← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update: Unfinished Revolution: Women's Paid Labor
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- [00:54]
A
Gonna change one of these days. Welcome, friends. This is economic update. And to be a little different this time, I'm going to rearrange the opening. My name is Richard Wolff. I've been a professor all my life of economics. And so I designed this program to share with you what I understand as the major events of the last week in terms of their impact on our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children, those looming down the road, really, what's happening in the economy we have to live in as we proceed across our lives. It's a pleasure to be with you each week. I look forward to it and I hope to make it interesting enough that you will look forward to it with me. Let's jump right in to the economic updates for this beginning of March 2017. This last week, a deal was struck in a courtroom in New York which pitted the Takata Corporation from Japan against the United States government. And it had to do, as I suspect many of you know, with exploding airbags. Takata is one of the great producers of airbags that were supposed to protect us in the automobiles of the recent years when they were installed. The problem was that the Takata Corporation took some shortcuts, producing bags that would, on occasion, not function or even worse, on occasion, explode. People were killed by these bags. People were injured by these bags. And so court cases were brought once it was understood what had happened. Court cases were also brought once it was understood that apparently the Takata Corporation, or at least some of the folks there, knew years in advance that this was a problem. The Takata Corporation has now also said in court papers that the companies to whom they sold these airbags, which include many of the largest automobile companies in the world, companies like BMW, Ford, Nissan and so on, knew about these problems. But everybody went ahead because it was profitable to advertise, and airbags and so shortcuts were taken. Another way of saying this is all these companies, the car companies themselves and the Takata airbag company are driven by profit. In order to make a profit, they try to economize on costs. They try to economize on everything that takes away from the revenue they get when they sell the product. That's what profit as your bottom line means. And we know in recent years what that has led car companies to do. General Motors had an ignition problem that likewise hurt all kinds of people, including killing some of them. And they knew it, and they kept quiet about it, and they've had to pay big fees and fines for it. We know the extraordinary example of Volkswagen which systematically installed in its cars, in millions of them, devices that would fool the pollution control efforts of governments around the world, giving false readings, while in fact the company polluted the air. We have no idea how many people suffered asthma, emphysema, lung cancer from the additional pollution all over the world that VW's criminal behavior produced. So now we have the Takata Company. Well, let me give you an idea of how they've been punished. They had to pay a billion dollars in a fine. Sounds like a lot of money. It is a lot of money, but. But then you discover that 42 million automobiles here in the United States have Takata airbags in them, which means that a billion dollars divided over 42 million cars works out to $23 per car. Wow. Remember what a car costs? This is not a large amount of money. Much of it, by the way, is to be used to pay for having the car's airbags fixed or replaced. What's going on here is remarkable. We now have every major automobile company having been caught pushing for profits at the expense of human safety, costing lives and injuries that those people will never, ever overcome. What does this mean? A rational society would ask the. Does the profit driven production of commodities lead capitalists to cut corners, to save money? To. To even make the calculation that it is cheaper to do something you know is dangerous and wrong and pay a fine if you're caught than it is to fix it? Can you be sure that the fine will be low enough? It often is. A rational society would then ask the question, is the problem here, the. The system? Is it that when you make every producer work under the gun of profitability, if you allow them to function as private enterprises without close government supervision, without the close supervision of the customer to make sure that the product is safe, do you run a risk? And is that risk something that ought to make you question the profit system? Well, the answer is obvious. We should have a debate about profit driven production systems like capitalism. But we don't, do we? We are all about how sad it is, how tragic it is, how bad the individuals were. Often we replace the bad individuals only to discover that the system takes good individuals and converts them into bad ones in their capacity as corporate leaders. Once again raising the question of the system. Let me turn to another economic update. President Trump last week announced a big increase in defense spending. The United States, depending on which estimate you take seriously, is planning on spending under Trump somewhere between 30 and $50 billion more. A very hefty increase of which President Trump is proud. Let's Review the economics of defense spending, just a few of them, to raise some red flags. First, the United States now spends more money on defense than the next nine biggest defense spenders in the world. We spend way more than Russia and China combined. If you add up our allies spending to our own, it's multiples of what is spent by people we could conceivably consider as potential enemies. Why are we raising spending when we already outspend every potential adversary and it's not even close? Think about it. Here's another question. Every increase in spending in the last 50 years has been justified on the grounds it's going to help protect us, and yet we seem to be at risk. That's growing. Does that mean the earlier expansions didn't work? Is increased defense spending not a successful way to handle economic and political and military threats around the world? It seems to be endless. Once upon a time it was the Russians. Then maybe it was the Chinese, then maybe it was radical Islam, then maybe it was isis. It seems we have an enemy whenever we need it to justify increased defense spending. Here's another economic dimension to think money spent on defense has to come from somewhere. If you increase money spending on defense, it either means you're going to have to raise taxes on Americans to pay for it, or you're going to have to cut other programs and use the money that might have been there to help college students or to protect the environment or anything else and use it instead for more defense spending. Or maybe you won't raise taxes and maybe you won't cut government programs. Then you'll just borrow more money and raise the deficit that is already at historic highs. Or one of those, and there are problems with every one of them, will have to be done to pay for the increased defense spending. And here's another measure. Most of what we do these days under the heading of defense spending is really not so much defense as it is offense. Oh, I know there are those who believe the best defense is offense, and that must include our military, because we're defending ourselves chiefly in places like Afghanistan, like Iraq, like Yemen. And those places are many, many thousands of miles away. But the interesting economics of all of that, besides raising questions about why we call this activity defense, the real interesting question is that Afghanistan and Iraq and Yemen and many of the other places where the United States spends defense money produces such turmoil, such catastrophe that refugees result. And guess what? If your country's already poor and if it becomes the place where violent military clashes happen, where drones drop bombs on funerals and wedding processions and family picnics, among other things. People leave, they become refugees, and they want to go to a country where they can get a job, where they can live more peacefully. They actually will come to the very countries whose bombing and whose defense spending made them refugees in the first place. And that causes problems that are severe around the world. Our president tells us that now we can blame the victim of all of this, the refugee, but it doesn't change the reality. Here's the economics at the base of it. Defense spending has a constituency. Profit driven companies that make the guns, the bullets, the rockets, the drones. They're pushing for defense spending because it's money in their pocket. Whereas those who question defense spending have no equivalent profit driven constituency to push for what they propose. And that's why we get defense spending of this sort. The rest is the kind of verbiage we have now come to expect from Mr. Trump and from folks like him. I've been telling you, I've been telling you frequently about inequality, and I've used it as a way to explain that we're not having an economic recovery, except for the very few at the top. And so my mind was drawn to some statistics that emerged this last week that show us just how clearly the absence of a recovery is what we're living through. The Wall Street Journal on March 1st carried two stories on separate pages, but they make the same point, coming at it from different angles. The first story talked about automobile sales in the United States in the particular period since Mr. Trump's election. November through January of this year. These car sales tell a story. So let me tell you the story. Total car sales in this period, November to January, under the new Trump regime, total car sales increased by 1.9% over the same period a year ago. So it's a measure of how much better we're doing. And as you can see, we're not doing very much better. 1.9% isn't very good, and I wouldn't be telling you about that if that were the story. What I want to tell you about is what kind of automobiles experienced a much greater rate of sales increase than the 1.9% for the industry as a whole. So let's start. The Maserati Corporation announced that Maserati cars increased over this same period when the total car sales rose by by 1.9% over the same period a year ago. Maserati sales rose 48%. Rolls Royce sales rose 42%. Ferrari sales rose 28%. Porsche up 11%. Bentleys up 11% Lamborghini up 8.6%. All of those to be compared with the industry as a whole, 1.9%. Those cars made by those luxury producers range around $250,000 per car. The growth of sales in them is staggering. The rich who can afford such cars are very happy with, with the new Trump government, aren't they? Their recovery has provided them with the money to buy. The recovery hasn't provided that to the average American, which is why car sales are so low for the industry as a whole. And here's the second story on the March 1 Wall Street Journal. Two private prison companies, that's right here in the United States, we're privatizing prisons. More and more prisons are owned and operated by profit driven corporations. The Obama administration found that these prisons trying to make profit were treating prisoners in an inhumane and unsupportable way. And, and the Obama administration ordered the prisons of the United States, at least the federal prisons, to stop working with private prison corporations. It looks likely that Mr. Trump will not follow suit. And that has made happiness in the land of the private prison company. Corecivic, a private prison company with its shares listed on the stock market, has since President Trump's election risen, that is the value of the shares, by 140%. And another company, Geo Group, its shares have doubled, that is risen by 100%. That is a far, far greater rise in, in the value of your shares than has been experienced by the vast majority of other stocks of other companies. It is a good time for the rich who buy Maseratis and it is a good time for those who make prisons and who make money off of making prisons. Then last week there was all the news about the aca, the Affordable Care act, often known as Obamacare. And President Trump in his speech railed against the awfulness of a bill, of a rule, of a law. Obamacare that requires that mandates is the word they use. Mandates that people do something, mandates that they get health insurance. Well, this is an attempt to play on people's ignorance or people's forgetfulness because mandates are a part of capitalism and always have been. And why is that? Because capitalism is a profit driven system that often produces results that, that people can't stand. And so they demand that the government come in and make things work differently from the way a private, profit driven capitalism works. And you all know that, even though Mr. Trump is counting on us to forget it. So let's go through the mandates that we already live with so that no one should think that a new mandate about health insurance is, is anything useful? The first mandate is public education. 150 years ago, after a long struggle in which wealthy people and business interests tried to prevent it, the people of the United States said, even if private schools are unwilling to risk their profits by educating everybody, everybody ought to have good education. So they fought for, and eventually they won a mandate. Every child must get an education. And the money was provided and the teachers were hired and the schools were built. Yes, you could get an exemption, but you had to prove if you didn't go to public school that you got at least an equivalent education someplace else mandate to get the education that the private profit driven schools weren't providing. Let me give you another example. At the beginning of the last century, the 20th century, profit driven food companies were poisoning us. Bad meat, bad fish, bad dairy products, bad vegetables. So we set up the Food and Drug Administration as a nation. The government would come in and mandate the health rules, the cleanliness rules that govern the food industry. And why? Because if you leave the food industry to the private profit driven activities of corporations, you get sick or worse. So we have mandates about health and cleanliness. Here's another. The insurance business. Turns out that we don't want to be driving our cars, have an accident and discover that the person we're driving with or the person who causes the accident has no insurance. So we mandate insurance companies have to provide it, even if it isn't profitable always to do that. We have the Occupational Safety and Health Administration because private driven companies were subjecting their workers to unhealthy conditions to make profits. So we impose on them mandates. The EPA is another one. Every city and town in this country has a weights and measures office because it turns out that profit driven business tried to palm off 15 ounces of something as if it were a pound. And we suffered from it. So we made the government come in. See, it turns out that profit driven capitalism does all kinds of horrible things to us as a population. We don't question this system because that's dangerous. So we bring in the government with mandates to try to offset what private profit capitalism has repeatedly shown us it's able and willing to do. So for the Affordable Care act to come in with mandates that, that we all have health insurance so that as we get sick, we can go to someone and get healthy again. Because we don't want to infect one another, do we? We don't want to lose the productivity of people who are unnecessarily sick because they didn't go to see A doctor, et cetera, et cetera. It is something a rational society does for itself. Private profit doesn't work that way. And, and so we need a mandate to do it. For the President to rail against mandate seems to suggest he doesn't know how capitalism works. Or maybe he does. And that of course would be even worse. Now, the last economic update I have time for, and it's a repeat, but it's one that is clear from the questions you've sent to me, and it extends the examination of mandates. One of the private profit industries that developed in American cities years ago was taxis. That's right, a company that you can call up or stop on the street and will give you a ride from your home to your job, from your school to the hospital, whatever. But the problem was capitalism. The private profit driven cab company could make more profit if it used an older car, a less mechanically managed car, maybe save on insurance so that if an accident happened, you weren't covered. Maybe hire people who hadn't had enough training and who might be more expensive. But because they've had that training, taxi companies cut corners and as a result the public suffered accidents, broken cars, inadequate insurance, unvetted drivers, and guess what, you guessed it, the government was called in to mandate that cab companies have a certain minimum insurance, have a certain minimum care from mechanics, have a certain minimum vetting of the driver and so on, to protect the public from what a profit driven capitalism can and always has done. And in order to make it work, when the government came in to keep the drivers happy and the cab companies happy and the customers happy, they set high prices. Prices that are high enough so that the workers get paid properly and the insurance and the mechanical maintenance and all of that is taken care of. And the minute that was done, high prices to pay for an adequate service, you bet a capitalist was waiting for an opportunity to figure out some way to jump back in there, cut corners and make more profit. That's what Uber is, that's what Lyft is. Save on the car purchase price by making the driver responsible. Save maybe on the insurance, save maybe on the maintenance, save maybe on the vetting of the driver. Save a little, make more money, make a lot of profit until the same complaints result in the same outcome. That's how capitalism works. If we were a different society, we'd face it and we talk about it, and the issue of system change would become part of the daily political discourse rather than being kept off of our agenda. We've reached the end of the first half of this program Economic Update will continue in a few moments with an interview of Dr. Harriet Fraad, who opens each month's programs by talking about issues that connect economics and psychology. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Say Hallelujah. Throw up your hands the bucket is kicked, the body is gone. Close your eyes and bow your head to rest your soul and the praise of death. Say hallelujah. Throw up your hands the bucket is kicked, the body is gone Dry your eyes and stand upright Put a smile on your face it wouldn't want us to come cry. The sun will rise, the stars will shine Turning day to dusk and night till dawn we'll pass on but until that time, say Hallelujah.
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A
Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Before I introduce our guest, Dr. Harriet Fraad, who is with me on the first program of each month to discuss the intersection of economics and psychology, I wanted to make two announcements. The first is for those of you that live and work in the greater New York area or who may be visiting New York City over the next week. On March 8th, International Women's Day, by the way, which is the second Wednesday of the month of March, I will be giving my usual talk at the Judson Memorial Church. That is a very old, very beautiful historic church on Washington Square in Lower Manhattan. Please join us there 7:30, March 8, because it's an opportunity for me to go into much greater detail about the kinds of topics I discuss here. It's an opportunity for me to meet you and vice versa. So if you're in New York March 8, 7:30pm Join us at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. And my second announcement has to do with the websites we maintain, where you can follow what we do in greater detail, where you can be a partner of Economic Update, which is what we urge you to do. The first One is rdwolff with two f's.com and the second website is called democracyatwork.info info. That's all one word, democracyatwork.info. those are websites that allow you to communicate to us questions, suggestions, likes and dislikes of what you hear and see on this program. It's ways for you to connect by bringing us to your community, by bringing this program to a radio station where you live, by learning more about the topics we cover. There are audio files and video files and lectures and articles. There's a vast mass of material that we add to all the time. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In short, there are literally Dozens of ways to partner with us to help sponsor both this radio program and the monthly talks at the Judson Memorial Church and more. Please make use of these websites. That's why we maintain them, so that you have even more materials that you can make use of. So Let me welcome Dr. Harriet Frad to this week's program.
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B
Glad to be here.
- [32:24]
A
Okay. As you and I were discussing this program, we came up with an idea that I want to pursue now, which is suppose we faced honestly the fact that you've documented in your work that women have had to over the last 30 to 40 years, enter the labor force in regular huge numbers because the sustaining family income would not be available from simply the man. Working women have had to go to work to supplement what men earn to have any chance at the so called American dream. And yet, as you've pointed out, and I want to explore with you now the conditions to enable women to do that, to make it a transition from a workforce mostly male with women at home to a workforce that is literally gender integrated. The supports, the necessary supports for women to do that have been absent and that that has caused incalculable economic and psychological pain and difficulty. Could you tell us about that?
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B
Yes. Part of the pain and difficulty I just want to elaborate on before I go on to something else is that there is no preparation, there is no support. Half the labor force is women and most women can't manage it. We have one of the highest divorce rates, second highest divorce rate in the world, and people don't even bother getting married anymore because they don't have the security. The majority of women are now single. The majority of young people who would have been married before are single because marriage is collapsing under the weight of this, of what's happening now. What is happening. What's happening is we have a set a culture and economic platforms that are based on what was true of white America, which was the majority until about the 70s, in which you had a wage earning, family wage earning white male and a dependent wife and children. Minorities never got a family wage. Minority women have had to work. But the mass of our country was white at that time. So what you had was a culture based on assuming that women's primary role was marriage, childcare and home maintenance. Now half the labor force is women. Women have to work and many want to work. They want a fuller life. But the culture has not prepared this at all. What do I mean when I say the culture has not prepared it? Well, part of it is there's a very macho culture of macho roles being presented. You see the buses going by. They're not showing hunky happy men with a vacuum cleaner. They're showing people with a gun with pretty sexy women in the background. If there are women in the background at all. You don't have the kind of supports, both culturally and also in terms of all the other supports that the western industrialized nations who are also wealthy have.
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A
You mean supports, Social supports for women to work. Give us some examples.
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B
Like early childhood care, Universal, starting at 3 years old. All the other western industrialized nations have universal care from 3 to 5 before formal schooling. And that's quality care with well paid.
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A
Teachers and so on, Maintained by the government.
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B
Maintained by the government as a service that acknowledges women's role in society. And they often have fewer women working than we do, but a lot more support. In terms of things like maternity leaves. Most other countries, in fact, all other countries but four have maternity leaves, and those leaves are extensive. All the others paid maternity leaves have paid maternity leaves. The average is 40 days. The United States is the only one of the developed nations that has no paid maternity leave. What we have is no guaranteed, no guaranteed paid, socially subsidized leave for maternity or paternity.
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A
In other words, as a matter of right to.
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B
As a matter of your right as a person creating a family who will be the citizens of the future. So what you have is in the United States, a woman has to negotiate with her employer who will suffer because it's not a social program for her 12 days of unpaid maternity leave. We are among four other nations who have no paid maternity leave. They are Swaziland, Lesotho, Somalia and Papua New Guinea.
- [37:49]
A
They're all extremely small and extremely poverty stricken.
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Right. This is, we're completely out of the league of developed nations in this respect. We don't have the subsidized after school programs that these countries have, which is why we have most crimes committed by school children and against school children that happen when the schools are released around 3 o' clock and when their parents get home at around 6. Every other nation has that as well as heavily subsidized or free summer care programs.
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A
So implicit here is the notion that it is the obligation of women primarily to deal with children.
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B
Right.
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The demand is made of women by the reality of the economy to go to work over the last 40 years. But nothing is done in this culture to deal with the problem. How is a woman who's out of the house and has to be for the American dream to be achieved, how is she going to manage that if nothing is happening, to take care of the children that she can't be there with and for. If she's going to perform the paid labor. This puts women in an impossible pressure situation.
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B
It does, and it is. And nothing's being done as a social program to help with the domestic labor. Someone has to create very important work. Cleaning, ordering, watching, nurturing. And those things have been devalued. That was a huge mistake of the original women's movement, of which I was a founding mother, to devalue. To devalue that traditional labor of women and only to value the economic and political work from which we were excluded. We would, in order to be able to have some kind of lessening of the enormous pressure that is destroying marriage and that makes household maintenance horrendously difficult for women, and as well as it's difficult for us to compete in the labor force as equals when we have two jobs. Part of what would have to be done is a change of culture so that those we have not even developed, no less insisted on. What are the values that you learn from taking care of vulnerable life? What are the knowledges that you gain? What is the value of a clean and orderly environment? When I had a client who went back to work after being a homemaker for four years, and her employer said, well, what have you been doing? And she said, nothing. Our culture doesn't show you. I have been managing a household, I have been provisioning it, I have been a negotiator, I have been a nurturer, I have created order. I have been an organizer, I have been a social liaison and putting values on those things. Now, there is an informal evaluation. If you want to look up on salary.com, a woman's household labor full time is $134,000 a year if you outsource the services to take out food and cleaning services and party organizers and the whole realm of things that women do, childcare centers.
- [41:24]
A
I want to ask you a question. Is it then your argument that because women's work as mothers, as homemakers, as caretakers for elderly in the home, as managers of the diverse schedules of husbands and children, and all that, if this is considered nothing, as your client told that employer, then in a sense you are building a culture which devalues women, which says to an employer, I can pay her less because she hasn't done anything? In other words, you're not recognizing skills and experience that are very valuable if they were gotten in a paid job, but are falsely devaluated and lie at the base of women's not only not getting the same salaries as men do, but now to go back to your earlier point, you can see how a culture like ours, with those values wouldn't have thought to put into place the social support institutions that other countries have to enable the women to go out to work, because they didn't understand what the work was that women were already doing. Right.
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B
And they didn't want to understand. I mean, as a founding mother of the women's movement, we have to acknowledge that our movement was shaped by the huge CIA. Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA at that point, and FBI influence to make it a gender only movement that ignored these issues. So they were very beneficial to capitalism because you eliminated the social supports necessary for women to be equals in the marketplace. Mothers get less than the 77 cents on the male dollar that women without children get. In fact, women who are unmarried and have no children make the same amount as men do in our culture in Sweden, for example.
- [43:26]
A
So in other words, the women women are penalized for their home, for their family maintenance work.
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B
That's right.
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A
But isn't that extraordinary? In a culture that likes to present itself as being committed to family values, being committed to supporting the institution of the family, you then have a situation, if I understand you correctly, in which that's fake totally. This commitment to the family is the kind of verbiage that is appropriate to say on the right occasions, or for a politician or a minister or anyone else. But the reality that you're describing is one that is destroying the family.
- [44:09]
B
That's right. So that the irony is that those who most tout family values are doing the least to preserve families. And it's one of the reasons that porno use is the greatest in the state of Utah, which is a religious state that touts family values all over the place and that their divorce rate is at least equal and perhaps exceeds that in spite of their family values rhetoric. Because it's untenable. When a woman has a child at work, she's considered less serious. If she takes any time off or even if she doesn't, it's assumed she'll be distracted. When a man is a father, his wages don't change, his promotion doesn't change, because within this false idea that is totally antiquated, it's assumed he'll be more responsible because he's supporting his family. That is why mothers make 70 cents on the male dollar in the United States. Single mothers, that's unmarried mothers In Sweden, make 98% of what men in Sweden make. And that's because they have subsidized housing for single mothers and they have all their social programs that allows women to compete equals. So if we talk about equality for women, we have to talk about social supports and a cultural support for changed roles. You have a very dominant presence of the NRA and the gun lobby. The nra, instead of saying, buy guns, make capitalist gun makers rich, they say, be a man, regain your manhood with your gun, which mass murderers try to do. You also have the military, which is a rape culture and a hyper masculine culture, which is why so many women, one in four at least, get raped and many more sexually assaulted in the military. You have porno, which is a $17 billion industry which presents women in humiliated positions because you're trying to compensate men for the reality they live 39% and now it's closer to 40% of marriages consist of a man and woman where the woman earns more. And ironically, the woman who earns more than her husband does more housework to compensate him for the antiquated notion that his masculinity means he should be the provider. This is a bizarre mismatch. We have not caught up with the economic necessity for women to be in the labor force and the fact that half the labor force is female.
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A
In other words, when you say mismatch. So we're stuck with an ideological celebration of a situation that is over.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
And tell us something, what does that do? You're a psychologist. You have, you know, clients that are part of your psychotherapy practice. What does this do to couples, to parents? This situation in which the man isn't earning the way he once did, has to adjust to the need for the wife to be a paid earner. They have to both adjust to what that means, to her inability to stay active as the full time manager, coordinator, nurturer. I mean, you're saying that modern American households are a scene of unspeakable stress and strain and dissolution and conflict.
- [47:54]
B
That's why marriage has become a luxury good. The people who can afford to stay married are those who don't have to fight over maintaining cleanliness and order and childcare because they're paying other less well paid workers to do that work.
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A
Yeah. You gave us in an earlier program some statistics about who's getting married and who's having children. And if I recall that your point was that it's the two extremes, the richest and the poorest, often the poorest being immigrants who are still bringing the family culture of their country of Origin. Exactly.
- [48:33]
B
Where children are an asset economically instead of a liability, which they are now. That childcare costs are the same as tuition costs for a public college. An average of 17,014 to $17,000 a year, so that poor women stay home because they can't earn enough to cover their child care expenses. And they're very poor, which is why children are the poorest Americans, the poorest of all.
- [48:58]
A
But the people who are actually living the old ideology of the family and so forth, even though the women go out to work, are those who have enough money to buy. To buy what the woman is no longer able to do.
- [49:15]
B
Exactly. Even you can see it amusingly enough, in the Johnson and Johnson Wax commercials, they've completely dropped the hand wax of your floor because nobody does that anymore. Who could afford that? Who could afford to do that? Labor en masse. And so what you have is. Is you have marriage being reserved for those who can afford it or immigrants who didn't know any better. And by the second generation, that changes. They have fewer children. Women need to go out to work, but there is no support.
- [49:50]
A
Maybe that explains ideologically, since the people who shape the ideology, who are the leaders of public opinion, tend to be the richest, who can afford the services that allow the traditional marriage to at least keep its trappings. So they keep promoting the ideology, while for the mass of people, it's actually not feasible to do that. And I like that because it's parallel with economics. You're telling everybody about the recovery. Well, the people doing the telling are the rich, and they have in fact recovered. And they're telling everybody else there's a recovery, and everybody else is scratching their head and saying, what are you talking about? I am not recovered. And so you have this disconnect between the ideology which is coming from the people who are at the top, who think it applies to everybody, but it can't.
- [50:43]
B
Right. You have it really well documented. Magazines are fond of talking about women who opt out to be home. Well, they're all wealthy women whose husbands make a lot of money. Sheryl Sandberg talks about. And she, by the way, was touted by Gloria Steinem as the new leader of the women's movement, that it is difficult, but with your husband's help, you can do it all. She didn't mention that. With your husband's help and nine servants, you can do it all. And you can have someone else cook up the meal for your ladies luncheon where you lean in and support each other. That there. Partly it's the devaluation of that labor that makes men reluctant to do it. And partly it's uncompensated labor, which is why menial laborers, people who work with their hands, are so poorly paid. Why should the orderly who is in the hospital wheeling people around or the janitor be paid so much less than the doctor? The doctor would infect all his patients if the hospital were dirty. They wouldn't even get to the surgery if the orderly didn't wheel them down there, if the nurse wasn't there to give them medication and supervise, if the nurse's aide wasn't there. This is bizarre. And it comes from this true devaluation of the physical work of the home that creates us who we are and allows us to function.
- [52:16]
A
Yeah. You know, as an economist, you can see another dimension of this. We've had an explosion in this country of fast food. But one of the major reasons now, as I think about it, is that women, desperate in the vice that you've described for us, can save a little time if on the way home from the job, they pick up the already partly or fully cooked prepared food and can just put it on the table because they couldn't possibly buy the food and clean it and cook it and serve it. It's impossible. So you've created a fast food industry out of all of this. And in that way, not understood. Also the emotional reality that the cooking and the preparing and the eating together of a dinner was also a moment in the emotional life of a family that is now gone. That is substituted by a very different experience of simply consuming what has been bought. You can begin to understand all kinds of social shifts in our culture from how this problem is struggled with by the women in our society and how it shapes the economy and how it.
- [53:34]
B
Shapes the whole family. I had a client who was an adolescent and I wanted to get to know him. His mother works full time and so does his father. You know, they're what they call Alice, assets limited, income constrained, employed people who are struggling. And I asked him, well, what's your family dinner table like? He said, huh, what family dinner table? I said, well, what's dinner like at home? He said, duh, everybody takes their own dinner. And I said, well, where do you eat it? He said, duh, in front of the tv. I said, well, do you have a dining area or a kitchen table? He said, the. There's no TV in there. You take it where the TV is. So everybody's isolated. They might heat up something in the microwave. The parents have different work schedules and the children Put something in the microwave. And the whole idea of a family dinner where people talk, where people look at each other, where they enjoy each other, where they consume a meal together, is disappearing. Except for those people who have someone else to prepare the meal or can go out to someplace if you don't have the money. You end up giving your children terrible nutrition at McDonald's because they're happy with it. And you can sit there and relax for a few minutes. That's why they have a playground, so the mothers can sit there and just relax or be on their cell phone where the kids are playing. You have to remember, 42% of American children are born outside of a marriage. Women are bringing up kids alone, and women are the poorest adults, and children are the poorest Americans overall because of this total failure to socially support the families that they say that they value.
- [55:32]
A
I want to pick up in the little bit of time we have left in order for these changes to come about, to deal with this, to give women the supports that will allow them to play this new role of joint income earner. You said not only that they need the supports of family leave and the supports of daycare and so forth, but you need even a more basic consciousness changing. Tell us a little bit about changing the notion of male, female, and what it means as part of what has to be done so that women are honored for the learning that they've done, the jobs they've done, the technical skills they've acquired. And do it quickly because we don't have much time. Please.
- [56:17]
B
Okay. It would be a cultural change. You'd have to do something with television. We'll have to do something with movies. You could have a campaign during World War II. They wanted to get women into the munitions factories and into the other factories. So they had. The Rosie the Riveter campaign was very successful. They also had a better network of public child care centers for children then than they do now. And they closed them at the end of World War II. So you could have a government push to change the culture, to make it manly to be cleaning and cooking and taking care of children.
- [56:53]
A
There'd be those posters that you began our program with today of a hunky guy working a vacuum cleaner on the side of the bus.
- [57:01]
B
Exactly.
- [57:03]
A
I wish we had more time.
- [57:04]
B
Just want to say one more thing, is they've also found that people where the man shares equally in housework get more sex. So that's another way that men would be more satisfied and women would, too, and their families would last longer.
- [57:18]
A
Thank you very much.
- [57:19]
B
Thank you.
- [57:19]
A
For those of you that want to see more of this psychology and economics, Dr. Fraad will be back with us at the first program in the the month of April. This is Richard Wolff. I'm going to be signing off. I want to thank all of you for partnering with us. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that's been partnering with us for a long time. This is Economic Update and I look forward to seeing you again next week.