Feminist Economics Kritik - Michigan 2024 STARTER

https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/phc3.12774
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2022/04/16/in-defense-of-rationality/
https://law.stanford.edu/2013/04/22/sla-2013-04-22-in-defense-of-economics/
https://www.dickinson.edu/news/article/5570/please_dont_call_it_the_dismal_science
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/09/ever-happened-feminist-economics.html
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1097&context=wmjowl
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-2942-8_8
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/homo-economicus-must-die/
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003264200-3/advocating-feminist-economic-policies-lila-caballero-sosa
https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/false-feminist-economics-methodenstreit-competition-versus-cooperation
Fem K Organizing
Notes/FAQ
A policy 1AC makes predictions about the world- if we don’t have IP XYZ will happen. In order to make a prediction like that, you have to have a theory of the world/how people in the world act and make decisions. For IP the most common “theory” aff authors are using is rational choice theory- the idea that each person makes decisions by trying to maximize their expected well being. Since people behave this way, rewarding them for inventing something with a patent will incentivize them to produce more goods benefiting all.
“Rational choice” is the common thread that unites theories of economics considered “orthodox”- even though Keynes and Friedman disagree on almost everything, they both agree on rational choice and thus Keynesianism and the Chicago school are both orthodox. Heterodox economics refers to theories that make a major break from the foundational assumption of orthodox economics (specifically “neoclassical” economics) and most of this relates to profit/motivation.
Many of the cards give examples of historical events or quantitative studies that disprove the foundational assumptions of IP (profit needed to motivate action) -this is how you should debate the case rather than read generic impact defense. Spend your time explaining why the aff authors/theories are wrong about how they view the world and therefore incorrect about the need for IP protection.
Why is this file so small?
Most of you will roll into your debates having personally prepped/highlighted less than 5% of the packet. As a result no one knows anything and the debates are generally of very poor quality. In the average K round each side is only reading 10-15 cards on average, so reducing the size of the file for packet debates is an attempt to make it easier for you to have reviewed/prepped everything. In order to improve at something like debate, where each round is made up of hundreds of individual decisions, and actions, you need to focus on small pieces at a time. When you don’t have to waste time/mental energy thinking about hundreds of cards you can focus on other things. Everyone will know the small number of aff/neg arguments, so “winning” can only be achieved by going deeper/getting better.
What should be in my 2AC?
Your 2AC should consist of cards from this file, and analytic arguments defending your case. Things that shouldn’t be in there
-extinction outweighs
-weigh the case/you need links to the plan
-cards from other files about other arguments
This is a critique of method/epistemology, and the things above are completely non responsive. Camp is the time to learn things, please start here.
1NC Materials
1NC Shell
Economics and policy making are profoundly gendered -fixation with objective facts and accurate predictions retard acquisition of useful knowledge by creating analytical blindspots
Harding, PhD, 95
(Sandra, Can Feminist Thought Make Economics More Objective, Feminist Economics 1:1)
When the values and interests to be identified by researchers are those that differ between individual researchers or even recognized research communities, the neutrality ideal can be useful. Here feminists have stressed that it has not been vigorously enough pursued. (It has its limits here, too. My point is only that it also has its uses.) But when culture-wide values and interests shape research projects, the neutrality ideal is notjust useless; even worse, it becomes part of the problem. It defends and legitimates the institutions and practices through which the distortions and their often exploitative consequences are generated. It certifies as normal, natural, and therefore not political at all, the policies and practices through which powerful groups can gain the information and explanations that they need to advance their priorities. As two feminist postcolonial critics put the point, modern science's claimed neutrality is "a politics of disvaluing local concerns and knowledge and legitimating 'outside experts"' (Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya and Vandana Shiva 1988: 60). Such information and explanations may well "work" in the sense of enabling prediction and control. However, this obvious fact does not end the matter. One form of explanation that "works" may at the same time obscure or draw attention away from other regularities and their causes that would suggest other possibilities for organizing nature and social relations. One can get information about the natural and social order that makes possible the accumulation of wealth by the few and misery by the many, or other information that makes possible the equitable distribution of means to satisfy basic human needs for food, shelter, health, work and just social relations. Moreover, the regularities of nature and social relations that make possible healing a body, charting the stars, or mining ores may be explained in ways permitting extensive, though not identical, prediction and control within radically different and even conflicting, culturally local, explanatory models. The kinds of explanations favored by modern science are not necessarily the most effective ones for all projects - for example, for achieving environmental balance, preventing chronic bodily malfunctions or distributing access to scarce resources fairly. The fact that societies with massive investments of public resources in natural and social science research have not been interested to prioritize such fundamental human problems is itself illuminating. "It works" is no guarantee that "it" works for explaining all of nature's regularities and their underlying causal tendencies, that "it" is the only reasonable explanation of a given phenomenon, or that "it" does not also generate systematic ignorance. "It works" is no guarantee of cultural neutrality (cf. Harding 1994, forthcoming b). This kind of argument is widespread in U.S. anti-racist analyses and in the postcolonial science studies and development literature, including much work now generated under U.N. auspices as that institution tries to grasp why forty years of conceptualizing "development" primarily as a matter of science and technology transfer from North to South has largely resulted in the dedevelopment (and worse) for the vast majority of the South's peoples. (Cf. Vernon Dixon 1976; Susan Feiner 1994; Goonatilake 1984; Harding 1993, 1994, forthcoming b; Nandy 1990; Petitjean etal. 1992; UNCSTD forthcoming.) The neutrality ideal functions more through what its normalizing procedures and concepts implicitly prioritize than through explicit directives. This kind of politics requires no informed consent by those who exercise it, but only that scientists be "company men" (and women), following the prevailing rules of scientific institutions and their intellectual traditions. This normalizing politics frequently defines the objections of its victims and any criticisms of its institutions, practices or conceptual world as agitation by special interests that threatens to damage the neutrality of science and its "civilizing mission," as an earlier generation saw the matter. Thus, when sciences are already in the service of the mighty, scientific neutrality ensures that "might makes right." Feminists in every discipline have argued that androcentric "might" has all too often appealed to neutrality-maximizing standards in order to justify as "right" distorted descriptions and explanations of natural and social regularities and their underlying causal tendencies. We need a concept of objectivity, and methods for maximizing it, that enable scientific projects to escape containment by the interests and values of the powerful. This only weak concept of objectivity, that remains contained by the neutrality ideal, can't do it. What is the mechanism in scientific processes through which neutrality, and thus objectivity, is supposed to be maximized? Method is supposed to "operationalize" neutrality and, thus, achieve objectivist standards. However, method is conceptualized too narrowly to permit achievement of this goal. For one thing, method - in the sense in which students take methods courses or a research report describes its methods - is conceptualized as functioning only in the context of justification when hypotheses are being tested. It comes into play only after a problem is identified as a scientific one and after central concepts, a hypothesis and research design have already been selected. It is only after a research project is already constituted that methods of research, in this conventional narrow sense of the term, start up. However, as critic after critic has pointed out, it is in the context of discovery that culture-wide assumptions shape the very statement and design of the research project, and therefore select the methods. Moreover, it is well known that the availability of a research technology that was itself selected in earlier contexts of discovery and found productive frequently helps select which scientific problems will be interesting to scientists and to funders (cf., e.g., Strassmann 1993a). And cultural interests, values and relevances always select which problems will get to count as important ones for research. Of course in the "mangle of practice" (Andrew Pickering 1991) during the research process, hypotheses, representations of the object of knowledge and research technologies are adjusted to each other such that an important element of objectivity is produced without the promise of total neutrality. The world constrains our beliefs without uniquely confirming them. The "positive" neutrality ideal has blinded us to the costs of limiting our understanding of "method" only to techniques that standardize or otherwise obscure the values and interests represented in the results of research. Even the U.S. National Academy of Sciences - certainly not a den of wild-eyed radicals now argues that the notion of research method should be enlarged beyond its familiar meaning of techniques to include the judgments scientists make about interpretation or reliability of data, ... the decisions scientists make about which problems to pursue or when to conclude an investigation, ... the ways scientists work with each other and exchange information. (National Academy of Sciences 1989: 5-6) All three of these expansions of the notion of method make dear that methods can themselves be selected because they advance local social values and interests. Thus methods aimed only at eliminating all values and interests from the results of research have no way of detecting the ones that first constitute scientific problems, and then select central concepts, hypotheses to be tested and research designs. The issue I am raising is that some normative influences on research evidently advance the growth of knowledge and others retard it, but the "positivist" understanding of method lacks any way to identify which are which; moreover it is incapable of detecting the most widespread cultural assumptions, such as androcentric, economically elite or Eurocentric ones, that invariably lead to only partial and distorted representations of nature and social relations. (15-18)
(Insert link)
The gendered division between productive innovation and inefficient care destroys economic and social sustainability
McCluskey, JD Yale, 20
(Martha, Prof. Emerita@BufflaoLaw, Law and Economics Against Capitalism BUFFALO Legal Studies Research Paper Series Paper No. 2020 – 009 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3815158 )
D. Law and Economics Revives Gendered Separate Spheres The foundational law and economics division between economic productivity and social responsibility is thoroughly entangled with the longstanding ideology of separate gendered spheres (further structured by race, class, sexuality, geography and other status markers). That ideology centers the economy on private production by autonomous interest-maximizing actors, set apart from social “reproduction” associated with hierarchical private relationships of altruism, dependency, and moral authority. Law continually reshapes that separation by designating some labor and interests as components of valuable production deserving public support and authority, while constructing other labor and interests, particularly those associated with feminized domesticity, as non-economic personal qualities, private responsibilities, or costly dependency meriting private sacrifice and submission.61 Even though the efficiency-redistribution binary does not explicitly assign its distinct spheres by gender, it draws on this gendered ideology and history for its narrative force. Nancy Fraser analyzes how unjust and destructive power gets mobilized and masked by defining and enforcing the boundaries of the economy, with those deemed inside entitled to exploit and expend the people, resources, and activities identified as relegated to the outside spheres of social reproduction and nature.62 Similarly, Angela Harris explains that the American political economy “was built on . . . [and] continues to reproduce relations of caste through property, race, kinship in the space marked ’the social.’”63 The exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from many U.S. labor law protections is one example of how law sets the economy’s boundaries to reinforce social caste. To instead direct the economy toward human flourishing, Harris urges law to challenge how the “social” determines “[t]he lives that matter and don’t, the populations that are and are not ‘native,’ the poor who are and are not deserving.”64 Law and Economics reinforces this systemic, gendered, subordination of the “social” with its core idea that well-being is inevitably dependent on and subordinate to an economy independent of social quality. During the Covid-19 pandemic, political pressures to support the U.S. economy by lifting public health restrictions regardless of human cost followed an ideal of economic well- being that assumes many people will need to sacrifice both their money and their lives to support wealth for a relatively privileged few.65 As Lynn Parramore explains, the anti-social idea of economic welfare maximizes not real societal wealth, but rather the inverse condition of societal “illth,” the term coined by nineteenth century political economist John Ruskin to describe the harmful effects of the emerging system of industrial capitalism.66 From this perspective, rising contemporary economic insecurity among men does not represent a zero-sum loss resulting from women’s gains. Instead, it reflects an anti-social economy designed to hold most people back from their potential for constructing a better world for themselves and others. What the law and economics model fails to recognize is that the social trust built from political and legal systems designed to broadly provide and reward care and protection for diverse individuals, environments, and communities can produce resilience, adaptability, and solidarity vital to long term economic strength.67 Individualized gain-seeking cannot rationally provide meaningful personal security or freedom in the contemporary context of catastrophic global risks from multiple systemic threats of pandemic, climate disruption, economic inequality and instability, social division, and political authoritarianism. By changing the legal subject from the autonomous individual liberal subject to the embodied human who is universally but uniquely born into physical and social dependency and mortality, Martha Fineman draws on feminism to ground economic welfare in responsibility for social quality and equality, making substantive provisioning for universal human vulnerability the central measure of productivity and legitimacy.68 III. Framing Freedom as an Anti-Feminist Economic Value Building on liberal political theory’s focus on individual autonomy, the law and economics master narrative further undercuts feminism with a neoliberal ideal of freedom severed from public moral governance. It responds to liberalism’s conundrum that advancing liberty through democracy and human rights means individuals must submit to the contested substantive judgments of others by positing an efficient market of formally neutral legal rules where individuals freely pursue self-determined gain through consensual transactions. In this view, the private market fosters diversity and personal agency free from collective control, seemingly compatible with feminist resistance to prescribed gender norms. But by grounding legitimate freedom in individualized, private self-interest, this narrative makes systemic gender-based subordination and violence appear to deserve legal deference—or even fundamental legal protection. A. Reducing Liberty to Individual Self-Interest In her intellectual history of neoliberal “rational choice” theory, S.M. Amadae concludes that the ideal of freedom as calculated individual gain-seeking reduces consent to no more than the act of showing up in a system beyond individual control.69 With a gun at your head, the choice to forfeit your money rather than your life is self-interested, but the opposite of meaningful freedom. A deeper understanding of liberty would turn not on the individual freedom to choose, but on the moral qualities of the collective conditions and processes governing our options. Neither economics nor individualized choice can enable law to impartially settle the questions of justice necessary for meaningful freedom. What conditions, for whom, constitute consent free from force and fraud? What individual gains from imposing harm on others should be protected as legitimate private rights or excused as personal, social, or local discretion or indiscretion? Government inevitably distributes the power to use force by how law defines, punishes, monetizes, and immunizes acts of violence.70 Contrary to the law and economics presumption of markets free of force, the recent #MeToo movement against sexual assault illustrates how the strong arm and insidious shadow of physical force is common, not marginal, to the everyday economic lives of many women, a factor to bargain with in the process of securing opportunities for education, work, housing and health care.71 The Black Lives Matter movement similarly shows that deadly public and private violence, tied to militarized policing, mass incarceration, and racial disenfranchisement, routinely looms over ordinary private activity to reinforce an economy of vastly unequal personal freedom and opportunity. Both of these movements are examples of how laws governing physical force are thoroughly gendered in ways that intersect with race, class, sexuality, nationality, and other status markers.72 The law and economics binary frame helps naturalize and legalize this unequal protection by identifying violence as a social or psychological problem or background fact outside an economic realm of self-interested rationality. Steeped in this view, the Supreme Court invalidated federal damage remedies for private gender-motivated violence despite voluminous evidence of its economic harm, 

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