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