Let's take a simple example:
If you can drink water from your well or nearby creek, the benefit of that water and the survival it offers you is without value in monetarist accounting systems, such as those used by the boys in charge since WWII. It simply does not exist in these accounting systems as "value".
But if your creek or well becomes contaminated and you have to buy water filters, or use more fuel for boiling drinking water, that is counted as "economic growth," because manufacturing and the exchange of money now has to take place for you to drink clean water and survive. If the water becomes truly undrinkable, i.e. contaminated in ways that filtering/boiling does not remove, then you have to resort to ever more energy- intensive practices (distillation, or the shipment of water over long distances to sustain your life). All this activity is considered positive in neoclassical econ theory.
The more energy and raw materials you now have to burn to maintain what was once a simple and natural function provided by a healthy biotic infrastructure, the more contemporary economists see "improvement" in the situation: the economy "grows" with every middle-man, technocrat, engineer, lawyer, materials scientist, truck driver, bureaucrat, inspector and police officer who gets involved in the business of you drinking a glass of potable water. If we now expend several tens of thousand BTUs to get one glass of water into your hands, when previously you just walked to the creek and dipped a bucket in, that's considered "economic progress".
[One is reminded irresistibly of the evangelising colonialists in the S Pacific who were absolutely shocked by the notion that native people could live fairly comfortably off their local resources without many hours of hard labour in each day. They were "lazy," said the missionaries, and needed to be taught the value of productive work :-) ]
One of the great contradictions of late industrial society is this placement of positive political/social value on destruction of what is renewable, cheap or free, and naturally abundant -- positive value is placed on artificial scarcity, damage, extinction, rarity, costliness, and eventually synthetic replacement. In the name of "efficiency" we have made many human needs harder to meet, more expensive to meet; and in the process we have convinced ourselves that doing so is "good for us" because it means more profit can be skimmed off the long chain of supply at each stage in the game. The more damage is done, the more effort it takes to overcome the damage, the more people can be employed and money spent in the countermeasures or cleanup.
Or perhaps one should say that it is not an undifferentiated "we" who have become convinced that endless centralization, complication, outsourcing, distancing, etc. are good for us. Those who skim the lion's share of the profit also own the mass media, exercise undue influence over political process, and tell us on a daily basis that this is all for our own good :-) (of course how "good" it is for you depends where you are situated in the economic food chain.)
Winterson (and the rest of us who hope for a saner, less violent, and less marginal life for women all over the world) is up against two powerful forces, not just one: there is the perpetual problem of male aggressiveness and the propensity for war and armed conflict; but there is also this relatively recent ideological and political problem to contend with, the economic redefinition of damage, crime, depletion and exploitation as net-positives. As Marilyn Waring memorably points out, when a Third World woman carries water several miles from a well, grinds corn, digs her vegetable patch, cooks, and feeds her family, her activity is "non-economic" and therefore "non-productive"; when a man operates a whorehouse, sells drugs or arms, smuggles, cuts down rainforest for lumber, etc., he participates in a cash economy which many economists argue should be figured into the real "prosperity" of a country, whether it is above or below the "legitimacy line".
So pimps, drug dealers and arms salesmen contribute to prosperity and economic "advancement," but a women hoeing her taro patch does not. This definition of prosperity is surely misogynist as well as preposterous.
"Economic growth," or "the politics of More" as it's sometimes called, is better fueled by doing things wrong and doing them over, than by doing them right and doing them once. Rural self-sufficiency, frugality, subsistence and barter economies (systems in which women tend to have more influence and local power than in industrialized/cash-crop/sweatshop economies and FTZs) are anathema to the growth economists.
Another example close to home: crime is "good for the economy." Say someone steals your TV: you go out and buy a new TV. Your purchase of the new TV increments the GDP/GNP and makes neoclassical economists happy. If you catch the thief, the whole process of incarceration, trial, litigation, etc. swells the GNP/GDP and makes economists happy.
If the thief goes to jail, he joins the large captive labour pool made available, below minimum wage (at taxpayer expense), to the transnationals; the larger this labour pool, the fewer jobs they need to offer to unincarcerated persons at real wages; the lower their labour costs are, the higher their profit margins become: stock prices rise, economic growth, happy economists. The bigger the prison industry becomes, the more people it employs, the more construction it generates -- happy economists.
Even if the thief kills you and gets away, your funeral expenses swell the GNP/GDP and make economists happy. If you're not personally burgled, but the fear of theft inspires you to put bars on your windows and buy an expensive burglar alarm, those purchases also make economists happy.
The more money people have to spend to overcome problems that afflict them in daily life, the happier economists are. There is something horribly wrong with this picture.
Critics of the neo-classical school have a simple slogan that sums it up: Economists Must Learn to Subtract. I'd suggest there is a feminist issue here as well: many of the things economists must learn to subtract -- crime, violence, environmental damage, impoverishment and displacement of ethnic minorities -- primarily harm and marginalise women. And this is another reason why our economic gurus find it so very easy to leave those items out of the reckoning.
It might have been Paul Hawken who suggested that the "economic hero" of our time is a thrice-divorced man with a heavy alcohol habit and terminal cancer :-) His sorry life history has "contributed" more to what economists call national success than that of a healthy, nonaddicted, non-litigious individual leading a quiet and contented life. He has certainly "contributed" more, in economists' eyes, than his ex-wives ever did by maintaining home and family, doing more than their share of unpaid domestic labour, minding and comforting kids, etc.
As a side note -- if the theoretical economic hero and/or his ex-wives were wealthy enough to hire a domestic servant to do all the household work, that work would magically have become "productive" and contributed to making economists happy. Same work, different woman: totally different accounting.
Even our hero's eventual expensive, protracted and agonizing death will "contribute" more to the economy than a quicker and more merciful exit. Paul (or whoever the guy was) was trying to show that the "growth economy" accounting model values destruction and "victimizes" even its most privileged participants (rich white men). But even more telling examples can be made, I think, by feminists. Women are also economic heroines, willing or unwilling.
... by ignoring or underemphasizing the vexing issue of environmental causes, the breast-cancer cult turns women into dupes of what could be called the Cancer Industrial Complex: the multinational corporate enterprise that with the one hand doles out carcinogens and disease, and with the other, offers expensive, semi-toxic pharmaceutical treatments. Breast Cancer Awareness Month, for example, is sponsored by AstraZeneca (the manufacturer of tamoxifen) which, until a corporate reorganization in 2000, was a leading producer of pesticides, including acetochlor, classified by the EPA as a "probable human carcinogen."-- Barbara Ehrenreich, "Welcome to Cancerland', Nov 2001, Harper's
Here is one way to fuel a "growth economy". Seek profit by enticing farmers into dependency on expensive petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers; maintain profit by cheapskating on safety standards and responsible waste disposal methods; maintain profit by investing in lobbying efforts to overturn or prevent environmental protection regulations; maximise profit by investing in growth markets -- such as the steadily increasing incidence of cancer in industrialized nations. And of course, protect profit by keeping the pharmaceutical interventions as costly as the market will bear.
It's like perpetual motion: polluting causes illness, illness generates profit. If you invest in both sides of the game, then the toxic byproducts of your own manufacturing processes are transformed into additional profits for the other branch of the firm. It's also like a Mafia-controlled town. Our salesmen offer you fire insurance. If you refuse to buy it, our arsonists burn down your business. Then our lumber yard and our contractors help you rebuild -- at a price. It's always been possible to play both ends against the middle if you can control enough capital.
Everybody wins in the toxicity game: more doctors are employed, more chemists, more lawyers, more insurance company adjusters, more professional staffers for the ACS. More overpriced medicines are sold. Pharmaceutical stock prices go up. Your pension plan and mine "do well" since the mutual funds we invest in are often diversified across big pharm, insurance, and HMO corporations.
The only loser is the individual woman (the 40,000 individual women) dying of breast cancer every year. It may be that our economic hero will over time become a heroine, as environmental cancers start to outstrip "elective" cancers (such as those produced by overindulgence in smoking and drinking) in lethality. Profits are not really generated spontaneously out of nothingness, as our giddy economic gurus currently preach. Somewhere down the food chain, they are taken out of someone's hide -- or life expectancy.
All this absurdity -- that economists, who have enormous power in today's governments and policy-making bodies, are made happy at least half the time by misfortunes, waste, loss, and pain that make ordinary citizens very unhappy -- is based imho partly on a deep and patriarchal bias against recognizing the value of anything but tangible property, currency, and things. With this goes a long patriarchal agenda of converting everything into tangible property, currency, and things -- including women.
There is great resistance to any recognition of the traditionally-dismissed-as-female resources of connection, family, responsibility, mutual obligation, care, etc.; and there is the same resistance to recognizing "unimproved" or "unexploited" natural resources. Biotic infrastructure is not recognized as valuable until men have "capitalized upon" it, in much the same way that a woman is recognized only as an inferior version of a man.
Over time I have come to agree more and more strongly with Waring: an essential task for feminists is to grapple vigorously with the exclusively monetarist, propertarian, and masculinist definition of "value", "worth", and "economy" -- so that we can stop counting, e.g. land mine manufacturing as an unalloyed social "benefit," while devaluing and ignoring the unpaid hours and years of life that women invest in caring for the victims of land mines; and we can stop counting e.g. the disposal of nuclear waste as a "growth industry" with "great economic potential" -- and so forth. There's a Kafka-esque frisson of horror in my heart when I read (excerpts from Advertising Age and other industry rags) that the PR companies who service the big pharm corporations really do see breast cancer as "the next big growth sector for pharmaceuticals."
Critics of neoclassical economics often ask how "the economy" can be divorced so entirely -- so psychotically even -- from what is good for ordinary working people. This dissociation is even more painful and severe for ordinary working women, who still bear the first shocks of -- and are hit hardest over the long haul by -- such trends as job flight, the "tempifying" of American labour, etc. Women overseas are hit hardest by the brutal "economic reforms" imposed by the IMF and WB on indebted nations. Women in general are on the front lines and vulnerable not only to modern wars, but to modern economic theory: when poverty bites hardest, it is the daughters of the family who will be forced into prostitution first. Female mammals are generally more sensitive to environmental toxins, and are used preferentially in laboratory experiments in toxicity and carcinogenicity. Canaries in the coal mine indeed.
IMHO women do need to "take a stand against this male madness," as Winterson says -- but not only against the soldiers and their cult of destructiveness. We need also to confront the professional economists who reckon up the profitability of war and its "possible warming effect on the American economy," who reckon on "opportunity markets" in breast cancer, who preach the joys of downsizing and outsourcing (mass firings and sweatshop labour, in other words) to our business leaders. We need to downsize those damned economists.