Marilyn Waring is a former New Zealand Parliament member, elected in 1975 when she was 22, who has since become a vocal critic of the standard cost-benefit analysis of labor and productivity. Framed by a lecture that Waring is giving to a Montreal audience, Canadian documentarian Terre Nash’s Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics, based on Waring’s book If Women Counted, uses as its springboard Waring’s consideration of unpaid female labor throughout the world, which is officially discounted as being “nonproductive” because it generates no capital gain, no “growth” to the economy. Waring’s argument, however, is holistic rather than gender-partisan, surveying a wide range of matters, including the “productivity” that wars generate, through the prism of the dismissal of the value of women’s work at home. This official view, Waring and Nash contend, is nuts. Who’s Counting? The question holds a double meaning, referring to who fixes value, according to what set of priorities, and to who and what in this scheme is being “counted” as having value or not.
Nash, who has also edited, interweaves two strands of material, one following Waring’s argument about global economics, and the other providing information about Waring herself—a single fabric, since Waring’s sensitive experience of the world informs her views.
Good-humoredly, Waring skewers the official view of things: “As long as the activity passes through the market, it’s good for growth.” She gives as an example the oil spillage from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster, citing the host of “benefits” that turned this environmental “cost” into a “fantastically productive” event: insurance, new tanker, civil and criminal legal proceedings, payment for clean-up operation, compensation for fishermen and Alaska’s tourist industry, TV and other media exercises, membership gains for “green” organizations. While we hear Waring’s measured voice ticking off this list, Nash shows us trenchant images of the spillage, including animals—bird, seal, otter—struggling in their unwanted, unnatural coats of oil. The film is spotty, but in a number of passages, such as here, it soars.
Waring and, through her, Nash address the “invisibility of women’s work,” which goes unpaid and is officially “of little or no importance,” referring to postwar rules that the international economic system imposes on all countries through the U.N. System of National Accounts. Any country that does not “conform to these rules of economic measurement” cannot belong to the U.N., cannot borrow from the World Bank or secure loans from the I.M.F. Again we hear Waring’s voice: “Important decisions are made with these figures, decisions which will determine whose needs are met first, decisions on how to spend your tax dollars, decisions on killing the planet, decisions on who will live or die.” Ironically, as this increasingly dire litany unfolds, what we see are shots of ordinary activity at the U.N.: “business as usual.” The “highly selective rules” confer value on “everything that goes through the marketplace, that has a cash-generating capacity,” “regardless of how that money is made.” Against the backdrop of a dark, sleazy nighttime scene in New York, which includes a neon sign announcing a peep show, Waring lists what the rules deny value to: peace; the preservation of natural resources for future generations; unpaid work, “including the unpaid work of reproducing human life itself.” Waring summarizes: “This system cannot respond to values it refuses to recognize. It is the cause of massive poverty, illness and the death of millions of women and children, and it is encouraging environmental disaster. This is an economic system that can eventually kill us all.”
Waring also takes up “[t]he international trade in arms,” which she describes as “the biggest growth industry of all.”
Throughout, Waring is measured and calm, never strident or rabble-rousing. Nash’s interviews of neighbors whom Waring once represented in Parliament convince; but her interviews of celebrities—an eyeglassless Gloria Steinem and economist John Kenneth Galbraith—do not. It is distracting that Galbraith must make an effort to recall Waring’s visit and all but disputes that he met with her more than once. Since the two are substantively in agreement, why must we listen to this nonsense? Is Nash making the point that even Galbraith is a doddering white male fool? If so, it is gratuitous. From our vantage, now that Galbraith is lost to us, such a point seems exceptionally cruel.
Nash concludes by showing Waring as a warm-hearted farmer among her goats—a scene that connects with the love of animals that infuses the earlier Exxon Valdez passage and completes the opening of the film, in which Waring is introduced on the beach amidst pristine sky, mountains and sea.
Nash won an Oscar, along with Edward Le Lorrain, for their short film If You Love This Planet (1982).
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
Dennis Grunes 
Kia ora, I enjoyed reading this review and look forward to somewhere being able to view the film “If You Love This Planet” 1982 – 2009 = twenty years. Thanks for the revisit. Mihirawhiti