Zoom

"Accounting is as subjective and partial as the art of storytelling, the other meaning contained in the word "account." -Jane Gleeson-WhiteThis is a story about feminist efforts to assign an economic value to care provision, a project that begins—but does not end—with preliminary efforts in the late 19thcentury to measure and assign a dollar value to unpaid work in the home. Today, the annual American Time Use Survey provides useful estimates of the average amount of time that Americans spend on a given day providing child care, elder care, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and managing households, and the lower-bound replacementcostof this time can be estimated by asking how much would be needed to pay someone to do it. This calculation, however, tells us little about thecontributionsthat unpaid and paid care services make to the production, development and maintenance of human capabilities. These vital contributions cannot be reduced to dollar values, inviting a larger, interdisciplinary effort to develop better dashboard indicators of individual and social well-being. Sponsored by the Care Studies Working Group at the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Economics.