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 Homemade Value-Added Stabilizer
During the Covid-19 pandemic, unpaid work served not only as a social safety net, but also as an automatic stabilizer.
Italian Feminists: In Defense of Caregivers
“The recent ‘Cura Italia’ (Care for Italy) decree, issued by the Italian Government, does not “take care” of domestic workers, home-based caregivers for the elderly and child minders.”
The Care Theory of Value
The limits of markets also help explain why we expect workers who provide care services. This expectation, generally though not always fulfilled, makes it difficult for care workers to threaten to withdraw their services; it lowers their bargaining power.
Are We All Care Workers Now?
Who, exactly, are care workers, other than the people we need most right now, as the covid-19 pandemic overlays the division of labor with a new division of risk?
View from a Blue Rurality
We are the lucky ones, distancing in an already pretty distanced place. On country roads, plenty of space for walking, biking, breathing easy.
Coronavirus and the Fragility of the U.S. Economy
The Roosevelt Institute organized a twitter chat on Friday, March 29th and invited me to participate, along with about twenty other people (under the hashtag #ProgressingAhead).
Not O.K., Boomers (with postscript)
I must be a boomer, because I can never remember the difference between Generations X, Y (Millennials) and Z.
Greta on Fire
Greta Thunberg is highlighting a point that most economists have missed: climate change is happening so rapidly that it is threatening the economic prospects of children already born, children who lack the political or economic power to fully represent their own interests, but are fully capable of anger, outrage, and protest at the complacency of the older generation.
Beyond the Margins 1.0
With a hat tip to one of the first feminist economics conferences, (“Out of the Margin” in 1993), I’m inaugurating a mini-series on miscellaneous outrages, Beyond the Margins.
Basic Incomes for Whom?
Whatever you think about Andy Yang, you gotta love his slogan: Make America Think Again, acronymized as MATH. Yang has helped publicize the concept of a universal basic income, or UBI, and that concept itself is encouraging America to think harder about social policy.
Daedalus and the Patriarchal Labyrinth
The Winter 2020 issue of Daedalus on “Women and Equality”