PDFs

In the wake of the World Health Organization’s report showing that violence against women and girls is a global health problem of epidemic proportions, the publication of Riane Eisler’s chapter Protecting the Majority of Humanity: Toward an Integrated Approach to Crimes against Present and Future Generations in the new Cambridge University book Sustainable Development, International Criminal Justice, and Treaty Implementation edited by Sebastien Jodoin and Marie-Claire Cordonier Seggeris both timely and practical. Continuing her work of placing the rights, problems, and aspirations of the majority of humanity — women and children — on the international agenda as integral to a sustainable and just future for all, Eisler proposes that the international legal foundations of the Rome Statute and R2P (Right to Protect) can, and should, be used to end traditions of violence that not only take the lives of millions of women and children but also have very adverse impacts on economic and social health.

Originally published on BlogHer.

by Riane Eisler and Valerie Young

Who says partisan politics only results in division, discord, and gridlock? After this week’s media frenzy over whether or not Ann Romney was “working” when she raised five boys, a consensus of sorts has emerged. Both Democrats and Republicans agree unreservedly that childrearing is a very important activity, valuable to the families involved, and essential to our civil society and national economy.

Now that that’s been settled, let’s check the political rhetoric against the policy realities.

The shocking truth is that our nation’s policies lag way behind those of every other developed nation in helping parents care for their children. We’re also way behind in helping families care for their elderly and sick. Despite all the talk of family values, we fail to value the work of care. In fact, the U.S. is the only developed nation on earth that does not guarantee paid sick days or paid parental leave.

Even more shocking is that more than one of every five children in the US lives in poverty and that our infant mortality rate is higher than all other industrialized countries, as well as those with significantly weaker economies, such as Greece, Cuba, and Slovenia. Our maternal mortality rate is also so high that a woman in the US has a greater chance of dying during childbirth or from a pregnancy-related condition than she does in all of Europe, Latvia, Oman, or Belarus. If superpower status were based on the survival of newborns and the women who give birth to them, we simply wouldn’t be one.

Behind these statistics lies enormous suffering that is the direct result of our nation’s failure to invest in caring for our people, starting in early childhood. A huge number of workers, both men and women, are periodically caregivers and care receivers across the lifespan. The workforce is aging, and with smaller and more mobile extended families, family caregivers will be older, fewer, and less able to provide care. The care crisis we face requires a shift in our national priorities. This shift is both possible and affordable, as evidenced by nations such as Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Germany that have highly successful economies.

This takes us to still another reason we need caring policies: purely economic one. What counts the most for success as we shift from a manufacturing to a knowledge/service economy is the development of what economists like to call “high quality human capital.” Other nations are committing a high percentage of their resources to human infrastructure, poised to realize the optimum potential of a creative, adaptable, and educated society. We must align our long-term investments with our stated goals of competing successfully in the global economy.

For businesses, making it possible for workers to tend to a seriously ill spouse or parent, or to bond in the early months with a new baby reduces turnover costs, enhances productivity, and promotes loyalty and commitment. Studies show that the financial gains to businesses and their investors from caring policies at work are tremendous. For example, companies listed on the Working Mother lists of the best companies to work for – that is, companies with more caring policies – have a substantially higher return to investors.

Doing what’s necessary to produce optimally functioning people requires time, energy, and commitment, as Ann Romney brought to media attention. However, most parents don’t share the financial advantage that Ann Romney has. The vast majority of mothers must also work outside their homes while providing most of the caregiving, vainly striving for work-life balance (the life component largely being caring for others).

Government policies such as paid sick leave and paid parental leave are essential, and it’s high time we caught up to other developed nations. Our children, our elderly, and our sick will benefit enormously, and so will the people (still mostly women) who care for them.

But in the end, the major beneficiary will be our nation, because in this rapidly changing technological and economic era, a caring economy is the only road to economic success and security. To date, the US has failed to put its money where its mouth is. Support for family care must become a basic minimum labor standard and human right for the United States to deliver on its promise of the American Dream.

Riane Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Studies and author of The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, now in 24 languages, and most recently The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics. For more information, see www.partnershipway.org

Valerie Young is a policy analyst and the Advocacy Coordinator at the National Association of Mothers’ Centers. She blogs about the intersection of motherhood and public policy at Your (Wo)Man in Washington.

Originally published on Huff Post Parents.

By Riane Eisler and Valerie Young.

Originally published on BlogHer.

By Riane Eisler and Kimberly Otis

Today’s State of the Union address offers President Obama the opportunity to talk with Americans about what our nation really needs. As we shift from a manufacturing to a knowledge and service economy, what we urgently need for both individual and national economic success is what economists call high-quality human capital. This requires investing in our most important American asset: our people. In economic terms, this translates into reversing the downward trend of U.S. international competitiveness. In human terms, it translates into ending enormous suffering.

It’s essential that the president clearly state that our nation’s economic success and the well-being of our people hinges on investing in the development of all our people’s capacities. In other words, our real wealth is not corporate profits or business wealth. It is our social wealth: American people’s capabilities.

The United States is already behind other developed countries in the measurements that reflect the real wealth of America — not only international competitiveness but basic measures such as child mortality rates, poverty rates, our standing in educational math and science rankings, and the state of people’s health and well-being. Unlike our gross domestic product (GDP), which is rising along with Wall Street, these are the social wealth measures that we should be prioritizing. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz notes, instead of cutting health, education, and other such programs, we desperately need more public investments in education, research, and infrastructure.

A major step toward this change in national priorities is the development of more inclusive and accurate economic indicators than GDP — social wealth economic indicators that assess the real state of our nation. We must show the general public and policymakers both the enormous “back-end” financial costs of failing to invest in people, such as more unemployment, poverty, crime, and despair, and the enormous social and economic benefits of investing in human capacity building so that our nation can weather the sweeping technological changes afoot.

As for our national debt, as another Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, and many other experts point out, it’s actually lower now than during WWII. Rather than increasing with big deficits, U.S. interest rates are at historic lows and U.S. bonds are still the safest investment, which is why so many foreigners also buy them.

Some people argue that foreigners who invest in the U.S. are reaping big profits, Krugman notes, but points out that “America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors.” However — and this again takes us straight to the critical need to re-examine our national priorities — U.S. corporations with foreign subsidiaries, from General Electric to Nike and General Motors, are not America. U.S. companies may be reaping big profits by investing in other nations, but by so doing they are creating jobs overseas and not for Americans.

In short, these kinds of private investments are not the kinds of investments that will economically benefit people like you and me, or that will really benefit the American economy in the long term. What we actually need, and this is urgent given our decline in global competitiveness, is a massive national investment in the work of caring for people, starting in early childhood. This kind of public investment in our social wealth offers the greatest return in both out human and financial wealth.

As Krugman states, “the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.” It’s up to us to demand changes to the ways in which we measure economic success by demanding more accurate indicators focusing on what really matters our social wealth. It’s also up to us to demand that corporations that are doing so well pay their fair share of taxes, so we can invest in the real wealth of America: our people. And it’s up to our president to level with the American people about what our nation really needs at this critical time.

Global Envision interviewed Riane Eisler for this piece highlighting her work and statistical support for caring economics.

Unlearn economics. Forget GDPs and growth rates. Ignore financial institutions (and their crises). Rethink well-being and worth. What do you care about? What in your life holds the greatest value?

This is a good starting place for a conversation with Riane Eisler, author of the highly successful book“The Real Wealth of Nations,” amongst others. She believes it is time for a practical critique of modern economics.

Eisler’s work in the fields of economics, women’s studies and social science has attracted a lot of attention. Some list her work beside great thinkers like Smith, Marx and Hegel. The book “Great Peacemakers” named her one of 20 subjects along with Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Theresa. This recognition is largely a result of her work on developing the ideas of a system of “caring economics.” We caught up with Eisler this week to discuss just what a caring economy would look like and how it might change the way the world works.

Global Envision: What’s wrong with modern economics?

Economics is the study of value, and for decades it has been assumed that value is measured mostly by money. If I value organic vegetables, I will be willing to spend more money for them. It should follow that if the government values organic vegetables, it would support the farmers that grow them. Economists devise ways to assess these values and attach number and formulas to quantify them: net worth, salary, gross domestic product. Flip to any news channel or radio station and you will hear endless debate about these figures as they rise and fall.

Eisler ignores this chatter.

“We have been stuck on a conservation that does not get to the core of the challenges we face,” she says. If economics is to be a measure of what we value and care about, why has it ignored raising infants, supporting families and nursing the elderly or infirmed? The constructs of caring extends beyond human relations and applies to the natural environment. But under both capitalism and communism, land is seen only as a source of profit. “An old stand of trees is only given value when it is chopped down,” Eisler says. “And yet we need them standing to breathe.”

Economic measures have become divorced from the real values they were originally intended to quantify, Eisler argues. For her, this is no coincidence. “Economic systems don’t evolve in a vacuum,” she says. “They are cultural constructs.” According to Eisler, the current system evolved in an environment where nature was exploited and so-called “women’s work” was devalued. Consider this: a women who stays at home and cooks, cleans, gardens, feeds, washes, and rears her three children for 16 hours a day contributes absolutely nothing to the GDP, a measure of a country’s standard of living. Instead, the GDP values only income. This includes the cleanup of environmental disasters, the sale of cancer causing cigarettes, war operations and weapon manufacture.

GE: If GDP is a bad measure of value, what statistics should replace it?

Eisler was ready for this question. In a recent report commissioned by Center for Partnership Studies, Eisler helped to synthesize 14 categories with 79 indicators that more accurately measure well-being, including human rights ratings, the number of premature deaths from pollution, and access to health care, as well as more traditional measures of joblessness rates and average annual earnings.

Eisler also hinted that measuring mechanisms should be secondary to the values behind them.

GE: In past economic transformations, the people with the least have been first to lose their livelihoods.

Eisler assured me this would not be the case. “After all, the majority of poor are women and children and a major reason for this is that care-giving is given no value,” she said. To prove her point, she pointed to societies who have already taken steps to place a greater value on caring. Many Nordic countries, who always seem to score high on human development indices, provide extended paternity leave for both parents, offer universal health care, and support government-funded child support. But can low income countries afford such programs? Eisler acknowledged the challenges they would face but also reminded me of CCTs in Latin America, a government program that financially rewards mothers for taking their children to health checkups and primary school.

GE: With this week’s massive spending cuts by an austere U.S. Congress, could the transition to “caring economics” happen here?

Eisler agrees the signs don’t look good but still remains hopeful. The way she sees it, creating an economic system that values the unpaid work of caring is an investment, not just an expenditure. In other words, the money spent now will be returned in future savings and revenues. And she has the scientific research to back her up. In her book, “The Real Wealth of Nations,” she cites substantial evidence that private corporations have been able to realize savings and increase profits by taking care of their workers.

GE: It sounds like there’s a lot of work to be done. What’s the role for those of us without advanced degrees in economic theory?

Eisler’s answer was surprising: Everything. She believes that interdisciplinary support outside the field of economics must begin valuing the work of caring. Gender equality, civil rights, environmental responsibility, access to quality education, the right to health care, and supporting families are all areas that work towards the goal of overriding the top-down, masculine-valued economic system currently in place.

“Change doesn’t happen quickly,” Eisler reminded me. “It can, but there are many steps that need to be taken.” Eisler is hoping to create a ground swelling grassroots movement that can champion such a transformation. Her foundation, the Center for Partnership Studies is making progress and inviting others to do the same. For example, the foundation offers an online training program where people from all over the world are able take leadership roles in the economic transformation. The next session begins this fall.

“The response to the online program has been wonderful,” Eisler said. But she also mentioned that with the size of this paradigm shift, “We will need more people.”