A short review of Nancy Folbre, Valuing Domestic Product New York Term Paper - 2

A short review of Nancy Folbre, Valuing Domestic Product New York Times, May 28, 2012 - Term Paper Example In her New York Times article titled â€Å"Valuing Domestic Product,† eminent economics professor Nancy Folbre lamented how domestic work or housework, is excluded from the usual computation of gross domestic product, which is the total value of all products and services that are produced within an economy in a given period. This is quite ironic because household work, if actually given a monetary value by computing the total amount of hours devoted to household chores and multiplied by the domestic workers supposed current market wages, is really a big amount of money and therefore constitutes a very significant portion of any gross domestic product. The economists have excluded or omitted this home sector of mostly unpaid services. An implication of the said article is that women who form the vast majority of the house workers suffer from gender inequality (Folbre, 2012, p. 1), an invisible workforce that over the years contributed greatly to improving living standards. This unpaid work has been exchanged in recent years with paid work due to globalization fostered by neoliberalism, which is more of a social and moral concept than just a mere economics idea, as more women join the workforce. A consequence of the neoliberalism fostered by the globalization concepts of free trade, privatization of public institutions, economic liberalization and open markets is an uptrend in the exploitation of labor, mostly women who now joined the paid labor force, and the degradation of the processes in social reproduction and a diminution of the social contract under a regime of the liberal democracy government. The home or family as a basic social unit has been weakened due to more women leaving the home in search of paid work outside, but at wages considerably less. Brown argues neoliberalism is a political project because it enforces the existence and operations of a free market by a state that can either promote or suppress it, but primarily to enhance it. This means