boddi wrote:
>I think that at some level you have to decide what activities are
>economic production and what are not.
Sure, that is what the US Department of Commerce did when it standardized our national income and product accounts (GNP) in the 1940s; the economists involved defined "production" by including some activities and not others. Look at the production process closely and decide...that's what others have done including Simon Kuznets who was involved in the project for a while...that's what I was doing. But for the record Simon Kuznets quit the US DOC project as he felt GNP should measure economic well-being and should include the value of unpaid home production because it is an important factor of production.
>I think it would be unreasonable under all circumstances to count, for
>example, the time it takes for a
>worker to brush his teeth as work. Instead, we call this consumption of
>toothpaste and toothbrushes because the "work" expended in brushing teeth
>only creates value for the person who immediately benefits from it.
Not necessarily, it often creates value within the production process itself. Many kinds of jobs absolutely require clean and nice looking teeth over and above just feeling good about yourself, albeit, we almost always do this activity ourselves. CBS News anchors Dan Rather and John Roberts both need cosmetics applied to their faces to produce whatever it is they both produce. These are part of the costs/factors of production. Tax write-offs or business tax deductions also point to some "social reproduction" type activities being part of production or at least part of what is required to earn income.
> It is not an exchange as such. I think you then extend that logic to, say,
>changing diapers. Obviously it takes work, but the main benefit of that
>work terminates immediately within the consuming household. I think that
>when we are talking about production, we are talking about the flow of use
>values among *economic* actors - those who then produce use value in return.
>It is not a simple distinction to make by any means - care of older
>children, for example, is a business - but I think it is a necessary one.
I guess I don't follow you here. It seems reasonable to me to assume that changing diapers has a use value that satisfies human needs. Are you saying that the care of babies is "consumption" because babies have no use value in return, but since older children may have use value in return we may consider those care work activities "production"? By "no use value in return" do you mean we can't put babies to work as an economic actor, but older children we can? Doesn't the baby's smile have some use value and meet human needs?
>I would make the case that most if not all social reproduction should be
>categorized as consumption and not output.
Including the application of Dan Rather's cosmetics and the truck driver's and CEO's eating activities (tax deductions) respectively relating to transporting and entertaining clients?
>One way to look at it is that at
>any given time there is a great variation in the effectiveness with which
>social reproduction is performed across households and this tells us
>something. In production, the no-arbitrage or Law of One Price principle
>should obtain. If truck driving, for example, fell too heavily on
>Californians, transportation prices would tend to rise and opportunities for
>arbitrage would open immediately. However, in consumption "no-arbitrage"
>need not obtain. One is happy pay five dollars for a Budweiser at a ball
>game he could get across the street for one dollar.
Arbitrage or the "law of one price" as you use in these contexts, hold in the production and consumption cases you give; it's just that there are factors other than price/cost that enter into consumption activities (how much do you value the leisure activity...do you have kids in tow...etc).
> Similarly, a person is
>free to Martha Stewart her house to the tune of fifty hours a week while her
>neighbor lives like a college student. In neither case of consumption is
>there any economic displacement or arbitrage opportunity because they are,
>primarily, choices about consumption.
Some people may choose to buy the drinks across the street and then sneak them into the stadium before the sports event begins. Isn't that economic displacement? But anyway how does this relate to social reproduction activities being or not being considered a part of production processes?
> If Californians take more or less
>care of their children than people in the rest of the country it creates no
>arbitrage opportunity for people in Arkansas. Moreover, the fact that
>social reproduction falls overwhelmingly on mothers and not fathers provides
>no great opportunity for arbitrage between the sexes since the minimum hours
>necessary don't change and what opportunity for arbitrage there is exists
>outside the home. In short, the economy is relatively insensitive to the
>total amount of social reproduction performed and by whom because it is
>overwhelmingly a private activity of consumption.
According to which guiding laws or phenomena? Perhaps the economy being insensitive to which economic activities are performed by whom and compensated as such, is the result of how various divisions (private and public spheres and all that) were created, under patriarchal and kinship based relations, in the first place.
> So the women take off in their space ship. The very first morning water
>consumption is down as dishes and laundry remain undone. Lines at fast food
>restaurants start to get longer. By day five "road rage' has been replaced
>with "play date rage" in the (half-)popular (half-)culture, although road
>rage has, if anything increased. Fast food restaurants cannibalize retail
>space everywhere. By day seventeen, the garbage dumps are brimming with
>fast food packages from restaurants that have tripled output, not to mention
>rugs and furniture removed by health departments now augmented by the
>National Guard. At the end of a month, Mexican assembly lines hum 24 hours
>a day producing hose-able, plastic furniture, wall and floor coverings,
>children's' action videos and Happy Meals for the American market. The fast
>food and video game industries easily soak up the workers fired from
>producing any and all products associated with social niceties. Families
>begin to move into communal Quonset huts and the world quickly takes on the
>look of a modern army base.
>
> After the men leave, different industries collapse but the world changes
>much less in general appearance. Obviously crime drops quickly although it
>makes a small, surprise comeback as decent women and their families are set
>upon by legions of unemployed prostitutes, strippers and Hooters waitresses.
>The automotive industry quickly grinds to a halt as all
>difficult-to-maintain automobiles are abandoned systematically. The
>transportation system is suddenly crippled in a spontaneous breakdown of
>national ride-sharing systems during a flu outbreak. Unemployment rises in
>the face of increased national efficiency and civil wars loom until
>countries begin to trade babysitting and play date time in their options and
>futures markets.
Boddi and Dwayne, your scenarios are hilarious, and I see an awful lot of social reproduction being directly related to production which was one of my points. Peace to you as well. Thanks and your posts were lots of fun.
Regards, Diane
BLOCKED MESSAGE: EventSink_FileBlock Blocked this message.