About Care Talk
Welcome to Care Talk! This blog was founded by Nancy Folbre to engage researchers, students, journalists, and others interested in the “care sector”– an important part of our economy devoted to the direct care of others through the family, the community, the market, and the state. In collaboration with Jocelyn Olcott and the Revaluing Care in the Global Economy network, the blog now features posts by researchers working in the quantitative and qualitative social sciences as well as the humanities to explore the problems of 1) how to measure economic contributions made by families and communities; 2) the shortcomings of the standard “business model” based on profit maximization and consumer choice as a means of delivering effective care services through the market; 3) poor institutional design in the U.S. public sector, which often fails to deliver equitable, efficient, or politically sustainable systems of care provision; and 4) the analysis of alternative models for ensuring equitable access to and valuation of both paid and unpaid care.
Pre-Care-iat?
Guy Standing’s arguments for a universal basic income (UBI) as a way of protecting The Precariat
The Tyranny of (Some) Metrics
This new book by Jerry Z. Muller (Princeton University Press, 2018) does a great job explaining what happens when policy makers rely too heavily on simplistic measures of performance.
The ILO on Care Work and Care Workers
On wages, working conditions and future shortages in paid care employment.
Global Centre of Excellence on Gender Statistics
The first thing I want to say is I love the logo, which I have just sketched here. It’s so… feminine.
Developing Care
A committment by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada
The Book Underway
My forthcoming book on how an analysis of care work complements intersectional political economy
Heroine of the Noisy Revolution
This post is based on my presentation at the session “Inequality, Public Policy, and the Future of Economics: In Memory of Barbara Bergmann,” organized by Diana Strassmann, at the meetings of the American Economic Association in San Francisco, CA, January 5, 2016.
China’s Looming Care Crisis
Guest post by Barbara E. Hopkins, Wright State University.
Work for Profit (or Not)
Most introductory economics texts assume that most of the work performed in the U.S. takes place in profit-maximizing firms. One important exception is Understanding Capitalism.
The Rape of the Yezidi
Rape is often a conspicuous feature of the conduct and aftermath of violent collective conflict. But seldom, if ever, has it been explicitly organized and religiously justified on a scale comparable to the ISIS sexual enslavement of non-Muslim Yezidi women.
The Opt-Out Elite
Hersch’s research does explain why trends at the very top are not representative even of the college-educated, much less the majority of the population of working mothers.
Options Other than Opting Out
Joan Williams of the Hastings College of the Law at the University of California has some very specific advice for lawyers considering career “pause”
Millennial Women and “The Pause”
Guest Post by Myra Strober, Professor of Education and Economics, Emerita, and founding director of the Michelle Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Kicking in the Door.
In Defense of Valuation
I think that estimates of the market value of non-market work are a worthwhile exercise (as my last two posts suggest) as long as they are done carefully and presented as an approximate lower-bound. But conceptual resistance to valuation remains remarkably fierce–which is a big reason we don’t see more of it.