It has become a belief of mine that economists do not know where babies come from. In an article by Zdravka Todorova
posted over on New Deal 2.0, she addresses this concern of mine and eludes to the obvious, which is that economists use the androcentric society model that we live in blindly and without thought of consequence.
When most economists talk abut “economic agents,” they are conjuring up bodiless, genderless automatons who naturally have no biological predecessors, do not carry babies, do not give birth, and do not face questions of physical survival and human development. So it is easy for them to look at double-digit unemployment rates and deflationary pressures on wages and benefits simply as market phenomena while ignoring that such things actually threaten the physical survival of families. It is not surprising that in crises like ours, macroeconomic policies stemming from such dehumanized conceptions of the economy do not address the majority of people’s hardships — and end up being inhumane indeed.
Now, in this huge financial crisis our country is facing today, all the talk is on the future generations and the insurmountable debt that the government will have that there will be no way for the children of our children to dig their way out. In the heat of this, we cease to remember that although the sovereign United States government can sustain “indefinite indebtedness,” United States households cannot. According to Todorova, “For one, they are not the sovereign issuer of the currency, and second, they are not inorganic entities without a life-span. It is often forgotten that just the opposite is valid for the State, let alone that the government debt is necessarily the private sector wealth.”
Lack of finances affect a household’s ability to sustain itself as a unit, clearly. The household has always provided “free” benefits to society, such as child and elderly care, care for the sick. Since the majority of housework and care taking is done by women, it is has become an assumption that women will always be there to help out and shoulder some of the brunt, bailing us all out a bit. This is through unpaid labor and care, and other duties that women typically perform in the household.
The question that Todorova then frames from this all is, “Do the proponents of private markets, and government deficit worriers understand that they assume there always must be somebody performing the unpaid and humane labor of love to secure the livelihoods of households in crisis? More interestingly do they understand that especially in crisis these people must be super-moms/dads/grandparents?”
Genderless macroeconomic thinking embraces this popular self-deception, and is not appropriate for real-life. Thus, knowingly (to economists) or unknowingly (to casual commentators), these families indeed are supposed to resemble the non-biological beings inhabiting the lifeless macroeconomic models. What are the consequences of moving on? For one, it is time to stop and to question the seriousness of the idea that we can get out of this crisis of social provisioning without growing government deficits. These deficits, however, need to directly address the reasons for financial hardships of living and breathing people.
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