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A Conversation with Hilkka Pietila
Economist Hilkka Pietila is one of the fore-mothers of ecofeminism. Her work in her native Finland and internationally stands at the intersection of local and global politics. She has been active for decades on behalf of women through the United Nations system and fought against her country joining the European Union. She and Australian-based CNS editor Ariel Salleh have maintained a correspondence for many years. This interview was completed by email in late 2005.
Ariel: Professor Joan Martínez-Alier, editor of Ecologia Politica and Chair of the International Society for Ecological Economics claims that your three-tiered model of the economy deeply influenced his thinking. Can you tell us about this analysis?
Hilkka: My critique of economics started with non-counted unpaid work and production in households. Laura Harmaja had opened up this topic in 1929 in the economic journal Kansantaloudellinen Aikakauskirja with an article entitled "Is Household Production 'A Triviality'?"1 Then the first assessment of the time use and value of household work was made in Finland in 1982. My insight was that if one looks at the whole economy from a household point of view, it will appear very different to how it is assumed to be in mainstream economics.
Reshaping Ecological Economics
In those days, there was a lot of discussion going on about limits to economic growth in rich countries, and my friend, Kyösti Pulliainen, had recently published the first textbook in Finnish on environmental economics. So he and I put our heads together and started to develop a theory combining the three levels of a modern industrial economy-international markets, nationally provided services, and production within households. We suggested, that economic growth would become unnecessary in a well-off country like Finland if we revived the basic human economy-that is, households-and became less dependent on money and consumption. With this transformation, we thought the daily well-being of people should also increase.
In our figure illustrating this theory, the household stood in the center as the basic unit of the human economy. We identified the three economic components as (1) the "free" economy of non-monetary, voluntary work in households; (2) the nationally "protected" economy of public goods, and (3) the "fettered" economy dependent on export and import in an international market....