 I really think intersectionality helps us understand our current political dilemmas. And I think it's evolving as a theory. I think it's a relatively new set of ideas, but many of us are winners in some respects and losers in others. Yes, there's some people who are at the bottom of every single hierarchy that's ever been imagined. And there's some who are at the very, very top. And if we look at them, we see that they often, those at the very, very bottom and very, very, very top have very similar characteristics. Those at the top tend to be from rich countries. They tend to be white and they tend to be male and they tend to own capital, right? At the other extreme, the mere image of that. But a lot of us are in between. So we're winners in some respects and we're losers in others. And so that means when we think about how to allocate our time and energy and collective action, we might want to advance the interests of our group, but we belong to many groups. So the strategic dilemma is pretty great. Hello, I'm Jayati Ghosh. I teach economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the US. And before that, I've been teaching for three and a half decades in Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. Today, I'm really delighted to be able to talk to Nancy Folbre, professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as well, about her new book, The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems, An Intersectional Political Economy. Nancy Folbre is well known to many people as one of the founders, really, of a branch of economics which I hesitate to call feminist economics because I really think it should be called human economics. So Nancy, thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, thank you so much, Jayati. I can't think of anyone I would rather be interviewed by. Oh, wow, I love that, so thank you for that. So Nancy, can you begin by just telling us in this book what exactly, I mean, I'm not going to ask what you're going to try to do because it's huge. I think the canvas you've taken on is enormous. But I think what is really striking is how you have picked on care as this fundamental concept that affects how economies are organized and what patriarchal systems are really all about. So can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, you know, historically, economics is really focused on the production of commodities, on things that are bought and sold in markets. But the economy really depends on human capabilities. And those human capabilities have to be produced, they have to be developed, and they have to be maintained. And I think we need to reverse the lens and think about the production of human capabilities as our end goal. Gross domestic product is an input into that rather than seeing workers as an input into the production of things that are bought and sold. And so I define care very much in those terms as involving the creation and the development and also the maintenance of human capabilities. So not just children, but people who are experiencing sickness or disability or the frailty of old age. This is a really central process and we can't just leave it up to nature or leave it up to kind of culture or leave it up to preferences. We have to think about how it's organized because it's organization, like the organization of commodity production involves both cooperation and conflict and collective conflict between men and women, between rich and poor, between citizens of rich countries and poor countries. All of those dimensions of collective conflict have an influence on the allocation of resources to care. You know, that's, it's so fascinating to hear you put it this way in terms of this sort of, you know, dilemma between conflict and cooperation within societies which in turn determines really how care is distributed and who performs the care. But one of the other very fascinating insights I think in your book is really about the nature of care about how it's different from other activities and that the very performance of care somehow reduces if you like the socially bargaining power of those who are doing it. Well, you know, care really requires some identification with and concern for the wellbeing of the person being cared for. And also it's not standardized. It has to be, you know, tailored to responding to the particular needs of an individual person. In fact, you could even think of care as something that's co-produced by the person receiving it and the person giving it. So if you're a teacher, you need, you need your students to do the work, to do the homework, to do the reading. And if they don't, you're not a successful teacher. If you're a doctor, you need to persuade your patient to be mindful of the ways to promote good health and to follow the best guidance and instruction in that whole process. You know, the challenge of parenting is to persuade children to do things that are good for them, you know, without resorting to threats or completely authoritarian parenting. So it really involves the creation of cooperative attachments between people. And that in itself makes it difficult for people to just, you know, enter and exit freely and go from one relationship to another because you, you know, attachment itself is sticky. And once you become attached to people who need your assistance, it's very hard to threaten to withdraw it. There's that wonderful phrase in your book that basically the caregivers, that you care about those whom you are caring for. And then that in turn, as you say, because it affects your ability to withdraw it, means that you have less bargaining power. Yeah, and I think ordinary people really experience this in a lot of ways. Like sometimes I think we realize that we're likely to become attached to people who need our help. And we kind of preemptively avoid putting ourselves in a situation where we might form that attachment because we know that it will be costly. You know, if you go on a vacation a lot of times, you don't wanna be on a vacation around people who are, you know, where you see or have to, you know, have contact with people who are really needy, who are really, are really deprived. You wanna shut that out because you know, if you see it, you'll feel the need to help out. So I think there's this, you know, it's not just that people get attached, it's also that we often have elaborate ways of preventing ourselves from getting attached to people who we think might be too needy. But then there's also this very profound point that essentially empathy, therefore underlies the economic order. That economies use empathy to generate care. Yes, empathy is really required. But in general, I would say also, there's a sense in which a lot of social institutions impose obligations on groups of people to provide this empathy. And it's not as though the natural force of empathy is sufficient to solve the problem. It has to be kind of reinforced and channeled by social institutions. And I think that's one of the reasons that patriarchal systems emerge is that they are systems that basically channel and reinforce the distribution of caring commitments, often basically requiring women to devote much more time and energy to care than men. And that is at the heart in many ways of women's reduced bargaining power. You know, there are these four concepts that economists use all the time, particularly I would say Marxist or socialist economists who use these concepts that you unpack. And I think you brilliantly dissect, which once you look at care from this particular vantage point, production, mode of production, social reproduction, exploitation, I think you really do unpack. Can you explain a little bit, for example, production? How does that change once we incorporate this particular notion? Well, I think it becomes bigger instead of being just about the production of things, it becomes about the production of people. And then not just the production of people, but also the production of the relationships and the institutions that enable people to cooperate with one another. So I guess I think the traditional Marxian emphasis on surplus value and the creation of a surplus, it's just, it's too simple. As though you can just easily distinguish the seed corn from the corn you have to consume from the surplus corn that's left over. In fact, for many years I used to teach Marxian economics using this piles of corn analogy. And the more I taught it, the more I realized it was really too simple to think about surplus in terms of a physical product. I mean, another way to put it is that population growth itself is a kind of surplus. If you are accumulating more, creating more people over time, creating more resources in terms of population and human capital, that too is a form of surplus. And I think that's a real challenge to the way that the word production is traditionally deployed. And then that feeds into the whole mode of production thing, you know, where we tend to think in these rather simplistic, as you've mentioned, movements between, you know, the primitive kinds of things to slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism. Yeah, because that centering of the productive technology became kind of the way to define the stages of history. You know, hunter-gatherers to sedentary agriculture to feudal systems to capitalist systems, et cetera, et cetera. And don't get me wrong. I think productive technologies have a big impact. And I've been very influenced by the theory of historical materialism, which I think really emphasizes kind of an evolutionary dynamic and dialectic by which societies change over time. But instead of thinking about how things are produced, I think we should think more about institutions of collective power. So I'm kind of bringing collective power to the fore and saying, let's look at the social institutions that give some groups power over others. And for instance, the ways in which patriarchal institutions give adult men power over women and children, but also to ask how those institutions are related to class, institutions of class power, and institutions of racial ethnic power, and many, many other forms of collective power. And I think it's the way in which these different structures kind of interact and interlock, and sometimes conflict with one another that's really a key to understanding the historical complexity, as it were. That's kind of central in your understanding of exploitation as well, isn't it? That you're really bringing in the fact of this power, which is sometimes compounded by cultural norms and different kinds of social norms and so on. So how does that differ from the standard sort of Marxian notion of exploitation? Well, the standard Marxian notion of exploitation is the appropriation of surplus value in production. So it's a very production-centric notion. And Marxian theorists have always been, no, not always, but have often been very sympathetic to struggles against inequality based on gender, race, national identity, so forth and so on, but have always sort of relegated them, have always sort of seen them as political or cultural or identity politics or not as economic. But I think if your focus is on collective bargaining power, it's possible to define exploitation as something that emerges when one group has enough collective bargaining power to claim a larger share of the gains from cooperation than they otherwise would have. And that general definition kind of subsumes the traditional Marxian theory of exploitation, which holds that capitalists have the power to extract surplus value because of the way in which they use the state to expropriate common property and common access to the means of production. So it's really kind of a generalization of that principle. So you could see that like a patriarchal law, like denying women property rights, gives men and women still cooperate, but men are able to claim a disproportionate share of the gains from cooperation because they have that institutional bargaining power that comes from laws, from ownership of property and also from cultural norms. You know, I think this actually leads immediately to something that many people ask about intersectionality. It's very clear to me that your concept is a much more profound concept than simply saying, oh, people have different identities and all of that. You're really making a much broader point about the interplay of these economic and social and cultural processes, aren't you? Well, you know, I really think intersectionality helps us understand our current political dilemmas in some really crucial ways. And I think it's evolving as a theory. I think it's a relatively new set of ideas and I guess I like to frame it as an emphasis on the fact that we're all, not all, but many of us are winners in some respects and losers in others. Yes, there's some people who are at the bottom of every single hierarchy that's ever been imagined and there's some who are at the very, very top. And if we look at them, we see that they often, those at the very, very bottom and very, very, very top, have very similar characteristics. Those at the top tend to be from rich countries. They tend to be white and they tend to be male and they tend to own capital, right? At the other extreme, the mere image of that, but a lot of us are in between. So we're winners in some respects and we're losers in others. And so that means when we think about how to allocate our time and energy and collective action, we might wanna advance the interests of our group, but we belong to many groups. So the strategic dilemma is pretty great and if you're advantaged in a significant way among one dimension, you might be very reluctant to challenge another dimension in which you're actually at a disadvantage. I think because people are really afraid of loss, any loss of position is generally more painful than failure to gain something. Intersectionality helps explain why hierarchical systems are so stable because a lot of people in the middle are very reluctant to challenge a structure that might be destabilized in a way that means their net benefits might be reduced. You're right that thinking about it in this way really does transform even how you look at political changes and many of these things. But then I suppose people would ask you what explains the optimism of your title, the decline of patriarchal systems that you also talk about in some of your chapters. I mean, I think that's so important to look at the other side of it. And I think just remember that's the nature of complex systems that they have contradictory effects. And in fact, that was a really key element of the Marxian analysis of capitalism and in many respects, it was a progressive force that developed technological change and that kind of undermined the feudal order. But it also had a downside in terms of its in terms of its exploitative aspects and its sort of vulnerability to crisis, right? So, you know, my take on capitalism is very similar actually to that vision. I would rather than emphasizing sort of the way which capitalism displaced and undermined feudal relations, I would say capitalism tends to destabilize some patriarchal relations. And in fact, patriarchal and feudal institutions often go together. But you know, one of the things that the technological dynamism of capitalism does is it undermines the family as a unit of production. It means that production moves outside the family to the factory, to the firm, capitalist firm. And as a result, it kind of undermines patriarchal control over women and children to the extent that that was based on kind of ownership of property or control over a commons. And so the younger generation begins to gain some independence from parents and women begin to gain some alternatives to marriage and complete specialization in the family division of labor. And that has some very liberating aspects for women, especially women who are less encumbered by reproductive responsibilities and care responsibilities. So I think single white women with access to education living in rich countries have made enormous gains. So there's this intersectional kind of unevenness to the destabilization of patriarchal institutions. But it also has a kind of cultural and normative spillover effect. And I think we're still trying to understand exactly how to what extent capitalist development is undermining some patriarchal institutions and yet reinforcing others. And in particular, I think capitalism tends to reinforce the idea that women are responsible for care and that care does not need to be socialized, publicly supported, publicly recognized or rewarded. So yeah, I may be optimistic in talking about the decline, but I see at least a possibility of it tipping in the downward direction. So you're probably right in the northern kind of context, but in most developing countries, many of us see it going the other way, actually, that you're getting a reinforcement of the worst kinds of patriarchal norms and gains made are often destroyed, not just by political changes, but even by neoliberalism, which forces more and more onto households. Well, I think that's absolutely true. And I think one of the things I try to emphasize in my book is that the form that capitalist development has taken in less developed countries is very, very different. There has not been a big expansion of wage employment. There has not been a big growth in opportunities for independent employment outside the home. There's been a huge ballooning of informal sector employment that is very unstable and very marginalized and not something that really gives those who participate in it very much economic independence or bargaining power. What I would argue is you could see that as kind of a failure of capitalism or an insufficiency of capitalism, that this idea that the capitalist development would be an exerable force for advancing living standards on a global level has really proven pretty false, because we've seen a tremendous concentration of wealth that means that, I don't know, we could call it a global capitalist system, but in a way it's a more complex system where capitalism in rich countries has delivered significant increases in living standards, but elsewhere, not so clear. Which I suppose would link with the kind of global imbalances of economic power and political power and imperialism broadly, which would bring in another kind of intersectionality too. I think, but even in the developing world, I think one of the things that you mentioned in your later chapters, in terms of the importance of coalitions and the importance of looking beyond your own specific thing for larger social movements, is still so important and so necessary. I think that whenever really serious global problems emerge that clearly require cooperation rather than competition, you see the emergence of new coalitions. And I think the COVID-19 pandemic is so transparently a global problem that markets themselves cannot really address, that it's kind of created a basis for new kinds of coalitions. But also, I think climate change is another very important global threat. It really requires cooperation and collaboration on a global level that we have never achieved in the past. And I would like to think that that's going to be a real impetus to rethinking a lot of the institutional arrangements that we've relied on during a period of economic growth where we had the luxury of ignoring effects on our social environment and our physical environment or natural environment. I'm sure all of you realize how fascinating Nancy's book is. If this is just a small flavor of the many, many insights and the rich tapestry that she weaves in this book. So if this hasn't got you interested in reading this book, I don't know what will, but I assure you it's really worth it. Thank you so much, Nancy, for joining us. Toyota, thank you for your optimism on all fronts.