Question

This format should allow you more time to think about your answer. The length of your answers should range from 2-4 paragraphs, depending on the complexity of the question. Remember to use the readings and your class notes to answer the questions. Use citations/quotes and then go on to interpret and explain the quote in your own words.

Feminist economists offer a different view of the economy by focusing attention on caring labor and the care economy. Why do they focus on care and what is meant by the care penalty? Finally, briefly explain some of the findings of empirical research on care work and the care penalty.  

Answer 1

Answer :-

The mainstream economics is mostly concerned with the decision making problem within the current economic and social set up while Marxian economics looks to understand the changes in social and economic organizations . Marx argued that the capitalist production is characterized by the separation between means of production and the proletariat . The surplus produced in excess of the subsistence is always produced by laboring people. In a slave society surplus was produced by the slaves, in a feudal society by serfs and in a capitalist society by factory workers or proletariat. The idea that the rate of profit would fall over time is an important element of the classical writing. Marx's contribution was to explicitly linking it with the demise of capitalism . Marx maintained that the drive for profit would induce the capitalists to accumulate more capital which would bid up the wage and reduce profit . Capitalists would responds to it by employing more machinery that would displace labor . With capitalists replacing workers with machines   will go up reducing the rate of profit given that all other parameters are constant .

Things are not so straight forward if technological change takes place which changes the rate of exploitation . If technological change leads to higher rate of exploitation – the effect on the rate of profit is ambiguous . However, Marx maintained the position that rate of profit will decline in the long run and that will bring down the capitalism. Some of the twentieth century Marxist economists such as Paul Sweezy and Joan Robinson contested the idea of falling rate of profit . So technology is the countervailling force .

Reducing the skill level of workers r making them specialized in one aspect can also offset falling rate of profit . That would also lead to lower wage rates .