 Hi, this is Gerald Friedman, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and I'm here to talk to you about care, the care economy. Why we care about care? Caring labor is different from the production of commodities, because in caring labor, what you're doing is providing time to other people, emotional time. I could make a pair of shoes and sell them to you. I don't need to know you, I don't have to like you, there doesn't have to be any relationship at all. With care, it's different, first, because the value of the activity depends on the amount of time invested in it. I make shoes, I become better at making shoes. I still shoes, care, I get better at taking care of somebody, I get off the phone faster when talking to my daughter. She doesn't feel like it's more efficient, she feels like it's worse. The value of the activity is the time, and second, the value of the caring labor depends on the emotional involvement in the activity. Third thing about caring labor, which it has in common with some commodities, is care produces public goods, produces something from which we all benefit. Care produces a healthy population, educated population, produces people who are generous, responsible, honest, trustworthy. All these are public goods. If we have a society where people are honest, we have a more productive society. If we have a society where people are healthy, they're less likely to spread disease. That's a better society. Caring labor produces that type of, those types of people. And it produces something that we all need, because we all need someone to lean on, sometimes, at least. Sometimes, some people need it all the time. Some children are born with our arms and legs. Some people are born blind, and they need somebody to help them find their way around. We all need somebody to help us find our way around when we start out. That's why caring labor is becoming more and more important in society. Childhood is longer. Used to be children would go to work at age 13 or 14. Now, 22, 25, 30, I don't know when. Finally, get them out of the house and into some productive employment. On the other end, we live longer. So even if we, as we're doing in the United States, we raise the retirement age from 65 to 67, we're still having a longer period of retirement because people live well into their 80s and 90s. In between, we all need someone to lean on sometimes because we get sick. I'm just getting over a bed cold. I needed my wife to walk the dog for me and do the shopping and things. Other times, people have accidents. I broke my shoulder skiing a few years ago. Needed people to take care of me. We get sick. We get hurt. We need emotional connections. We need people because that's what we are. Human beings need people, so we all need care at some points sometimes. Now, some of this care we do through the market. We hire nurses. We hire doctors. There was a movie by Steven Satterberg about girlfriends, people, business people hire young women to go to dinner with them when they're traveling around. We all need teachers. But prostitutes is another form of caring labor coordinated through the market. Much caring labor, though, is done through families or non-market. And for most caring activities, you can see a market and a non-market provider, childcare. You hire childcare workers, you hire nannies, or you take care of your own children, meals. You go to a restaurant, or you cook yourself. Cleaning services. You hire somebody to come in and clean your house or you vacuum yourself. Schools provide education. Families also provide education. Help children with their homework, teach them to read. Some children are homeschooled. Elder care can be provided through the market. You hire a nurse or somebody to go into your grandma's house or you visit grandma yourself. Doctors and doctors, yes, if your children are sick or else, you give them aspirin yourself and save the copay. Prostitutes or love. All these things, market, non-market. In general, care labor markets do not work well. They don't work for the people providing the care and they often don't work well for the people who need the care. There are certain simple basic reasons for this. First of all, care labor is undervalued in society. People resent having to pay for it in a way that they don't resent paying for a shirt or a pair of shoes because the expectation in the back of people's mind is care labor is supposed to be provided by mom or by daughters. It's supposed to be free. Why should I have to pay for this? Why should I have to pay so much for childcare? Well, do you want somebody? Do you want a cheap person taking care of your kids or do you want quality? Yeah. But the expectation is it should be free because there should be a mom out there taking care of it. Second, the people who need care can't pay for it themselves. Children? How are they going to pay for childcare themselves? How are they going to pay mom to make dinner with dad to do the laundry for them? Well, you have soccer practice. Are you going to pay your parents? Even if your parents would insist on the money, where are you going to get it? Children can't afford to pay for the parents' attention. Nor can many elderly or disabled people pay for care because, hey, they're disabled. Where are they going to earn money? They're elderly. They're retired. They can't work. You know, they're partly immobilized by something or other. How are they going to pay for the care they need? So care, people who need care depend on some third party to pay for the care. And third parties, whether parents or governments, they kind of resent having to pay for it. Third, those who receive care need some idiosyncratic care. You want your mom to take care of you when you're sick? She does it right. Hiring some nurses is not the same thing. You want your lover to sleep with you at night? Hiring somebody off the street is not going to be the same thing. You care needs to be provided by the right person, which means you depend on that person. This is not a good market relationship where you can walk away from the pizza parlor and go to a different one because you don't like the quality of the pizza. If you don't like the quality of care you're getting from your parents, you're kind of stuck. These problems lead to problems with the care economy and problems for those who need care. They often don't get the right type of care. They can't afford it. They can't get the right people to do it for them. They depend on the kindness of strangers like Blanche du Bois, and we know how that worked out. Oh, sorry. I get enthusiastic. Also for the people providing care, caring for others is a really bad idea. I hate to tell you this because many of you are going to want to go off and be teachers or nurses or doctors or do good things and it's wonderful. It's important that people do this, but care workers are poorly paid. Caregivers tend to be poor because they're working for people who are poor. Those who devote themselves to caring for those who cannot pay well are not well paid. This is especially a problem for women because within the market provision of care, 80% or so of the people providing care work are female, elementary school teachers, prostitutes, nurses, home health aides. These occupations are filled with women, poorly paid women. Care depends on emotional connections. That means that those who need to exit from care relationships find it difficult to do that, which leads to one of the great tragedies of modern families, widespread sexual abuse, spousal abuse, abuse of children, etc., abuse of elderly people, often unrecorded without complaints because the people who need the care are devoted to the people who are giving the care, even when the people giving the care are abusive and terrible. These are all major problems and that type of abuse is especially common because the caregivers are so poor and underpaid. Because care pays poorly, Americans increasingly don't want to do it. So who's going to take care of our children? We import nurses from the Philippines and Jamaica and other countries. We import nannies from Latin America. Someday we can always, sometimes we can just dream of Mary Poppins. Maybe she'll save our care economy. Well, thank you very much. Have a good day.