Hacker News Reader

Comment by zakary | Hacker News Reader

Emotional Labour is definitely the better term for it. Thank you for giving me the right term to google.

I wonder how much of the ‘economy’ (in terms of work done and the dollar figures we put on that) is actually a part of this undocumented category.

The GDP-PPP of countries doesn’t take this sort of thing into account as far as I’m aware, but I’d like to know what would happen to those numbers if everyone simply stopped doing unpaid emotional labour. You could get a sense pretty quickly of how much society is undervaluing it.

View on HN

The reason that the economy is defined in terms of transactions that involve an exchange of money is that such transactions can be quantified objectively. If no money is exchanged, then assigning a valuation to an activity is pure speculation. Of course, this doesn't stop bureaucratic number-crunchers from attempting to do so anyway (e.g. the inclusion of "owner-occupied implied rent" in CPI calculations) but it's not hard to see the slippery slope it creates. Assigning a name to something ("emotional labour") doesn't mean that it somehow becomes quantifiable in any tractable or objective manner.

Absolutely agree. Still, it would be cool to see real data about this stuff if it could be objectively collected

Interestingly enough I believe this is partially why there was a "wages for housework" movement[0]

0:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wages_for_housework

What about the fact that she owns half of all marital assets as they accrue?

Wasn't always true in all jurisdictions, and certainly not in 1972 when the campaign started.

Even today there's a distinction between "is theoretically entitled to half the assets by court order on divorce" and practical day to day access to that money.

It comes up commonly in discussions about how poor GDP is as a measure of societal wealth. For example, if we would strike a bargain to do each others' laundry for a trillion USD per year each, the GDP would "magically" go up by two trillion compared to if we would just do our own laundry. However, no additional value is created compared to the current situation.

GDP is not a measure of economic wealth (much less "social wealth", whatever that is) and never has been. GDP is a measure of economic activity. I.e. transactions, spending. But since one year to the next, the structure of a nation's economy doesn't change dramatically, it can be used as a proxy for changes in wealth.

However, the longer time period you look look at between two GDP figures, the less comparable they are. And finally, since different nations have different economic structures, a direct currency translation may be misleading, hence PPP (which is misleading in a different way, but <shrug>).

> everyone simply stopped doing unpaid emotional labour.

Arguably this is the situation in Europe, compared to America, as there isn't a comparable tipping culture.

In Germany, there is a word to describe how this has tipped over into a "Service desert" - "Servicewüste", a complete lack of acceptable customer service.

However I think a non-tipping culture is preferable.

Emotional Labor is a horrible term for it, since it has little to do with emotions. “Household” or “domestic” labor would be better.

Emotional Labor would be a better term for eg the stresses of maintaining relationships.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com