To solve today’s crises, economics must move beyond masculine ideas of output growth

For the problem of too few women at work holding growth back, our answer is to enrol more women in formal jobs. The complication? With overall jobs limited, women will compete with men in a job-scarce market.

For the problem of low-productivity farm work keeping India’s overall productivity down, our answer is to move people from farms and rural areas into cities and industry. Complication: Cities and industries are not providing enough jobs with decent wages.

For the problem of AI displacing human labour, the answer is to employ more people in care-giving work that AI cannot do. Complication: Who will pay for care services? The market may not expand that quickly and state budgets may be unable to afford the bills.

For the problem of unpaid care-giving services in ‘informal’ family and community settings, the answer is to value this work more. Complication: Equating the worth of human beings with their income and wealth is a deeply ingrained social norm. If more money has to be paid for it, who will pay it?

Such inter-connected problems cannot be solved separately by specialists in their respective fields. A feminine worldview is required to solve them at a systemic level.

If we tackle them bit by bit, the solution to one can backfire on others. It is common sense that intractable problems cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that caused them. Paradigms are hard to change, as Thomas Kuhn explained in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, because those most empowered in a prevalent paradigm resist change for fear of losing their power and wealth. That is why the Papal church suppressed the discovery that Earth and humanity are not at the centre of the universe.

Francis Bacon had declared at the birth of Western science in 17th century Europe that science and technology would give us the power to overcome unruly nature.

Modern technology has enabled us to improve our productivity by replacing labour with fossil energy. It has raised agricultural yields with factory-made fertilizers and insecticides, plus the mechanization of large farms that reduce human work. Markets for mass-produced products have expanded with fossil fuel-powered transport and storage systems. Economies of scale have been achieved.

Unruly nature, however, is striking back at human hubris. We are proving unable to control climate change caused by the excessive use of fossil fuels for technological improvements of productivity and output. Vaclav Smil, the Czech-Canadian environmental scientist, analyses the circulation of fossil-fuel based energy in the modern economy in his book, How the World Really Works.

Smil reveals that the globalized food production system has become the largest user of fossil fuels and calculates that small-scale organic farms, with diversified crops that cater to local markets, are the most sustainable solution for reducing harmful emissions and preventing soil damage. They employ more humans, but, as he points out, productivity gets reduced only if measured the way economists conventionally measure it.

Smil points out that food is more fundamental for human survival than AI, which also requires huge amounts of energy, much of it will be from fossil fuels for now. Tech evangelists argue that it will work out for the best in the end. Perhaps, it will, but as with all major technological transitions, which always take decades to work their way through the system, the most vulnerable people will suffer. This is a problem that few are willing to take responsibility for.

Climate change is not the only systemic problem humanity must solve over the next few decades. The UN Sustainable Development Goals list 17, including deficiencies in public health and education systems, inadequate social protection, persistent poverty and growing inequities.

All must be addressed simultaneously. Scientific solutions to mitigate climate change are no good for humanity if they exacerbate other problems. This is the fundamental flaw in our top-down and scientifically siloed approach to solving systemic problems.

We need a paradigm shift in how we tackle global problems. One, we need dense and local economy webs, not global supply chains. Two, we need systems based on cooperation, not competition. And three, we must empower the voiceless in discussing and developing solutions.

Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009, was awarded for her explanation of how local communities cooperate to govern their ‘commons.’ The second woman winner, Esther Duflo, won in 2019 for her work in examining micro-systems centred on human welfare, and the third, Claudia Goldin won in 2023 for her work partly for explaining biases against women in labour markets.

It is time for a new economics that values the work of caring for and sustaining lives more than the work done to increase economic output. We need a feminine way forth to replace the masculine approach of hard competition and scale domination.

The author is writer of ‘Reimagining India’s Economy: The Road to a More Equitable Society’.