Jan 4: Who's Counting

Who's Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics

In this feature-length documentary, Marilyn Waring demystifies the language of economics by defining it as a value system in which all goods and activities are related only to their monetary value. As a result, unpaid work (usually performed by women) is unrecognized while activities that may be environmentally and socially detrimental are deemed productive. Waring maps out an alternative vision based on the idea of time as the new currency.

Waring’s book If Women Counted, uses as its springboard Waring’s consideration of unpaid female labor throughout the world, which is officially discounted as being “unproductive” because it generates no capital gain, no “growth” to the economy. Waring’s argument, however, is holistic rather than gender-partisan, surveying a wide range of matters, including the “productivity” that wars generate, through the prism of the dismissal of the value of women’s work at home. This official view, Waring and Nash contend, is nuts. Who’s Counting? The question holds a double meaning, referring to who fixes value, according to what set of priorities, and to who and what in this scheme is being “counted” as having value or not.

     Nash, who has also edited, interweaves two strands of material, one following Waring’s argument about global economics, and the other providing information about Waring herself as a single fabric, since Waring’s sensitive experience of the world informs her views.     

Waring and, through her, Nash address the “invisibility of women’s work,” which goes unpaid and is officially “of little or no importance,” referring to postwar rules that the international economic system imposes on all countries through the U.N. Any country that does not “conform to these rules of economic measurement” cannot belong to the U.N. Waring summarizes: “This system cannot respond to values it refuses to recognize. It is the cause of massive poverty, illness and the death of millions of women and children, and it is encouraging environmental disaster. This is an economic system that can eventually kill us all.”

     Waring also takes up “the international trade in arms,” which she describes as “the biggest growth industry of all.”

     

     Nash concludes by showing Waring as a warm-hearted farmer among her goats—a scene that connects with the love of animals that infuses the earlier passage and completes the opening of the film.