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  3. Economics often misses an important element of inequality between males and f

Economics often misses an important element of inequality between males and f

游客2025-03-26  9
问题    Economics often misses an important element of inequality between males and females: unpaid work. The main measure of economic activity, GDP, counts housework when it is paid, but excludes it when it is done free of charge. This is an arbitrary distinction and leads to the funny question of what happens to a country’s GDP when a man marries his maid.
   The usual defense is that measuring unpaid work is hard. Diane Coyle, an economist, asks whether statistical agencies have not bothered to collect data on unpaid housework precisely because women do most of it. Marilyn Waring, a feminist economist, has suggested that the system of measuring GDP was designed by men to keep women "in their place".
   Women in rich countries spend roughly 5% more time working than men. But they spend roughly twice as much time on unpaid work, and only two-thirds the time men do in paid work. By excluding unpaid work from the national accounts, economists not only diminish women’s contribution, but cover up the staggering inequality in who does it.
   Ignoring unpaid work also misrepresents the significance of particular kinds of economic activity. Ms. Waring thinks that raising well-cared-for children is just as important to society as making buildings or cars. Yet as long as the former is excluded from official measures of output, investing resources in it seems like less of a priority. In a perfectly equal world, men would do much more child-rearing than they do now. It is women who are disadvantaged by economists’ failure to measure the value of parenting properly.
   Now let’s look at the impact of measuring things differently. A new version of GDP that included unpaid work was attempted. Doing so boosted GDP overall, but lowered the growth rate: as women have moved into paid work, they have been doing less unpaid work at home, so total production has not been rising as quickly as official figures suggest. By some estimates, including unpaid work boosted GDP in 1965 by 39%, but by only 26% in 2010. Over the 45 years between, they put the average annual nominal growth rate at 6.7% if unpaid work is included, lower than the official 6.9%.
   Ignoring the feminist perspective is bad economics. The discipline aims to explain the allocation of scarce resources; it is bound to go wrong if it ignores the role that deep imbalances between men and women play in this allocation. As long as this inequality exists, there is space for feminist economics. [br] The first paragraph implies that a country’s GDP______when a man marries his maid.
选项 A、is likely to increase
B、is going to fall
C、remains unchanged
D、becomes unreliable
答案 B
解析 第一段第二句讲，GDP包括有报酬的家务活，而免费的家务活不计算在内。保姆做家务应该是有报酬的，而妻子做家务往往是义务，我们几乎没听说过夫妻做家务要有报酬。一旦某人娶了保姆，以后家务活就免费了，所以国家的GDP减少了。
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