Extracts from reviews:
-
Rodney Maddock, Australian Economic History Review (September 1995)
-
Lee A. Craig, Journal of Economic Literature (December 1995)
-
Jane Humphries, Economic Journal (May 1996)
-
Peter Gunn, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology (August 1996)
Graeme Snooks' latest book, Portrait of the family within the Total Economy, represents his attempt to pick up the mantle of his predecessor at the Australian National University, Noel Butlin, and follow the lead of Timothy Coghlan in providing a landmark statement about the nature of Australia. In scope and ambition it is a book to compare with Butlin's and Coghlan's Labour and industry. In pursuing this research plan Snooks continues his work in their style of quantitative economic analysis of Australia's history. It is a radical book. It places the household at the centre of analysis and uses that standpoint to evaluate Australia's last two hundred years. In integrating the family within the broad structure of the evolving Australian economy, [he] has had to make hard choices about appropriate methodologies. These choices deserve to be analysed within the profession and will provide much meat for future discussion. Regardless of the consequence of the debates, the work will stand as one of the major contributions to Australian economic historiography and as a major challenge to the profession. It spans all of our history, although the section on the pre-1788 period is sketchy compared to the detailed quantitative analysis of the later period.
The stated intention of the volume is to"stimulate our collective memory about the role of the household economy in the process of 'total' economic change' (p. xi). By this the author means two things. First, that we have tended not to notice the important role of the household in our thinking about the economy and, second, that the family needs to be considered within the context of the longrun dynamic processes which shape Australian society. Snooks will of course concede that he does not start with a blank slate. He pays due regard to the work of Gary Becker in raising the consciousness of economists about the family and the household but seeks to differentiate his work through his emphasis on the dynamic, the inductive, and the long-term rather than on static, deductive, and short-term analysis. I This task requires the reconstruction of the process of household production and of the dynamic relationship between the household and the market sectors . . .
This is a work which challenges virtually all economic historians with an interest in Australia. Its sweep is enormous. It attempts to introduce a major new actor, the household, into the broad picture of Australian economic history. In doing this it provides a wonderfully detailed source of information about Australian labour force participation, household formation, household capital formation, and a large number of related series. We thus get a long view of the household in the economy for the first time. This is a major contribution.
At a second level, the book constructs an important new data series intended to describe the evolution of material living standards in the economy. This requires the manipulation of the household data which had been collected and described into a form such that it can be added to estimates of marketed output in order to produce an integrated series. The process involved has required the author to make a number of assumptions about valuation with which many readers will not agree. The area of money metrics is a difficult one, and for activities which take place far from any direct monetary measure it is doubly difficult. The series which have been created in this way, most notably Gross Community Income, will not please all readers. Despite this, the series are of considerable interest and provide an important sophistication of the view of Australian economic history developed in the tradition of Coghlan and Butlin.
On a third level Snooks has interpreted the quantitative work in an attempt to establish both the primacy of the household as a unit of analysis and the advantages of an empiricist rather than a theoretical approach to the pursuit of knowledge. I would argue strongly with most of this material. To the extent that the criticisms of measuring living standards in per capita terms are based on the fact that the dependency ratio has changed over time, Snooks is on strong ground. However, with the structure of the household changing dramatically before 1860 and again in recent years, the case for using the household as the basic unit is not completely secure. Fortunately the data is structured so that those who wish to restructure it to obtain alternative estimates will be able to do so.
In summary, this is a major work in Australian economic history. It challenges many current views and standard interpretations. It is provocative and will invoke responses. As well as taking strong stances and challenging the way things are done, the book is a well developed academic treatise, carefully and thoughtfully presented. It is well produced, has few typographical errors and has an excellent index. It will provide the profession with a wealth of new material for research, with clear views and new challenges.
Rodney Maddock, "The household and the Australian economy: a review of Portrait of the family", Australian Economic History Review, vol. XXXV, no. 2, September 1995, pp. 112-20.
Return to top
It is not often that one comes across a scholarly work in economics that begins with a discussion of reality based on ideas expressed in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus. That is probably as it should be, but, as Graeme D. Snooks explains in the first chapter of his book, Wittgenstein does offer fundamental insight into the relationship between models and reality, a relationship which lies at the core of modern economics. According to Wittgenstein a picture is a model of reality. According to Snooks an economic model of reality must be empirical; that is, like Wittgenstein's picture, it must be a model of existence -- an ''existential model" in Snooks' words. By its nature, an existential model must he inductive; thus it contrasts witll a "logical moclel," which is deductive and, unlike Wittgenstein's picture, a construct of the mind. Transposing Wittgenstein's logic, Snooks eschews theoretical models (as that term is commonly used among economists) and instead uses data to create economic pictures or "timescapes.''
This tension between the theoretical and the empirical composes a central theme of Snooks' volume, but it is not the sole theme. At another level the book explores the key features of the household economy. Here Snooks argues that, with a few notable exceptions, economists in general have misguidedly focused on the marketplace while ignoring the household. Simultaneously, he critically reviews the exceptions to this argument, which include primarily Gary Becker and his students, and not surprisingly, Snooks finds a major flaw in their reliance on logic at the expense of empiricism. At yet another level the book contains a critique of traditional national income accounting. Here Snooks produces a set of alternative or "Gross Community Income" (GCI) accounts, which include the value of housework. He produces GCI figures for Australia dating back to the eighteenth century, and, finally, in interpreting them, he provides an economic history of Australia. Readers interested in any of these topics should take a look at this thoughtful volume . . .
Economists from a number of fields will find this volume either useful or irksome. Macroeconomists and economic historians may value the book as a font of new aggregate data; however, the acceptance of such data implicitly raises questions about all previous scholarly work on and inferences drawn from traditional income and product accounting, which one supposes is exactly Snooks' objective. Labor economists and, again, economic historians may either accept or reject Snooks' central propositions concerning theory and the household and in either case still quibble endlessly about the assumptions and techniques by which he obtains his estimates. Theorists will find a manifesto for their unemployment. Lost in many of these arguments, however, will be a number of important questions that lie at the heart of the book. What is "economic activity"? What is the nature of its organization? How should we portray it? As Graeme Snooks demonstrates, these questions should be considered before the first equation is written or the first widget counted.
Lee A. Craig, Journal of Economic Literature, vol. XXXIII, no. 4, December 1995, pp. 2017-18.
Return to top
'Despite being the core of all economic systems . . . the household economy has been neglected, disregarded, slighted and put out of the collective mind . . . Remembering the forgotten economy requires new concepts, new data, and a great deal of new analysis' (page 1). Graeme Snooks aims to recover the forgotten economy of the Australian household, and, in so doing, to reinterpret Australian economic history.
The book makes three contributions: statistical, through the estimates of household labour, capital equipment, output and productivity; methodological, through the discussion of the conceptual and empirical problems faced in valuing household activities; and, historical, through insight into the dynamics of the Australian economy. Snooks claims a further contribution. In approaching the household economy not through the deductive logic of orthodox economics, but through the data, by establishing what he calls 'economic timescapes'. Snooks promises greater understanding of 'real-world dynamic processes' (page xii).
The statistical contribution is obvious. Snooks provides estimates of numbers of households and household workers, and the value of' household labour services and capital formation broken down into equipment and buildings, and with equipment further disaggregated. These data are then used to value household activities. The book culminates in what the author claims to be the first social accounts for Australia from 1788 to 1990. These accounts extend the GDP concept to the household and market sectors, establishing what Snooks calls Gross Community Income (GC:I) and the analogous inclusive concept of capital, Gross Community Capital Formation. GCI does not always move in line with GDP. The author uses this to argue for the importance of including the household economy in any analysis of long-run dynamics and to suggest that Gross Community Income is superior to GDP as a measure of economic activity.
The value of these social accounts depends on the quality of the underlying sources and methods. Snooks describes his approach as 'pragmatic', as '[an] attempt . . . to develop a conceptual framework that utilizes available Australian data over the past two centuries to the best advantage' (page 162). Briefly, Snooks aims to estimate household production, defined as non-market uses of household time in the production of a good or service that could be sold in the market. Ideally he wants to measure the value added by these household activities. There are two methods of estimating value added: the production approach, whereby the value of material inputs is subtracted from the value of output; and, the income approach, whereby value added is estimated from the value paid to the various factors of production. Data on household output are rare, so Snooks opts for the factor incomes approach. Most other attempts to measure factor returns have focused on valuing household labour, but Snooks extends his analysis to include household capital stock and residential land: useful given the increasing importance of the capital input into household production. Recent attempts to value household services have estimated hours of household labour from time use surveys. The rarity of Australian surveys forces Snooks back on aggregates of different kinds of household workers (women who work only in the home, women who work in home and market, and married men and single males and females) as his basic physical inputs.
Although he attempts to see virtue in this necessity, many would be sceptical, especially as he does use Australian time budgets to establish the hours that each kind of worker works in the home, and so to calculate annual hours of household labour. Snooks values the hours of household work with reference to the opportunity cost of market wages rather than with reference to the wages of general or specific domestics. Whether or not future researchers follow Snooks's method, they will be grateful for his clear discussion of the issues.
These data are not just a post feminist addendum to conventional national accounts. By seeing the household sector in harness with the public and private sectors, Snooks can identify three phases in Australian economic development. Each phase was dominated by a different sector, the household sector during the rapid expansion from the goldrush to Federation, the public sector during the stagnation from Federation to WWII, and the private sector in the atypically rapid growth from 1945 to the 1970s.
. . .
Jane Humphries, Economic Journal, 106, May 1996, pp. 733–5.
Return to top
. . . This volume fills a very large gap and breaks new ground. In two major monographs in the nineteen sixties, Noel Butlin teased out the role of domestic product, domestic capital formation and overseas borrowings in shaping the growth of the Australian economy between 1861 and 1939 and, secondly, explored the role investment in urbanisation, rural development and communications played in economic growth during the second half of the nineteenth century. This present volume doesn't have quite the elegance or detail of Butlin's pioneering work but it h does address the issue Butlin confessed he could not -- namely, the role of the household sector within the broad sweep of Australian economic development since 1788 . . .
What then is the value of the story these long-run data tell? Snooks' data certainly prompt a reappraisal of the economic forces that shaped life at home and at work in Australia over the past two hundred years. However, the importance of this book will lie as much in the stimulus it will give to future research as in the answers it gives within the compass of its pages.
Peter Gunn, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, vol. 32, no. 2, August 1996, pp. 122-4.
Return to top |
