If from the encyclical Laudato Si’ we have learned that “everything is interconnected”, Fratelli Tutti teaches us that “we are all connected”. And thus we ask how can the economy change if we are to maintain together people, relations, society and nature, the care of our common home. And we necessarily need to find the answers to some questions.
How can we bring together the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth? How do we ensure the costs of the energy transition do not fall onto the poorest?
Which sort of sensitivities should we adopt in order for Covid-19 containment measures not to become automatic mechanisms that increase inequalities, as we are witnessing now? (In this sense, we need enter a dialogue without prejudice on measures such as UBI).[1]
At the same time, we need concrete and contingent responses.
To do so, we need to look at things with a different kind of eyes. Let me focus on two considerations.
1. Drawings, language and measurements
What economic theory does not see… it destroys: if economic theory, through its lenses, does not see certain realities and possibilities, then the economic and political world operate in a way that ruins and annihilates them. For example, this is the case of environmental goods: before the environment became an economic good, when starting new constructions, new companies, new activities, no one considered the environmental impacts they would produce. Only when damage to the environment became evident, they introduced the new category of environmental “goods”. At the same time, if the economy sees and cultivates, it transforms things into categories of efficiency. If the economy starts to see the importance of relationships, then we see, for instance, paid listening services emerging (www.rentafriend.com).
With our graphs and language, we are used to think that the more we have, the better, as Kate Raworth states. In a passage of her book “Doughnut Economics”[2] she says: "spatial metaphors such as ‘good is up’ and ‘good is in front’ have become deeply rooted in Western culture, shaping our way of thinking and speaking... It adapts to the profound conviction, expressed by Paul Samuelson in his textbook, that ‘although more material goods are not in themselves the most important thing, a society is happier when it progresses’”. (p. 61). And she concludes that a profound change in our metaphors is necessary: from ‘good is upwards’ to ‘good is in balance’. And therefore, when we approach SDGs, we should ask ourselves whether the most suitable measure to represent their evolution is one drawn on a Cartesian plane.
From another point of view, this is the right moment to change some measurements that are now standardized in international accounting standards. For example, the treatment of training expenditures as an investment in human capital, and not as a cost that reduces profits. The so-called human capital should be considered an investment, and not a cost: if I hire and form people, I have a cost as a company; if I buy a machine it is an investment. The formal motivation for all of this is that people cannot be considered a company asset, in that they are not property of the company and the latter does not have total control over them. These principles were established following the abolition of slavery: slaves were considered the company’s property. Perhaps, accountancy of the 21st century should consider that thinking of work as a cost to compress is a new form of slavery for workers, and this principle should be rethought.
2. Work as care – care as work
The pandemic has allowed us to rediscover the importance of care: we have experimented, because we had to go without, the value of a hug or a caress. Care is a dimension that we have failed to adequately foster in our societies. In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis writes: “Let us admit that, for all the progress we have made, we are still ‘illiterate’ when it comes to accompanying, caring for and supporting the most frail and vulnerable members of our developed societies” (FT 64). We know how to reach the moon, but we haven’t learned the language of taking care of each other. We may know how to do that in our inner circles, but it is not a social attitude. And yet, work and care are two fundamental dimensions of the human being. How come, through work, we have managed to advance and reach enormous progress, and we are far behind when it comes to the ability to care? I would like to give a perhaps bold interpretation. We have not learned from the alphabet and the semantics of care, because we have always relegated it to the private sphere, and particularly to women. This led us to socially consider care as something that is less relevant when compared to other aspects. We all agree that work gives us dignity, to the point that not being able to work represents social suffering, other than economic. We see work as human flourishing and realization. But this does not extend to care. Are we personally and socially convinced that taking care of other people, not just family, is something that makes us worthy of living on this earth? What does it mean to take care? It is about gestures of attentiveness, taking care of who needs at any given moment: helping an elderly person to eat or get dressed, reading fairytales to a child, cleaning rooms if those who live there cannot do it, and so on. We are not talking about organized professional care. Usually, when we meet a person for the first time, we introduce ourselves, and we ask them: what do you do? What is your job? What do you study? We do not ask them: who do you care for? Care is usually considered as a distraction from more important jobs, “outsourced”, usually to women or people who do it on behalf of others and live off of this, often miserably. The very fact that remunerations to those who carry out these jobs for a living are lower than average suggests that care does not have a high social consideration. We need to bring back care to the public scene. We should not accept the fact that there are legislators and decision makers that do not have something to care for. Pandemic responses seemed to be more effective in countries where women had responsibility roles. Could it be because they have experience in caring?
To better balance work and care times, and to give everyone (men and women) the ability to learn how to take care of one another and of nature, a proposal comes from Canadian philosopher, Jennifer Nedelsky.
Nedelski's proposal is to work less and to devote oneself to care-giving activities. The hours freed from work could be returned to society in a different way: caring for children, the elderly, the weak, in the family and in the neighbourhoods of reference, and for the cultivation of our relationships and our humanity.
In order for it to be a eutopia (good place) and not a utopia (not place), it would require a collective commitment and a broad vision, a long-term horizon. Starting to compare is a first, necessary step, which could represent the start of a process.
END NOTES
[1] http://www.humandevelopment.va/content/dam/sviluppoumano/vatican-covid19-response/doc-newsletter/economics/book/COVIDComm-Wk2-economics-21-April-2020.pdf
[2] Raworth, K. (2018), Doughnut Economics. Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Random House.