I think Scott (and Jacob Levy, who he quotes at length) gets a lot right here. The discussion over housework has a strange tendency to take the distribution of chores as the only mutable variable, while leaving the actual quantity alone. In fact, my hunch is that in an age of multiple wage earners, standards of tidiness will simply have to go down. Put it this way: folks with more money can buy a better car. If you have less money, you buy a lesser car. No one disputes betters cars are more desirable, but with cash in limited supply, you cut back on horsepower in favor of other things. Similarly, if you have a lot of money and/or time, you can strive to attain spotlessness or pay someone to clean your house. If you lack those resources -- particularly time -- scrubbing the floors daily (or weekly, or at any time save when they start sprouting mold) seems like a perfectly natural place to cut back.
The problem, of course, is when the two parties can't agree on an appropriate cleanliness level and then don't find compromise, leaving (usually) the wife to sacrifice her own time to reach this higher level of tidiness. That's bad. But while the key in that situation is obviously better communication and negotiation skills, the more global problem has an element of unreality to it, an unwillingnes (often on both sides)s to admit that conceptions of cleanliness that worked in past decades should still be sought today. Guys playing a free rider game are obviously in the wrong, but disabusing ourselves of unrealizable domestic ideals is worth some thought also. Without doubting that the disproportionate amount of time women spend on homemaking should equalized, it's perfectly acceptable to shrink it both through better distribution and a more realistic chore list.
