When unpaid cooking, cleaning and child care get a dollar value, income inequality in the US shrinks – but the gap has grown since 1965

When economists track inequality, they typically focus on income and spending.

But a significant share of the services that families actually consume – meals cooked at home, child care, housecleaning and lawn mowing – is produced by unpaid labor that never appears in these conventional measures.…

© La Conversation - mercredi 4 mars 2026