freeing women to stay in work on the other. This is the approach taken by countries that offer generous paternity leave and free childcare provision.
While laudable, neither of these gets to the real heart of the issue, Holten suggests. The problem is not with women, and neither is it with care. The problem is with economics and the way that it understands value. Across a series of chapters, the book describes the rise of our current system of pricing and markets, and how early economists accounted for care. The answer is that they generally didn’t (as Katrina Marçal also explores in her splendidly named book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?) Early economists – all of whom were men – managed to write complex theories of society that neglected to mention childbirth or childcare, as if new workers sprung up in the woods like mushrooms. Ideas such as care, home, family and love are basically invisible in enlightenment philosophy.
Holten also challenges the branch of feminism that sees liberation through employment. This is the feminism of the privileged, she argues. As black feminists have pointed out, for one woman to go back to work, someone else might step in as a nanny or au pair. Usually that will be someone lower down the economic ladder, often an ethnic minority or immigrant. For that person, the shoe might well be on the other foot: they would much rather work less and have more time for their own family. They work because they have to, but liberation for them would be the freedom to work less and spend more time with their children.
This is also true of men, Holten notes. Plenty of men sacrifice family time in pursuit of paid work and the status it brings. That’s a bad deal, in my opinion as a dedicated part-timer, and many would benefit from working less.
Feminist economics, as Holten sees it, isn’t just about getting more women into the workplace or putting a price on care. It is about making care visible in economics and giving us the language to improve things that can’t be counted. It would open up new political space, and breathe new life into the public sector. It may prove critical in solving the crisis in care, where the dominance of GDP and market thinking is blunting our response. “As long as the goal is a society with more money in it, there will always be a pull away from those things that are hardest to put a price on, and the people deemed expensive, valueless or immeasurable will face constant degradations.”
Governments can now only speak confidently about things they can cost. The over-arching policy goal is to pump up GDP, in the hope that more money will give us all the things we need. “There is no talk of giving us the right to more of what we can’t put a number on – vacation days, care for our minds and bodies, maybe a society in which no children are poor.”
I think this is an important argument. There are few things more important than care, in all its forms, and a decision-making system that sees it as worthless isn’t fit for purpose. We need to fix the blindspots in economics if we want to make progress on the things that matter most, and Holten’s book is an excellent introduction to a more holistic economics.
- You can buy Deficit from Earthbound Books
- See also Tim Jackson’s latest book The Care Economy, and Katherine Trebeck‘s work, including the book we co-authored, The Economics of Arrival.
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