Open Arsenal

The Labor Behind a Functioning Home.

Domestic Economics is an AI-powered open source specification designed to measure and document the labor behind a functioning home. It recognizes that household activity can involve substantial amounts of skilled, productive, and time-intensive work even when that work does not generate a conventional paycheck. Users can describe their household responsibilities in natural language, allowing the system to identify duties, break complex responsibilities into individual tasks, and map those tasks to comparable paid occupations.

The specification calculates the current market value of household labor using factors such as time, frequency, occupation, geographic location, and applicable wage data. It can value childcare, cooking, cleaning, transportation, caregiving, education, home maintenance, household administration, and other domestic responsibilities. The system also includes a Mental Labor Module that recognizes planning, scheduling, coordination, monitoring, research, decision-making, and other cognitive work required to keep a household functioning.

Domestic Economics extends beyond labor valuation through its Household Production and Household Balance Sheet modules. Household Production measures goods and services created within the home, while the Household Balance Sheet provides a broader view of paid income, unpaid labor value, household production, expenses, outsourced services, and avoided replacement costs. The Lifetime Contribution module can maintain a historical record of household labor and calculate its cumulative value, while Inflation and Wage Growth tracks how the market value and replacement cost of that work change over time.

One of the specification’s central outputs is the “What Would It Cost to Replace Me?” report. This report estimates what a household would need to spend to replace the documented work with paid services, breaking the calculation down by duty, occupation, hours, wage rates, and replacement costs. A Research Module additionally provides tools for analyzing aggregate household labor, domestic production, care work, mental labor, geographic differences, and changes over time while supporting privacy-preserving research.

Domestic Economics is designed as a modular system. Specialized plugins can extend the core functionality into childcare, eldercare, disability care, education, cooking, cleaning, laundry, transportation, gardening, home maintenance, household administration, financial management, shopping, and other areas of domestic work. This modular approach allows the specification to grow into a broader framework for household economic measurement while keeping the core labor valuation system independent, transparent, and extensible.

This specification is released under the AGPL-3.0+ license and is free to use with required attribution. Attribution-free deployments may obtain a Specification Branding License, with fees based on usage, deployment scope, and environment size.