Helen Keller: Men Have a Lot to Learn about Economics

Helen Keller writing in 1932, three years after the start of the Great Depression, on how women are smarter than men about economics. I was surprised at her grasp of the macroeconomic issues of the day and how easily she wove them into her tale of a husband and wife trading jobs. This is the first part of the essay, but it doesn't fully convey her ideas, so click through if you are interested in reading more:

Put Your Husband in the Kitchen, by Helen Keller, The Atlantic, 1932: In my childhood, even before my education had been begun, I was allowed to take part in the elaborate ritual which, in those days, marked the making of a fruitcake at Christmas time. Although I was blind, deaf, and speechless, the thrill of the occasion communicated itself to me. There were all sorts of pungent and fragrant ingredients to collect and prepare — orange and lemon peel, citron, nuts (which had to be cracked), apples, currants, raisins (which had to be seeded), and a host of other things. ... All in all, this concoction of a fruitcake was a long and complicated task. ...

To-day this ritual ... is fast becoming a lost art. The modern housewife has only to go to her compact kitchen cabinet to assemble the ready-prepared ingredients, even to shelled nuts. ... The cake almost bakes itself in an automatically regulated gas stove, while the lady of the house goes about her other duties. Or perhaps she achieves her fruitcake by buying it in a tin container at her grocer’s. Whether she bakes it or buys it, her labor in either case is simple and quick compared to what it was even a few years ago.

The same thing may be said of almost every other phase of household work. Our grandmothers had to perform a tremendous amount of dreary drudgery in managing their homes. They were kept busy from morning till night, for those were the days when a woman’s work was never done. Since then, however, the machine age has come upon us, transforming the home no less surely than the factory. The housewife of to-day finds that many heavy responsibilities ... such as the baking of bread and the weaving of cloth have been lifted from her... Electricity and gas and innumerable mechanical devices have reduced household labor to a fraction of its former burden. In consequence, the modern woman enjoys a degree of leisure which her grandmother could hardly have dared to dream of. ...

Few of us seem to have grasped the significance of this new leisureliness which has come to grace our households. As a matter of plain fact, what women have done with labor-saving machinery in the home is exactly the reverse of what men have done with it in their factories and offices. The captain of industry seizes upon improved tools as means to increase production, and now he finds the channels of trade clogged with more goods than can be sold; his wife uses them to produce leisure, of which she can never have too much.

The average woman is not very familiar with the complexities of economics, but it seems to me that she has ordered her household economy upon a more solid basis than that upon which men have arranged the affairs of their larger world. In industry, the amazing increase in the use of labor-saving machinery has brought about overproduction, unemployment, and widespread suffering. Either women are wiser, or they have a sounder instinct for economics. At any rate, they use labor-saving devices for the heretical purpose of saving labor, and in doing so they have, I think, demonstrated in their homes a practical object lesson in economics which their husbands would do well to master. While theorists are still searching for the causes of the depression, and politicians remain at loggerheads in their effort to conjure up remedies, I am tempted to think that the perplexed businessman might discover a possible solution of his troubles if he would just spend a few days in his wife’s kitchen.

Let us see what would happen if he did. [...continue reading...]

Comments

[Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD]

Men Have a Lot to Learn about Economics
Put Your Husband in the Kitchen, by Helen Keller, The Atlantic, 1932:
Sir
The word spinsters come from the Worlds War One and World War Two. Why do I talk of spinsters in this column? Simple. The ladies had to sit in the tunnels when the men were flying the small air crafts getting maimed or killed or simply disappearing and lassie mostly single had to hide in the tunnel to keep on feeding the people who stayed away from the wars and the wounded and had to knit the clothes. The fabrics you know, the Chinese now are famous for. Yes sir. That was it. Then came Charles Babbage to see the pattern of the in and out and created what we have the computers from the punched tape. I agree with Helen. But then the changes are so rapid that now I agree to that there are presidents in the countries in the world few I man I can count them off the cuff but that would insult many women and my mama don’t like anything to say about women as they are best at the food recipes and knitting and keeping the shopkeepers busy opening the packets if gifts and refusing and bargaining and the rejecting what was ordered a and what was dispatched and the price was not agreed upon and so forth. Oh the talks and the rumors of jealousy like Shakespeare has said, Women thy name is jealousy”. May be Helen did not have these read.
Economics need the blend of both the supplier and one who need. The nature too has created the NOA’S ark of pairs. One cannot do without other. Can we close this here and let the ladies of India show the Miss World and the Hawaiian and Malaysian the net art of inviting the men to visit their countries or Egypt the belly dancers. Oooh I love these. Men cannot do that sir.

Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD
P.O.Box 6044
Dar-Es-Salaam
Tanzania
East Africa

[Al Buono]

You said:

"I was surprised at her grasp of the macroeconomic issues of the day..."

Why?

[Mark Thoma]

I was just using a phrase that I hoped would encourage people to read more. These ideas were not well understood by anyone at the time - this was pre Keynes - so it wasn't intended as a comment on the writer in particular except in admiration of her abilities. Both the struggle between directed and undirected economies as well as ideas about gluts and deficient aggregate demand are evident.

[anne]

Besides Hellen Keller being a remarkable intellectual, the Atlantic through the 1930s was remarkable for the quality of articles and columns ranging from writings by a Hellen Keller to an Eleanor Roosevelt from civil rights to farm and industrial economics to the arts.

[ken melvin]

Still can't grasp the leisure thing, can we? Capitalism is somehow antipathetic to the idea of leisure for labor? To humanity?

[Brenda Rosser]

The concept of leisure in counter to the intent of exploitation. Why was public transport infrastructure destroyed to promote oil-dependent vehicle use? Why was a consumer culture engineered against the wishes of most informed advisors of the day?

1896 – The Dow Jones makes its debut
1908 The discovery of a bountiful oil field in Iran
1914 The establishment of the US Federal Reserve
1915 – The Armenian Genocide. 1.5 million people killed
1916 – The Sykes-Picot Agreement imposed on the Middle East. Oil
1919 – US a Creditor nation refusing to act like one
1920s – 1950s - General Motors destroying public transport infrastructure
Socially-engineering a consumer culture
1920-40 - Gradual increase in farm production resulted from ever expanded use of mechanized power
1921 British backed coup d’etat in Iran. Oil
1929 – US Stock market crash and the great depression. Global
1930s – Oil story
1930s – the dustbowl The overplowing of the US Great Plains. [commercial tractor farming driven by speculation implicated.]
1931 “The Dow’s Biggest One-Day Jump
1932 – 2007 American oil companies acquire Saudi Arabian oil. US then gears policies to securing Middle East oil at the expense of all else...

Why was our economy designed to run on oil? Who runs our Governments? How many oil CEOs in the Whitehouse today?

says...

Time for me to unfurl my leisure theory of value again. Oh, if only I had the time to persue it. (The idea is that utility is a function of leisure and goods and services - goods (& services) are merely an input into the real production function not the finished product themselves). There are diminishing returns to both leisure and goods (& S). Goods (& S) are worthless without the time to enjoy them.

Our system is set up to maximize the production of goods not the production of utility. I particularly see credit markets and land prices as ratchets that drive irrational self-defeating behaviour here (fruitless competition for positional goods).

[reason]

That was me above - don't know what happened there!

[Alex Tolley]

To some extent, this is a largely an american perspective. Europeans generally enjoy more leisure and will trade off more income for more leisure time - something that US commentators often deride Europeans for doing as if it were some character defect. As for consumption, one of the first things I noticed when I visited the US from England in the 1970's, was how much "stuff" everyone had and the use of garages to store much of it.

However, I do have a critique of the article.

1. The miller and the baker were the village monopolists in pre-industrial times. Assuming that they both had excess capacity, they could serve other villages too. Helen would say that all this extra competition would glut the market, but it is likely that a least a few millers and bakers would give up and do something different. Certainly a baker might keep his ovens and try to develop patisseries and the miller grind those newly discovered coffee beans instead of wheat.

2. The irony that Keller did not see from her time was that indeed the very machines she had brought into the house to save labor weren't even needed. Fifty years later, cooking from ingredients has become a hobby activity. One can live with just the microwave oven and a small fridge and eat mass-produced meals or eat in restaurants. (I've even met people who cannot cook at all). Would she have considered the rise of independent house cleaners who bring their own vacuum cleaners to efficiently clean the home for a few hours a week? I would argue that the very means of production - ovens, vacuum cleaners are slowly being used more efficiently and that we do have more leisure to do different things today than ever.

The pity is that so many people seem to put so much work into "enjoying themselves", as if it was some competitive race to consume as many leisure activities as possible.

[reason]

Alex - nothing to disagree with there. But I should point out that the choice between leisure and work is actually very hard to do as a normal wage receiving individual. The choice is generally made on a political level.

[evagrius]

The article should be mandatory reading ( and an essay required on it) for every college student, no matter what the discipline.
It should also be required reading for all bureaucrats in the Fed and other economic deparments of government, federal, state and local.

[evagrius]

By the way, the scenario reminds me of some 30's screwball comedies.

[Alex Tolley]

Reason:

I should point out that the choice between leisure and work is actually very hard to do as a normal wage receiving individual. The choice is generally made on a political level.

If you are referring to taxation policy, then yes that affects leisure. But personal choices do intrude:

1. Europeans have longer standard vacation days than in the US. Is this the result of politics, a legacy of "holy days" or accepted standards for each country? (probably a mix.)

2. In the US, there is a, admittedly small, trend to negotiating longer vacations rather than higher salaries amongst professionals. This seems like personal choice to me.

3. Using technology to stay in touch with work or not. I think the use of cellphones, Blackberries and laptops to stay in touch with work during vacations is more a US phenomenon than a European one, but that is anecdotal rather than statistically based. Given vacation is pre-paid, why should behaviors differ based on anything other than personal choice and peer pressures?

[chris]

You know, I grew up only knowing about HK from stupid jokes. I just looked her up on wikipedia ... I had no idea she was so accomplished! The woman was unbelievable!

[gaddeswarup]

I missed this article before but an abridged verion of her autobiography (and Thoreau's Walden) were prescribed text books for us. May be it is her influence, the economic management in our house was always done by my wife. And, I have been doing most of the cooking for the past few years.

[Richard N.]

What about the micro side of Helen's arguement, "He forgot that the sole purpose of any economic system is to facilitate the manufacture and exchange of the necessities and luxuries of life, in order that life may be made easier and finer. Like many another captains of industry, he had come to consider business, not as a means toward this end, but as an end in itself." I think the husband isn't acting like a capitalist since he isn't concerned about the long-run supply side of the situation. Why would he bake ten cakes when the market only demands, give or take, two. If you looked at from the long run supply side baking anything over 3 cakes would produce a lost profit outcome. Maybe the husband is more of the "let's create artificial demand through advertising" type

[reason]

Alex Tolley...
next time you go for a job interview ask for more leave than fellows in the office. Look through the job ads and see how many TELL you how much leave you can have. The fact that at the margin SOME people can make such decisions personally doesn't change the fact that standards of leave are either set by law or have been negotiated by unions in the past and remain as a culturally accepted standard. In both cases, politics has driven the process.

[prostratedragon]

Gee, this really looks like fun ...

Actually, Ms. Keller's comedy is a lot more sophisticated than any actual screwball movie I can quickly think of, in that the premise is not how inept Mr. Jones is in using the kitchen machinery —pancake batter all over the kitchen, etc.— but how inept his thinking is about the possibilities afforded by the kitchen machinery. Pretty sharp. Somebody shoulda filmed it.

[Cyrille]

Personal experience: I got an offer from McKinsey WITHDRAWN when I asked how many paid leave days there would be.
Not that I complain too much, I would not have been happy there, and in fact may have turned it down, but it says something.