Pluralistic: Care Inflation (18 Jan 2023)

pluralist
1

Originally published at: Pluralistic: Care Inflation (18 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow


Today's links


The old woman in the shoe. She stands before her shoe, wearing a fierce expression and brandishing a switch, as a line of downtrodden children file into the shoe. Behind her is a three-dimensional 'line-goes-up' graphic with a dollar-sign at the tip of its surging, rightmost arrow.

Care Inflation (permalink)

You can be forgiven for thinking that the Great Inflation Story is how a recent once-in-a-century pandemic, combined with a senseless war, combined with monopolistic price-gouging, temporarily drove prices up by less than ten percent, prompting calls to crush worker power and suppress wages in order to "reduce demand" for scarce goods:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/14/medieval-bloodletters/#its-the-stupid-economy

But for all the attention we gave to this transient inflation, there has been precious little alarm over the soaring inflation in "Care Labor" – daycare, preschool, nursing homes and medical services – whose price growth has outpaced the Consumer Price Index (CPI) every year since 1997.

Care inflation has severe knock-on effects for the rest of the economy. When workers can't find someone to look after their kids, their elderly relatives, or a sick or disabled partner, they are often forced out of the workforce, or they give up good jobs and accept lower wages and worse working conditions so they can take the time to do care labor.

Writing for The American Prospect, Nancy Folbre unpacks the causes and effects of this massive, long-term inflation, and offers a compelling explanation for why it garners so little attention (spoiler: because it mostly harms women, especially low-waged women):

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-01-18-inflation-unfair-costs-of-care/

It's a subject Folbre is eminently qualified to write on. She is an emeritus professor of economics at UMass Amherst, where she directs the Program on Gender and Care Work. Her blog, Care Talk, is a must-read on this subject:

https://blogs.umass.edu/folbre/

Folbre notes that workforce participation by working-aged people has declined since 1999, as an ever-larger slice of our productive capacity has been sidelined by the need to stay home and do care work. This unwaged care work can't pay the bills, leaving workers to fill in the gaps with insecure, low-paid jobs. This, in turn, leaves workers dependent on community ties that make it impossible to relocate in search of better jobs.

Despite a quarter century of price increases, "child care workers and nursing home aides have been and remain among the most poorly paid workers in the US." In health care, workers other than MDs have seen only modest, subinflationary pay increases.

Unlike manufacturing and customer service, care work can't be offshored. You can't ship your toddlers, elderly parents, or disabled spouse to a poor country where low-waged workers will take care of them. The declining pool of low-waged immigrant labor only partially offsets this disparity between the price of care and other services.

Leaving care work to the market – rather than subsidizing care through public services – enriches a small pool of shareholders, especially backers of the private equity funds that have "rolled up" smaller care facilities and practices, slashing wages and jacking up prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

For anyone who doesn't own a private equity fund, the rising price of care work exacts a terrible toll. Public investment in care work has a "high social payoff" – it is necessary to produce the next generation of productive workers and the goods and services they will provide to each other and everyone else:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/hec.3995

The rising price of care is an example of what AFL-CIO Chief Economist William Spriggs calls "inequality inflation." When care is left up to the market, affluent families bid up the price of decent care. Poor families drop out of the market altogether, because it's cheaper for them to forego waged work than it is to outbid a professional family for care work.

This "pits low-wage workers providing care services against low-income consumers" – any time a care worker gets a raise, it gets harder for low-waged families to afford care work. The care work market gets hollowed out, with a high-end servicing the richest 10 percent of households, and Medicaid providing stopgap service for the very poorest, while everyone else is out in the cold.

(This has political consequences. As Folbre writes, "No wonder families with incomes just above the official thresholds for public assistance are politically disenchanted.")

The unwillingness to commit public funds to care work produces inexorable pressure to reduce the labor costs of care. For decades, care workers have seen their colleagues laid off and been told to work longer hours to pick up the slack, yielding a care sector filled with burned-out, demoralized workers.

And, as Folbre points out, care workers are disproportionately female – as are the workers who leave the waged workforce to work for free providing care to their family members. Unpaid "women's work" is badly accounted for in tradition economics, which gives politicians cover for inaction as women are forced out of the labor market by failures in the care economy.

The (predominantly) women who do unpaid care work are heavily reliant on programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which is not indexed to inflation and has fallen in real terms every year since 1996 – a total drop of 40% in a generation.

Even if you don't care about gender equity, equity for disabled people, or a dignified old age for our elders, this should concern you: "Our economic system runs on human capabilities, and these are not a costless resource supplied by some self-sacrificing Mother Nature. Our own production, development, and maintenance requires both personal commitments and public support."

Public investment in care work would do more to curb this critical form of inflation than any interest rate hike. "[Care workers] will never be as cheap to produce as television sets, cars, or even robots. We will remain more valuable, even if we can’t be bought and sold."

Folbre's excellent piece is part of an equally excellent series at the Prospect: The Great Inflation Myths is a riveting, ongoing series of articles that demystify inflation through a political economy lens, probing the causes and effects of inflation on real human lives, beyond esoteric economic equations and jargon:

https://prospect.org/great-inflation-myths

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Eric Eldred Act: A bookkeeping change that would feed the public domain https://web.archive.org/web/20030201110456/https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2003_01.shtml

#20yrsago Bernstein’s patent-policy work-to-rule https://cr.yp.to/patents/tarzian.html

#20yrsago Civil liberties in gamespace https://web.archive.org/web/20030110002343/https://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/playerrights.html

#15yrsago Can the Smithsonian’s public domain images join the Library of Congress’s “Commons”? https://groups.google.com/g/open-government/c/VJ5UL8UdhIw?pli=1

#15yrsago Lawyer claims he owns “cyberlawyer” — actual cyberlawyers laugh and laugh https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/01/cyberlaw-and-cyberlawgs

#10yrsago TSA terminates its contract with Rapiscan, maker of pornoscanners https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-jan-17-la-fi-mo-fullbody-scanner-contract-20130117-story.html

#10yrsago Dan Bull song tribute to Aaron Swartz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb0tCgNzbjk

#10yrsago Debunking DoJ statement on Aaron Swartz’s prosecution https://www.techdirt.com/2013/01/17/carmen-ortiz-releases-totally-bogus-statement-concerning-aaron-swartz-prosecution/

#5yrsago EFF to NSA: you scammed your way to another six years of warrantless spying, and you’d better enjoy it while it lasts https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/open-letter-our-community-congresss-vote-extend-nsa-spying-eff-executive-director

#5yrsago Amazon’s useless “transparency reports” won’t disclose whether they’re handing data from always-on Alexa mics to governments https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-the-least-transparent-tech-company/

#5yrsago Hawai’i emergency notification system password revealed in photo about problems with Hawai’ian emergency notification system https://qz.com/1181763/hawaiis-emergency-management-agency-accidentally-revealed-an-internal-password

#5yrsago Trials confirm the use of psilocybin for depression without the “dulling” effects of traditional antidepressants https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320636

#5yrsago Leaseholders in building sheathed in flammable Grenfell cladding sent a £2m bill for repairs https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/17/citiscape-croydon-2m-recladding-bill-prompted-grenfell-disaster


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Yesterday's progress: 504 words (95504 words total)

  • The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a nonfiction book about interoperability for Verso. REVISIONS COMPLETE – AWAITING COPYEDIT

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. ON SUBMISSION

  • Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION

  • A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause." FINISHED

  • A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." FINISHED

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2022 Edition https://craphound.com/podcast/2022/12/12/daddy-daughter-podcast-2022-edition/

Upcoming appearances:

Recent appearances:

Latest books:

Upcoming books:

  • Red Team Blues: "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books, April 2023

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

(Latest Medium column: "Normalize Dark Corners!" https://doctorow.medium.com/normalize-dark-corners-6df4bc752cf3)

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

2

This topic was automatically closed after 15 days. New replies are no longer allowed.