Interview

Questions and answers on Marilyn Wiring's work:

- In Counting for Nothing you say that our international accounting systems do not take into account many things, especially the work of women and the cost of environmental damage. Can you elaborate on this?

There is a very simple rule in accounting and that is if something is valued only if there is an exchange in the market, then the reproductive and productive work of the environment does not figure as visible in the equation. Unpaid community work, unpaid caring work for a dependent person, unpaid household work, is in fact the social capital that enables the whole of the economy to function. But if you are not visible as a producer in the nation's economy, then you are not visible in the distribution of benefits either. So people who do those things are either called economically inactive or they are called a problem of welfare because we have to give them a benefit in order for them to do these things. It would be fine if it was a system that was only used in the private sector and only by some elements of government in terms of things like working out investment options, strategic plans around productivity, trying to assess labor needs etc. But the problem is that this unit-dimensional set is used as the basic data on which all policy is made. And at that point, as it actually measures things that are hugely destructive as good for the economy, then it is a pathological system. (Waring 1995)

I am definitely not on the fringe anymore, I am definitely mainstream, and people get taught about what I wrote. People who once criticized what I wrote now write newspaper columns that say they knew it all along and that they invented the critique. I mean the caveats are constantly entered. However while there has been work around genuine progress indicators and there is some very promising work around time-use surveys, and while there are far more different data collected about a lot of things now, there still have to be major doubts at the interpretative capacity of people driving the main desks in the worlds finance departments. You have got to work very hard with social science research skills because economics to a certain extent deals with figures but people treat it as objective science. Economics is a social science just like any other social science: it is no more rigorous than psychology, for example. Unfortunately that is not something that gets through. It is very funny the way they play it: you frequently find economics being taught in the business departments of universities but it is a social science. It still tries to wear shoes that are far too big for it.

- How did you start working on the issues that concern you?

Sometimes I think that one of the biggest changes you can make being an academic is to give people permission to think, permission to step outside the square, permission ...