Adding unpaid housework to GDP lowers 55 years of US growth by 0.2 points a year

The $6 trillion is an upper bound, and it arrives with its own denominator: if that figure is a fifth of measured output, measured output is about $30 trillion ^[1][15].

GAO's growth comparison is the smaller finding. Conventional GDP grew an average 6.3% a year from 1965 through 2020, against 6.1% for a Bureau of Economic Analysis measure that accounts for household labor ^[4]. Two-tenths of a point compounds: 1.063 to the 55th power divided by 1.061 to the 55th is 1.11, so the two series end about 11% apart ^[16].

Work crossing the line between household and market is what opens that gap. Nancy Folbre, the economist who wrote Making Care Work, told Fortune that women's access to higher education and higher-paid jobs opened up in the 1960s. GDP recorded their entry into the workforce without accounting for the household labor that stopped. That, she said, "artificially boosted" the economy's growth rate ^[5].

Misty Heggeness is an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas. If families stopped cooking and providing childcare themselves, she told Fortune, much of that work would have to be bought from the service economy instead ^[13]. "The value of the money that we make in our jobs would be reduced because it would be more expensive for us to survive," she said. That is "because we would be looking at the formal labor market for those services" ^[9].

I'd treat the level as close to inert for a growth model. Household output is excluded from GDP because no money changes hands ^[2]; it is not taxed, and it sits on no one's revenue line. The flow across the boundary is the part that changes a forecast, because paid childcare, paid elder care and prepared food all book revenue the home-produced version never booked. Folbre made the household version of that point. A second paycheck raises total family income. But when the job leaves less time for necessary tasks, part of the extra income goes on buying back work the family used to do itself ^[14].

The case against leaning on the 0.2 point gap is that it is one average across 55 years, and the Fortune account does not break it out by decade ^[18]. If the gap has narrowed since 2000, headline GDP already tracks the fuller measure closely, and the $6 trillion is then a statement about how work is distributed inside households. Folbre said valuing unpaid labor should not be read as encouraging women back into the home but as a way to share the work more equitably. She added that "however valuable that unpaid work might be, it's very disempowering" ^[12].

Women who out-earn their male partners still do twice the cooking and cleaning those lower-earning partners do ^[20]. Burnout at work runs 48% among women against 36% among their male colleagues ^[7]. A person putting in 3.72 hours of unpaid household work every day is doing roughly 1,358 hours a year ^[3][17]. "The whole productivity debate is so focused on the measurement of what people are doing at the office, but the productivity of taking care of other people is also really, really important," Folbre said ^[11].