Family+-+'The+Truly+Invisible+Hand'

Family: "The Truly Invisible Hand"

Man, I really never know how to start these... Although I am glad that this one was a little more provocative in a way; that makes a response easier.

The basic idea that "The Truly Invisible Hand" uses as a platform is that women, specifically mothers, are the foundation of our economic system and because of that deserve far more recognition than they currently recieve. However, I think the evidence that Crittenden uses demonstrates that mothers are important to a country or culture's "wealth", but not the monetary wealth that she so persistently stresses. Crittenden is very keen on using the semantic history of the word "economics" which creates a very fine line. On the one hand, there is the typical economics that involves the value of money, natural resources, and job industries; on the other hand, there is the //oikonomia// which is "management of the household so as to increase its use value (56)." What I think Crittenden is trying show is that the economic system does not begin with the resources a country has, but in the way the country's people work to increase the "value" of the country. Now, despite having a desire to define economics, Crittenden fails to define "value" and "wealth"; and because of that, what appears to be a sturdy argument actually doesn't hold its own. Taking a page from Crittenden's own book; the word wealth has mant meanings: a large amount of money or other valuable items, an abundance, anything that has a monetary value, or rich or valuable in contents [all definitions were obtained from dictionary.com, though not word-for-word]. Now since the word wealth uses the word valuable, the definitions of value: relative worth or merit, and anything that can be exchanged for money. This means that while a gold bar is valuable, so is a queen in a game of chess; there are two very distinct, yet similar, meanings, and I think Crittenden overlooks that. There is the monetary value and wealth that Crittenden looks at and says mothers contribute to largely. However, there is another value that is better built from a mother's parenting: moral value; the work ethics and morals a child takes into the world taught by their mothers. When dicussing Tony's contributions to his country, Crittenden states that "the voters... essentially decided an election on the issue of character (59)." Despite Crittenden's laments about how "this is not the kind of story you will read in economics textbook (59)," she still considers it a source of national wealth, and in a way she's right. The problem is that Tony is a source of national //moral// wealth: his election did not stand on a basis of money, but on character. Character creates work, and work creates money, but no character does not mean no work, it simply means bad work. It makes sense that Tony may be an "unsung hero" who contributes much to his country's cultural wealth and is rich in moral wealth; but morals don't translate to banknotes, and because of that, Tony doesn't have too good of a chance of getting into an economic textbook.

So now that the allusive "wealth" that motherhood contributes to is a little more defined, what of Crittenden's assertion that mothers play the most important role? I think that Crittenden needs to take a step back and evaluate what she's saying. While raising the pedestal for mothers, she is simultaneously bringing down the pedestal for everyone else. A child's personality is shaped by their surroundings, and that includes everything: teachers, media, books, school, strangers, ideas, parents, and tons of other stuff. Whie Tony's life would have taken a possible turn for the worst, he was rescued by Virginia and brought onto a path that made him very successful, but what about all the other factors. The story seems to have accounted for this train of thought because it specifically states that no one would adopt him. So what we're supposed to get is that without Virginia, Tony's entire future would be crap. But there are other factors: the family's Catholic beliefs, college education at both Harvard and Yale, and other maternal and parental figures, each having their own impact on Tony. Now I think Crittenden saves herself from blatant bias when discussing the mother's role in allowing a child into these institutions. I think that when it boils down to it, the mother's allowance of a child to venture into the world affects the child's personality. So, allowing a child into the wrong places from negligent parenting creates just as bad, if not worse, of a child than completely shielding the child. Furthermore, in a study conducted by Marion Winterbottom, "mothers of "high" achievement-oriented sons expected them to have more independence and mastery of various tasks (61)." On the other hand, "the mothers of the other boys [the less success-driven] reported putting more restrictions on their sons at the same age (61)," limiting the number of influences on a child, and more influences from a wide variety of people creates well-rounded people, which adds to the national wealth of the culture. While Crittenden does point out that mothers play a vital role as the conerstone of the a country's wealth, her writing tries to turn the cornerstone into the entire building, and it simply isn't. In fact, I find it insulting to try to make the cornerstone, one of the most important parts of a building, and try to make to everything else.

I think, with everything previously stated in mind, that the most interesting part of the article is the last section Human Capital. "Since most natural resources are a given - you can't create more oil or arable land - this means that //in the wealthiest countries, human capital accounts for three-quarters of the producible forms of wealth// (60)." Again, I think that Crittenden conufuses a delicate definition, in this case human capital would be the work force and knowledge with training. While, yes, Crittenden argues that you don't arrive to the conclusion without the beginnings, the human capital that she has been discussing can't really be thrown into the economic study. Economics is worried about money, the exchange of money, what is considered money and monetarily valuable, trends, resources. Crittenden is trying to add something that doesn't belong: non monetary work-ethic and the drive for success brought up in a child by parents. It's as though she were arguing that historians need to take everthing on the internet über seriously, simply because it's technically part of the human record.

As a final note, I find find Crittenden's quip about Sir Richard Stone's Nobel prize being "the only Nobel, ironically, that has never gone to a woman (56)" as a bit of a gigantic oversight. I'm fairly certain that other males have won the prize as well, and I think it just goes to show that Crittenden has a strong bias in her writing that ultimately affects it.