Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?: A Story About Women and Economics

156 Pages·2015·0.94 MB·English

by  Marcal

KATRINE MARÇAL
Who Cooked
Adam Smith’s Dinner?
A Story About Women and Economics
Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
‘Economics is about money and why it is good’
Woody Allen
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
DISCLAIMER
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
In which we climb into the world of economics and ask ourselves who Adam
Smith’s mother was
CHAPTER TWO
In which we are introduced to economic man and realize that he is incredibly
seductive
CHAPTER THREE
In which it becomes apparent that economic man is not a woman
CHAPTER FOUR
In which we see that our pact with economic man isn’t turning out as we had
expected
CHAPTER FIVE
In which we add women and stir
CHAPTER SIX
In which Las Vegas and Wall Street merge
CHAPTER SEVEN
In which the global economy goes to he
CHAPTER EIGHT
In which we see that men are also not like economic man
CHAPTER NINE
In which economic incentives aren’t shown to be as uncomplicated as we
might think
CHAPTER TEN
In which we see that you aren’t selfish just because you want more money
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In which we see that a negative number is still zero
CHAPTER TWELVE
In which we all become entrepreneurs
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In which we see that the uterus isn’t a space capsule
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In which we discover economic man’s unforeseen depths and fears
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In which we see that the greatest story of our time only has one sex
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In which we will see that every society suffers in line with its bullshit. And
we say goodbye.
EPILOGUE
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CREDITS
INDEX OF PERSONS
Copyright
DISCLAIMER
The protagonist in this book is fictional and bears little resemblance to persons
living or dead. The reality depicted doesn’t exist, really. The economic theories
that the protagonist is derived from have very little to do with reality. Any
similarities between readers and the book’s protagonist are coincidental.
This is because you want to be like him. And not because you are.
PROLOGUE
Feminism has always been about economics. Virginia Woolf wanted a room of
her own, and that costs money.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women joined together to
demand the right of inheritance, the right of ownership, the right to start their
own companies, the right to borrow money, the right to employment, equal pay
for equal work and the option to support themselves so that they didn’t need to
marry for money, and could instead marry for love.
Feminism continues to be about money.
Feminism’s aim for the past decades has been to take money and privilege
from men in exchange for less quantifiable things like ‘the right to cry in public’.
Or at least that’s how some people put it.
More than six years have passed since 15 September 2008, the day the
American investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Within a few
weeks banks and insurance companies around the world followed suit. Millions
of people lost their jobs and their savings. Families were forced to give up their
houses, governments fell, the markets shook. Panic swept from one part of the
economy to the next and from one country to another as a system that couldn’t
stand up any more stumbled forward.
We watched in wonder.
If everyone just works, pays their taxes and keeps quiet, everything will sort
itself out.
That’s what we’d been taught.
But that was false.
After the crisis, one international conference was held after another. Book
upon book was written about what had gone wrong and what needed to be done.
Suddenly, everyone seemed to be criticizing capitalism, from Conservative
politicians to the Pope in Rome. It was said that this crisis was a paradigm shift,
that everything would now be different. The global financial system needed to
change. New values would have to dominate the economy. We read about greed,
about global imbalances and about income inequality. We heard ad nauseam that
the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ was made up of two characters, one meaning
‘danger’, the other ‘possibility’.
(Which isn’t correct, by the way.)
Six years later the financial sector has recovered. Profits, salaries, dividends
and bonuses are back to what they once were.
The economic order and the economic story that so many thought would
disappear with the crisis proved to be stubborn. Intellectually robust. The
question is, why? There are many answers. This book aims to give you one
perspective on the matter: that of sex.
And not in the way you might think.
If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, the financial crisis would have
turned out differently, said Christine Lagarde in 2010, when she was still
France’s Minister of Finance.
Presumably not entirely seriously.
Audur Capital, an Icelandic private equity fund entirely run by women, was
the only fund of its kind that made it through the crisis without so much as a
scratch, she pointed out. And there are studies that show that men with higher
testosterone levels are more prone to taking risks. Excessive risk-taking is what
causes banks to capsize and financial crises to occur, so does this mean that men
are too hormonal to run the economy?
There are other studies that show that women are at least as prone to taking
risks as men, but only when they are in the middle of their menstrual cycles. Is
the problem with male bankers that they are like ovulating women? What is the
connection between the business cycle and the menstrual cycle?
Further studies note that girls in all-girls schools are just as eager as boys to
take risks. Girls in mixed schools, on the other hand, are more cautious. In other
words, norms and ideas about what your sex is in relation to the so-called
opposite sex seem to matter.
At least when the opposite sex is present.
We can joke about these things, or take them seriously, but one fact remains:
Lehman Brothers would never have been Lehman Sisters. A world where
women dominated Wall Street would have had to be so completely different
from the actual world that to describe it wouldn’t tell us anything about the
actual world. Thousands of years of history would need to be rewritten in order
to lead up to the hypothetical moment that an investment bank named Lehman
Sisters could handle its over-exposure to an overheated American housing
market.
The thought experiment is meaningless.
You can’t just switch out ‘brothers’ for ‘sisters’.
The story of women and economics is much bigger than that.
Feminism is a tradition of thought and political action that goes back more
than two hundred years. It is one of the great democratic political movements of
our time, no matter what you think about its conclusions. And feminism has also
accounted for what is probably the largest systemic economic shift of the last
century.
Some would say ever.
‘Women went to work in the 1960s’: that’s how this story is usually told.
But it’s not true. Women didn’t ‘go to work’ in the 1960s or during the
Second World War.
Women have always worked.
What has happened in the last decades is that women have changed jobs.
From working in the home, they’ve taken positions out on the market and
started to take payment for their labour.
From having worked as nurses, carers, teachers and secretaries they have
started competing with men as doctors, lawyers and marine biologists.
This represents a gigantic social and economic shift: half of the population
has moved the majority of its work from the home to the market.
We went from one economic system to another, without really being aware of
it.
At the same time, family life has been transformed.
As recently as 1950 American women on average gave birth to four children
each. Today that number is down to two.
In Great Britain and the USA, women’s family patterns have arranged
themselves in accordance with their level of education. Well-educated women
have fewer children, and they have them later in life. Women with less education
have more children, and they have them a lot younger.
In the media, both of these groups are depicted as caricatures.
The career woman with the screaming baby in her briefcase, she who waited
until she turned forty to push out her offspring, and now she doesn’t even have
time to take care of it.
She is selfish, irresponsible and a bad woman.
The young working-class mother sitting in her council flat, living off benefits
and without a man in her life.
She is also selfish, also irresponsible and also a bad woman.
The debate about the colossal economic shift that we have gone through often
starts and ends here: in opinions about how individual women, or caricatures of