Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Last Monday I joined other international members of the grandly named Commission for the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress in Paris to present a report commissioned by the president of France on alternatives to reliance on gross domestic product.
We were whisked from our luxury hotel to the presidential palace to an impressive auditorium at the Sorbonne. Organizers, secretaries, drivers, waiters and translators were there to meet our every need, and I hope they were richly paid to do so, increasing France’s G.D.P.
Although my expenses were reimbursed, I volunteered the time I put into the report, as did my husband, whose indirect contributions in the previous month included shopping, cooking, taking me to the hospital emergency room to tend to a smashed finger, and passing up a trip to Paris to stay home and meet the plumber coming to fix a basement leak.
All of these services could have been reported in a time-use survey and assigned a market price (what it would have cost to purchase them were they not contributed free). But they weren’t reported this way, and they won’t show up in any country’s G.D.P.
Such omissions seem less drastic than other shortcomings of our national accounting systems detailed in the report. Our official statistical offices could systematically trace reports of job satisfaction and happiness. They could also develop better measures of the depreciation of natural assets such as forests and fisheries, the costs of air and water pollution, and the risks of destabilizing local ecosystems and global climate.
As the report indicates, economists are moving forward — albeit slowly — on all these fronts. But press coverage of the report in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times hardly mentioned the issue of unpaid work. Here are two big reasons that it should have.
The movement of women into paid employment represents one of the most important labor force trends of the last 50 years. But as women increased their hours of paid work, they decreased their hours of unpaid work. While men began doing a bit more housework and child care, they didn’t take up the slack. As a result, the increases in G.D.P. that we have experienced since 1960 probably overstate improvements in our living standards.
Sure, our family income went up, but we had to spend a larger portion of that income purchasing food away from home, housekeeping, child care and elder care services that were once provided outside the market.
Our public policies continue to define economic welfare — and eligibility for public assistance — entirely in terms of family income. Yet there is a big difference in living standards among families with the same income but different amounts of time to devote to unpaid work.
Take a household consisting of one full-time wage earner, one stay-at-home parent and two children, relying on an after-tax income of $50,000. Compare this to a similar household in which both parents work full-time for pay, each bringing home about $25,000 in after-tax income.
A stay-at-home parent typically provides more than 40 hours a week of time devoted to housework and child care. Working parents are hard-pressed to provide the equivalent, and in the United States they typically need to purchase child care (unlike those in France, where it is publicly provided).
Yet when considering eligibility for public benefits — such as the health insurance subsidies now under consideration — we treat the two families the same because they earn the same market income.
Similarly, we expect single mothers of young children to work for pay, and we don’t subtract the costs of the child care from their market income when we determine their eligibility for income or health care assistance.
In other words, we ignore the fact that working for pay actually costs money — the money required to purchase substitutes for family care.
Unpaid work remains largely invisible to those who don’t do much of it themselves. But the American Time Use Survey now offers the tools to measure it. We should move forward with efforts to estimate its market value and improve our statistical accounting systems.
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