The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (review)

Economics: the word strikes fear in the hearts of some, confusion in the minds of many, and concern in the souls of most worldwide today. In The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, Riane Eisler calms our fears and demystifies our confusion, while demonstrating how dominator economics have cost us and how partnership economics can help us cultivate the real wealth of our nations—our people.

During the over twenty years since she first published her international best-seller (now in twenty-three languages) The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987), Riane Eisler has applied her cultural transformation theory to a range of social questions: to sex, spirituality, and the body in Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body (1996); to education in Tomorrow's Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century (2000) and Educating for a Culture of Peace (2004); and to daily life in The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that Will Change Your Life (2002). As Eisler has focused her dominator-partnership lens on a different aspect of our society in each book, she has used her interdisciplinary, social systems perspectives to help us understand the dominator systems we have created so far and to offer a road map for creating partnership systems.

In her latest book, Eisler focuses her dominator-partnership lens on economics as a social system. Her comprehensive analysis offers a big-picture perspective that is often missing from economic discussions. Here she lays bare the flawed fundamental assumptions of our current dominator economic systems and reveals ways that partnership economic systems might help us create the world we long to inhabit.

Although most of us have learned to think about economics as a battle between capitalism and socialism, Eisler demonstrates how neither the capitalist free market (envisioned by Adam Smith) nor the scientific socialism (envisioned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) could be realized due to their shared inheritance of dominator beliefs, structures, and habits. Smith's capitalism assumed that competition would counter self-interest, but the evidence of ruthless business leaders historically and today belies that erroneous assumption. Eisler also reveals core fallacies of capitalism as a dominator economic model. For example, what we value is determined by supply and demand; scarce goods and services are more valued than abundant ones. However, this ignores the fact "that current economic policies and practices often artificially create scarcities" and that so-called "demand is largely determined by cultural beliefs about what is and is not valuable" (16). Similarly, Marx and Engels's vision of an egalitarian socialist economic system could not manifest in the midst of dominator values that emphasize hierarchical control. According to Eisler, what is missing is that neither capitalist nor socialist theory recognized "that a healthy economy and society require an economic system that supports optimal human development," and she adds that "the ultimate goal of economic policy should not be the level of monetary income per person, but developing the human capabilities of each person" (148).

Eisler proposes a new "partnerism" economic model to replace both capitalism and socialism—one that recognizes "the essential economic value of caring for ourselves, others, and nature" (22). She explains that developing partnerism will require fundamental changes in our economic measurements, institutions, and rules and outlines seven steps toward creating this new "caring economics":

1. 1. Recognize how the cultural devaluation of caring and care-giving has negatively affected economic theories, policies, and practices.

2. 2. Support the shift from dominator to partnership cultural values and economic and social structures.

3. 3. Change economic indicators to assign value to caring and care-giving.

4. 4. Create economic inventions that support and reward caring and care-giving.

5. 5. Expand the economic vocabulary to include caring, teach caring economics in business and economics schools, and conduct gender-specific economic research.

6. 6. Educate children and adults about the importance of caring and care-giving.

7. 7. Show government and business leaders the benefits...