Who makes the best ultra-endurance athlete? Are they male or are they female? It’s a question thrown out by a media eager to gobsmack. Jasmin Paris runs away with the 268-mile Montane Spine Race. Katie Wright slogs 30 hours nonstop to scoop the Riverhead Backyard ReLaps Ultra-marathon. Reporters collapse into quizzical fluster: what, how and why? Aided by interviews with willing scientists, gender differences are carefully weighed and given a tabloid twist. Men benefit from greater aerobic power, but muscled physiques weigh heavy in any winning diatribe. Women, in contrast, are deemed superior at managing fatigue. Coping strategies are adopted to successfully re-frame emotional responses to side-line pain. Steadier performance is enabled, fabricating a winning mentality. I rehash this debate to my partner, trusting for a female perspective. She doesn’t entertain my prance. Bored, she shushes me: “we’re both inept at running”.
This could become an economic indulgence over shiny statistical tools. We understand distribution. These athletes are outliers and have running abilities far beyond Joe and Joan Average. However, there is an alternative debate here which has potentially more grunt repercussion. The economist, embracing what can be quantified, will typically construct their analysis around inputs and outputs. It is a deliberately rigid concentration on ‘means and ends’ to guarantee empirical testing of hypothesis. Its advertised by the economic consideration of the family. That scrutiny blossoms over issues such as joint labour supply. Re-configuring standard concepts such as division of labour, an optimal family decision can be suitably mapped. Theory and data allow for concrete conclusion. Those moaning that individual relations within the family are ignored are swept aside. Quantitative analysis out-trumps all.
The long-distance runner debate now becomes opportune. It becomes a metaphor befitting the questioning of the validity of this standard approach. Career success is taken to be akin to winning the ultra-marathon. Labour markets are ultimately seen as contests, with the wage winner permitted champagne celebration over their superior productivity. It’s a simple understanding of success and failure; effort in, performance out. Earnings are then explained through the construction of a wage equation capable of assessing the individual’s willingness to ‘train’. Differences in gender outcomes reflect endurance. Women apparently trip up early, giving up career opportunity to raise a family. They are apparently hardwired to be less career minded. The man, brought up on a diet of machismo, is more likely to see the opportunity in embracing danger. Keen to maximise over all aspects of the career slog, they receive compensation for accepting any elevated risk. Mind you, a slither of unexplained wage differential is still admitted. There is discrimination at play. It is a problem easily solved mind you; passive policies, such as equal pay legislation, can ensure a fair race.
Are you content with that approach? I personally struggle with it. The wage equation, after all, is just a minor adaptation of a supply and demand model used to explain markets for inanimate objects. Interpersonal relationships, while certainly irrelevant for the market for lard, are a key part of family life. What happens when we do consider them? Take my own circumstances. My partner, Louise, has a PhD in Welsh Literature. It would be folly to suggest, through my career switch from Swansea University to UEA, that Louise’s economic opportunities remain unhindered. The East Anglian interest in ‘all things Welsh’ is unforgivably rather niche. The choice to re-locate is in my favour and against hers. The decision reinforces my labour market dominance in family decision-making.
What does this mean? To have a full understanding of economic outcome arguably requires you to reject rigid focus on gender characteristic differences. Instead, shouldn’t the attention be on these differentials of power? It’s those power divides, after all, that guarantee observed differences in economic outcome. Without an understanding of power, can we really comprehend differential male-female performance outcomes? And it isn’t just about gender. Could we, for example, also understand social class without reference to how power divides hinder income mobility? Ultimately, our desire to quantify may have ironically guaranteed only a half measure in what we do.
Let’s conclude with one more reference to the long-distance metaphor. Might there be additional comment relevant to the transformation in how economics is taught? Economists often disagree. Their quarrel is a celebration. Given economics is a pluralist subject, any consensus would perturb. Economics, at the very least, should embrace a comparison of conflicting schools of thought. That comparison must include the inclusion of the impact of differential power on economic modelling. Economics would then automatically spring towards a feminist perspective. But how can you, as someone interested in economics, achieve that? It ultimately requires endurance as, over the long term, you keep up with mainstream economic models and then challenge their position. I’m already running that marathon. Put on your running shoes and join me.
Banner Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash
Hey Duncan,
You often challenge us to be skeptical of what economic approaches we believe in. I think the points you make here are very interesting, and you are certainly correct in that interpersonal relationships cannot be modeled on a graph.
However, I disagree with your idea of challenging the mainstream economic models. As far as I’m aware, a model is designed to be a simplification of the world around us. This means that no model will ever show how society works to a 100% accuracy. I feel that criticising a model for not representing how society functions properly is a valid complaint, however I also feel that these models were not designed to do this. They are simplifications, and in my opinion instead of challenging them we can use them as a basis to create newer more accurate models on things such as interpersonal relationships, and how the household’s function in the economy and instead of having one mainstream model for the economy. We can represent it through many more specific models which can be compared and understood due to being based on the current mainstream models.
This is all obviously just an idea I have. I am a student and I’m at university to learn. By no means do I expect to hold this opinion forever and there are many people who will have put far more thought into this than me and have many different ideas about the subject. Just thought I could give my inexperienced opinion to see if I could add to the discussion
Andrew,
Thanks for your well thought out comment. I certainly agree that there is a lot of merit in mainstream modelling. There is a reason why economics is so important: from delivering high employability outcomes to successfully influencing policy. In addition, those interested in pluralism in economics do sometimes get just caught up in a simple rejection of neoclassical economics. Any suggestion that we must replace one school of economics with an alternative is really just a rejection of pluralism.
I’d suggest that the purpose of the blog is two fold. First, in its rather blunt way, it is calling for greater application of feminist economics. It could be argued, for example, that there is simply too much reliance on approaches such as decomposition analysis in Labour Economics. Second, it is about acknowledging the need for flexibility and to learn across schools of thought. There is some great stuff out there. Examples include: Socialist political economy learning from Austrian Economics; crisis theory allowing post-Keynesians to develop alternatives to marginal cost pricing; and neuroeconomics linking psychology, behavioural economics and science. As that continues, economics will undoubtedly further flex its muscles. Its when its at its most monist, and calls for a one-dimensional ‘economic imperialist’ approach reliant on an overly simplistic view of rationality, that it becomes sidelined.
Duncan,
Thanks for your response to my question, and for clarifying for me your thoughts on how economic schools of thought should come together and how important it is to implement feminist economics. And overall, i agree with you on this, in that if we are to be informed properly, and are to make correct decisions, using a monolithic type of economics based only on the idea of a “rational agent” is wrong.
However, I am curious. When making decisions, would a government or entity ever have the ability to gather the entire school of economics’ opinions from various areas of thought in order to make a decision? In an ideal world this would be the best outcome and i know that currently decision making is dominated by a handful of schools of thought. However as much as i genuinely enjoy debating and gathering different ideas and approaches, do you think that there will ever be a way to implement such a wide group of ideas or models in a practical sense? Not to say we shouldn’t carry on debate and the fine tuning of models, but do you see a practical way for a government to be able to adopt a two dimensional; three dimensional; Nth Dimensional approach in a manner where maybe not all schools are happy, but are at least in a semi-consensus?
I hope that didn’t come accross as too confrontational. It wasn’t meant to if it did.
Andrew,
To be honest, I don’t really have an issue with confrontational. Ultimately I cannot offer any notion of a single righteous truth. I therefore should always expect valid counter. However, one noticeable word in your response is the use of “ideal”. That has arguably negatively impacted on previous efforts to construct macroeconomic policy; from the false debate over the Phillips Curve to pre-financial crisis error over our level of economic understanding.
But on the practical, which you focus on? We could refer to the possibilities offered by the likes of complexity economics. Try something like Törnberg (2018, Complex realist economics: toward an ontology for an interested pluralism, Review of Social Economy, 76:4, 509-534, DOI: 10.1080/00346764.2018.1480796): “This calls for a question-driven and methodologically pluralist approach, that uses modeling tools from both neoclassical economics and complexity science to explore stasis and dynamics, but does so within an epistemological framing that enables economists to draw insights that are situated, reflexive and meaningful”. There is perhaps room there to derive your partial consensus, but don’t expect anything soon (or straightforward).
Ironically, it does become a little simpler when looking at wicked problems/social messes. Then we don’t have to necessarily search for an integration of approaches. If we go back to gender wage differentials, there remains disagreement over the extent that those differentials reflect economic inefficiency. Some will suggest all gender differentials reflect market forces. Others will refer to various market failure. However, our task may not be to derive optimal policy recommendation. Instead, it may be about providing the machinery capable of objectively evaluating policy. Suppose that Corbyn gets into power. Say also that his government decides that passive labour market policies are insufficient and that they should implement extensive affirmative action (positive discrimination). Our task is simply to provide the quantitative analysis capable of testing its success or failure. Pluralism then highlights the need for comparison: we can’t just rely on Mincer earnings functions. Rather than a statistical focus on confidence intervals, we must ensure alternative measures are provided to cover possible conflicting outcomes across key schools of thought.
There are no easy answers here. That’s a good thing though, particularly for the career economist…