 Women's traditional work is disparaged as not being very economically relevant or productive or contributing to economic growth and then that same view is applied to the state where social spending is viewed as a drag on economic growth rather than a contribution to the development of human capabilities. Today there's a lot of time use data that shows that about half of all the time that people spend working in the United States, they're working outside the market. They're taking care of their kids, they're taking care of their parents, they're doing the shopping, they're doing the cooking, they're rolling the lawn. That work affects living standards and it affects levels of consumption and yet it's largely omitted from measures of income or consumption or investment. On both the micro level and the macro level, which is crazy. On the micro level if you have two families and they're both earning a market income of $50,000 and they have the same number of children, you treat them as having the same standard of living. But in one of those families there could be two adults working full-time contributing to earn that market income. In the other family there could be one adult working full-time with a full-time stay-at-home parent providing all of those services that this other family has to buy in the market. So the idea that these two families are in the same place in the income distribution is basically wacko. And likewise you can look at countries, you know countries with higher rates of labor force participation of women have a higher GDP than those that don't. But if you assign any kind of economic value to the work that housewives and mothers do, that relative ranking can change. How should economists define work? Well I think the traditional definition is something that you engage in only because you want the end product. So the process itself is not a source of utility. But if you think about it, that suggests that all the work that we do for pay we only do in order to get paid. But there's a lot of evidence that people often like their job and derive a lot of satisfaction from their job. Likewise, taking care of your kids, cooking dinner, sure you get satisfaction from it. Do you really not want to call it work? I think a better definition and I think one that's being more widely used is work as an activity that you could in principle pay somebody else to do for you. But if in principle you can hire somebody to do it, you can ask, well what would happen if I didn't do it? And you basically have to pay money to enjoy that same level of consumption. The definition of work has been altered. It is changing and evolving. But it's a lot harder to get economists to change their definition of income or savings or consumption or investment. You'll hear economists talk in a kind of casual way about investment in kids and human capital. Do they include investment in spending on education? Is that tallied as investment in the national income accounts? No way. The time that parents devote to children, is that considered investment rather than consumption? No, not at all. I guess my prediction is that's the issue that's going to be processed. It's taking that greater appreciation of non-market work and translating that into better measures of non-market income consumption investment.