Care Work in the United States Has Been Broken for Years

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

Tracy, you know, we've spent the last, I don't know, I guess it's like three years now, maybe even a little. Actually, it's been longer than three years now.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

Feels like a long time.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Talking about many aspects of the sort of physical manufactured economy that broke or are broken in some way.

Tracy Alloway (0:31)

Yeah, and I think it's because, I mean, obviously, the pandemic exposed a lot of these fault lines with global supply chains for physical goods, primarily consumer goods, things like furniture and food and stuff like that. But on the other hand, there was also a lot of disruption to services, and we haven't really spoken as much about that.

Joe Weisenthal (0:53)

Right, and the other thing that's really striking with services, so actually, right now, we're in this period where, like, for the Fed, there's a lot of focus on services inflation and when is that going to come down, et cetera. The other thing with a lot of services, particularly, like, very crucial services, is that, to the extent that we talk about certain industries being broken or market failures, which I think was, like, a sort of, like, recurrent theme of our work, many of what's sort of broken, it seems, in the services space existed long before. Like, these problems were actually very evident even prior to COVID.

Tracy Alloway (1:29)

No, totally. There was actually a chart I was looking at just last week that showed the long-term inflation trends in the US broken into sort of components. And if you look at it, the highest price increases are all in services. So things like health care, child care, while all the consumer goods, the durable stuff has been going down. So it's much cheaper to buy a big-screen TV than previously, but it's much more expensive to have a kid and send them to college and things like that.

Joe Weisenthal (1:58)

Right. And so these are, like, these sort of, like, deeper things. And so we're thinking about, like, okay, what are the bottlenecks? What are the, you know, the so-called market failures, et cetera, that caused this? And we look at it in the manufacture world, but by and large, you know, TVs and refrigerators and air conditioning and cars, and they get better and better, it seems like, over time. And by and large, they do get cheaper, even with the recent disruptions.

But why are there parts of this economy that I think everyone considers to be crucial and sort of things related to child care, care work, elder care, which is going to become a bigger and bigger crisis or issue for the economy as the baby boomer generation ages?

These have been broken for people for a long time, and there's no like end in sight. There's no like, oh, it's going to finally normalize because the pre-COVID trend was so bad.

Tracy Alloway (2:44)

Yeah. Are we pivoting from goods to services? Is that what's happening?

Joe Weisenthal (2:48)

I think we are doing a little pivot. All right. Well, let us, but yeah, we need to talk about this more. And so I'm very excited about our guest today. We're going to be speaking with Nancy Folbre. She is a professor emerita of economics at UMass-Amherst and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute. Professor Folbre, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Nancy Folbre (3:09)

I'm really looking forward to it.

Joe Weisenthal (3:11)

So let's just start with like the premise of this conversation, because I, you know, we discussed it as this is a care work and that encompasses multiple things.

It feels like an area that's been broken in some sense for long before the pandemic. But I'm curious, like, A, do you accept that premise that broken is a good way to think about it? And how would you characterize the sort of, you know, what have we seen for years in this sector that feels wrong to people?

Nancy Folbre (3:41)

You know, I kind of agree with the broken word, but I think that analyzing it completely in terms of markets, even in terms of market failure, is a little bit misleading, because what's really interesting about care provision is it involves a lot of paid work, but also a lot of unpaid work, and also a lot of government provision. And it's the way that all of those sources of provisioning interact, I think, that give it some very particular characteristics, in addition to the kind of characteristics of services in general that make it different from manufacturing.