Acknowledgments
For this work, I would like to express my deep gratitude to William Milberg of New School University who provided support in ways too many to enumerate. I am also grateful to St. John's University for giving me a summer research grant in 2002 which helped me work on the paper. An early version of this essay was presented at the History of Economics Society's annual conference in July 2003, at Duke University. The two anonymous referees offered invaluable suggestions and they deserve much credit for improvements in the revised version. I also thank Jane Austen for providing me with my opening lines, albeit slightly recast from hers in Pride and Prejudice. I hope it does not amount to plagiarism. And naturally, I alone am responsible for the shortcomings of this essay.
Notes
1According to England, the three basic assumptions, impossibility of interpersonal utility comparisons, exogenous tastes and self-interested economic actors in the market with independent utilities, along with the fourth implicit assumption that individuals do not behave this way in the family (and where men particularly behave altruistically), are male-centered in the sense of being biased in favor of men's interests. Some of these concepts can be traced directly to classical economics, particularly the self-interested individual. The exclusion of the patriarchal nature of the power relations within the household from economic analysis, as in Smith, continues to this day in economic theorizing. And the assumed altruism of the male head of the family as in Becker (1981) opens the theory to charges of unreality.
2Nelson Citation(2002) looks closely at Smith's provocative argument in Theory of Moral Sentiments that although people, especially the poor, are deceived by the appeal of material things, they in essence are adding to social wealth because of it and therefore it is a good thing. Nelson, in pointing out the flaws in this notion and linking it to Smith's love of the efficient way in which the economic machine works, writes: “I suggest that Smith's romance with the ‘spirit of the system’ and the growth of industry for its own sake has helped run the Western world, at the turn of the second millennium into a state of spiritual and ecological crisis” (p. 3). I wonder how Smith, the moral philosopher, would feel abut this sentiment.
3I am using the standard interpretation of the origin of Smith's division of labor. In their formidable essay “The Etiology of Adam Smith's Division of Labor: Alternate Accounts and Smith's Methodology Applied to them,” (paper presented at the 2003 conference of History of Economics Society), Willie Henderson and Warren J. Samuels have proposed many interesting sources of Smith's concept. I will have occasion to use some of their accounts later in different contexts.
4Jerry Evensky, in an ingenious construction of what Smith “would” have said when confronted with a certain critique of his method, says: “These [Smith's] works represent the way I see the world given what I've seen of the world and what I ‘see’ in its history. They seem reasonable to me” (quoted in Henderson and Samuels Citation2003, p. 44). This description of Smith's work seems reasonable to me and adds to the sense that Smith's vision should have been more true to real life, and I use the term vision to convey all shades of its meaning.
5I owe a large debt of gratitude to Glen Hueckel and Edith Kuiper for pointing me in the direction of this work.
6The literal translation of the word purdah is screen or veil. Purdah is the practice that leads to the seclusion of women from public observation by wearing concealing clothing from head to toe and by the use of high walls, curtains, and screens erected within the home.
7One immediately thinks of the popular example in introductory economics textbooks which nod in the direction of recognizing women's work, mostly in a footnote. The authors write with a wink, as it were, about how if a man marries his housekeeper, the GDP actually declines by the amount of the salary she used to earn, even if she may continue to perform the same services after marriage.