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To Win the Chore War, Think Like an Economist
Stop playing against your partner
If you’ve ever felt that you do more than your fair share of the vacuuming or that you could be taking out the garbage more efficiently but don’t know where to start, let me offer an unlikely source of help: economics. Yes, the lessons from that textbook you studied in the 12th grade can offer you and your partner a ready-made toolkit for better capitalizing on your time, putting you on a route to household bliss.
Let’s start with the concept of division of labor, the idea that more gets done when each person takes on one part of a project rather than everyone doing a bit of everything. (You might be familiar with this idea if you have a boss who has explained why it is economically imperative that you do all the tasks that he doesn’t want to do.)
Two hundred and fifty years ago, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, economist Adam Smith foresaw that the division of labor in manufacturing would lead to massive increases in productivity. While you probably want to stop short of giving your home that authentic Victorian factory vibe, it’s nice to know that the soot-filled sky’s the limit in terms of potential efficiency gains. To paraphrase the top-hatted economists of the day, there’s always more efficiency to be squeezed out.
