We’ve heard all about economic man, but what happened to economic woman? Women are noticeably absent in theoretical economic models and—perhaps not so coincidentally—they’re also massively underrepresented in the field of economics itself. This week, we’re joined by journalist Katrine Marçal and economists Dr. Lisa Cook and Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman in an examination of why women are excluded from economics, and what we can do about it.
Katrine Marçal is a journalist for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s most prestigious daily newspaper. Her book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? was shortlisted for the August Prize in 2012 and has been translated into 19 languages.
Twitter: @katrinemarcal
Dr. Lisa D. Cook is an Associate Professor of Economics and International Relations at Michigan State University. Among her current research interests are economic growth and development, financial institutions and markets, innovation, and economic history. As a Senior Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the 2011-2012 academic year, Dr. Cook worked on the euro zone, financial instruments, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Twitter: @drlisadcook
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is a Research Scholar in Economics at Harvard University working at the Blair Economics Lab, a Visiting Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a pre-doctoral trainee of the NYU/Schmidt Futures Program. She is the co-founder and CEO of The Sadie Collective, a group that supports greater representation of black women in economics and related fields.
Twitter: @itsafronomics
Further reading:
Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781681771427
Opinion: It Was a Mistake for Me to Choose This Field: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/opinion/economics-black-women.html
The Sadie Collective: https://www.sadiecollective.org/our-mission.html
Why are there so few women economists? https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2019/article/why-are-there-so-few-women-economists
Women’s Economic Agenda: https://www.epi.org/womens-agenda/
Nick Hanauer:
Neoliberalism has created an enormous amount of value for a very small group of almost exclusively white men.
Anna Gifty O.:
We need to first acknowledge that there are people in the room that we have not been acknowledging.
Katrine Marcal:
What leads to this huge economic gap between men and women is the undervaluation of care work in the world, and that goes back to the foundation of modern-day economics.
Anna Gifty O.:
And we have to talk about that.
Speaker 4:
From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a pointed conversation about who gets what and why, with one of America’s most provocative capitalists.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
Stephanie Ervin:
I’m Stephanie Ervin. I run a lot of our advocacy and campaign work here at Civic Ventures.
Nick Hanauer:
In this episode that we’re calling Economic Woman, we’re exploring the relationship both between the theoretical parts of economics to women and how they participate, and also how the profession on the ground treats women or intersects with women.
Stephanie Ervin:
And these things are linked.
Nick Hanauer:
They are linked, in this really interesting, recursive, fractal way. Honestly, until we started doing this episode, I hadn’t thought about it really, really deeply, but it is super interesting when you consider the fact that the idea of women and the characteristics that we attribute to femininity is excluded from how we view human behavior in neoclassical economics and neoliberalism. And the models, too, assume that people are perfectly rational and all this stuff, exclude caring, intimacy, loyalty, love, reciprocity, basically-
Stephanie Ervin:
Community.
Nick Hanauer:
All that stuff. And the fact that the profession itself has been massively dominated by mostly rich white guys, who have been, it turns out, incredibly hostile to women. Then you have this on-the-ground lived experience where women are paid, whatever it is, 71 cents on the dollar of men. I think it’s more now.
Stephanie Ervin:
I think it’s better now, like 81, 83 cents.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. And the amount of wealth held by women is de minimis compared to men. And where there is wealth, it is often a consequence of-
Stephanie Ervin:
Inheritance or-
Nick Hanauer:
Inheritance or-
Stephanie Ervin:
… being a dependent of a man.
Nick Hanauer:
Or being widowed or whatever it is. And how all of these things are interrelated, that if femininity is excluded from how we think about economics, and women are excluded from the profession of economics, it should not surprise us, I suppose, that women are screwed by the economic system. I hate to sound clinical about it, but it is kind of interesting, and bad.
Stephanie Ervin:
Nick, who cooks your dinner?
Nick Hanauer:
Actually, mostly I cook my dinner.
Stephanie Ervin:
Is that right?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Stephanie Ervin:
I didn’t know that.
Nick Hanauer:
Mostly. Actually, my wife, Leslie, and I trade off, but I think I can say that I cook as many dinners as she does, maybe a few more. Yeah, but why did you ask me who cooked my dinner?
Stephanie Ervin:
Well, because, as our next guest lays out, the foundational question of economics as put forward by Adam Smith is, where did your dinner come from?
Nick Hanauer:
He never really reflected on where his dinner came from, did he?
Stephanie Ervin:
Right. So it’ll be super fun to talk to journalist and writer Katrine Marcal, who wrote the super interesting book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Katrine Marcal:
My name is Katrine Marcal. I’m a journalist and author. I’m the author of Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, which is a book on women and economics. It has been translated into 20 languages. I live in England and work from there as a journalist, but I am originally from Sweden.
Nick Hanauer:
In your book, you argue that economics needs feminism, so lay out your argument.
Katrine Marcal:
Yes. I go back to the founding question of economics, or at least the founding question of economics if you asked Adam Smith, the founding father of economics. He says that the founding question of economics is “How do you get your dinner?” which is a very good economic question, because we take it for granted that we can go into a store and there will be things to buy there and everything will work. Actually, for there to be goods to buy and a store that’s open, lots of coordinated economic processes need to take place, and Adam Smith was interested in why does it all work, what’s the fundamental force in the economy that makes it all function somehow. How do you get your dinner?
Katrine Marcal:
His answer to this founding question of economics was the very famous sentence “It’s not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that you get your dinner. It’s from them serving their own self-interest.” The answer to the question “How do you get your dinner?” is self-interest. Self-interest is the fundamental force in the economy, according to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
Katrine Marcal:
This then becomes very, very important, the idea, in economics. Economics has even been called the science of self-interest. To think like an economist is to look at a situation and analyze it based on the idea that people are in it acting out of self-interest. This is the idea that people take from Adam Smith, and this is what becomes, in many ways, economics.
Katrine Marcal:
I look at Adam Smith’s life. Okay, if the fundamental question of economics is “How do you get your dinner?” how did Adam Smith himself get his dinner?J
Nick Hanauer:
His mom, it turns out.
Katrine Marcal:
It turns out it was his mother. Exactly. He lived with his mother for most parts of his life. She was a widow in Scotland in those days, the 1700s, and she looked after the household for him. They had servants, but it was her job to make sure that everything worked.
Katrine Marcal:
She is the part to the answer to the question “How do you get your dinner?” that he forgot, because can you say that she did what she did out of self-interest? Maybe, partly, but there were not huge other economic opportunities for widows in Scotland in those days. It’s fair to assume, I write in the book, that probably she did what she did because she cared for him, she loved him, she was worried about him, all these other reasons why people do what they do that’s not self-interest, and that also matter in the economy, and that economists have not been very good at studying, which has led economics to forget about women, and that’s a big problem.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I think it’s really worth underscoring that when we talk about economics, the rational actor is always a man.
Katrine Marcal:
Yes.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, it’s homo economicus, and that all of the models and the narratives generated from those models proceed from that fundamental assumption. Therefore, to a certain extent, the only thing that matters is what matters to them, which, I think you would agree, has had some pretty profound consequences for the world and, I suppose, for women.
Katrine Marcal:
Yes, absolutely. There’s lots of people and a lot of books that will tell you that homo economicus, rational economic man, is not real, that this model of human behavior that we rely on in standard economic theory is fiction. What I say is that, yes, this is fiction, but this is also a fictional model of human behavior which its fundamental characteristic is that it’s not a woman, it’s a man, and that matters.
Katrine Marcal:
Everything we assume that human beings are in economics, rational, self-interested, these individualistic atoms, perfectly powerful, coming into every situation knowing exactly what we want and how we want it, all of these characteristics are the same characteristics that we have been taught for hundreds of years to view as male. And everything that economics goes to great extent trying to exclude from its world, like context, family, the body, relationships, altruism, are things that we have been taught to view as female. That cannot, that’s what I argue in the book, cannot be a coincidence, and it somehow must have something to do with the fact that women are earning less than men, that women in this world are facing lots of economic problems that men are not facing, and the fact that the system is rigged in the way that it is.
Stephanie Ervin:
Can you talk about that more specifically, like the consequences in terms of wage suppression or the lack of value for care work, for example?
Katrine Marcal:
What this leads to… Adam Smith forgets about his mother and forgets about the contributions that she does, her part in how he gets his dinner, and this leads to economics forgetting about women’s work in general in many ways. Actually, you have to say that Adam Smith is slightly more… His theories are slightly more complex than this, but what people take out from Adam Smith and move on with through the history of economics is this idea of self-interest and rational economic man. It’s not all he thought.
Katrine Marcal:
Anyway, this leads to economics forgetting about the work that women do, because it leads to us studying just the things that human beings do out of self-interest on the market as economic activity, and define the work that is done, the care work, the work that’s done within the home, and not for self-interest in that way, as not important to the economy, and this is not work, this is not anything that contributes to economic growth.
Katrine Marcal:
We still have that. For example, when we look at growth or the GDP measurement, which is tremendously important, obviously, for how we judge a country or an economy, work that is done within the home and lots of care work, therefore, is not visible. It’s not counted as work.
Katrine Marcal:
This leads to this thing that feminist economists have been pointing out for decades, the bizarre situation where, for example, in a developing country, if you have a young woman who walks 11 kilometers every morning to get firewood and walks back with this to the village and works most of the day around the home, what she does is completely invisible an economic statistic. It is something that is not deemed as something that contributes to the economy or to growth in this country. This gives us a very false picture of what the economy is and how development works, and it also completely ignores women.
Katrine Marcal:
To connect this more to inequality between men and women, the main reason why women today in this world have less money than men is that women do more care work than men, whether that is unpaid care work in the home or paid care work, which is often very underpaid in almost every economy in the world. It’s something that we do not value. We have no tradition of valuing this work economically because we assume that it is something that we don’t have to study; it is something that will just automatically happen. Adam Smith’s mother will always prepare the dinner. It is like some kind of natural resource that will always be there, and it doesn’t matter. We can take this for granted.
Katrine Marcal:
What leads to this huge economic gap between men and women is the undervaluation of care work in the world, and that goes all the way back to the foundation of modern-day economics.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. One of the turns of phrase you had in the book somewhere was that women didn’t so much enter the workforce as change jobs.
Katrine Marcal:
Yeah, exactly.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s interesting.
Stephanie Ervin:
I think one of the other consequences that you raise is… I think you literally say we redefined people to fit our idea of the economy, that if we decided the perfect economy was built on selfishness and competition, that people should then start behaving that way. Ultimately, I feel when I reflect on the early feminism, as it entered my life, was really about how to fit even that mold, not that women could participate in whatever way they show up as, but at best, as mirrors of how we think men operate, or should operate in a perfect world.
Katrine Marcal:
Yes, exactly. That’s what’s so backwards and so strange, really. We have this fictional idea of how people should be in an economy, and then we just try to, as you say, fit into that mold instead of just acknowledging the full extent of our humanity, which includes these traits that we have been taught to view as female, and therefore to look down upon, things that are not self-interest, dependency, the body, family, our ties to each other, these things, acknowledge that those are part of being human, as well, and trying to create a society and an economy that can support us in the full extent of our humanity. That, as I view it, ought to be the feminist project, really.
Nick Hanauer:
What’s remarkable to me is just how out of step the conception of homo economicus is with how the world actually operates, because if you go outside the home, where it’s more obvious that care work isn’t based on naked self-interest, but even into a highly competitive capitalist enterprise, 99% of what occurs every day is reciprocity and cooperation. The act of building a product like an iPhone is a symphony of almost surreal amounts of cooperation, both within companies and companies cooperating with other companies through global supply chains, and at the very end of that process, there’s a little bit of competition to decide whose phone gets sold better.
Nick Hanauer:
The truth is that if you examine what happens in the world on a minute-to-minute basis, if you just go outside and watch what’s happening, people are not competing to get down the street; they are cooperating to make traffic go. The world is a symphony of reciprocity and cooperation in the deepest human instinct. I actually think that Adam Smith was right, there is an invisible hand, but the invisible hand is reciprocity, not self-interest.
Katrine Marcal:
No, I completely agree. This was what fascinated me so much when I was working on this book, is why… We’ve known for decades that this model, rational economic man, as you’re saying, it’s not true. This is not how the world works. The amount of experiments that have been done proving that this is not how people act, we are not just driven by self-interest, and we are not rational in this way, and the only people that maybe behave a bit like this are children under five, study after study after study, and why are we still so invested in this model? Why do we want the world to be like this? Why is this so seductive?
Katrine Marcal:
For me, the answer that I was thinking a lot about to this question is that it is seductive in the same way that a very certain type of masculinity, like the lonely cowboy or whatever, can be seductive. If the world was like, if we were all these rational self-interested people that you could just look at and then calculate these rather beautiful equations explaining everything that happens in the economy, then the world would be controllable. It would be easy to understand. It would be safe, in many senses. We would not have to deal with these things that are messy in life, because all the things that we try to exclude from economic theory, family, relationships, other people, the body, gender, these things, they do make life messy, but also they’re what makes us human and what makes everything meaningful.
Katrine Marcal:
But without them, you get this perfect rational world, which I think is comforting to us in some sense, and I think that’s why this type of economics has been so incredibly seductive and so incredibly powerful, and almost become this underlying religion in society. I think it’s a lot about acknowledging why we are actually attracted to these models.
Nick Hanauer:
I agree with that, but with this addendum, that one of the reasons that this model of human behavior so infects our culture is that it is massively beneficial to people with power and wealth and status, because if it is true that humans are perfectly selfish, and we look around the world at all the prosperity in it, then it has to be the case that selfishness is the cause of prosperity, and therefore the more selfish we are, the more prosperous we become.
Nick Hanauer:
That arrangement very much benefits people who are super comfortable being rapacious and selfish, and excuses both politically, socially, and culturally the worst kind of behavior, because if you can persuade people that the bigger a selfish shithead I am, the better it will be for you, well, if you’re a really selfish shithead, you have a lot of latitude to do some pretty terrible things that may benefit you, but bring harm to other people.
Nick Hanauer:
I think it’s hard to understate how important that is to folks, for instance, in my world, who desperately want to believe that selfishness is the cause of prosperity, that the more selfish they are, the more prosperity they create for everybody; therefore, anything they do, no matter how horrific or objectionable, is morally righteous.
Katrine Marcal:
As you’re saying, it becomes a very effective way of defending the status quo, because according to this theory, if human beings are always rational, and the market is an expression of these rational forces, if something exists on the market, say, inequality between men and women, then the only job of an economist is to think about why is it rational that men earn more money than women, and then you figure out the reason for that, and you express that in an equation and you win the Nobel Prize in Economics, basically. It’s a very effective way of defending the status quo.
Katrine Marcal:
I do, however, also think that that’s a big part, but I personally also have been very interested in examining not just the neoliberal conspiracy out there, which probably exists, maybe.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure.
Katrine Marcal:
I don’t know. But I’m interested in the neoliberalism within me. Why are we so almost psychologically, religiously attracted to these things? Why does it hold such power over us?
Katrine Marcal:
I do think the masculinity of these models… Because, also, we have been taught that anything that is male, that should dominate us. We should let that dominate us. That is more valuable. That is higher. We categorize economics and economic theory as this very male theory, and I think that gives it this authority, even in the debate and in the discussions, that I do think play a part.
Stephanie Ervin:
Do you think a lack of a better explanation or a better story is also contributing to our inability to just trash this one?
Katrine Marcal:
Yes. Yes, I do. I do. But I don’t know what the story would be. People keep asking me. I’ve been very lucky, this book has been out in so many languages and so many cultures, that people keep asking me in one way or the other, what’s the alternative to economic man? Who is economic woman? And I don’t really have a good answer. I tend to think about it as… that the trouble is that we cannot just get rid of economic man and put somebody else in his place because the solution actually is to just let economics be much, much messier and to be this messy social science that we disagree on.
Stephanie Ervin:
For what it’s worth, I do think the wit and, somewhat, ridicule you apply in your analysis is very useful to calling out what’s happening and forcing people to confront it.
Katrine Marcal:
I think the main thing that I always wanted was just to contribute to a process where we don’t leave economics to the economists, because it’s far too important for that. We need all sorts of people to be comfortable being in this discussion and in these debates. Especially when I was writing the book, I felt there was a situation where people were very… as soon as somebody started speaking economics, using the jargon, lots of people just backed off and felt that the discussion wasn’t for them. I wanted to contribute in the way I could to changing that, and especially… I’m going to stay positive… making more women interested in these things and willing to contribute to this discussion.
Stephanie Ervin:
We ask every one of our guests at the end of our interviews, why do you do this work?
Katrine Marcal:
God, that’s a good question. I should’ve prepared that. Why do I do this work? I don’t know. I can’t stop. I just find it so fascinating. Really, it may be selfish. I want to know. I want to understand these things. I want to understand why the world is the way it is.
Katrine Marcal:
I think especially with these economic theories, I think I do write this in the book, in Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, that if you’re happy with the world and the way it is, and you look around and you see the inequality and you see the poverty and you think, “Well, this is rather good,” then you can afford to invest in this model of economics, of rational choice and self-interest, but it doesn’t have much to do with reality and with how human beings really work.
Katrine Marcal:
But if you do actually want to change things, if you do think something else is possible and should be possible, then you need to try to understand how the economy really works. I think that’s what drives me. I want to know, I want to understand, and I want to do my bit there. And I love writing. I do love to write.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s a great answer. Well, Katrine, thank you so much for spending this time with us. It was a really interesting conversation.
Katrine Marcal:
Thank you.
Nick Hanauer:
Best of luck on your new book. It sounds fantastic.
Stephanie Ervin:
Yeah, can’t wait.
Katrine Marcal:
Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay, talk soon.
Katrine Marcal:
Thank you. Bye.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay. Bye-bye.
Nick Hanauer:
We’re also going to talk to Dr. Lisa Cook and Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman about their experiences in the economics profession.
Lisa Cook:
My name is Lisa D. Cook. I am an associate professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University. I do research on invention and innovation, on financial crises, and on lynchings.
Anna Gifty O.:
My name is Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman. I am currently a research scholar in economics at Harvard University, and I’m currently working with Dr. Peter Q. Blair, who is a professor at the School of Education at Harvard. I’m also a visiting research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a predoctoral trainee at the inaugural NYU/Schmidt Futures computational traineeship program.
Stephanie Ervin:
I want to get to why you, Lisa and Anna, both wrote this important op-ed together, literally titled It Was a Mistake for Me to Choose This Field, about economics, especially reflecting on how you got into it. But I think importantly for our audience, we talk mostly in terms of power and where it comes from.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, our podcast, Pitchfork Economics, is largely devoted to exposing what we think is the truth about economics, that it isn’t a science like physics; it’s mostly how human beings rationalize who gets what and why. It’s how we instantiate our social and moral preferences about status, privileges, and power, and your field, economics, has largely been, over the last 40 years, a protection racket for rich white guys. It certainly was not surprising to find that women of color ran into trouble in a field dominated by rich white guys making other rich white guys richer, which apparently has been your experience.
Lisa Cook:
It’s funny that you should mention this, because I was giving a talk at Cornell the other day to graduate students, and I was giving them advice about how to make it in this world of academic economics. I told them mainly about the mistakes that I made, the things that my 20-year-old self would have wanted to know, and the first one was this. My dad, who was an administrator of a very large hospital, a very good manager by many accounts, one lesson that he always tried to impart was to find a person, whatever job you’re in, find a reference point, and measure yourself, and make sure that that reference point is an ambitious person, a person who is trying to make his or her way up the ladder, and set yourself on the same path as that person.
Lisa Cook:
As you just said, the reference point in any economics class, a PhD class, is going to be a white man, so I just started doing what the… I picked an ambitious white guy and I benchmarked myself to everything he was doing, and that turned out to be a disaster. I had no idea what I was getting into.
Lisa Cook:
The graduate students sort of chuckled at that, but I took that advice so seriously, and at every setting I showed up in, I was like, “Okay, is there the medium person? Can I set myself to the medium person in my cohort and do what that person is doing?” I tried very hard. This was standard advice we were given, too. It wasn’t just my dad’s advice. This was standard advice given by our professors.
Lisa Cook:
I always ran into trouble. When I was appearing to be confident, and I was told to be confident, and conveying my results in a paper, in a presentation, and my confidence came off as defensiveness, for example. I was told that I was being too defensive in getting my job market paper when I was giving practice job talks, and I was doing exactly what I saw the people in my cohort doing. I wasn’t doing anything different, but it was certainly perceived very differently.
Lisa Cook:
We didn’t pick that particular comment that was the headline of the article, “We wouldn’t have chosen this field.” I think after having been in it for almost 30 years now, I wouldn’t say that it was a mistake. Certainly, the person whose comment we pulled out of the AEA climate study felt that way, and there were many others who felt that way, and at times I have felt that way. But certainly one of the things that I am hopeful about, as you saw at the end of the article, is that we’ve acknowledged that this climate exists. There were many people who denied before and still deny that it exists and that it hampers women, and black women in particular, so I think it is really important that that comment and the data got it.
Nick Hanauer:
It seems to me that it’s worth zooming in on a couple of issues. They’re interrelated, but distinct. The first is the challenge of, how do I put it, operating effectively stylistically with this group of people as a woman of color, just being different from your typical white guy. But there’s another issue at play, which is just caring about different things in economics than Milton Friedman did.
Nick Hanauer:
These are two different things, but obviously if you’re Milton Friedman and you’re mostly talking to other wealthy white people, neoliberalism is an awesome system. Neoliberalism has created an enormous amount of value for a very small group of almost exclusively white men over the last 40 years, and one of the reasons it did that so successfully is no one else was at the table. No one else was there saying, “Hey, y’all, this is not working out very well for a whole bunch of other people. It’s working out super well for you, but not very well for the other 99% of us.”
Nick Hanauer:
There’s that issue, which is, to me, super interesting and speaks to why it’s so important to have diversity in the field, particularly in a field that is as consequential to the outcomes that most people have in their lives, but then there’s this whole other equally difficult issue, which is just the challenge of being a woman in a man’s workplace, not to mention being a woman of color in a white man’s workplace, just the style differences and the different expectations and the higher standards and all this other bullshit that you all have to deal with.
Anna Gifty O.:
I’m glad you recognize it.
Nick Hanauer:
What I’d love for you guys to do is to address both of those things, but separately, because they’re different, but connected.
Anna Gifty O.:
Yeah. I think you mentioned a number of different things. It’s absolutely true. Because, by design, I’m a different person than you, I’m going to care about different things. One thing that has come to my attention, coming through this profession, is that the things that we care about, specifically as black women, but more broadly as underrepresented minorities, is not rewarded in the profession.
Nick Hanauer:
Or in the economy, I might add.
Anna Gifty O.:
Yes.
Nick Hanauer:
These two things are linked.
Anna Gifty O.:
If you think about it, the economy is upborne by people in the profession, so if the people who are getting the training to do economic analysis and are ascending to the top don’t value the questions that directly affect communities that don’t look like them, then the communities that don’t look like them are going to be negatively impacted by whatever they do. That’s something that is crystal clear. It’s even more of a reason why citing black women specifically, but citing underrepresented minorities more broadly, is really important, because the perspectives that we bring to the table are representative of some of the concerns that our communities might have. It’s really important for people who look like the world to study the world.
Nick Hanauer:
This explains where the field has gone off the rails, why the country has become so unequal, why people of color and women have been so left behind, and why the field is so resistant to change, because the people in the field benefit from the orthodoxy in the field and-
Stephanie Ervin:
Current arrangement.
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly. And their masters insist that they continue to toe the line. Our friend Marshall Steinbaum put it incredibly well, reflecting I think both of your experiences, which is “If you want to get tenure in an economics department that is funded by a bunch of rich white guys in big corporations, there’s a line to toe. There’s an orthodoxy that they want to hear, and it is very hard to come in conflict with that orthodoxy and advance. You guys are at the bleeding edge of that conflict.
Lisa Cook:
I completely agree, and this is in line with what Janet Yellen has said about the financial crisis. Where did it come from? It came from people being trained in the same way, asking the same questions. This is what you’re getting to. If you come to the economy in a very certain way, through a very certain lens, that everybody has a trust fund or everybody has college paid for, nobody has struggled to pay bills or has ever paid bills, for example, then they are going to have a certain perspective on the economy that women, and women of color in particular, black women, will have. They’ll have a very different perspective. This is what Janet Yellen was saying about the causes, the origins of the financial crisis.
Lisa Cook:
I can tell you from being a person who goes into government every so often to help clean up financial crises, both here and abroad, I can tell you that the lack of women and diversity in these conversations leads to the next crisis. You’re cleaning up one crisis and you’re starting another if you’re not including people who are integrally intertwined with the economy, who are making most of the economic decisions in the household. Household consumption accounts for about 65% of GDP. Women are making most of those decisions.
Lisa Cook:
Certainly, the math suggests that they should be consulted more, and African-Americans and other underrepresented minorities should be consulted more. It’s the questions people are asking and their lived experience that makes a big difference with respect to the questions that are posed, with respect to research, and with respect to policy.
Stephanie Ervin:
What can we do? Maybe, Anna, you can speak to this. What can be done to impact both the culture of the economic field and what gets measured in this path towards tenure or what kind of research is valued, and how would that impact, hopefully for the better, our economic, social, and cultural decisions as a society?
Anna Gifty O.:
Yeah, that’s a really great question. I would say black women, specifically black women economists, have done a really good job of naming the problem, naming that the culture is the problem, and that through the climate survey, through the works of Dr. Rhonda V. Sharpe and Dr. Nina Banks, as well as Dania Francis, we know that there’s something wrong with the pipeline. But I think we have to get to the point where it’s not just saying that “Oh, there’s something wrong with the pipeline,” but then taking it to the next step and saying, “Okay, so how do we acknowledge the people that we’ve left behind?”
Anna Gifty O.:
I think one thing that I’ve noticed is that while people are really enthusiastic about diversity at the moment, there’s generations before me that bear the brunt of discrimination and racism and sexism and all of that. That was clearly shown in the climate survey results. Obviously, through the quote that is the title for the New York Times op-ed, there are people who have built a career, have gotten the training, and still are disrespected by their peers. Those folks need to be acknowledged and cited and included in the conversation to begin with. We need to first acknowledge that there are people in the room that we have not been acknowledging.
Anna Gifty O.:
Then the second thing I would say is beginning to address why the pipeline into economics isn’t as robust as it could be. It comes from, obviously, generations of racism and sexism and discrimination, but then also acknowledging that there are literal behaviors and biases that happen from the very early parts of the pipeline, as Dania Francis has pointed out, that impact whether or not students decide to progress through a specific educational trajectory.
Anna Gifty O.:
What I’ve noticed in my own personal life is that people cannot fathom black women succeeding in any respect, and I think that that’s problematic and we have to talk about that. I think on a more practical standpoint, people who are not black women need to understand what role they can play to allow black women to flourish, even if the space does not allow for it. That’s where the idea of sponsorship and allyship comes into play. If you see a black woman colleague, how do you interact with her? How do you make her feel like she’s part of the space?
Anna Gifty O.:
Through The Sadie Collective, we have sort of built that network of professionals and institutions that are helping young black women, as well as black women who are later on in the pipeline, understand that their work is and will always be valuable, and it will find their work in such a way that allows them to move progressively through their professional careers.
Lisa Cook:
One thing that we find is that black women, as we say in the op-ed, the ones who report the most discrimination just in general, the moves they have to undertake to avoid discrimination, objectively more than any other group, racial, gender, otherwise, every other group. That’s the first thing. That’s the opening part of the conversation.
Lisa Cook:
But in particular, they report, more than any other group, problems with respect to promotion and pay. If you look across the academy, this is a very, very common perception, very common practice, of not retaining black women and not promoting them and not paying them. Everyone can see it. I think that this information could be closely held in another world without social media, but this generation and some generations preceding this generation, they’re all on Twitter. They’re all on Facebook. This information is easily passed along. They know when tenure decisions happen. I think that it is becoming embarrassing that the same practices have been happening for 40 or 50 years.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, again, just to try to wrap the conversation up, what’s most interesting to me about it is in the field of economics there’s an even bigger challenge than there are in other academic fields or in other domains because economics in our society is the tool we use to write the rules that define who will have status, wealth, and power. That’s why it’s such a consequential field, and that is why it is even harder, I think, for people who are not from the dominant caste, if I could use that term, to break into it, because if people who are not from the dominant caste break into it, they may very well rewrite the rules of who gets status, wealth, and power in ways that are not preferred by the people who currently have it. So there’s this really interesting recursive or fractal interrelationship between your struggles in the field and the field’s struggles to account for people who are not like the people who have written the rules in the past.
Anna Gifty O.:
It really comes down to commitment and power, like you were saying. People who have the power to bring diversity into rooms that dictate spaces are the people who really need to make the change. I don’t know any black women who are editors of any economics journals besides Dr. Cook. I guess also Dr. Rhonda Sharpe, as well, for The Review of Black Political Economy.
Anna Gifty O.:
But if the academy committed to, okay, I want to mentor a black woman each year, or even just an underrepresented minority more broadly speaking, the profession would become diverse, but you have to commit to that. I think it’s really easy to throw money at an organization like The Sadie Collective or to retweet a couple things and say, “Rah, rah, rah, I’m excited about diversity,” but it’s another thing to commit, and that’s what people don’t want to do. We’re hoping that this op-ed, as well as the results from the climate survey that Dr. Cook assisted on, will really push people to commit to understanding that without diversifying the profession, the profession does not grow and does not reflect the world.
Stephanie Ervin:
Well-said. I have one question that we always ask all of our guests which I’d love to hear from each of you, which is, so why do you do this work?
Lisa Cook:
I will answer that question, and I’ll respond to what Nick just said as well, because I think it’s provocative. I’m doing this work because I have always done this work. I desegregated something every single year I was growing up. It was the pool. It was the school. It was the hospital. It was the restaurants. I grew up in the rural South, so this happened a lot later than it did in the rest of the country, or it is happening a lot later than it has in the rest of the country.
Lisa Cook:
I think that this is something that I was prepared to do, that I was trained to do, trained in nonviolent change. So I don’t think that this is… The place I’ve wound up, it’s economics where I’ve wound up, this is somewhat serendipitous. The training that I got and the kind of optimism I’ve always felt, I’m just bringing to this job. That’s why I continue to do this work.
Anna Gifty O.:
For me, I do this work because I have to. My existence in this profession depends on doing this work. And I do this work because I want to. I think that what is more important than prestige or accolades, or whatever, is legacy. In order for this profession to move forward in a way that is conducive to our world and to society in general, we have to acknowledge that the voices that have been suppressed for literally 100 years, starting with Sadie Alexander, and even before that, absolutely have to be unearthed in this next iteration of talking about social justice and talking about different issues that affect marginalized communities. For me, it’s a labor of love, and I’m honored and humbled to be doing it.
Stephanie Ervin:
Well, hey, we really enjoyed this conversation and so appreciate you both taking the time. I think this discussion has been incredibly valuable. I’m happy that our audience gets to hear it. Thanks for being with us.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, thank you guys so much for doing this.
Anna Gifty O.:
Thanks for having us.
Lisa Cook:
The pleasure is all mine, all ours.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Okay, talk soon then.
Lisa Cook:
Okay. Thank you.
Anna Gifty O.:
Thank you. Have a great day.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay, bye-bye.
Speaker 4:
All right, bye.
Anna Gifty O.:
Bye.
Nick Hanauer:
Steph, as we did this episode together, is it surprising to you? Did you learn stuff by doing this episode?
Stephanie Ervin:
I think I had my views enriched, is a good way to characterize it.
Nick Hanauer:
You weren’t surprised.
Stephanie Ervin:
Was I surprised that we’ve been excluded?
Nick Hanauer:
No.
Stephanie Ervin:
No.
Nick Hanauer:
But the more you think about it, the more layers to it you can see-
Stephanie Ervin:
Yeah, for sure.
Nick Hanauer:
… and the ways in which these things interact. For my own part, being a guy, what I’ve been highly attuned to isn’t the gender way in which economics expresses itself, but in the class way that economics expresses itself. I tend to think of it as family units, and some winning and most others losing, but sadly less natural for me to think about it from a gender perspective or a race perspective, although all of those things intersect.
Nick Hanauer:
Of course, it shouldn’t surprise us, certainly not me or this podcast, because we are devoted to the idea that economics really isn’t mostly a science, although there are scientific aspects of it. It is mostly how human beings instantiate their moral and social preferences about status, privileges, and power. It is mostly a story we tell ourselves to rationalize who gets what and why. It’s a narrative that, certainly in our age, in our country, has been formed by and for rich white guys for other rich white guys, and that’s it. So a lot of other people are excluded both from the narratives and from the profession and from the fruits of how the system distributes the goodies.
Nick Hanauer:
One of the things that we didn’t reflect on in the conversations we had with our guests was that… I didn’t feel it was fair to interject… that my collaborator Eric Beinhocker and I really do think we have a new model. You’ve seen that around the office and stuff like that, that, in fact, we completely agree with them that we have to throw away homo economicus, and replace it with what we call homo sapiens, which is what we actually are, which is other-regarding, reciprocal, intuitively moral, and also sometimes selfish, a much fuller picture of what a human is, whether you’re a man or a woman, that reflects, in the best way that we can, what people are really like.
Nick Hanauer:
Now, it’s a separate question, one I honestly haven’t considered, should we have two models, a male and a female model? I don’t think that that-
Stephanie Ervin:
No, I don’t think that’s appropriate at all, but I do think, given what has been and how inadequate homo economicus and neoclassical and neoliberalism has been, and how exclusionary it’s been to race and gender questions, I think it would serve you and your cohorts much better to be really intentional about explicitly including racial considerations and considerations of gender.
Nick Hanauer:
And gender. Yeah. No, it’s a good-
Stephanie Ervin:
The absence of those-
Nick Hanauer:
Being explicit-
Stephanie Ervin:
… doesn’t make it a better model necessarily. It may make it a more complete explanation than what we have today in neoliberalism, but it maybe would still be inadequate if it didn’t be more intentional about asserting the inclusion–
Nick Hanauer:
Of those-
Stephanie Ervin:
… of those considerations.
Nick Hanauer:
… aspects. Right. Yeah. Right. No, it’s a really good point. We feel pretty strongly about the completeness of the social science research that we’re depending on to assert this new model of human behavior, but certainly from a narrative, rhetorical, and sales point of view, being more explicit and intentional about including more of humanity in how we think about-
Stephanie Ervin:
People need to see themselves in the story that’s being told, and that’s homo economicus’s great failure. Only white rich men see themselves in that economy, in that culture.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, right. It turns out that most people aren’t rapacious, so if you are rapacious in a world where most people are not rapacious, you can take advantage of that very, very easily.
Stephanie Ervin:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, we need to push back on that.
Stephanie Ervin:
In addition to having a better narrative forthcoming, a better story, a better explanation, more complete view forthcoming, I’m also just feeling a little, in general, optimistic. I don’t know if it was our guests or the fact that I learned I’m having a girl yesterday-
Nick Hanauer:
Oh my God.
Stephanie Ervin:
… which is very exciting.
Nick Hanauer:
Big news on the podcast.
Stephanie Ervin:
But I feel like it’s possible to create a world in which her future contributions will be more recognized.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure.
Stephanie Ervin:
That feels possible to me.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Well, and it’s indisputably true. The arc of history is bending towards justice. Your circumstances are better than your mom’s.
Stephanie Ervin:
100%.
Nick Hanauer:
And her circumstances were better than her mom’s. And your kid will have better circumstances than you. It will take us a long time to get to the perfect promised land, but-
Stephanie Ervin:
For sure. And I’ll do my bit to contribute to that.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Anyway, no, that’s cool. Yay, a girl.
Nick Hanauer:
In our next episode, we get to talk to an extraordinary economist, Gabriel Zucman, about his fantastic new book, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay.
Speaker 7:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. The magic happens in Seattle in partnership with The Young Turks Network. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer; follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works; and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.