Economic Woman

This is my third post in response to a single post from weeks ago, but bear with me – I have three unrelated thoughts. In a reaction to this blog and feminist economics generally, Peter Boettke articulates a common reaction to identity politics:

Women, like men, let alone minorities, should not accept any artificial barriers to pursuing their goals.  If people get in your way, don’t let them — either side-step them or run them over.  Don’t ever let others define you, you define yourself; you are in control of your own destiny.  The cream always rises, is what my father always taught us.

I think this is something we need to believe on some level in order to function. Certainly, as I work towards my goals it helps to imagine that I am in control of my own destiny, that my “cream” will rise if I work hard enough. But the social scientist in me also sees barriers, institutional and otherwise, which put others like me (women, queer women) at a disadvantage.

I’d suggest that, broadly, people on the left are more likely to experience this disconnect. That got me to wondering if this is why conservatives are happier than leftists. Lo and behold, that study’s authors argued something similar.

In the Austrian Economists post that I just linked to, Peter Boettke eventually concludes: “economics and feminism do not collide.” My tagline has attracted a fair amount of attention, as was intended, I suppose. So I’d like to say that I roughly agree with Boettke on this one.

If I thought that the discipline of economics and the politics of feminism were fundamentally opposed, I’d have difficulty practicing both. Note that I’m defining feminism as a political orientation right now – if you’d like to argue that it’s a social science in and of itself, well that feminism may well be incompatible with economics…)

The tagline is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I think that economists and feminists often collide. But when we make an effort to listen to each other, I think both sides benefit. Or, more whimsically, you could say that when economics and feminism collide little sparks of insight spray everywhere.

I should also say that there has been remarkably little of the wrong sort of collision in these comment threads since Economic Woman started up a few months back. Thanks for that, folks. It’s great fun reading your responses.

Here’s something I’ve been meaning to link to for awhile. Last month, The Austrian Economists’ Peter Boettke linked to this site with some friendly, if sceptical, thoughts on feminist economics:

I ask “don’t demand curves slope downward regardless of gender or sexual orientation?”  For example, hasn’t there been significant studies over the years that have attempted to control for various factors (e.g., occupational choice, job tenure, educational choice, etc.) in the wage gap, and once these are taking into account the gap closes significantly.

I did not respond at the time, in part because I was a little starstruck – the post mentions me alongside Deirdre McCloskey – and also because I figure this blog is a sort of long, gradual response. But briefly, controlling for the factors Boettke mentions does close the gap somewhat, but not completely, as I’ve written before. In a broader sense, we can also be interested in why women make occupational and educational choices differently than men, and what welfare effects result.

In any case, the post is worth reading, and so are the comments. McCloskey herself has dropped in with better points than I could have made:

Sure, the technical points about Max U go on holding regardless of who wields the bordered Hessian matrix. And to push one step back from that formal point, sure, demand curves slope down, regardless of gender. [...]

But as some here have suggested, there’s a wider context, yes? In The Bourgeois Virtues I suggest that an economics that works only with the virtue of Prudence is going to, sometimes, get into trouble. Not always, but sometimes, and those some times are pretty important. A feminist economics admits other virtues and vices beyond Prudence Only. With economic results.