ECONOMY
How 8 Female Economists Are Redefining Capitalist Economics
Professional women are in the lead re-imagining capitalism
My biggest insightful aha-moment arrived after years of feeling something was not right. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Economics is just that. Economics. I learned about it in my studies, used it in my high-fly business career, but never really understood the flaws. The toxic triggers.
Until I started my second-phase-career as a changemaker.
And then it became so obvious. We are really blinded by our culture. By our thinking that things are what they are because they’ve always been that way. It’s just not true.
They grew into what we have now. They evolved. And now it’s time to do it better. The aha-moment came when I heard someone explain to me years ago that our biggest wealth indicator, the GDP, grows when we pollute more.
“What?” I laughed incredulously. “That can’t be true. Economists and governments cannot be that stupid.”
But it is true. Mariana Mazzucato explains it most clearly for me. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the main indicator of wealth in a country, grows when we pollute more. And the reason is simple.
The GDP is the sum of all wealth creation. And if we pollute more, and create huge piles of waste, we pay people to clean up the mess. Mess cleaning is wealth creation. So, our economies grow when we pollute more. Is that a toxic trigger or what?
Can anybody still dispute that we need to re-imagine economics?
I’ll give you a few more toxic triggers before I rest my case and go on to solutions.
Toxic Triggers of Economics
Okay, so we have toxic triggers. And we need to become aware of those before things will change and we can let new wisdom and healthy triggers in. Let me enlighten you about a few of them.
1. Scale
Every big-scale solution has huge disadvantages. Big-scale means big extraction of resources, such as lithium mining, rainforest destruction for palm oil, ocean pollution, etc. The scale in itself results in transportation pollution and exploitation in low-wage-countries.
And the perceived benefits are not as pure either. Big-scale is often not resulting in solving a basic need for humans or other species. Do we need a new model phone every year? Or is it a matter of fashion manipulation and bad design of batteries and software…?
Example: large scale, uniform products are being shipped all around the world, instead of being made locally and contributing to a local, vibrant economy.
Example: big pharma isn’t doing us a favor by developing pills we need to take forever. Medicines should just provide a temporary reset of our body’s ability to heal itself. The big-scale research funders for pharmaceutical companies are medicines for chronic diseases such as high blood pressure or life-induced depression. Life-style hacks, such as walking in nature, would be much more appropriate medicines for those illnesses. But they aren’t big-scale money-makers.
2. Uniformity
With efficiency and scale comes uniformity. MacDonalds knows that. Heineken knows that. Unilever knows that. We think we need uniformity to make automation possible. We think we need uniformity to make packaging efficient.
But uniformity ruins the world and local economies. Our world has become a boring, tame attraction park cultivating uniformity. Cultural richness can only be experienced as a tourist attraction nowadays.
And even worse. Uniformity ruins the nutrients in our food.
Example: Monoculture (one crop only, uniformity) depletes the soil and attracts pests. Hence, a need for more artificial fertilizers and pesticides and a downward spiral of killing biodiversity in the soil. And that leads to fewer nutrients in our food.
“A landmark study on the topic by Donald Davis and his team of researchers from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was published in December 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century.” — Scientific American
Example: when we had biodiversity in rice, there was carotene in red rice. Now, we sell GM crops with carotene and say it solves blindness. Plain stupid. Blindness wouldn't be caused by nutrient deficiency if we still had biodiversity and red rice.
3. Linear Cheap
We all want cheap, don’t we? And I will not deny that affordability is a very important trigger for an economy. BUT. The cheapness we have now is the result of a flaw in our economic mechanism. We are allowed to produce products without being responsible for everything we create. Including waste, pollution, etc. These so-called externalities are not solved within the business model, but outside of it. By society.
We don’t have True Prices in which all costs are included.
Example: plastic waste is created all around. A packaging company is only responsible for making loads of packaging from whatever (non-biodegradable) materials. They (or their customers, the users of packaging for their products) are not responsible for cleaning up the litter.
Example: synthetic fibers, or more specifically washing synthetic clothes, are most responsible for micro-plastics pollution of the ocean. Together with car tires by the way. This is a flaw in material science. We can do much better if we put our minds to it…
4. Trade-offs
Last example before we go on to solutions: the big tech companies are trading our time and our privacy for maximizing their profit-wish.
The documentary Social Dilemma shows these toxic triggers from inside the companies. They want us to scroll, see advertisements, and spend as much time as we can on our phones and computers. They keep us inside our bubble of like-minded people in order to keep us interested.
Results: addiction to scrolling, fear of missing out (FOMO), distorted body-images, tribal conflicts, polarization, etc.
Economic Solutions
Cartesian science and capitalism have brought us benefits as humanity. I don’t deny that. And although not all aspects mentioned in this article on what capitalism has done for us hold true, I do agree with lower child mortality rates, fewer wars, and at least some female recognition.
But the time has come now to look the shadows of capitalism in the face and change the toxic triggers into healthy triggers.
Let’s create a regenerative world in which normal scars of living our lives can be healed with attention and time.
Nature can do it… We can do it…
Economies and other human systems can be transformed accordingly with some small, but very important hacks.
- In science, we can change the focus from genes to regenerative cells. Genes are just storing past information. Epigenetics shows that genes can be switched on and off depending on environmental factors. Much more interesting than gene-manipulation. We can gain deep knowledge of neuroscience without abusing it to manipulate people. We can teach systemic design, connecting the dots, leadership with values, combinatorial innovation, entrepreneurship with healthy triggers, etc.
- In business, we can adopt regenerative business models. Keep our focus on self-sufficient, local economies solving basic needs problems. Creating with 5-Kingdoms-of-Nature-materials produced with local, abundantly available crops and designed to be biodegradable in soil, water, and air
- In governments, we can refuse to be the ones to clean up the mess. We can put responsibility for what they create back with all individuals in our societies and support everyone in gaining wisdom. Not only rational knowledge. Wisdom and compassion with all of our three brains!
Let me give you an example of new roles that could work:
- Governments: responsible to prevent excesses and make sure basic needs are met locally. No more subsidies, just steering by curtailing what we don’t want. And commons creation for what we need to manage together as a society. Maybe redistributing wealth by giving everyone a basic income?
- Laws: we will not create our laws because of incidents, we will use trust as a basis. Not only people will have human rights, but also nature will have rights. Rivers have rights in several countries already
- Individuals would be able to create in whatever way their passions take them. All of them will balance money, time, and freedom differently. That’s okay. We don’t need a society of uniformity. We need a society of diversity and action. And responsibility for all we create
- Science would concentrate on deep knowledge and be the only body allowed as patent owners, spreading knowledge wide in education for all with massive open online courses (MOOCs). And financing their further research with the patents
- Companies would concentrate on unique solutions and combinatorial innovation. Creating Blue Ocean Strategies for themselves in which competition is made irrelevant. Maybe companies will pay a fee for the patents according to company size to make patents affordable for SMEs. The benefits are created with healthy triggers and the externalities are solved within their models.
Women Economists
This story is part of my book Abundanism that will come out later this year. It’s my own work of connecting the dots. Systemic solutions. Economic viability. Equality. Fairness all around. It’s time that we, as humans, take up our rightful place in the world. Be confident, courageous, creative, AND leave space for others. Other humans. And other species.
Many professional women are changing the economic climate nowadays. Re-inventing capitalist economies by thinking in multiple values instead of just money. Macro-economies, micro-economies, governance structures, businesses. Here are 8 economy-changing names for further exploration:
- Esther Duflo
- Stephanie Kelton
- Mariana Mazzucato
- Carlota Perez
- Kate Raworth
- Noreena Hertz
- Katherine Trebeck
- Eve Poole
Five of them are described in this article on Forbes. Welcome to take a quick peek into the future of value-capitalist economics.
Want to connect? You can find me somewhere on our beautiful planet, with my hands in the soil and my eyes gazing at the stars. Or find me via Linktree.
Thank you, Mike, for adding your wise energy to my words.
© Désirée Driesenaar
