Who Pays for the Kids?

Gender and the Structures of Constraint

Nancy Folbre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9780415075640
• eBook ISBN: 9781134903948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Three paradoxes surround the division of the costs of social reproduction: * Women have entered the paid labour force in growing numbers, but they continue to perform most of the unpaid labour of housework and childcare.* Birth rates have fallen but more and more mothers are supporting children on their own, with little or no assistance from fathers

Part I
CONCEPTS OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

1
FEMINIST THEORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

Imagine a feminist economist standing between two groups of political economists, those to her right representing the neoclassical tradition, those to her left, the Marxian tradition. Ms. Feminist holds forth on the possibility of equal exchange and gains from trade. ‘Feminist theory has a great deal to learn from political economy,’ she announces, ‘but the reverse is also true.’ Three or four heads turn and offer her an encouraging glance. She continues. ‘I come to economics with a different set of questions than you do, and a different set of observations, perhaps because I come from a different place in the economy.’

Eyebrows are raised, and a gruff voice challenges her: ‘Why should that matter?’

‘It’s a long story,’ she replies. ‘First, I was taught that my family should be more important to me than my career, and partly as a result, I think I care more than you do about the economics of the family, the sexual division of labor, the distribution of housework, the costs of children, the meaning of domestic violence…’

‘Caring about it more doesn’t mean you have a better theory of it,’ a masculine voice points out. ‘Both neoclassical and Marxian economists are writing about the family now.’

‘Yes,’ she agrees, ‘but being torn between family and professional responsibilities has made me realize that most economists do not do justice to the most interesting aspect of the family: the tension between selfishness and altruism, individual self-interest and the interests of the group as a whole. They treat the family either as though it were a single person, with one common will, or a collection of single persons bargaining with each other in a completely selfish way.’

‘What’s the alternative?’ ask many voices in unison.

‘Love,’ she suggests a bit tentatively, ‘may be about interdependence, about identifying with others, considering them a part of your self—not necessarily placing their interests above your own as in pure altruism, but finding their happiness intertwined with your own, sometimes separable, sometimes not. This is a possibility relevant not just to the family, but to a larger theory of collective identity and action.’

‘That’s a big jump,’ the audience protests.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but joining with other women to try to change a few things has made me appreciate the complexities of collective action.’

‘Ah ha!,’ say the neoclassical economists. ‘You mean the free rider problem!’

‘Ah ha!,’ say the Marxian economists at the same time. ‘You mean the problem of false consciousness!’

‘Well, uh,’ she says. ‘Both those problems are important: there are conflicts between individuals and larger groups, and individuals do sometimes fail to recognize common interests. But there’s another related problem: people generally have allegiances to more than one group at a time, and often the interests of these groups conflict.’

‘Give an example,’ demands someone in the audience.

‘Take me,’ says Ms. Feminist. ‘Some of the interests I seek to fulfill are unique to me as an individual. I also identify with other women, partly because I have some interests in common with them. That’s why I consider myself a feminist. But I also identify with and have interests in common with varying subsets of other people: sometimes everybody, sometimes members of my nation, my race, my class, my profession, my neighborhood, my family, and so on. My choice of possible avenues of collective action is determined by particular circumstances, including what I predict other people’s choices will be.’

‘This is beginning to sound more like sociology than economics,’ someone growls.

‘I do not care what you call it,’ she retorts, ‘but contending forms of collective identity and interest help explain the sexual division of labor, and I think they’re relevant to the larger course of economic history and development, as well.’

‘Sounds a bit conspiratorial,’ someone says.

‘It would definitely be too conspiratorial,’ she replies, ‘if it were all executed in a perfectly conscious, rational, instrumental way. But individuals are so embedded in a complex structure of individual and collective identities and competing interpretations of these that sometimes they do not even know whose interests they are acting on.’

‘Speaking of confusion,’ someone says, ‘I’m getting lost. It seems like this conversation is based on a lot of past conversations that I haven’t been a part of. I need to know more about the context of this argument. It would help to see it written down.’

‘Here it is,’ she says.

This chapter is divided into three parts. The first focuses on the neoclassical theory of individual ‘agents,’ criticizing conventional assumptions, praising recent revisions, and exploring their relationship to feminist concerns. The neoclassical concept of ‘rational choice’ implies some strong, probably unwarranted assumptions about how individuals makes decisions. We may do better to develop a less ambitious but more flexible concept of ‘purposeful choice.’

The second section follows a similar pattern, focusing on the Marxian theory of ‘structures’ in its traditional form, in more recent revisionist versions, and in dialogue with feminist theory. The Marxian concept of a ‘mode of production’ puts too much emphasis on one dimension of collective conflict (class) and one aspect of structural position (assets). We may do better to develop a more complex theory of structural constraints on individual choice.

The third section examines the relevance of neoclassical, Marxian, and feminist insights to a broader theory of collective identity and action. It explains how and why individuals come to identify themselves as members of groups and yet make purposeful choices about group allegiances and actions. It also explains why social institutions such as the patriarchal family, the capitalist firm, and the bureaucratic state have both efficient and exploitative aspects.

AGENTS

Neoclassical economic theory focuses a brilliant analytical light on the rational choices of self-interested agents. The first distinctive glimmerings came from early utilitarian thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. In the late nineteenth century, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Alfred Marshall intensified the glare. Non-neoclassical theorists were gradually relegated to the shadowy margins of the discipline, until the Great Depression of the 1930s lent credence to John Maynard Keynes and others who argued that individual decisions were not always rational and did not always lead to efficient social outcomes.

Beginning about 1975, Keynesian arguments fell into disfavor and neoclassical theorists effectively reasserted themselves, pushing virtually all the social sciences towards more reliance on assumptions of rational choice. At the same time, however, even neoclassical theorists began to argue that rationality was being interpreted in rigid terms that required excessively strict assumptions. What if individuals do not have adequate information? What if the future is uncertain? What if individuals change their minds about what they want?

Recently, feminist theorists began to add new questions: How do individuals define their self-interest? How are people’s desires socially constructed? Do conventional definitions of a separate ‘self’ reflect a masculine view of the world? Some feminists of post-modern persuasion have argued that rational choice is simply an interpretive fiction. Others insist that we need a theory of individual choice that retains at least some emphasis on rationality broadly construed as reasonable, purposeful behavior.

A brief, informal introduction to all these debates sets the stage for a closer consideration of the problems and possibilities of a theory of purposeful agents.

The REMS

Traditional neoclassical theory stars Rational Economic Man. Call him Mr. REM, for short. His tastes and preferences are fully formed; his personal and financial assets are given. He is a rational decision-maker who weighs costs and benefits. He processes perfect information perfectly. All his decisions are motivated by the desire to maximize his own utility— to make himself happy. In the competitive marketplace, where he constantly buys and sells, he is entirely selfish, doesn’t care at all about other people’s utility. In the home, however, he is entirely altruistic, loves his wife and children as much as his very self.¹

The same goes for Mrs. REM, who is like him in every respect, except for a different set of biological assets. Both Mr. and Mrs. love to calculate, to choose, to buy and sell. Can there be any exploitation, any oppression in their world? Only if some Big Brother, like the state, restricts their choices. What is their home life like? Pretty nice, because both of them want the same things—they (and all the little baby REMs) have a joint utility function. No fights over the dinner table, no buying and selling in the living room, either. Funny, it sounds sort of like Utopian socialism in one family.

The minute they walk out the door, however, the REMs enter a different world in which individuals do not know or care about each other: the marketplace. There, the relentless pursuit of individual self-interest is not only allowed but encouraged. Competition ensures that everyone will benefit. Excess profits can exist only in the short run. If one firm enjoys a higher than average rate of return on its capital and managerial skills, other firms rush into its market, driving profits down. Unemployment is transitory. When individuals lose their jobs, they agree to work for less, wages fall, and employers hire everybody back again.

The same competitive process punishes individuals who let their opinions interfere with their single-minded search for profits. If Mr. REM was an employer with a taste for gender and race discrimination, he might hire only white male workers even if he had to pay them more. In that case, employers who hired the cheapest workers, regardless of their race or gender, would make higher profits and eventually outcompete him. The overall demand for the most discriminated-against (and therefore lowest paid) workers would increase, and bid their wages up. Over time, competition would erode discrimination.²

Not surprisingly, Mr. REM argues that differences in the wages that men and women earn reflect differences in the kind of labor they are willing to supply. One possibility is that women simply do not want the most demanding, better paid jobs, because they want to save their energy for housework and child care. Another is that married women accumulate less human capital in the form of experience and on-the-job training because they take more time out from paid work. Just because you cannot explain all the variation in wages between men and women by differences in their education and experience doesn’t mean that discrimination is taking place. After all, researchers cannot observe many relevant factors, such as less effort on the job.³

What if Mr. REM was a worker rather than a boss? If he were a bigot, he would be reluctant to work with or under the authority of some people, which would limit his job opportunities. His attitudes might also reduce the demand for his labor, so he would end up earning lower wages (like a racist or sexist employer, paying a price). But he might try to get together with other like-minded employees to resist integration in their workplace, to try to keep some individuals out. He might even join the Ku Klux Klan or another organization that threatens to punish anyone who contests racist or sexist attitudes.

Mr. REM’s designers insist that such collective strategies are unlikely to succeed. After all, the individuals involved would have to coordinate and plan their strategy of exclusion, a costly process in itself. Some individuals would have to be willing to bear substantial risks—such as being caught if they break the law. ‘Free riders’ eager to enjoy the benefits of collusion but reluctant to pay the costs would drag the group down. People like the REMs are clever opportunists, unlikely to vote or to participate in other forms of collective action unless the economic or psychic benefits of doing so exceed the costs.⁴

What if Ms. Feminist corners Mr. REM, and asks him why women do by far the greater share of housework and child care, even when they have full-time paying jobs? Biological differences help explain the sexual division of labor—but why should they result in a longer work day for women? Mr. REM can provide an explanation: women place a greater value on family amenities in general, children in particular. They are willing to pay a higher price for family life, because they enjoy it more.⁵ Otherwise, why would they do it? No one is holding a gun to their head. ‘Well,’ Ms. Feminist might retort, ‘maybe they’re not so willing to put up with inequality any more, and that’s why they are now less likely to marry and to specialize in motherhood.’

‘No, no, no,’ say the REMs. They explain that women are just responding rationally to technological change. Its more efficient now to produce goods and services outside the home than within it. Today’s jobs require less physical strength, so women’s market wages have increased relative to men’s. The opportunity cost of having children (the market income that parents must forego) has soared, along with the direct costs, so parents now demand fewer children. Also, parents spend more money on children’s education. So naturally there’s less demand for large families.⁶

‘But isn’t there more to economics,’ asks Ms. Feminist, ‘than changing relative prices?’ She wants an explanation of why women’s political and property rights have traditionally been defined differently from men’s. The REMs explain that such phenomena are an unfortunate feature of backward, non-market societies, which will eventually be transformed by the process of ‘modernization,’ the expansion of education and markets. The real danger, they argue, is the growth of Big Government, which interferes with the competitive market and undermines the incentives to individual effort.

In general, the REMs are so confident of individual choice that they believe we live in the best of all possible worlds. So it is hardly surprising that Ms. Feminist disagrees. She has at least three criticisms of their theoretical perspective. First, they take too much as given, ignoring the processes that determine the initial allocation of financial and human capital and shape tastes and preferences. Second, their basic assumptions seem to be at odds. If individuals are perfectly selfish in the marketplace, how can they be perfectly altruistic at home? Where exactly does the boundary lie? Finally, their predictions are not borne out—people can and often do engage in forms of collective action that serve their economic interests, including overt, persistent forms of discrimination against women, racial and ethnic minorities, citizens of other countries, and individuals who are simply ‘different.’ There is not much point in developing these criticisms in more detail, because this simplistic interpretation of neoclassical economic theory is rapidly becoming irrelevant. A defense of individual choice and its relevance to gender inequality can be couched in much more persuasive terms.

The IRSEPs

In recent years, Mr. and Mrs. REM have revised themselves. The changes have come little by little, from many different directions, with enormous cumulative impact. Not everyone has noticed, but the REMs no longer resemble the pictures in their high school yearbook. They wear different clothes; they live in a different world that cannot be described as a market writ large. It is full of complex social institutions.

In this new world, inhabited by Imperfectly Rational Somewhat Economic Persons, or IRSEPs, the future is uncertain. Information is costly. Even when it can easily be acquired, it takes time to process and analyze. Sometimes there is little basis for rational assessment of the possibilities. Habit, tradition, and cultural stereotypes provide individuals with shortcuts. The actual practice of decision-making doesn’t always conform to the theory of rational behavior. Mr. and Mrs. REM may, for instance, weigh $5 quite differently depending on whether it represents a potential gain, a potential loss, an unexpected gift, or an anticipated reward. Or if they get upset or emotional about something, they may act in ways that they will term, in retrospect, ‘irrational.’⁷

Markets do not work perfectly. Uncertainty about the future may lead to speculative behavior and boom-and-bust cycles. Many important contracts struck in the marketplace are difficult to enforce. Employees who are paid per unit of time do not have much incentive to work hard, and employers find it difficult to monitor their work effort. Borrowers who have obtained credit may decide to default on their loans.⁸

The scope of markets is limited. Barri...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: CONCEPTS OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
• PART II: HISTORIES OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION
• NOTES
• REFERENCES