Ingrid

In July I couldn’t blog about a major episode in the Belgian political crisis – I was on holidays in the Walloon area of Belgium, in a cottage without electricity, and without access to the web. Today there is another sequel in the Belgian political crisis which has now been going on for about 15 months. By now most Belgians are suffering from political depression: they are no longer able to swallow yet another glass of this soap. Yet if anybody out there is still interested (I am, even if also politically slightly depressed), below the fold is a short summary of the last two episodes of the Belgian crisis. Warning: this post requires some knowledge on the Belgian political labyrinth, which I’ve tried to sketch here
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Finally and long overdue, here is my book review of Valuing Children, Nancy Folbre’s latest book. The overall goal of this book is to show how and why children matter for economic life, to provide estimates of the economic value of family (nonmarket) childcare and parental expenditures in the USA, and to raise critical questions about the size and kinds of public spending on children in the USA.

Folbre formulates four questions which she sets out to answer: (1) Why should we care about spending on the children? (2) How much money and time do parents devote to children? (3) How much money do taxpayers spend on children? And (4) who should pay for the kids (in other words, which share of the costs of children should be borne by parents and by the government)?
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I’d like to put an empirical claim on the table for discussion. The claim is that people who have never done a significant amount of informal carework, are extremely likely to underestimate the burdens of care. In this claim I include care for small children, severely disabled people, dependent elderly, or any other human being in need of significant amounts of informal caring. And with burdens of care I mean all sorts of burdens – they can be physical, or psychological, or emotional, or another dimension, or (most likely) a mixture of these.

Now, I am not entirely sure where to look for empirical evidence which can confirm, refute or help me to refine or revise this claim. Perhaps in a psychology or sociology of care literature? I have come across plenty of anecdotal evidence, but haven’t come across a study that has investigated this claim in a qualitatively-grounded quantitative way (or a similar claim, perhaps focusing on just one type of care situation). Anyone suggestions for literature? Anyone views on the plausibility of this claim?

Political philosophers/theorists may be interested in the latest issue of Social Theory and Practice , which is a special issue devoted to the debate on ideal and non-ideal theories of justice. This special issue is a selection of papers from a wonderful ECPR workshop which Adam Swift and I organised in Helsinki in 2007. There has been quite a bit of debate on this topic in recent years, and Harry and I have been mentioning in some of our posts that we should have that debate here too – Well, I wait till my copies have arrived. The journal sells single issues for a mere ten dollars (plus shipping for outside the USA); scroll down on the journal’s homepage for instructions in case you’re interested.

A study conducted by sociologists from Cambridge University seems to suggest that the support for working mothers is weakening. The researchers compared survey results from the 1980s till recently, and found “growing sympathy for the old-fashioned view that a woman’s place is in the home, rather than in the office”, caused by “mounting concern that women who play a full and equal role in the workforce do so at the expense of family life.”
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Just back from holidays in the Walloon woods of Belgium – with no access to the internet for two weeks (which feels like a health treatment). While I was there, the Belgian government almost collapsed, the ethno-linguistic battles intensified once more, and the Regime Crisis (now truly with capitals) reached a new height – but I will tell you more about the latest episode of that Drama after I’ve caught up with e-mails.
I only quickly want to flag something with a deadline soon coming up—Public Reason is organising an online podcast symposium for political philosophers next semester. Sounds like a laudable initiative, especially for those of us who are not physically close to the centres of academic debate and/or limited in their ability (or willingness) to travel to seminars, conferences and workshops. Abstract submissions are due by July 31st.

Recently I was talking with a political philosopher, who is based in Italy, about my reasons for supporting birthleave for fathers. He told me that in Italy parenthood is strongly gendered, and gave the example of a note put up at his kids’s school, stating that ‘Today Mothers should pick up their children at 2 pm rather than 4 pm’ (or something very similar). If I ever were to read such a note, I would be outraged that the school would assume that it could only be mothers who would get the kids from school; he, as a father, was outraged that the school assumed that there would be no fathers picking up the kids from school.

In my view there are plenty gendered messages in daily life, and many of the people I encounter are not aware of the gender codes they create, reinforce, and spread. I few months ago I thought I should write down during one year all the public and private gendered codes and messages that I encountered in daily life and explain why I find them problematic (or not). For time reasons, and perhaps also because it would be difficult pursuing such a project without violating people’s right to privacy, I haven’t embarked on that project yet, though I may do so one day. I think such a gender codes diary would show how many gender codes surround us, many of which are uncritically absorbed by consumers and citizens. Which was the last one you encountered?

Amartya Sen turns 75 later this year (on November 3rd, to be precise), and we are going to celebrate this. In academic style, of course. Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur have edited a 2-volume Festschrift, aptly called Arguments for a Better World. I am not sure when Sen is going to read those 1400 pages, but that detail shouldn’t spoil the party. And Basu and Kanbur are also organising, together with the Institute for Human Development a conference to celebrate his birthday. That event will take place in New Delhi on the 19th and 20th of December. The Call for Papers, which so far I haven’t seen circulating, is only open to young economists and social scientists, with ‘young’ being defined as those under 40. It’s a pity, though, that political philosophers are not invited to submit papers, given Sen’s important contributions to that field.

Nancy Folbre, who is widely considered to be one of the most knowledgeable economists on issues of care work, has recently started a new blog, called Care Talk. It’s a research blog that aims to bring together interdisciplinary insights on issues of care—child care, care issues related to primary education, elder care, care for disabled, and health care. Care is a neglected issue in several disciplines and subdisciplines, including economics and political philosophy, and I can only applaud this initiative. I hope that this will become a genuine international blog— much can be learnt from looking at how care work is organised and divided in other countries.

Folbre published earlier this year her new book Valuing Children which I have here on my desk. I promise our readers a review of that book sometime in June.

This week I received my copy of The Capability Approach, a fat book that contains a large number of essays on… yes, good guess. It’s primarily written by social scientists or interdisciplinary oriented scholars—hence not so much the more philosophical side of that literature. Sometimes I feel very happy and satisfied, perhaps even a little proud, when I see a book to which I’ve contributed a chapter. For instance, that was the case last September when Jude Browne’s splendidly edited The Future of Gender came out. That volume contains many excellent essays on issues of gender and sexual difference by interesting thinkers, and I felt my own chapter was decent enough. Sadly, I do not have such feelings about my chapter in The Capability Approach. The simple reason is that that chapter was written in 2001, and analyses certain limitations of the capability approach for the analysis of gender issues. Yet in the 6 years and 8 months between sending that chapter to the editors and its ultimate publication, I think very little of what I wrote in that article is still original or not by now broadly appreciated. The literature on the capability approach has developed at an incredibly fast pace, and the arguments in that chapter are… well, a little old. Academic publishing is a slow business – often too slow. Anybody a worse experience than those 6 years and 8 months?

Part-time work is often argued to be one possible solution for working parents, so as to make the balance between work and caring easier. This post is not about the question whether this is indeed (part of) the solution in general – that is, for all types of paid work. Rather, I’d like to raise some doubts about the idea that part-time work is a good thing for academics who are doing research (in addition to whatever else they do – teaching or management). In this country, plenty of academics work part-time, and often standard lecturer positions are only offered on a part-time basis (often 80%). [click to continue…]