Quoting James Ahiakpor :  
  
  
It seems to me that the care of children is (and should be) the  
responsibility of their parents.  And the care of the elderly is (and  
should be) the responsibility of adults to prepare for during their  
working age (or perhaps their children in some kind of reciprocity for  
their having been cared for in their growing-up years).  Why is there a  
need for "devising national policies" for such cares, let alone making  
"a claim for a more generous expenditures on both"?  Is any of these  
cares a "public good"?  
  
I apologize if this takes us far afield from HET, but I don't believe so. This is  
related closely to the development of economics as the social science which  
de-emphasized social institutions. Perhaps it is apropos as we read the Galbraith  
obituaries. The care of children is the responsibility of their parents, of course.  
But since the reality is that we have many two-worker families, either by necessity  
or choice, then we can improve on the current system by making it more feasible for  
parents to find affordable childcare. The well-off can always find good care for  
their offspring, but the poor and working class parents find it either beyond their  
means or low quality. Why isn't this a public good somewhat analogous to public  
education? A better management through the public sector will improve total economic  
welfare. It will improve worker productivity; make for more secure future of  
children (the future labor force); and give harried parents some release time to  
participate in community affairs (better economic citizens?).   
  
Let me go back to the reality (by necessity or choice). If it is a necessity, a  
strong case can be made for devoting some social resources to something as important  
as the welfare of our children.  If it is by choice, I would make the economic  
argument that having women in the workplace increases the quantity of labor and also  
its quality by broadening the skilled labor pool. The education levels of women have  
steadily increased, even vis-à-vis men. If affordable childcare is an obstacle for  
many of them in working outside the home, then lowering it will make for greater  
social utility. In the final analysis, whether we consider it a public good,  
semi-public good or purely private good depends on our institutional culture.  
Scandinavian countries treat it as the former and one can devise policies more  
suitable to the specific situations. I believe similar arguments can be made about  
eldercare where innovations in combining personal and public responsibility can be  
fruitful.  
  
  
"Second, given the differences in individual (subjective) valuations of  
goods and services produced or consumed, whom would the computed values  
of home production be expected to satisfy?  I thought economists long  
learned to avoid engaging in interpersonal comparisons of worth, values,  
or utilities."  
  
   
For starters, it would satisfy the people engaged in such production.  Economists  
have avoided making interpersonal comparisons of utility by adhering to some  
implicit assumptions. I offer two not unrelated arguments. One comes from feminist  
economists. In her essay, "The Separative Self: Androcentric Biases in Neoclassical  
Assumptions", in Beyond the Economic Man, (1993), Paula England writes: "The  
assumption that interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible flows from assuming  
a separative self. To see how this is true, imagine that we started by assuming the  
sort of emotional connection that facilitates empathy.  Such empathy would  
facilitate making interpersonal utility comparisons, since being able to imagine how  
someone feels in a given situation implies the possibility of translating between  
one's own and another person's metric for utility....  if we assume instead that  
individuals can make interpersonal utility comparisons , then surely we would  
conclude that as scholars we, too, are capable of making such comparisons. These  
comparisons would provide information about the relative advantage and disadvantage  
of individuals under study. We then would view such comparisons as practical  
measurement problems (analogous to 'shadow prices') rather than as impossible in  
principle", p. 42.  
   
I will end by invoking Adam Smith's ideas about sympathy and the impartial  
spectator. To quote Keith Tribe in "Adam Smith: Critical Theorist", JEL (June 1999):  
The Smithian conception of self-interest is not an injunction to to act  
egotistically and without scruple, safe in the knowledge that by doing so the public  
good would somehow or other result; it is embedded within a framework of social  
reciprocity that allows for the formation of moral judgment", p. 269. The social  
institutions and norms do change and so our analyses should be capable of  
incorporating those in our frameworks.  
   
This post is far too long, both by choice and necessity. But I will resist the  
temptation in future!  
   
Sumitra Shah