Deficit
How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World
Emma Holten
Translated by Sherilyn Hellberg
Having read it
★★★★★
Absolutely essential reading for its humanity, honesty and simple and clear highlighting and explanations of how backward our apparently ‘enlightened’ economic systems and processes are and that care is integral and really does matter to progress.
[...] as long as the goal is a society with more money in it, there will always be a pull away from those things that are hardest to put a price on, and the people deemed expensive, valueless or immeasurable will face constant degradations. There can be great violence in a spreadsheet.
A good passage
Women all over the world simply spend more time taking care of other people, both at home and at work, both when they are being paid, and when they are not. The mother tongue of politics struggles not only to understand the value of caring for one another, it struggles to understand the value of much of what makes life worth living.
A second good passage
Established economics, which does not take the maintenance of human beings and the planet into account, can result in a system in which an increasing amount of economic activity, or what we call growth, can in fact shorten our lives. In which crises literally make it easier to breathe. In which the things that give us money also kill us, making our lives poorer, shorter, more brutish.
A third good passage
The fight for a more caring society requires a break with the feminism that takes the position of men as the measuring stick for liberation. If we don’t see value in the activities that have traditionally been associated with femininity, the poorest paid and most vulnerable people will be gravely impacted. These are the people who have the toughest time buying and fighting for more time, peace and closeness with their loved ones, because their bodies and time are the least valued.
[...]
[...] The Brown woman is an eternally flexible figure in the Western imagination, and with the stroke of a pen, she can go from being an economic burden or threatening migrant to a desirable caretaker.