Mansplaining Economics

and C.S. Lewis on why women don't live in the world of ideas

In this video I recount a conversation with a 'qualified economist' on my Five Feminine Economies and read C.S. Lewis on why women can't live in the world of ideas with men. I recommend watching or you can intone your own condescending voiceover:

YouTube commenter on Five Feminine Economies:

As a qualified economist myself, I feel I have to point out that the economic ideas in this video are not very wise. I urge the creators of this kind of thing to read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell (available in audio if you prefer)

These ideas aren’t “feminist economics” they are more accurately described as “how to make starvation economic ideas sound palatable” Sorry to pour cold water on this video, but it’s not called the dismissal science for nothing

My reply:

Hi, James. Please clarify—do you dismiss the goal of an economy that serves families and communities or only the means of achieving it? Or do you think the existing economy already does? Or perhaps that the goal is something only a woman who knows nothing about economics would even want?

I specifically describe my economies as feminine, not feminist because the latter means women competing equally in a man's world and it accepts the goal of the current economy to make the rich richer. That's been the outcome of the monetary system since the invention of coinage, as I detail with hundreds of references in my book, How to Dismantle an Empire.

If an economy that serves families and communities isn't your goal as a qualified economist, I can see why you'd be happy with the way things are. If it is your goal but you have a better plan, you should go to my Substack and give your recommendations point by point for how you would protect against the coming de-dollarization, current real estate grabs, and future food shortages, while continuing to pay the bankers for the right to live in a house, with money they issued out of thin air. I'm very interested in your ideas that will work better than mine.

James:

@Third Paradigm  you’re making a lot of assumptions about me, putting a lot of words in my mouth and your message is very slightly hectoring, but I’ll respond in good faith. The goal of any economy is to use resources as effectively and efficiently as possible. You’re talking about non-economic values, but there are only non-economic values as economics is not a value structure.

There is nothing in economics that says you must earn the most money possible, or even that that’s how people act. These are just straw man arguments. Economics is the science of making trade offs given that all resources are limited. (Scarcity). How different economies do that varies depending on the type of economy. The most efficient (and therefore the best) economies are price led, which mean they let prices decide.

I recommend Thomas Sowell’s books because while the basics are fairly straightforward and easy to understand, they are beyond the scope of a YouTube comment. It’s all too easy for you to make a straw-man claim that “prices are all well and good but what about the poor” showing a failure to understand economics or a willingness to mislead your audience.

Prices are man-made, but the underlying scarcity is real. In a world where people have to choose how to allocate resources, people can’t choose to do everything. Prices just communicate that. Economics is not a value system for deciding what to do, but a system for determining the cost of doing one thing over another. (I could earn more as a hit man, but I choose not to).

Your ideas of “carrot” currency and protectionism are seriously flawed and will lead to the communities who adopt your ideas being poorer than they would otherwise be. If you’re looking for more information, I can recommend Tim Hartford’s books (the undercover economist, logic of life and the undercover economist strikes back are all particularly relevant for you)

Given the things you say in your video, you will definitely learn a lot from reading those two authors (Thomas Sowell and Tim Hartford) and that will help you to make your arguments and points more accurate and robust. Because at the moment (and I mean no disrespect because we all had to start somewhere) your arguments make you good to the uninformed, and sound foolish to the informed.

Sorry if that sounds harsh. I’ll bet you 3 carrots that after reading the books I’ve recommended, you can rewatch your video and it will then sound foolish to you too. Good luck with your journey and your project. We’re all trying to make the world better and hats off to you for trying. I hope my comments don’t discourage you from learning and growing. I’m just trying to truthful.

I tried to keep a snarkless voice while reading but it just wasn’t possible. Let’s look at what James is doing here. After watching 15 minutes of my video, and knowing nothing about the system that he pictures as the exchange of orange vegetables, he’s ready to pat me on the head for trying and send me toddling off with an intro to econ book. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Economics isn’t about families and communities, it’s about setting prices! Leave it to the qualified men, who are also qualified to judge what’s feminist. We all have to start somewhere and those ten years of research for the book you wrote, well, I’ll betcha three carrots that will seem foolish to you too.

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The patronizing tone of this seems like it would be at home in the Oxford and Cambridge smoking rooms where C.S. Lewis held forth. Early in the discussion on Tonic Masculinity, one of the guys quoted Lewis on the folly of letting women into the circles where men discuss ideas. This is from "The Four Loves":

Hence, on the one hand, we get the wife as school-marm, the “cultivated” woman who is always trying to bring her husband “up to her level.” She drags him to concerts and would like him to learn morris-dancing and invites “cultivated” people to the house. It often does surprisingly little harm. The middle-aged male has great powers of passive resistance and (if she but knew) of indulgence; “women will have their fads.” Something much more painful happens when it is the men who are civilised and the women not, and when all the women, and many of the men too, simply refuse to recognise the fact.

When this happens we get a kind, polite, laborious and pitiful pretence. The women are “deemed” (as lawyers say) to be full members of the male circle. The fact—in itself not important—that they now smoke and drink like the men seems to simple-minded people a proof that they really are. No stag-parties are allowed. Wherever the men meet, the women must come too.

The men have learned to live among ideas. They know what discussion, proof and illustration mean. A woman who has had merely school lessons and has abandoned soon after marriage whatever tinge of “culture” they gave her—whose reading is the Women’s Magazines and whose general conversation is almost wholly narrative—cannot really enter such a circle.

She can be locally and physically present with it in the same room. What of that? If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent through a conversation which means nothing to her. If they are better bred, of course, they try to bring her in. Things are explained to her: people try to sublimate her irrelevant and blundering observations into some kind of sense. But the efforts soon fail and, for manners’ sake, what might have been a real discussion is deliberately diluted and peters out in gossip, anecdotes, and jokes.

Her presence has thus destroyed the very thing she was brought to share. She can never really enter the circle because the circle ceases to be itself when she enters it—as the horizon ceases to be the horizon when you get there. By learning to drink and smoke and perhaps to tell risqué stories, she has not, for this purpose, drawn an inch nearer to the men than her grandmother.

But her grandmother was far happier and more realistic. She was at home talking real women’s talk to other women and perhaps doing so with great charm, sense and even wit. She herself might be able to do the same. She may be quite as clever as the men whose evening she has spoiled, or cleverer. But she is not really interested in the same things, nor mistress of the same methods. (We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.)

The presence of such women, thousands strong, helps to account for the modern disparagement of Friendship. They are often completely victorious. They banish male companionship, and therefore male Friendship, from whole neighbourhoods. In the only world they know, an endless prattling “Jolly” replaces the intercourse of minds. All the men they meet talk like women while women are present.

I answered this with:

I can only offer myself as proof point. Do you find me unable to live in the world of ideas? Am I illogical in my arguments? Disinterested, bored and silent when affairs of the world are discussed? Are you needing to explain things to me that are over my head? Do I appear as a dunce feigning interest in the male terrains of religion and economics, on which I've written my book?

Smoking, btw, was a way that women were 'Virginia-Slimmed' into the trappings of masculinity, serving the double toxic-male agenda of profit through poisons—not tobacco itself but all the chemicals added. It doesn't matter if it was women sipping mimosas who put together this PR campaign, they embodied toxic masculinity. That's why the goal of the group is more important than their appendages.

And the economist among the ‘tonic’ men replied:

I wanted to push back a little. The change in economics over the past 10 years or so as women complain about feeling "unwelcome" when people question their work presented at conferences pushes against the idea that women are as at home in the realm of ideas as men, on average. There are many exceptional cases, yourself included Tereza, but the pursuit of "equity" in economics, which has meant admitting and promoting women above men regardless of skill, has demonstrated ably that most women cannot tolerate having their work dissected and criticized.

They see "I think your idea is wrong, and here is why" as a personal attack, the idea as part of themselves and not something external to be worked on, perhaps. I don't know why, but my impression has been that most women want to be praised for doing stuff like other people, and not for having done actual good work, and having their stuff they are doing critiqued is badwrong.

My sense is that pushing people into roles because we desire parity of some sort instead of testing for competence and talent has put a lot of people into positions they are not at all suited for. Exceptional women like you are far more comfortable there and belong, just as there are exceptional men who can teach kindergarten passably or excel at fashion design, but we shouldn't expect the curves of each gender's innate talents and tendencies to overlap perfectly.

And I’ll end with my answer:

I think we probably agree that the current economic system is designed to make the rich richer, not to have our labor and assets make families and communities stronger. Yes? So including women in academic discussions about making the rich richer does nothing. A goal of a feminine economy whose purpose is to serve families and communities would change everything, and it wouldn't matter if it was done exclusively by men.

All I've ever wanted is to go toe-to-toe with my ideas, with clearly defined and measurable objectives. But the other person needs to put their own rooster in the game, not just shoot down mine. Read my book and tell me, not just where I'm wrong, but where your system is better. As long as my book is dismissed without reading it we both need to consider that it may be because I'm a woman. If you can show how your, or the current system, logically better serves the goal, then I will admit that men naturally have more competence and talent in economics and slink back to fashion design and teaching kindergarten ;-)

And I know that mansplaining is a trigger word here, but try being a housewife with a book on economics. I can't tell you how many times the guy on the next barstool has regurgitated the latest Paul Krugman at me or asked if I knew who Adam Smith was.

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In summary, I will often get people saying, “You need to read this book” or “here’s this plan that has the answer,” from people who have neither read mine, nor the dozens of books in my bibliography and hundreds of references in my end notes. Here’s the question that I’m asking—if we had one chance to change the system, what’s the simplest change that would enable families and communities to take responsibility for themselves? If someone else had that answer, I wouldn’t have wasted my time.

Do I not know how to read or do research? Do I not know how to think? Am I not asking the right question? I’m not sure why it’s not seen as insulting to suggest that I should abandon my last decade of research and adopt someone else’s plan. I think that, if someone else has the solution, you should work with them rather than convince me to change my mind, based on fifteen minutes of attention.

Or at least watch the episodes, two of which I’ve linked below, that outline the measurable goals of a community system and tell me why your plan meets those goals better. Put your rooster in the ring!

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Buckminster Fuller said that to change things, you can’t fight the existing reality. You have to build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. This episode outlines ten universal principles of a new model, including the purpose of government, how to measure its success or failure, what community wealth really is, how to protect and proliferate it, the intergenerational transfer of wealth, and paying your debt to society backwards and forwards. I begin by talking about the spiritual and metaphysical obstacles that keep us from imagining a new model and how to remove them in your own psyche. Based on my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I end with the three powers that communities require in order to control their own labor: debt, tax & cash:

In this I define socio-spirituality as looking with open-eyes at the reality in the world and questioning with an open mind the reality of the world. I distinguish its purpose, not as giving comfort, but giving the power to change the world. Its one dogma is that I'm no better than anyone else, followed by four beliefs and one suspicion. How these relate to small scale sovereignty is the topic of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire.:

and the one that started this: For Mother's Day, here are my hopes and dreams for five feminine economies. I develop a subsistence economy with neighborhoods involved with farming and animal husbandry. A reciprocal economy for local goods and services, as explained in my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. An edu-travel economy for a lifetime of learning around the world. A hosting economy with travel vouchers and sibling cities. And a gift economy for all things infinitely replicable like ideas, writing, music and open source software: