Economics
What is She Worth? How to Value (Or Not to Value) a Woman’s Life
The 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund dispensed death benefits for female victims that averaged only 63% of those for male victims. Why? Special Master Kenneth Feinberg was instructed to use a formula similar to that used in U.S. courts, taking victims’ estimated future earnings into account. For more details, see his fascinating book, What is Life Worth? (Public Affairs, 1995).
Is it Work?
Steven J. Dubner and Steve Levitt suggest the following: “It’s work if someone else tells you to do it, and leisure if you choose to do it yourself.” This definition makes it sound like neither self-employed nor self-motivated individuals do any work.
Children as Pets
This recent New Yorker cover satirizes the notion that children, like puppies in a store window, are just another consumer good. I think the gender stereotyping is intended as a joke, though not all viewers would take it that way.
Measuring Progress
I’m in Paris for a meeting of a new Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. It’s a city that invites reflections on the past that can make the future shimmer. Walking down the Rue des Francs Bourgeois in the Marais I recall an essay contest sponsored by a group of learned French scholars in 1759. They asked, “Has intellectual and economic progress contributed to the moral improvement of humanity?” The winner, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (smiling enigmatically on the left), elaborated famously on his basic answer: non!
When a Commodity is Not Exactly a Commodity
Every week, the journal Science complements its published articles with one or more “Perspectives” offering a brief and informal summary of research on an important topic. I was thrilled to be invited to submit one of these recently, and chose to focus on the impact of personal interactions and emotional connections on the economics of care services.
Justin Care
Most debates over family policy in the U.S. focus on comparisons with Europe, Canada, or Australia. But so much is happening in East Asia! The rapidity of fertility decline in Korea –combined with the mobilization of women’s groups there–has led to major new government initiatives.
Buying Care
At a Women’s World conference in Korea two years ago some community artists laid out a large piece of canvas on smooth ground, along with pencils, markers, and paints for passersby to express themselves. The resulting piece of collective art was tapestry-like, with a layered intricacy exceeding that of most renegade graffiti.
Theories of Value
What if all the parents in the U.S. got up one morning and went on strike, demanding more recognition and support for the work they do?
What’s the Economy For, Anyway?
Sometimes its hard to see through that almighty dollar. We need to stop and ask what the economy is FOR, anyway. This question is the focal point of a campaign being organized by filmmakers John de Graaf and Laura Pacheco, an outgrowth of the Forum on Social Wealth, described in my last post.