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OVER THE PAST CENTURY, women in the United States have made extraordinary gains in the world of work, argues Harvard economist Claudia Goldin in Career & Family. Most no longer need choose between having a child or a job. Women’s college enrollment and graduation rates outstrip men’s. And slowly but surely, opportunities have expanded enough to give many women the possibility of not just a job, but a career.

Abstract

OVER THE PAST CENTURY, women in the United States have made extraordinary gains in the world of work, argues Harvard economist Claudia Goldin in Career & Family. Most no longer need choose between having a child or a job. Women’s college enrollment and graduation rates outstrip men’s. And slowly but surely, opportunities have expanded enough to give many women the possibility of not just a job, but a career.

Greedy Work

OVER THE PAST CENTURY, women in the United States have made extraordinary gains in the world of work, argues Harvard economist Claudia Goldin in Career & Family. Most no longer need choose between having a child or a job. Women’s college enrollment and graduation rates outstrip men’s. And slowly but surely, opportunities have expanded enough to give many women the possibility of not just a job, but a career.

Goldin painstakingly maps female college graduates’ approach to work and family over the 20th century, given each decade’s constraints. A woman graduating in 1910 had to choose between a family and a career. In the 1920s and 1930s, by contrast, many women worked for pay before going on to have children. The trend flipped in the 1950s as the marriage age dropped and women began their families earlier, only to pick up a job—if they were able to—later on. The broad adoption of the birth control pill changed everything, so that by the 1970s, many women opted for a career first, sometimes at the expense of family. But by the 1980s and 1990s, women were pursuing career and family at the same time.

Don’t be fooled, though: the advancements don’t mean we’re anywhere close to economic parity or gender equality. Take the yawning gender pay gap—and I mean yawning in every sense of the word. Women’s earnings in the United States have been stuck somewhere between 77 cents and 82 cents for every dollar a man earns for 25 years. (And that figure masks how much worse it is for women of color.) To pin the pay gap just on gender bias or sexism or women’s apparently below-par negotiation skills—or their apparent predilection for lower-paying roles—misses the point entirely, suggests Goldin. Tat’s because it’s the very structure of work that’s at the heart of the problem.

Work, Goldin says, is greedy. It demands time from employees, and the more time they have to give, the more they will be rewarded. In a supply and demand world, companies pay more for staffers who are willing and able to put in endless hours and who will drop everything for a deadline. But time, as we know, is finite. And nothing illustrates that quite as powerfully as when a child enters the picture. Suddenly there’s another pull on an employee’s time that cannot be ignored. (You try ignoring a call from the school nurse and see where that gets you.)

Claudia Goldin

Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity

Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2021, 344 pp., $27.95

Companies pay more for staffers who are willing and able to put in endless hours.

So, what is to be done? One solution is to look at industries in which professionals can easily sub for one another. Here, Goldin points to pharmacists, who have figured out that consumers don’t need their prescriptions filled by the same person each month. But pharmacists are an exception; other white-collar professions like law or banking are not there yet. Clients still expect to have “their guy” pick up the phone when they call.

The progress we have made is being stymied by greed, argues Goldin. Too bad the thing we’re most greedy for is the one thing we can’t make more of: time. FD

FRANCESCA DONNER, an executive editor at Quartz focusing on the future of work, women, and gender

The Dollar ‘s Primacy

WHEN THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC triggered a “risk-of” fight of capital in the spring of 2020, private investors and financial institutions turned to US Treasury bonds as the alternative “safe asset.” The retreat from financial markets was soon reversed, in part because of the Federal Reserve’s formidable response to the threat of a global financial collapse. Fifty years after President Richard Nixon cut the link between gold and the dollar reserves held by foreign central banks, the US dollar continues to play a predominant role in the global financial system, with enormous spillover effects for US monetary policy.

Anthony Elson

The Global Currency Power of the US Dollar: Problems and Prospects

Palgrave Macmillan,

London, UK, 2021, 205 pp., $24.99

Anthony Elson, a former IMF staff economist, explores the reasons for this phenomenon and the prospects for the future in The Global Currency Power of the US Dollar: Problems and Prospects. He traces the historical roots of the widespread use of the dollar for trade and financial flows to the emergence of the United States as the world’s largest economy after World War II. US financial markets are unequaled in terms of breadth and liquidity, which reinforces the use of the dollar in financial transactions. The widespread usage of the dollar provides an incentive—the network effect—for new users also to adopt it.

Elson methodically lays out the benefits and deflects of a dollar-based system. US international traders and investors avoid the cost of foreign exchange transactions and exchange rate risk. The US government can continue to run fiscal deficits with low interest rates because of the demand for US securities. In addition, the cutoff of access to the dollar-based global banking network through sanctions serves as a valuable foreign policy tool.

The vulnerabilities of the system include the dependence on fiscal deficits to supply safe assets to the world. This “new Trifin dilemma” raises the question of whether there is a threshold of debt that would trigger concerns about the sustainability of the US debt. These concerns may become manifest if interest rates rise in 2022 as the Federal Reserve responds to inflation. Moreover, any increases in US interest rates will raise the cost to foreign governments of refinancing their external debt.

What is a feasible alternative to the central role of the dollar? Elson points out that a multiple reserve currency system including the euro and the Chinese yuan could have advantages over the existing dollar-based system. But a number of conditions must be met before those currencies gain more acceptance, and Elson foresees the pace of adaptation and change will be slow. Similarly, the expanded use of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights depends on reforms in the IMF’s operations and its voting structure, which must be negotiated.

The most interesting alternative to the dollar’s primacy may not be other national currencies but digital currencies. Central banks are actively exploring the use of these electronic means of payment. If a system of payments for international transactions emerges that is seen as safe, stable, and not dependent on any one country, then the dollar’s central role may be replaced by a different form of money altogether. FD

JOSEPH P. JOYCE, professor of economics, Wellesley College

Overshadowed Founder

STANDING ON PEDESTALS in the anteroom of the IMF’s Executive Board are two bronze busts: one of John Maynard Keynes, the other of Harry Dexter White. While innumerable books and biographies have been written about the former, much less is known about the latter. Former IMF Historian James Boughton redresses this imbalance in his superb biography—Harry White and the American Creed.

In the first part of the book, we learn about White’s early years, including his humble origins; White started his higher education only in his late 20s, after serving in World War I. He attended Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard, where he was awarded the prize for the best PhD dissertation in 1932. Despite his academic pedigree, during the Great Depression jobs were hard to come by, and White ended up teaching at a small college in Wisconsin. He got his big break when famed economist Jacob Viner invited him to intern at the US Treasury for three months in the summer of 1934. It is a testament to White’s intelligence, drive, and ambition that, during his internship, he produced a 400-page report on what monetary system the United States should have.

The internship was the entrée to White’s signature achievement: his contribution to shaping the postwar international monetary order decided at the Bretton Woods Conference. A doggerel found among White’s papers ran, “In Washington Lord Halifax once whispered to Lord Keynes, ‘it’s true they have the money bags, but we have all the brains!’ “ Boughton sets out to debunk this claim, crediting White with four main insights: that the postwar system needed to be designed while war was still being waged; that it would need to be designed by all the allied nations, and not just presented as a fait accompli negotiated between Britain and the United States; that it should promote multilateral trade and payments; and that it should be based on the US dollar, rather than some new, artificial international currency. While one might question the wisdom of basing the international monetary system on the currency of a single country (even one as powerful as the United States), White’s instinct that Congress would otherwise never ratify the IMF’s Articles of Agreement was probably correct.

James M. Boughton

Harry White and the American Creed: How a Federal Bureaucrat Created the Modern Global Economy (and Failed to Get the Credit)

Yale University Press,

New Haven, CT, 2021, 464 pp., $40

Boughton’s book is a fine piece of scholarship that reads like a thriller.

The book also addresses the charges at the end of White’s life—and that likely ended his life—of being a Soviet agent. Here Boughton does a meticulous job of documenting every charge and insinuation to show how flimsy (and often ridiculous) they were. As Boughton concludes, “if White was a spy, he was very bad at it… for a man who was so good at everything he applied himself to doing, to accuse him of such an agency would be the unkind-est charge of all.”

Boughton’s book is a fine piece of scholarship that reads like a thriller. And whatever else one takes away from it, one conclusion is clear: it is quite right to honor White alongside Keynes. FD

ATISH REX GHOSH, IMF historian

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