Giovanna Garzoni

RITA JANE writes: 

The problem with the assertion that women working grows the economy is that all labor done at home doesn’t count toward traditional GDP analysis. If you pay a teacher to educate your kids, that generates measurable economic growth; homeschooling doesn’t.

In fact, any time a commercial transaction is substituted for a non-commercial one, the economy grows. But that doesn’t mean we’re better off. Today I mended a sweater, cooked our lunch at home, cooked dinner at home and cleaned the bathroom. If instead I’d paid my tailor to repair the sweater ($5), bought lunch out ($15), bought dinner out ($25) and had a cleaning lady do the bathroom ($10), I could have grown the economy by $55. The tailor, waitress and cleaning lady would undeniably be better off then, but would I be? Now, working people do plenty of stuff around the house themselves rather than hiring others to do it, but most professional career mothers I know outsource a LOT, because it’s brutally difficult to sustain a full-time job and raise young children.

If I stay at home and watch my own children, walk to the nearest grocer, clean my own house, and cook my own food, I’m not going to generate much measurable economic activity. If I got a job which just covered the cost of taxes, daycare, a work wardrobe, commuting, four hours a month with a cleaning lady, the odd convenience food and weekly meals out, the economy would be “growing” by a good $45,000 or more a year, but my family’s quality of life wouldn’t have improved at all. In fact, it would have worsened. Housewives do a lot of labor that has a huge amount of social value but goes uncounted in the statistics. Pushing women into the workforce can thus drive up GDP statistics without producing real gains in quality of life for anyone.

— Comments —

Roger G. writes:

But of course, of course, all of the home labor that you mentioned has economic value.  Where a woman is not working out in the marketplace and drawing wages, that’s an adverse effect on the economy.  If, at home, she’s not rolled up in a blanket and locked in a box, but doing what you mentioned, then all of those activities positively affect the economy.  All proponents of free market economics would agree. The most basic, foundational, bedrock principle of our avatar, Frédéric Bastiat, was that, to understand economics, we must consider what is unseen as well as what is seen.  That was the moral of his Broken Window Parable.

Roger continues:

It seems to me that some housewives feel compelled to justify their lives. I think it’s like Sophia Loren needing to check a mirror.

Laura writes:

Christine Lagarde is a proponent of free market economics; she does not agree. The problem is with the neutrality you suggest and the fact that in typical libertarian fashion you do not acknowledge that people follow social models and ideals. If women have valuable work to perform at home, then their work in the market interferes with their contribution to the economy. (I am speaking in general of course, not of any one woman.) Rita Jane mentions menial tasks but she does not mention the intangible aspects of creating a home, the value of which cannot be quantified. If society valorizes paid work, then regardless of whether any one woman is rolled up in a blanket at home, that social model is deleterious to the economy if the work women do in creating homes is essential to economic development and social harmony. The woman rolled up in a blanket is at least doing her part to destroy that golden calf. So it just isn’t so simple as, yes, women working hard at paid employment and women working hard at home are all doing their part for the economy.

It seems to me that some housewives feel compelled to justify their lives. I think it’s like Sophia Loren needing to check a mirror.

Oh, good grief, where have you been?

Do you think it might be because the entire world is telling them that their paid work is essential and that they do nothing but menial tasks at home?

Rita Jane writes:

By the way, I’m not a housewife. I work full time, and have since I completed college, barring a couple short stints of unemployment. (Not gloating. I’m stating the reality.) But I’m intelligent enough to realize that all those hours spent cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, running errands and generally making two adult’s lives (we have no children) go smoothly are labor and have value that is normally not noted in traditional economic analysis. Unless magical fairies are doing all that in his house, presumably someone is contributing that labor for “free” or he’s paying someone else to do it. Either the 20 odd hours a week I devote to this stuff are work or they aren’t. But they don’t cease to be economically valuable because I do them in my own home for free, instead of in my neighbor’s home for cash.

Roger G. writes:

Maybe a problem here is that we’ve been confusing, or conflating, or something, the normative and the positive.  Me too.

If women have valuable work to perform at home, then their work in the market interferes with their contribution to the economy.

It does indeed.  An economist I am not, but I believe the relevant concept here is opportunity cost.

Rita Jane’s work at home adds value to the economy.   When she’s busy at home working for “free,” she’s not available to add value by working in the market – i.e., for a paycheck.  In both instances she’s adding economic value, and they interfere with each other.  Of course there are multiple economic factors and multiple cultural factors at play, and of course they interact.

And I don’t believe I suggested neutrality.  And even I understand that people follow social models and ideals.

So it just isn’t so simple as, yes, women working hard at paid employment and women working hard at home are all doing their part for the economy.

Doesn’t “part” mean —duty–, —obligation—?  I don’t believe that women or any other sex has a duty or an obligation to the economy.

To reiterate, I thought I was agreeing with Rita Jane that her domestic activity indeed does have a real economic value, regardless of our ability to assign the correct dollar amount.  Whether or not she provides more or less economic value in the home instead of the workplace, the answer is what it is, whether I like it or not.  I nevertheless still agree with her being in the home, even if that choice provides less economic value.

Yet again – domestic work has real economic value, whether or not quantifiable, and both the cultural and economic effects of a woman staying home provide economic value.  God knows, and I don’t, if after all the positive and negative economic and cultural effects of women staying home are identified, quantified, and compared (as if we ever could), the end, ultimate, final, uttermost result is a decrease in the net economic value.  Let’s say that it is.  For cultural reasons, I’m still in favor of women staying home.

And yet again – there are culturally conservative choices which I believe are correct, whether they help or hurt the economy.  Winning may be everything and the only thing, but the economy is neither.  It is easier to pass a cable rope through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter paradise.  Poverty becomes a Jew, as a red bridle becomes a white horse.

Oh, good grief, where have you been?

Learning as best I can from Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Laura Wood, and Larry Auster.

Hannon writes:

I enjoyed Rita Jane’s insights on this important subject. It seems to me that nowadays people will often conflate community with economy, as if the former is merely an appendage of the latter or the two are inseparable. One could argue, at least historically, quite the reverse: that any economic scheme serves its host community for the sake of cardinal social, spiritual and personal goals and the healthy state is where we are consciously the master of our social condition first and foremost, and where the economy is our servant.

It’s difficult for me to hear erstwhile conservatives going on about how “It’s all about jobs!” or “It’s the flow of money, of capital!” Like the GOP itself these types have forsaken difficult social issues and put all their money (no pun intended) on abstract– and certainly important– issues that could not offend anyone. How can it be that our politics has become more sharply divisive even as we continue to retire difficult issues from intelligent public debate?

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