WU Kolloquium „Research Seminar in Economic and Social History“ des Instituts für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte der WU Wien (Web)
Zeit: Di., 09.12.2025, 17.00–18.30 Uhr
Ort: WU Wien, Gebäude D4, 3. Stock, Raum D.4.3.106 – and virtual space
For access please contact geschichte@wu.ac.at
Economists pay little attention to caring labour provided commercially and ignore it if unpaid. Disregard is theoretically indefensible, unjust, ignores services that have significant value, and probably misleads accounts of income and growth. In this lecture I will use some of my recently published research as well as new work to demonstrate the importance of care, particularly unpaid care. I look at three kinds of caring work: domestic labour or housework; breastfeeding; and end of life care. Following the conventional methodology, I infer the value of such work according to the costs/prices of contemporary market equivalents and relate aggregated values to estimates of national income. Historically unpaid domestic labour represented some 20 per cent of the value of total output, while breastfeeding represented another 1-2 per cent, or even more depending on the choice of commercial substitutes. While demonstrating care’s importance, a market equivalent valuation misses two important points. First, as care is sometimes exchanged for money and sometimes given for free, it is sometimes included in conventional estimates of output and sometimes not. With no change in actual activities, these accounting shifts are spurious.
Bizarrely, national income would fall if a woman decided to breastfeed her baby! Economic historians must ask whether such changes could have misled accounts of growth. Second, unpaid care often provides effects beyond the individuals directly involved, generating externalities that are ignored by the market and so the ‚as if marketed‘ imputation strategy. Many of these externalities relate to health and welfare and so lead to questions about the adequacy of modern GDP and its historical equivalents as measures of wellbeing. To fully understand care’s importance, economic historians must extend their macro statistical scaffold to recognize activities beyond the measuring rod of the market.
Moderation: Wilfried Kiesling
Jane Humphries (Oxford Univ.) is a Professor of Economic History and Continue reading
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