Toward a Gendered Post Keynesianism: Subjectivity and Time in a Nonmodernist Framework

Abstract

The heterodox “Post Keynesian” school, which emphasizes fundamental uncertainty and the time structure of economic activity, overlaps feminist economics in its treatment of subjectivity and its understanding of the relation between micro and macro phenomena. Why, then, is the intersection of the two fields in the published literature so small? This paper argues that Post Keynesians have adopted a number of additional institutional assumptions that have the effect of excluding gender from their analytical frame. These assumptions can be jettisoned without impairing fundamental Post Keynesian analytics.

Keywords:

• Agency
• feminist economics
• methodology
• Post Keynesian theory
• subjectivity

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the editor, an associate editor, three referees, the assistant and style editors, S. Charusheela, Robert Prasch, and participants in a session at the 2003 IAFFE conference in Barbados.

Notes

JEL Codes: B41, B50, B59

 ¹ See also Victoria Chick (1995), Allin Cottrell (1994), and J. E. King (2002: 181 – 202) for surveys and discussions. While it may seem like splitting hairs to readers unfamiliar with the various approaches that claim to follow the legacy of John Maynard Keynes, the particular approach followed in this paper is now often distinguished from others by a particular orthography: “Post Keynesian” with a capital P and no hyphen (see Paul Davidson 1990: 296), as opposed to “post Keynesian” and “post-Keynesian.”

 ² Although excellent work in neo-Kaleckian structural macro has overlapped with feminist economics (e.g., Maria Floro and Gary Dymski 2000), this work falls outside the narrower “Post Keynesianism” addressed in this paper.

 ³ Walrasian market clearing is timeless (Douglas Vickers 1994), assigning the process of coordination to “logical time,” a sort of magical time outside of time.

 ⁴ The locus classicus of Keynesian uncertainty is Keynes (1937: 213 – 14); for more discussion and more formal specifications, see Shackle (1969), Donald Katzner (1986, 1998), Davidson (1994: 87 – 94), and Vickers (1994).

 ⁵ There is a large Post Keynesian literature theorizing decision-making in a fundamentally uncertain world. See Shackle (1969), Brian Loasby (1976, 1999), Douglas Vickers (1978, 1994), Peter Earl (1986), Lavoie (1992), Katzner (1998), and Ted Winslow (2003).

 ⁶ Some of the Austrian and evolutionary economics literatures share this point; see Loasby (1999). See also Anthony Giddens (1976) for a more elaborate working-out of a social ontology in which subjects are situated, have projects, and develop particular knowledge appropriate to their situations, an ontology that steers between radical individualism and rigid structuralism.

 ⁷ This includes institutions whose primary work is the creation and circulation of meanings. The contingent precariousness of institutions and the need to remake them continuously is often recognized most clearly by social conservatives.

 ⁸ See Ann Jennings (1993) and Julie Nelson (2003) for paths via institutionalism.

 ⁹ For some of those Post Keynesians, this is not a drawback. For example, Basil Moore, interviewed in J. E. King (1995: 78), says: “It may then simply be impossible, and a false search, to attempt to find an alternative general theory to replace the mainstream theory. The mainstream theory is general, in the sense that its ‘hard core’ uses rational, utility-maximising behaviour as a stylized fact, in our terms, to explain whole areas of economic behaviour. Becker has used it for non-economic behaviour as well. It takes you a long way.” (King's collection of fifteen interviews with prominent Post Keynesians, which were conducted in 1992 and 1993, and which devote considerable attention to the relationships of Post Keynesians with Marxists and institutionalists, is conspicuously silent about gender as a category of economic analysis.)

¹⁰ A distinction can be drawn between the idea that sociality enters at the level of knowledge-gathering and the possibility that sociality is relevant to the goals to which decision-making is directed. I direct my critique at the latter. Much Post Keynesian literature depicts an entrepreneur or speculator who possesses sophisticated social knowledge, such as instincts about how other people will react to events. But the literature still treats these people or firms conventionally as analytically isolable entities. Suppose instead that the firm is in part constituted via its ties to other firms, as well as to nonfirm institutions, and that decisions can reshape these ties. See Loasby (1976) for examples.

¹¹ Sylvia Yanagisako's (2002b) study of family firms in Como, Italy, shows how a particular ideology of the family firm – that the firm was established by the supreme will and hard work of a lone, unaided ancestral man – obscures a reality in which family contacts, sisters and wives, and various others often assisted in the development of a company that was retrospectively coded as the sole work of the founding patriarch.

¹² Hanmer and Akram-Lodhi (1998) devote considerable space to Post Keynesian neglect of both households and women's unpaid labor in households. Christopher Fuller (1996) notes the Post Keynesian neglect of households but then compounds that neglect: despite the term “household production” in his title, he ignores the actual work that takes place in households (see Maria Floro 1995 and Carmen Sirianni and Cynthia Negrey 2000 for correctives) and asks only to what degree households as institutions influence consumer purchases. Both articles take the category of “household” as obvious, given, and bounded; Fuller writes of “the biological family unit” with no evident awareness of the criticism this conceptualization has accumulated from anthropologists. See Sylvia Yanagisako (1979, 2002a) for an introduction to the large literature on kinship in anthropology that has critiqued the link between biology and family. For critiques of households as units, see Olivia Harris (1981), Jane Guyer and Pauline Peters (1987), Rayna Rapp (1987), Gillian Hart (1992), and Henrietta Moore (1992).

¹³ Though Post Keynesian work on consumption (Earl 1986; Lavoie 1992) constructs a rich framework that might be extendable in the directions suggested here.

¹⁴ Post Keynesians, deeply worried about the hiring and investment behavior of the capitalist, tend to see the macroeconomy from the capitalist's vantage point (though generally not, to be sure, with the capitalist's ideology). The capitalist understands consumption as the point at which final payment is made for goods (“realization” in Marx's language) and has no interest in what happens to goods after that point. The capitalist also wants workers to show up to work on time, well-fed, well-rested, and healthy. But the capitalist does not see what happens in between – for all the capitalist knows, workers flush their purchases down the toilet and survive on manna from heaven (a point I owe to conversation with S. Charusheela). I stress that this does not imply that Post Keynesians exhibit any lack of concern for the consequences or outcomes of household processes, but rather that they have tended to understand those processes as outside the reach of economic science.

¹⁵ As noted below, “the state” in much Post Keynesian theory glides between positive and normative (Steven Pressman 2001): the ideal state that would take Post Keynesian policy advice, thus ensuring full employment, and actual states that fall short of this ideal. But the essential properties of real states are still understood with reference to the ideal.

¹⁶ Chartal money owes its existence and use to government institutions.

¹⁷ If, for example, a state has been built around the interests of a particular group, or if it has established legitimacy on the basis of a gendered or racialized nationalism, it will behave in certain ways. More generally, the boundaries of state and nonstate are often unclear and shifting, the things around which the analytical boundary of “state” are drawn may not be internally coherent, and so forth. See further discussion in Colin Danby (2004).

¹⁸ Not that this question can be entirely avoided for spot transactions. For further discussion, see Colin Danby (2002).

¹⁹ In other words, the problem is not that a modernist like Davidson has no category for institutions like households or kinship. The problem is that his category for them commits them to analytical oblivion.

²⁰ One need only ponder the reality of employment contracts to see how strong and unrealistic these assumptions are; for a critique of this approach as it applies to transactions between actual capitalist firms, see Granovetter (1992). See also Nancy Folbre (1997) on gender coalitions.

²¹ Note that if these assumptions stand, Post Keynesian theory will be even less amenable to explorations of household questions than is neoclassical economics. Post Keynesianism lacks even a Gary Becker.

²² See also Jennings (1994: 562).

²³ In reality, the tension between the ideology of freely made contracts that benefit both parties and the onerous restraints that contracts often produce has created considerable difficulty for real-world legal systems. See Elizabeth Mensch (1981).

²⁴ Especially when Marxists, who also start with a rather stark model, have devoted decades to this question. See also Harris (1981) on the coding of women's labor, and Sylvia Yanagisako and Jane Collier (1987: 24) on the underlying folk model that separates production and reproduction.

²⁵ See, for example, King's (2002: 222) conjecture that the concerns of feminist economics are “orthogonal” to Post Keynesianism. Kathy Ferguson's (1993: 7 – 8) discussion of framing, and the implicit politics of selecting a frame for analysis, is another useful language for approaching and critiquing the selection of institutional assumptions.

²⁶ Though Mutari (2003) provides a useful feminist critique.

²⁷ See, for example, Lourdes Benería and Martha Roldán (1987) on urban Mexican households, and Josiah Heyman (1994) on less urban Mexican households. Rhoda Halperin (1990, 1994) examines the time aspects of “householding”; Halperin (1994: 205 – 31) surveys a number of other works on this subject in economic anthropology.

²⁸ Despite his lack of interest in households as such, Fuller's (1996: 600 – 1) interest in the larger interactive social space of consumption points in this direction.

²⁹ We only need to point to phrases like “family business” or “country club” or “glass ceiling” to remind ourselves of the informal means by which even the most formal, legally incorporated firms organize their activities and relations with others. See Granovetter (1992) and Deirdre McCloskey (2000).

³⁰ And as Agarwal (1994) has shown, these micro-level factors have clear macro-level effects.

³¹ See Jane Guyer (1997).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Colin Danby

JEL Codes: B41, B50, B59