When ministers slap down effective environmental laws, when they cross their fingers instead of taking the action needed to stop Covid from spreading, it’s because they believe in fairytales: the “invisible hand of the market” will somehow sort it all out.
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Why do they believe in magic? Because throughout their lives they’ve been surrounded by it. Food magically appears in front of them. When they throw their clothes on the floor, they reappear in the wardrobe, washed and ironed. Houses clean themselves. They live in a fairytale.
They are surrounded by invisible hands, the unseen, unappreciated work of mothers, nannies, wives, servants and underlings, making things happen, while they strut and posture and build their castles in the air.
The man who coined the "invisible hand" failed entirely to see the work of his long-suffering mother, and that of the entire household economy of unpaid labour. Without her invisible hands, he would have starved. As Katrine Marçal documents in Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?
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