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If we imagine a world in which there are no children and no one ever, ever does anything for anyone else except in direct exchange for cash, in which trees grow only in tree farms and the only water to be seen is that flowing through pipes, a world in which no one eats or wears clothes or builds shelters or enjoys the use of implements and tools who does not also have a bank account, we see at once the absurdity of those current economic models in which reproduction, environmental values, and unpaid production are omitted or underaccounted for.
There has been great resistance to attributing value to unpaid work (as one way to unrig the figures and realign values and public policy). Traditional economists say it would be too difficult, that they simply don't know how to do it. Yet governments are agile when it comes to estimating black market and other criminal economic activity, or in identifying cash equivalents (such as cocaine) when the object is to supply guns to the monetarily very poor.
Because women's work, especially, remains invisible in national and international economic accounting and women, themselves, are overlooked in the distribution of benefits that flow from production, we may still need, in the words of Sojourner Truth, to turn this ol' world upside down.
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