food and clean water, sanitation, adequate shelter, schooling, health care, and the like. These conditions are undermined not because capitalists dislike investing in these things—they might love to invest in them, if they could—but rather because it is difficult to make a secure profit from doing so. The required investments may be very large and long term, tying up capital for many years, but either there is no possibility for profit or it is uncertain whether a sufficient profit can and will be made. If, for example, foreign investors invested in a country's essential infrastructure, a falling currency exchange rate some years later might wipe out the profits they could get. Therefore, such investments could occur only if foreign or local government authorities (and ultimately taxpayers) subsidized them (or at any rate, if they acted as a guarantor for the investments), or if financial institutions could find sufficient financial insurance to protect the value of investment capital through terms that reduce financial risk to investors. Reproduction of labor power Reproduction can also refer to the worker's daily reproduction of his or her own labor power. This consists of the tasks of everyday existence—food preparation, laundry, and so forth—that maintain the worker and his or her ability to work. Since roughly the 16th century, much of this domestic labor has been made the responsibility of women, through various developments put in motion by powerful institutions in the transition period from feudalism to capitalism. Adding to the process of social degradation of women in that period was the devaluation of the reproduction of labor. As Silvia Federici notes, "In the new monetary regime, only production-for-market was defined as value-creating activity, whereas the reproduction of the worker began to be considered as valueless from an economic viewpoint and even ceased to be considered as work". Thus it is of particular interest in feminist economics. For example, it was reported in 1988 that the paid work done by both men and women outside the home in West Germany totalled 55,000 million hours a year, earning them a total of $335 billion; but housework done by women inside the home totalled 53,000 million hours a year, which earned them no salary at all. One of the principal inventors of modern national accounts, Simon Kuznets, did at one time suggest that the value of household labour should be estimated as a standard measure, even just for