One has to have great respect for Humberto's 
rather thankless task (or at least, I have never 
thanked him) of keeping the discussion within the 
bounds of "history," when in fact such 
discussions must drift off course to the pure 
ideas represented by the history. Perhaps he will 
not notice that I am sneaking in some purely 
evaluative comments under the cover of an 
historical discussion. But I think Marie and 
Evert have touched upon an historical reality 
which is often ignored. Much of the "growth" of 
the last 40 years has not been real growth at 
all, but merely the monetizing of work which was 
formerly performed in the family economy. When 
mama cooked you a good meal, it did not show up 
in the GDP numbers; but when she took the family 
out to MacDonald's, it was recorded as "growth" 
in the economy. No new services were performed, 
only now they were measured and recognized. This 
largely happened for what was called "women's 
work," although it happens for jobs that were 
usually (but not always) "masculine," mowing the 
lawn, fixing the drain, etc. These tasks moved 
from the use-economy to the exchange-economy, and 
only one of these economies is regarded as 
"economic," even though the whole point of the 
exchange economy is the use economy.

The problem is that there is not enough money on 
the planet to monetize the work that women do. 
The Dutch in trying to monetize it destroy it. 
Now it becomes a monetary decision that may be 
performed by Grandma (compensated by the State) or by an outside baby-sitter.

I think it is somewhat strange to be having this 
conversation, since the whole point of an economy 
is to support the material needs of the human 
person, and that person always has its origins in 
the family. Let us say (if we must) that the 
family is the production process of the human 
person, and like any economic process it has its 
own set of costs and its own standards of 
efficiency. We can "produce" better or worse 
humans over a range of different cost 
allocations, public and private. Children are, 
for the most part, consumers of goods, and it is 
a mistake to make them producers too early or in 
the wrong way. While this may have some short 
term benefits, it results in a large inventory of 
unfinished or partially finished goods, goods 
which then impose their own costs on society, in 
the form of increased crime, low productivity, 
social unrest, high welfare costs, etc.

Children are, economically, the next round of 
producers and consumers, and certainly these are 
public goods, or at least goods without which 
there is no public that can continue in being. Of 
course, one can regard children as a purely 
private utility, to fulfill some biological need, 
as a display of one's wealth, etc. While none of 
these explanations are completely wrong, none of 
them are particularly right, and all of them are incomplete.

John Médaille