In a paper published in the Atlantic Economic Journal, economists Sandipa Bhattacharjee and Timothy Haase of Ramapo College of New Jersey develop a simple household production framework that explains why some time-saving innovations deliver systematic reductions in housework while others barely move the needle. Their central insight is deceptively simple: the relevant question is not whether a technology saves time, but which component of the household production problem it actually changes. Technologies that look superficially similar can have sharply divergent effects on how families allocate their hours.

The framework builds on a long tradition in economics dating back to Gary Becker’s landmark 1965 theory of time allocation, in which households are treated as small production units that combine time and market goods to produce things people value, such as clean homes and cooked meals. Later work by Robert Gronau, Jacob Mincer, and others refined this approach, and quantitative studies by Jeremy Greenwood, Valerie Ramey, and their collaborators have used it to explain long-run trends in work and leisure. What Bhattacharjee and Haase add is an explicit distinction between two classes of technology that existing treatments often blur together.

The first class consists of efficiency-improving technologies: innovations that reduce the time required to produce one unit of a home-produced good. A robotic vacuum cleaner is a canonical example. It lowers the labor cost of each square meter cleaned, but it does nothing to change the price of the market alternative, such as hiring a cleaning service. The second class consists of technologies that lower the full price of market substitutes. The full price combines the money outlay with the time a household must spend obtaining the good. On-demand food delivery platforms are the clearest modern case: they slash both the waiting time and the coordination cost of replacing a home-cooked dinner with a restaurant meal.

The crucial difference lies in what happens to demand. When a technology makes home production more efficient, it effectively makes home-produced goods cheaper to produce, and households respond by consuming more of them. A robot vacuum may clean faster, but families may respond by expecting cleaner floors, more frequent cleaning, or larger homes that generate more work. The net effect on total housework time is therefore ambiguous: the induced increase in consumption of the home-produced good may be smaller than, equal to, or larger than the direct per-unit time savings. This is why a century of appliances produced only modest reductions in housework time. Efficiency gains were largely absorbed by rising standards of home-produced output.

Technologies that lower the full price of market substitutes work through a different channel. They make it cheaper, in both money and time, to buy the good instead of making it at home. When the elasticity of substitution between home-produced and market goods exceeds the aggregate demand elasticity, households systematically substitute away from home production, and housework time falls. In the authors’ formal model, the derivative of home-produced output with respect to the full price of market goods equals the market share times the difference between the substitution elasticity and the demand elasticity, a condition that produces a clear prediction rather than an ambiguous one.

To illustrate the mechanisms, the paper examines three contemporary technologies. Robotic cleaning devices represent the efficiency-improving case: they reduce the time per unit of cleaning but leave the market alternative untouched, so their effect on total cleaning time is theoretically indeterminate. Food delivery platforms represent the full-price case: by collapsing the time cost of acquiring prepared food, they generate consistent and measurable reductions in domestic food preparation time, a finding echoed by recent empirical work on delivery platforms published in Management Science. Meal kit services occupy an intermediate position, partially outsourcing shopping and portioning while leaving cooking itself at home, so their time effects fall between the two poles.

The authors organize these patterns using data from the American Time Use Survey, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that has tracked how Americans spend their hours since 2003. The series covering 2003 to 2019 and, after the pandemic disruption of 2020, 2021 to 2024, reveals the divergent time-use trajectories that the framework is designed to explain: persistent housework categories that resist efficiency gains alongside food-related categories that respond visibly to the arrival of delivery platforms. The survey data are publicly available, and the paper’s supplementary appendix derives the key equations from first principles under two-stage budgeting, including a worked Cobb-Douglas example in which the substitution and demand elasticities both equal one.

The implications extend beyond household appliances. Firms and policymakers routinely promote time-saving technologies on the assumption that they will reduce the time households devote to unpaid work, and the economic value of that assumption is enormous, shaping product marketing, forecasts of labor supply, and debates about gender inequality in domestic labor. If the technology in question is an efficiency improvement, the framework warns, the promised time savings may be quietly consumed by higher standards of home production. If instead the technology lowers the full price of a market substitute, and households are willing to substitute between home and market goods, the time savings are far more likely to materialize.

The analysis also speaks to a broader puzzle in economic history. Studies of the twentieth century, including Ramey’s reconstruction of home production time from old surveys and Bowden and Offer’s comparison of the United States and Britain, documented that the appliance revolution coincided with rising standards of cleanliness, childcare, and meal preparation rather than a dramatic collapse of housework. Bhattacharjee and Haase’s framework gives that historical pattern a precise analytical form: the appliance era was dominated by efficiency improvements, while the platform era, with its delivery apps and gig-economy services, is dominated by full-price reductions. The technologies of the twenty-first century may finally deliver the time savings that the twentieth century promised, not because they are better machines, but because they change a different parameter of the household problem altogether.

Subject of Research: How different classes of household technology affect time spent on home production

Article Title: Home Production and Technology: Why Time-Saving Innovations Do Not Always Save Time

Article References: Bhattacharjee, S., & Haase, T. (2026). Home Production and Technology: Why Time-Saving Innovations Do Not Always Save Time. Atlantic Economic Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-026-09864-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11293-026-09864-4

Keywords: household production, time allocation, labor-saving technology, home appliances, food delivery platforms, meal kits, robotic vacuum cleaners, American Time Use Survey, substitution elasticity, full price, consumer behavior, economic theory

Milbank begins from what he calls capitalism’s “paradoxical oscillation between stasis and flow.” The modern market economy, he writes, must constantly increase its static accumulation of wealth while simultaneously risking that accumulation through continuous circulation. He illustrates this with two contrasting images: the privileged economic enclave such as the City of London, a bounded physical site where the normal writ of the state scarcely runs, and the ceaseless day-and-night circulation of global transport, both real and virtual. Flows require hubs, but flows alone secure the power and permanence of the hubs—much as medieval castles housed troops, yet depended on those troops’ forays for their own security.

From this tension the paper derives a threefold account of what capital consists in. First is the “geographic” ownership of terrain and equipment, which in modernity has become more absolute because it is decoupled from the relationships between people that once delimited ownership through conditional obligation. Second is the “mathematical” ownership of money in abstracted forms such as shares and dividends. Third—and most polemically—is what Milbank describes as the effective ownership of people. Although slavery has been commuted into wage and salary dependency supplemented by welfare, he argues that for the vast majority who own few assets, a mode of semi-serfdom persists: people have been “capitalised,” treated as economic resources rather than as spiritual creatures or citizens, stored in precariously owned housing and constantly retrained and redeployed lest they escape into what he calls enclaves of neo-primitive anarchy.

The paper’s central theoretical move comes in its treatment of money. Against the classical picture—shared, Milbank argues, even by Marx—of money as a neutral mirror or representation of exchange value generated by labour, he aligns himself with a minority tradition in the sociological and Keynesian camps, drawing on eighteenth-century figures such as George Berkeley and Sir James Steuart and on modern writers including Philip Grierson and Geoffrey Ingham. On this “unit of account” view, money is before all else the attribution of an abstract, free-floating quantity of number to people: a register of credit and debt relationships, and therefore of unequal power and ultimately coercion. This tradition is sometimes called the “Cambridge” theory of money in the paper.

It is this credit–debt register, Milbank contends, that makes financialisation primary rather than secondary to capitalism. The conversion of people into capital is not only a matter of exploiting their labour or their consumer desires; it is the reduction of persons to docketed numbers standing in relation to finance capital as borrowers and lenders, to the state as taxpayers, and to landed capital as rent payers—a nexus in which financial and landed capital secure each other, and whose instability was exposed by the 2008 financial crash. Historically, he argues, the decisive “shift at the top” was not the creation of a wage-earning class at the bottom, which was only partial in early modern England and in proto-factory islands of Italy and the Netherlands, but the emergence from around 1300 onwards—and at a new pitch in eighteenth-century Britain around the Bank of England—of a complex relationship between extended state debt, private banks and the tax-paying landed class. Banks began to create money out of nothing through speculative loans backed by central banks and Crown debt, which in turn was underwritten by the tax returns that such speculative investment itself generated.

On this reading, contemporary phenomena that look like capitalist decline are nothing of the sort. Milbank invokes Robert Brenner and others on slowing profits, rentiership and the shift to services, but insists that capitalism has never been interested in physical wealth, innovation or even profit in isolation from class domination. A quasi-feudal, “vectoral” extraction of surplus information is not an anomaly but the revelation of capitalism’s financial core, which from its English Whig outset was about maintaining the power of a political, banking and landed elite. He even suggests this reframes populism: rather than an aberration beside class struggle, populism is the assertion of petty producers and workers against elite financiers, as with the Trump constituency in the United States or the Peronist regime in Argentina, undone by capital flight and consequent inflation.

Yet the paper does not rest in this grim diagnosis. Milbank notes that the same German sociologists and Cambridge theorists who established money’s debt-based origins—Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Grierson, Ingham—still, in his view, share one classical assumption: that earlier tribal economies were barter economies. Against this he appeals to Marcel Mauss’s account of gift-exchange, in which economic exchange is also a symbolic mutual binding, carrying a triple obligation to give, receive and give again. Even David Graeber, who invoked the gift, is criticised for reducing it to spontaneous communist sharing and treating the “indebted” dimension of gift-exchange—the owing of a counter-gift—as an anachronistic economistic projection on Mauss’s part, when Milbank takes that dimension to be empirically well attested and inseparable from gift-exchange’s ritual symbolism.

Reading money through the gift allows the paper to mediate the old debate between money as commodity and money as unit of account. Unlike a bartered object, a gift is at once a thing, a value, and a participatory stand-in for the giver—quasi-personal, as persons themselves can be exchanged as gifts in marriage. Very early token money, in Mauss’s account, arose in symbolic and religious contexts and was both a representative commodity and a recorder of social credit and debt, but debt in that context was largely positive and binding. Drawing on Lewis Hyde, Milbank observes that a gift creates a relationship one did not already have and increases the giver’s power—strangely akin to a modern bank inventing money through credit it does not really possess. Token gifts were even “usurious” in an old sense: through circulation a gift’s value increased, part of which returned to the original giver, though the increase could itself be passed on further. In Latin, usura long meant precisely this positive increase of things through use—the barley seed that grows into a bushel, the ancestral ring that acquires meaning. Modern usury, by contrast, lets the increase accrue only through foreclosure and repossession.

This yields the paper’s most striking reinterpretation: modern financialised capitalism is a parody of gift-exchange, not an escape from it. Mauss’s “total social fact”—the inescapable obligation of reciprocity—cannot be exited, so late capitalism remains within it, distorted. Its reduction of money to pure credit returns money, perversely, to direct power relations between people; its insertion of debt into every corner of life binds persons together, however etiolatedly; and its fiat money, dependent wholly on trust, promotes once more the truth that human beings endlessly create meanings and things out of nothing. Even paying a restaurant bill, Milbank suggests, is a constrained counter-gift, and the possibility of general defaulting reveals an element of free spontaneity in everyday consent.

From here the paper turns to policy and what Milbank calls the choice between the “infinite line” and the “infinite spiral.” The infinite line is the straight, asymmetrical accumulation of abstract capital by a few; the spiral is infinitisation bent back into regional, national or local circuits of mutual support, where gain is endlessly passed on under a mutual-insurance principle and debt guarantees a promised reversal into credit. Examples he offers include strictly local currencies not exchangeable beyond certain limits, and rethought banks and building societies in which borrowing is reconceived as taking shares in ventures, with the bank sharing in the risk of lending—a mode of non-usurious investment. He cites precedents ranging from leaving the gold standard, which enabled the New Deal and the Keynesian era, to mutual-protective arrangements like Bretton Woods. Conversely, he argues that the infinite line must police its own limits—the gold standard, then the dollar-gold link, then the dollar, euro and yen, and today international bankers’ demands for fiscal prudence—to prevent illegitimate exits into the spiral. He points to the rapid fall of British Prime Minister Liz Truss as a dramatic illustration of finance’s power over democratic economic choices, and to more than five thousand special economic zones worldwide, joined by deregulating states such as Javier Milei’s Argentina and Donald Trump’s America, as castellated enclaves hollowing out the national “spirals.”

The limitations of the piece are evident and, in a sense, acknowledged: it is a philosophical and historical essay, not an empirical study, and its prescriptions are sketched rather than modelled. Milbank concedes there is no inevitable good synthesis; things can grow darker, with land rendered uninhabitable and human capacities—knowing, willing, being able, in the triad he borrows from Tommaso Campanella—eroded. He also notes that a genuinely reforming British government would likely have to compromise with current global financial circumstances. The proposed “new sort of socio-political action” is candidly described as yet to be invented.

Still, the implications are considerable. If money’s anarchic, created quality can be interfused with social, ethical and religious value in spiralling, gift-exchanging forms, then the contemporary dominance of debtor–creditor relations unmoored from production might be reinfused with generosity, with all lending becoming real investment in physical, cultural and personal processes. Milbank ends on a deliberately expansive note: ours is not, as many suppose, an age of rediscovered limits but of the infinitely open—renewable energy replacing exhaustible fuels, money freed from gold—and this infinity offers either a Faustian power for elites, as Goethe’s Faust Part Two intimated through the creation of paper money, or an “infinite-finite spiral” of reciprocal recognition and encouragement. His final claim is that only such a spiral, not the infinite line of consolidation and extraction, can be forever sustainable—an argument likely to provoke economists, though one grounded, unusually, in theology, gift theory and the long history of money itself.