The gross bias of domestic production calculations:How our teaching of GDP ignores the value of household labor
Civics of Tech Announcements
Next Book Club on Thursday, 03/21/24: We are discussing Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini led by Marie Heath. Register for this book club event if you’d like to participate.
Next Monthly Tech Talk on this Tuesday, 04/04/24. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be this Tuesday, April 4th, 2024 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
by R. Zackary Seitz & Alexandra Thrall
“How much time does your family spend per week doing household labor?” In my years of teaching economics, I (Zack) had never asked a question like that before. This time, I decided to ask this question during a lesson discussing how Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is quantified. At risk of sounding like Ferris Bueller’s economics teacher, GDP seeks to calculate the total market value of all goods and services produced within an economy in a year. Typically, when I teach about calculating GDP I do it from this dominant perspective, which largely ignores unwaged labor, and elicits little inquiry or discussion from my students. This time, though, most of my students were contemplative, and actively discussed the amount of work they and their families undertake just to keep their households functioning. Students not only recognized the amount of time and effort that goes into “maintaining” a household, but also that a majority of that work is and has been done by women.
My own personal curiosity in teaching this exclusion was inspired by Allie’s guest lecture at the doctoral class that I co-teach at the University of North Texas with Dan Krutka and Ryan Smits, called Teaching Against the Machine. In the lecture, Allie talked us through the work she has done bringing Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s book, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, into classrooms and educational research. The book, originally published in 1983, was a breakthrough work in the then emerging field of feminist histories of science and technology. Cowan demonstrates how the household technologies invented during the U.S. Industrial Revolutions, which have long been characterized as time-saving devices, actually replaced child and male household labor and created more work for women.
One such example from Cowan’s work that Allie discussed was the invention and adoption of the cast-iron stove. Although many people, including Allie’s 8th grade students, might assume that the invention of the stove made housework easier than cooking over an open hearth, Cowan reveals how the introduction of the stove changed expectations of family meals from the daily, one-pot stew, to elaborate, at times, multi-course meals. Cast-iron stoves needed to be tended to at great lengths, which was a task done entirely by women. Meanwhile, cast iron stoves, which burned fuel much more efficiently than a fireplace, either greatly reduced the male labor of chopping firewood, or eliminated that work entirely as the family moved to burning coal in the stove. Using Cowan’s work to guide K-12 historical inquiries, Allie argued, helps students and teachers grapple with the (un)intended consequences of technology, and consider the value of the traditionally female labor of housework.
Listening to Allie’s lecture as a male economics teacher, it occurred to me that I had never critically considered why this labor was excluded from how GDP is calculated. I have taught about GDP dozens of times – I’ve listened to the Planet Money podcast episode about the history of “the economy” for deeper understanding about the creation of GDP; I have even tried to pique student interest by discussing how black market transactions don’t make their way into GDP calculations -- all with varying success. However, nothing has been more personal and provoked more reflection than when, the day after Allie’s lecture, I decided to lead my students into a discussion of how GDP ignores household labor. Students were able to directly link their personal experiences to the subject matter, and calculate the cost in time spent just maintaining their own households. They were also able to make astute commentary that connected to the unfathomable monetary cost of hiring someone to do all that work.
Ignoring domestic labor in economics is as short-sighted as ignoring it in history. The etymological root of the word “economics” comes from the ancient Greek words: oikos and oikonomia. These words mean “household” and the art of “household management”, respectively (Därmann et al., 2016). While there are severe flaws in the Greek philosophical views of oikonomia – women, in this economic model, were excluded from public and civic life, and household economic surplus was largely generated by enslaved people, to name a few such flaws -- it is still important to note that there is a centuries-long precedent of centering household production in understandings of economic surplus generation. Furthermore, it was recognized that this household labor, led by wives/women, produced the surplus necessary to support external pursuits of men, such as philosophy and civic participation (Lesham, 2016). Hence, oikonomia recognized not just that household labor had value, but that it was central to the ability of a broader society of men to pursue desired goals —in this case philosophy and political participation.
While many aspects of modern economics, thankfully, differ from Greek understandings of an economy, the exclusion of the value of domestic labor in quantifying national production is one that is especially difficult to understand. Phyllis Deane, who went on to become a renowned economist within the field of national accounting, assisted the team who created what would become GDP as a statistical measurement. Deane’s role was to visit what is now Zambia and Malawi and lead a team of researchers (all female), who attempted to calculate the value of what was produced in those countries. Reading her writing on their various deliberations on what to include in calculating GDP, a couple of things become abundantly clear: (1) GDP as a statistic was created by researchers, who were extremely biased against non-western economies (including Deane), and (2) that Deane saw the flaws in ignoring domestic labor production. She states that it seemed “illogical to exclude the value of women’s services in collecting firewood, preparing and cooking food… yet include their work on the land” (Deane, 1946, p. 156). In Deane’s initial calculations she included the value of this labor, but the broader research team, led by men, excluded this from their final methodology and GDP as it exists today continues to exclude this vital labor (Messac, 2018).
Since GDP was created, feminist economists have fought for the inclusion of the value of household labor mainly borne by women across the globe. Warring (2004) explains that mainstream theories of economic analysis are built upon the notion that only certain economic activities count and that these are overwhelmingly shaped by the viewpoints of men. She then illustrates how economic theories and analysis use language and mathematical formulas to cloak their analysis in a false shroud of objectivity. This history of GDP and feminist challenges to its status as the dominant measure of production is still largely ignored in K-12 economics curriculum (Shanks, 2019). Coupled with the fact that economics education in K-12 schools is often framed through a classical neoliberal lens, critical analysis of statistics discussed in classes remains ignored in the curriculum (Adams, 2019; Shanks, 2019). This allows our understanding of GDP to exist as a “technology in disguise” (Postman, 1993, p. 138). In traditional economics classes, we do not know or even question the history of and ongoing societal effects of this failure to account for the value of all types of provisioning and household domestic labor that is both necessary for (survival/thriving/economic well being/something) and largely done by women (Himmelweit, 2018).
Teaching these critiques of GDP and the fight to account for unpaid economic activity to be accounted for can help our students connect the economics curriculum to their own experiences and observations. A better understanding and discussion in our classes can help students find the language and fill the gaps of mainstream economic beliefs with a more robust accounting of all economic and technological activity.
References
Adams, E. C. (2019). Economics and the civic mission of social studies: Two critiques of neoclassicism. Citizenship, Social and Economics Education, 18(1), 16-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/2047173419841915
Cowan, R.S. (1983). More work for mother: The ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave. Basic Books, Inc.
Därmann, I., Frank, S., Hinschh, M., Keller, W., Lobsien, V., Lucci, A., Pfeiffer, H., Skowronek, T., Spahn, P., Vogl, J., Welgen, T., & Winterling, A. (2016). From the oikonomia of classical antiquity to our modern economy. Literary-theoretical transformations of social media. Journal for Ancient Studies, 6, 306-348. http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/FUDOCS_document_000000025993
Deane, P. (1946). Measuring national income in colonial territories. In M. Gilbert, D. Brady, & S. Kuznets (Eds.), Studies in income and wealth. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/chapters/c5697
Himmelweit, S. (2018). Feminist economics. In L. Fischer, J. Hasell, J. C. Proctor, D. Uwakwe, Z. Ward-Perkins, & C. Watson (Eds.), Rethinking economics: An introduction to pluralist economics (pp. 60-75) . Routledge.
Lesham, D. (2016). Retrospectives: What did the ancient greeks mean by oikonomia. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30(1), 225-231. https://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jep.30.1.225
Messac, L. (2018). Outside the economy: Women’s work and feminist economics in the construction and critique of national income accounting. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46(3), 552-578. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2018.1431436
Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Vintage Books
Shanks, N.G. (2019). Against ‘economic man’: A feminist challenge to prevailing neoclassical norms in K-12 economics education. Theory & Research in Social Education, 47(4), 577-603. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2019.1647904
Warring, M. (2004). Counting for nothing: What men value and what women are worth. University of Toronto Press.