Misogyny, economics, housework, telephone sanitising... and so on

[Malacandra]

Well, that’s BlueJohn disposed of… but there was an interesting discussion going on there that had nothing to do with accusing women of being mindless, soulless parasites, and probably doesn’t need to involve quoting Hitler. Let’s see where we’d got to:

Originally posted by Truth Seeker
You have a pretty bizarre definition of wealth – corn meal qualifies but caviar doesn’t.

Of course. Much more has to be spent to get caviar than can be recouped from the food value of the resulting product. We can afford caviar only because we have enough necessities to spare. The acquisition of caviar doesn’t represent a net gain in wealth.

Originally posted by Truth Seeker
You also seem to adopt the marxist view that things have some sort of intrinsic economic value.

Learning that I’m lining up alongside the Marxists made me blink for a second, but in a sense I suppose I am. You must eat, and be clothed, sheltered and warmed, and whatever contributes to that can be considered as having “intrinsic economic value”, surely?

It’s asking a lot even of Marxism to be wrong at all points. Since I’m not a student of Marxism and don’t plan to be, can we just leave it that where I do agree with Marxism, it’s purely by accident?

Originally posted by Truth Seeker
Well, they don’t. “Wealth” is what people define as “wealth.” If people are willing to trade diamonds for dung then both are “valuable” and producing them increases society’s total “wealth.”

If people are willing to trade diamonds for dung then that’s their affair, but since it’s not contributing to feeding, clothing or housing them then it’s not increasing society’s total wealth; rather, society has to subsidise the diamond/dung trade out of its real wealth.

Originally posted by Truth Seeker
The most efficient way to determine their relative values is through market forces.

I agree; but that is not the same as saying that everything society is willing to pay for represents an increase in wealth. If society is willing to give me a bigger piece of the pie, it does not follow that I have made the pie bigger by letting it do so.

Originally posted by Truth Seeker
In other words, every job that someone is willing to pay you to do increases wealth.

Since I contend that jobs that produce no necessities do not create wealth, and I do not believe you have shown otherwise, I argue that your “in other words” actually represents an attempt to beg the question.

Originally posted by Truth Seeker
Even your silly “telephone sanitizer” example creates wealth if the free market says so. First, if our telephone sanitizer does nothing, it is obvious that he or she creates no wealth at all. If, however, a company is willing to pay someone to sanitize phones, then that job has value to that company. You might think it silly but it is entirely possible that there is a perfectly sound economic basis for such an activity, e.g., Our workforce costs us 30 GBP/hr. We lose an average of 10,000 hours of work every year because of colds and flu. Our telephone sanitizer allows us to reduce that figure by 10%. Therefore, it makes good economic sense to employ a telephone sanitizer so long as it costs less than 30,000 GBP/ yr.

True, in this instance. Preventive healthcare that enables the producers to carry on producing is indeed a form of wealth creation. Telephone sanitising that consists only of making the phones smell lemon-fresh and has no impact on the sick-days would be another matter entirely. The “silly” example was, of course, a nod towards the great Douglas Adams doffs hat in reverence.

Originally posted by Truth Seeker
<quote from Malacandra about job creation snipped>
Once again, you are espousing an essentially marxist position. Free market economies simply do not create “make work” jobs in order to simulate full employment. Instead, governments provide social benefits through transfers of tax revenues. While these sometimes may involve subsidizing certain classes of workers for brief periods of time, this is an entirely different thing.

I’m struggling along here to understand the difference between creat(ing) “make work” jobs in order to simulate full employment and * governments provid(ing) social benefits through transfers of tax revenues*. I understand the latter to represent “taking wealth from someone who’s creating it to give it to someone who isn’t.” What haven’t I understood?

I saw an example of “telephone sanitising” only the other week. A design team came up with a new name for “The Arts Council of England”. It was “Arts Council England”. Price, GBP70,000. Did that add GBP70,000 to the GNP? I doubt it.

Originally posted by Truth Seeker
<quote from Malacandra about housework snipped>
Let’s assume, for the moment, that this is correct. You do realize, don’t you, that this makes women the basic foundation of all wealth creation in society? Building bridges and whatnot is all very fine. But it is, as you say, a “frivolous luxury” when compared to the task of educating and socializing the young. In fact, there would quite literally be no such thing as “society” if the next generation were not socialized and educated. Under your definition of “wealth creation,” one elementary school teacher – a traditionally female job – is worth a thousand coal miners.

Erm, no, I don’t realize anything of the sort. I do realize that if the youngsters and the carers alike weren’t fed, housed, protected, clothed and warmed, the carers would socialize and educate in vain. I also realize that the main difference between the lifestyle enjoyed by 21st century Western carers and children and those of even a few centuries ago is that, considered as a whole, the population enjoys a guaranteed level of those basic necessities now that were unthinkable then; and we can afford a lot more socializing and educating than we could formerly, because we have got much better at providing. Meanwhile, as I said before, the carer’s responsibility hasn’t changed much: It still consists of distributing the necessities to the dependents, teaching them how the society that they live in works, and passing on whatever the current state of “elementary” education may be.

No, under my definition of “wealth creation”, it does not follow that one elementary school teacher, is worth a thousand coal miners, though I applaud the effort to boost the status of a traditionally female task at the same time as recognising it for the rhetoric that it is.

Originally posted by Truth Seeker
The point here is that you can arbitrarily define “wealth” as consisting solely of gold bullion if you want to, but that has nothing to do with what actually makes society “wealthy.”

True again, but I wasn’t arbitrarily defining wealth in any such way, but by saying: Wealth consists of the ability to provide necessities. All else is luxury founded on wealth, not creating it.

Originally posted by mhendo
I’ll just take a couple of examples from Malacandra’s post to make my point:
<quote from Malacandra about “big male wins” snipped>

Well, the only reason the “big wins are down to men” is because they have traditionally had the time to work on large questions of technology, transportation, etc., etc. And the reason that they have the time to do this is because women have taken care of so much of the other work that needs to be done in society. Women’s labour on essential things has freed men to spend more time and energy on the “big” things that make such an obvious technological contribution to our society. The wealth creation that women do might not appear so obvious because it doesn’t appear in the form of Boeing 747s or Pentium computer chips, but women’s production plays a huge role in the broad social and economic circumstances that allow such innovations to occur. This is an argument that could be made equally well, i think, by a free market economist or a Marxist economist.

That women have done the housework and the childcare has freed up men to innovate, explore, and generally do a lot of hard work, true; but it is jumping the gun to call that “the only reason that the big wins are down to men”. Men might equally well have just used it as an excuse to sit on their big behinds and do nothing at all. You have to give some credit to men’s get-up-and-go for the current wealth of the society you live in.

Originally posted by mhendo
<quote from Malacandra about female employment and its impact on the economy snipped>

Actually, research tends to show that what happens when women go out to work is NOT that “someone else gets paid to do it,” but that the woman ends up working what feminists have labelled the “double shift.” That is, the man and woman each work full-time at a job, but when they get home the work required to keep the house going is still overwhelmingly done by women. And, despite the increasing willingness of (many but not all) men to pitch in and help with household duties, this double shift is still a reality for many women. Despite the prevalence of maids and other service staff in movies etc., the majority of families do not have hired help to keep their households running.

True to an extent, though as a case in point, while Mrs M is out at work, the kid goes either to nursery or to a child-minder, and we have a cleaner in once a week to take the load off Mrs M - and we’re not ultra-high wage-earners by any means. Equally, though Mrs M assumes the laundry duties (out of a belief that I won’t do it properly, I suppose - you’d think I’d never managed in my bachelor years), this consists of a few minutes sorting and putting into an automatic washing-machine, rather than spending a whole day over a steaming copper or on the banks of a stream. Clothes-mending is almost unheard of, and as for meals, it’s comparatively rare for us to eat anything prepared from raw ingredients, and when we do, it’s more likely to be done by me than by her. I also believe this is not unrepresentative of modern society as a whole.

Originally posted by mhendo
For those interested in reading about any of these issues in specific (American) historical context, there are a couple of really interesting books that i would recommend.

Phoebe: (very seriously) Oh! Oh I wish I could, but I don’t want to.

<off-topic quote from mhendo about the politics of housework snipped>