Professor Jane Humphries will give the Alice Murray Distinguished Scholar Lecture on Thursday 27th February 2025 at 17:00 in the Neill Lecture Theatre of the Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin: ‘Caring about care: The economic history of caring labour’.
Abstract: Economists pay little attention to caring labour provided commercially and ignore it if unpaid. Disregard is theoretically indefensible, unjust, ignores services that have significant value, and probably misleads accounts of income and growth. In this lecture I will use some of my recently published research as well as new work to demonstrate the importance of care, particularly unpaid care. I look at three kinds of caring work: domestic labour or housework; breastfeeding; and end of life care. Following the conventional methodology, I infer the value of such work according to the costs/prices of contemporary market equivalents and relate aggregated values to estimates of national income. Historically unpaid domestic labour represented some 20 per cent of the value of total output, while breastfeeding represented another 1-2 per cent, or even more depending on the choice of commercial substitutes. While demonstrating care’s importance, a market equivalent valuation misses two important points. First, as care is sometimes exchanged for money and sometimes given for free, it is sometimes included in conventional estimates of output and sometimes not. With no change in actual activities, these accounting shifts are spurious. Bizarrely, national income would fall if a woman decided to breastfeed her baby! Economic historians must ask whether such changes could have misled accounts of growth. Second, unpaid care often provides effects beyond the individuals directly involved, generating externalities that are ignored by the market and so the ‘as if marketed’ imputation strategy. Many of these externalities relate to health and welfare and so lead to questions about the adequacy of modern GDP and its historical equivalents as measures of wellbeing. To fully understand care’s importance, economic historians must extend their macro statistical scaffold to recognize activities beyond the measuring rod of the market.
The Alice Murray Distinguished Scholar Award is awarded annually by the Centre for Economics, Policy, and History (CEPH) to an economic historian who has made a major contribution to the discipline.
In accepting her award, Professor Humphries notes, ‘I am pleased and proud to receive the Alice Murray Distinguished Scholar Award. The medal, awarded by the Centre for Economics, Policy and History (CEPH) for major contributions to the discipline, is named in honour of Alice ‘Effie’ Murray (1877-1951), the first woman to receive a D.Sc. Econ. degree from the London School of Economics. She was a member of a group of women economic historians including Ellen McArthur and Lilian Knowles, both of whom taught Effie, whose work deserves broader recognition. My current research focuses on a different kind of work, mainly done by women, which is also undervalued: caring labour. I look forward to presenting my public lecture at Trinity College Dublin, February 27th Caring about care: The economic history of caring labour.’