Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Story About Women and Econo... by Katrine Marçal

Future societies will look back on economics as a kind of foolish male mysticism, and Marçal’s book anticipates the tone of their laughter. It’s not human nature, not biology, just a matter of time. For her part, Marçal makes a radical suggestion that patriarchy, having operated for “thousands of years of history,” is bound to come to an end. The literal translation of the book’s Swedish title, Det enda könet, is “The Only Sex,” which seems to speak to a French feminist tradition that views woman as a product of structural conflict with man. Marçal rejects Lagarde and the “Lean In” brand of feminism that imagines women, economically, as heretofore repressed men. In short, the thought experiment is meaningless. Thousands of years of history would need to be rewritten in order to lead up to the hypothetical moment that an investment bank named Lehman Sisters could handle its over-exposure to an overheated American housing market.

Marçal has little tolerance for this kind of ahistorical thinking:Ī world where women dominated Wall Street would have had to be so completely different from the actual world that to describe it wouldn’t tell us anything about the actual world. That is to say, women might have a better temperament for managing global capitalism. Marçal quotes Christine Lagarde, then French Minister of Finance, who surmised that things would have turned out differently if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters.

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Story About Women and Econo... by Katrine Marçal