How Can We Define And Create A Care Economy?

The terminology is tricky enough, but the implementation is essential.

Hello, friends,

Last week, we talked about Medicare For All, a concept that would, depending on implementation, be a solution to the healthcare crisis this country faces.  But Medicare For All is just one aspect of a larger concept known as a “Care Economy.”

This topic was suggested by Robert Buonaspina, who’s already written about it for Long Island Press.  In his article, he stresses the important lifting that a Federal jobs guarantee would provide for the purposes of creating jobs.  And these are important things!

But let’s dive a little deeper.

Defining A “Care Economy” Is Trickier Than Expected

Intuitively, this would be an economy centered around caring for one another before we care about profits.  Is it that simple?

Alas, once I started researching, I discovered there are conflicting definitions of the term, depending on the sectors one explores.  Indeed, it seems that the term is already in use as something else, entirely.  The International Labour Organization centers the “care economy” around the need to provide care to those in need, such as children and the elderly.  Care Work And The Economy has a similar definition, focusing on the gender and racial equity of those involved in providing care.  

So - you’ve started digging into a topic and found that you’ve got conflicting terminology!  What do you do?

Touch on them both, at least a little!

Last week’s article about Medicare For All, as well as the previous two entries, help provide context and solution for the definition that we’ve stumbled into.  By expanding government support for health care through a single-payer (or, at least, mostly single-payer) system, we can pay our medical care workers a living wage.  By doing something similar with childcare, such as expanding Universal Pre-K, we can rise to meet the “care economy” referred to by the traditional definition.

What About Our Economy, Overall?

Let’s turn back to Buonaspina’s proposed concept:  The key precepts he espouses in his article are “The government is good,” paired with “We are the government.”  In a Democracy (however poorly ours might function, and however much better it could be), the government is made up of the people.  Yes, granted, it’s hard to do a direct Democracy; but the concept holds true for a representative Democracy, as well.  The people are us.  While it’s understandable not to provide universal trust and power to the government, especially one as imperfect as ours, it should serve as a comfort if one assumes that most people are good.  The transitive property is clear:  Government = us = mostly good.

It’s to this end that Buonaspina proposes a Federal Job Guarantee.  The concept is exactly what it sounds like:  If you want a job, the Federal Government will hook you up with one.  It’s not as alien as it sounds:  Our government provided similar employment opportunities with things like the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program that provided jobs to young workers (as you might expect of our checkered history, this meant men) who needed a source of sustenance.

Furthermore, he cites Stony Brook University Economics professor Stephanie Kelton’s book “The Deficit Myth” to suggest that our government can afford to spend about $600 Billion more than it already is in order to fund jobs programs, without boosting inflation.  This number was conceived of before the Russian invasion of Ukraine helped spark a drastic inflationary cycle due to worldwide resource shortages, so it may or may not be an accurate read for 2023’s economy.

But let’s drop the notion of a specific dollar value for a moment.  We know from experiences like the CCC that these types of programs can and frequently do work out to everyone’s advantage:  Workers get jobs and, thus, salaries; the government gets to complete projects; ‘consumers’ get to use whatever the workers built; even politicians get to say they’ve accomplished things by making such programs work; hell - even the corporate fatcats get to benefit because the workers now have money to afford their products.

How Do We Implement These ReformsTo Our Economy?

From a governmental standpoint, it would require passage through both chambers of Congress and a signature from the President.  With Republicans taking charge of the House in 2022, that doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon, but one never knows.  To some extent, this kind of program was enacted with the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.  It will cut some prescription drug costs; it will aim to modernize our electrical generation and drought resistance systems to the tune of $391 Billion; and it will modernize tax enforcement to hopefully raise more money (by eliminating cheating) to ultimately pay for more programs.

However, in this case there’s far more afoot than legal wrangling.

There is something of a catch-22 approaching as automation continues to push people out of jobs.  According to the European Parliament’s relatively rosy outlook, Artificial Intelligence will be an economic boon as “the diffusion of innovation” takes place, and a “virtual workforce” is created.

Of course, one needs to look no further than the art world to see what AI is doing:  Twitter user @Vanessid created a thread about “Shudu,” a Black model who is 100% generated by AI, a problem verified by Lauren Michele Jackson of The New Yorker.  It’s now possible for product designers to use Shudu, and presumably other procedurally-generated models, as a model and avoid paying actual Black women for their likeness.  In another case study, Luke Plunkett of Kotaku talks about how an art site called DeviantArt wants to use its millions of users’ work to train an AI to make more of it, requiring opt-outs rather than opt-ins. In fact, Eckhart’s Ladder, a youtuber, demonstrated via his Twitter the use of an AI chat bot called Chat GPT to create an eerily-coherent short story.

This type of thing threatens to do what artificially intelligent translation services have already done to the paid translation industry:  Decimate it. And that’s to say nothing of the consequences of physical automation changing the landscape of employment.

Therefore, it makes sense that a Federal Job Guarantee be paired with another “Progressive” idea so self-evident in the age of machinery that Milton-Fucking-Friedman believed in it:  Universal Basic Income.  The idea is simple enough:  The government provides a minimum amount of money to all citizens once a month, more-or-less irrespective of ongoing employment.  But we’ll talk about UBI more another time.

After all, if machines are doing most of the work at the low cost of maintenance and electricity, who is making the profit from the cost savings?  It’s not acceptable for the answer to that question to be, “The owners and only the owners.”  No; the beneficiaries of Humanity’s ingenuity must be Humans, ourselves - all of us.  (And, as a Sci-Fi writer, let me include any aliens we eventually make friends with in the future by suggesting the term “Sapients” as an alternative for when the time comes...)

The bottom line is that in order to reform our economy, we have to actually reorganize our economy.  That means increasing the government’s (who, again, is just us) involvement in our economy to create jobs and to provide basic sustenance so that, in the end, people displaced by outsourcing, mechanization, AI, and other economic factors have a fallback position that keeps them from becoming bankrupt.  It also means doing things like Medicare For All, but that’s another story.

Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe.  If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list.  This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.