The “care economy” is the latest hideous term thrust upon us by the ruling and media classes.
In our materialistic, atomized, transactional culture, neologisms tend to be exactly this bland and tasteless. Neutering the language seems to be the goal.
Journalists are “media workers,” and even hookers and strippers get neutered to “sex workers.” It’s in that vein that nursing your child, having a catch with your son, or checking in on your mother is now “care work,” which is part of the “care economy.”
This phrase seems not to have existed until the past decade. The first appearance of “care economy” in the New York Times seems to be a 2012 essay by an economics professor. During the 2020 presidential election, all the Democratic candidates started talking about “investing in the care economy.” This means universal day care, and it also means more government-subsidized and protected jobs for Democratic-friendly labor unions.
The politicians’ big plan for the care economy is to move more “care” into the paid economy and thus out of the home.
When politicians talk about investing in the “care economy,” it is typically an effort to get more parents out of the house and into the office. “I’ll fight for investments in our care economy to grow our labor force,” Democratic congressional candidate Maggie Goodlander promised.
No more stay-at-home parents — they’re hardly in the economy at all!
It is also apparently time we tossed out old-fashioned ideas such as asking grandma to watch the children. One Washington Post parenting columnist, having benefited from grandma’s babysitting, lamented it “mooching child care.”
The biggest problem for the care economists isn’t simply that caring for our children ourselves might drag us away from paid work that “grows the economy.” A worse thing is how uneconomical it is to let parents do “care work” at all.
“We are clearly leaving GDP points on the table,” Slate’s Jordan Weissmann fretted in early 2019 when he realized that 30% of mothers were caring for their own children. America ought to be “reserving more child care for professional centers that can do it a bit more efficiently,” he wrote.
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“Even if you factor in rent and other overhead,” Weissmann calculated, “it’s probably more cost-effective for one caretaker to watch over four infants than it is to have every parent looking after their own.”
Though if it’s economies of scale our care economy needs, we needn’t look to universal day care — we could find a way to encourage couples to start having four or more children.
