{"id":2638,"date":"2020-05-22T17:07:17","date_gmt":"2020-05-22T17:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/?p=2638"},"modified":"2020-12-28T19:23:22","modified_gmt":"2020-12-28T19:23:22","slug":"the-homemade-value-added-stabilizer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/blog\/2020\/05\/22\/the-homemade-value-added-stabilizer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Homemade Value-Added Stabilizer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cShelter in place\u201d mandates in the early stages of the U.S. Covid-19 pandemic required many people to stay home, cook their own meals, school their own children, and entertain themselves. \u00a0Unpaid work served not only as a social safety net, but also as an\u00a0automatic stabilizer<\/a>. While it didn\u2019t dampen fluctuations in official Gross Domestic Product, as did unemployment insurance, it clearly helped stabilize consumption.<\/p>\n

Just imagine what would have happened if most people had not had refrigerators, stoves, and computers\u2014or just read reports of the\u00a0plight<\/a>\u00a0of homeless people.<\/p>\n

By mid-March 2020, many states and localities shut down restaurants for any services other than take-out. Home-produced meals increased of necessity. Many such meals probably consisted of convenient processed foods that could be popped into a microwave oven, but a renaissance of home cooking also became apparent, along with reliance on long-lasting, easily stored items such as rice and beans. \u00a0Analysis of Google Search terms showed a sharp\u00a0spike in questions<\/a>\u00a0concerning food preparation and storage. As one newspaper put it, America began\u00a0baking its heart out<\/a>. Yeast suddenly became as hard to come by as toilet paper.<\/p>\n

In 2018, according to the\u00a0American Time Use Survey<\/a>, adult civilian women spent an average of .8 hours a day, and their male counterparts .4 hours a day in meal preparation. How much more did they spend in the months of March and April, and what was the monetary value of this unpaid labor, based on what it would have cost them to hire someone to plan, cook, and clean up? How much did they save on eating-out?<\/p>\n

Many childcare centers and schools were closed, leaving parents with responsibility for home-schooling, supervising children, and keeping them from going confinement-crazy. \u00a0The American Time Use Survey averaged the amount of reported time that married mothers and fathers living with children under the age of 18 spent in\u00a0primary activities<\/a>\u00a0of caring for and helping household children\u00a0 over the 2013-2017 period\u2014an average of 2.6 hours per day for mothers not employed and 1.4 hours for fathers not employed.<\/p>\n

Under sequestration, both active care and supervisory care (defined as the\u00a0time in which an adult reported that a child under the age of 13 \u201cin their care\u201d ) ballooned. How much did these two forms of childcare increase? How much did households save on childcare costs?<\/p>\n

Video streaming and gaming increased dramatically, especially during afternoon hours, and people began to\u00a0rely<\/a>\u00a0more heavily on streaming for instruction and exercise as well as entertainment. So, while they spent less money (and less travel time) on entertainment away from home, they substituted forms of entertainment that were probably less expensive, on average. How much less expensive?<\/p>\n

Between March and May, average household income plummeted as a result of job furloughs and unemployment. The increase in time devoted to household production buffered this loss to some extent\u2014but without answers to the questions above, we can\u2019t know how much. Most recent impromptu household surveys have focused primarily on women\u2019s unpaid work relative to men\u2019s\u2014an important, but different topic.<\/p>\n

For years, I have protested economists\u2019 lack of interest in total consumption\u2014defined as the sum of money expenditures and the consumption of home-produced services.<\/p>\n

Let me will repeat one example that I have\u00a0written about<\/a>\u00a0in more detail elsewhere: Compare two couples, each with two small children, each earning $50,000 after taxes. Conventional measures treat them as having exactly the same income. Yet one couple may include an adult earning $50,000 and a full-time homemaker\/caregiver, while the other includes two adults earning $25,000 each and obviously has less time to devote to unpaid work. If we assigned any positive value to unpaid work, the first household would obviously be better off in terms of both income and consumption.<\/p>\n

Market income is just not a very good indicator of total consumption among households with differing inputs of unpaid work. Also, the value of unpaid work is greater in households with more than one person, because of economies of scale in food preparation and childcare. Standard equivalence scales used to adjust household income for household size and composition completely\u00a0ignore<\/a>\u00a0these issues.<\/p>\n

Obviously, the additional unpaid work performed while sheltering in place was a source of great stress, especially for those simultaneously telecommuting, zooming, or otherwise trying to fulfill paid employment responsibilities at home. Yet, it\u2019s hard to deny that this work also \u201cadded value,\u201d enabling an important form of social provisioning.<\/p>\n

The worst-case scenario for a household with children was almost certainly one in which all adults (e.g. mother and father) were essential workers, required to keep working (often at risk to their health) but unable to work from home. Federal and state agencies tried to provide \u201cresources<\/a>\u201d for these workers, but no guarantees were forthcoming.<\/p>\n

In many cases, one of the adults (probably the mother) was forced to quit or take a leave of absence from paid employment. While new\u00a0federal legislation<\/a>\u00a0gives states flexibility to pay benefits where an individual leaves employment to care for a family member, not all states do so.<\/p>\n

Such a policy is effectively a paid family leave\u2014something that most states have shied away from for years, making this country an international\u00a0outlier<\/a>. The complexity of the new legislation, plus the difficulty of actually filing for and\u00a0receiving unemployment benefits,\u00a0<\/a>has probably kept take-up pretty low even in states that allow this option.<\/p>\n

Just one more reason to consider policies such as federal paid family and sick leaves and a\u00a0universal basic income<\/a>\u00a0that could help the stabilizers known as households do their job.<\/p>\n

Original blog published on CARE TALK: FEMINIST AND POLITICAL ECONOMY on May 19th, 2020. See<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>here<\/a> for the original posting. <\/em><\/p>\n

Reposted with permission from<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/span>Dr. Nancy Folbre<\/span> from University of Massachusetts Amherst and an expert researcher for the Care Work and the Economy Project within the Rethinking Macroeconomics working group.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cShelter in place\u201d mandates in the early stages of the U.S. Covid-19 pandemic required many people to stay home, cook their own meals, school their own children, and entertain themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[536,565,546,567],"tags":[629,575,552,573,603],"class_list":["post-2638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-covid-19","category-time-use-survey","category-u-s","category-unpaid-work","tag-american-time-use-survey","tag-child-care","tag-covid-19","tag-policy","tag-u-s"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.american.edu\/careworkeconomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}