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.
The Temporal Constraints of Child Care
Fortunately, the American Time Use Survey includes a question that asked respondents to indicate times when a child under the age of 13 was “in your care.” This makes it possible to measure the amount of time devoted to supervisory child care.
The Dollar Value of Grown-Up Care
Work is no less valuable if it’s fun (I’m working for fun right now).
Elect for Child Care
What can policy researchers do to help shape the upcoming U.S. debate? I can think of a lot of interesting possibilities
Bargaining up to $15
home care workers joined the national Fight for $15 about a year ago, forming a political coalition with other low-wage workers.
The Best Care Work Reporting of the Year
The British newspaper famous for its courageous investigative journalism on many different fronts wins my prize for the best reporting of the year on paid care work.
When Family-Friendly Journalism Backfires
Poorly–designed policies that may initially appear “family-friendly” can impede progress toward gender equality in two different ways—by making it costly for employers to hire or promote workers suspected of having costly family commitments (e.g. women of childbearing age) or by encouraging workers with such commitments to drop out of paid employment for so long that their prospects of advancement on the job are permanently damaged. In other words, increases in women’s job tenure and/or reductions in work-family stress may be purchased at the expense of women’s earnings and career advancement.
Jobs for Whom?
Despite efforts to increase women’s participation in traditionally male jobs, such as construction, occupational segregation in the U.S. remains significant. Why not advocate for “pink jobs” as well as “green” ones?
Theories of Value
What if all the parents in the U.S. got up one morning and went on strike, demanding more recognition and support for the work they do?
Care and the Commons
Much of my work focuses on the social organization of care. I am especially interested in the parallels between care work and other economic resources that are not privately owned or priced on the market. For more on these parallels– including some videotaped lectures by six great speakers, check out the Forum on Social Wealth.
Justice in the Balance
Instead of trying to walk the tightrope known as work family balance, maybe we should seek work family justice—something we all deserve rather than something we are easily blamed for not achieving on our own.
From Dobbs v. Jackson to Rights v. Obligations
What’s wrong with Ross Douthat’s interpretation of the world in general and abortion rights in particular?
Social Capital vs. Social Climate
Social capital is a delightfully contradictory concept, which explains why academics kind of like it: So much room for elaboration and disputation, both qualitative and quantitative!
Seizing the Moment
Seizing the “Moment” for the Global Care Agenda: From Theory to Practice. International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) event, January 25, 2022
Gender Economics and the Meaning of Discrimination
Shelly Lundberg gave a terrific paper at the session on Identity, Culture, and the Economics of Gender at the Allied Social Science Association Meetings, January 8, 2022, and this is a distillation of my comments on it as discussant.