Care work — the feeding, washing, comforting, supervising, teaching, and emotional sustaining of other human beings — is arguably the most essential form of labour that any society performs. Without it, children do not develop, the elderly are abandoned, the sick go untreated, and the social bonds that hold communities together dissolve. Yet care work occupies a peculiar position in modern economies: it is simultaneously indispensable and chronically undervalued, praised in the abstract and neglected in practice, acknowledged as vital by almost everyone and adequately compensated by almost no one.
The reasons for this devaluation are deeply rooted in history. For centuries, care was classified not as work at all but as a natural expression of feminine virtue — something women did because it was in their nature to do so, requiring no training, no recognition, and certainly no payment. This ideological framing had the convenient effect of rendering an enormous quantity of productive activity economically invisible. When care did enter the formal labour market, as it gradually did over the course of the twentieth century, the wages and conditions attached to it reflected the lingering assumption that it was unskilled, instinctive, and therefore worth less than other forms of employment. Nursing, social work, childcare, and elderly care remain among the lowest-paid occupations in most developed economies, despite the complexity of the skills they demand and the severity of the consequences when they are performed poorly.
The economist Nancy Folbre has argued that care work suffers from what she calls a 'prisoner of love' dynamic. Because care workers are motivated in part by genuine concern for those they look after, they are less likely to withdraw their labour in protest at poor conditions — and employers, whether private or public, exploit this reluctance, safe in the knowledge that a nurse will not abandon a patient or a teacher walk away from a classroom simply because they are underpaid. The emotional commitment that makes care work valuable is thus turned against the people who perform it, functioning as a subsidy that keeps wages artificially low.
The consequences of this arrangement extend far beyond the individuals directly affected. Societies that underinvest in care create a cascade of secondary costs: children who receive inadequate early education enter school at a disadvantage; elderly people without proper support end up in expensive hospital beds; burned-out care workers leave the profession, creating chronic staffing shortages that further degrade the quality of provision. The economist's term for this is a market failure — a situation in which the price mechanism fails to allocate resources in a way that reflects their true social value. Care, in this analysis, is the paradigmatic case of a good whose benefits are diffuse, long-term, and difficult to quantify, and which is therefore systematically underprovided by markets left to their own devices.
Some countries have attempted to address these failures through public investment. The Nordic nations, in particular, have built comprehensive systems of publicly funded childcare, eldercare, and parental leave that treat care as a social infrastructure comparable to roads and hospitals. The results — in terms of gender equality, child development, labour force participation, and public health — have been widely documented and broadly positive. Yet even in these countries, care workers' wages remain lower than those of comparably skilled professionals in other sectors, suggesting that the cultural devaluation of care runs deeper than any policy intervention has yet been able to reach.
The question of how societies value care is ultimately a question about what they consider important. An economy that pays a hedge fund manager several hundred times more than a nursery worker is making a statement — not necessarily a deliberate one, but a statement nonetheless — about the relative worth of financial speculation and the nurturing of young children. Whether this is a statement that any society would consciously endorse, if asked to articulate it plainly, is a question that the economics of care forces us to confront.