There is also a strong cultural aversion to certain forms of outsourcing. Hiring people to work essentially as servants smacks of classism or insufficient self-reliance. Scrubbing your own toilet or doing your own laundry supposedly builds character, or something to that effect. And while it’s certainly good to have these skills in a pinch, it’s probably not a wise financial decision to use them all the time if you could instead be engaging in other activities that improve your — and your family’s — well-being.

It doesn’t help that these anti-outsourcing mores are reinforced by the U.S. tax code, which encourages us to spend money to live in a gigantic homes (via the mortgage-interest deduction), but discourages hiring household help (via complicated “nanny taxes” on domestic workers).

Outsourcing isn’t only for workaholics; it can also create room for leisure time, which is perhaps the hardest argument for non-economists to appreciate. Paying someone else to work so you have more time to play sounds improvident, both financially and morally. But not if buying time for leisure makes working more tolerable. (Oddly, it’s perfectly fine if leisure time includes those inefficient D.I.Y. household tasks that some people find rewarding and fun, like pickling beets or knitting.)

“You have to start from a point where you say: What is necessary for me to be happy with my decision to be a working mother?” says Susan Athey, an economist at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. “I think a lot of working mothers end up throwing up their hands in exasperation and saying, ‘I can’t live this way!’ and quit their jobs.” If parents who want to work abandon their careers before trying outsourcing all the household tasks they don’t enjoy, or feel overwhelmed by, quitting may be shortsighted. Happiness in the present, earning power in the future and familial bliss need not be in conflict.

Especially, Athey says, if the outsourcing costs are temporary ones that enable parents to remain in the work force and thereby earn more money after they no longer face such a time crunch (e.g., after the kids need less supervision and can even start helping with chores themselves).

Athey qualifies all this by saying that, of course, not everyone can afford a nanny or a housekeeper or a personal assistant — like, for example, if you are yourself a nanny or a housekeeper or a personal assistant. But if you do earn more than people in these occupations, chances are that it would pay off to hire them.

In fact, one economist I spoke with, Justin Wolfers, at the University of Michigan, made me promise before I got off the phone that I would embrace my newfound appreciation of comparative advantage and look into hiring someone to do some errands for me. Hire-a-gofer sites like TaskRabbit and Gigwalk facilitate such outsourcing, their success perhaps a product of their ability to technologically grease a transaction that might otherwise be awkward. And, Wolfers says, the lousy economy means there are a lot of people willing to pick up odd jobs. He was right: last week I posted an online ad to see if I could find a personal factotum for just a few hours a week, and within 24 hours, I received more than 75 inquiries.

I hope to hire someone on a trial basis — thinking, maybe, it will buy me more time to write — but I still haven’t decided whom. Going through all those résumés has been overwhelming and extraordinarily time-consuming. It’s the kind of task that I’d really love to outsource.