The Narrative of the Modern Economy
In Econ 403: Global Economic Controversies on April 2, during a discussion on inequality, a peer pointed out something difficult to ignore: dining workers—whose labor shapes students’ daily experiences—are often paid far less than administrative positions many students rarely encounter. What began as an observation evolved into an after-class discussion about how modern economic systems assign value to labor, and why work that sustains everyday life is frequently undervalued.
This article attempts to answer a broader question: How was the modern idea of “the economy” constructed, and why does it privilege certain forms of value over others?
The modern economy is often treated as a neutral system governed by impersonal forces like markets, supply and demand, and productivity. Prices are accepted to reflect value, and income inequalities to reflect geography and skill. Outcomes are attributed to competition and efficiency rather than decisions or priorities.
It might be surprising, then, how recent this narrative of “the economy” actually is. For most of human history, people did not experience economic life as a separate, self-contained system governed by abstract forces. Work, care, trade, and community were embedded within social relationships rather than organized around growth, productivity, and efficiency.
The economy, in its modern avatar, was globalized in the aftermath of World War II, when Western industrial powers—particularly the United States—universalized and legitimized growth-centered development, transforming economic expansion from a byproduct of prosperity into a central policy objective and tool for projecting power. Bolstered by the Bretton Woods architecture and the onset of the Cold War, a new gospel swept across the world: industrial production and technological prowess became synonymous with national strength, and “economic development” became the new language of progress—a prescription for the world to industrialize, urbanize, and expand.
Yes, economic growth has also reduced global poverty in the aggregate, improved life expectancy, and expanded access to education. Yet these gains coexist with deep structural inequalities. The world’s richest 1% have accumulated over $33.9 trillion in new wealth since 2015, an amount large enough to eliminate global poverty many times over. (Oxfam, 2025)
Asish Kothari, in an interview with The Caravan, succinctly explains, “Through various means, the world was sold the idea that, to reach prosperity, economic growth based on industrialisation, urbanisation and financialisation was the only way to go. The notion of “developed” and “developing” also came up then, as a highly misleading method of asserting that the United States and Europe had already sorted out their paths of progress and that the rest of the world needed to copy them. In a way, this was a continuation of the colonial project to convert the whole world in the image of the white man, drawing on patriarchal roots, dividing peoples and nature into nation states that are in hostile competition with each other, enabling capitalism as the primary ideology and giving free rein to the military–industrial complex.”
The implications of this governing logic are evident in the privileges in legitimizes, shaping how value itself is perceived and defined, especially in the labor market. For example, paid market work (traditionally male) became “productive,” while unpaid domestic labor (traditionally female) became invisible as European industrial economies rose, and the systems of GNP accounting were developed by Kuznets in the early 1930s.
Over time, labor that generated measurable output came to be viewed as “productive,” while work rooted in care, maintenance, and community became peripheral. Marilyn Waring’s work reveals how modern economic metrics confuse transactions with worth: a parent caring for their child at home contributes little to GDP; hiring a nanny does. Cooking for a family does not register as economic activity; purchasing processed meals does. From an ecological perspective, a forest cut down contributes to GDP; a forest preserved does not. Essentially, many activities essential to survival are treated as relatively insignificant, while activities that commodify or replace them count towards growth.
Moreover, domestic and care work in the United States has historically relied on enslaved Black women and later immigrant and minority workers. Today, the “invisible” direct-care workforce—home health aides, nursing assistants, and caregivers—remains disproportionately composed of women of color, who now make up over half, and in many regions nearly two-thirds of the workforce, with immigrants significantly overrepresented in these low-paid roles.
Internationally, too, the systemic undervaluation of care work shifts essential labor onto already vulnerable communities, further entrenching inequalities in prosperity. Domestic and care work is largely performed by lower-class, rural-to-urban migrant women in India and China, often without adequate socioeconomic protections, and immigrant women—particularly from North and West Africa—in France.
What is understood and valued as skilled and unskilled labor also came from 18th-century English law and industrial-era U.S. labor categories, which sorted workers based on their access to formal training and elite institutions. Over time, this evolution birthed modern credentialism, positioning universities as the primary gatekeepers of professional legitimacy. Consequently, labor that commands high market value—such as business, technology, law, or administration—is prioritized through formal degrees, while essential work rooted in physical skill, emotional labor, experiential knowledge, or community care is systematically devalued as “less practical.”
The hierarchy of value embedded in economic measurement becomes a hierarchy of labor, and ultimately, a hierarchy of lives. But these hierarchies are not natural. They are constructed — shaped by European colonization, patriarchy, racial hierarchies, and credential-based definitions of skill.
The resulting “economy” privileges certain forms of value and success over others: Development frameworks increasingly measure progress through expansion—industrial output, GDP growth, and market integration. Stability, sufficiency, and ecological balance, by contrast, appeared as stagnation. Productivity and efficiency are elevated as primary virtues. Industrialization, GDP growth, and market integration are universal markers of progress, and economic growth was seen as an inherent good, obscuring the fact that such constant expansion often demands resource extraction, occupation, and the structural violence of the military-industrial complex—less a modern invention than a continuation of older imperial logics, from Rome to colonial capitalism.
Land became property (think Indigenous land systems replaced by settler-colonial private property regimes), nature became a resource, and labor a commodity.
And once this logic becomes normalized, decisions that might otherwise provoke resistance begin to appear inevitable. “It’s good for business” becomes a sufficient justification and the language of efficiency replaces the language of values. This narrative captures the modern imagination, hardening into a “common sense” that now dictates how governments define success, how institutions allocate resources, and the lens through which students interpret work, education, and achievement.
Departments are evaluated by enrollment numbers. Programs are judged by revenue potential. Labor is assessed by measurable output rather than relational value. The definition of value narrows, such that arts programs that do not lead to immediately marketable skills are labeled “impractical,” and teaching-intensive departments that do not attract large enrollments or external funding are deemed inefficient.
And so, by a combination of narrowed definitions of value and over-reliance on “market forces,” constructed under heavily biased assumptions, dining workers, who sustain the rhythms of campus life—preparing meals, maintaining spaces, and shaping students’ daily experiences with care—are often compensated less than administrative roles tied to enrollment growth, branding, or strategy.
It is curious then how we widely reject patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and imperialism as historical injustices, but continue to not only accept the system they helped build—and the logic that sustains it—but continually reinforce it through everyday language and accepted reasoning. The question that remains then is not simply how the modern economy was constructed but whether we continue to accept the values it constructs.
Note: For those interested in imagining alternative socioeconomic systems, Alternative Futures: India Unshackled (2017) offers a compelling starting point.