Category: uncategorized

Both the archive and ongoing posts for this blog are now integrated into a new site as part of the Transforming Care in the Global Economy project.    Please come along!     Read more →

  So much talk about inflation–but not much about its disparate impacts. Nor do differences in the rate of price increases between “necessities” and “luxuries” get much attention.  Data that I downloaded from the  Data Finder  of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics  shows that price of three major care services–day care and preschool, nursing homes and adult daycare, and… Read more →

Lest we forget the time-hallowed misogyny fueling anti-abortion activism, the cartoon character known as Matt Gaetz pops up to remind us in Trumpian fashion that women who support abortion rights are too ugly to need them. At the other extreme, the NYT’s token conservative Ross Douthat is utterly convinced that feminists are over-reacting, because many opponents of abortion today (including… Read more →

Some Notes from Panel on The Economics of Gender and Households  Southern Economic Association  November 22, 2021 This, a great  opportunity to cross-fertilize with some excellent economists who represent a variety of different theoretical and empirical approaches to gender and households. At this point in time, Biden’s Build Back Better plan is moving through a torturous political process. Whatever you… Read more →

Happy Inauguration Day.  We now have a president who wears a mask. Everywhere. Which is something to be grateful for. Hope was that the pandemic would help raise awareness of just how much we depend on care work. This hope grows. A quick list of the three major care-related proposals President Biden has advanced so far:   More support (to… Read more →

If you don’t know David Sloan Wilson’s work, you should. He’s a pioneer of evolutionary biology, a great communicator, and an advocate for community-level mutual aid. He takes the science of altruism seriously, and helps run an online magazine, This View of Life, that could be a venue for more dialogue between evolutionary biologists and social scientists. I’d like to… Read more →

“The recent ‘Cura Italia’ (Care for Italy) decree, issued by the Italian Government, does not “take care” of domestic workers, home-based caregivers for the elderly and child minders.”  This is the first sentence in a petition being circulated by the feminist magazine Ingenere, published here in English (and I’ve borrowed their beautiful picture of a woman’s folded hands).  They are… Read more →

After  her first speech to the Davos Forum of world “leaders” in Switzerland last year, Greta Thunberg was cautioned against causing panic. In her recent encore performance of January 21, 2020 she drily observed that she was clearly not causing panic, because they had done absolutely nothing over the past year  to halt global climate change. Anyone who doubts that Thunberg’s… Read more →

Guest post by Almaz Zelleke: Thanks, Nancy, for inviting me to share my proposal for a UBI that supports women, children, and care work in general. As we weigh the pros and cons of a UBI, it’s important to be specific about the goals and details of any particular proposal, since the basic definition of a UBI–a broadly distributed regular… Read more →

Whatever you think about Andy Yang, you gotta love his slogan: Make America Think Again, acronymized as MATH.  Yang has helped publicize the concept of a universal basic income, or UBI, and that concept itself is encouraging America to think  harder about social policy. The merits of any UBI depend greatly on the specifics, and I have long worried about… Read more →