A Mother Feeding Porridge to her Child (1653–1655) | Quiringh Gerritsz. van Brekelenkam / Rijksmuseum / Public Domain
Mainstream economics tends only to consider that which is measurable and only to value that which produces a monetary cost or benefit. Unpaid labor becomes an afterthought, something easy to dismiss and subsequently devalue. This framework leaves no room to account for the labor dedicated to caring for ourselves and for each other. In her newest book, Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First (University of California Press, 2026), and in conversation with Emma Robertson, feminist economist Nancy Folbre illuminates the undeniable labor that goes into care work and why the proper valuation and recognition of this work is vital for any country’s future prosperity. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Emma Robertson: You define care provision as, “the process of producing, developing and maintaining human capabilities.” Could you describe what you mean by “capabilities” and why it’s so crucial that we protect and support our abilities to reproduce them?
Nancy Folbre: First of all, you have to produce the person. It begins before birth. I think we need to recognize that gestation, pregnancy, and child-rearing are productive activities that we all rely on. To turn that little mammal into a human requires a lot of nurturance, education, and emotional connection—and it’s not always easy to protect a child’s physical and mental health. It can be very challenging. Most of us learn how to take care of ourselves, but that too is a challenge that requires considerable resources of time and money. So it’s not just caring for other people, it’s also caring for ourselves and caring for the environment that people inhabit, whether it’s their home or the planet. All these activities that we engage in every day we know are important, but we don’t really think of them as being productive activities that deserve evaluation, recognition, and valuation.
Robertson: You mention early in the book this trade-off between individual freedom and our responsibility to care for others, which feels like a core issue preventing people from caring. How do you envision us building empathy in society and a willingness to take on the responsibility of caring for others?
Folbre: Well, the first thing that we have to do is get people to recognize that this is a problem that needs our attention. We have to tend to this. Otherwise, all the other things that we depend on are going to shrivel and die. Once you persuade them to have a broader perspective about economic success—not being just about the Dow Jones Industrial Average or inflation and unemployment, but actual outcomes of health, education, well-being, and happiness—if you can rally around those goals, then you can make a case for all sorts of public policies that make it easier for people to care for themselves and for each other.
A lot of that involves things like public provision of care services, more support for care in the home and the community, and seeing care as a part of the life cycle not just for kids, but for intergenerational support and longevity. We have to keep fighting for the values that we think are going to be the best for everyone. In a country where there’s not a lot of inequality and not a lot of racial, ethnic difference, it’s easier for people to see their commitments to one another in family-like terms. Then the policies themselves have an equalizing effect, which reinforces the solidaristic policies that are adopted. But the US is at the other extreme, with a lot of racial, ethnic inequality, the legacy of slavery, and class inequality. Therefore, it’s difficult to pass policies that reduce inequality. We get caught in a historical cycle that’s hard to break out of.
Robertson: How do you respond when you’re in conversations with people (often, conservatives) who prescribe family values and yet their policy recommendations fail to provide the actual support needed to provide care for families? How are you able to convince them to see the reality of what they’re speaking about or recognize the discordance in the values they preach?
Folbre: I’m not sure that I am very successful at reconciling them, even though I’m trying really hard to do that. But I feel like the best way to kind of negotiate this with people is just to keep asking them questions. What do you mean by family values? Why are you defining family in such narrow terms? Don’t you value principles of family solidarity? Why should that not extend to a wider community of family?
Robertson: You mention this anecdote in your book: while you were working on a committee, you wanted research on the economic value of human breast milk to be included in the report, and when the male superior refused, you responded by saying, “I’ll tell your mother on you,” and he complied. I found that so compelling because it speaks to this innate awareness we all share of the value and importance of respecting our mothers’ work, but so many develop this knee-jerk reaction of wanting to deny it unless confronted by it specifically. It made me wonder, what does that look like on a larger scale—a national version of telling your mother?
Folbre: Sometimes, it’s taken the form of a strike. The Icelandic women’s strike [of 1975] is a really famous collective event, and it pushed Iceland in the direction of these really progressive policies of support for women and families. Also, the fact that we’re at below-replacement fertility in the US and the long-term problems that’s going to cause—I think it’s bringing home to people the necessity of recognizing the value of caring for the next generation.
I get a lot of interest in my work in countries like Korea and Japan, where they’ve been dealing with below-replacement fertility for a long time. And it’s because they are getting this message of, we’re going to be in trouble if we don’t provide more public recognition and support for families. It’s particularly apparent in those countries because their fertility rates have fallen really rapidly and sort of unexpectedly.
Robertson: Speaking of policies, you explore another way of envisioning taxes and payback for taxes. Would you explain your ideas behind this?
Folbre: Well, instead of thinking about taxation as something that we just pay to support government and public services, we should think about taxation in large part as an intergenerational transfer similar to that which takes place in families already. That is, adults devote resources to raising children, and then children, when they grow up, devote resources to caring for elderly adults. And a lot of the modern “welfare state” is not really a welfare state. It’s basically a family state that is socializing expenditures on children and expenditures on the elderly.
So, if we look at taxes over the life cycle: as a child, you’re the recipient of services that are paid for by taxes, especially education and health. As an adult, you’re paying into the tax system more than you’re getting back. Part of that is, metaphorically, payback for what you received as a child, and then paying forward what you’re going to get as an elderly person in terms of retirement and health care.
Ideally, we would like to have a system of public finance that’s equitable, efficient, and keeps this life cycle transfer going. One of the challenges of below-replacement fertility is that it makes it very hard to keep the existing system of intergenerational transfers functional because the number of elderly grows enormously relative to the number of adults paying taxes. So, we need to change the way that we think about the whole system of intergenerational support.
There is now (at least among economists) some effort to really look at the size of intergenerational transfers that are both private and public. But part of the whole right-wing backlash that we’re living through is complete disrespect for taxes and the public sector on many levels, so that makes it very hard to get people to pay attention to a radically different way of thinking about how and what we’re doing.
Robertson: What would be your policy priorities?
Folbre: I recently presented a policy brief called the Care Package. It’s an argument for four different policies which should be free and provided to all who need them. They would be financed largely through a tax on income generated from capital and on wealth, supporting efforts to reduce inequality by taxing more at the top end and using those funds to pay for the following programs:
First, free universal child care. This would take the form of expanding the existing school system to cover pre-K for three- and four-year-olds and provide subsidies for family day care and care centers with a focus on nonprofit and community-organized and community-run centers. Second, it would include paid family and medical leave of six months per parent. This would be financed largely through a tax on employers and workers. The third program would expand long-term care insurance for the elderly and funds for home- and community-based services that allow elderly and disabled people who are capable of staying in their own homes to be provided with services. The last policy is like a universal basic income for kids and other dependents that would take existing tax credits and fold them into a slightly larger package that would be paid out on a monthly basis per child or per any other dependent that adults are caring for.
Robertson: What do you feel are the moments of the most disconnect or most misunderstanding related to care provision and this invisible labor of care that holds more progressive policies back?
Folbre: To me, the really big problem is taking things that don’t have a price tag on them for granted. You don’t have to think about them, you don’t have to worry about them. So you can dump stuff into the environment. You can mistreat people. And when mothers aren’t paid a salary for what they do, people will think that they’ll do it no matter what, that it’s just a natural urge. So they think, Why do we need to worry about it? Why do we need to support it? It’s really the taking-for-granted of things that are not bought and sold that is a fatal mistake.
Robertson: When you talk about the need for better data collection to account for and acknowledge the invisible labor of care work, you describe the shortcomings of countries’ overreliance on GDP as an index of country growth. Can you tell me more about your thoughts on better measuring tools?
Folbre: The GDP is still interesting and even startling to look at in comparison to the Genuine Progress Indicator, and it’s a good thing to look at both to compare. But in general, I think we need a dashboard of indicators, rather than just one. In fact, I think GDP should be one of those indicators; I don’t think it’s irrelevant. I just think it should be demoted down to the level of a number of other indicators.
From just talking to people, I think the really important things have to do with health—both physical health and mental health. We all want to avoid pain, we all want to live as long as we can, we all want our friends and families and fellow humans to have a decent life. Yet, we see a lot of mental health problems in our society. We see a lot of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, and economic despair that literally kills people. So I’m really struck by the fact that in the US, states that have more pro-care policies have longer life expectancy and have better mental health. It’s hard to nail all those connections down, and so that’s one of the things I’m doing in my book. I’m trying to persuade more people to provide more detailed and comprehensive measures to get clearer pictures and indicators.
Click here to read an excerpt from Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First by Nancy Folbre (University of California Press, 2026).
