Haute Lumière
Commerce · V.04 · MMXXVI · daylight
ASSESSMENT · Chapter V.04 — Care as Infrastructure
Three instruments: a ten-point quiz, eight reflection questions, five essay prompts. The quiz checks comprehension rather than recall. The reflections are private and first-person. The essays are arguable from more than one side.
THE QUIZ — ten points
Four on recall.
1. State the third-person criterion and use it to classify two activities.
If you could pay somebody else to do the activity for you and still receive the benefit, it is production; if not, it is consumption. Cooking, childcare, driving a relative to hospital: production. Sleeping, eating, enjoying a concert: consumption. One mark for the criterion, one for correctly noting that it turns on substitutability rather than on effort or on virtue.
2. Name the two methods of valuing an unpaid care hour and say what question each one answers.
Replacement cost — what would it cost to buy this on the market? Opportunity cost — what did it cost the carer to supply it? Full marks require the second half: they are not rival estimates of one quantity, they are answers to two different questions, which is why a serious account publishes both.
3. Give the global scale of unpaid care work in hours and in full-time equivalents, and name the share performed by women.
16.4 billion hours a day, which at an eight-hour day is 2.05 billion full-time equivalents and 5.99 trillion hours a year. Women perform 76.2 percent of it — 265 minutes a day against 83, a ratio of 3.19 to one.
4. What three inputs does this chapter say a care proposal must name in numbers, with money at risk against them?
Staff-to-child ratio, staff qualification, and staff turnover. Credit an answer that adds a named observational measure of process quality. Do not credit "enrolment" or "places filled" — those are inputs to the budget, not to the effect.
Four on application.
5. A minister's office quotes the UK's £1,240 billion household satellite account and a colleague replies that it is "priced at a cleaner's wage, so it proves nothing." Is the colleague right, and what do you do about it?
The colleague has correctly identified that it is a replacement-cost figure and is wrong that this makes it meaningless — it is the conservative estimate, and its conservatism is the reason it is quotable. The move is to publish both valuations side by side with the 1.559× wedge named, so that the same hours read as 63.0 percent of GDP at replacement cost and considerably more at opportunity cost. The strongest answer notes that publishing only the higher figure invites the mirror objection — that the carer was not in fact earning that wage — and that the wedge itself is the finding.
6. A campaign asserts that care investment creates 3.25 times as many jobs as construction. What is wrong with the claim, and what is the right one?
3.25× is the direct ratio, computed from labour share, import leakage and average compensation. The published total ratio, which includes indirect and induced effects, is 1.73× in the US — smaller, because construction pulls a long and largely domestic supply chain and care pulls almost none. Quote the total; use the direct decomposition to explain it. Half marks for spotting the error without supplying the mechanism.
7. A provincial government is told its childcare programme "pays for itself" and its finance ministry cannot find the money. Explain the disagreement, and name the fix.
Both are right. In the measured Quebec case the programme returned 104 percent to the province and 43 percent to the federal treasury, 147 percent combined — so 29.3 percent of the whole return was collected by a government that paid nothing. The programme self-funds for the public sector and not for the payer. The fix is not more evidence; it is an intergovernmental revenue-sharing clause indexed to induced employment and verified by the statistical office rather than by either party.
8. An operator bids to run 400 places at US$9,000 each, undercutting a US$13,333 specification, and promises "the same quality outcomes." Diagnose the bid.
The saving has to come out of the staffing line, which is 65 percent of the cost and the input the evidence says carries the effect: 1:6 with a degree-qualified teacher is US$8,667 per child, 1:12 at a lower grade is US$2,833 — a factor of 3.06. The effect sizes the bidder is quoting belong to programmes at the higher specification. Credit any answer that points to the Tennessee and Quebec results as the empirical form of this, and that proposes the remedy used in the chapter: put 8 percent of the availability payment at risk against ratio, qualification and turnover, on a formula with no discretion in it.
Two that require the arithmetic to be done.
9. A quality place costs US$13,333 a year. The parent pays US$4,800 and the employer pays US$1,437. Care-worker tax and consumption tax return US$2,673 per place regardless of any behavioural effect, and each induced maternal entrant returns US$35,562. How many induced jobs per place does the public share need in order to break even, and how does that compare with the two available estimates?
The public residual is 13,333 − 4,800 − 1,437 = US$7,096. Break-even is (7,096 − 2,673) / 35,562 = 0.1244 jobs per place — one induced entrant per 8.0 places. The elasticity model gives 0.078 and Quebec realised 0.350, so the break-even sits between the two available estimates. The point of the question is that the fiscal case is not settled by better rhetoric: it is settled by measuring jobs per place from year two and publishing it whether it is good or not.
10. US household production was 26 percent of GDP in 2010 at replacement cost, valued at US$16.12 an hour. Re-price the same hours at an opportunity-cost wage of US$25.12 an hour. What does the account read, and what is the movement in points of GDP?
The wedge is 25.12 / 16.12 = 1.559. Then 26 × 1.559 = 40.5 percent of GDP, a movement of 14.5 points. The stronger answer states the conclusion in the right register: no new activity occurred and no estimate was corrected — a methodological choice moved a national account by more than the whole of most countries' manufacturing sectors, which is why the method must be stated every time the figure is.
REFLECTION — eight questions, for one person and a pen
These are not for a room. Write the answers by hand if you can; the slowness is the point.
- Count the hours you spent last week on work that would pass the third-person criterion and that nobody paid for. Do not estimate — reconstruct the week. What is the number, and what did you expect it to be?
- Who has done unpaid care work that made your own career possible? Name them. What did it cost them, in hours and in the thing they did not do instead?
- Where in your own life are you the inframarginal user of something — the person a subsidy pays for who would have done it anyway? How does it feel to be counted as deadweight in an argument you agree with?
- If you have ever chosen a lower-paid role because the work mattered to you, what was the annual gap, and what is the thirty-year present value of that choice at a three percent real rate? Write the number down before you decide how you feel about it.
- What is the care arrangement in your household that would collapse first, and who would absorb it? Answer with a name, not a role.
- Think of a time you were able to keep working through a period of care responsibility. What made that possible, and who arranged it? Did you ever tell them what it was worth?
- Where have you quietly assumed that something unmeasured was therefore unimportant? Name one, from this year.
- If you had to defend the ratio in a bad budget year — the number that costs the most and shows the least — what would you say, and to whom? Write the sentence now, while nothing is at stake.
ESSAY PROMPTS — five
Each is arguable from more than one side. Each requires at least one source the chapter cites and at least one it does not.
1. The wedge, and what it is evidence of. The chapter argues that the 1.559× gap between opportunity-cost and replacement-cost valuations is itself a measurement — a reading on how much of care's value goes unpaid — rather than a methodological inconvenience. Argue either that this is a legitimate inference or that it confuses a relative price with a moral claim, and that the low market wage for care is fully explained by supply, skill composition and compensating differentials. Use England, Budig and Folbre, and one source on compensating wage differentials that the chapter does not cite.
2. Should care be scored as infrastructure in fiscal rules? Most fiscal frameworks treat physical capital spending differently from current spending, and care provision is classified as current. Argue for or against reclassifying high-quality care provision as capital investment for the purposes of a fiscal rule. Engage De Henau and Himmelweit on the employment multiplier, and one source on fiscal rules, public sector net investment or the golden rule that the chapter does not cite.
3. Quebec, honestly. Baker, Gruber and Milligan's work gives both the strongest labour-supply result in this literature and one of its most uncomfortable child-outcome results, from the same programme. Write the case that Quebec proves universal childcare works, then the case that it proves the opposite, then say which you find more persuasive and why. Use Baker, Gruber and Milligan (2008 and 2019) and Kottelenberg and Lehrer on heterogeneity, and at least one evaluation of a different universal system — the Nordic countries are the obvious place to look — that the chapter does not cite.
4. Perry Preschool as evidence. A programme with 123 children in one Michigan town in the 1960s is the single most-cited piece of evidence in early childhood policy worldwide. Argue either that it remains the right anchor — because it is the best-identified long-run evidence available and the mechanism generalises — or that its scale, era and sample make it unfit for that role, and that the Head Start and Tennessee evaluations should have displaced it. Use Heckman et al. (2010) and Durkin et al. (2022), and one source on external validity, site selection bias or scaling in policy evaluation that the chapter does not cite.
5. Who should pay, and what happens if they do. The chapter's instrument splits a place three ways — parent, employer, public — on the principle that each pays only what its own ledger justifies. Argue either that employer-linked care provision is the fastest available route to universal coverage, or that tying care to employment reproduces exactly the dependency that care policy exists to dissolve, and disadvantages precisely the households with the weakest labour-market attachment. Use the chapter's Quebec fiscal material, and one source on employer-provided benefits, job lock, or the history of employment-linked health insurance that it does not cite.