Caring Economics

Pat Egenberger

Caring and economics ... what an odd combination of words! Economics has long been called the dismal science yet some modern thinkers, such as Riane Eisler and David Korten are giving it a face lift, claiming that our economic system should reflect our values and promote human welfare and happiness, not just getting and spending.

We certainly have seen the effects of an economic system based on an ethos of greed. Who here has not been touched in some way by those who chose greed over caring? It could have been the Saving and Loans debacle, Enron's deliberate manipulation of California's energy markets, the housing bubble, insider trading, or perhaps something even more personal. Perhaps you have even been taken economic advantage of by a personal friend.

I have a deeply personal connection to the choice between caring and greed. One night almost fifty years ago, I could see my father was very upset. I sat on the floor by his green overstuffed chair and asked him what was wrong. Two of his intimate friends, one he had known since his youth, had taken a major account from him when he was just starting to make it in business for himself. He said, "Patty, it's funny how emotions can affect you. I feel tingling all up and down my arm." That night he had a stroke and died a week later at the age of 49. Even though I was raised in an economically conservative household, I never again put my faith in unfettered capitalism. It had hurt our family too much.

What would a caring economic system look like, how would it help, and how can we get from here to there? Today I would like to start a conversation about these issues because I believe that much of the injustice we struggle with cannot be rooted out without some systemic changes.

Many of us were raised during what is called the Cold War in which the communist economy of the Soviet Bloc vied with capitalist democracies of the West. However, neither system has been able to solve the chronic problems of poverty, environmental degradation, and the violence of war.

In her book,The Real Wealth of Nations, Riane Eisler, a survivor of the Holocaust, asks why when we humans have such a great capacity for caring, consciousness, and creativity has our world seen so much cruelty, insensitivity and destructiveness?

Through decades of studying history and prehistory, Eisler developed a thesis that the history of most of the last five thousand years of what is called civilization shows us empires based on the domination of the many by the few, particularly the domination of women. Some believe that we are wired for this pattern of domination and violence. Yet Eisler finds in societies that have economic systems based on partnership and caring, such as in early goddess-worshipping cultures, societies were more egalitarian without evidence of fortifications and armaments and without great disparities in wealth. She explored this theme in her earlier book,The Chalice and the Blade. She and other researchers into human motivation such as Daniel H. Pink, affirm that we are wired to care about each other and want to work for the general welfare, provided that this attitude is nurtured by society and that we have a chance at a life lived above the subsistence level. It's when we have to fight at the bottom for scraps.

Eisler fears that in the present time we are veering from the great social movements such as the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements, that brought us greater equality and opportunity back to a dominator society with the rich getting richer and more powerful, the middle class shrinking and poverty becoming more widespread. When the bottom 80 percent have 20 percent of the wealth and the top twenty have 80 % of the wealth, how can democracy be sustained? This creates a twisted golden rule in which those who have the gold make the rules.

Eisler suggests that the first thing we can do about this alarming trend is to look at the science of economics in a new way. Now the measures of economic productivity include goods and services produced by the market economy, the government economy and the illegal economy such as the drug trade, sex trade, and arms trade. Some of these economic measures obviously count as positive wealth goods and services that do not represent caring. For example, extreme short-term investing or stock market gambling adds nothing to the true health of our economy, yet these are listed in the positive column of economic growth. Surely the illegal drug trade promotes much uncaring activity. Most ironic of all, clean up of environmental disasters such as the BP oil spill will be counted as positive Gross National Product.

However, a huge amount of our economic wealth and productivity for human happiness is not counted as part of Gross National Product, for example:

• The household economy, where the work of nurturing children and the elderly takes place
  
  
• The unpaid community economy such as volunteering
  
  
• natural resources
  
  

Valuing these care-giving activities and resources and counting them as economic production and wealth would lead us toward Quality-of-Life measurements that more accurately reflect what activities contribute to human well-being and environmental sustainability.

Even in the market economy which obviously is counted as positive GNP, a serious disparity exists between how we value the caring professions with child-care workers, for example, earning an average of ten dollars per hour. Eisler believes that somehow deep within our cultural psyches we value stereotypically male professions more than female ones. This is because of a dominator ethos rather than a caring one, thus leading to a national budget that feeds the military-industrial complex and starves human services. We see this all too vividly now that when times are tough, government programs for the most vulnerable in our society are being cut. World wide women, because many societies value them less than men, represent 79 percent of the 1.3 billion people on our planet who live in absolute poverty. Ironically, in societies, such as the Scandinavian ones where there isn't a great between men and women in money and power, the happiness index for both sexes is higher.

Many claim we just can't afford caring programs and institutions, that somehow the free market will solve our problems. However, we can see without too much effort that trickle-down economics has turned into "gushing up" as the disparity between the rich and poor grows.

Contrary to what many might think, Eisler finds that investment in caring is good for business and good for society. For example, in Nordic Nations such as Finland, Norway, and Sweden, investment in health care, child care and generous paid parental leave, up to almost a year, is an investment in a high general quality of life, a happier population and a more efficient, innovative economy. In 2003-4 and 2005-6 Finland was even ahead of the much richer and powerful US in the World Economic Forum's global competitiveness ratings. The Finns know that caring and caregiving have contributed to a more skilled workforce that commands higher wages, and thus can add more to the tax base for social security and other programs.

We know that the early years of life are critical in the production of high-quality human capital. When Ontario, Canada, started their Healthy Babies Healthy Children Program, they discovered that in the families who received home visits after the birth of a child and on-going parental education, the children exceeded in all measures of development--self-help, gross motor skills, fine motor skills and language development. In addition, rates of family violence were also reduced. Child abuse costs the US economy as much as 94 billion a year. If we invested more in our children, we wouldn't need to have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. After all, it is known that the majority of people in prison for violent crimes have a history of abuse or neglect. Leroy and I saw this first hand when he worked at a halfway house run by the American Friends Service Committeefor ex-convicts.

Eisler details as well how caring is good for business. The Fortune 100 companies that are rated best to work for turn out to be those that are most profitable. SAS, the maker of shoes, is a leader in family-friendly policies. They provide on-site day care, even high chairs and booster seats in the cafeteria so the children can eat with their parents. In addition, caring business policies sharply reduce employee turnover and absentee rate. People who feel cared for are more productive. Our brain chemistry wires us to think better when we work cooperatively because it gives us pleasure to help other.

We know the litany of sorrows that accompany crushing poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and environmental degradation. What can we do about it? Sometimes I am overcome by rage. Leroy and I were recently watching a documentary about the Enron debacle. I am so angry about how we are still paying for this over-the-top greed that it becomes hard for me to focus on what can be done. After all, I have been hurt and have seen my friends and relatives hurt by the rampant greed of people who appear to have no social conscience.

Eisler believes in hope. She has devoted her life to that sense that we can push this boulder up the hill. Thus she has developed a center for partnership studies and has taken concrete steps for change. For example, she used her legal skills, for example, to desegregate wants ads from Male--good jobs high-paying, Female bad, low- paying jobs. She reminds us of the liberation movements of the past half century as positive achievements. She points to dozens of non-government agencies working for a more egalitarian and just world.

So what are some of the things I can do?

I am thinking more and more about my own resources, both financial and personal, and how I will use them in the time remaining to me. I know I want to change my investments to be more socially conscious, to purchase from locally owned businesses when possible, to lower my carbon foot print day by day, to increase my generosity, to examine my own sex-stereotyping, to think more mindfully about what I value most and give my energy to that. I am trying to be truly changed myself, which is a pitifully slow and agonizing process at times. I am trying to get people to read these books I am talking about so I plan to offer a series of book discussions. I know we are more powerful when we work together.

What are Eisler suggestons for us as a society? First we can have some conversations about what real wealth is and how we should re-evaluate consumption and productivity. We can push for more caring policies through our friends, our media, our legislators, pointing out how these policies are fiscally sound. We can demand changes in our tax laws so they don't reward people for risky, short-term stock sales, and short term business decisions, for outsourcing our jobs, we can demand the elimination of tax havens and money laundering. We can choose to invest in companies that are good to work for, to buy products made by these companies, to shop at local business that are responsive to our community. We can work through local non-government agencies that promote a more caring society such a Family Promise, the Parent Resource Center, Friends Outside, Inter-Faith Ministries, Habitat for humanity, the Pride Center, the Salvation Army as well as support other local, national, and international agencies fighting for justice and a more caring society. We can turn the conversation around. When people start blaming Obama or the immigrants or the Congress for the sorry state of affairs, we can ask leading questions to get them to re-evaluate their economic presuppositions. We can continue to examine our own attitudes that feed into the dominator mode. Are we as free from sexism as we think we are? Are we as free from other prejudices as we think we are?

As Eisler says, when a significant number of us change our beliefs and actions, our society changes. We must not choose greed over caring. Our planet and the people on it can't survive that choice.

[Delivered July 25, 2010 . Pat Egenberger is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County. She taught junior high for many years. She leads our Women in Religion group and co-leads the Explorations in Art adult class.]

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