Economics

Having Children and Saving the World

15 September 2024

Pro-natalists don’t seem to realize that “having” children requires both caring and paying for them.

Working with Time-Use Studies

9 September 2024

Is time-use a measure for care or exploitation? Three working papers of emerging scholars from the United States, India, and Sri Lanka, will examine the trade-offs of time-use. Register for Friday, September 27, 9-11am ET.

Nancy Folbre: Seminar & Talk

9 September 2024

Nancy Folbre will give a seminar on her manuscript-in-progress “Accounting for Care,” as well as public talk, entitled “Valuing Care: Time, Money, and Capabilities.” Both events will be in person at the Revaluing Care Lab at the FHI in Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, C106.

Understanding the  Care Economy

5 August 2024

Why we need better data on the care economy, how we can get it, and what we could do with it.

CryptoCare©

17 November 2023

Perhaps you’re curious to know—just hypothetically–how far the current value of global cryptocurrency could go toward increasing the supply of child care in the U.S.

In Defense of Valuation

22 July 2015

I think that estimates of the market value of non-market work are a worthwhile exercise (as my last two posts suggest) as long as they are done carefully and presented as an approximate lower-bound. But conceptual resistance to valuation remains remarkably fierce–which is a big reason we don’t see more of it.

The Temporal Constraints of Child Care

22 July 2015

Fortunately, the American Time Use Survey includes a question that asked respondents to indicate times when a child under the age of 13 was “in your care.” This makes it possible to measure the amount of time devoted to supervisory child care.

The Dollar Value of Grown-Up Care

16 July 2015

Work is no less valuable if it’s fun (I’m working for fun right now).

All the Child Care Workers in the USA

18 June 2015

All the child care workers in the U.S. combined earn less than the top 25 hedge fund managers and traders. Wow. Even a jaded old care-work researcher like me finds this pretty startling.

Care and the Great Transition

18 June 2015

Because I think there are fundamental similarities between care and ecological services, I look for opportunities for dialogue with environmental researchers and activists.

Recovering from the NYT

1 October 2009

I started this blog in 2008, but soon let it lapse as I became an almost–weekly contributor to the New York Times Economix blog from 2009 to 2014. This felt pretty demanding on top of my regular job and I needed a while to recover and reconfigure.

What is She Worth? How to Value (Or Not to Value) a Woman’s Life

26 October 2008

The 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund dispensed death benefits for female victims that averaged only 63% of those for male victims. Why? Special Master Kenneth Feinberg was instructed to use a formula similar to that used in U.S. courts, taking victims’ estimated future earnings into account. For more details, see his fascinating book, What is Life Worth? (Public Affairs, 1995).