I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. We're about to learn how the size of every country's economy is actually a total miscount, at least according to economist Marilyn Waring. In her illuminating and infuriating archive talk from TEDx Christchurch in 2019, she calls out all the ways the real and often

exhausting labor we do, especially when unpaid, is considered unproductive by economic standards

and all the consequences of not accounting for this work.

Taupiti, Teuanghaanga, Waikota Teawa,

call Marilyn Tene,

Kiyora.

As you've heard, when I was very young,

I was elected to the New Zealand Parliament.

And at that age, you learn mostly by listening to others' stories. I remember a woman

who'd been injured in a farm accident, and it was coming up to shearing time on the farm.

And she had to be replaced by a shepherd, by a rousey in the woolshed,

and of course there was still someone needed to manage the household and to prepare the food

for the shearing gangs. And her mother came to help with that.

But the family got no compensation for the mother

because that's what mothers and family members are supposed to do.

One year, a company called Gold Mines, New Zealand,

applied for a prospecting licence on our beautiful Mount Pirongia.

It is a mountain full of extraordinary ecosystems, of verdant native forests.

It produced oxygen, it was a carbon sink, it was a home for endangered species

and for pollinating species in the farmland around.

And the mining company put up this great economic prospectus that was about how much money

could be made from mining our mountain, about all the growth and development that would show in New Zealand's budgetary

...