Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?
Smith, the originator of what we now call economics, may have imagined a table set with self-interest-filled plates, but he didn’t cook his own meals, nor did he pay anyone to do it for him. He didn’t go from one devotee’s house to another like an ancient Greek, and he didn’t sit at a patron’s table like a court painter. Instead, he had his mommy do it.
.. Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? is Marçal’s book-length attack on the idea of economic rationality as a whole, from Smith to the present day. For Marçal, the title story points to a fundamental error in economic ideology: “Somebody has to prepare that steak so Adam Smith can say their labor doesn’t matter.” Much of women’s domestic and reproductive labor quite literally does not factor within economic models. The old joke is that GDP declines when an economist marries his housekeeper, which is not so much a joke as a good explanation of Gross Domestic Product and what it does not account for.
.. The economic rationality that is supposed to guide human behavior isn’t designed to apply to the half of the population expected to work for free. Marçal doesn’t argue that economics is sexist so much as that it’s totally clueless.
.. Marçal rejects Lagarde and the “Lean In” brand of feminism that imagines women, economically, as heretofore repressed men.
.. Only a man, she suggests, would imagine independence rather than dependence as the basis for the human condition. Individualists make the mistake of economic thinking: They forget about their mothers.
.. But nothing could be further from the truth: The fetus is entirely enveloped within another human being, and the birth process is called labor.
.. She makes an excellent argument for the value of feminism as an analytical lens: It is not a way to show respect or fill out the historical record, but a critical means of differentiating truth from falsehood. Proceeding from the truths that women are people and many people are women reveals the ways in which other modes of thought begin with very different assumptions.
.. Not until the conclusion is it apparent how absent violence is from Marçal’s story. Reading the book, you might think capitalist patriarchy is propped up by reason. Marçal is fully convincing when she argues that centuries of individualist thinkers have worked from a limited understanding of human beings.
.. We have been taught, she writes, to identify with economic man: with “the depth of his feelings,” with his “fear of vulnerability, of nature, of emotion, of dependency, of the cyclical, and of everything we can’t understand.”