I’m laying out several relevant aspects below for understanding and incorporation into a better contractual structure for marriage and other less commonly non-valued/priced arrangements. While I use the term “wife” throughout because I want to throw in all miscellaneous work associated with a conventional single-income household into it (indeed that is half of what is written below), it’s not meant as an exclusive claim.
The first consideration is the amount of homemaker and caregiver labor to be performed. Where does this come from/what creates the specific amount of work?:
- The size of the house and real estate generally
- The complexity of financial affairs
- The ordinary errands e.g. grocery shopping, car maintenance
- The number of pets, plants, and other items that require tending
- The number of dependents brought into the house, and the level of care that they require
So there is a combination of choice items, and non-choice items (e.g. when your parents get too sick to live by themselves). This in turn provides the context for how much labor has to get performed, when it needs to be performed, and the hourly rates/charges at which you could get it on the free market. Particularly, the schedule of work; if you just have housecleaning and ordinary errands, you have a low hourly rate, but if you have to wake up twice at night to care for a child for an hour, that’s a much larger commitment and hourly rate.
Another question is, “what is the required level”, and “what is the preferred/optimal level” of care provision? Of course you could just have kids, let them grow up more or less feral, hand them over to kindergarten with no education, and then let them struggle their way through school and become low-wage retail laborers. It is an option, and one (for various reasons, sometimes voluntary, but usually related to economic situation) that people do adopt. However, from what we have begun to understand, and in light of various powerful influencers like drugs, omnipresent entertainment like video games, etc., in order for the children to have a reasonable probability of becoming middle class or higher, the parents and possibly other people outside of school will have to tutor and discipline them, requiring some additional effort. A similar line of logic exists with regards to caregiving for the elderly and disabled. (see below for more thoughts about what actually needs to be required/provided in this situation)
While this accounting establishes the open market labor rate, it doesn’t fully account for the assignment of specific individuals e.g. the mother, who are uniquely qualified to care for relatives. Hence for those specific tasks, we also must consider the counterfactual of labor prices and situation given the commitments each participant in the contract undertakes. That is, someone is giving up their career track. The major difficulty in accounting for this is that many women choose their careers based on their compatibility with having kids; you can’t say “oh this woman is just going to be a nurse and this is the advancement she’s giving up” if she would have chosen the doctor track in a childless lifestyle. The better answer is to price based on scholastic aptitude, though it’s still not very accurate.
The final major factor, primarily applicable to childrearing but possibly also e.g. to elder care, is pricing the contract length, and all the aspects around the breaking of that contract. Childrearing can be procured on the open market, but you can’t procure a child’s mother in the same way. Hence, when a man and a woman are negotiating a marriage contract, part of that labor rate is the implicit commitment that the father and mother both will provide their assigned share of the childrearing duties – and the price/terms (e.g. you can’t take a new job out of the city in which your child has been living) of that could change in the event of divorce.
To establish the order of magnitude, let’s be concrete: the price for open-market labor is much higher than you would expect based on historical (underpayment): with $15 USD an hour total compensation, a year’s worth of labor is $30,000, for a standard 8-hour week with days off. In reality, the wife has an on-call schedule which requires additional labor. This is enhanced if the wife handles the finances and other home matters (as is wise), so she is working from until the kids get up until at least they get home and have dinner. Now you’re easily talking 10 hours a day, plus whatever happens on the weekends. That kind of schedule now starts to push you up to the $50,000 range, which effectively makes the wife a median-income value provider. Thus if the husband is out making $60,000, he should be paying all his income to his wife, minus his share of the caregiving duties. Even with that adjustment, and for items such as free rent, you easily still would be looking at $30,000 a year, which is way beyond anything the husband realistically could expect to save with several kids and a wife in a major metropolitan area, let alone provide for his own separate retirement. None of this considers that the wife could be smart and therefore capable of pulling down a six figure income.
To consider the additional cost of the long-term contract: by itself, divorce is not that difficult; however for a middle-income-or-less family, it is financially infeasible. You aren’t going to do less work raising the children divorced than married. Additionally, you have to shuttle them between the parents, and you have to maintain two completely separate households, whereas before you could have at least some merging of the two. Meanwhile, there isn’t enough money for the husband or wife to retire in any half-equitable distribution. But the biggest hit comes when we talk about the new division of labor. The husband was paying for everything while the wife was doing the work effectively as an employee. In the divorce, the husband loses the sex contract and household savings, but still has to pay for everything, while practically speaking will only get the kids on the weekends, at most. If the kids were older, this could work. However in the general case, the wife has young children, which means she only effectively can work part-time, which is close to economically net worthless labor at this point in human history (e.g. you can always import more low-skilled labor). “Paying to work” is a thing in the western world. Hence there is an ugly de-specialization of labor which works to the detriment of all parties. If the husband takes more of the kids (since he may have been wanting them in the first place), then he de-specializes and the economic hole gets even deeper. If the wife is getting the kids almost all of the time (since she is working and providing labor most of the time), similar to how the married arrangement worked, then the husband is hemorrhaging cash for a weekend day or two. From a quality perspective, you may be looking at $50 a hour or more effective costs per child-hour; if he pays support costs of $30,000 a year, but only gets the kids for an average of one day a week…not a good situation, especially if the sex contract was a significant reason for the marriage. As for the woman – she was getting $30,000 a year but had rent included; now she has to pay for her place (easily another $15,000/year), plus the caregiving costs, plus the transportation and coordination of kids back and forth with the husband. Where’s that extra money coming from? The husband doesn’t have it, because he’s middle-income-or-less.
In the preceding discussion, we mentioned two cases where the caregiving labor might come up short:
- Not raising the kids to the desired quality standard when adequate time/resources are provided
- The divorce and what happens economically if the divorce is unaffordable, which could include letting the kids go feral
so the other way to check/account for homemaking and caregiving labor, is the cost to the welfare state of alternative arrangements in these cases. Recognizing the quality differences – you come up with numbers on the order of $50K/child when they are abandoned. When you look at “wraparound services”, you recognize that the supplemental value of the labor is on the order of $10K or more, and when you pull in “food stamps”, housing vouchers, etc. you work your way back up towards that $50K number. The similar considerations apply for nursing homes and other elder care arrangements.