Reflections on a DIY Society and Jessica Calarco’s Holding It Together
Lisa Gennetian with 2024 summer book club scholars (alphabetical order) Shannon Egan-Dailey, Matthew Maury, Hema Shah, Prachi Shukla and Laura Stilwell
Jessica Calarco’s 2024 book Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net makes a compelling argument about the social costs of the neoliberalism that swept into the U.S. in the 1950s, resulting in a do-it-yourself, or “DIY,” prevailing norm in U.S. society—that is, an emphasis on individual responsibility to the exclusion of community care structures. Calarco describes neoliberalism as a force that has undermined work unions and the safety net while stifling the economic power and agency of women, especially women of color.
Many economists agree with the general view that neoliberalism has helped foster wealth among the few. As one consequence, the wealthy have influence over technology, media, academia, and political leaders. Indeed, some claim the wealthy have too much influence on U.S. democracy and in turn, on decisions related to expanding social protections, such as universal child care. This neoliberal line of thinking, Calarco argues, has survived in part by perpetuating myths about women’s role in families and society and by fueling perspectives that bad outcomes are due to people’s choices.
Calarco grounds these arguments with stories from women, mostly white, mostly from the Midwest, and mostly involved with the evangelical faith community. The book calls attention to a new vision for a care economy, bringing back unions, and creating a stronger safety net. These recommendations are motivated by a line of reasoning described as “linked fates”; that is, the collective costs of, for example, a sick child, or a stressed worker who is a parent, have many negative ripple effects across society, such that the actual cost to society is much larger than the cost to any individual. For instance, a sick child that attends daycare due to a parent unable to take sick leave will infect other children and staff, possibly resulting in the temporary shut-down of the daycare facility. Stories from Brooke, Cara, and Monica share a common theme of caregiving demands disrupting their education or earnings and the impact on them and others of underpaying formal child care providers.
This book inspired several debates in our Duke 2024 summer reading club. Mostly, we wondered: is it always the case that the consequences of a DIY society are “zero-sum,” i.e., one gains or extracts resources through the loss or depletion of resources from others, primarily women in the context of Calarco’s book? Here are four examples of how we interrogated this question.
1. The neoliberal (or DIY) society that extols the principles of free markets and the virtues of competition may concentrate economic power for the few (as Calarco claims); competitive markets may also contribute to efficient distribution of resources.
Calarco describes the choices that high-income or high-wealth people make as morally fraught and as exploitation. One example is the claim that high financially resourced women only succeed by relying on low-income women to do their unpaid work. Perhaps this is true, but it is incomplete in two ways.
First, the dominant gendered argument does not hold up. Is it still considered exploitation if a man or any person hires a car repair person or a nonunionized plumber or a painter to do what would have been their unpaid service work, had they chosen to perform those tasks instead of hiring someone? What if a DIY economy fosters economic power among women or more generally fosters economic power for the primary caregiver, such that a household’s primary caregiver controlled earnings, bank accounts, and all household decision making?
Second, in any DIY type of competitive market, the flow of services and goods would also affect prices in ways that might make goods and services more affordable for more people. Think about the flood of masks that entered the market after the initial shortages in response to COVID-19. Even if there were a shored-up system of government-paid leave or health care, there may still be demand for an informal care economy that could continue to affect prices and people engaging in markets to buy more or different goods, all else equal. The informal care economy may operate in parallel and complementary ways particularly if quality, availability and price of government provided goods are not responsive.
2. Government bailouts of firms may be overprotecting firms with big profits but may also translate to sustainable long-term jobs for workers.
The Cheesecake Factory, featured in a chapter of Calarco’s book, benefitted from COVID-19 pandemic payments to stay afloat, furloughed 40,000 workers, and yet posted a profit. This is held up as an example of economic exploitation of workers. This is not untrue (the current DIY economy is structured in a way such that companies are more beholden to their shareholders than to their workers); but it is also not a full long-term picture. Without the government payout, and without posting profits (given that it is beholden to shareholders), The Cheesecake Factory may have risked entering bankruptcy, closing shop at its hundreds of locations, and taking thousands of jobs away from workers. This may signal opportunity for future investors, or not. Even if a new restaurant or business were to re-enter, its opening would not be fast enough to counteract the unemployment benefits paid to eligible workers (a cost to the government), the loss of work routines, and the workers’ possible increased despair that spills over to affect their family life. Thus, an open Cheesecake Factory may be less costly to workers and well-being, given the alternative, than a closed Cheesecake Factory.
3. More women in “power” may not be enough to transform the lives of the most economically vulnerable or be enough to push against DIY society winds. Nevertheless, it may be a mechanism of grassroots agitation.
The movement jump-started by business executive Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, which argued that women need to set high career goals and not “lean back” from paid work in anticipation of caregiving responsibilities, may not have been an inclusive generator of feminist social change, as it paid insufficient attention to the challenges faced by low-income women. However, accusing women in power of appropriating patriarchy to gain power does a disservice to recognizing the prospect of achieving change through power. Anything less basically means we must believe that women’s agency and autonomy and self-determination are not enough to break down structures, including those fueled by DIY norms. Structures are dismantled incrementally, and that can happen both from the ground up and from the top down.
Title IX is an example of change from the top down, yet the contemporary state of women’s sports has also been influenced by the roles of pathbreakers such as Billie Jean King, Venus and Serena Williams, and Simone Biles, who across generations battled different barriers to their athletic dominance and success. Title IX worked in the background in concert with these dynamic athletes.
Context clearly also matters, particularly in a winner-take-all society: it’s a good thing that wages (or earned income) increase in response to performance, though that might look different for the C-suite vs. a top manager at McDonald’s.
4. Religious institutions may have a lot to extract from neoliberal economic power but also serve as key equity-enhancing economic institutions.
Community and collective spirituality pervade many cultures and religions, including matriarchal ones. Faith-based organizations have long held privileges in the U.S. that have not always generated social benefits. Nevertheless, religious institutions play a core institutional role in the economy. They are a vibrant economic venue with transactions and exchanges of goods and services, including food and child care for many economically vulnerable people and communities, often filling voids left by the lack of government social safety nets; religious institutions can also serve as a market for ideas and champions of economic, racial and social equity.
More Nuance on a DIY Society
Stepping back and revisiting the DIY arguments from a historical and theoretical economic framework, we can characterize the DIY society as a system of extracting benefits but also a means of returning those benefits to society and, further, a mechanism for the creation of structures and processes that foster equality with efficiency. The economic philosopher Adam Smith describes the theory of the invisible hand (not so far removed from current conceptualizations of DIY) in which there are benefits and efficiency to be gained from barter, specialization, and comparative advantage.
Joseph Stiglitz does not disagree: it’s not that free trade is bad, but free trade without the right external conditions may not benefit everyone as proclaimed. This points to considerations of the broader care economy, the broader labor market, and the broader systems and structures that are springboards or impediments to economic growth and power (e.g., education). And, who is included or excluded. A recent analysis in the U.S. points to how zero-sum thinking can be traced back to experiences of individuals and their ancestors with respect to degrees of upward mobility, inequality, immigration and enslavement.
These considerations raise additional nuanced thought experiments about the kinds of universal social safety net programs, instead of or in addition to targeted means-tested programs, or visions of a care economy, that do not have to land in a zero-sum game that impact people’s lives and also shape their beliefs and perceptions.
