Metrics
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.
Child Care Time
Guest blogger Charlene Kalenkoski of the Ohio University Economics Department is doing research that addresses these questions: When I took this picture of my friend Gaela (who is a girl, not a cat), was I engaging in photography, child care, or both? What if I stayed at Gaela’s house while her parents stepped out to a party on a Saturday night, spending most of my time curled up on the couch writing a blog entry after she had gone to bed? Would I be providing child care?
Measuring Progress
I’m in Paris for a meeting of a new Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. It’s a city that invites reflections on the past that can make the future shimmer. Walking down the Rue des Francs Bourgeois in the Marais I recall an essay contest sponsored by a group of learned French scholars in 1759. They asked, “Has intellectual and economic progress contributed to the moral improvement of humanity?” The winner, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (smiling enigmatically on the left), elaborated famously on his basic answer: non!