One Acre Homestead

In economic terms, declining marginal value means that every extra hour of work provides less benefit than the previous hour. This is especially true if you have other ways to use your time. If the other things you’d do with that 20 surplus hours a week have profit potential, then there is a monetary opportunity cost for working an extra 20 hours per week. The opportunity cost is the lost profit from other ventures, and should be subtracted directly from the monetary compensation for those 20 hours per week.

I, personally, side with Wendell Berry and other authors, who assert that the home is the basic economic unit—the foundation on which the rest of capitalist society is based. If we cannot invest ourselves in our own homes, then where are we headed as a society? In truth, the concept of home is gender-neutral and universally desirable. The home should function well as a symbol of security. While security is never guaranteed, an insecure home is no good place to be. Home economics is, at its very basis, the study and practice of making a secure and functioning home.

It is an unquestioned cultural assumption in developed countries that your food will come from the grocery store, and all of your household supplies will be brought in from some distant source. In his essay “Feminism, The Body, and The Machine,” Wendell Berry observes, “The modern household is the place where the consumptive couple do their consuming. Nothing productive is done there. Such work as is done there is done at the expense of the resident couple or family, and to the profit of suppliers of energy and household technology. For entertainment, the inmates consume television or purchase other consumable diversion elsewhere.”

Public education has a mission: to serve public interest. The public interest in our modern society means, above all, a single-minded focus on national economic goals, namely GDP/GNP growth. Young people in school are being trained to contribute to these national economic standards, both as consumers and as potential employees or business owners. To a lesser extent, students are there to boost US ranks in international competitions over who has the smartest kids—another way to boost our world economic standing. This attitude trickles down. Now parents truly seem to believe that their children must measure up to these national standards, first and foremost, or something is wrong. Many parents are afraid to homeschool their children because they fear the requirements they have to meet to prove their children are learning.