Metrics
Understanding the Care Economy
Why we need better data on the care economy, how we can get it, and what we could do with it.
Dreaming Big
A new year and a new grant has us imagining the next horizon for the Revaluing Care project.
The Value of Valuation
Assigning a market value to non-market work can be risky, but it calls attention to the economic contributions of unpaid care.
Work for Profit (or Not)
Most introductory economics texts assume that most of the work performed in the U.S. takes place in profit-maximizing firms. One important exception is Understanding Capitalism.
In Defense of Valuation
I think that estimates of the market value of non-market work are a worthwhile exercise (as my last two posts suggest) as long as they are done carefully and presented as an approximate lower-bound. But conceptual resistance to valuation remains remarkably fierce–which is a big reason we don’t see more of it.
The Temporal Constraints of Child Care
Fortunately, the American Time Use Survey includes a question that asked respondents to indicate times when a child under the age of 13 was “in your care.” This makes it possible to measure the amount of time devoted to supervisory child care.
The Dollar Value of Grown-Up Care
Work is no less valuable if it’s fun (I’m working for fun right now).
All the Child Care Workers in the USA
All the child care workers in the U.S. combined earn less than the top 25 hedge fund managers and traders. Wow. Even a jaded old care-work researcher like me finds this pretty startling.
What is She Worth? How to Value (Or Not to Value) a Woman’s Life
The 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund dispensed death benefits for female victims that averaged only 63% of those for male victims. Why? Special Master Kenneth Feinberg was instructed to use a formula similar to that used in U.S. courts, taking victims’ estimated future earnings into account. For more details, see his fascinating book, What is Life Worth? (Public Affairs, 1995).
The Motherhood Penalty
Most women know that having a child is costly and leaves them vulnerable to poverty. But most probably don’t know how these costs and risks actually measure up, especially considering important differences across women and their families. Even as you read this, highly-skilled researchers are figuring out how to “do the numbers.”
Is it Work?
Steven J. Dubner and Steve Levitt suggest the following: “It’s work if someone else tells you to do it, and leisure if you choose to do it yourself.” This definition makes it sound like neither self-employed nor self-motivated individuals do any work.
Children as Pets
This recent New Yorker cover satirizes the notion that children, like puppies in a store window, are just another consumer good. I think the gender stereotyping is intended as a joke, though not all viewers would take it that way.