Natascha Heinisch:
Hallo! Heute gibt es mal keine eigentümliche Einleitung mit einem besonderen Bogen hin zum Inhalt der Folge, denn diese Folge ist sich schon ganz besonders, es ist nämlich unsere erste englischsprachige Podcastfolge ever! Wundert euch also nicht, es geht gleich auf Englisch weiter, aber wir stellen euch auf equalpayday.de auf der Webseite unter „Podcast“ auch eine deutsche Übersetzung der Folge als Transkript zur Verfügung. Ich bin gleich verbunden mit dem schönen Dänemark und spreche mit Emma Holten, Autorin, feministische Aktivistin und Beraterin für Geschlechterpolitik. Dann bin ich auch nicht verschnupft! Hi, Emma. Nice to have you on our first ever English episode. I’m very happy to have you here.
Emma Holten:
I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for letting me be the premiere.
Natascha Heinisch:
Yes, you are. We had a book in our last episode as well. Today, we’ll talk about your book. The English title is Deficit. The German title is “Unter Wert”, meaning below value. What’s the Danish title?
Emma Holten:
Underskud, which is almost like a combination between deficit and Unter wert. It means both things.
Natascha Heinisch:
I love languages, so that’s always super interesting.
Emma Holten:
Underskud has a lot of meanings in Danish, so the translation of the title has been a headache.
Natascha Heinisch:
I’m sure. That’s why I always admire translators. We’ll go on a journey through history today, looking at how care work was devalued in the way that it is looked at today. But I would first like to start with your reasons to write the book. I’m sure there’s many, many reasons, but is there anything in particular on a personal level that made you write the book?
Emma Holten:
Yeah, I think I had been thinking about these questions for many years, but I think, as always, there are some things that really put them front and center for you. I think what happened to me was that in 2019, I was hospitalized with a chronic autoimmune illness. That’s called ulcerative colitis, which is a bowel illness. It was the first time I was in hospital for a long basically since my birth, and I got a fantastic treatment, and I was so impressed and moved by the work that I witnessed in the hospital. Of course, I think as in most hospitals all around the world, the people I met there were mostly women, mostly nurses. What happened was that a year after I was out of hospital, feeling much better, thanks to many of these nurses in particular, I read a headline in a Danish newspaper that said that women were a net deficit to Danish society. So women were taking more from the economy than they were giving back. And this was presented as a very neutral fact, as a rational statement that could not really be debated. And it turned out that the way that they calculated value was through tax payments.
And one of the issues was that women mainly worked in the care sector where the salaries are not that high. And I thought, this seems a very odd way to calculate the value of a person’s contribution. This does not seem at all representative because these people had saved my life. They were the reason I could work. Where was that part of the equation? I think that really stimulated me to dive deeper into these questions and try to understand why are we looking at value in the way that we’re looking at it? Why are we calculating it like that? And what does it mean? And that is what Unter Wert is about.
Natascha Heinisch:
It’s always like the things that you don’t need, you don’t really think about them that much. And then once you come into that situation, you’re like, Okay, I never thought about that, that’s a really big thing. So we’ll look back at history and we’ll start with the enlightenment, another very nice word in English. So it’s about light, light coming in. In German, it’s Aufklärung, meaning clearing up, being able to see things better or seeing them the way they are. What’s the Danish word for enlightenment?
Emma Holten:
Oplysning. That’s also enlightenment.
Natascha Heinisch:
Okay. Yeah. So at school, in history class, we had to learn the first two sentences of what Immanuel Kant said about the enlightenment, what it means. I’m going to say it in English now: Enlightenment is a human beings emergence from self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s own mind without the guidance from another. That sounds very… I mean, the enlightenment brought about very many good things. But how does the enlightenment come into play when it comes to care work? What happened then that changed people’s view on care work?
Emma Holten:
Yeah, I think that’s a very central question in my book, because as you say, the enlightenment is extremely important also if you’re a feminist, because what is born in the enlightenment is the idea of the rational individual, the idea that there is someone called Emma and there’s someone called Natascha, and we’re separate from one another, and we have rights as people, and we can think as people, and we need to have the possibility to realize ourselves. All these things, of course, extremely important breakthroughs. But what also happened in the Enlightenment was that there became a very big focus on mathematics, on mechanics, and physics, and chemistry. We became very good at the natural sciences and at the methods that we used in the natural sciences. Many of the ideas in the natural sciences that we still use today are things we found out in the Enlightenment. A couple of people in my book, I talk especially about Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and John Locke, the really big figures in the Enlightenment, were incredibly fascinated and taken with the natural sciences and the power that they had to give us a straight, good, perfect answers to very complex questions about how the world worked.
One of the desires, especially of Hobbes, but also in some sense of the others, was to make a natural science, but for society. They wanted to measure and weigh and predict with mathematics in the same way that we can do, for example, with the motion of something falling from the sky. I think that was a beautiful ambition to describe the world as perfectly as you came. But that also meant that there were some parts of life that are difficult to describe with mathematics that don’t follow perfect laws. And care work really falls into this. Something like family or love or sickness. If you look at a person like me, I became sick when I was 27, and no one knows why I became sick. I just suddenly became sick. There’s really no prediction of why it happened, but suddenly I needed very serious help. And what happened in the Enlightenment was that all of the parts of society that were difficult to describe with numbers fell out a little bit of philosophy, and especially things that had to do with the body and the mind and taking care of the body and the mind, which was the part of society where women mainly worked.
They just weren’t really so interested in it. It was not where they spent their time. They had some amazing breakthroughs thinking about politics. But the home and the relationships we built in the home became a little bit of a black box. I think that’s what I see has followed us, as I show in the book, all the way up until the economic models we use today, that the care that all human beings need disappears from view. I think the biggest example of that is Thomas Hobbes writes in one of his books that the human beings he writes about, We should just imagine that they spring up of the Earth like a mushroom.
Natascha Heinisch:
That was a very, very impressive image. They’re just there. They’re just there. Even though real mushrooms don’t work like that either, but just imagining.
Emma Holten:
There is this idea that we’re making politics for adults who can think and walk and talk, but there is no really reflection on where do these people come from? What does it take to make a human being? Then I think what my book is about is a cultural history of what happened to making human beings and making sure that we feel healthy and happy and alive.
Natascha Heinisch:
I remember, talking about mushrooms, our history teacher, when he explained the enlightenment to us, was like, Okay, before people would see a tree and they would go, “That is a beautiful tree.” Then the enlightenment came along: Why is the tree there? How does it grow? Where does it come from? Obviously, that didn’t happen with mushrooms because they were just there haha
Emma Holten:
– I got to say, I think that sometimes people are a little hard on people before the enlightenment.
They were not that stupid. There was scientific inquiry and curiousness about what it means to be a human. But I think what really changed, of course, was this scientific method, doing an experiment and testing it. Of course, that is fantastic, but it is not so good at describing every part of the world. It meant that things… I think it is true, you can talk about a tree as if it is just wood and history. But of course, a tree is also beautiful. I think in a way, that example is really important because we need to both be able to see the tree as a scientific thing, as a thing that can be described with numbers and atoms. But we cannot use the atoms to describe what does it make me feel to see it. Why does it make me happy to have greenery around me? I think it’s those kinds of emotions that are so important to human beings that I tried to describe in my book.
Natascha Heinisch:
You also write that the view of the enlightenment led to more traditional forms of living together, of believing – superstitions – that they started to be looked down upon. Can you tell us a little more about that? Maybe a bit like the before and after, how people used to live and then the Enlightenment came along.
Emma Holten:
Yeah, I think in a way, the family, as we know it today, really started with the Enlightenment, mother, father, and children as a unit of family. I’m very fascinated here by, especially the Italian think Silvia Federici, who describes that what happens at the end of the Middle Ages and the start of what we call the modern age and then the Enlightenment, is that there becomes a political desire to have a more orderly society, to know who is who’s children, who is inheriting what from whom, who owns what. So of course, the richer and the more complex societies become, the more we need to have laws and lawyers that can make sure that everyone knows what’s what. But if you go just 200 years or 300 years before the Enlightenment, it was much more common, mostly because more people died, or example, if you were a woman and your husband died, it was not uncommon for your sister to move to move in or your mother to move in and help you take care of the children. Or if you were a father and the mother of your children died, maybe your sister would move in or someone else would help you.
Many people lived with their parents in bigger communities. In the Enlightenment, we really see that the nuclear family starts coming up and the idea of the mother as the most important person in the children’s lives and the person who has the most responsibility for the home starts coming up. Also because many, many more men start working outside the home. So fewer people are peasants working on their own farm, many more people are working in a factory. That starts the separation that we also have today with the home as the private sphere, where we have the children and everything, and then the work as the public sphere. That creates an idea of the woman as a caretaker of children and a family instead of what she had been before, which was a little bit of a different role where she also helped on the farm and did all different types of tasks. Suddenly, we get the father out and the mother in the home as a gender ideal in some ways. Of course, I think we all know that that still is dominant in most cultures all over the world.
Natascha Heinisch:
You also talked about enlightenment, separating rationality and everything you can calculate in mathematics from all the things that no one to this day can. Why do people fall in love? Why do we have desires for certain things? One part I found very interesting was how the witch hunt comes in, because I thought, if a man finds he desires a woman and he can’t explain why, because you can’t, it must be something in the woman, that idea of there must be something evil and that she’s doing that to me because, of course, I can control myself, I am a rational person.
Emma Holten:
She’s driving me crazy. Yeah.
Natascha Heinisch:
That’s an aspect I thought was really, really super interesting.
Emma Holten:
Yeah. I think the witch hunt is something that I keep returning to as, I think, a very formative and interesting thing in European history. I think, at least in my education, when I grew up, I was taught that the witch hunt was a part of the dark Middle Ages, that that was before the Enlightenment, that we became smart, and that was back when we were superstitious and unscientific. But what Silvia Federici and also German thinkers like Ina Prätorius and Maria Mies have pointed out is that actually that is not the timeline at all. The witch hunt is happening at the same time as we are starting to become enlightened, as we call it. A lot of the witch hunt processes are simultaneously with kings and rulers who want to have a more orderly scientific society. A lot of the people who are hunted in the witch hunt are people who live lives who are a little bit unconventional. Many women, but also some men, it might be people who live in a different type of family or women who live alone, who are unmarried. But also, as I show some examples from France in my book, women who worked as midwives.
Because this was also a time where there, because of the plague, which killed a third of the European population, there was a lack of labor power. There was a lack of people. People wanted more employees to work on their farms, but there were not enough people, so they could ask for a very high salary. They thought, we need more people. And they knew that there were people like midwives, for example, who were doing abortions and who were helping women eat different types of leaves and stuff like that to make sure that they didn’t get pregnant. And a figure like Jean Bodin in France is super interesting here because he both represents the enlightenment. He’s one of the first people to do a proper people counting or a census in the way that we know it today. He is the first person to use the word inflation, like he’s really a light. But at the same time, he was also a very, very violent witch hunter. I think he’s a perfect example of this, that we have this idea that witch hunts were not a part of the enlightenment was not a part, but it was actually a part of the foundation of the modern state was to control what type of lives and what type of women we wanted in our society.
I think this is a very important point in the book that sometimes we say that on one side, we have culture, and on the other side, we have economics. What I show is that actually what type of culture we have is extremely affected by how we run economics. Of course, if we want children, then we want women to get married very, very quickly, and we want them to stay in the house and have children. If we don’t want children, then we encourage women to work and do something different. What we can see all through human history is that what a woman is and what she’s allowed to and also what men are allowed to be, are super, super affected by what type of labor we need them to do.
Natascha Heinisch:
You don’t just write about women, you also write about how that idea that the body is a machine and we are afraid of what we can’t control because we don’t understand, we don’t know it, anything that’s not rational to our understanding, that also influences how people discriminate against other cultures and how racism, we have like, witch hunt and racism as well that comes into play because people just didn’t understand that other people live differently or didn’t want to understand. Maybe you could talk about that as well.
Emma Holten:
Yeah, I think for me, there is a very close relationship between what we now call the Western world or Central Europe, this idea of ourselves as enlightened. You mentioned Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant also famously had his ranking of races, of what races were enlightened and what races were not. And this idea that we were smarter and therefore more valuable, was certainly a very, very strong driving force in colonialism as well. The concept of the African person or the South American person as a savage because they lived in a different type of family structure or they worked in a different way was one of the ways that we legitimized colonization. There’s a quote from John Locke that I think is extremely revelatory about this, where he says that one of the reasons that it is legitimate to colonize North America and, for example, take land that has been owned by or occupied by Cherokee Indian tribes is because they do not “till the Earth” and they do not make a profit out of the Earth. In that way, we say that they are wasting the Earth. I think this is one of the ways that we still legitimize land grabbing today is by saying that the rational and the most enlightened, maybe you could say, way of using the Earth is to make a profit from it.
Leaving the tree as beautiful as it is to stand is somehow less enlightened and less developed. I think this shows, and I think this is a very central point in what’s called eco-feminism, is seeing this relationship between the exploitation and abuse of care work and taking value out of care work and relating it to the exploitation of native and Aboriginal peoples and nature, and saying, actually, these are similar because we’re seeing within the capitalist machine a devaluation of these categories. And then when you devalue something, of course, you can make a profit off of it. It was really important for me to get that perspective in also. To say that certainly a very central part of feminist economics is having a global solidarity with the different ways that women’s care work has been abused in the home, but also in slavery and also in colonization, that we can always find similarities in the abuse. But of course, there are differences of intensity of racialization.
Natascha Heinisch:
We have women, we have colonization, discrimination of other cultures. You also… about the sick, because if you’re sick, you can’t work, so you’re not contributing to society because you’re not working. Children, you can’t control them, and they don’t work, so they don’t create value. I was wondering, did you find anything – I know that’s very far off the track – but did you find anything about how maybe the enlightenment changed how we see animals? Because they don’t work.
Emma Holten:
Oh, that’s a really good concept. I really want to recommend a new book by Alyssa Battistoni called Free Gifts, which I think is maybe the nature book that’s similar to Unter Wert, where she goes really into this. She actually quotes Hobbes on the mushroom thing and says that in a way, that is also how we treat human beings, but animals, we treat as a product. That the way we treat animals in modern factory farming is similar to as if they were a thing. The thing that is so interesting here is how this cheapening happens. For example, why do we in Denmark, and I think similar in Germany, why do we find it disgusting to eat a dog, but not disgusting to eat a pig? There is absolutely no rational reason for this. These are animals of extremely similar intelligence, and you could easily have a pig in your home and teach it some of the same things that we teach a dog. I think this really shows that culture is at the heart of our economy. It is actually extremely important to factory farming and to our food economy to keep our understanding of animals as things going.
I think this is the thing that is very interesting in feminist economics… one of the things that I find to be very useful that I think we can use it in many, many cases in the economy, is this concept of cheapening, that we use culture to cheapen something, and then it becomes cheap in the economy. Of course, one of the things we have to have cheapened is care work. That has become cheap, even though it is incredibly important for human beings. But of course, an animal has also been cheapened through culture. The idea that it is not violent, for example, to transport – I come from Denmark, where there are four pigs for every person – and we transport pigs in very, very close quarters stuck together all across Europe in these tiny vans. For me, it is a very interesting economic and cultural question why everyone is not disgusted by this. I think that we cannot separate economics, what we find to be rational in economics, from what we find to be rational in culture. We have to understand those together to understand why we organize the economy in the way that we do.
Natascha Heinisch:
It’s super interesting that you took the example of the dog versus the pig. I was thinking about people getting outraged about dolphins being killed. There are certain types of dolphins, they’re not on any red list. There’s lots of them. People get outraged about dolphins being killed. But pigs get killed every day, and they’re really smart. Dolphins are probably… They are smart, but how we look at animals in a very different way depending on where we live and what we’re used to.
Emma Holten:
It seems so random, right? If you look at something like a rat, people have absolutely no issue killing a rat, but they are very outraged when someone kills a squirrel just because a squirrel has a better outfit. A cuter tail. I think that that shows us that, and I think this is a very core idea of economics that I really disagree with, which is that they say that how we approach value is rational, that in some ways we have a rational brain, and there is a good reason why we do the things that we do. But as a feminist, of course, you can never look at society like that because we know as feminists that women have been incredibly devalued for absolutely no other reason than violence and abuse for many, many, many years. And that the way that we have treated women has developed, luckily, in many societies, and that has also increased women’s economic value. As soon as you have a feminist lens, you very quickly can begin to use it in other places and say, Okay, so what we value is actually super cultural and something that we can change and challenge.
Natascha Heinisch:
I’d like to get more into the economics part of the discussion. Now, you already mentioned the concept of feminist economics, but maybe we can talk about how… we talked about the enlightenment and now how modern economics, where do they stem from? What are the core values of how they used to be, what is now regarded as especially valuable, and how does that make care work less valuable in the eyes of someone who’s into that kind of economics?
Emma Holten:
Yeah, I think what’s important to know about a lot of modern economics is that many economists perceive themselves as apolitical. That means that they work with value and valuation and decision making and processes, but they see their decisions as apolitical and scientific. The way that they calculate value is through price. What they say is we have a market, and if there is a high demand for something on the market, for example, if many people are willing to pay very little for care work or for a slice of pig, then that reflects the true value of this thing. I think that this is one of the most important parts of my book that I try to explain, because I think this is a very central thing to understand in how economics works, is that price and value are the same. But I think for most regular people, this seems absurd. Look around you in the room that you’re sitting right now, you will be able to see something that was very expensive that does not mean that much to you. You will find something that was very cheap that you would grab it if the house was on fire, a picture or a memory or something like that.
What happens in the 1870s is it’s what’s called the marginal revolution, which is still, I think, probably the most important thing that has ever happened in economics, which is saying that we can calculate value through price. They use very complex mathematics to do this. But what happens is that everything that does not have a price, which means natural resources, a beautiful tree, or a time with a friend, or resting, or being with children, becomes very, very difficult to describe. The only way we can talk about the tree is if the tree becomes a bench, and we sell it. That means we have no way to talk about the tree before it becomes a bench. We cannot say: What did it do? What did it mean to people? The same thing goes for care work. I think this is a very specific thing that happens to care work is that, of course, we have unpaid care work that falls out of economics completely and becomes unproductive activity. But what also happens is that payment becomes value. The thing with care is that I think, of course, using prices value is always an issue. I’m very skeptical of it, but especially with care work, because when you pay for care work, you never know what it’s going to give you.
Of course, if you buy a car, you have an assumption that you will be able to drive it and you can make an idea of what value will it create for you. But for example, in 2019, when I got into hospital, I didn’t know, will they make me healthy? How long will I be sick? And what will it change in my life? What abilities will I have or will I lose? And care work is incredibly unpredictable in that way. If you have a child, six years old, starting in school, you don’t know where that child is going to end up. I think that this is a very important issue for care and economics. I think that sometimes we talk about economics and care work and we say, Oh, they hate women or they don’t care about the work that women do. I think some of them really do, but they have a methodological issue, which is that the methods that they use are built for cars and factories. They are not built for school rooms or physical therapy or childcare, it is simply something completely different. So that means that if they were to actually include care in the economy and in their methods in the way that I argue for in my book, which is a way I think resonates with a lot of people in their everyday lives, it would mean a big change for them in how they think.
I think for some of them, it’s a little bit difficult to even imagine, to think of the world in a different way. But I think we are in a care crisis right now all over the world, which necessitates new ways of thinking about value.
Natascha Heinisch:
One example that really stuck with me was if you look at kindergardeners and the value that the – I don’t know what the English word is – the people looking after kindergarteners. You can’t measure the work that they do. The only way they came up is you look at what these children, how much money they earn when they grow up.
Emma Holten:
Yes.
Natascha Heinisch:
That says nothing the experiences they had when they went to kindergarten and what helped or what created value in their life. You look at the jobs that they found afterwards and how absurd that is.
Emma Holten:
Exactly. That’s saying that a person is more valuable the more money they make. I think that in itself is just absurd. I think that’s probably the thing that I’m the hardest on in the book, the idea that someone who works in a bank is more valuable than a nurse. I don’t think that there are any empirical arguments for this. I think one of the central arguments in my book is to say, economics is a fantastic science. There’s a lot of things it can do. It is really powerful. But there is also many, many things that it cannot do, that it is simply not equipped to do. I think that’s fine. It’s like that with all sciences. All sciences have limitations. But what I’m asking is, why do economists have such a central role in every single political room and decision? Where are the psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, biologists who could teach us how to think of politics from other perspectives? I think right now, the power of economics as a science, the way that it is just completely unparalleled in political influence is what’s giving us a very one-sided way to look at what a society is and what a society could be.
It is presenting itself as neutral. What I show in my book is that a lot of political decisions are being made in calculations that seem neutral. That means that we maybe are not living in a society that’s as democratic as we would like because we’re not being presented with all the different ways that we could build a society. We’re being presented with the ways that economics thinks a society should look. That is maybe not the optimal way in all aspects of life.
Natascha Heinisch:
The Very important concept that you have is feminist economics. Of course, I would like to talk about that. Feminist economics as a counter philosophy or counter idea of the economics that we have now, what would that entail? The optimal future with feminist economics, what would be different? What’s the core concept?
Emma Holten:
I think a very important thing is that feminist economics is, of course, not called feminist economics because it is only relevant to women. The reason it is called that is because what we have been interested in and have been interested in since the ’60s—this is a very long movement with a really rich history—is the areas of society where women are overrepresented. That is still the care sector in the public sector, typically in Europe, and in the home. We are interested in how do we understand this type of activity. As we’ve been talking about already, that has been in traditional economics or what we call New Classical economics, very systematically devalued or completely unvalued, set to zero. What we try to challenge is not necessarily saying we would like society to look at a specific way. I think many of us believe in a democracy where we can decide that together. But I think what we do say is that if you want a sustainable society where the democracy works, where people are happy, where everyone is treated equally, which is, of course, the core tenet of feminism is the equal treatment of everybody, you need to have an understanding of the fact that human beings need to be taken care of in order to live dignified lives.
Of course, some people need more taken care of than others. If you have a disability, for example, or you have children, or you are elderly, you need more help to live your everyday life in a dignified way. But what we say is that you cannot just leave it up to something outside the economy to take care of care. That is something you to be intentional about if you want to have everyone live a dignified and equal life. I think for a long time, both the feminism in Denmark, in Germany, basically everywhere, we have been very focused on, and I think also because that has been the type of feminism that has been the most profitable was getting women out and living the same lives as men, working, contributing to GDP, these types of things. Of course, that is extremely important, I think as a feminist, I care very much about women having their own money. But we have not talked so much about, Okay, but what happens in a society if all women start living like men? That is what we’re seeing more and more now: less children, less people wanting to be nurses, less people wanting to work in childcare, huge recruitment issues all across the care sector in the entire world.
What we’re starting to find out is that these women that looked like they were a deficit and not creating value was actually extremely important to the economy. As soon as women stop performing this underpaid roles, everyone is very worried. I think one of the perfect examples of this is the fertility crisis, as they call it. I’m assuming you also talk about this in Germany. It’s a big subject all over that not enough children are being born. I think this is the central paradox that I show in my book, is that everyone wants care. Everyone wants women to do the care work, but no one wants to put resources towards it, to actually invest in it and get proper time to it. There is an assumption that women were able to do exactly what men had always been doing without it having any consequences for society except positive. That’s, of course, because they assumed that women were not creating value right now. I think that’s what we insist on in feminist economics, is that even though something is economically devalued, that does not mean that it not incredibly valuable to human beings.
Natascha Heinisch:
As always, it looks like the Danish are doing a bit of a better jobs than the Germans are. They’re a step ahead already. Maybe you can give us some insights on what some other countries are doing more successfully in that sector than Germany, for example, is.
Emma Holten:
Yeah, I think so. What happened in Denmark in the ’60s and ’70s were that there were actually some fantastic feminist economists who became quite influential and who said that if you want to have women working and being a part of society, which we, of course, as feminists, we wanted women to work because we wanted women to have their own money. If you want that, you need to have proper childcare of a high quality, you need to have proper elder care of a high quality, and you need to have schools that work where people want to send their children. I think that has really been, I think in some ways, the welfare state, as we know it in Denmark, is an example of feminist economics being extremely successful. Of course, Denmark, a very, very wealthy country. What we have shown is that it is actually possible to make these massive investments in care and have it be something that contributes to the economy. But what happened in the mid ’80s was that a new type of economics became very influential, both through the EU, but also through American influence, which saw the welfare state as something that took money out of the economy.
That was a huge change because in the ’60s and ’70s in Denmark, we have had seen the welfare state as something that contributed to making us richer. But suddenly, and we still do this now, we see it as something that takes money out of the economy. I think a perfect example is in Germany right now, there is all this talk of a new economic policy, of industrial policy. They say they want to invest billions and billions of euros in making Germany richer. But what they mention as examples of this is weapons factories, green engineering energy, and other types of building cars. Nothing about building people, right? So the idea that a weapons factory creates value, but a hospital does not create value, is actually super central in modern economic policy. For example, in the EU, it is allowed to borrow money if you want to build a factory that creates weapons, but it is not allowed to borrow money from the EU if you want to build a school or a nursery. I think that this is so central to, in my opinion, the misunderstanding of what is important in an economy. Because, of course, it is important that you have the things that you need that comes out of the factory.
But if the family isn’t functioning well, if people aren’t feeling good, if people who are sick are not getting what they need, if people, for example, in Denmark, we have a huge mental health crisis. I think I’ve heard you have this in Germany as well, people who are mentally ill who are waiting very, very long for help, and it’s very difficult for the families, et cetera. If this doesn’t work, it gets very difficult to get the factory to work. We have this idea that we’ll get the care after the factory, but actually, it’s the opposite. You need to get the care first and make that work. I think that many of the initiatives we’re seeing all over Europe right now will fail if we don’t address the care crisis. I think this also goes for political polarization, frustration, political anger that is so widespread. If people don’t feel valued and seen and appreciated by their government and feel that they’re getting the help they need, they do get frustrated and angry and lash out. That’s what we’re seeing both on the left and the right right now, that people are incredibly frustrated with the political system.
Natascha Heinisch:
What’s your outlook, if I may ask, where we are now and where are we going? Is there any hope?
Emma Holten:
I think when you’re a feminist, it’s a little bit a part of the job to be hopeful, even though it’s difficult. I think what does give me hope is that I do see some of the same issues being raised on both the left and the right. A lot of the modern right, even though I disagree with its relationship to nationalism and patriarchy, are talking about being sick of individualism. Prioritizing the family, prioritizing local community, stuff like that, which is similar to what a person like me is talking about. I think I do see across the political spectrum a desire for more communal politics, for more collective engagement. I think that gives me hope that maybe there can be a positive politics of community building and of care as something that could appeal to a wide group of people. I think it was certainly an intention of mine when I wrote the book to say that we cannot let the patriarchal right dominate the conversation on the family. As feminists, we also need to have a language for the importance of rest, of home, of close connections, and we can still have a wide definition of the family, a wide definition of what a woman is, a wide definition of what type of lives we want to lead while still fighting for the right to a restful home where you have time for the people that you love. I think I really do believe that there is a lot to be won from that type of politics across the political spectrum.
It’s just that very few people are running that politics now. But I think what we’re seeing in the success of my book, for example, shows that actually there is a desire for that in many people. I think that that gives me hope. What also gives me hope is looking at what people have achieved in the past 100 years. Free school, free health care. Actually, what we’re asking for right now in a book like mine is very little compared to how rich we are and the technology that we have. I think in a way, we’re also in a crisis of imagination that we think less is possible than it was 50 years ago, even though we have so much now. I think that has to do with how we’re looking at what an economy is and what we can do together.
Natascha Heinisch:
Maybe you’ve already answered parts of my question. Every In every episode, I ask my guests for one thing that right now makes them especially mad when it comes to questions of equal pay or unequal pay, and one thing that makes them happy.
Emma Holten:
Okay, I think that’s a good way to end it. I think I have a statistic in my book regarding equal pay, which shows that male bosses who have a daughter pay their female employees better after the daughter is born. Of course, and I think this is both… it’s a depressing thing, but also the hopeful thing. Because it’s, of course, extremely depressing because it shows that women are being underpaid for absolutely no reason. But it also shows that it’s something we can change. There’s actually a huge potential. I think the things in my book that can get you down, also regarding pay for nurses, for example, or pay for people in the care sector, is also something that can get your hopes up. Because what I show in the book is that it is not necessary that it is like this. The economy is a system that we have created out of culture and institutions. That means that we can also change it. I think sometimes we think about the economy as part of nature or the market as nature, but it is 100% something that we create and we could shape it to something that maybe is softer and kinder to people.
Natascha Heinisch:
That is a very wonderful outlook, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. To all our listeners, if you have any questions regarding today’s episode or any other episode, you can send me an email at info@equalpayday.de, and you can follow us on social media where we use the hashtag EPD. Thanks, Emma, for your wonderful book. I really enjoyed reading it. I’m a former arts student, so I didn’t know anything about economics, but it was super good and easy to read in a way where I would understand everything. So thank you for your insight. Thank you for being here, for taking the time.
Emma Holten:
That makes me so happy. Thank you so much for having me.
Natascha Heinisch:
And to everyone else, goodbye.
Emma Holten:
Bye.
