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Naila Kabeer People are saying that today's levels of global inequality are what they were at the height of British, of the empire. You know, we have reached that level. No matter how hard you work, save money, etc., nothing is going to get you to the next run-up. (...)
Sanam That's Naila Kabir, professor of gender and development at the London School of Economics and a member of the UN's high-level expert group on Beyond GDP. (.) This is If You're in Charge. I'm Sanam Naraghi Anderlini.
Kavita Ramdas And I'm Kavita Nandini Ramdas. Welcome. We're going to talk economics today. About bloody time, I'll say. (..) It's so great to hear Naila, isn't it, to sort of have her kind of spell out for us the actual costs of this craziness.
Sanam And also kind of the whole question of what is GDP and where it came from. We all, everybody throws GDP around, but what do they actually measure? I've always wondered about that, right? It's like, and also this whole idea that, you know, your GDP of the state goes up, but people are getting poorer.
Kavita Ramdas And it's certainly not about what the current perpetrators of war seem to care about, judging by Mr. Trump's recent statement about how he doesn't really care what the average Americans cost at the petrol pump or the gas station, as they call it in America. They don't really care.
Sanam The other side of that coin is the New York Times did an article about the cost of war. I did one looking at the cost of war to civilians and Iran as a nation. But the New York Times one looked at it in terms of how many jobs are lost. And it's something like two to three million jobs may be affected in Iran. And in a war where they used and they weaponized Iranians and the well-being of Iranians, Iranians' human rights, as an excuse to go to war. So between what's happening in the U.S. and then what's happening in Iran, and then globally, in terms of the cost of fuel and fertilizer and all these other things, they really don't care. But they're making a lot of money on the stock market themselves, which is also incredibly frustrating.
Kavita Ramdas Yeah, didn't you just say, Sanam, that violence costs the global economy $19.97, almost $20 trillion annually, which is 11.6% of the GDP that we don't know what it actually measures?
Sanam It's, you know, and that was in 2024. So this adds to it, right? Like, I mean, this year, in terms of what damage they've done, that's adding to it. And the other thing which I've just found soul-destroying was that the U.S. has decided for 2027 that their defense budget is going up to a trillion dollars. That's our taxes going up to, and it's borrowed money, right? It's more borrowed money from the future. Borrowed money from the future and China, maybe. (.) And also, the war, just the sort of daily cost of the war was $25 billion so far that they've counted. It's going to be a lot more than that. And this is at a time when, yeah, they're cutting back on social services and education and infrastructure. They're here, everywhere. It just, you know, who's making these decisions? It's very depressing to feel like we have no say and yet we're paying for it. Like, you know, I just find it very frustrating. I'm like, I want to, are we allowed to withhold our taxes? Yeah.
Kavita Ramdas Absolutely. Which is why I think it was so great for us to listen to Naila, as a feminist economist, give us a little bit of a sense of this reframe, right? I mean, she was talking about how global inequality has returned to sort of the age of empire levels, you know, literally sort of going back to colonialism. And despite the sort of situation that we find ourselves in, where we're absurdly paying for wars we can't afford, because actually we've taken out loans to pay for those wars, essentially, reminding us that we somehow seem to find money to pay for things that don't do the world any good. But then we don't think about a critical issue like protecting the planet.
Sanam It's the connection with the deficit and democracy, because the money that we're putting into wars now is going into private companies. I just came from this talk about the use of AI in warfare and specific targeting in this war on Iran. They had, they targeted a thousand places in the first 24 hours, right? And this is just AI giving them the information and they, and they go and, and they, you know, um, whatever, they throw a bomb and missile and whatever. But all of this technology is actually, um, owned right now, or most of the sort of progressive stuff is in, is in private companies. So it's not actually public, you know, it used to be like the Pentagon and you'd think there was some kind of a state owned, you know, process. But this is now, it's, it's, it's a handful, literally a handful of small companies getting all of our money and we have no say.
Kavita Ramdas I mean, it does make you wonder, Naila references the Stiglitz reports on inequality. And she mentions that finally, mainstream economics is beginning to take what feminist economists have said for a long time, seriously. And I was just thinking about the fact that people just dismiss this whole notion of a care economy, right? Such a core part of what feminist economists have predicated for us. And I was wondering, Sanam, if, for example, you know, you know, that phrase, I'm looking forward to the day when the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers, there'll be free education and healthcare for all. (.) I think it's predicated on this notion that care isn't actually included in GDP. And yet it's the core work that women do. And it's the core work that actually fuels all other work.
Sanam I went for a mammogram the other day and it's, you know, national health. I walk into the hospital. The person who guided me to where I had to go was Eastern European. The nurse who registered me in was clearly sort of not British African. She had, she was clearly an immigrant. And the technician who did the mammogram was Filipina. And this is in the week that Nigel Farage's reform party that is anti-immigration has just won lots of council seats, right? And they want to get rid of immigrants. And I was thinking this Filipina lady was trained in the Philippines. So the government of Philippines trains her and pays for, invests in her. But the globalization is such that she's better off, sadly, coming and working almost a minimum wage job in England, which is a care job, right? Than staying in her own country. So it's the exploitation. Yep. It may not just be about minerals or colonization of that form. It's also human exploitation, but largely in the care economy. Absolutely.
Kavita Ramdas And I think that was and has been this extraordinary contribution of economists like Naila, like Amartya Sen, who people often, I mean, I brought him to the Open Society Foundations under our Ask a Feminist lunch series. And it made George Soros sit up and he was like, Amartya Sen is a feminist? And I was like, yes, in fact, he's the founder of the Feminist Economics Journal. And he was the person famously who talked about the missing women in economies, China and India and Korea because of sun preference.
Sanam Coming back to Naila's work, the fact that they're looking at new indicators of societal well-being or, you know, how well a country is thriving in terms of GDP. One of the questions I was discussing with her privately was, can one of the indicators be about the vibrancy of your civil society? So not just, you know, what's the reproductive health care situation, but do women and ordinary people, can we do volunteerism? Is there, are there civil, is civil society being funded to do the good work that it does in terms of social cohesion and so forth? So these kinds of indicators are different.
Kavita Ramdas That's the paradox you've also mentioned about Iran, which is that, yes, you can have a oppressive theocracy at one level of a regime. And yet the paradox is, is that you can have incredibly vibrant civil society and women making their own choices and choosing agency, even within that context. And I wondered if you might say a little bit more about that, Sanam, because she, she, she talks about the Bangladesh paradox in her book.
Sanam Iran is, is, is fascinating. First of all, I think it's, it's important to acknowledge that it's, you know, it's layering, right? So, so you go back a hundred years and it was, you know, girls' education became a norm, right? And then the revolution at one point they wanted to push it back, but within that group of revolutionaries, there were those who are also social justice folks. And so it was about having, you know, separate girls' schools and boys' schools, but also the hijab became the pathway to public life for women, both in universities, but also in the workplace. So you could be a traditional, isn't it, it's amazing, right? So fascinating. You could be traditional, but so long as you put on your hijab, you came and worked in the office, you went to university. We now, in Iran, 65% of university professors are, are women. And I think they're the majority of students also in university. Yes, yes. That, that's been a long time. But my, my father used to say, it's a river. You can't stop this river. And he said, you know, in the old days we would have the odd, you know, secretary, right? But they were not significant. They were almost like kind of just perfunctory, like little dolls that you had. He goes, now you have women in significant positions with responsibility. And, and his, his point was one of the, one of the things he laughed about was he goes, people, people who can be bribed because they can do stuff and, and they want to be bribed because, you know, you end up with a system that's economically defunct. Well, if you're, if you're a senior enough woman, you're going to play the same game. So it's this weird, yeah, juxtaposition of, yes, you have a theocracy, as you say, and the mandatory hijab, but then the hijab has been a way for women to come into the workplace. And then how they then navigate that. And now the hijab is now gone.
Kavita Ramdas The mandatory hijab is de facto gone. Part of the reason for us to talk economics and part of the reason I think that for those of our listeners who are interested in another podcast worth listening to, Naila as one of, as the outgoing chair of the International Association of Feminist Economists, just told me about a new podcast they've come out with on feminist economics. So for people who want to listen to Radhika Balakrishnan and Naila and Veronica Gago, an Argentinian feminist economist, maybe that's a place where they can listen to more specifics about economics. But I think you and I learned a lot from this conversation with her.
Sanam So, yeah, I, yeah, it was, it was very, very enlightening and, and also just, at least for me, as making me feel a little bit less stupid. I was like, thank you for explaining without making us feel dumb. (..) Take care, my dear. This has been fun. Yes. Thank you. Lovely to see you. Yeah. And, uh, and, uh, and I hope, I hope everybody enjoys this conversation and, um, you can find us wherever you find your podcasts and, uh, listen and share and, and go back to the previous episodes as well. And I hope it gives you the inspiration that we all need right now. (........) Naila, it's really wonderful to have you. You are the professor of gender and development at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics. You're also on the UN Secretary General's Advisory Council. High-level expert group. High-level expert group on what, exactly? On beyond GDP. Beyond GDP. Excellent. Okay. So, assuming that certainly I am not an economist, even though I've been adjacent to economists for many years of my life. And I'm not an economist, although I've been adjacent to economists for much of my life. What, what do you mean by beyond GDP? What's, what's the premise there?
Kavita Ramdas And why is it important?
Naila Kabeer How many minutes have we got? Okay. Back, I think, around the time of the Second World War, et cetera, when countries like UK and the US needed to know how much wealth they had in order to be able to fight the war and prepare for the peace, they decided to count what was being produced in their countries. And this was supposed to be the wealth of the country. And they counted it by looking at what people were doing. And if they were doing it for the market, you know, for price or profit, it would be counted. The whole thing would be added up. And that was the country's GDP. And that told you how much wealth the country had, you know, to do with it as it wished. The problem, of course, is that the GDP, by relying on market prices, excluded some very important things. For instance, you and I and Kavitha will recognize the fallacy of excluding the unpaid work that women do within the home, in the fields, gathering fodder, fuel, and so on. It excluded that. It excluded nature and the environment unless we were making money out of it. It excluded whether the GDP was equally distributed or unequally distributed. So as long as a country grew, it was supposed to be doing well, even if half of the people or 80% of the people were below the poverty line. And finally, interestingly, it made no distinction between the production of what you might call goods, like medicine or food, and the production of bads, like almonds. You know, all of this, as long as it made money, was counted as a part of the GDP. And over the years, there has been growing dissatisfaction about the way we measure how we're doing by how well we're doing in the market. And that dissatisfaction has become far more intense as we see that this growth, the money, the profits that are generated by the market, are being monopolized by fewer and fewer and fewer people. So today, we are in danger of being ruled by a handful of oligarchs, most of them men, I have to say. I don't think that's a coincidence. And many of them in the United States, and I don't think that's a coincidence. So I think that dissatisfaction with the GDP as a measure of not what profits are being made, but also how well we're doing as a country, how well we're doing for the future, how well prepared. It's coming to a head, I think. I mean, there's been many, many attempts to go beyond the GDP. And so we're hoping the Sustainable Development Goals was an attempt to go beyond the GDP, but there were too many of them. So I think this panel is trying to come up with a manageable set of indicators that every country will gather information on and will tell that country and everybody else how well it's doing on the things that matter. So our job is to work out what are the things that matter.
Sanam That was brilliant, by the way. I don't know how you did that.
Kavita Ramdas Thank you for explaining that so well. You're an expert. //S00: Excellent, excellent.//
Naila Kabeer No, but what are the indicators? Just that and then, yeah. Well, I'll tell you the kinds of things we're looking at. We haven't come to a complete consensus, but we're converging. Some of these indicators are exactly what you would expect. Health, education, a clean environment, decent jobs. So in collecting those indicators, which are about well-being, we're also actually collecting indicators about inequity and inequalities. And so you can talk about jobs, but who's getting the jobs? Who's getting the pay? Who's getting the money? Who's doing all the work that continues to be unpaid? (.) Who gets to see, drink clean water? Who gets to breathe unpolluted air? (.) And then we also have to think about the future. To what extent the way we're proceeding, consuming at levels or producing at levels that are eroding the natural base for the future, and we're leaving future generations with far less or maybe with nothing. So the challenge for this panel is we are determined not to go beyond, you know, the SDGs, I think, at 150 to 150 indicators. It's far too many. I think we're trying to be very disciplined, you could say very narrow, but narrowness involves discipline, to get enough indicators, let's say 20, 25, that enough countries will agree to collect as a part of their collective effort to find out how we're doing. And more and more, I think it's not possible to just look at what's happening inside a country. Carbon emissions are not, don't observe national boundaries. You cut down the forests in the Amazon, it affects us all. So more and more, the spillover effects, Trump imposes tariffs. That's an American policy, but it affects the world. So more and more, I think we're looking at the spillover effects between countries. Quite difficult, for me anyway.
Kavita Ramdas Naila, I first met you and you were introduced to me as a feminist economist. Are the things that you've just described, the desire to go beyond the narrow market definitions of a gross domestic product, which is what GDP stands for, was that something that emerged out of an alternative set of conversations amongst yourselves as economists? I mean, both Amartya Sen and others like yourselves have committed to a notion of a feminist economics, and there are annual conferences. Can you tell us a little bit about what that field means and what it has meant and how it has influenced the kinds of questions you as an expert group at the UN are able to talk about?
Naila Kabeer Sure. I think the beyond GDP agenda and the things that I've mentioned are not the product of any one group. Certain groups were exercised by inequality, you know, austerity. Others really cared about the environment. If I think feminists have contributed one major piece of the whole picture, it is unpaid care work. And the extent to which that unpaid care work is not just about people, it's about the planet. You know, women are at the front line. They're looking after their families. They're looking after doing all the unpaid household work. But they're also at the front line of biodiversity. And why is that? Some people might say it's because they're women, but I don't think it is. I think it's because they have been marginalised from all the mainstream markets. They have also been given the responsibility of looking after. And looking after means looking after your family and looking after the environment. I want to give you a little story here, if I may. When I was doing research in Bangladesh, I came across this woman and she used to, through microfinance, she got some cows. She was rearing that. And every time the cows were taken for slaughter at the Bakrid thing, she would weep. And I thought, you know, well, what did you think, you know? But what I hadn't understood is she loved the cows. And it was only when my friend in Pakistan, Haris Kastah, talked about how these women talked about loving their cows and not really wanting to see them being eaten. That I began to realise that, you know, we think of love as something being invested in families and children and mothers and fathers. Love is also invested in all growing things. If you bring up a plant or you bring up, you know, it's a very expansive notion of love. Yeah. And I think that is something feminist. So, feminists have talked about care and they've talked about care as not just a set of activities that you do, but as an ethics. It's a way of, you know, caring about the world around you. So, I think that has been the major feminist contribution. I don't hear that focus on care and interdependence in quite the same way in these other advocates of beyond the GDP.
Sanam I came across this type of, you know, this angle on economics and GDP through the work of Radhika Balakrishnan, who's also involved. Who is at the moment in London? Oh, yes, exactly. And so, so what I loved about her work was that she was layering indicators of well-being on the universal declaration of human rights and saying, why don't we measure GDP, gross domestic product, or however you, whatever term you want to use, around the delivery of shelter and food and free time and so forth. And moving it beyond private and public, right? She was saying, you know, the rule is everybody in a country needs to have access to clean water.
Naila Kabeer Yeah.
Sanam Now, if the state can provide it in urban areas and a private company is willing to come along and provide it in rural areas, that's fine, provided that there's no price gouging and there's no, and the quality of the water is the same. It's possible to do that. So, has there been any shift in the discussions and in any implementation? Is any country picking this up and saying, hey, this is how we want to sort of assess and measure our development or the state of our being? Are you seeing any progress in any particular place?
Naila Kabeer Yes. I think there are countries that have adopted a well-being approach. I think New Zealand and in Scotland, you know, there are these scattered countries. And, of course, Bhutan, with its happiness, doesn't mean they're happy, by the way. Just because you've adopted a measure of happiness does not mean all Bhutanese people are happy. So, you know, we should ask, what are the results of these measures? But going back to Radhika's work, there are two things I'd like to say about the issue of human rights. And, you know, it's under attack at the moment from all different quarters. And one of the things I've found through my own research in Bangladesh, in India, is that the law, the law gives us a language that allows for contestation in a way that religion and tradition do not lend themselves. We can all come together to renegotiate legal reforms. (.) It's very hard to do it about tradition, because who are the keepers of tradition? And it's even harder to do it with certain kinds of religion, because certain people set themselves up as the experts and are accepted as the experts. So it's only when we turn to the law, and with the law, we can talk about human rights as an alternative ethics to the ethics of religion and culture and so on. So I think that whole thing around human rights is becoming even more important, particularly as we watch some countries just tearing up the rules around rights. The other thing that Radhika is doing right now, you know, as a part of the work in our program, is she's trying to see what the rights discourse would look like if we extended it from human beings to the living planet, so that our relationship with things that we eat, you know, people have been eating plants, eating animals, you know, so that it doesn't rule that out. But it rules out making a huge profit out of it. It rules out wasting it. It's a part of regeneration. You know, it allows the earth to regenerate itself, because we are recognizing its rights. Now, this is a view that I have come to very recently myself, because I've always thought of environmentalism as a luxury for people who have enough. You know, something that poor people can't afford because they have to live. But now I realize increasingly that environmental destruction is actually hitting the poor hardest. If we want to see a more shared prosperity, environment becomes central to the agenda of poverty reduction and, you know, redistribution. So this has been a recent shift for me, you know, from...
Sanam But it's been part, I mean, the question of indigenous communities and how they manage the forests, how they manage the ecosystem and so forth has always been there, right? It's always been there. But we also have to recognize that indigenous communities have their own forms of inequality. Yes.
Naila Kabeer I mean, if we look at the indigenous people in Jharkhand and all that, there is an indigenous form of patriarchy. Oh, of course. Absolutely. Acknowledge the wisdom that they bring from having had to depend and be interdependent with nature without necessarily idealizing them. You know, I think that's important.
Kavita Ramdas Or romanticizing other forms of inequality that are built into indigenous systems.
Sanam But in an environment where the UN literally has just put out an SOS saying, hey, we're going bankrupt by the end of the summer. Do you wake up in the morning thinking this is, you know, this is just a sort of a theoretical exercise? Or do you actually see that you're laying the foundations for a change? I mean, are these ideas being picked up? Do you imagine that in five or 10 years time, we're going to have a change in the way we... In other words, what's keeping you up at night, Naila? (..)
Naila Kabeer Or what gets me up in the morning? Well, I'll tell you something. Again, I talked about, I used to think of the environment, the concern about it as a luxury for the rich. You know, something that... Now I think despair is a luxury for the well-off. I do not think we can afford to despair. I really don't. And we can only do what we do as well as we can. So you do what you do. It gets you out in the morning. Of course, you could give in to complete existential depression at the moment. Because every morning you pick up the paper, you think, what now? What next? So for me, I just think, okay, what we're doing on this panel and what we're doing through the various pieces of research do not feed directly into social change. But they're the background you need. You need to have these facts and figures. You need to be a voice attempting truth. Yes. In a sea of misinformation and alternative facts. Yes. So that's what academics do. And that's what researchers do. And, you know, I am fortunate that in spite of what's going on in the world, I can lose myself in my work. And I think all of us have found a place in the world that allows us to lose ourselves. Because otherwise, you would give in to despair. We saw a film in the 70s, I think. It was called Threads. It was called What Happens After Nuclear Holocaust in Britain. And the threads are what bind us together. And it just comes apart. And that was the fear then. Today, you don't know what to fear most. You don't know whether to fear for climate change and how people are accelerating it. You don't know whether to fear the warmongers. You don't know whether to fear the rise of orthodox illiberalism. You know, there's a lot going on in the world that is not very...
Sanam But losing yourself in this work, but also putting together some of the ideas, it's imagining the future in some ways. And it actually reminds me, I was recently speaking at a panel on UN-80. And I went back to some work that I did 30 years ago. You know, the UN didn't just come out 80 years ago. It was built on 500, 600, 700 years of thinking from the Persian poets to the Renaissance, where literally the ideas of, you know, the law should determine how things go. Might is not right kind of thing. And I'm like, 500 years ago, these guys were thinking about these ideas. And they're not around to see the fruits of what they thought about. And the destruction. I hope we don't. Yeah. And I hope that we're not waiting another 500 years. But we've been talking about this idea of the imagined future. And it comes to the question, if you were in charge, charge of whatever you want it to be. That's right. If you were in charge, what would you do?
Naila Kabeer What is it that you would like to do and see right now? But if I'm in charge, does that mean I have to take the world as it is? Or can I imagine a new world?
Sanam You can start with where we are and say how I'm going to change it. I mean, just to be vaguely real. (.)
Naila Kabeer I'm going to start with where we are and the whole issue of growth. Okay. And I think we do need people to be productive. I think we do need things and ideas and all kinds of things. So the idea that people should engage in forms of activity that contribute to their own and the well-being around them is a good one. I'm not against that. You know, you can call it wealth. You can call it prosperity. Whatever. (.) Growth has got a negative meaning now. But one of the things that really bothers me is that we don't make the best of the talent that we have in the world. You know, there was a poem we learned in school and a line of it that has always stayed with me right through my life. And it's two lines from an Elegy in a Country Churchyard. And it is, Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and wastes its fragrance in the desert air. So beautiful. And what that means is there are so many talented people that never get a chance to show their talents. So I would retake the way that we look at childhood, starting with children. And I would say whoever is born, right, they don't have to decide there and you don't have to decide there and then what they're going to be when they grow up. Neither their gender, nor their sex, nor their talent, nor their class, etc. We should all have the opportunity in order to maximize the wealth and prosperity of a nation for every child to be allowed to grow up free of expectations and roles. (.) And then there would come a stage in their lives when they might say, well, I want to be a poet. And you wouldn't say, well, you're going to be a working class poet or a female poet. You know, you would be a poet or you would be a builder or you would be, and if you don't like sanitation work and a lot of people don't, well, you know, we'll have to find some way of organizing that. But I think that business of not allowing every person's talent to flourish, your talent is what you want to do most, right? Because that's where you can be the most expressive and the most. So I think if we had such a world, then I think we would be maximizing our potential. (.) We would be comfortable in who we are. We might even stop coveting my neighbor's goods at a local or a national level. I mean, I'm not a philosopher of war, so I can't tell you what creates war. But I suspect there's a deep dissatisfaction with what you've got and a need to somehow dominate and dispossess others. So I just feel, I mean, that's what we all want. We want to live in harmony with nature, in harmony with each other, not be driven by envy. But we can only have that if we have an egalitarian distribution of what there is.
Kavita Ramdas Naila, I love that you as an economist have such a romantic, poetic vision.
Naila Kabeer You're stereotyping economists.
Kavita Ramdas I was never a proper economist. No, no, no, I'm not stereotyping economists. I'm just saying that I think one rarely hears economists being free to express the ways in which actually they envision their work coming to fruition. And actually what I just heard for me is a wonderful expression of exactly that, which is it's a marvelous combination of both the individual and the collective, which is sort of saying if one allows for the individual to flourish in a space that is conducive and supportive, then really you're ensuring that the collective will also flourish in a way that is supportive. As long as you said, there's an egalitarian framework holding that together.
Sanam Naila, from what you're saying, you know, I'm looking at the state of the world right now and my kids who are 20, they just turned 25. (.) And thinking about their generation and how they're going to live. I mean, how do you have housing? How do you actually sort of have a grown-up life and have children or, you know. And the fact that we don't value creativity, the fact that we don't value teaching or even medicine anymore, or whether it's productivity with your hands or services, and instead the money is literally in the hands of finance. You know, the guys who don't do anything other than move money around, they just make money, make money, wouldn't be straight-jacketed into roles.
Naila Kabeer You could be somewhere along a continuum of, you know, it's, it would become, you would be allowed to be who you want to be.
Kavita Ramdas To me, what you just described is sort of what you would do if you were in charge. We also ask, what's a radical idea that you don't think should be radical? And in a way, that's what I meant by saying, as an economist, you just expressed a radical idea that has nothing to do with a economic value, per se, of the ability to dream about who you want to be. And I think that there is a way in which perhaps we haven't created enough space for that. But I was also thinking that when Mamdani ran for mayor in my city in New York, that's also strangely what he gave voice to. He allowed especially young people to dare to dream that they could do something that everybody said was impossible. And so I think that that's something that I would love to hear a little bit more from you about, whether you feel that there are other examples that you see around you. You said despair is not for us. We don't have that luxury. And I think that certainly here in New York, I can tell you at the end of a very rough year, it was the one bright spot of news. //S01: And for so many of us who were involved.//
Naila Kabeer And for the world, actually, yes. Yes.
Kavita Ramdas So we do need those examples of people who are unwilling to give up.
Naila Kabeer Well, on a more mundane note, I would say that this new report that's been brought up by Joe Stiglitz and a whole lot of other people that, you know, Joe Stiglitz, et cetera, at the behest of the G20 at South Africa. You know, here is a much more mainstream economist. You know, I'm kind of on the fringes of economics. It's taking inequality as the biggest challenge of the day. Because if you think of the world I would like to create, it doesn't require everyone to earn the same amount of money. I don't think anyone, you know, you don't want to flatten everything. But you do want to make sure that we all have the fundamentals of life. And from that, we can flourish. And we also want to make sure that people can't make that excessive amount of money because there are no rules in the market. How can it be possible that Elon Musk is worth the billions that he is, except by gambling, except by gambling?
Kavita Ramdas I mean, now it's a trillion. He's worth a trillion dollars.
Sanam It's unimaginable. It's also a government subsidy.
Kavita Ramdas Yes. I mean, let's, right, it's also that. Absolutely. I mean, socialism for the rich is accepted and socialism for the poor is absolutely, you know, considered to be horrific. So if you give free childcare, that's horrific. But if you give Elon Musk a huge subsidy to build a Tesla compound. The fossil fuel industry. And the fossil fuel industry.
Sanam Growing up, I remember in our school books in Iran, we had the story of Albert Schweitzer, you know, who was this German doctor who went to Africa and, you know, helped. Yeah. I mean, the heroes of the past were people who provide, who did service.
Naila Kabeer Yeah.
Sanam The heroes are today. I mean, Bill Gates, who made money doing Microsoft, he now gets to speak about healthcare. Why? You know, it's, there's something about this, this idolizing of these incredibly wealthy men and not actually holding them accountable for the horrific things that.
Kavita Ramdas There are young men in all across Hyderabad who have huge posters of Elon Musk up in their rooms because he is considered to be the tech guru. And all these young men who want to become computer engineers and scientists and come to work in the United States have sort of created, you know how, Naila, in Hindu tradition, you can have pictures of gods and goddesses. Because apparently Elon Musk has that kind of status now in so many homes, there's a framed picture with a garland around it.
Sanam This guy has 15 kids. He's got three wives in court who are, you know, he doesn't look after, he's on drugs all the time. I mean, what has happened in terms of who it is that we revere and so forth. So, so yeah, this, this worship of money era that we're, I don't know whether, I'm sure it existed in previous times, but at least before you felt that maybe the church or some, or there was some moral framing or social shaming that contained it.
Naila Kabeer Whereas now we don't know, it's a free for all. Yeah. It's a free for all. You know, markets have gone global. I mean, there are no rules and regulations anymore. I think even under the most, even under the caste system, for all its, you know, egregious nature, even in the caste system, there were mutual obligations. Yeah, exactly. The landlord had a duty, even if that person fled him to become a commodity.
Sanam There was a connectivity between, a vertical connectivity between the, yeah, there was an interdependency. That's, that seems to have gone.
Naila Kabeer Reproduced, obviously. Yeah. And in that sense, the market might have offered an arena of freedom, but when the market becomes this complete, you know, monolith, I mean, it's got a life of its own.
Kavita Ramdas And it isn't free, right? Because if the state is giving a break to one sector and penalizing another sector, so for example, why should childcare be as expensive as it is, or education be as poorly rewarded as it is, meaning how much teachers get paid or how much childcare workers get paid, whereas the armaments industry has constantly given a break in terms of efficiency or how well it produces or even whether you've paid. There was something recently in the New York news about, you know, the cost of toilets on a jet plane or something and, you know, how nobody decided to even look at, look at what that was, you know, involved. (..)
Naila Kabeer Another example, I'll give you another example of this asymmetry in the way that the state is, if you look at the, the, the crisis, the financial crisis, you know, it was austerity for the work, for the poor. And it was bailouts for the banks. Correct. You used public money to bail out the banks and then you impose, you cut the public sector, you accuse them of being greedy and assy. So very soon in Britain, we saw the shift in the blame from the banks to these greedy public sector people who have pensions and God knows what else.
Sanam That in the States was also really horrific because people were sold houses that they clearly could not afford. So it was a whole fraud system. Of course, this was, you know, this is the American dream. They, they have their house, they're, they're trying to keep it up. And instead of helping them maintain it, which meant that neighborhoods would then also be maintained. Correct. They ended up, you know, evicting people, which then destroyed the rest of the neighborhood. And, and meanwhile, the bankers, you know, got away with it. It just, the whole thing was so bizarre.
Kavita Ramdas I mean, it, it, you're. Yeah. Going back to your, to your comment about this recent report, Naila, can you tell us a little bit more about why it is important for us to understand inequality? And what hope that actually gives us if we, you know, as you said, sometimes it can feel dry, but here's a mainstream economist and a report coming out talking about why inequality poses a threat to the world that we want to see. We're not economists, Sanam and myself, but we'd love to understand a little bit more. Is that a radical idea? You know. And is that the radical idea that, that we, that shouldn't be so radical? I mean, if we were going to ask you that question, does it pertain to this?
Naila Kabeer You know, we've always had inequality, right? It's not, it's not new. What we've had since the seventies with the, uh, onset of neoliberal deregulated markets, et cetera, is people are saying that today's levels of global inequality are what they were at the height of British, of the empire. You know, we have reached that level. Because in between, we went through a period when the state was trying to manage the economies and so on. Why does it matter? It matters because that no matter how hard you work every day of your life for your children, whatever, save money, et cetera, nothing is going to get you to the next run up. You know, no, because, because that money is being monopolized and being appropriated. The profits are being appropriated through perfectly legal mechanisms by the people at the top. So if you look at the share of labor income compared to what is being taken by capital, it has shrunk and shrunk. And of course, at the bottom of all this is our women who are doing, you know, like two thirds of the world's unpaid work and earning one third of the world's money.
Kavita Ramdas On our podcast, Naila, we ask us a certain set of questions to all of our guests. And one of them is, you know, Sanam referred to that, if you were in charge, but also if you had the resources. So let's say somehow magically those unequal division of resources were to fall into Naila Kabir's very capable hands. What would you be doing if you were in charge and if you had the resources to be able to shift some of these dynamics? Where would you begin?
Naila Kabeer I am very clear about what I would like to see as the backbone and the foundation of every economy. And that is human capabilities. I would, I would have a life course approach that we invest in people from the day they're born. (.) They live, you know, they survive to the next five years. They are healthy. They have reasonable education, education that allows them to choose who they're going to be. That there's health services provided as they get older, that maternity care, you know, everything that is due with a human being would be central. And I think that is the kind of growth that would result that you would want.
Kavita Ramdas And is that a state, is that a state responsibility then?
Naila Kabeer It has to be regulated collectively. Okay. But it can be delivered by all kinds of, it can be delivered by cooperatives, it can be, profit should not be the overriding goal. You know, you can make a bit of profit here and there, but it should not be what determines, I'm going to give this to you and not to you. You know, that's the problem with profitability. But if it's done on a cooperative basis or on a collective action basis or even small scale enterprise, there's all kinds of ways where you can keep exorbitant profit out of the picture to make sure that these basic, you know, Amartya Sen's concept. Yes, human capabilities. Inner, inner capabilities as well as the physical. So inner is to be able to imagine a different world, to be imagined, to be able to assess what you don't like about the world you live in and what is the kind of world you would like to live in and to be able to fight for it. You know, so I think for me that everyone should feel like they have a chance in life. And I think the most frustrating things, and that adds up collectively to war, is the frustrations that people feel about their own future.
Sanam Naila, so just to end, what in your work, in the, you know, in the institutions you're involved in, what is genuinely giving you hope now? (..)
Naila Kabeer Tell you, I've just brought out a book, and it's called Renegotiating Patriarchy. (.) And I think it has lessons for all of us who live in very oppressive forms of patriarchy. I hear after the July uprising, you know, women talk about overthrow patriarchy. Nobody in Bangladesh, no woman in Bangladesh is ready to overthrow patriarchy. They're not looking for revolution. They're not looking for the restoration of patriarchy either. So I think the idea of renegotiating your way in a territory that you know, where you know how to navigate the constraints and make sure of the opportunities, that has given me hope. And I'm hoping, we have to now watch the elections that are coming up in Bangladesh. And I'm hoping that common sense of ordinary people in Bangladesh will overcome some of the stridency that I'm hearing amongst the kind of the talking classes. You know, it doesn't mean the talking classes are right or wrong, but I feel they're sometimes out of touch with that pragmatism that allowed women in Bangladesh to make some remarkable progress. So I think documenting the strategies that they used, documenting the forms of agency that people in the most oppressive circumstances can nevertheless exercise without overthrowing everything, that gives me hope. And I think a lot of people who've read my book in Bangladesh really like that possibility, because it doesn't make you confrontational with everybody. Yeah. It doesn't make you confrontational with the people you care about in your family, in your community.
Sanam You know, we have a, there's a Persian poem that we used to learn in second grade or third grade during my time. And it's a story of a little mountain stream that comes down and hits a big rock, and it says to the rock, would you mind moving aside so I can carry on going down? And the rock, of course, is absolutely not. And of course, the stream erodes it slowly and becomes a river. And I think of that so often in terms of this very pragmatic, as you say, non-confrontational, just persistence of that human need for justice and dignity, whether men or women in authoritarian states or otherwise. But it doesn't have to be top-down, violent, you know, as you say, confrontational. It can be from within, and it can be a slow process, which is much more sustainable often. But it's less visible.
Naila Kabeer Because it carries people with you.
Sanam Yeah, exactly, exactly. Correct. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Naila. It's great to talk to both of you.
Kavita Ramdas Thank you so much, Naila. This was so exciting. (..)
Sanam This was If You Were In Charge, a podcast brought to you by ICANN, the International Civil Society Action Network. Get in touch and tell us what you think at info at icanpeacework.org and follow our newsletter. Like and subscribe, and please tell everybody else who might like the show. My thanks to ADA Productions for making the show possible. to a little monster media for our music, and of course, to my amazing co-host, Kavita Nandini Ramdas. And finally, to all of you for listening. We'll be back soon. Thank you.