3 Votes for women and state priorities
The expansion of the state in the twentieth century has come hand in hand with the expansion of women's political rights. That includes the right to vote. Some have argued that the correlation is far from causal, that women (at least historically) tended to favour conservative values as opposed to big government.54 Others suggest that the correlation was no mere coincidence: that the state was women's tool for ensuring their interests were met.55
As the vote spread to women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the story goes that politicians began to appeal to their interests and that these interests were, on average at least, very much ‘left’ of their fellow men. Whilst state expansion is more commonly attributed to the rising power of the working classes, the rising power of women was, it is argued, just as important. Through the state, women could find insurance against the risk of divorce ‒ a welfare system that would not leave them destitute ‒ and employment in an expanding public sector. John Lott and Lawrence Kenny estimated that women's suffrage led to a 10 per cent rise in tax collection.56
Women were also often the very people living a life on the periphery of ‘the market’, in precisely the conditions where negative as opposed to positive effects could be felt. They were more likely to be in a vulnerable position, one which allowed the market to prey on their weakness, leading to exploitation and abuse. Not only were women acutely aware of the dark side of the market, they also saw the way in which markets failed to fully address problems such as insanitary conditions and a lack of clean water. As those historically responsible for the domestic chores, the everyday tribulations this presented would have been excruciating. Dealing with the day-to-day consequences of environmental degradation, together with time spent fetching clean water, remain big issues for the world's poorest women. For all of these reasons, one could easily equate votes for women with the vote for a more sizeable state.
However, as we saw in the previous chapter, markets can also provide advantages to women, offering a way out of repressive families and heavily gendered social expectations. A bigger state is not always better for women, which may explain why a debate still rages about whether the political emancipation of women really did lead to a bigger state. This does not, however, mean that the women's vote didn't affect the composition of state expenditure: what states chose to do with their tax revenues.57 Evidence from developing countries shows that, where women have greater influence over household spending, a higher proportion of family income is spent on necessities, education and health care.58 Furthermore, since they suffer relatively more from the effects of environmental damage, and of bigger families, their political representation has been shown to lead governments to take family and the environment more seriously.59 Super-sizing this to the level of state spending, it seems likely that the spread of the vote to women would, at the very least, have caused the state to rethink its priorities.
Conclusion
Markets and the state have long been seen as adversaries. However, the most successful economies are those in which the state and the market work in unison, allowing us to deal with the downsides of markets without throwing away the baby with the bathwater. How a country like Britain was able to develop a (relatively albeit not perfectly) capable state, one that generally worked in favour of prosperity creation, is one of the great questions which face economists today. Historians traditionally pinpoint Britain's peculiar geography and its history of having to defend itself, including against those pesky Vikings, but that is far from enough. As we have seen, just as important was the way individuals engaged on the ground, and that includes within the family. Agency and voice within the family fed through to politics and to wider commercialization.
To understand how a little island off the edge of Europe managed to build a sizeable and capable state, democratic institutions and a whirl of commercial activity, we have to begin in the home. It is also, therefore, by looking within the home that we will find the source of poverty and dysfunctional states within many poorer countries today, together with what more can be done in the West to ensure markets and the state continue to bring out the best in each other. Personal is indeed political.
Notes
1 Ortiz-Ospina and Roser (2018).
2 Ma and Rubin (2017).
3 Johnson and Koyama (2017).
4 Acemoglu et al. (2014).
5 Acemoglu, Moscona and Robinson (2016).
6 Elson (1998); Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas (2011).
7 Duflo (2012).
8 Friedman and Schwartz (1963).
9 Lu, Luan and Sng (2016).
10 Fraser (2013b), ch. 8.
11 McCulloch (1848), p. 156.
12 Pennington (2011), p. 42.
13 Pateman (1988); Pedersen (1995).
14 Kessler-Harris (2001). See p. 300 (fn. 36‒38) of the latter for further references on gender and the US welfare system. Also see Goldin (1990), including for a detailed discussion of marriage bars and sex segregation.
15 Cooke (2011). Also see Esping-Andersen (2013) and, on the United States, Kessler-Harris (2001).
16 Pedersen (2018). Also see Kessler-Harris (2001, p. 5), for the same point in regard to the United States.
17 Benería, Berik and Floro (2016), ch. 2; Elson (2012); Hozic and True (2016); Rubery (2015).
18 Htun and Weldon (2017), p. 159.
19 Ibid., p. 160.
20 Ibid., table 6.1, p. 164.
21 Stiglitz (2016).
22 Dahlerup (2018).
23 Offer (2002).
24 Johnson and Koyama (2017).
25 Besley and Persson (2009).
26 Skarbek (2014).
27 Scott (2018).
28 Scheidel (2017).
29 Blaydes and Chaney (2013).
30 Klein and Ogilvie (2017).
31 Epstein (2000).
32 Besley and Persson (2009).
33 Tilly (1975); Dincecco, Fenske and Onorato (2014); Koyama, Moriguchi and Sng (2017).
34 On East Anglia, Oosthuizen (2017).
35 Karaman and Pamuk (2013); O’Brien (2010).
36 Rubin (2018), pp. 17, 202‒4.
37 For a feminist perspective, Hirschmann (2007).
38 Rubin (2018), pp. 206‒7.
39 Aghion et al. (2010).
40 Johnson and Koyama (2017). Also Tabellini (2008); Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales (2016); Xue and Koyama (2018).
41 Alesina and Giuliano (2015).
42 Johnson and Koyama (2017).
43 Carmichael, de Pleijt and van Zanden (2016).
44 Todd (1988, 2011); Mill (1859, 1869); Okin (1989); Carmichael (2016), p. 32.
45 Kok (2017).
46 Bryson (2016).
47 Greif (2006).
48 Greif (1994).
49 Van Bavel and Rijpma (2015).
50 Johnson and Koyama (2017).
51 Laslett (1988).
52 Bateman (2016b).
53 Roberts (2016).
54 See Collins and Teele (2017) for a discussion and empirical critique.
55 For a summary, see Eswaran (2014), pp. 322‒5.
56 Lott and Kenny (1999).
57 Funk and Gathmann (2014).
58 Kabeer (1997); Duflo (2003).
59 Agarwal (1992).
Part IV
Humanity
Introduction
Throughout this book, I have tried to emphasize not only how crucial women's freedom is for delivering prosperity but equitable and sustainable prosperity. However, as we will see in the remaining chapters, economics is blind to women's freedom and to the associated policy implications. Gender bias is built into economics through its very choice of assumptions and approach. To see why, we need to delve into the history of economic thought; to see how economics first came to conceive of the individual, and what that meant for the direction of economic thinking fro
m the late nineteenth century through to the present.
Despite being so commonly associated with money, economics is first and foremost about people. What's going on in the economy is the outcome of our most personal decisions: whether to go to university; whether to start a business; whether to have children; whether to take time out to look after our children; whether to rent or buy; and whether to stick to that new year's resolution to eat healthily, exercise and save more. Summed up across the population, these and numerous other decisions affect how much our economy is capable of producing, what kinds of products it produces and its ability to invest and grow. When modelling the economy, economists therefore begin by thinking about how individuals make decisions.
Now, of course, the way people behave is something that falls into the realm of neuroscientists. However, you don't have to be a scientist (or ‒ one of my favourite television characters ‒ Frasier) to ponder why we do what we do. From the moment we are born, we interact with those around us and, in an effort to prevent ourselves from being exploited, have to try to second-guess other people: if we are too friendly and trusting, we might be taken advantage of, but, if we are too cold and cruel, our reputation risks being sullied in the wider social group. Hence, in some sense, we all have to become amateur psychologists from a young age simply to successfully socially engage with others.
As a teenager, I had far too much time to ponder human behaviour. I was never part of the ‘in-crowd’ – one of the Pink Ladies or T-Birds of the kind I saw in the film Grease. You know the kind I'm referring to – the kind who rebelled by smoking behind the bike sheds, by talking back to teachers, by breaking the school uniform code, and who had a string of older boyfriends with cars and earnings to take them out (albeit, when it came to the cars, not very new ones, and when it came to the cash, sums that only really seemed impressive relative to pocket money).
The result of being an outsider, of not being involved in the everyday action, is that you're able to stand on the periphery, pondering why people do what they do. I wondered why some of my peers paid so little attention to their school work when it was clearly going to affect the rest of their lives. We were, after all, growing up in Oldham, where deindustrialization meant that job opportunities in the traditional industry were shrinking and education seemed to be more important than ever. I also wondered why people became bullies – why they would sometimes snatch the book I was reading out of my hands and tease me before losing interest and turning on someone else. Did they actually enjoy tormenting people or was it a desperate attempt to build a reputation for being tough and cool (in which case it might have left them with sleepless nights of regret)?
One particular event is fixed in my mind. It was a Whit Friday evening back in the 1990s on the edge of the moors to the east of Manchester in a bleak and hilly group of villages known as Saddleworth, where the Moors murders still cast a shadow. I was heading back home with friends after listening to the last of the brass bands playing in the local band contest. As my friends and I started to leave the crowds, we were followed by a rather tough-looking group of girls not from ‘our parts’. They threatened to beat us up unless we emptied our pockets. We knew they were serious, and so we reluctantly did as they said. I tipped out my pockets and handed over what was not much more than a few measly coins. ‘Is that it?’ the ringleader said. What she did next was a real surprise. She handed back the coins. Relieved but puzzled, I wondered if she had had a sudden burst of solidarity, or if she instead reasoned that the pickings were too small to risk being the centre of a police report. And, of course, whether she managed to maintain her tough reputation within the gang.
I might have given the impression that, in my youth, I was an island of good sense. However, looking back on some of my own decisions I am left puzzled. I was eleven when, in the course of a deep economic recession, my father's business failed and, by the time I was fourteen, my parents had separated (perhaps the only advantage of which was, rather strangely, it seemed to buy me ‘street cred’.). My teenage years were filled not only with emotional turmoil but with poverty. Most of what my mother earned paid the rent but little else. My grandparents – only on a state pension themselves – would help to top things up. The minimum wage and tax credits were introduced some time later, so there was relatively little help from the state then. However, some assistance did come in the form of free school meals. The problem was that the queue at the school to collect your free dinner tickets was so public that it might as well have had a sign over it reading ‘the needy poor’. And, to join the queue, sometimes you had to be excused from class. Of course, the rest of the class knew precisely where you were going. I preferred to go hungry rather than have to join that queue and so begged my mum not to claim. If friends commented on why I wasn't buying lunch, I would just make up an excuse: I was often, it seems, dieting. I soon worked out ways of economizing, for example, buying a pack of cheap scones from the local co-op supermarket and making it last all week for lunches. When you're hungry, you find solutions.
But why was I so ashamed of being poor that I let it stand in the way of doing what would have obviously been best for my health? It's likely cost me in the longer term, including my height of just under 5 ft. The answer is straightforward: I put some value on what other people thought of me. I didn't want to look poor. Life's not just about money, it's also about dignity. Poverty is tied up with all kinds of emotions. That's easy to ignore.
What all of these experiences taught me was that human beings are pretty complex and, more than anything else, their decisions are often filled with tensions: tensions between wanting to be friendly but at the same time having to maintain a reputation for being tough so that they're not taken advantage of; tensions between doing what's best here and now and doing what's best for the longer term; tensions between doing what they themselves want but also feeling that they need to live up to what other people expect of them; and tensions between meeting their physical and their emotional needs ‒ where the latter includes the very respect and human dignity for which we all aim.
However, as we will see in what follows, the way economists think about individuals is much simpler. We are assumed to act as little more than robots; as rational, self-interested calculators. In the next chapter, we will consider how and why these economic assumptions emerged. In chapter 9, we will see how they have been challenged by behavioural economics. In the final chapter, I will suggest that if economics is to open its eyes to gender, it needs to go further: it needs to adopt a behavioral-cum-feminist approach to human life. As we will see in the process, whilst it has become common to criticize economic thinking, these criticisms have both gone too far ‒ and not far enough. New ground now needs to be broken if economics is to take us in the direction of equitable and sustainable prosperity. Feminist economics can point us in the right direction.
8
Me, Myself and I: A History of the Individual
To understand the economy, we need to understand people. In this chapter, I want to look at the way economists have thought about the individual throughout the ages, culminating in the individualistic ‘rational self-interested economic agent’ paradigm that still exists today. We will see that it has now become popular to critique this model of human behaviour, but there was an underlying logic to economics moving in this direction, adopting what might appear to be a very simplistic and unwholesome model. However, whilst the direction was understandable in the context of the time, it also created a problem, one that will become abundantly clear in the remaining chapters: it helped to crystallize the increasingly gendered division of the economy that emerged in the nineteenth century, one that cast men as economic actors and women as unproductive dependents.
At the Beginning
As a recent history of economic thought has noted, ‘[e]conomics is a relatively young academic discipline … Economic thinking, on the other hand, has a much longer tradition … As long as humans have lived on earth, they have resolved economic
questions.’1 Markets and money can be found throughout the writings of Greek philosophers, the Bible and in the work of medieval scholars. They were, however, explored in relation to questions of ethics and justice; acquiring riches was certainly not seen as a suitable end goal for individual existence. It was, we were told, by keeping selfish monetary desires in check that a society would be able to lift itself in spiritual and moral terms. That would, at least according to the Bible, ensure that the fruits of God's earth would be sufficient to provide for the fruits of the loins. Poverty was not attributed to a lack of hard work or talent, or even to the class system, but to a lack of faith and of basic morality. Making money, such as through business and merchant activity, was frowned upon, and charity was the means by which merchants and bankers would pay for their sins.
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