Future Here Now: The Externalities of Unpaid Domestic Work

I have a 30-year marriage and two 20-something kids, so when I tell you this article spoke to me, I’m not kidding.  Being a working mom in a demanding field demanded so much more of me than I realized at the time.  And while my husband is a very good father and participated in most of the household work, it’s no surprise that I tended to be the first line for fevers, school forms, cooking, eradicating the squirrel-sized dust bunnies and all the rest.

This calculator didn’t exist back then, but I would have liked to see the results.  Or maybe not.

You might not notice at first, but the crux of this article is really about dealing with externalities.  

Unpaid domestic labor is commonly treated as external to the usual economic transactions, but when you dig deeper, you see that the work we had ignored economically comes at a real cost to everyone.  All of the alternatives that this article explores are based on a simple but unspoken premise: If we treat this labor as an externality, which…