The Cake Question: Recognising the Productive Functions of Households

-By Joanna Roughton–

Imagine two cakes. 

 

One I buy from a supermarket. In its own tiny, infinitesimal way, the money I hand over helps keep the check-out staff and shelf-stackers in work. Oh, and shareholders fractionally happier.

 

The other cake, I bake at home. The ingredients come from the same supermarket, so those shareholders still get a slice (of my cash, not my cake); albeit less than they would have done had I bought the finished product directly from them.

 

So by baking my own cake, I save a few pennies. 

 

But what about the non-monetary stuff? What if I share the cake-baking experience with a child or, indeed, several of my children? 

 

At that point cooking becomes an end in itself, and not just a means to an end; since the very act of baking becomes something recreational and educational. 

 

And what if I simply enjoy cooking for its own sake? To smell those lovely odours seeping from the oven? To find peace of mind by losing myself, briefly, in a recipe.

 

Lest you think I have spent too long sniffing the caster sugar, let me say that I pose these questions in a spirit of academic inquiry. I do so, inspired by the words of Professor Michael Burkhard-Piorkowsky, who wrote a working paper in 2011 for a Home Renaissance Foundation conference.

 

In a subsequent interview with the Mercator website, the professor invokes the memory of Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker (who described the home as a ‘truly small factory’) to raise the cake question. 

 

And, silly though it sounds, the cake question – in a roundabout way – lies at the heart of the debate which the HRF is seeking to promote. Because the work of Becker and Burkhard-Piorkowsky makes clear that the home will never attain the societal status it warrants until it is given the economic value it deserves.

 

Or, as Burkhard-Piorkowsky eloquently puts it in his 2011 HRF paper: “In mainstream economics…households and families are viewed as mere consumers of so called consumption goods and services, and their productive functions are neglected….Households are like small factories. They combine capital goods, raw materials and labour to clean, feed, procreate and otherwise produce useful commodities.”

 

This failure to put a price on the output of the home formed part of a recent EU parliamentary debate. The point was made that unpaid care work – for children or the elderly – should be included in GDP figures. 

 

Why stop there? 

 

Every time I take in a parcel from Amazon for a neighbour (because I am at home and they are not), my home is making a small, unrecognised contribution to our economic lifeblood. When a neighbour, a working mother, calls me from the office (where she has been asked to work late) and asks me to take care of her child –gratis – my home is making another micro addition to the wealth of our nation.

 

There are many other examples, of course. They all have one thing in common though. They show how the work of the home is taken for granted by policy-makers and most economists. Thanks to the work of fresh-thinkers like Professor Burkhard-Piorkowsky, the HRF, and our friends in Brussels, that benighted situation might not last for too much longer.

 

Stay-at-home Parents and the Productivity Juggernaut

-By Joanna Roughton–

Economists themselves call their area of study ‘the dismal science’. Yet there is no getting away from the fact, dismal or otherwise, economics matters more now than ever before. 

Its practitioners have been elevated to celebrity status, its relevance enhanced by the economic crash of 2008, its predictions used to guide government policy.

When it comes to the home, economists see things through the prism of hard cash. Take stay-at-home-mothers. From an economist’s perspective, a woman who chooses not to do a job, is economically inactive, an example of zero productivity.

And because policy-makers believe that rising productivity is a ‘very good thing’, a whole series of counter-arguments fail to make an impact.

These are not the counter arguments you might be familiar with. I am not talking about the importance of having a mum around to create a home, or a place apt for the fruitful raising of children. 

No, I mean the stuff which economists fail to understand. The benefits for which there are no metrics. And because they can’t be recorded, they cannot be advanced as a brake on the productivity juggernaut.

What are these benefits and why are they so nebulous?

Many of them acrue to the so-called Big Society. Now lots of people – our own Prime Minister included – will say that Britain’s charitable and voluntary sector are in rude health. They point to levels of participation which prove that all is well.

But that is sophistry. Much of the big society is now made up of organisations and NGO’s which take cash in return for good works. At the grass roots level it’s a different story. From my own experience of talking to other Mums, I know that there is a crisis of engagement.

Clubs which have run successfully for decades, clubs which impart valuable life lessons to children (and which do not charge for the privilege) are now struggling to recruit people to run them.

Often they fall back on a ever-more hard-pressed core of non-working volunteers. The burden falls especially hard on older women – retirees – who are not being replaced by younger women who would, once, have taken their places.

Some will wonder: where are the men in all this? 

The truth is that women, because of their hard-wired organisational and communication skills, have always formed the backbone of the voluntary world. They are natural activists. At the community level, it is their energy which shapes things. Just google the words “mothers against” and you will see what I mean.

It is very difficult to put a value on the work that stay-at-home-mothers do outside of the home. But I have a very strong conviction that there will be a cost to all of us in the future because fewer of these women now exist. 

At the most basic level they communicated one essential verity to the next generation. They showed that there can be a value system based, not on financial reward, but on charity, on giving, on service and duty. 

Driving Solo Through the Housing Conundrum

-By Joanna Roughton–

Perhaps it’s an urban myth. Some cheeky drivers in San Francisco are said to place mannequin dummies in the front passenger seat of their cars to avoid a penalty charge for driving alone.

There is certainly nothing apocryphal about the special traffic lanes in some British cities which – usually at peak times – can only be used by those who are ‘car sharing’. 

And although we have not reached the stage where sitting at the wheel of a big gas-guzzler without passengers carries a stigma, there is a general feeling that – where possible – it makes sense for commuters to ease congestion by travelling together in the same car.

Strangely, the same disapprobation does not apply to homes. And yet there is every reason why it should. Just as we have a shortage of road capacity, there is a dearth of housing. And just as sharing a car cuts an individual’s carbon footprint, so sharing a home achieves the same end, relative to someone who lives alone.

I say this in view of research published today which claims to reveal a dramatic rise in the number of Britons who do not share their home with anyone else. The number of single occupancy households has more than doubled in the last 40 years and now stands at almost nine million. 

There are now parts of the UK where this is the norm. The 2011 census revealed that in some areas, especially parts of London, single people are now the dominant social group.

What strange, etiolated places these must be. On the one hand vibrant and ‘happening’, but with about as much social cohesion as the average university hall of residence. 

Today’s research also shows that these singletons pay an average of around £1,800 more in bills for the privilege of living alone. But the real cost is to the common good. In an era of scarce energy it does seem like folly to heat, cool and light a home for one when the same resources could provide those services to multiple occupants. 

This is not to excoriate those who find themselves living alone through no fault of their own. We are living through a time of unprecedented improvements in life expectancy, one by-product of which is a rising number of widows and widowers. 

Divorce is also on the increase. And people are marrying, or cohabiting with a partner, later – if at all. These are huge social changes and deploring them carries a danger of demonisation.

Yet there is still the logic gap brought about by the comparison with cars. Why do we permit ourselves to label as a social ill the solitary occupation of a vehicle, while ignoring the same deficiencies in a home?