Drucilla K. Barker

Emancipatory for Whom? A Comment on Critical Realism

Tony Lawson (1999) argues that critical realism will facilitate revelatory and emancipatory projects in feminist economics. The strength of Lawsons argument lies in its rejection of social atomism and methodological individualism. Societies are best understood as structurally connected systems rather than as atomistic aggregates. Its weakness lies in its reliance on a humanist conception of human agency, a conception that is increasingly questioned by some feminists.

The Effects of Tort Reform on Medical Malpractice Insurance Markets: An Empirical Analysis

I use statewide loss ratio data to assess empirically the manner in which tort reforms have affected relative prices and profitability, and underwriting risk in the medical malpractice insurance industry. The empirical evidence suggests that the imposition of statutory ceilings on recoveries both decreased risk and improved relative profitability. Reforms that codified the required standard of care appeared to have a beneficial effect on relative profitability in certain cases.

Feminist economics and the World Bank : history, theory and policy

Contents List Of Illustrations Notes On Contributors Acknowledgements 1. Feminist Economics And The World Bank: An Introduction Part 1: Gender And The World Bank: An Institutional History 2. The World Bank, Development, Adjustment, And Gender Equality 3. An Assessment Of Efforts To Promote Gender Equality At The World Bank 4. Comment Part 2: Policy Evaluations 5. Engendering Development 6. Engendering Agricultural Technology For Africas Farmers 7. Taking Gender Differences In Bargaining Power Seriously: Equity, Labor Standards, And Living Wages 8. Comment Part 3: Disciplinary Paradigms/ Development Paradigms 9. Colonizing Knowledge 10. Adjustment With A Womans Face 11. Gender And Intrahousehold Decision-Making 12. Engendering Development Or Gender Main-Streaming? 13. Comment Part 4: Explorations: Future Directions Of Feminist Research 14. A Seat At The Table 15. Why Feminist Economists Should Pay More Attention To The Coherence Between The World Bank And The WTO 16. Engendering The German Parliamentary Commission Report On Globalization Of The World Economy 17. Womens Rights And Engendering Development

As the World Turns: Globalization, Consumption, and the Feminization of Work

It is widely argued that global imbalances are the cause of the financial crisis. Political imbalance (the United States as dominant world force) mirrors economic imbalance (the debt-financed consumption sprees of the past three decades). There is, however, a missing (third) term—gender, which is constitutive of the economy both discursively and materially. Gender, in this sense, is a governing code that feminizes women as well as economically, racially, and culturally marginalized men. The feminization of labor made the consumption patterns of the elite possible and naturalized the type of hegemonic masculinity that characterized the international finance system.

Economists, social reformers, and prophets: a feminist critique of economic efficiency

This article examines the concept of Pareto optimality, bringing to light some of its implicit assumptions about the nature of human agency, work, and gender. It explores the androcentric character of the economic agent and the gendered nature of neoclassical models in relation to the historical development of the concept of economic efficiency during the late 1930s. The thrust toward the development of Pareto optimality as a scientific criterion of economic welfare was a response to the methodological tensions between the clearly political nature of economics and the scientific aspirations of economists. An examination of the debates from this period illuminates some of the values that became embedded in neoclassical economics, and which are now hidden by the masks of mathematics and abstraction.

Querying the Paradox of Caring Labor

Caring labor has long been considered “womens work” in economics. It is a problematic concept because its affective dimension means that it does not fit neatly into the category of work, and dominant gender ideology constructs it as a “labor of love.” The problem, according to feminist economists, is that the nature of care and the dependency of those receiving care imply that caregivers must genuinely care about those to whom their well-being is entrusted. From a global political economy perspective, the problem is that migrant populations—disenfranchised and disposable—provide much of the care work that the more prosperous world depends on. The feminist economics work on care frames it in terms of households and markets, which leaves in place its racialized, feminized, and heteronormative connotations. This paper argues for using a queer/global political economy lens that focuses on care work as sites of biopolitics. This analytic move allows feminist scholars to examine its affective dimension without reinscribing it as womens work.

Unstable Feminisms: A New Marxian Class Analysis of Domestic Labor

This article is a brief reflection after the Rethinking Marxism conference book session on Class Struggle on the Home Front: Work, Conflict and Exploitation in the Household, edited by Graham Cassano (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Domestic labor has long been a major concern for feminist scholars seeking to understand both the causes of womens subordination and the collective well-being of industrialized societies. The importance of this essay collection lies in its use of New Marxian Class Analysis to consider persistent themes in feminist theory: the valorization of womens household labor, migration and labor market hierarchies, and the role of womens participation in the paid labor force.

Economics, economic anthropology, and debt

Miranda Joseph’s monograph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism, contributes to an emerging body of scholarship that locates debt in its wider social context. Joseph’s work, rooted in cultural studies, explores debt and its meanings in the contexts of criminal justice, time, gender, and interdisciplinarity in the academy. Two major and interrelated concepts organize the book: first, the dialectics of abstraction and particularization through which capitalism becomes legible, and second, the moral/ethical question of accountability. Regarding the first, drawing on Marx, Joseph understands particularities as the results of abstract social processes and relations, a dialectical processes in which the contradictions created by class antagonisms and tensions produce differences in the meanings of abstractions. Thus she navigates a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of privileging particular formations of social difference, on the one hand, and trivializing them in favor of abstract categories, on the other. Understanding abstraction in terms of generative, historical, real social forces allows Joseph to develop an appreciation of the dialectical and complementary relation between the particular and concrete. Regarding the second concept, accountability, the key questions are: Who has to pay their debts, and who does not? From whom is accountability required? Generally not the class at the top, the famous 1%. Accounting and statistics are disciplinary practices used to separate neoliberal subjects into those who are worthy of social inclusion and those who are excluded. How do the abstractions produced by accounting and statistics create dynamic social processes that enable accountability for the many and carte blanche for the few? As Joseph (2013) argues in an earlier piece, ‘financial accounting in its managerial mode (cost accounting) and the “metrics” (statistical measurements) meant to track the efficacy of practices and programs are the technologies by which most public institutions are managed and held “accountable”’ (n.p.). They are also the technologies through which individuals and groups of individuals are represented, managed, and held accountable (or not). My interest in this topic stems from my work in feminist political economy and interest in economic anthropology. In the remainder of this essay I offer a reading of three aspects of Joseph’s work – methodology, criminal justice, and gender – concentrating mainly on the questions of methodology and accountability. I conclude with a brief discussion of future directions for this type of work.

Ethics and Social Justice

Economists often operate as though they had perfect knowledge and their expert knowledge, couched in difficult and abstruse mathematics, was infallible. In the material world of uncertainty, risk, reward and, all too often, impoverishment, the consequences of bad policy decisions are not just theoretical mistakes on paper; but rather, they create harms for many people. Thus a meaningful code of ethics is necessary. Developing a meaningful code of ethics may be difficult if economists must remain within the mainstream paradigm; however, there are many alternative economic approaches that may or may not use the methods and tools of the mainstream. All of them have ethics at their core in the sense of respect and care for other persons and the environment. The prudential principle, the principle of informed consent, and autonomy are embedded in their methodologies and approaches. In developing a code of ethics for economics, we should look to other heterodox schools and related disciplines where such codes have a long and successful record.