The idea that the home is a site of real economic production — cooking, cleaning, raising children, caring for the sick — and that the national accounts which measure a country's wealth systematically leave this work out, rendering invisible the labor that makes all other labor possible.
Every year, economists publish a number meant to capture everything a country produces. It counts car factories and law firms and coffee shops. It does not count the person who woke at five in the morning to prepare breakfast, dropped the children at school, came home to care for an elderly parent, cooked dinner, and put the children to bed. None of that appears in the gross domestic product. It is as if it never happened. The economist Marilyn Waring noticed this in the 1980s and asked a simple question: if a disaster like an oil spill adds to GDP because someone has to clean it up, but raising a child adds nothing, what does GDP actually measure? The household economy is the answer to that question — and a challenge to every assumption about what an economy is.