PROVOCATION - CARE AND THE PANDEMIC - A PROGRESSIVE APPROACH TO THE ECONOMICS OF CARE

A new approach is needed, recognising the immense importance of care to our economy and society, with care work properly supported in all its forms, effective support from the public sector, and an integration of the care system into our wider social and physical infrastructure. [...] The pandemic also revealed the bad treatment of people who care (both paid and unpaid) and how that treatment contributed to the failures of the care system in the light of Covid-19. [...] The welfare state’s collective pooling of risks and redistribution over the life-course became seen as costly and a threat to the provision of individual insurance and savings products by the financial sector. [...] The growing financialisaton of the economy more widely has impacted on the care sector, which (from the point of view of finance) has regular payments to “securitise” (convert into a financial asset), economies of scale to reap, and in some case land holdings to collateralise. [...] And what wrong with how it’s conceived? Failure to recognise the dependence of the economy on the rest of society allows it to undermine the “care economy”, just as it does to the environment or “natural economy”.