National income accounts, the dominant economic statistical representation, measured primarily market transactions and thereby made nonmonet
National income accounts, the dominant economic statistical representation, measured primarily market transactions and thereby made nonmonetary utility exchanges, including unpaid household work, unobservable.
Paper reconstruction — Dustin Avent-Holt & Alysha Bailey (2024), What counts as productive? Redefining ‘producers’ in economic discourse, 1890–1960
The commodified-utilities frame became dominant after World War II, defining productive activity as utility that is bought and sold through a market transaction.
The accounts' primary inclusion criterion was market transactions; consequently, market transactions came to define productive activity.
By imposing no ethical or practical qualifiers on utility transfers, national accounts also excluded earlier moral and practical limits on what market transactions should count as productive.
National accounting construction explicitly excluded housework, defining work primarily done by women in the home as unproductive.
By the mid-twentieth century, national income accounting statistics had become the dominant means of statistically representing economies.
Because the accounts relied on market transactions, nonmonetary transactions—including utility exchanges outside markets—became empirically unobservable to economists.
National income accounts measure income flows in nationally bounded economies and were constructed through contested measurement decisions, including decisions about utility-providing activities without clear market payments.