I agree with all that. But it’s not what you said before. What you said before was that since Bob isn’t willing to pay someone to mow his own lawn, and does it himself, that means it has no value, and we have to “trust him” that it has no value. That’s simply untrue. Neighbor A and Neighbor B may value a mowed lawn exactly the same, but since Neighbor A is a lawyer and Neighbor B is unemployed, A pays a service and B mows his own lawn. It’s the different opportunity costs that determine their actions, not how much they value the mowed lawn. Hell, neighbor B may well value a mowed lawn more, because he’s home to look at it all damn day.
GDP is not a perfect measurement. That’s fine. It’s certainly close enough for what we use it for. There’s absolutely no need to develop elaborate models that take into account non-market activities. But saying that non-market activities aren’t counted because they aren’t as valued as identical activities that do enter the market is not correct.
I used to use this exact same analogy with my kids. They still struggled with it because they have never seen a factory. Now I talk about building a disco that will go on to produce entertainment. Disco:entertainment:housing.
I vacationed in Australia last year and went to the penguin parade on Philip Island south of Melbourne. (Which is totally awesome, by the way. It’s just penguins going home, very simple but still totally worth doing.) They have a guy in a booth with binoculars and a little clicker, counting how many penguins come home every evening. They said there could be more accurate ways of counting, but this is the traditional method and they continue with that method to have continuity with past numbers. That’s almost definitely a relevant idea for GDP, too.
Of course, if people feel the problem in measurement becomes big enough, they often do small tinkering, like they’ve done many times with unemployment calculations.
Pretty sure jtgain was trying to get across the idea of velocity of money with that example. Pretty sure. He was talking about personal production being real production in the first paragraph, then switched gears to talk about the flow of money after that. It all seemed solid to me, anyway.
If you’d like, you can draw all sorts of conclusions from the fact that they better understand the idea of entertainment as a product than widgets.
According to McConnell/Grue, we still estimate farmer-consumer agricultural production. I think that’s another good example of how this is more about stability than anything. I am sure that, once upon a time, excluding that would have been a meaningful distortion. But today? Surely it’s not as large a number as self-mowed lawns. And it’s less prone to economic fluctuations: in a downturn, lots more people start doing their own lawn care than growing their own crops.
Fair enough. I thought he was arguing that we exclude non-monetary transactions from GDP because they do not contribute to the velocity of money and we want the GDP number to reflect “economic activity”. I think it’s important to remember what GDP is and isn’t: it’s a measure of production. It’s not a magic rating of your economy.
Of course not, and nor did I say they were, but it’s not really a matter of dispute that women do the bulk of it.
By those who count GDP, which is what this thread is about. Again, not a controversial statement.
Capitalism in general depends on paying people less than the full value of their labour. This surplus value is how capitalism makes its profits.
Women’s unpaid work in the home isn’t unique in this respect, but it is significant for the sheer volume of it. Think of what it would cost if, instead of Mom doing the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, etc. for no financial reward, all this work was treated as a service that must be paid for. The implications of this would be enormous - first, obviously, millions of people would receive wages for things they hadn’t previously received wages for; secondly, those who were already receiving wages for these things (domestic servants, nannies etc) would see their wages rise as they would no longer have to compete with unpaid labourers; and thirdly it’s likely that women’s wages for non-domestic work would also increase, as the justification for paying them less would evaporate.
All this would add up to an absolutely gigantic wage bill for women’s labour. It’s all theoretical, so it could be going too far to say that it would actually cause the *collapse *of capitalism - but it’s hard to see how it could survive in its present state with the loss of such a monumental chunk of its profits. Which is precisely why demands that women be paid to do housework are so strenuously resisted.
I’ve a problem with much of the upthread. I think people have missed a basic point: the stuff people do at home - cooking, cleaning, childrearing, mowing the lawn - is all prep-work for the wage-earner(s). So surely it’s already included in GDP?
Silly example: I can’t turn up to work naked. I could employ a valet to dress me and a boot-boy to shine my shoes, but I do both myself.
Oh, but companies and organizations often do it. Compensating debts is an option but sending both checks does happen. I’ve had clients who refused to compensate because it was less straightforward than two checks, specially since the two amounts are highly unlikely to be equal.
housing.