Economics, love, and family values: Nancy Folbre and Jennifer Roback Morse on the Invisible Heart.

• Author: Waterman, A.M.C.
• Position: 'The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values' and 'Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work' - Book Review

Disagreements among economists, Milton Friedman has said, are empirical, not theoretical. I once had the pleasure of meeting Friedman, and he told me he had learned that truth from my former Cambridge supervisor, Joan Robinson. When Friedman was visiting Cambridge in 1953, Robinson telephoned to say she would lecture next week to explain why Friedman's policy recommendations were quite wrong. Would he like to come along? Indeed he would! At the lecture, Robinson introduced him to the audience: "This is Professor Friedman from Chicago. Like me, he is an economist. That means he uses the same analytical tools in the same way as I. If we disagree, as we do, it must be because we differ on empirical or ethical grounds or on both."

Economic theorizing is not an ideological club for bashing our political enemies. It is a method of inquiry, irenical and ecumenical, uniting all who submit to its discipline in a search for truth (such "truth" as any science can afford, that is), whose destination cannot be known in advance. I have been reminded delightfully of this pleasing doctrine by two recent books on economics and the family, each excellent and together important. The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (Folbre 2001) is written by the president of the International Association of Feminist Economists, a political activist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, whose earlier works bear such frightening rifles as Who Pays for the Kids? and War on the Poor. The other book, Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work (Morse 2001), is written by a woman who has dissociated herself publicly from feminism (Morse 1997) and has come up the hard way from Ayn Rand-type libertarianism through the Public Choice Center at George Mason University and the Hoover Institution, not to mention the Church of Rome.

Nancy Folbre and Jennifer Roback Morse are at least as far apart politically as were Joan Robinson and Milton Friedman, but each is a first-rate economist, and each has an honest heart. Therefore, their analyses and conclusions overlap and converge to large extent. There are some amusing paradoxes. Nancy Folbre, the hard-nosed feminist and leftist, writes with a seductive charm--warm, feminine, witty, and sweetly reasonable--that makes one want to believe her every word. Jennifer Morse, the champion of motherly love, writes in a tough, masculine style--rigorous, didactic, and occasionally polemical--that makes one sit up straight and pay attention or get one's knuckles rapped. Best of all, from my standpoint as a historian of economic thought, both the "liberal" Folbre and the "conservative" Morse construct their argument in explicit and respectful dialogue with Adam Smith. Each identifies virtually the same lacuna in that great man's work and in all subsequent economic theorizing.

In this essay, first, I describe each author's arguments in turn. Then, I offer a few critical reflections and suggestions.

Folbre's View

Folbre is "an economist who studies the rime and effort that people put into taking care of one another" (Folbre 2001, xi). Some personal care is supplied through the market, but much is and always has been provided within the home without pay by family members informed by "family values," which Folbre understands as love, obligation, and reciprocity: "The first word implies feelings; the second morality; the third, rational calculation. I think my parents understood it this way: loving and being loved are essential to a meaningful and happy life. Each of us has some obligation for the care of other people, whether we like it or not. Moreover, if we take care of other people, they are more likely to take care of us" (xii).

The first two (perhaps even the third) constitute what economists sometimes refer to as "altruism." Without parental altruism, children would not be reared and educated to become productive members of any kind of society. In particular, they would be unsuited to perform well in a capitalist, market society, for a well-functioning market economy depends on a high degree of honesty and trust in its members. Unless we obey the rules of the game most of the time, even when the umpire is not looking, the market game quickly ceases to be worth playing. Honesty and trust, however, are not free gifts of nature. They are scarce goods, and they are produced within the family. The Invisible Hand of the market therefore depends on the Invisible Heart: "the feelings of affection, respect and care for others that reinforce honesty and trust" (xiv).

Adam Smith understood all this. His prescription for a well-ordered society was "the natural system of perfect liberty and justice" ([1776] 1976, 606). The phrase "and justice"--often ignored by naive propagandists of deregulation and "free markets"--means commutative justice: a scrupulous willingness in all individuals to respect property rights and to honor contracts. This is Folbre's "honesty and trust," without which "perfect liberty" quickly produces Hobbes's war of all against all. But Smith believed that "However selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles of his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him" ([1759] 1966, cited in Folbre 2001, xiii). Altruism or "benevolence," expounded in Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is taken as given in The Wealth of Nations. "Smith was so confident of human benevolence that he never asked where moral sentiments came from or if they might change over time." In particular, "he ignored the possibility that the expansion of an economy based on self-interest might weaken moral sentiments" and so jeopardize its own viability (Folbre 2001, xiii).

This is not the only blind spot in The Wealth of Nations. To be sure, it is not from the benevolence but from the self-interest of "the butcher, or the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner" (Smith [1776] 1976, 26-27). But who actually prepares that dinner and puts it on the table? Our wives or mothers. And do they, too, act from self-interest? God forbid! "Self-interest was appropriate only to the impersonal world of the market" (Folbre 2001, 9). Not only, however, were benevolence and altruism the proper motivations within the family as a whole. Division of labor required females to cultivate these propensities and to specialize in the "caring" work to which they were fitted so naturally. Male breadwinners thereby were set free to pursue their self-interest in market production for the greater good of all.

I shall tell the rest of Folbre's tale in my own words and my own order, omitting many...