Credit: Greg Beadle/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images
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Over the past decade, not only have we faced the biggest global economic crisis since the Great Depression, we have also seen increasing inequality, the stagnation of wages and a slowdown in economic growth. All this despite ever-more inventive technology – seen as the fundamental driver of economic improvement. As so often is the case with economic turmoil, political turmoil has followed. The politics of the West is being rewritten.
Right now, our political and business bigwigs are in Davos to do some head scratching and glad handing. They seem to appreciate the scale of the problem. But do they have the understanding needed to help bring about the right sort of change?
Well, if sex were irrelevant for economic growth and inequality, there might be reason to be upbeat. For not only does Davos represent a concentration of riches, it does also attract some of the brightest people in the world. If they can’t get to grips with the underlying causes of our present situation, there isn’t much hope for the rest of us.
However, our understanding of the forces which shape the global economy has, for too long, been limited. Limited by a story of the past which sees men as the wealth creators, and class as central to how the resultant pie is distributed. It is a story that locks out women, sex and reproduction.
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It’s time for Davos Man to move over. While the importance of gender equality for economic growth is starting to gain traction, it is much less common to join the dots between gender and income inequality. Probably because doing so requires a conception of freedom that goes beyond the male-centred one that developed with the political philosophy of Locke. We cannot understand either economic growth or inequality unless we pay attention to that vital difference between men and women: women give birth. It is those births that in turn create the labour supply that feed into the wider economy.
Modern economics, however, typically explains rising inequality through a combination of the “two T’s” (technology and trade), with those in more radical quarters, from Stiglitz to Piketty, highlighting the role of the state. Sex does not get a look in.
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