Descripción general del procedimiento de auditoría de mantenimiento a utilizar

This section traces how the problem of productive activity outside markets has been dealt with in the history of economic thought, specifically through Margaret Reid’s third- party criterion, showing how this principle informs contemporary beyond GDP accounting practice. It situates Reid’s work in a specific moment of problematisation, in which neoclassical value theory had unfixed the boundary between productive economic activities and society. Reid’s work reflects the concern of neoclassical thinkers to demarcate economic activity as relating to allocative choice between present disutility and future utility, grounding the notion of labour in alienability and exchange. This led Reid to formulate the re-integration of non-market work into the economy in specific terms: while she broadened the concept of labour to include unpaid work, she did so with reference to whether a market existed for delegating these activities. Current methodologies for valuing unpaid work – based upon Reid’s work – consequently represent an ambiguous terrain in which substantive objectives are practically advanced through a continued methodological privileging of exchange relations as the foundational site of the economic. They reproduce the concerns of neoclassical thinkers to explicitly contain the economy within the sphere of calculation, scarcity and exchange, after subjective value theory had threatened to compromise its boundaries.

Defining Productive Labour from Classical to Neoclassical Economics

Classical political economists famously worked with a labour theory of value; but this might also be described as a value theory of labour. Labour was activity that produced goods with exchange value. Smith often defined labour in open-ended terms, as: ‘the fund which originally supplies [the nation] with all the necessaries and conveniences of life’ (Smith 1993 [1776], 8), or elsewhere simply the ‘toil and trouble’ of initially producing useful goods. Smith did, however, draw a crucial distinction between productive and unproductive labour, based on whether its value was consumed in the process of creating it or stored up in a tangible good with exchange value:

The labour of the manufacturer fixes itself in some particular vendible commodity, which lasts for some time at least after that labour is past. It is, as it were, a certain quantity of

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labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion. That subject, or what is the same thing, the price of that subject, can afterwards, if necessary, put into motion a quantity of labour equal to that which has originally produced it (Smith 1993 [1776], 191; emphasis added).

In doing so, Smith coupled productive labour to the ability to bring the resultant good to market– i.e., generally to the manufacture of physical, tradeable objects. The distinction was used, moreover, to explicitly exclude the work of domestic servants as economically unproductive.29

Nevertheless, while the productive nature of labour is indeed grounded in the ability to exchange or barter the resultant products, Smith’s distinction did not imply that the dividing line between productive and unproductive work was the labour market. Smith’s definition excluded many activities which are traded on markets for a wage: even the services of a paid domestic servant were considered unproductive, as they were consumed immediately. Conversely, the unpaid production of exchangeable capital goods would be considered productive labour. Smith rather defined all affective service work as consumption (Brennan 2006). Until the late 19th _{century, this provided a secure} principle on which to demarcate productive economic activities from unproductive consumption or society.30

With the marginalist shift to a subjective theory of value, definitions of productive labour evolved. Value was now considered in utilitarian terms, as anything that satisfies a desire or want rather than as physical goods produced by units of labour time. This potentially engendered much more expansive definitions of what constituted productive economic activity, which in turn threatened to overflow manufacturing work to encompass almost every human action (see Brennan 2006). Marshall, for instance, explicitly contested Smith’s definition of productive labour, arguing that ‘man cannot create material things

29_{‘The labour of the menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing… [it] does not fix or}

realise itself in any particular subject or vendible commodity. His services generally perish in the very instant of their performance, and seldom leave any trace or value behind them for which an equal quantity of service could afterwards be procured’ (ibid, 191-2).

30 _{This focus must be understood not as representing a fundamental ontological divide, however, but as}

inspired by his concern with the ethical underpinnings of commercial society and transactions (see Watson 2018, 21-23).

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… [W]hen he is said to produce material things, he really only creates utilities’ (Marshall 2011 [1890/1930], 45). On this basis he entertained the notion that ‘it would be best to regard all labour as productive except that which failed to promote the aim towards which it was directed, and so produced no utility (Marshall 2011 [1890/1930], 41). Likewise, in Taussig:

Since the essence of production is that it leads to satisfactions or utilities, it follows that any labour or effort which yields utilities is productive. The musician whose performance brings us pleasure does precisely the same sort of thing as the florist whose blossoms last a few hours. The domestic servant contributes to our ease just as does the artisan who

supplies the furniture for our dwellings…[The] services of those whom Adam Smith and

his followers called unproductive labourers…are desired and prized; and they are yielded

by human effort. The rewards earned by these efforts are an important topic in economic science (Taussig 1911, 18-20).

However, since almost any purposive human activity arguably engenders utility, this potentially implied that productive work could no longer be confined to market-oriented activity. Thus, the first objective of neoclassical theorists – to ground economics in a utilitarian theory of value – threatened to compromise the second, i.e. to turn economics into the mathematical study of choice and allocative efficiency under scarcity conditions. Anxiety about the potential implications of this proliferation in the concept of labour is evident in the writings of neoclassical theorists. In particular, we see a concern to exclude from the economy activities which were done simply for their own amusement and yielded transitory pleasures. This was done through two central demarcation strategies: firstly, to re-define labour as only encompassing activities which did not themselves render utility for the person doing them; and secondly, to thereby re-connect labour conceptually with the exchange of an alienable and transferrable good. Wages could thus be reconstituted as the marginal price needed to offset the disutility of the labour involved with compensatory consumption possibilities. These moves were vital to Reid’s subsequent efforts to re-include non-market work in the economy through the third- party criterion, which underpins modern accounting methodologies.

Firstly, labour was carefully distinguished from leisure and consumption in neoclassical theory through an emphasis on its essential disutility. Jevons, for example, worried that: ‘In defining labour…we may, if we like, include in it all exertion of body and mind. A

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game of cricket would, in this case, be labour’ (Jevons 1965 [1871], 168). Rejecting this as absurd, he provided a definition of labour as the temporary endurance of disutility and hardship to produce future utility: ‘Labour is the painful exertion which we undergo to ward off pains of greater amount, or to procure pleasures which leave a balance in our favour’ (ibid). Marshall agreed with Jevons, and for similar reasons:

Though some exertions are undertaken merely for their own sake, as when a game is played for amusement, they are not counted as labour. We may define labour as any exertion of body or mind undergone partly or wholly for with a view to some good other than the pleasure derived directly from work (Marshall 2011 [1890/1930], 46).

Through this emphasis on disutility, labour was re-connected to future-oriented activity: consumption, leisure and society became things that were done for their own right by the doer, and which yield no future utility; productive labour is activity that is, by contrast, inherently painful and unpleasant but stores up future utilities. Importantly, this focus on disutility also allowed neoclassical thinkers to connect labour with the marginalist methodological focus on rational calculation over the allocation of scarce resources. This allowed for a de facto analytical focus on labour markets and wages as the price we receive to endure disutility in order to produce future consumption possibilities. Revealingly, Jevons decided against a more inclusive conception of labour precisely because, since such activities are ‘undertaken solely for the sake of the enjoyment attaching to it’, they ‘demand no calculus’ (Jevons 1965 [1871], 168).31

Thus, neoclassical authors restored Smith’s principle that productive activity was something yielding a future exchange benefit, but expanded it to apply to service work as well as ‘vendible commodities’ (Smith 1993 [1776], 191). They did so by delineating labour as temporary disutility which produces a store of utility that can be transferred to others on the labour market (the site where decisions over how to allocate this future- oriented disutility were made).

31 _{The sense of labour as a disutility also underpins the development of compensating wage differential}

theory, which see wages as the marginal benefit needed to offset the disutility represented by the work performed. Furthermore, when Jevons considers how we might make economics a quantitative science, he admits that since no unit of pleasure and pain exist, so we must look to price movements as the visible effects of these hedonic calculi.

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Margaret Reid, the Third-Party Criterion and the Incomplete Escape from Formalism

It is in this intellectual context – in which the scope of the economic and its boundaries with the social had been unfixed by neoclassical value theory – that we should situate Margaret Reid’s canonical work in the 1930s on household production. Foreshadowing Polanyi’s critique of formalist economics avant la lettre, Reid observed that:

With few exceptions the interest of economists has been concentrated on that part of our economic system which is organized on a price basis. The productive work of the household has been overlooked, even though more workers are engaged in it than in any other single industry (Reid, 1934, v).

It was on this basis that Reid sought to clarify the economically productive aspects of non-market activity and secure its status within economic analysis. It is important to consider her work in some detail, as the way in which she approached this has provided the motivating force for beyond GDP efforts to integrate unpaid labour into national accounting, and the methodologies used to do so.

Reid’s work directly engages with and reflects the concern of neoclassical thinkers to keep the economic within its proper bounds: exchange and allocative choice. Thus, while her thought is motivated by the desire to extend the definition of production to include unpaid work, she sought to keep it clearly demarcated from the ‘social’ activities of leisure and consumption. Discussing the expansive utility-based definitions of production introduced by neoclassical authors, she agreed:

To define production merely as the creation of utility is to identify it with purposeful

activity…Such a definition of production leaves production and consumption in a state

of hopeless confusion and makes no distinction between economic, personal and social

activities. A cheery “good morning”, a swim in the lake, a game of golf, and social

intercourse at the family table are production along with the cultivation of the soil, the making of shoes, the care of the sick (Reid 1934, 8).

Reid thus accepted the need for the demarcation work done by neoclassical thinkers, seeking to show how this might coherently justify incorporating many aspects of household labour as valuable and rendering it visible to economists. In doing so, she was committed to defending the idea of a clear boundary between economic and social

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activities, and the idea that these can be meaningfully disentangled; however, she wanted to annex more territory for ‘the economy’, so that it now securely extended to productive labour in the household.

Moreover, Reid drew upon many of the same arguments outlined above to draw these distinctions in the context of unpaid household work. Firstly, she adopted the arguments of Jevons, Marshall and others that labour must not include activities done for their own sake: ‘if the utility is derived only through the “doing” or by the participation of the one who uses the good, then the activity is consumption’ (Reid, 1934, 10). Crucially, she also followed neoclassical theory in grounding labour in the storing up of alienable services which could be transferred and used by others. Reid explicitly ruled out activities which stay within the immediate social relations of the people doing them. Doing otherwise ran the risk of:

Classifying as production many activities of a purely social nature. It is true that some of the deepest, most fundamental and lasting satisfactions arise from our associations with

people…in the groups to which they belong.... [But] it seems that production is something

apart from activities having to do with purely personal relationships (Reid, 1934, 11). Thus, for Reid it was the ability to disentangle goods and utility from the idiosyncratic interactions and relationships of the group who created them that separated productive economy from personal ‘consumption’ and inter-personal ‘society’. The economy was the sphere of (at least potentially) impersonal exchange.32

This led Reid to formulate a precise definition of which unpaid activities are to be counted as labour, based around the possibility of these unpaid activities being obtained on the market. This has become known as the ‘third-party criterion’, and underpins modern accounting methodologies for valuing unpaid labour:

[T]he test which may be applied in order to separate production from consumption and social activities: If an activity is of such a character that it might be delegated to a paid

32 _{Moor and Lury (Moor and Lury 2018, 5) argue that it was only around 1800 we get the ‘orientation}

toward the impersonal’ in markets and trade practices, which ‘contributed to the differentiation of economic relations from other types of more personalised relationship’ (See also Carrier 1994; Slater 2002).

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worker, then that activity shall be deemed productive…[H]ousehold

production…consists of those unpaid activities which are carried on by and for the

members, which might be replaced by market goods or paid services (Reid, 1934, 11). This definition has been extremely influential in formulating the contemporary critique of the SNA production boundary and recent attempts to value household labour, as we will explore below. Specifically, it informs input-based estimates arrived at by comparing time-use data with equivalent market wages for similar activities.

The third-party criterion has been critiqued in recent years. Important feminist interventions, notably by Wood and Himmelweit (Himmelweit 1995; Wood 1997), have pointed to the masculine and western assumptions reproduced by this understanding of production, modelled as it is on ‘first world economies, with interesting (if problematic) results for the treatment of third world women’s labour…[through] an overriding exclusion of the personal’ (Wood 1997, 48). Here I build upon these existing arguments to address the specific concerns of this thesis, namely: in formulating the economic value of non-market labour in these terms, how far did Reid escape exchange-based assumptions about economic activity which Polanyi defined as ‘formalist’? I show how, since Reid’s third-party criterion bears the legacy of the neoclassical theory which it responded to, it represents a partial and incomplete escape from formalist renderings of labour, as it continues to privilege exchange as the locus of the economy and is unable to fully conceive of non-commodity forms of economic integration as independent. To understand this, it helps to re-emphasise two aspects of Polanyi’s ‘substantive’ definition of economy.33

Firstly, Polanyi argued in several places that economic and social relationships generally exist in hybrid forms, and that they are often in practice impossible to disentangle. He famously argued for instance that ‘man’s economy is, as a rule, submerged in his social relations’ (Polanyi 1968, 65). Moreover, there was no specific motive – such as desire for gain – that could be isolated as the source of economic action: ‘In vain was [man] exhorted by economists and utilitarian moralists alike to discount in business all other motives than “material” ones. On closer investigation, he was still found to be acting on

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remarkably “mixed” motives, not excluding duty toward himself and others – and maybe, secretly, even enjoying work for the sake of it’ (ibid, 69). Thus, a substantive definition of economy arguably implies a rejection of disutility as the essence of labour as well as the idea that personal relationships should be isolated from productive activities. Indeed, it was for this very reason that ‘the economy’ itself was hard to discern before the 18th _{century when markets for the major factors of production became} common. Fully adopting a substantive outlook would mean accepting that the border between economy and society cannot be hard and fast.34

As we saw in chapter 3, this was based on Polanyi’s notion of independently instituted modes of economic integration. Economic activity can be co-ordinated in a number of viable and discretely instituted ways, which were inextricably bound up with personal, symbolic and familial ties, social duties and status. Exchange represented only one of these, which moreover had until the 18th _{century tended to be marginal and heavily} circumscribed. Indeed, in reciprocal or householding arrangements, many of the activities Reid hives off as ‘social’ – including, for instance, ‘working out for themselves and others satisfactory relationships in the groups to which they belong’ (Reid, 1934, p.11) – would be essential to the co-ordination of economic activity. Thus, in Polanyi we get a vision of economy and society as multiple, heterogeneous and hybrid; whereas in Reid we continue to encounter the neoclassical concern that ‘a satisfactory means of distinguishing between economic and social activities must be sought’ (Reid, 1934, p. 10), even while the boundary of this is now to be set beyond the formal labour market within the family and the household.

Secondly, Reid makes labour markets the dominant standard through which non- exchange relationships might be considered valuable and productive (Wood 1997). This is sought because the existence of markets for these activities brings with it the possibility of an alternative allocation of this time to others, and thus brings these activities into relationship with economising allocative decisions. But as Polanyi argued, whereas ‘The formal meaning [of economy] implies a set of rules referring to the choice