Redeeming Economics (5) Mother's Task

In his book called Redeeming Economics, John D Mueller discusses the Mother's Task. He shows that economic theory cannot explain what mothers do.

The best way to learn economics, thought Philip Wicksteed, is to consider the daily activities of a typical mother. We’ve already seen that the word “economics” means “household management.” And who better understands how to manage a household than a mother? It wouldn’t do to begin with a typical father, because most of a father’s daily activity is at once too specialized and too far removed from its ultimate purpose to be understood easily. Even in households not run by a mother, household affairs are something that “every member of every family is more or less keenly interested in,” so it furnishes us with a “common ground, the exploration of which demands no special or technical information.”

This is why Wicksteed’s Common Sense of Political Economy, though now all but forgotten by economists, remains the best introduction to the meaning of modern economics by any of the economists who played a central role in forming it. Most economists, and perhaps most mothers, are under the impression that mothers need to learn from economists, not vice versa. This mistake underlies half of all serious errors in economic theory. (The rest are due to the ignorance of most economists about the 2,100-year history of their discipline before Adam Smith.) The job of the economist is not to tell the mother what to do, but to understand what she is doing. And the only way to learn this is to sit at her feet and watch.

Wicksteed’s Common Sense therefore begins with examples from the life of a typical English mother, circa 1910. We find her first shopping: weighing the advantages of new potatoes against old potatoes, the purchase of a piano against a bicycle (which will take her to piano recitals, among many other uses), whether to serve cod or chicken to her guests (in light of the couple’s social standing, the fact that all the women guests know the prices of cod and chicken, and their aspirations that the children will learn to speak French), and all of these against an urgent appeal to alleviate a famine in India. Then we observe her at home as she combines her market purchases with her own most important resources—her time and attention—in the combinations which will be most valuable to her family. Finally, we watch her distribute the household’s goods to the users she had in mind from the beginning: whether serving the milk and potatoes to family or guests, or distributing her time and attention among family members, an outside job, unpaid volunteer service, reading great literature or worship.

Today’s American mother spends much less time preparing food, more time in the labor market, and more time transporting family members from place to place in the family “wagon” than her British or American counterpart of a century earlier. Her family’s budget can purchase a much larger quantity, a higher quality, and a much larger variety, of goods and services. The particular objects of choice are therefore somewhat different: she and her husband would be considering the purchase of a minivan in the same light the couple of a century earlier viewed a bicycle, for example. And much of the food is at least partially prepared, to save on the mother’s time: the 24 hours in a day are one thing that has not increased, though the mother and other members of her family can expect to live 20 or 25 years longer. But even before allowing for these changes in income, “household technology,” and longevity, Wicksteed’s examples from the early 20th century remain perfectly intelligible to an American mother of the early 21st century. And they illustrate exactly the same lessons about life and economics.

“Her doings in the market-place and her doings at home are … parts of one continuous process of administration of resources, guided by the same fundamental principle; and it is the home problem that dominates the market problem and gives it its ultimate meaning,” says Wicksteed. The fundamental principle is that in all cases, “She is trying to make everything go as far as it will, or, in other words, serve the most important purpose that it can. She will consider that she has been successful if, in the end, no want which she has left unsatisfied appears, in her deliberate judgment, to have really been more important than some other want to which she attended in place of it. Otherwise there has been waste somewhere, for money, milk, potatoes, or attention has been applied to one purpose when they might better have been applied to another.”

Yet, when we turn to even the simplest of her daily tasks, we discover that the modern economist cannot fully explain what the mother is doing. Consider this example offered by Wicksteed: how the mother distributes the use of a single good, milk, which has alternate uses. “In the usual routine, milk may be wanted for the baby, for the other children, for a pudding, for tea or coffee, and for the cat,” notes Wicksteed. The quantity of milk on hand begins with the amount she purchased in the supermarket (or in Wicksteed’s day, from the daily delivery wagon), which was based on her expectation of its various uses and the price she found in the market. Normally, the baby gets to drink until she is full, before any milk goes to the older children. The older children’s cups in turn ordinarily take precedence over milk for the adults’ daily tea or coffee; and milk for the adults’ coffee or tea normally takes precedence over an occasional pudding or a saucerful as a treat for the family cat.

What, exactly, is the mother doing here? Not for some 70 pages after presenting and discussing this interesting problem does Wicksteed reveal that, in his opinion, the problem crosses the line of what he considers Pure Economics: “The widest definition of the scope of Economics would confine their scope to things that can be regarded as in some sense exchangeable, and capable of being transferred according to order and agreement. No one would regard the principles upon which I balance the claims of devotion [to God] against those of friendship, or of either against the indulgence of my aesthetic appetites, as within the range of economic science.”

And the mother’s activity is clearly a combination of the two: “For instance, the housewife’s administration of her stores amongst different claimants at home is not a series of acts of exchange, but is a series of acts relating to exchangeable things.” This leads to an enlightening discussion of what Wicksteed calls an “economic relation” (to which we will return after trying to figure out what the mother is doing)—but not a complete explanation of the mother’s actions. The important point is that Wicksteed has flagged to our attention that the mother, by dealing simultaneously with exchangeable things and with persons she loves, is doing something which cannot be reduced to a series of exchanges.

Paul Samuelson, considering a similar problem half a century later, shrinks from giving an explanation of what the mother is doing. The only theory he offers concerns what “must be a family of adults, or at least of very unusual children.” Even in that case, Samuelson says, there can be no straightforward explanation of what the mother is doing. He contents himself with trying to prove that the family can be treated as if it were a single consuming unit.

In the past few decades, economist Gary Becker claims to have explained what the mother is doing. Becker says she is always doing basically one thing: maximizing the “utility” to herself of various “commodities,” among which she includes her children. Becker’s explanation amounts to saying that everyone (even an “altruist”) treats other persons as things providing him- or herself with “utility.” But he never really explains what “utility” is, and as we will see, Becker cannot fully explain exactly how the mother administers the milk.

Mueller summarises the problem this way.

The mother's problem is simply to determine the amount of milk to allocate to each one. If all the alternatives were personal use, neoclassical economic theory could provide the solution. But the mother's problem is quite different and and answerable by neoclassical economic, since she is not only dealing with her own preferences, but also the preferences of several other users of the milk. Her problem is twofold: not only to estimate the preference of each use, but also to decide how much weight to give to those preferences (pp.87,88).

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