Economics as social theory

`Nancy Folbre focuses on questions that most economists never think about: how and why people form overlapping groups that influence and limit what they want, how they may behave, and what they get. She has sharp and plausible things to say about group solidarity and group conflict and how they have affected the workings of economic institutions. Anyone would be a better economist, or just a clearer thinker, after reading this book.'- Robert M. Solow, Professor of Economics, MIT and Nobel Laureate in EconomicsWho Pays for the Kids? is the short version of the longer question: How are the costs of caring for ourselves,, our children, and other dependents are distributed among the members of society? These costs are largely paid by women, both inside and outside the money economy. They also seem to be increasing, due to the expansion of wage employment, the increased importance of education, and improved health technologies. Despite the social programmes of the welfare state, parents with young children, especially mothers on their own, are increasingly susceptible to poverty.How can we explain the distribution of the `costs of caring' between men and women, parents and children, parents and non-parents? Traditional neoclassical economics answers this question by emphasizing personal choice. Traditional Marxian economics answers it by emphasizing class interest. Traditional feminist theory answers it by emphasizing gender interests. Arguing that all these answers are incomplete, this book offers an alternative analysis of individual choices within interlocking structures of constraint based on gender, age, sex, nation, race and class. A comparative history of this interaction in Northwestern Europe, the United States and the Caribbean helps explain differences in political movements, state policies, and social welfare.Written in a fresh and energetic style by a well known feminist economist, Who Pays for the Kids? is an excellent text for upper level courses in women's studies and the social sciences. A wider public will appreciate its relevance to current policy debates over spending, old age insurance and child support enforcement.

For many, the East European revolutions of 1989 and the disintegration of the USSR represented not only the overdue demise of Soviet-style communism, but also the obsolescence of all utopian ways of thinking. History has reached its end-state in the form of a victorious liberal-democratic capitalism and all attempts to imagine an alternative social order were now damned as both futile and quixotic. Economics and Utopia rejects this stifling dogma in the belief that utopian thinking is a necessary condition for the development of alternative solutions to the problems of the present and thus for historical progress.Economics and Utopia is emphatically not an attempt to breathe new life into existing utopian models, whether state socialist or neo-liberal, which are seen as misunderstanding the nature of learning and knowledge in a modern economy. The author's utopianism is based on an examination of the potential for an alternative future based on the growth of knowledge-intensive production, one whose feasibility would derive from its ability to respond to the needs of rapidly-changing industrial economies. More than just a consideration of economic alternatives, Economics and Utopia is also an important contribution to the critique of mainstream economics which is considered to be unable to understand the market system except in the most formal and abstract terms. Thus in order to imagine new worlds a change in our economic thinking is necessary, one that focuses on the relationship between learning and knowledge in economic systems, as well as on the institutional and cultural context of different economic models.