For All You Hong Kong People That Treat Your Maids Like Shit....

It never ceases to amaze me how typical Hong Kongers treat their maids. These people, paid a few thousand HK$ a month or around US$500, are caring for what I argue is a families most precious asset, their children. The value of child care and household help is much more valuable than people realize, particularly for the people here that get a huge benefit for such a low cost.

For Mother's day, Salary.com has calculate the work value of Mom and this is what they have to say...

If the typical stay-at-home mother in the United States were paid for her work as a housekeeper, cook and psychologist among other roles, she would earn $138,095 a year, according to research released Wednesday.

I would go even further, since a country's GDP is calculated by summing all the tangible monetary values within an economy, the US GDP would not be the $13 trillion that it is now, but under calculates the value by around 50%. The way that I get this number, is that there are about 100 million households in the US. Of these, less than half have children at home and the production of children is a good that is not counted in GDP, only the spending on them. So a mother, that is giving value of $138,000 a year and assuming that there are around 45 million families with children, then GDP is under counted by about $6 trillion.