Why care work doesn’t show up in GDP
The hours spent caring for a sick parent, feeding a child, or doing a neighbor’s grocery shopping. All of this labor holds society up, yet it barely appears in economic indicators, because no money changes hands.
Invisible labor
Several studies estimate that, converted to dollars, unpaid care work amounts to a sizable share of a national economy. Yet this labor is left out of the statistics, and so it is often left out of policy too. What isn’t measured isn’t managed.
If we counted care
- Credit caregiving time toward pension eligibility
- Raise caregivers’ wages to skilled-labor levels
- Increase public support for local care cooperatives
- Include employees’ use of caregiving leave in corporate ratings
In the end, the economy is a story about how we care for one another.
From an economist’s lecture
Compassion is a feeling, but what makes it sustainable is institutions. A society that leaves care to individual goodwill alone ends up passing the cost to its weakest members. It is time compassion had a ledger too.
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