I am a little hesitant to step into this minefield, both because I
have not read Becker's article for years and because I am not an
economist.
But, really.
Tony Brewer is of course correct: no recent paper in any respectable
journal could overtly identify rationality and masculinity.
But look at the characteristics that are assigned to those
("sex-unspecified") abstract agents. Rationality as consistency, for
instance. My guess is that, in the way that judgements and arguments
are made by people, rationality as consistency is more valued by men
than women in modern western cultures. Rationality as self-interest
(maybe that is too old-fashioned or too political science-y) also
strikes me as a male sense of rationality. (Now, if you defined
self-interest as alienation, then maybe you'd have a non-male
definition of self-interest.) The whole development of the atomised
abstract individual pursuing his self-interest, which I trace back to
Hobbes, for instance, displays its gendered nature in all its glory
there, where individuals quest for power after power, like good men
have done since Achilles. (There was a great argument in psych along
these lines two or three decades ago, when some man proposed a
quasi-Kantian morality [of consistency with the categorical
imperative] as the highest stage of moral development, and some woman
came along and said, that sounds like an awfully gendered definition,
can't you imagine that someone like Jesus or Buddha or Ghandi has a
different, and higher, stage of moral development in which
consistency and [Kantian] rationality take a back seat to a kind of
intelligent intuitive imaginative insight.) In short, I think you
could take almost all the elements that go to make up the abstract
agent in economics and show that they are connected to traditionally
masculine characteristics or attributes, or to characteristics and
attributes that are part of the development of modern public life.
Or, to go back to the original instance (rather than talk in --
typically masculine -- abstractions): here is what was originally
said about Becker's argument:
If Becker's theory does not describe how families actually behave or
make decisions, it at
least ought to have a meaningful resemblance to the family analyzed.
For example, it
makes assumptions about the family relationships, such as being led
by the altruistic male
head, which can be construed as either wrong-headed or harmful in
the conclusions it
reaches. Some feminist economists worry that this assumption of
altruism on the part of
the male householder who meticulously follows self-interest in the
market place, does not
have logical inconsistency, particularly if you are going to use the
same market-oriented
tools to analyze behavior in the family, not even enriched by any
insightful observations.
They are also concerned about the policy implications of this benign
picture of the
household which contradicts women's inferior economic status.
Now, don't you think it is just a little odd that the male head is
altruistic? Does Becker ever suggest that people are altruistic,
except here (maybe he suggests the gov't is altruistic? I'd doubt
it.) Doesn't this automatically raise the male, who is great enough
to be able to be altruistic at home (no self-interest at home, just
the good of the family) and meticulously self-interested in the
market place, to a position of great intellectual and psychological
fortitude? (Is the female equally altruistic and self-interested,
turned on and off according to circumstances?) Doesn't making the
male head altruistic automatically put any "rational" wife in a
double-bind: if she follows what her altruistic husband says, she
cannot become an active rational actor in the market (or even a
coherent subject and actor) because she follows what her husband
says; and if she asserts her self-interest she is undercutting what
the altruistic husband establishes as community. So the woman is
automatically screwed by Becker's "abstract" -- timeless -- analysis
of the family. And, of course, whereas Hobbes was decent enough to
see power everywhere, Becker's agents are so abstracted that there is
no power at work, at least not by the rational altruistic male, and
of course no need for power by the little woman.
At any rate, I think that the above sets of arguments would expand
Roy's quite nice statement about a 'gendered account of rationality.'
Peter G. Stillman
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