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    Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?: a story about women and economics
    Unavailable
    Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?: a story about women and economics
    Unavailable
    Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?: a story about women and economics
    Ebook232 pages3 hours

    Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?: a story about women and economics

    By Katrine Marçal

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A feminist critique of new-liberalism.

    How do you get your dinner? That is the basic question of economics. It might seem easy, but it is actually very complicated.  When economist and philosopher Adam Smith proclaimed that all our actions were motivated by self-interest, and that the world turns because of financial gain, he laid the foundations for ‘economic man’. 

    Selfish and cynical, ‘economic man’ has dominated our thinking ever since – he is the ugly rational heart of modern day capitalism. But, every night, Adam Smith's mother served him his dinner, not out of self-interest, but out of love. Even today, the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning, and cooking is not part of our economic models. All over the world, there are economists who believe that if women are paid less, it’s because their labour is worth less. 

    In this engaging, popular look at the mess we're in, Katrine Marçal charts the myth of economic man, from its origins at Adam Smith's dinner table, its adaptation by the Chicago School, and, finally its disastrous role in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis  — and invites us to kick out economic man once and for all.

    PRAISE FOR KATRINE MARÇAL

    ‘The word economy comes from the Greek oikos, meaning home, and yet until recently, economists failed to factor home economics — women’s unpaid work — into their equations … As Katrine Marçal so wittily shows, this masculine construction is a myth that ignores the irrational, emotional and often altruistic reality of our lives … This wonderfully accessible and entertaining book empowers readers to question the economic ‘‘truths’’ that have come to dominate our lives.’ The Sydney Morning Herald

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribe Publications
    Release dateApr 22, 2015
    ISBN9781925113723
    Unavailable
    Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?: a story about women and economics
    Author

    Katrine Marçal

    Katrine Marçal is a Swedish writer living in London. She writes a weekly column about politics and economics for Aftonbladet, Scandinavia's largest daily newspaper. Her book, The Only Sex, was shortlisted for the August Prize in 2012. Her writing has appeared in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, German, and British publications — one of her most acclaimed texts won her a bold compliment from Ed Miliband in person. In 2013 she was awarded 'Lagercrantzen', a prestigous award sponsored by Dagens Nyheter, for writing in ”a bold and personal style that entices and challenges the reader with the audacity and intimacy of her intellectual landscape.” Marçal was discovered by a Swedish editor through a blog she wrote while studying at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She started writing for Swedish national newspapers at the age of 22 and published her first book, Rape and Romance when she was 25. After working for the centre-left think tank Arenagruppen, she joined Aftonbladet in 2009. The Only Sex is her second book and has been described as a ”feminist Freakonomics”. Marçal has been invited to speak about economics and politics in Barcelona, Berlin, London, Saint Petersburg, Stockholm, Oslo, and Copenhagen. She lives in London.

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    Reviews for Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Homo Economicus is a concept in economics that is wrong. It has failed almost every test, every environment, and every theory. Katrine Marçal has found a new way it is has failed. It totally misjudges women. It helps repress them, keep them subservient, underpaid and unappreciated. They are second class contributors when they are considered at all. Economic models are developed basically without them. This is hardly the first book to damn homo economicus, but he persists and thrives nonetheless. It just continues to make economics wrong. The book is a thorough and thoughtful attack on homo economicus, from a feminist standpoint.Marçal writes in a very fast style. Her paragraphs seem very often single sentences, which quickens the pace. It doesn’t stop her from beating a point to death, but it makes reading the book a breeze. Economics can be so absurd she only has to report on it and it comes across as sarcastic and satirical. It usually doesn’t even require a comment from her. But the book is an endless stream of such nonsense – that we actually operate by. Our governments make faulty decisions based on faulty statistics plugged into faulty models.The core argument is that housework should count. Canada once calculated women’s work – maintenance, childcare, cooking – to be worth between 30 and 45% of GDP. But GDP includes none of it. This is hardly the only problem with GDP, an unrealistic and artificial fabrication, and ignoring the value contributed by women is an age-old festering sore that Marçal picks at gleefully.There are so very many reasons why economics is wrong. This is a major one, but there are more important missing components, like natural resources. Raw materials are not part of any standard economic model. We assume they are always available. Free. Free to consume and free to waste and free to pollute. This is the biggest reason the planet is wheezing and groaning – because economists decided homo economicus was no longer part of the ecosystem. He was above it and could exploit as he pleased without accounting or consequence. Marçal finally gets to this point at the very end, giving it one page. Marçal’s neutral, positive solution: “Economic science should be about how one turns a social vision into a modern economic system.” If only.David Wineberg
    • 4/5
      Economic theory is based around the idea of Economic Man - a perfectly rational individual whose only relationships with other people are in trade or in competition (all traditionally masculine traits, of course). Of course, humans aren't like this, but over time Economic Man has gone from a simplification for the purposes of theorizing to an ideal that we strive to emulate in all things. This isn't just wrong, it's damaging. It leaves out fundamental, necessary parts of the human experience, like bodies, like dependency, like love. It breaks people and economies and societies, and because we don't understand what we're doing, we just keep doing it over and over again.The GDP doesn't include unpaid women's labor - childcare, housekeeping, cooking for the family. Feminism's economic progress has been calculated in terms of how many women take paid jobs, but has ignored the fact that this means that their unpaid labor still needs doing, and that this represents a massive shift in the way our economy functions (or, too often, doesn't). The prose in this book is written in crisp, short sentences in short paragraphs, which, combined with the subject matter, gives the impression of a cold, sarcastic rage. Marçal is engaged in the process of tearing down one of the pillars of society, and she's doing it with a vengeance. I wish I had faith that she would succeed.
    • 3/5
      Great in the parts when it addresses the book's advertised point regarding a feminist reading of economic theory, but this covers only around a third of the book with more general economic criticism filling the rest. Interesting enough, if a little 101, but not what I signed up for.