Household services and the age of the plaintiff

Once criticism that economists typically encounter when calculating the loss of household services is that it is unrealistic to use the average number of hours spent on household services because the number of hours that a person will spend performing household services will decrease as the person ages.

Data on the how people allocated their time within a given day (time use surveys) suggest that this criticism is unfounded. For instance, according to time use data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and calculations performed by economic demographers at Expectancy Data (www.expectancydata.com) the opposite is true. That is the amount of time spent performing household services such as housework, food cooking, outdoor chores, home maintenance, and time spent obtaining goods and services actually increases as a person ages. For example, a male who is between 25 and 34 will spend 11.7 hours performing household services; where as a male between the ages of 65 and 74 will spend 21.3 hours performing household services.