My girlfriend thinks the fact that we both wear clothes establishes that we should both do laundry. This is a consumption-based theory of labor allocation. It would be an unusual way to organize a firm, and I do not understand why sharing a bed makes it economically sophisticated.
The relevant question is what each of us gives up by doing the work. I bill consulting at $180 an hour. Thirty minutes spent sorting and folding therefore carries an opportunity cost of $90. She is a salaried architect. Her employer does not pay her an additional $90 for leaving our towels unfolded on Sunday afternoon.
People sometimes confuse comparative advantage with being better at a task. She is, in fact, better at laundry. But even if I could fold a fitted sheet faster, it would not follow that I should. A highly productive person can be the wrong person to perform a necessary job precisely because their productivity has more valuable uses elsewhere. The relative value of our alternative activities should be established before we allocate the unpleasant one.
There is an apparent measurement problem. My alternative use of the half hour has a market price; hers does not. She planned to sit down and read. I agree that this has value to her. The difficulty is that admitting an unpriced benefit into the calculation does not tell us its magnitude. For the baseline estimate I use zero, with the understanding that she can supply a defensible alternative. This is a bookkeeping convention, not a claim that her happiness is worthless.
By contrast, valuing my time at zero because I happen not to have a client call this Sunday would be a serious error. Consulting income depends on a much broader stock of professional capacity. Reading industry discussions, considering possible products, and recovering sufficiently to work on Monday all contribute to maintaining that stock. She has described some of these activities as “being on your laptop.” This tells us very little about their expected return.
She also objects that the additional income would initially belong to me. That is a distributional issue. If specialization increases our combined surplus, it is possible in principle for me to compensate her while leaving us both better off. Whether I actually make that transfer is a separate discussion; it cannot change which allocation produces the surplus in the first place.
I would be willing to revisit the arrangement if our relative opportunity costs changed. For now, the evidence favors her doing the laundry. If she assigns an additional value to seeing me do the work, she should state it explicitly. At present we are being asked to sacrifice measurable household income to satisfy a preference whose owner declines to price it.
Since he's asked me to price it: my Sunday reading time is worth $95 an hour. I've chosen a number five dollars above his, which I'm told is how this works.
That valuation hasn't been market-tested.
This is absolute advantage with comparative advantage vocabulary. Comparative advantage compares opportunity-cost ratios across at least two tasks. You need a second task and both of your productivities in it. With one task and your billing rate, all you've shown is that your time is expensive, which nobody disputed.
The second task is consulting. She can't bill at my rate.
Then you have an absolute advantage in consulting and she has an absolute advantage in laundry, which you concede in paragraph three. That's the simple case, and in the simple case she does the laundry and you do the consulting. Except you aren't consulting on Sunday.
That's the hole. You don't have a client call this Sunday, so the marginal half hour isn't billable. Your opportunity cost is your next best use of the half hour, which by your own account is "reading industry discussions." What's the hourly rate on that?
It's an investment in billable capacity, which by construction is priced at the billing rate.
"Whether I actually make that transfer is a separate discussion" is the whole problem. If compensation is actually paid, the reallocation can be a Pareto improvement. If it's only possible in principle, you're using the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, which gets criticized for this reason: it calls a change efficient when the losers could in theory be compensated and in practice aren't.
You've modeled folding as a labor input. It's also a weekly signal about whether the relationship is solvent, and that part doesn't transfer when you outsource the labor.
Slightly off topic, but can anyone actually fold a fitted sheet? I've been rolling them into a ball for ten years.
You tuck the corners into each other, then fold it into a rectangle. I've watched the video about forty times and managed it once.