Neva Say Neva

To give just one example: standard economics textbooks all repeat that there are essentially three kinds of economic activity: production, exchange (or distribution), and consumption. In the textbooks on which I'm the lead author, we make the point that this leaves out an essential fourth activity: resource maintenance. How can you produce bicycles, cars, or anything if you don't maintain your production tools and machinery? How can you exchange goods and services if you don't maintain the social and physical infrastructure -- laws and communications systems? How can you "consume" (that's the term that's used) the pleasures of leisure time (music, cooking good food, athletics) if you don't maintain a healthy home and body? How can you produce, exchange, or consume anything at all if you don't maintain a healthy ecosystem, with clean water and air and other essentials for human existence?

For teachers who are not ready to adopt a text that is not virtually identical to all the others that have evolved from Paul Samuelson's Economics, I oversee the writing of teaching modules, downloadable for free from our website, which can be used to structure a class, or a week's worth of classes, around such topics as climate change or tax policy, or to insert into a mainstream micro- or macroeconomics course an overview of the environmental issues that are missing from the standard presentation. (These have been downloaded by teachers -- and others, such as people in NGOs -- in about 85 countries.)

Reaching out to researchers and other readers, in academia and elsewhere, I have edited two book series. One, "Evolving Values for a Capitalist World," deals with questions like how to steer different elements in a society toward a more long-run vision of what matters; various approaches toward corporate responsibility and irresponsibility; or how to understand the relationship between rich and poor, in terms of what kinds of assistance are and are not useful. The other book series, "Frontier Issues in Economic Thought," is designed to lure researchers, through irresistibly convenient summaries of fascinating articles, into areas such as ecological economics; the consumer society; the difference between economic goals and normal human conceptions of well-being; the changing nature of work; inequality; and the social and environmental sustainability of economic development.

Those are my intellectual pursuits -- the things I really like to do. Then I also spend a certain amount of time in administration at the institute (something I don't feel I'm especially good at) and, alas, fund-raising. Writing proposals can be a creative act -- but I'd rather be writing textbooks or editing other things.

In 1971, when my children were ages 3 and 1, I spent a year in France, rather isolated from adult companionship. Before leaving this country, I had stopped at the U.S. statistical office. You might well ask: Why would a young mother and aspiring novelist do that? It was because I was so conscious of the value of parenting, home health, and nutrition activities, and other kinds of homemaking -- now known as "caring labor" -- as among the essential activities for any society; and I was also painfully aware of the low value our society places on such work. It seemed to me that there was almost an inverse relationship between pay, which in our society is closely correlated with respect, and the importance of different kinds of work for the quality of life. Home-based caring labor is normally paid nothing. People who do the actual work of raising food, along with grade-school teachers, social workers, nurses, and others who contribute most to society's health and well-being, come close to the lowest end of the pay scale.

I had an idea that I called "robbing Peter to pay Paula" (sexist, I admit, but based on reality), which was about levying a tax on all income; the money raised would go to pay for the work people do in their own homes to create the basic environment for healthy, happy children and adults. I spent a good deal of time that year studying the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. Census, 1970 (my great find from the statistical office), figuring out how much of the gross domestic product would have to be taxed out and recycled back in to provide even minimum wages for this essential work. (The answer came out at a little over 25 percent. I've later learned that other such calculations have been made, generally coming out between 20 and 33 percent.)

I remember sitting with tears running down my face as I looked, in the statistical abstract, at the figures for farms -- the number of farms declining every year. I knew how much heartache went with the loss of most of those farms. (Total farm acreage, by the way, hasn't declined; this is a story of big farms absorbing small ones.)

I guess I should have known, when the statistical abstract could move me to tears, that I was headed for a career change. But it wasn't until 1975, when I was 13 years out of college, that I went back to Harvard to do pre-calculus, econ 101, etc. -- and on up through a Ph.D. at Boston University.

The question that motivated me, to start with, was: Why don't wages reflect the real value of work to society? The question that continues to motivate me is: How can we change the socio-economic system so that our human values will be better reflected in the signals we give, which in turn determine the character of that system?

In these terms, environmentalists are now embracing the universe -- nature and people. That's really good.