Housework as Part of GNP

It will be a great day for our country--and for women everywhere--when the value of our inescapable and growing burden of unwaged work is included in the gross national product (“Bill Would Make Housework Count in Calculation of GNP,” Dec. 12).

I was struck by the sheer common sense of economist Carol Clark’s observation that policy-makers would have foreseen the current crises in child care and elder care “if we had been counting women’s unwaged work in the GNP 30 years ago.”

In recent years, however, our policy-makers have built whole careers by devising schemes to remove socially necessary work from the public arena, making it wageless and invisible. Isn’t that what cuts in social services are all about?

So it’s amusing, but not surprising, to read the absurd comment of Mr. “Ignorance-is-Bliss” Charles Schultze (former director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution) that to include in the GNP (the measure of all goods and services produced in the nation) the value of all goods and services produced would “obscure” the meaning of the figure!

SUSAN ANDRES, South Pasadena