Deirdre McCloskey: Publications: Folbre and Crittenden

Ann Crttenden

Nancy Folbre

by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Unpublished review for The Nation on the eve of 9/11, September 2001
Filed under feminist economics

The latest experiment in tweaking the academic left is a full-page advertisement against feminism, or at any rate against the conservative right's picture of feminism. Watch for it next term in your local college newspapers. Feminists have more practice than most folk on the left in handling flat-out denials of the obvious. So the denials in the ad from the Independent Women's Forum (typical "emerita" member: Lynne Cheney) shouldn't cause the uproar David Horowitz caused with his little tract against reparations for slavery.

The student editors have been smarter this time. The ad has been printed now in the Yale Daily, the Dartmouth Review, and the UCLA Bruin---though turned down by the Harvard Crimson and by the Columbia Spectator. (The Spectator has in the recent past published in its columns anti-Semitic rants by the head of the Black Student Union.) Go, you Harvard and Columbia journalistas! Protect those jobs-to-be at Newsweek!

The Forum's Ten Most Common Feminist Myths, belief in any one of which suggests you may need deprogramming (good choice of words), don't seem to have been assembled with much thought. You can imagine a gaggle of 30-something country clubbers telling each other that such and such a belief of feminists is a just a howl. The Forum ladies have not read and reflected much on what they think they oppose. Maybe the right needs some feminist theorists, or at least some people who have read books about the actual experiences of women-or, better, had some. I say this as a woman of the right myself, a longtime libertarian, certified (no jokes, now).

Number One, for example, of the silly, crazy, mythical, ludicrous, self-refuting, politically correct unbelievabilities of leftwing academic socialist silly-head feminism is that one out of four women report by college graduation that they have been subject to attempted rape. The statistic, from a study by Mary Koss, turns out to be horribly-you might say soberly--correct when you include, as the question did, high school time and too drunk to say no. I can report from Animal House at Dartmouth in 1963, before the Beetles' first LP, that one in four seemed an accurate statistic then. Nobody I've talked to on either side of this sex-and-power struggle thinks one out of four, or one out of some pretty small number, is silly, crazy, red-under-the-bed.

Number Eight is the stupid, staggering, preposterous myth that girls suffer a dramatic loss of self-esteem during adolescence. Well. Maybe they don't at the country club, dears, with all those lovely garden parties, and Daddy's SUV, and summers at that riding camp in the Berkshires. But I know a lot of girls I love who do and did suffer a dramatic loss between ages 12 and 15, and so do you.

Number Nine, a special interest of mine, is the foolish, bizarre, patently absurd myth perpetrated by the unashamed Communists in Women's Studies Departments that. . . get this . . . gender is a social construction. Here the ladies of the Independent Women's Forum join the bull dyke security guards of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in a pre-feminist essentialism. Biology is destiny, yes? Real women are born, not made, right? What matters is not your jeans but your genes, si?

Bizzzz! Wrong again. Social roles and the depths they evoke are, well, social roles, as every woman and almost every man who has given it thought since Sappho, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill has agreed. After reading Nancy Folbre's The Invisible Heart and Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood I have a friendly suggestion for the next draft of the Forum's list (heh, we right wingers need to stick together). Myth Number Eleven: "Women do most of the unpaid or low-paid work of caring." Boy, there's a stupid, vicious, left-wing feminist myth.

Test your anti-feminist IQ with the following culled from the two books here: "

The value of unpaid caring work is (1.) 10 percent or (2.) nearly 50 percent of the properly measured total of economic activity. "

American parents spent less time on their children in 1985 than they had in 1965 (1.) by 40 percent or (2.) by zero percent. "

Of those taking care of small children (1.) 70 percent or (2.) nearly 100 percent are still women. "

Being a college-educated mother and spending some years taking care of your children reduces your lifetime income by (1.) $10,000 or (2.) $1,000,000. "

Of the one quarter of American workers in 1996 who provided some care for an ailing parent over age fifty (1.) about half or (2.) over three quarters were women. "

Professional care services (teaching, nursing, social services), one fifth of total employment in 1998, outweighing employment in manufacturing and construction employment combined, was staffed (1.) less than one half or (2.) over three quarters by women. "

Of welfare recipients in 1995 (1.) most were perpetual lay-about welfare queens with six children or (2.) two-thirds were in fact children, in families in which the average number of children was two, with a mother who went back to work within two years. "

All the subsidies for children taken together represent (1.) a big subsidy to the poor or (2.) about equal subsidies to poor and rich, leaving the middle holding the bag. "

Women with jobs outside the home work on average (1.) You call that work? or (2.) eighty hours a week, first shift and wifey/mommy.

How answer you? Door Number 1, behind which are piled all the toys that a male professional income unencumbered by pesky child-support payments can buy? Or Door Number 2, behind which bleats a leftwing, feminist nanny goat?

Bingo.

You get the goat.

The theme in Folbe and Crittenden is simple. Being a woman is no longer a financial catastrophe. Good. But being a mommy still is. Bad. "Changing the status of mothers, by gaining real recognition for their work," says Crittenden, "is the great unfinished business of the women's movement." She relies often on Folbre's wider argument: "The invisible hand of markets depends on the invisible heart of care." Caring is integral even to capitalism. And who does the care? Who makes the office coffee, who raises the kids, who makes a home to retreat to after a long day of turbo-capitalism? Time's up. Folbre argues that "assigning women primary responsibility for the care of others does more than let men off the hook. It separates care from power, and therefore reduces the overall level of support for caring work." Her proposal? "We should encourage both men and women to combine paid work with family and community work-a new division of labor that would develop men's capacities for care along with women's capacities for individual achievement."

Crittenden describes a study by Claudia Goldin, the first tenured woman at Harvard's Department of Economics (and a student I am proud to say of Donald McCloskey), of the patterns that educated women have tried out: Class of 1910, career, no children, ever; Class of 1933, little career, then few children; Class of 1955, many children, then small career; Class of 1970, big career, then few children. The point is that few women have Had It All, big career and children, any number, no start-stop, just like the guys. Crittenden is in the last, 1970 category, having had a big career at theNew York Times and then in 1982 a son After a few years as a mommy she was asked by someone, "Didn't you used to be Ann Crittenden?" She knew then she had to write The Price of Motherhood.

Crittenden's book is a little more skillfully written. A once foreign correspondent for that same Newsweek or a financial reporter for the New York Times is not taught, as Folbre and I were in the dismal school of academic prose, that you must say what you're going to say, say it, then say that you said it. Nor that "not only . . . but also" (non solum . . . sed etiam) is a swell ornament. But Folbre exceeds by far the readability standard set in most economics. (Please: I've already warned you about cute comebacks.) Her stories from her Texas childhood, for example, real life versions of Giant or Dallas, ring like a bell. One looks forward to a full-length memoir from this still young star of left economics.

Folbre's book is a little deeper. She detects, like the political scientist Robert Putnam, an erosion of communal values (I reckon both are mistaken: market capitalism has enriched relationships on balance, providing the bowling alleys, after all, for bowling together). The Invisible Heart is a major statement of left social policy, grounded in realism about economics and about life. She's a lefty after innocence, after the 20th century and its bloody experiments in collectivism. "A kinder and wiser economic development" would not ignore the difference in result between, say, North and South Korea-Folbre admits that markets do some things well. Her better society would not push people around. Like Mommy, it would take care.

So these are two winners, as the guys would say. Touchdowns for the Left. Slam dunks against the midget men of chauvinism and their cheerleaders in the Independent Women's Forum.

Folbre and Crittenden are impatient with the contradictions of rightwing "family values"-the value of keeping women in the kitchen, the value of gender-reorienting camps for queer kids, the value of sexual-orientation tests for adopting children, the value of reviving a patriarchy that in its prime seldom worked to anyone's advantage except (surprise, surprise) the patriarch's. Yes.

The contradictions of leftwing "social justice," though, are given gentler treatment. The notion that raising a child is an indulgence, even a social burden, gets nourishment from the environmentalism of the left, even though its dogmatic Malthusianism has no basis in economic fact. Crittenden and especially Folbre (who is an economic historian of stature along with everything else she does) grasp this. But they should explain it to their green and socialist friends. Malthusianism was one of the great scientific mistakes in economics, a little bit like Marxism itself. World population grew after 1820 by a factor of five. How much did income per head fall in response? Not at all: it was raised, by the global capitalism which Marx predicted would fail and which is now under attack whenever the World Trade Organization meets, by a factor of eight. Despite the evidence against it, it (Malthusianism, and for that matter Marxism) lives on in the single-child policy of China, resulting in the abortion or murder of millions of girls. And what is to the point here it lives on in the zero-population-growth sneers at Western cocktail parties, devaluing motherhood. What, you'd give up a socially useful career as a corporate lawyer to have children?!

The left feminist idea that biology cannot be permitted to count for anything, that admitting any Nature as against Nurture is a fascism to be met by violence, not sober inquiry, has set mothers up for feelings of failure. As Crittenden observes, the "blindsided" generation of the feminist revolution "simply had not anticipated . . . the degree to which they would fall in love with their babies." Nor did they anticipate, she adds, "the high professional price they would pay for that love." About the high professional price we can do something. About mother love we can't. Forget about "shouldn't." As economists would put it, anyway it's not in our opportunity set. A Dutch friend of mine worried before she had her fourth child whether (in her very words) she would fall in love with it. She had with the other three, but she was over forty, and so on and so forth, all the reasons love might not hold. But in the end of course reasons had nothing to do with it: she fell for her daughter, hard. The problem is that if women fall in love with their babies, or with their lovers, in this care-giving way, care givers are going to be abundant and cheap. As Peggy Seeger put it in her song of first-wave feminism, "I Want to Be an Engineer," "What price for a woman?/ You can buy her for a diamond ring."

What to do?

My own, card-carrying libertarian proposal is a minimum income for everyone (thus Milton Friedman since the 1960s), Federal cash support for maternity care, a Federal deadbeat law enforced by DNA testing administered by the courts, a $6,000 a year Federal voucher for education age 2 to 22-all paid for by closing down the FBI, the DEA, OSHA, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Defense. Yes, libertarian prayers. But a lot of them overlap in detail with the leftwing prayers that fill the later portions of The Invisible Heart and The Price of Motherhood. The left and the libertarians agree on getting the government out of subsidizing the paterfamilias. Most economists agree that national income should be measured to include caring labor. If we get together on this we can crush the country club.

But I get worried when Folbre and Crittenden call in duh govm't. You knew I was going to say that-I've confessed I'm a libertarian. When Crittenden proposes that we "transfer all responsibility for postdivorce payments to a single Federal agency" I say to myself, and now to you: Oy. That's swell. And pretty soon we'll have a Department Of Parental Emendation that works almost as efficiently and fairly as the FBI, the IRS, the INS, and the Postal Service. When I've exorcised that image-it takes a few minutes of Episcopal centering prayer--I reply mildly to her, "I guess I'd rather have a national collection system that worked through the local courts, not a Federal agency, thank you. I agree with you that the courts do a poor job now. Let's fix them. We enforce contract laws across states. Let the lawyers profit from a well-made deadbeat law and watch the child-support payments roll in." In making the case that kids are not pets Folbre tells about her horse. I want her to imagine providing for the horse in a federally owned and operated Big Barn. Folbre has long been an activist in politics, taking the chances of state violence ever since the cops carried her down from a tree-saving protest as a college student. But I worry that she and Crittenden still don't have a vivid enough sense of how very, very nasty Big Brother is, and what a lousy idea it is give him anything to do but cut checks.

And both Folbre and Crittenden assume steadily that we already know the art of "raising children well"-chiefly that mothers and fathers should spend a lot of time with them at taxpayers' expense. Oh, really? I wonder. Is the adult-dominated world of youth soccer in 2001 better for kids than the autonomous skip rope and ball games of 1951? If our task, as Crittenden puts it, is to produce "self-reliance, honesty, industry, and thrift," then maybe, just maybe, we did it better in 1951 with Catholic schools and nuns followed by unsupervised play in the alleys than with the suburban home in which Mommy runs the kids around to music lessons á la "The Sopranos." In producing competent adults why would the Mommy household, an invention of the 19th-century bourgeoisie, work any better than the Mommy state (the invention of the 20th-century bourgeoisie)? I dunno.

As for already knowing, well, we've had quite a lot of that, haven't we? If we think we already know that fiscal policy can be fine tuned, that Agent Orange will flush out the VC, that embargoes will overturn Saddam Hussein, that high-rise public housing will help the poor, we are of course duty bound to try. But do we actually know? It would be unfair to note that Crittenden and Folbre have half a child between them-after all, Dr. Spock, who guided our parent's generation, had none at all. And our authors do a much more serious job than Dr. Spock did in scouring the scientific literature. Crittenden has a reporter's eye for fact-checking and Folbre a professor's eye for theory-noting. Not much gets by them.

True, an economist worries that they might not have nailed down the argument that children are a public good. Both contend repeatedly that the warrants for treating kids like national defense rather than like pet horses are that (1.) we need kids now to pay for our social security later; and (2.) the grown kids "provide benefits for the rest of us." Since the books sparkle elsewhere with fact and argument you wonder why this central argument is made so thinly and unpersuasively. In most economic thinking social security is not the only or the best provision for old age; the kids earn for themselves as income most of the "benefits for the rest of us"; and anyway the presence of a spillover, if there is one, is not a knock-down argument for calling out the Feds.

Yet these are two fact-filled, passionate, wholly readable books that make a case hard to answer. It fact it's unanswerable. We d need to encourage the caring economy. We do need to stop taxing the kids.

Come on, now, you ladies of the Independent Women's Forum. Your first step is going to be painless: read Folbre and Crittenden. Then think through the list.

by Deirdre N. McCloskey Unpublished review for The Nation on the eve of 9/11, September 2001 Filed under feminist economics

by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Unpublished review for The Nation on the eve of 9/11, September 2001
Filed under feminist economics