If you don’t know David Sloan Wilson’s work, you should. He’s a pioneer of evolutionary biology, a great communicator, and an advocate for community-level mutual aid. He takes the science of altruism seriously, and helps run an online magazine, This View of Life, that could be a venue for more dialogue between evolutionary biologists and social scientists. Here, I’m sharing… Read more →
Author: folbre
Gender Economics and the Meaning of Discrimination
Shelly Lundberg gave a terrific paper at the session on Identity, Culture, and the Economics of Gender at the Allied Social Science Association Meetings, January 8, 2022, and this is a distillation of my comments on it as discussant. You can find abstracts for the session as a whole here, and the papers will be forthcoming in the May 2022… Read more →
The Child Tax Credit, Singed if Not Combusted
The smoldering heat originates mostly from the coal-fired wealth of Joe Manchin, the Senator from West Virginia who continues to oppose the child tax credit on the grounds that mothers should be required to “work” (meaning, earn money) in order to get assistance. Still, it’s pretty clear that this keystone of the Build Back Better act, this policy that dramatically… Read more →
Gender, Bargaining, and Build Back Better
Some Notes from Panel on The Economics of Gender and Households Southern Economic Association November 22, 2021 This, a great opportunity to cross-fertilize with some excellent economists who represent a variety of different theoretical and empirical approaches to gender and households. At this point in time, Biden’s Build Back Better plan is moving through a torturous political process. Whatever you… Read more →
Why JoeCare Has a Chance
Happy Inauguration Day. We now have a president who wears a mask. Everywhere. Which is something to be grateful for. Hope was that the pandemic would help raise awareness of just how much we depend on care work. This hope grows. A quick list of the three major care-related proposals President Biden has advanced so far: More support (to… Read more →
Republican Women, Intersected
Back in November, if you remember, a much larger percentage of women than men voted for Joe Biden (55% compared to 46%). The big news was that the gender gap remained about the same as in the 2016 presidential election, despite Trump’s callous disregard for women or public health. The race/gender intersection proved more salient: 93% of Black women voted… Read more →
Manifold Exploitations
Most of the Left continues to rely—implicitly or explicitly–on an outdated definition of exploitation that distinguishes “economic” differences based on class from “social” or “identity-based” differences based on race/ethnicity, gender, citizenship and other dimensions of socially-assigned group membership. From this perspective, unpaid care work can be considered unequal, unfair, or unfortunate, but it can’t be considered exploitative, because it doesn’t… Read more →
Evolution and Intersectional Conflict
If you don’t know David Sloan Wilson’s work, you should. He’s a pioneer of evolutionary biology, a great communicator, and an advocate for community-level mutual aid. He takes the science of altruism seriously, and helps run an online magazine, This View of Life, that could be a venue for more dialogue between evolutionary biologists and social scientists. I’d like to… Read more →
Expendable Heroes?
You can buy this great lawn sign on Etsy, but you might want to get out a black marker and add “Deserve Hazard Pay” at the bottom. Most essential workers in the U.S. are still in suspense regarding the possibility of compensation for their forced exposure to Covid-19 infection. The big question is when and if the HEROES act proposed… Read more →
The Covid-19 Care Penalty
In the U.S., as elsewhere, essential workers have been rightly praised for their willingness to take on additional risk and stress. Their commitment to helping patients, students, and customers face-to-face went beyond the ordinary requirements of earning a paycheck. Yet some essential workers faced more serious risks of infection than others, and differences in pay among them were also significant.… Read more →