Fitness, Economics and Maids and the GDP !!
Dinesh K Kapila
We in India are generally foodies but don't eat a balanced meal, we partake of a meal which is generally carbohydrate and oil rich and lacking in protein. Mostly cooked by maids in a hurry. Or over worked cooks. We think walking is enough exercise but walking needs to be coupled with resistance training. Plus we rarely do any house work thanks to the abundant supply of cheap labour. But salaries and more important the expectation for higher salaries are increasing. A fact. Now when our maid and cook will have to be paid a salary of fifty thousand a month each as the statisticians and economists project, we will all be fighting fit like the Europeans and Japanese. There will be no option. We may not have thought of this, the alternative route to fitness. By the way, economists and statisticians are always projecting, its in their DNA.
In the Indian context we can still vouch for the presence of wives in the kitchen and in the house, but not the men on the couch. Mostly on the couch or the bed! They will however certainly get moving. If the salaries of maids will go up most people will first vacuum clean their house every day by force of habit and mop it once every three days and then slowly once in maybe ten days like in the US or Europe. Our eternal dust in the air would make it a concern but the battle would be interesting, vacuum every day and mop every two days and stay fit or prolong the gap between two vacuuming days and stay the way we are.
Of course the hope will be that the salaries of maids in India just cannot progress to like the forty to fifty dollars or Euros for a few hours but the trends do indicate an inflation in salaries. I do know most men will be saying please don't float such ideas, the vacuum cleaner will be the domain of the men under the eagle eyes and directions of the wife, a real reversal of roles !! Some may prefer robotic vacuum cleaners but the operations would still be male focused.
Now on the Economic Aspects, once maids are replaced by vacuum cleaners, the GDP would fall. Though it would improve manufacturing and employment at factories. As I just pointed out, the non employment of maids would reduce the GDP or national income. National income, as we know it today, owes much to the pioneering work of Simon Kuznets about a century ago. While his work created the basic framework used to measure a country's economic output and growth, there were several computational anomalies. One classic anomaly is that national income is at a particular level, when you have a maid working for you. But and this is an important BUT, should you marry this maid and she becomes a housewife, the national income takes a hit because household work is not accounted for in the elaborate computational framework developed by Simon Kuznets. Now this may not have been factored in !! Or thought off !! Just random thoughts as trundle along in India.
Dinesh K Kapila
We in India are generally foodies but don't eat a balanced meal, we partake of a meal which is generally carbohydrate and oil rich and lacking in protein. Mostly cooked by maids in a hurry. Or over worked cooks. We think walking is enough exercise but walking needs to be coupled with resistance training. Plus we rarely do any house work thanks to the abundant supply of cheap labour. But salaries and more important the expectation for higher salaries are increasing. A fact. Now when our maid and cook will have to be paid a salary of fifty thousand a month each as the statisticians and economists project, we will all be fighting fit like the Europeans and Japanese. There will be no option. We may not have thought of this, the alternative route to fitness. By the way, economists and statisticians are always projecting, its in their DNA.
In the Indian context we can still vouch for the presence of wives in the kitchen and in the house, but not the men on the couch. Mostly on the couch or the bed! They will however certainly get moving. If the salaries of maids will go up most people will first vacuum clean their house every day by force of habit and mop it once every three days and then slowly once in maybe ten days like in the US or Europe. Our eternal dust in the air would make it a concern but the battle would be interesting, vacuum every day and mop every two days and stay fit or prolong the gap between two vacuuming days and stay the way we are.
Of course the hope will be that the salaries of maids in India just cannot progress to like the forty to fifty dollars or Euros for a few hours but the trends do indicate an inflation in salaries. I do know most men will be saying please don't float such ideas, the vacuum cleaner will be the domain of the men under the eagle eyes and directions of the wife, a real reversal of roles !! Some may prefer robotic vacuum cleaners but the operations would still be male focused.
Now on the Economic Aspects, once maids are replaced by vacuum cleaners, the GDP would fall. Though it would improve manufacturing and employment at factories. As I just pointed out, the non employment of maids would reduce the GDP or national income. National income, as we know it today, owes much to the pioneering work of Simon Kuznets about a century ago. While his work created the basic framework used to measure a country's economic output and growth, there were several computational anomalies. One classic anomaly is that national income is at a particular level, when you have a maid working for you. But and this is an important BUT, should you marry this maid and she becomes a housewife, the national income takes a hit because household work is not accounted for in the elaborate computational framework developed by Simon Kuznets. Now this may not have been factored in !! Or thought off !! Just random thoughts as trundle along in India.
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