Being England
David Ricardo and the advantage of part-time work for men...

By Matt Mitchell '89

If you had to be a country, you would think England would be a good one. The pretty countryside, the London streets, and the national gift for comic understatement all argue persuasively for the home of The Beatles and The Bard.

But despite my own British heritage I’ve never wanted to be England and it’s all because of David Ricardo and his theory of comparative advantage. Back in 1817, Ricardo wrote in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation that even if Portugal could produce both cloth and wine more cheaply than England, both countries would benefit from trade. It’s just more efficient to specialize, Ricardo argued. Today, his theory still stands as a key intellectual justification for free trade policies.

Ricardo’s theory, drilled into me in Professor Hans Palmer’s introductory macroeconomics class, is great for foreign trade theory. But you can begin to see why no one would want to be England in their marriage: I’m worse at making money, and if you believe the shouts for Mommy, worse at taking care of the kids than my spouse.

And so Ricardo’s centuries-old theory haunts my household today: I’m a stay-at-home dad, and my wife works full-time. Is there any way to break free from specialization, produce both cloth and wine, have it all and work part-time?

This is what a solid preponderance of moms seem to want. According to a 2007 Pew Research Center report, 60 percent of employed mothers said that working part-time was the “ideal” situation. This compared with 21 percent who thought working full-time was ideal and 19 percent who would rather not be employed.

What about dads? While polling and research about part-time work tends to focus on the needs and desires of mothers, I suspect that a large group of fathers, if pressed, would also like a shot at working part-time.

Increasingly, it may also make economic sense for dads to log some years as part-time workers and child care specialists. While I don’t have as practical a graduate degree as my wife’s (nursing), at least she and I have the same level of educational attainment. Not so for the generation now in their 20s. Young women are increasingly better educated than young men, which means that the number of English gentlemen and ladies of Portugal is about to shoot through the roof.

To illustrate how this relates to part-time work, let’s say a couple decides to have kids. Let’s also say the woman has a 16.7 percent earnings advantage over the man (this was the actual earnings advantage twentysomething women in New York City enjoyed over twentysomething men in 2005, according to Queens College demographer Andrew A. Beveridge). In economics lingo, the woman in our hypothetical partnership has a 16.7 percent “absolute” advantage at making money.

Let’s also say the same woman has a 10 percent advantage at taking care of the kids. Admittedly this figure is a bit arbitrary. In my situation, for example, my wife firmly believes I have an absolute advantage at taking care of our boys. But let’s stick with that 10 percent disadvantage—not bad, actually, given that you’re competing with Mom.

Finally let’s assume that our hypothetical young family will need and want one full-time income and one part-time income. Obviously this is not the case for many families, who often need two full-time incomes just to make ends meet. But if you believe the Pew Center, a great many women, at any rate, define the good life as one where one partner (preferably them) holds down a part-time job. So let’s be generous in spirit and assume the good life.

Now that we have a set of assumptions big enough for a real economist, let’s keep them in the back of our minds while applying Ricardo’s comparative advantage idea to the domestic sphere.

Under my variant of Ricardo’s theory, it would make sense for the man in our hypothetical partnership to be the child care specialist and part-time worker. He has a clear “comparative” advantage at child care, which is to say his absolute disadvantage at taking care of the kids (10 percent) is substantially less than his absolute disadvantage at making money (16.7 percent).

Nice and mathematical, right? Unfortunately, I also think that the man in this hypothetical partnership is going to have a very tough go at finding that part-time job. There are several reasons why.

One is that women traditionally dominate many of the fields with the best part-time jobs, like teaching and nursing. It’s going to take time for more men to enter these fields, and for society to fully accept them there.

Another reason both men and women have trouble finding part-time work is that my old nemesis David Ricardo was right back in 1817. Specialization really is more economically efficient. That impersonal beast, the global economy, wants its specialized workers and is often willing to pay them handsomely. Unfortunately, however, the beast also wants more and more hours on the job from its favored specialists.

This means that well-paid (and traditionally male-dominated) fields from corporate law to software programming that are exposed to global economic forces tend to have few part-time jobs available. This is not a men’s problem in particular, but the fact that the media has framed the issue of part-time work and flexible schedules as a women’s issue means that many of the few “flexible” jobs that exist are either implicitly or explicitly reserved for moms.

There are also issues of cultural expectations that go beyond economics. I’m firmly convinced, for example, that there’s an all-or-nothing quality to being male out there in the labor market. This contributes to the difficulties I’ve found in landing part-time work, to the despair of men I see who have lost good jobs in their 50s and find themselves unable to get jobs of any kind, and to a disturbing drop in labor force participation among men in their 20s. In a sense this is the reverse of the “glass ceiling” faced by women. If the measure of women’s ongoing economic inequality is the wage gap, a corollary measure of economic suffering among men is probably the labor force participation rate.

It’s tough to fight cultural expectations for men, and the deep logic of economic specialization expressed by Ricardo, Adam Smith and other classical economists can make it even harder. But it’s worth fighting the fight anyway. Many women seem to get this, as evidenced by the Pew Center finding that a substantial majority of mothers desire part-time work while their children are young. In this regard it’s time more men, and more fathers, caught up with their female counterparts.

Matt Mitchell is a stay-at-home father and sometime writer and urban planner. He and Annie Redman ’90, a certified nurse-midwife, live in Sacramento with sons Simon and Gus.