Here are my recommendations for your consideration, as well as some of the research and reasoning behind them-along with my warmest good wishes!
The ground has shifted, and we all know it: the issue is breakdown or breakthrough. Through decades of research, I've identified strategies that will move us from unbridled consumption and accumulation of "stuff" to produce what really counts for human beings: health, relationships, meaning, creativity, service.
We must redefine "productive work." Not long ago, shifting to industrial technology radically changed "productive" work, when employment dropped from over 80 percent agriculture-based to just 3 percent. Robotics and other forms of automation will continue to radically cut present manufacturing, service, and middle management jobs as we shift from the industrial to the post-industrial era. The truth is that millions of the jobs currently disappearing are gone for good. Bailing out dinosaurs like the auto industry so it can continue making unwanted cars that aren't good for the planet makes no sense.
The ingenuity of our citizens and the natural environment are our most valuable assets-we need realistic economic measurements that include them. Current measures of "productivity" such as GDP put activities that harm life (like selling cigarettes and the health and funeral costs from smoking) on the plus side but ignore the life-sustaining activities of both the household economy and the natural economy. A Swiss government report showed that if the unpaid "caring" household work were included, it would comprise 70 percent of the reported Swiss GDP! We must give visibility and value to the work of parents and others caring for children-neuroscience shows that the quality of child care directly affects human capacity development. Human capacity cannot develop properly without such care. Without human capacity, there are no advances.
We need a new economic road map. I expand on these ideas in my book The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, which is a road map for long-term change. Call it the "new economy." It takes us beyond the old dying economic systems-and the old capitalist vs. socialist thinking-to a practical new "partnerist" economic paradigm.
We need education and training to meet real needs. Millions of Americans are going uncared and under-cared for. Elder care is expensive, and too often inadequate. Our children are woefully under-cared for as both parents work and education budgets are cut. Environmental issues need urgent attention. Education and retraining must focus on meeting these long-term needs. As long as education teaches people to navigate through an outmoded system of short-term paper profits, these "bubbles" will continue to burst.
Caring for others is a core spiritual value. We've been told it's OK for our taxes to fund big government and huge deficits for weapons, war, and now corporate bailouts-but not for health care, child care, early education, or maintaining a clean environment. This disconnect reflects a culture that devalues the "soft" or stereotypically feminine-whether in women or men. Caring for others is a core spiritual value. But as long as anything associated with women and the stereotypically feminine is devalued, it's not realistic to expect more caring government and business policies.
Replacing uncaring practices with caring policies brings enormous economic gains. Companies that care for employees have more productive workers and higher shareholder returns. Government policies that invest in our most important assets-high-quality human capital, beginning in childhood-would save billions that America now spends on prisons and other "back-end" costs. Highly successful nations such as Sweden, Finland, and Norway invested in their human capital. These models are not perfect. But they have much lower crime rates and far lower tax expenditures for prisons; lower health care costs and longer life spans; very low poverty rates and less wasted human potential. How? By investing in universal health care, high quality child care, stipends for families with children, elder care with dignity, generous paid parental leave, and even social security credit for the first seven years of caring for a child at home. The citizens of these nations come out ahead, because they pay a lot in taxes, not in spite of it. And they are not socialist, but a mix of market and central planning-often referring to themselves as "caring nations." While they were so poor in the early twentieth century that thousands fled famines, they're now on the top ranks of UN Human Development Reports and the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Reports, because they invested in high-quality human capital.
Who cares? Women do. We need Real Representative Democracy. Perhaps most striking is that women make up 40 percentpercentper of national legislators in these "caring nations." Obama won a decisive majority among women but lost among men. We need substantial numbers of women bringing their social perspective for caring and care-giving to governance-not just the occasional woman making it by proving she's not too "soft" or "feminine." Women make up 52 percent of our population, yet only 17 percent of our legislature. The executive branch should model true representative democracy.
"Intractable" problems such as poverty can be tractable-once we recognize that the mass of the world's poor are women and children. Using statistical data from eighty-nine nations, the Center for Partnership Studies research shows that women's status is a better predictor of everyone's quality of life than GDP.
Together, we can build a partnership society. The Real Wealth of Nations is waiting to be tapped!
Riane Eisler is a systems scientist and cultural historian, president of the Center for Partnership Studies, and author of the international bestsellers The Chalice and The Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations. See www.rianeeisler.com.
