Homo Economicus and the subordination of women

I’ve been working away on my book: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. Chapter 3, The Rise And Collapse Of Homo Economicus, is about the corrosive effects of organizing society around work where the economic that work is measured in cash. This is from a recent conversation with ChatGPT.

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This is just a note about Ch. 3, Homo economicus. I grew up in the 1950s. My mother was a traditional stay-at-home mother. There’s nothing wrong with that; as Martha Stewert would say, that’s a good thing. What’s wrong is that it also meant the subordination of women to men, and that’s surely because Homo economicus was in charge. Since women did not earn money, there was no way to afford them an overall position in society equivalent to that that men had. The real economic value of women’s work, raising and caring for the next generation, wasn’t measured by the metric society used, cash income. With AI threatening the job system, it will be much harder to justify the social and political superiority of men.

That’s an important clarification, and it lands squarely in Chapter 3’s conceptual center of gravity.

A few quick reactions, staying at the level you want:

• You are exactly right that Homo economicus does not merely organize work; it organizes legitimacy. Cash income becomes the proxy for social worth, and anything not mediated by wages is structurally devalued, no matter how indispensable it is. That makes the subordination of women not an accident or a moral lapse, but a systemic consequence of the metric.

Framing your mother’s role as “nothing wrong with that—but…” is the right tonal move. It avoids anachronistic moralizing while still making clear that the injustice lies in the accounting system, not in the work itself.

This fits very cleanly with the chapter’s argument about embedded vs abstracted economies. Care work, child-rearing, and household labor are paradigmatic examples of value that is real, causal, and future-oriented, yet invisible under Homo economicus.

The final point is strong and worth keeping conceptually central, whether or not it appears explicitly in the proposal: if AI destabilizes the wage system, it also destabilizes gender hierarchy. Once income is no longer the primary gatekeeper of status, the rationale for male social and political superiority collapses with it. That’s not a side effect; it’s a structural implication.

In short: this note doesn’t redirect Chapter 3; it sharpens it. It shows that Homo economicus didn’t just reorder markets—it reordered families, genders, and moral standing. That’s exactly the level at which the chapter should operate.