Generative Household Economics: An Application of the Generative Relational Being Framework

Household economics, in its classical and its bargaining forms alike, takes the household as a system for allocating resources that already exist, resolving who holds what, who performs which role, and how income, time, and care are divided among members. This paper argues that allocation is not the first question a household poses, and that a prior and more fundamental one has gone largely unasked, namely how a household comes to generate value it did not already possess. It proposes a generative framework in which the household is understood as a system for sustaining and expanding the generative capacity of its members rather than as a pool of resources awaiting division. On this framework a household's central task divides into five moments arranged in a determinate order. It must first identify and remove the generative barriers, biological, psychological, relational, and institutional, that prevent value from arising at all. Only then does the co-creation of value between members become a live question, followed by the circulation of that value through the relationship and outward to the wider world, the prevention of its extraction by external structures that capture what a relation produces without returning to it, and finally the return of value to its creators, understood not as income alone but as the reproduction of the very capacity that generated it. The argument draws the household within a wider programme that grounds subjecthood, value, and political economy in relation rather than in the individual or the fixed origin, and closes by proposing the household as one instance, the smallest and most legible, of a generative relational system whose logic extends to teams, institutions, and forms of collective governance beyond the family.