Monday, March 28, 2022
Care Work : unpaid Labor
Everything You Need to Know about Care Work
The foundation of thriving communities and economies, care work largely falls on women.
Mother carrying her baby on her back while working in tobacco fields in Malawi's Kasungu region. | Marcel Crozet / ILO / Flickr
By Leah Rodriguez
September 13, 2021 Meal prep and cooking. Collecting water. Caring for children. The amount of time spent on chores and caring for others might not always seem like a lot. But eventually, it adds up — especially for women and girls who live in poverty and are from marginalized groups.
This phenomenon is referred to as unpaid care work. Unrecognized and undervalued, this invisible labor becomes mothers’ and daughters’ responsibility. The percentage of men performing it is much lower than the percentage of women carrying out similar tasks.
Tweet Now: Big Media: Report From a Gender Perspective NOW!
Global Citizen is joining forces with Decididas for International Women’s month to promote gender equality in Latin America. Tweet at Mexico and Latin America’s most important media outlets and ask them to hire gender editors. Negative stereotypes and harmful objectification of women in the media are preventing us from achieving gender equality. Global Citizen is joining forces with Decididas for International Women’s month to promote gender equality in Latin America. Tweet at Mexico and Latin America’s most important media outlets and ask them to hire gender editors. Negative stereotypes and harmful objectification of women in the media are preventing us from achieving gender equality. Global Citizen is joining forces with Decididas for International Women’s month to promote gender equality in Latin America. Tweet at Mexico and Latin America’s most important media outlets and ask them to hire gender editors.
Unpaid work is essential for households and economies to function, but it's valued less than paid work. Unpaid care and domestic work make a substantial contribution to countries’ economies. The total value of unpaid care and domestic work is estimated to be between 10% and 39% of gross domestic product. It contributes more to the economy than sectors like manufacturing, commerce, or transportation.
But unpaid labor rarely receives as much recognition. Estimates show that 16 billion hours are spent on unpaid care work every day. The International Labor Organization found that if care work was valued the same as other work, it would represent a tenth of the world’s economic output. Some governments depend on unpaid work to compensate for public services, widening the global gender gap further.
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/womens-unpaid-care-work-everything-to-know/
By Leah Rodriguez
September 13, 2021 Meal prep and cooking. Collecting water. Caring for children. The amount of time spent on chores and caring for others might not always seem like a lot. But eventually, it adds up — especially for women and girls who live in poverty and are from marginalized groups.
This phenomenon is referred to as unpaid care work. Unrecognized and undervalued, this invisible labor becomes mothers’ and daughters’ responsibility. The percentage of men performing it is much lower than the percentage of women carrying out similar tasks.
Tweet Now: Big Media: Report From a Gender Perspective NOW!
Global Citizen is joining forces with Decididas for International Women’s month to promote gender equality in Latin America. Tweet at Mexico and Latin America’s most important media outlets and ask them to hire gender editors. Negative stereotypes and harmful objectification of women in the media are preventing us from achieving gender equality. Global Citizen is joining forces with Decididas for International Women’s month to promote gender equality in Latin America. Tweet at Mexico and Latin America’s most important media outlets and ask them to hire gender editors. Negative stereotypes and harmful objectification of women in the media are preventing us from achieving gender equality. Global Citizen is joining forces with Decididas for International Women’s month to promote gender equality in Latin America. Tweet at Mexico and Latin America’s most important media outlets and ask them to hire gender editors.
Unpaid work is essential for households and economies to function, but it's valued less than paid work. Unpaid care and domestic work make a substantial contribution to countries’ economies. The total value of unpaid care and domestic work is estimated to be between 10% and 39% of gross domestic product. It contributes more to the economy than sectors like manufacturing, commerce, or transportation.
But unpaid labor rarely receives as much recognition. Estimates show that 16 billion hours are spent on unpaid care work every day. The International Labor Organization found that if care work was valued the same as other work, it would represent a tenth of the world’s economic output. Some governments depend on unpaid work to compensate for public services, widening the global gender gap further.
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/womens-unpaid-care-work-everything-to-know/
Care Economy
http://blog.dol.gov/2021/08/11/an-economists-view-on-the-care-economy
An Economist’s View on the Care Economy
Filed in Care Economy Workforce Development • By: Office of Public Affairs • August 11, 2021
In June, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh hosted a virtual roundtable on the care economy featuring business leaders and Dr. Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts. We asked Dr. Folbre to share more of her thoughts on the care economy – and what kind of investments will support America’s care infrastructure – as we continue to recover and build a more inclusive economy.
Tell us about yourself and why you chose your current career path. I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, in a household where I was exposed to both extreme wealth and the realities of the working class. My father worked for oil millionaires as a business manager and accountant. An immigrant nanny who raised my father, known as Auntie or Tia, took care of me as a child, and I was very close to her and her successor, Maria. They were extraordinarily kind and wise caregivers. When I was about nine years old, Tia died and left me her life savings — a modest sum of money that later helped pay my college tuition. So, I had good reason to be interested in economics. I knew I wanted to go to graduate school, and to specialize in something that would at least seem somewhat practical, and was always drawn to themes like wealth, poverty and inequality.
How would you describe the care economy to someone who is unfamiliar with the term? I use the term care economy as the site of production, development and maintenance of human capabilities — a process very different from producing commodities that easily be bought and sold. A lot of the time and money that goes into the care economy moves outside the market — in families and communities that raise children, care for sick or disabled family members, and the frail elderly. Historically this form of “production” was excluded from “the economy” simply because it is based on meeting needs rather than the forces of supply and demand. Fortunately, this is beginning to change.
The care economy, however, is not confined to families and communities; it encompasses many private and public enterprises that provide health, education and social services. There are big synergies between unpaid and paid work — parents collaborate with teachers in educating children, and doctors and nurses rely on patients and their family members to help produce “health.” Childcare workers and eldercare workers are also indispensable to effective care provision.
Women are heavily concentrated in both unpaid and paid care provision, and this helps explain why they generally earn less than men. It is harder for them to “capture” the value they create.
What is caregiving work? One distinctive feature of caregiving work, emphasized above, is its highly customized and individually specific output. Another distinctive feature is the labor process itself, which often entails more personal connection than other types of work. These two features are clearly related — intrinsic motivation becomes especially important when it is difficult to reward people on the basis of measurable value-added. In caregiving work, concern for the wellbeing of the care recipient is quite likely to affect the quality of the services provided — the “invisible heart” of personal commitment is more important than the “invisible hand” of an impersonal market.
Why do you think it’s important to invest in the care economy? Investment is such an important word for economists — it points to future payoffs.
The care economy produces human capabilities that have intrinsic value and also generate distinct economics benefit. People are the real wealth of nations. If you think about it, gross domestic product (GDP, the value of all goods and services bought and sold in a country) is simply an input into what we care about most — our potential to lead happy and meaningful lives.
Yet, too often, we think of GDP as a goal in itself, without considering how it actually benefits — or fails to benefit — ordinary people. Public health crises, increased income inequality, increased “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse, and poor levels of literacy and educational attainment all represent economic losses, not just social side effects. The overall productivity of our economy is largely determined by our collective capabilities for cooperation, innovation, hard work AND the care of others.
Public investments in the care economy can pay off for everyone by improving productivity. Improved access to health, education, child care and elder care can also help heal painful divisions based on race, ethnicity, gender and class by improving opportunities for everyone to realize their own best potential.
In particular, investments in child care and home- and community-based care for people experiencing disability or frailty can reduce tensions between paid work and family work, making it easier for people (especially women) to both earn the paychecks they need and provide the unpaid care their families, friends and communities deserve. A better care infrastructure would give everyone more freedom and flexibility to design their own care “packages.”
How do you think the care investments highlighted in the Biden-Harris administration’s #BuildBackBetter agenda will benefit families? The expanded child tax credit represents a long-overdue recognition of value that parents create for the rest of us — raising the children that will grow up to become taxpayers who help finance health insurance and pensions for the older generation, including me! The U.S. has been an international laggard in support for families, and we now have the opportunity to institutionalize this version of a family allowance for the long term. I hope we don’t miss this by letting the tax credit expire.
The proposed investments in child care and home- and community-based services for disabled and elderly persons would also bring us into alignment with other affluent nations. They can significantly enhance the quality of life for both unpaid and paid caregivers and also (speaking as an economist!) improve family productivity.
Our current national accounting system makes it difficult to clearly see or measure these gains, but there is plenty of economic research documenting the value of investments in people. It’s time to recognize that families and communities, as well as firms, contribute to the U.S. economy.
You Might Also Want To Read:
Tell us about yourself and why you chose your current career path. I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, in a household where I was exposed to both extreme wealth and the realities of the working class. My father worked for oil millionaires as a business manager and accountant. An immigrant nanny who raised my father, known as Auntie or Tia, took care of me as a child, and I was very close to her and her successor, Maria. They were extraordinarily kind and wise caregivers. When I was about nine years old, Tia died and left me her life savings — a modest sum of money that later helped pay my college tuition. So, I had good reason to be interested in economics. I knew I wanted to go to graduate school, and to specialize in something that would at least seem somewhat practical, and was always drawn to themes like wealth, poverty and inequality.
How would you describe the care economy to someone who is unfamiliar with the term? I use the term care economy as the site of production, development and maintenance of human capabilities — a process very different from producing commodities that easily be bought and sold. A lot of the time and money that goes into the care economy moves outside the market — in families and communities that raise children, care for sick or disabled family members, and the frail elderly. Historically this form of “production” was excluded from “the economy” simply because it is based on meeting needs rather than the forces of supply and demand. Fortunately, this is beginning to change.
The care economy, however, is not confined to families and communities; it encompasses many private and public enterprises that provide health, education and social services. There are big synergies between unpaid and paid work — parents collaborate with teachers in educating children, and doctors and nurses rely on patients and their family members to help produce “health.” Childcare workers and eldercare workers are also indispensable to effective care provision.
Women are heavily concentrated in both unpaid and paid care provision, and this helps explain why they generally earn less than men. It is harder for them to “capture” the value they create.
What is caregiving work? One distinctive feature of caregiving work, emphasized above, is its highly customized and individually specific output. Another distinctive feature is the labor process itself, which often entails more personal connection than other types of work. These two features are clearly related — intrinsic motivation becomes especially important when it is difficult to reward people on the basis of measurable value-added. In caregiving work, concern for the wellbeing of the care recipient is quite likely to affect the quality of the services provided — the “invisible heart” of personal commitment is more important than the “invisible hand” of an impersonal market.
Why do you think it’s important to invest in the care economy? Investment is such an important word for economists — it points to future payoffs.
The care economy produces human capabilities that have intrinsic value and also generate distinct economics benefit. People are the real wealth of nations. If you think about it, gross domestic product (GDP, the value of all goods and services bought and sold in a country) is simply an input into what we care about most — our potential to lead happy and meaningful lives.
Yet, too often, we think of GDP as a goal in itself, without considering how it actually benefits — or fails to benefit — ordinary people. Public health crises, increased income inequality, increased “deaths of despair” from suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse, and poor levels of literacy and educational attainment all represent economic losses, not just social side effects. The overall productivity of our economy is largely determined by our collective capabilities for cooperation, innovation, hard work AND the care of others.
Public investments in the care economy can pay off for everyone by improving productivity. Improved access to health, education, child care and elder care can also help heal painful divisions based on race, ethnicity, gender and class by improving opportunities for everyone to realize their own best potential.
In particular, investments in child care and home- and community-based care for people experiencing disability or frailty can reduce tensions between paid work and family work, making it easier for people (especially women) to both earn the paychecks they need and provide the unpaid care their families, friends and communities deserve. A better care infrastructure would give everyone more freedom and flexibility to design their own care “packages.”
How do you think the care investments highlighted in the Biden-Harris administration’s #BuildBackBetter agenda will benefit families? The expanded child tax credit represents a long-overdue recognition of value that parents create for the rest of us — raising the children that will grow up to become taxpayers who help finance health insurance and pensions for the older generation, including me! The U.S. has been an international laggard in support for families, and we now have the opportunity to institutionalize this version of a family allowance for the long term. I hope we don’t miss this by letting the tax credit expire.
The proposed investments in child care and home- and community-based services for disabled and elderly persons would also bring us into alignment with other affluent nations. They can significantly enhance the quality of life for both unpaid and paid caregivers and also (speaking as an economist!) improve family productivity.
Our current national accounting system makes it difficult to clearly see or measure these gains, but there is plenty of economic research documenting the value of investments in people. It’s time to recognize that families and communities, as well as firms, contribute to the U.S. economy.
You Might Also Want To Read:
Nancy Folbre : Caring Labor
https://transversal.at/transversal/0805/folbre/en
anscription of a video by O. Ressler, recorded in Amherst, U.S.A., 20 min., 2003
My name is Nancy Folbre. I am an economist, a feminist economist.
Most of what I work on is the concept of “caring labor.” I am defining “caring labor” as work that involves connecting to other people, trying to help people meet their needs, things like the work of caring for children, caring for the elderly, caring for sick people or teaching is a form of caring labor. Some kind is paid; some is unpaid. It has some really important characteristics that I think economists don’t pay enough attention to and that we need to understand better.
What is really distinctive about caring labor is that it is usually intrinsically motivated. People do it for reasons other than just money, even though there is often money involved, like you need to get paid to work, or you are exchanging the care of a family member in return for a share of another’s family members wage. Still, we always think of care work as something which involves a sense of commitment or obligation or passion for the person who is being cared for. That intrinsic motivation is a really important part of what makes caring labor so valuable and what insures it is being provided at a pretty high quality. But, it also means that it is very hard to organize caring labor in a market, and that the market wage that you pay for care work is almost always quite low. Historically women have done a very large proportion of our care work, and that is still true today. Even though many people work fulltime for pay, a lot of the jobs they are being involved in is caring for other people. Most of these jobs pay less. And the fact that women are in these jobs does a lot to explain why women in general are paid less than men. There is also a kind of penalty that is imposed on women for taking on care responsibilities at home. If you take time out of paid employment to take care of a child or an elderly person, that often not only reduces your wages in the present moment, but over your entire lifetime. So, mothers in general earn a lot less than women, and there is actually, in terms of pay in the U.S., a bigger difference between women who are mothers and women who are not, than between women who are not mothers and men who are not fathers. So it is a pretty important dimension of inequality. The big question, from an economic point of view, is: If caring work is so poorly paid and involves a penalty, why are women willing to provide it? Where does the supply come from? And I think the answer to that question is that it is supplied through a kind of social construction of femininity and a relationship between femininity and care.
There is a kind of paradox of the weakening of the patriarchal control over women. And the paradox is, that it is a great thing in terms of choices for individual women, it is a great thing for women who want to have more room to express their own individuality and to be less constrained by traditional concepts of femininity. But the paradox is, now that there is no longer pressure on women to provide their care work, there is really no pressure on anyone to provide it. A result could be a reduction in the overall supply of care to other people within the home and in the market. If you are a conventional economist you don’t worry about that, because you think the market will solve the problem: Care work will become scarce, the marked will beat it up, the price will come up, and everything will be fine.
But if you think that care work does not necessarily succeed as well in a market environment, then you have to worry about it. And you have to think about ways that we could collectively ensure a greater supply and quality of caring labor, in ways that are independent of the market, or at least can help supplement the market provision that we use. That is where the need to think more creatively about social institutions comes into play.
One of the reasons that care is undervalued is just historical: We tend to take it for granted because it was traditionally provided by women at a very low cost, essentially outside the market economy. There are still a lot of women working in care jobs. And, because women in general are being paid less than men that helps lower the costs of care than if it were done by men.
There is also something in care work itself that contributes to its undervaluation. One thing that is relevant is that care workers care about the people they are taking care of. So it is harder for them to go on strike, it is harder for them to withhold their services unless they are being paid. They become a kind of hostage to their own commitments and their own affections for the people they are caring for. So, they can’t bargain as effectively as other workers can, or threaten to walk out or not supply what is needed. That’s one reason why it tends to be undervalued.
There is a second reason why it is undervalued that is kind of obvious: People who really need care the most are children, the sick and the elderly who have the least to pay. If you are a care worker, you provide a service that is not a luxury to rich people. Well, you can specialize in a luxury and care job, but most care work is being devoted to people who by definition need help and are not in a position to pay a lot of money for it, and very often require public support. And, with the erosion of public support, of course, there is going to be an erosion of the amount of money that we can pay care workers to provide that assistance.
And there is another reason, which I think is perhaps a little more technical and of more interest for economists: that it is very hard to measure the quality of care work, because it is so personal. I might be a very good teacher with one person, but with another person completely unsuccessful. To measure my quality as a teacher is much harder than to measure the quality of somebody who is producing some physical thing, whose characteristics are independent of the person producing it. Also care workers have these emotional dimensions: If I am a good teacher, I make students really like to learn, that is more important than just conveying information. But it is very hard to measure the success in doing that. Normally, in a market, the way you get higher quality is to pay more money for higher quality work. But, in care work, it is hard to do that because the quality is so variable and hard to measure. Care work always has to have some intrinsic motivation; people have to do it for reasons which have to do with their own feelings and commitments and obligations. That is like a natural resource, a natural energy that can provide good care, but needs to be respected and honored in order to keep flowing.
The most obvious prerequisite for a care economy is that you The most obvious prerequisite for a care economy is that you meet the basic needs of ordinary people, especially children, the elderly or people who are sick or hurt or discouraged in any way. But, of course, all the rest of us, also require some care. Somehow, you have to have an economic system that creates a space and a time in which the principles of care are respected and rewarded. It is very difficult to do that in a market economy in which people are competing so fiercely with one another – just to stay alive, to get a job or to meet their subsistence – that they fear if they take time out to care for others, they will be punished and left behind.
It may be true that markets can have good effects on people under certain circumstances. A little bit of friendly competition can really bring out the best in people. But this is not true if the market is so completely unrestrained that it leads to a kind of destructive winner-take-all-competition. And, I think that is the direction the market economy is taking in the world today and that is what many people feel very disturbed and anxious about.
All alternative economic systems are about organizing labor. That is the big question: How do we organize ourselves? And the point I am making is that when we answer that question – whether we are coming from a corporate capitalist point of view or from a socialist point of view – we have to recognize that there is this kind of labor that is different than other kinds, that this labor is not as reducible to the logic of exchange or to the logic of central planning and bureaucratic administration. It is an intrinsically personal, intrinsically emotional kind of exchange that requires long-term relationships between people. And, that is not something that the grand theoreticians of capitalism thought about. And, it is not something that the grand theoreticians of socialism thought about either. So, it is in the middle, it is kind of neglected by both sides. You really see this very clearly in people who have a vision of market socialism. They think, “Oh, markets work fine, as long as we have a equal distribution of wealth, then some rules of the game will allow market competition to take place in a context in which people’s basic needs are met”, and so on. Well, I am sympathetic to that vision of market socialism, but not if it organizes care on the basis of markets. Because I don’t think care quality can be protected in a market. And there is something about the market competition that can erode it. I spend a lot of time trying to persuade leftist economists and utopian visionaries to pay more attention to the ordinary work that women do and to learn from it.
Isn’t that a kind of metaphor: to get rained on and to talk about this [Editors note: The interview was conducted outside and rain began falling.]. This is my life, standing in the cold, getting rained on, saying the same things over and over.
€ The family itself has always been a kind of metaphor for socialism. Socialism is really a family at large; we take care for our brothers and sisters. That’s the interesting thing about feminism: That feminists always had to challenge the traditional family, the idea of the patriarch, the male-led household, telling all the younger generation what to do and sending the wife to the kitchen to cook the meals and scrub the floors. But, at the same time, there has always been something about the family, the solidarity, the love and affection for one another, that is so central for family life, that feminists have tried to lay claim to and to think about how one could take that sense of mutual affection and mutual aid and generalize it to the society as a whole. It doesn’t seem that far fetched, if we can do it on the microeconomic level, we should be able to figure out how to generalize it.
A society could and should be like a really healthy happy egalitarian family, where people have their own responsibilities. They might go out and earn a living or might specialize in different kinds of work, but they all come home to a set of shared priorities and goals, and they have made a commitment to work together and to respect one another in a really profound way. In a way, it is utopian and visionary; but, in another way, it is very old-fashioned and very traditional.
I think there is a lot of evidence that caring for other people is a little bit like a skill; if you practice it, if you do it, you enjoy it, you take greater pleasure in it. It is also something that grows out of a personal connection with other people. And if you never put into that connection of responsibility for other people then you never become aware of or develop that sense of connection. It should be a central part of our educational process for people to take on responsibilities for other people, and to do it in ways... you know, not just going down one day per month and work at the soup kitchen and come in contact with a new group of people every time. But, to really make a long-term connection with people who are different than us: Who are not our next-door neighbors or the people who go to our church or the people who attend our university, but the people outside of that system we might not otherwise come into contact with. We could plan a kind of labor exchange and reciprocity on a larger level that could develop those skills and would really benefit us tremendously as a society.
People don’t like the idea of mandates. They think: Oh well, that’s fine, if you want to go and care for other people you should be free to do that, but don’t make me do that. I am a big believer that we have some obligations to one another and that we can’t realize these obligations just by paying taxes or by sharing some of our income: We have to share some of our time and our energy and some of our affection.
I don’t know if John Rawls has some impact in Europe; but, in the Anglo world, as an English-speaking philosopher, he has. He developed this metaphor of a “veil of ignorance”: Somehow you take people out of their daily context and you put them behind a veil or a curtain, in which they don’t know their own identities. And so they can’t act for their own interests and so they make decisions that are truly in the interests of all, because they don’t know who they are and who they will be. This would be a wonderful plot for a science fiction story: To develop a global system, pick citizens from all around the world and put them behind some kind of veil of ignorance, where they don’t know whether they are American or Chinese or Australian or from Botswana. So they would just look at the world from a completely neutral point of view and think: What should our priorities be? Where should our efforts go? I think that is a very powerful metaphor, even though we have not got the technology to do it.
I am a big fan of science fiction. I like Marge Piercy’s science fiction and that of Sherri Tepper, Kim Stanley Robinson; that’s where the social imagination first takes hold. In a way, what I am doing is just a sort of coming behind these more imaginative visions and trying to figure out and think about, how we might actually put it together and how we could adapt some of our existing economic institutions to move in that direction. Economists are kind of engineers of the utopian; our job is to take care of the nuts and bolts of that alternative economic system and I think we depend on artists and writers to help us see where we want to go."
The text has been edited by Harald Otto in the course of the project transform (http://transform.eipcp.net).
http://blog.dol.gov/2021/08/11/an-economists-view-on-the-care-economy
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/care-economy.html
anscription of a video by O. Ressler, recorded in Amherst, U.S.A., 20 min., 2003
My name is Nancy Folbre. I am an economist, a feminist economist.
Most of what I work on is the concept of “caring labor.” I am defining “caring labor” as work that involves connecting to other people, trying to help people meet their needs, things like the work of caring for children, caring for the elderly, caring for sick people or teaching is a form of caring labor. Some kind is paid; some is unpaid. It has some really important characteristics that I think economists don’t pay enough attention to and that we need to understand better.
What is really distinctive about caring labor is that it is usually intrinsically motivated. People do it for reasons other than just money, even though there is often money involved, like you need to get paid to work, or you are exchanging the care of a family member in return for a share of another’s family members wage. Still, we always think of care work as something which involves a sense of commitment or obligation or passion for the person who is being cared for. That intrinsic motivation is a really important part of what makes caring labor so valuable and what insures it is being provided at a pretty high quality. But, it also means that it is very hard to organize caring labor in a market, and that the market wage that you pay for care work is almost always quite low. Historically women have done a very large proportion of our care work, and that is still true today. Even though many people work fulltime for pay, a lot of the jobs they are being involved in is caring for other people. Most of these jobs pay less. And the fact that women are in these jobs does a lot to explain why women in general are paid less than men. There is also a kind of penalty that is imposed on women for taking on care responsibilities at home. If you take time out of paid employment to take care of a child or an elderly person, that often not only reduces your wages in the present moment, but over your entire lifetime. So, mothers in general earn a lot less than women, and there is actually, in terms of pay in the U.S., a bigger difference between women who are mothers and women who are not, than between women who are not mothers and men who are not fathers. So it is a pretty important dimension of inequality. The big question, from an economic point of view, is: If caring work is so poorly paid and involves a penalty, why are women willing to provide it? Where does the supply come from? And I think the answer to that question is that it is supplied through a kind of social construction of femininity and a relationship between femininity and care.
There is a kind of paradox of the weakening of the patriarchal control over women. And the paradox is, that it is a great thing in terms of choices for individual women, it is a great thing for women who want to have more room to express their own individuality and to be less constrained by traditional concepts of femininity. But the paradox is, now that there is no longer pressure on women to provide their care work, there is really no pressure on anyone to provide it. A result could be a reduction in the overall supply of care to other people within the home and in the market. If you are a conventional economist you don’t worry about that, because you think the market will solve the problem: Care work will become scarce, the marked will beat it up, the price will come up, and everything will be fine.
But if you think that care work does not necessarily succeed as well in a market environment, then you have to worry about it. And you have to think about ways that we could collectively ensure a greater supply and quality of caring labor, in ways that are independent of the market, or at least can help supplement the market provision that we use. That is where the need to think more creatively about social institutions comes into play.
One of the reasons that care is undervalued is just historical: We tend to take it for granted because it was traditionally provided by women at a very low cost, essentially outside the market economy. There are still a lot of women working in care jobs. And, because women in general are being paid less than men that helps lower the costs of care than if it were done by men.
There is also something in care work itself that contributes to its undervaluation. One thing that is relevant is that care workers care about the people they are taking care of. So it is harder for them to go on strike, it is harder for them to withhold their services unless they are being paid. They become a kind of hostage to their own commitments and their own affections for the people they are caring for. So, they can’t bargain as effectively as other workers can, or threaten to walk out or not supply what is needed. That’s one reason why it tends to be undervalued.
There is a second reason why it is undervalued that is kind of obvious: People who really need care the most are children, the sick and the elderly who have the least to pay. If you are a care worker, you provide a service that is not a luxury to rich people. Well, you can specialize in a luxury and care job, but most care work is being devoted to people who by definition need help and are not in a position to pay a lot of money for it, and very often require public support. And, with the erosion of public support, of course, there is going to be an erosion of the amount of money that we can pay care workers to provide that assistance.
And there is another reason, which I think is perhaps a little more technical and of more interest for economists: that it is very hard to measure the quality of care work, because it is so personal. I might be a very good teacher with one person, but with another person completely unsuccessful. To measure my quality as a teacher is much harder than to measure the quality of somebody who is producing some physical thing, whose characteristics are independent of the person producing it. Also care workers have these emotional dimensions: If I am a good teacher, I make students really like to learn, that is more important than just conveying information. But it is very hard to measure the success in doing that. Normally, in a market, the way you get higher quality is to pay more money for higher quality work. But, in care work, it is hard to do that because the quality is so variable and hard to measure. Care work always has to have some intrinsic motivation; people have to do it for reasons which have to do with their own feelings and commitments and obligations. That is like a natural resource, a natural energy that can provide good care, but needs to be respected and honored in order to keep flowing.
The most obvious prerequisite for a care economy is that you The most obvious prerequisite for a care economy is that you meet the basic needs of ordinary people, especially children, the elderly or people who are sick or hurt or discouraged in any way. But, of course, all the rest of us, also require some care. Somehow, you have to have an economic system that creates a space and a time in which the principles of care are respected and rewarded. It is very difficult to do that in a market economy in which people are competing so fiercely with one another – just to stay alive, to get a job or to meet their subsistence – that they fear if they take time out to care for others, they will be punished and left behind.
It may be true that markets can have good effects on people under certain circumstances. A little bit of friendly competition can really bring out the best in people. But this is not true if the market is so completely unrestrained that it leads to a kind of destructive winner-take-all-competition. And, I think that is the direction the market economy is taking in the world today and that is what many people feel very disturbed and anxious about.
All alternative economic systems are about organizing labor. That is the big question: How do we organize ourselves? And the point I am making is that when we answer that question – whether we are coming from a corporate capitalist point of view or from a socialist point of view – we have to recognize that there is this kind of labor that is different than other kinds, that this labor is not as reducible to the logic of exchange or to the logic of central planning and bureaucratic administration. It is an intrinsically personal, intrinsically emotional kind of exchange that requires long-term relationships between people. And, that is not something that the grand theoreticians of capitalism thought about. And, it is not something that the grand theoreticians of socialism thought about either. So, it is in the middle, it is kind of neglected by both sides. You really see this very clearly in people who have a vision of market socialism. They think, “Oh, markets work fine, as long as we have a equal distribution of wealth, then some rules of the game will allow market competition to take place in a context in which people’s basic needs are met”, and so on. Well, I am sympathetic to that vision of market socialism, but not if it organizes care on the basis of markets. Because I don’t think care quality can be protected in a market. And there is something about the market competition that can erode it. I spend a lot of time trying to persuade leftist economists and utopian visionaries to pay more attention to the ordinary work that women do and to learn from it.
Isn’t that a kind of metaphor: to get rained on and to talk about this [Editors note: The interview was conducted outside and rain began falling.]. This is my life, standing in the cold, getting rained on, saying the same things over and over.
€ The family itself has always been a kind of metaphor for socialism. Socialism is really a family at large; we take care for our brothers and sisters. That’s the interesting thing about feminism: That feminists always had to challenge the traditional family, the idea of the patriarch, the male-led household, telling all the younger generation what to do and sending the wife to the kitchen to cook the meals and scrub the floors. But, at the same time, there has always been something about the family, the solidarity, the love and affection for one another, that is so central for family life, that feminists have tried to lay claim to and to think about how one could take that sense of mutual affection and mutual aid and generalize it to the society as a whole. It doesn’t seem that far fetched, if we can do it on the microeconomic level, we should be able to figure out how to generalize it.
A society could and should be like a really healthy happy egalitarian family, where people have their own responsibilities. They might go out and earn a living or might specialize in different kinds of work, but they all come home to a set of shared priorities and goals, and they have made a commitment to work together and to respect one another in a really profound way. In a way, it is utopian and visionary; but, in another way, it is very old-fashioned and very traditional.
I think there is a lot of evidence that caring for other people is a little bit like a skill; if you practice it, if you do it, you enjoy it, you take greater pleasure in it. It is also something that grows out of a personal connection with other people. And if you never put into that connection of responsibility for other people then you never become aware of or develop that sense of connection. It should be a central part of our educational process for people to take on responsibilities for other people, and to do it in ways... you know, not just going down one day per month and work at the soup kitchen and come in contact with a new group of people every time. But, to really make a long-term connection with people who are different than us: Who are not our next-door neighbors or the people who go to our church or the people who attend our university, but the people outside of that system we might not otherwise come into contact with. We could plan a kind of labor exchange and reciprocity on a larger level that could develop those skills and would really benefit us tremendously as a society.
People don’t like the idea of mandates. They think: Oh well, that’s fine, if you want to go and care for other people you should be free to do that, but don’t make me do that. I am a big believer that we have some obligations to one another and that we can’t realize these obligations just by paying taxes or by sharing some of our income: We have to share some of our time and our energy and some of our affection.
I don’t know if John Rawls has some impact in Europe; but, in the Anglo world, as an English-speaking philosopher, he has. He developed this metaphor of a “veil of ignorance”: Somehow you take people out of their daily context and you put them behind a veil or a curtain, in which they don’t know their own identities. And so they can’t act for their own interests and so they make decisions that are truly in the interests of all, because they don’t know who they are and who they will be. This would be a wonderful plot for a science fiction story: To develop a global system, pick citizens from all around the world and put them behind some kind of veil of ignorance, where they don’t know whether they are American or Chinese or Australian or from Botswana. So they would just look at the world from a completely neutral point of view and think: What should our priorities be? Where should our efforts go? I think that is a very powerful metaphor, even though we have not got the technology to do it.
I am a big fan of science fiction. I like Marge Piercy’s science fiction and that of Sherri Tepper, Kim Stanley Robinson; that’s where the social imagination first takes hold. In a way, what I am doing is just a sort of coming behind these more imaginative visions and trying to figure out and think about, how we might actually put it together and how we could adapt some of our existing economic institutions to move in that direction. Economists are kind of engineers of the utopian; our job is to take care of the nuts and bolts of that alternative economic system and I think we depend on artists and writers to help us see where we want to go."
The text has been edited by Harald Otto in the course of the project transform (http://transform.eipcp.net).
http://blog.dol.gov/2021/08/11/an-economists-view-on-the-care-economy
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/care-economy.html
Inheritance of ADAPTIVE acquired characteristics
“But some research suggests that events in our lives can indeed affect the development of our children and perhaps even grandchildren - all without changing the DNA.”
The issue of events in an individual’s life affecting their children and grandchildren is only part of the dogma against inheritance of acquired characteristics. There must also be a natural selection action . Both Darwin and LaMarck have theories of natural selection.
So , the context of the event in the individual’s life that affects offspring must be that there is an adaptive problem. Not only that : the adaptive problem must be the event that affects the change in the individuals body that is passed on to progeny ! AND the change must be the solution to the adaptive problem. That’s what happens in the giraffe stretching it’s neck fictional hypothetical. How did the giraffe evolve a long neck ? By solving an adaptive problem : it was naturally selected for . LaMarck had an evolutionary Natural selection theory , too. Darwin dabbled in LaMarck’s theory ; Engels too in “The Role of Labor in the transition from Ape to Man”.
The dogma against inheritance of acquired characteristics came about with the discovery that new phenotypes arise due to genetic mutations ( of course, Darwin and LaMarck did not have the theory of DNA as the method of inheritance and variety of types in a species) And that mutations that give rise to phenotypes that adapt to a problem in the struggle for existence occur _randomly_in relation to the adaptive problem they solve . Here , I finally figured out, randomly means they are not caused by the adaptive problem that they solve. .
The giraffe example contradicts this because the adaptive problem-food being too high up to reach with a short neck- causes the giraffe to stretch its neck ; the problem causes its own solution, so the solution does not occur randomly in relation to the problem it solves. None or very few of the epigenetic examples even mention an adaptive problem . The ones that do don’t clearly prove their claim. Some say the new phenotype seem to be generally maladaptive .
The dogma’s name should be changed to inheritance of _adaptive_ acquired characteristics .
Charles Brown
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/epigenetics-is-not-inheritance-of.html cb at 7:07 AM
The issue of events in an individual’s life affecting their children and grandchildren is only part of the dogma against inheritance of acquired characteristics. There must also be a natural selection action . Both Darwin and LaMarck have theories of natural selection.
So , the context of the event in the individual’s life that affects offspring must be that there is an adaptive problem. Not only that : the adaptive problem must be the event that affects the change in the individuals body that is passed on to progeny ! AND the change must be the solution to the adaptive problem. That’s what happens in the giraffe stretching it’s neck fictional hypothetical. How did the giraffe evolve a long neck ? By solving an adaptive problem : it was naturally selected for . LaMarck had an evolutionary Natural selection theory , too. Darwin dabbled in LaMarck’s theory ; Engels too in “The Role of Labor in the transition from Ape to Man”.
The dogma against inheritance of acquired characteristics came about with the discovery that new phenotypes arise due to genetic mutations ( of course, Darwin and LaMarck did not have the theory of DNA as the method of inheritance and variety of types in a species) And that mutations that give rise to phenotypes that adapt to a problem in the struggle for existence occur _randomly_in relation to the adaptive problem they solve . Here , I finally figured out, randomly means they are not caused by the adaptive problem that they solve. .
The giraffe example contradicts this because the adaptive problem-food being too high up to reach with a short neck- causes the giraffe to stretch its neck ; the problem causes its own solution, so the solution does not occur randomly in relation to the problem it solves. None or very few of the epigenetic examples even mention an adaptive problem . The ones that do don’t clearly prove their claim. Some say the new phenotype seem to be generally maladaptive .
The dogma’s name should be changed to inheritance of _adaptive_ acquired characteristics .
Charles Brown
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/epigenetics-is-not-inheritance-of.html cb at 7:07 AM
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/oliver-stone-talks-to-jacobin-about-jfks-killing
Someone : "Oliver Stone idolized Kennedy. He lionizes him. That greatly influences his craft. His film about JFK is sensationalism and has too much informational “noise,” which doesn’t separate the wheat from the chaff".
Charles Brown : His arguments stand on their own . I made many of them before his movie or independently of him . He’s been peer reviewed in the scientific sense .
it was Kennedy who backed down and didn’t invade Cuba ( Cuba is still independent to this day ), who was going to pull out of Vietnam , who made a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets and who fired the heads of the CIA. To fanatical anti -Communists in the military-industrial complex , Kennedy was soft on Communism , a treasonous offense to them . Oswald was the fall guy in a CIA Coup d’etat conspiracy. He was a spy for the US when in the Soviet Union.
A huge percentage of people alive at the time did not believe the Warren Commission. The US House of Representatives Committee that investigated it concluded it was a conspiracy (!) The Spooks shut all that down and made the media characterize anyone who said it was a conspiracy a “nut” , to be shouted down and censored. The coverup is part of the evidence that they did it . They protest too much , Methinks.
Someone : "Oliver Stone idolized Kennedy. He lionizes him. That greatly influences his craft. His film about JFK is sensationalism and has too much informational “noise,” which doesn’t separate the wheat from the chaff".
Charles Brown : His arguments stand on their own . I made many of them before his movie or independently of him . He’s been peer reviewed in the scientific sense .
it was Kennedy who backed down and didn’t invade Cuba ( Cuba is still independent to this day ), who was going to pull out of Vietnam , who made a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets and who fired the heads of the CIA. To fanatical anti -Communists in the military-industrial complex , Kennedy was soft on Communism , a treasonous offense to them . Oswald was the fall guy in a CIA Coup d’etat conspiracy. He was a spy for the US when in the Soviet Union.
A huge percentage of people alive at the time did not believe the Warren Commission. The US House of Representatives Committee that investigated it concluded it was a conspiracy (!) The Spooks shut all that down and made the media characterize anyone who said it was a conspiracy a “nut” , to be shouted down and censored. The coverup is part of the evidence that they did it . They protest too much , Methinks.
Theses on Humanity
By Charles Brown Objective reality exists (Lenin); this is the definition of materialism . Humans uniquely of all animals think of objective reality in words or symbolic signs ( see semiotics) . So, human practice , activity , action behavior is in the form of the anthropological concept of culture or symbolic sign / word ruled behavior ( see anthropologists Leslie A. White and Marshall Sahlins ; Charles Brown definition of culture and language ).
This Cultural behavior is the Hegelian unity of the universal / practice contradiction. For Hegel, the proof of the pudding recipe is in the eating , the proof ( or disproof ) of the recipe theory is in the taste of the eating ; or as Marx has it , the proof of the truth of theory is in practice ( human practice is cultural activity).
Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach is Marx’s dialectical critique of materialism, activist materialism ( see CB essay “ Activist Materialism “). It boils down to a Hegelian critique of all previous materialism: humans practice thinkingly ( in words or symbolic signs), uniting the universal , which is in their language or words, and practice . And the truth or falsity of that thinking is proven in that practice.
Reproductive practice is the primary or direct determinant of selves , human thinking subjects ; productive activity is the secondary or indirect determinant ( see CB “For Women’s Liberation “
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/07/for-womens-liberation-comradely.html)
The origin of language and culture was in childcare or reproductive labor circa 2.5 million years ago with Homo habilis, beginning of the Stone Age or toolmaking based on imagination or a “blueprint” like an architect ( See Marx in Capital on unique characteristic of human labor) . We know this because the Stone tools are made in styles or with thinking in symbolic signs / words . I hypothesize that the invention of words ( using something to represent something it is not ; arbitrary relation between sign and thing signified) was mothers inventing names for children for more efficient childcare. This is a materialist hypothesis because it is in the material practice of reproduction . Necessity is the mother of invention is a folk aphorism statement of the materialism philosophical principle.
The Ancestor Veneration of Stone Age peoples , Hegel’s universal or Idea religions’ supernatural/ immortal gods /God, Natural ( non-supernatural) Soul are all Culture and Language ( collective consciousness) or knowledge passed from _dead_ generations to living generations. This gives those dead generations a certain ( but not literal ) immortality. ( with religions gods are literally and fictionally attributed immortality) . Passing knowledge down through generations is a unique human capacity made possible because of the displacement capacity that symbolic signs give to human communication.
( see https://owlcation.com/stem/The-difference-between-animal-and-human-communication on displacement; displacement is the ability to communicate regarding that which is not concrete, not immediately available to the senses , not in the present, but in the past , future or physically far away)
. Thereby knowledge accumulates over the generations as in the scientist Isaac Newton’s saying that he stood on the shoulders of giants ( Newton is venerating his ancestors). Newton is able to share the experiences of dead generations. No other species can do this .
Phylogenetic logic or Darwin’s Tree of Life Logic is a dialectical logic. In evolution Ancestral Genus characteristics are preserved , and new species characteristics naturally selected overcome ancestral characteristics. Evolution is a dialectical process , not surprisingly-smiles
In human evolution, Antoinette Blackwell’s critique of Darwin is that it is the “survival of the nicest” ( http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/09/survival-of-nice-and-fertile.html) - cooperation and balance between humans , not savage rivalry and competition, is selected for; especially cooperation and balance between females and males because heterosexual mating , not success in the struggle for existence, is the most powerful determinant of fitness ; fitness is success in passing on genotypes to future generations. This success is only indirectly determined by success in the struggle for existence; it is directly determined in reproduction, including child rearing . Furthermore, for humans , their original success in the struggle for existence through the 2.5 million years of the Stone Age is cooperative, not individual; it is from each according to ability for the group , to each according to need . So individual fighting ability effectiveness is shared with the group (not used against other humans in “competition and savage rivalry “, Blackwell’s words) .
It is Individual _courting_ ability that is selected for; therefore larger and smarter brains are selected for by courting success from Homo habilis through Homo sapiens; not so much by individual success in the struggle for existence.
Language and culture give humans a LaMarckian-Like adaptive mechanism: the adaptation is caused by the adaptive problem that it solves ; it does not arise randomly relative to the problem it solves as with selection for genetic mutations that arise randomly relative to the adaptive problems that they solve .
( http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/05/culturally-inherited-adaptations-give.html)
Why is written history a history of class struggles? Why is the principle of historical materialism true ? See my essay “Materialism, Necessity and Freedom : Rehearsal of The Fundamentals of Marxism“ “ http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/materialism-necessity-and-freedom.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/annotation-of-marxs-theses-on-feuerbach.html
This Cultural behavior is the Hegelian unity of the universal / practice contradiction. For Hegel, the proof of the pudding recipe is in the eating , the proof ( or disproof ) of the recipe theory is in the taste of the eating ; or as Marx has it , the proof of the truth of theory is in practice ( human practice is cultural activity).
Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach is Marx’s dialectical critique of materialism, activist materialism ( see CB essay “ Activist Materialism “). It boils down to a Hegelian critique of all previous materialism: humans practice thinkingly ( in words or symbolic signs), uniting the universal , which is in their language or words, and practice . And the truth or falsity of that thinking is proven in that practice.
Reproductive practice is the primary or direct determinant of selves , human thinking subjects ; productive activity is the secondary or indirect determinant ( see CB “For Women’s Liberation “
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/07/for-womens-liberation-comradely.html)
The origin of language and culture was in childcare or reproductive labor circa 2.5 million years ago with Homo habilis, beginning of the Stone Age or toolmaking based on imagination or a “blueprint” like an architect ( See Marx in Capital on unique characteristic of human labor) . We know this because the Stone tools are made in styles or with thinking in symbolic signs / words . I hypothesize that the invention of words ( using something to represent something it is not ; arbitrary relation between sign and thing signified) was mothers inventing names for children for more efficient childcare. This is a materialist hypothesis because it is in the material practice of reproduction . Necessity is the mother of invention is a folk aphorism statement of the materialism philosophical principle.
The Ancestor Veneration of Stone Age peoples , Hegel’s universal or Idea religions’ supernatural/ immortal gods /God, Natural ( non-supernatural) Soul are all Culture and Language ( collective consciousness) or knowledge passed from _dead_ generations to living generations. This gives those dead generations a certain ( but not literal ) immortality. ( with religions gods are literally and fictionally attributed immortality) . Passing knowledge down through generations is a unique human capacity made possible because of the displacement capacity that symbolic signs give to human communication.
( see https://owlcation.com/stem/The-difference-between-animal-and-human-communication on displacement; displacement is the ability to communicate regarding that which is not concrete, not immediately available to the senses , not in the present, but in the past , future or physically far away)
. Thereby knowledge accumulates over the generations as in the scientist Isaac Newton’s saying that he stood on the shoulders of giants ( Newton is venerating his ancestors). Newton is able to share the experiences of dead generations. No other species can do this .
Phylogenetic logic or Darwin’s Tree of Life Logic is a dialectical logic. In evolution Ancestral Genus characteristics are preserved , and new species characteristics naturally selected overcome ancestral characteristics. Evolution is a dialectical process , not surprisingly-smiles
In human evolution, Antoinette Blackwell’s critique of Darwin is that it is the “survival of the nicest” ( http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/09/survival-of-nice-and-fertile.html) - cooperation and balance between humans , not savage rivalry and competition, is selected for; especially cooperation and balance between females and males because heterosexual mating , not success in the struggle for existence, is the most powerful determinant of fitness ; fitness is success in passing on genotypes to future generations. This success is only indirectly determined by success in the struggle for existence; it is directly determined in reproduction, including child rearing . Furthermore, for humans , their original success in the struggle for existence through the 2.5 million years of the Stone Age is cooperative, not individual; it is from each according to ability for the group , to each according to need . So individual fighting ability effectiveness is shared with the group (not used against other humans in “competition and savage rivalry “, Blackwell’s words) .
It is Individual _courting_ ability that is selected for; therefore larger and smarter brains are selected for by courting success from Homo habilis through Homo sapiens; not so much by individual success in the struggle for existence.
Language and culture give humans a LaMarckian-Like adaptive mechanism: the adaptation is caused by the adaptive problem that it solves ; it does not arise randomly relative to the problem it solves as with selection for genetic mutations that arise randomly relative to the adaptive problems that they solve .
( http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/05/culturally-inherited-adaptations-give.html)
Why is written history a history of class struggles? Why is the principle of historical materialism true ? See my essay “Materialism, Necessity and Freedom : Rehearsal of The Fundamentals of Marxism“ “ http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/materialism-necessity-and-freedom.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/annotation-of-marxs-theses-on-feuerbach.html