How to Run Your Home Without Help by Kay Smallshaw

From grocery store checkout clerks, to gravediggers, to lawyers and doctors, Studs Terkel spoke to everyone, and the conversations he recorded provide us with a remarkable way to humanize the work that makes the market possible. This collection of interviews with working people of every age and in every profession is a great read and a gripping way to understand the meaning of work to the people who do it. Her analysis of swapping will be fascinating for economists, but her larger observation that families find ways to function even in the worst of circumstances is a vital contribution and, again, one that is still relevant to discussions today. Their findings are fascinating as an early example of this kind of social science and as historic economic data, but they are perhaps most valuable for their continuing importance to our discussions about poverty today.Īfter I made Steve Horwitz read ‘Round About a Pound a Week, he pointed me to Carol Stack’s similar study of networks of exchange and support among Black families in the late 1960’s. To answer the question, Pember Reeves and her colleagues asked mothers in a working poor neighborhood of London (where the average income was “‘round about a pound a week) to record their expenses. Maud Pember Reeves, a Fabian Socialist, undertook her groundbreaking demographic study in the early years of the 20th century to try to understand why poor families are poor. This is the book that began my fascination. ‘Round About a Pound a Week, by Maud Pember Reeves (1913)

Here’s a reading list of texts I really like (in no particular order) to get you started: Economics is everywhere, and while an increasing amount of attention has been paid to texts like these by historians and scholars of literature, I don’t think that economic historians have given them as much attention as they merit.

If you’re looking for this kind of material, you can’t go wrong by haunting used bookstores and poking through their collections of advice books, home economics texts, and collections of tattered old magazines. I think their diaries and letters and interviews and books of advice tell us at least as much about the economic circumstances under which they were written as do articles by economists–probably more. A little while ago, I mentioned on Econlog that I have a history of fascination with economic thinking as expressed in non economic works–and particularly with the economic thinking of people who are in the daily grit of working blue collar jobs and doing household work.

How to Run Your Home Without Help by Kay Smallshaw