ADAM SMITH'S MOTHER

Katrine Marcal, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?: A Story of Women and Economics, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (New York & London: Pegasus Books, 2016) ("The 'having it all' narrative is, at its core, a story about the broken promises of feminism. The women's movement told us we could have unencumbered full-time careers, a loving partner, well-adjusted children, time to cook dinner every night, and still some energy left to save the world in the evening after the kids went to bed. Then when these promises couldn't all be delivered, everyone blamed feminism. However, as I will argue here, this is not a failure of feminism, but a failure of economics." Id at v. "Yes, feminism needs economics, but even more than that: Economics needs feminism." Id. at viii. "We can joke about these things, or take them seriously, but one fact remains: Lehman Brothers would never have been Lehman Sisters. A world where women dominated Wall Street would have had to be so completely different from the actual world that to describe it wouldn't tell us anything about the actual world. Thousands of years of history would need to be rewritten in order to lead up to the hypothetical moment that an investment bank named Lehman Sisters could handle its over-exposure to an overheated American housing market." "The thought experiment is meaningless." You can't just switch out 'brother' for 'sisters'." Id. at 3. "This is a story about being seduced. It's about how insidiously a certain view of economics has crawled under our skin. How it has been allowed to dominate other values, not just the global economy, but in our own lives. It's about men and women and about how when we make toys real, they gain power over us." Id. at 6. I have to give a special shoutout to the beginning of one chapter's beginning: "CHAPTER SIXTEEN: In which we will see that every society suffers in line with its bullshit. . . ." "You might think it silly that the world's third-largest indoor snow park is in Dubai. On the Persian Gulf, On the 25th parallel north, The temperature outside is around forty degrees Celsius in the dry, windy summer months, In the winter it goes down to twenty-three." Id. at 179. There the invisible hand for you. Whatever (invisible) body that the invisible hand of economics is attached, it is a body with an invisible (or should I say nonexistent) brain. Which leads me back to the end of the previous chapter, Chapter Fifteen: "What we call economic theory is the formal version of dominant world view is our society. The greatest story of our time, who we are, why we are here and the reason we do what we do." Ad the person in this story, economic man? His defining characteristic is that he is not a woman." Id. at 178. In short, men, especially economic men, do really stupid shit such as (1) building snow parks period, and (2) building the world's third-largest indoor snow park in Dubai. Also, see generally, Anne Lowrey, "Division of Labor," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/12/2016.).