Unpaid household labor, growing food in the garden, repairing your own car, or even painting your apartment are all activities that add too wellbeing, but they are not counted in GDP. By the same token, every time someone is treated for cancer GDP goes up.

This is a serious flaw in the accounting process. There is actually a lot of research on ways to change the way we do national income accounts. The Genuine Progess Indicator is one approach that tries to get around some of these problems.

Economists measure the “value” of things by adding up their prices. That’s how we can add sweaters + apples + cars + … + zinc. To add things up they need to be in common units. Economists add in currency units (dollars, euros, yen).

Problem is, a whole lot of things that have prices are actually “bads,” and many things that don’t have a price are “goods.” By standard reasoning the Exxon Valdez was a great succcess. The fact that it spilled thousands of gallons of oil is not counted as bad … Valdez bay has no price. The millions of dollars spent cleaning up are counted as good, because everything usesd in the clean up had a price.

There isn’t much justification for the way we currently add things up to get GDP. It’s just the way it’s done.

Household labor is left out because it doesn’t have a price, it isn’t paid. Ditto for the veggies in your garden.

Because GDP tracks the level of monetized exchanges … things are in GDP when goods trade for money, and money trades for goods … anything that is not monetized gets left out.

This is one of the ways that women’s economic contributions are erased from the record. The accountants don’t have an column for it. Nobody bothers to monitor household labor, so policy makers ignore the impact of changes in government programs on families.

For example, the structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank often called for cuts in health and education. But the social need for health care and education did not go away. Rather than being performed by professionals in public settings, the work was pushed back onto private household.

This policy change increases the demand for women’s domestic labor. More work at home left less time for paid work.

The accounting/statistical invisibility of women’s unpaid labor is a problem. But adding this back into national accounting systems won’t change women’s work experiences at all. Public awareness would likely change, and that would be a good thing. But not good enough to make changes in national income accounting central to a feminist economic agenda.