Valuing Work by Women of Color - Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Episode Overview

Podcast: Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Episode Title: Valuing Work by Women of Color
Date: May 13, 2021
Main Theme:
This episode explores the economic invisibility and undervaluation of the unpaid work performed by women of color, with a special focus on Black women’s community labor. Host Richard D. Wolff interviews Professor Nina Banks about her research on the topic, covering historical and contemporary examples, the roots of its neglect in mainstream economics, and the social and systemic forces behind this erasure.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introductory Commentary: Incentives in Capitalism

Bernie Madoff’s Legacy & Systemic Incentives for Corruption
- Wolff draws lessons from the Bernie Madoff case, emphasizing that capitalism inherently incentivizes both positive and negative behaviors, including large-scale fraud ([00:10]).
- Quote:
  
  “Every system has a mixture of incentives, good and bad... capitalism has incentives that produce disastrous results, corruptions that ruin large numbers of people...”
  — Richard D. Wolff ([02:00])

2. U.S. Military Spending & the True Costs of Wars

Review of the economic impact of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
- U.S. defense spending increased dramatically over two decades.
- The only clear economic “winner” is the defense industry; ordinary citizens and affected regions are left worse off ([03:00]-[08:00]).
- Rising military expenditure is justified with new geopolitical tensions, e.g., with China.

3. Structural Racism in U.S. Housing Policy

Recap of Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, exposing government-facilitated racial segregation through housing policies ([08:30]-[11:30]).
Emphasizes how capitalism and government policy intertwined to deepen racial divides, particularly affecting Black Americans’ access to housing and wealth.

4. Debunking ‘Capitalism Lifted Millions from Poverty’

Wolff challenges claims that capitalism alone reduced global poverty, pointing out China’s experience under communist leadership as a critical counterexample ([12:00]-[14:30]).
- Quote:
  
  “Most of the advance of poor people was not done as a gift from capitalism. It was done in opposition to capitalism—whether it’s a rising minimum wage, a better tax system, or funding public schools.”
  — Richard D. Wolff ([13:23])

Featured Interview: Professor Nina Banks

Guest: Professor Nina Banks, Associate Professor of Economics at Bucknell University, President of the National Economic Association
Segment Start: [15:13]

The Problem of ‘Uncounted’ Work

Main Argument:
- Mainstream economic metrics (e.g., GDP) only value work that is paid for in the market.
- Vast amounts of unpaid work, especially by women of color, are systematically left uncounted and thus devalued ([15:15]-[16:42]).
- Quote:
  
  “Feminists take a look at the work that women disproportionately perform within the household: cooking, cleaning, laundry, caregiving... But what I found is it did not do an adequate job of capturing a lot of the unpaid work that racialized women perform for their own communities.”
  — Nina Banks ([16:42])
Intersectional Framework:
- Banks advocates for an intersectional feminist political economy that centers the lived experiences of Black women.
- Differences in how white women and Black women conceptualize oppression: White feminist theories often focus on private household dynamics, while Black women’s “lived experience is informed by racial oppression” and communal responsibility ([17:00]-[18:30]).

Historical & Contemporary Examples of Community Work

Historical Self-Help Initiatives
- Black women organized collectively to address unmet community needs—from segregated schools to inaccessible healthcare ([20:07]-[21:45]).
- Notable example:
  - Atlanta Neighborhood Union (1908): Black women conducted community needs assessments, raised funds, established social services ([21:45]).
  - During the Great Depression, the AKA Sorority established mobile health units in the Mississippi Delta, sending Black doctors to serve the rural poor ([22:30]).
  - Recent case: Black women in Delaware fighting the unjust placement of Black boys in special needs programs ([23:20]).
  - Environmental justice movements as further evidence of Black women’s unpaid organizing ([24:00]).
- Quote:
  
  “These are activities that have not been theorized as work and often not recognized as work. So they’re largely unseen.”
  — Nina Banks ([21:15])

Why Has This Work Been Ignored?

Devaluation by Society and Economics
- Both the actors themselves and broader society often don’t label these activities as “work.”
- Economic systems and cultural norms systematically erase and undervalue the unpaid labor of Black women ([25:27]).
- Quote:
  
  “There tends to be a devaluation of work that African American women perform for their own communities and for their own families.”
  — Nina Banks ([25:38])
Racialized Hierarchies of Value
- The work of middle-class white homemakers, while unpaid, is socially valued; Black women’s unpaid familial/community work has never been so, even being stigmatized if a poor Black woman wishes to stay home as a caregiver ([26:20]).
- Wolff:
  
  “It fits into the very way that capitalism in this country has systematically culturally devalued the working class, white and black.”
  — Richard D. Wolff ([26:00])

The National Economic Association

History and Mission ([27:04]-[28:09])
- Originated as the Caucus of Black Economists in 1969.
- Focuses on research about racial disparities and anti-Blackness.
- Advocates for institutional change and bold solutions to long-standing structural inequalities.
- Quote:
  
  “Black American economists have always been at the forefront of thinking very critically about racial disparities in the United States and proposing very bold solutions to the problems of racial disparities against Black and Brown communities.”
  — Nina Banks ([27:38])

Notable Quotes

“Every system has a mixture of incentives, good and bad... capitalism has a set of incentives that produce disastrous results.” — Richard D. Wolff ([02:00])
“Feminists take a look at the work that women disproportionately perform within the household... But what I found is it did not do an adequate job of capturing a lot of the unpaid work that racialized women perform for their own communities.” — Nina Banks ([16:42])
“These are activities that have not been theorized as work and often not recognized as work. So they’re largely unseen.” — Nina Banks ([21:15])
“Work that African American women perform for their own communities and for their own families... there tends to be a devaluation of that work.” — Nina Banks ([25:38])
“Black women have never been valued as mothers in our society.” — Nina Banks ([26:40])

Important Timestamps

00:10 — Wolff opens show, discusses Madoff & capitalist incentives
03:00 — U.S. military spending and impact of Afghanistan and Iraq wars
08:30 — Housing segregation and systemic racism in policy
12:00 — Debunking the “capitalism reduces poverty” narrative
15:13 — Introduction to Professor Nina Banks and today’s main theme
16:42 — Banks begins unpacking the neglected unpaid labor of women of color
20:07 — Historical examples of Black women’s collective work
25:27 — Discussion of why this work is ignored and undervalued
27:19 — National Economic Association’s origins and mission

Summary & Flow

This episode begins with a critique of capitalism’s built-in negative incentives, such as those that enabled the Madoff Ponzi scheme, and segues into discussions of war spending, systemic racism in housing, and the myth that capitalism alone has alleviated global poverty. The central interview with Professor Nina Banks is illuminating and urgent: she explains how mainstream economics fails to recognize the crucial unpaid labor—mutual aid, social services, activism—performed by Black women in their communities. Through historical and modern examples, Banks demonstrates that not only is this work foundational to community survival, it is erased by both cultural and economic value systems due to persistent racism and sexism.

Listeners come away understanding both the value and the invisibility of women of color’s unpaid labor, as well as the need for broader frameworks and economic recognition of such work. The episode concludes with a brief introduction to the National Economic Association and its mission to dismantle structural inequality through research and advocacy.

Transcript

A (0:10)

Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly show devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin this show by remembering Bernie Madoff. He died very recently at the age of 82. His life was in many ways a testimony to what capitalism makes possible. The stunning fact that estimates indicate that he was able effectively to swindle $82 billion worth of stocks, bonds, and cash out of many, many individuals or organizations and institutions is a testimony to what capitalism makes possible. But I want to point out something others perhaps haven't, and that is that capitalism has built into it incentives for this kind of behavior. It was an incentive for him to take the money he got from later investors and use it to juice up the rate of return he could give to earlier investors, who thereby raved about how great he was at investing when he was basically just fudging the numbers. And he could build on this for decades. Why am I stressing that the system has incentives for corruption and crookedness on a grand scale? Because so many people seem to need to defend capitalism with the idea, well, whatever its flaws, it has incentives. There are rewards given to entrepreneurs who start a new business. Well, there's some truth in that, but it needs to be balanced with an understanding that this system has a set of incentives that produce disastrous results, corruptions that ruin large numbers of people, that misallocate huge amounts of resources that could have and should have gone somewhere else. Every system has a mixture of incentives, good and bad. And if you want to compare capitalism to socialism, for example, you'd have to compare what the incentives, good and bad, are for each system, rather than pretending that capitalism has incentives that are all charmingly positive without the negatives that the Bernie Madoff case puts right front and center. My next update has to do with some of the economics of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. President Biden has set a September date this year, pushing it back from the May date that Trump had originally proposed. And I want to talk about that first. Both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been the longest wars in American history. No other wars we've engaged in were anywhere near that long. And up until now, in Afghanistan, the explanation was we couldn't withdraw, we couldn't leave, because certain basic conditions had to be met. Well, suddenly the conditions don't have to be met because the conditions put forward in the past haven't been met. And even the government trying to cover this up in one way or Another for what it is, hasn't come up with any conditions that have sudd been met. It's just taking too long and it's time, whatever exactly that means. So now let's take a look. In the year 2000, the beginning of this century, defense spending was 2.9% of GDP. We measure defense spending as to how much of the wealth produced in this country each year is going for defense or basically the military. 2.9% in 2000. I should remind everyone, in case you think that number is small, the United States in the year 2000 spent more on the military than the next 10 countries together did. And that 10 includes China, Russia and the eight other countries, all of which are allies of the United States. By 2011, it had risen to 4.5%. That's a 50% increase in the proportion of our total output of goods and services used to fund the military. And even in 2021, it's back down to only 3.4%, which is a lot more than what it was as a burden on the wealth of this country back in the year 2000. So military spending has gone way up and has not come way, way, way down. Well, who are the winners and losers in this war? It would be hard to argue that the winners are those who died or those who were wounded or those civilians who lost their lives. And you know, it didn't do much for America's geopolitical position. The Taliban, according to all information that I have, is still dominant in the countryside. Only the cities are precarious. And it's not clear what will happen there once the United States leave. All the other so called coalition countries have announced they're leaving also. So we'll see what happens. Those people there do not love the United States because it has decimated that country. And that happened in Iraq too. So it's not clear what exactly has happened. Those people don't love the United States. They don't welcome whatever the United States brought them. They may be afraid, but you have to wonder whether that's really an advance for the United states with its 800 military bases around the country. There was one clear winner, the defense industry. They were able to sell into this storm endless amounts of ammunition and guns and planes and missiles, and you name it. And I want you to think about that. They were unambiguous winners. Everything else is either a loser or a winner in quotation marks with lots of ambiguity. And perhaps the most frightening is the show now of a new cold war with China, which of course will justify is already being used to justify more military spending. My next update has to do with a book by an author named Richard Rothstein. It's called the Color of Law. There's now a film being produced about it. This is a remarkable book because it studies the housing industry in the United States and particularly the role of the United States government through something called the Federal Housing Administration FHA. And it shows that throughout the 20th century's existence of the FHA, it systematically discriminated against African Americans in terms of lending them money, enabling them to buy their own homes, enabling them to rent in federal housing projects designed for people with limited incomes. And what Rothstein does, besides showing from the memos, and by the way, this was all open, it was said in instructions to lower levels of the fha. Do not allow non whites to enter these projects. Do not make loans to non whites. What's going on here is, of course, yes, racism, and particularly the power of the south in the United States to make a racial part of government programs all over the country. And that was done, but it has to be explained somehow why this is done in the South. Capitalism's security came in part by splitting its working class, white and black, so that their upsets and angers and bitternesses would be directed at one another rather than at the employers they both faced in their different way. And this had to be built in. And it was picked up by not a few northern and Western employers who understood the same black institutions and black social movements weren't strong enough in those days to fight this very effectively. They tried, but it didn't work real well. The government was interested in saving money because of the usual fear of taxing. So not giving help to African Americans made the program cheaper than it otherwise could be. You could put it all together, but it's important to understand that the private sector was the cause and the government policy was the result, which reinforced the cause in a vicious cycle that separated the experience of African Americans and whites over the last century. That has to be understood as the systemic differentiation that we did in this society and that now is demanding compensation correction. And that's going to be difficult when you try to offset or reverse something so deeply ingrained in both the private sector and the public sector for so long across so much of a society. The last economic update we'll have time for today is my response to something I'm hearing more and more often, a defense of capitalism, which I understand has to be articulated today when a majority of young people keep answering public opinion polls that they prefer socialism to capitalism, including Gallup's polls. I understand this frightens the people who have always defended capitalism. So they've come up with a kind of final fallback of what it is they're going to say to defend this system. And here's the over the last 300 years that capitalism spread across the world, millions and millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. That is, if we count people below Living on $1 or $2 or $3 a day. And by the way, those are the benchmarks that are being used. Well, millions of people are not in as bad shape today as they were 100, 200, or 300 years ago. The argument made this way is intended to convey an interesting idea, that it is capitalism that lifted them up and that therefore we should be grateful with all of capitalism's flaw that it did this good thing for the world's poor. All right, let me respond on several levels. Number one, if you separate out China from the rest of the world, the numbers don't look anywhere near so large. Why? Because the Chinese, with their enormous population, the most populous country on this planet, they're the ones who rose the most. And that wasn't capitalism that did that. That was the Communist Party of China in the Revolution of 1949. Before that, China was one of the poorest countries on this earth. And if you are interested in it, go get the novels of a writer named Pearl Buck. She wrote eloquently about the conditions in China where she lived. And you can understand something about Chinese poverty. Then the Communist party revolution in 1949 changed all of that. They built a new society with new infrastructure. They did everything. Yes, in the 1980s, they welcomed private capitalism. But the attempt to suggest that the only reason China helped the poor was what it did with private capitalism tends to ignore that the Communist Party was and remains in charge that there are many parts of industry owned and operated by the government. It's not the capitalism that we normally speak about. But there's an even more important reason not to accept this defense. Most of the advance of poor people was not done as a gift from capitalism. It was done in opposition to capitalism, whether it's a rising minimum wage, whether it's a better tax system, whether it's funding public schools or national health. Over and over again, what lifted poverty was the effort of the poor and the working class to get things which capitalists as a whole and their institutions opposed. Just look at the struggle over the minimum wage in this country at this time. It's bizarre for the defenders of capitalism to give credit to the capitalists that always opposed and do not even account for the alleviation of poverty. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Before we get to the second half, I want to remind you our new book, the Sickness is the System When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or itself, is available@democracyatwork.info books. I also want to thank our Patreon community for their ongoing and invaluable support. If you haven't already, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate to learn more about how you can get involved. Please stay with us. We will be right back. We with today's guest, Professor Nina Banks. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's program. And it is a pleasure for me to welcome to our microphones and to our cameras a professor of economics that I have known for many, many years since since the time we worked together at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She is Nina Banks. She's a associate professor of economics at Bucknell University. She's also the president of the National Economic association, which we'll talk about a little later, and serves on the board of the Economic Policy institute in Washington, D.C. her new book, democracy, Race and the Speeches and writings of Sadie T.M. alexander, is due to be published by Yale University Press this coming June. So let me begin by thanking you, Nina Banks, for joining us today.