Kamala Harris Is Thinking About the Care Economy. Here’s Where She Should Start.

recently, new york times Vice President Kamala Harris and Melinda French Gates Considering joint event About the “care economy”. My heart leapt. to hear what the Vice President has to say new specific call Expanding Medicare home care benefits a few days later was just a bonus.

In early 2020, my Yale colleague Amy Kapczynski and I boston reviews About how our country ignores politics of care It was clear even in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic that we were headed for disaster. Simply put, being able to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, including our extended family, close friends and colleagues, neighborhoods, and communities, is essential to surviving this once-in-a-century pandemic. I pointed out that. . Millions of Americans suffered severe falls in the years that followed because the United States lacked the care infrastructure that could “catch people when they fall.”

At the time, Amy and I were working on a largepublic health corps” is a short-term solution to help people get through COVID-19 and ensure their daily needs are met while putting people to work in communities reeling from the pandemic. The idea was that after the pandemic subsided, this locally-based force could be repurposed to build the nation’s health from the ground up, with care at the heart of its efforts.

But the “care crisis” was already visible before coronavirus and has been talked about for years. We can see it even in our broken systems childcare and elderly carepaid family and disease Vacation and other policies. You can also see it in the way our economic system is, where productivity is important.Intended to extract and exploitleaving you with little time to care for yourself or others. create a caste system of care In poor neighborhoods, Black and brown women typically end up shouldering the burden of caring for those higher up the socio-economic ladder. and keep away both the sick and the poor for generations. enter the criminal justice systemthrough the public hospital system, and back again on a merry-go-round of punitive and inadequate services that provide huge profits to a few but never address essential care needs.

So it’s very inspiring to hear two of the most influential people in this country talk about care. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not naive. Winning the policy changes needed to make care easier and more accessible to all will be an uphill battle. The right, even the Boston Consulting Group, will say we don’t have that luxury. suggests it will cost trillions of dollars. (In other words, if we ignore the long-term care crisis at hand, the U.S. will still lose about $290 billion in GDP per year beyond 2030).

It will take decades to confront the more fundamental problems in our socio-economic system. But as Jessica Green of the University of Toronto says about global warming, we’re talking about an existential question here. This is a matter of life and death, and caring for people is directly tied to caring for the planet.

We’ve yet to hear what Kamala Harris or Melinda Frenchgates think about their big frames.political philosophy of care— but they couldn’t have missed these larger discussions happening about how. we act in the interests of others and Build a system of governance So that people can prosper.

And while talk of “care” may not seem to be a priority for the right, they are debating this area as well. The conservative movement focused on the burden on American families and proposed its own robust agenda to address the caregiving crisis through “families first” and proposals to make America more “.”family friendly”, many of their ideas models come from things like: Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

So we have a choice. Either we cede the debate about care to the right and prioritize their narrow and exclusive vision of family (which doesn’t have to be the case for childless dog-and-dad LGBT households), or the nascent vision of care emerging from Vice. You can help shape it. President Harris and French Gates, along with dozens of other supporters who have pushed the care agenda forward over the years.

And care is a combination of short-term policy initiatives such as child care, elder care, and paid sick leave, as well as long-term thinking about how to “build back better” and create an economy that works for society. Both can be centered. all of usrather than wearing us down day by day. As Amy and I argued four years ago, care is essential if we are to survive not just the pandemic, but the tremendous pressures that modern life places on our ability to thrive in this world.