Your wallet may care for you, but does it care
about you ? 

It’s 7 a.m. in New York City. Bagel shops are firing up their ovens, subway conductors are steering sleepy commuters through the city, and office workers are shuffling to their desks, coffees in hand. But if you really think about it, none of this could happen without a group of often invisible workers: the caregivers. 

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Caregivers don’t just keep New York, or any city, running; they make life possible. Yet, the work they do rarely makes headlines. Their efforts go largely unpaid, underappreciated, and, ironically, undervalued in the very metrics we use to measure our economy’s success. 

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It’s a curious thing: the gross domestic product (GDP) defines how we talk about progress, but it tells us nothing about the real backbone of our society. GDP counts the value of the pizza delivery that fuels a late-night office project but ignores the unpaid care that enables countless workers to show up in the first place.

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The Care Economy: Unseen, Unpaid, and Unavoidable 

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If you’re thinking of "care" and imagining babysitters or elder caregivers, think broader. Care includes everything from raising children to caring for elderly parents, from cooking meals to tidying homes. It’s work that enables every other job to happen, yet it remains invisible in economic statistics. Globally, women bear most of this load, spending an average of 4.5 hours per day on unpaid care, compared to men’s 2.5 hours. And for women in lower-income households, the burden is even heavier. 

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To economists like Diane Elson, addressing this imbalance is essential to creating a fairer society. She and other feminist scholars propose the “three Rs” of care: Recognize, Reduce, and Redistribute unpaid care work. Added to this are two more from Professor Jennifer Olmsted: 

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Reinforcement and Reward. Together, these five principles offer a framework for revaluing care work and making it more equitable.

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Beyond Economics: The Real Impact of Recognizing Care

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If you think the care economy is just about the economy, think broader. Think about the lives shaped by care: children raised with the support of communities, elderly parents supported through their later years, entire generations brought up by family and neighbors. Care work touches all of us, either as those giving or receiving it. Yet we often sideline its importance. The hard truth is that overlooking care work isn’t just unfair; it’s costly. When governments and businesses don’t support care, the impacts are felt in workplaces, schools, and health systems. Economies slow down, gender inequality deepens, and communities grow less resilient. The COVID-19 pandemic made this crystal clear. When care structures collapse, everything else begins to fall apart.​

 

Raised by a Community, Supported by Care​

 

If you think care is just for children or the elderly, think broader. Most of us were raised by caretakers or parents. Yet, this work was never only done by them alone. There were neighbors, extended family members, teachers—all part of a community that cared for us and helped us grow. Now, as adults, we may manage to keep ourselves going, with a bit of help from friends, partners and maybe even pets and a few surviving houseplants. Even so, many of us still experience struggles. This shows just how critical care work is, not just for children or the elderly but for all of us, no matter our age or life stage. Every time we brush off the care economy, we’re ignoring the essential story of our lives: we don’t succeed alone, and we don’t thrive without support.

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Making Care a Public Good​

 

If we want a fairer, more sustainable world, we have to make care a priority. This means rethinking it as part of essential public services. It means investing in paid care work and creating policies that support caregivers, whether that’s through flexible work schedules or subsidized childcare. It’s on all of us to demand these changes.​

 

It’s time we stop seeing care as an afterthought and start recognizing it as the foundation of our society. Care work sustains our communities and fuels our development. When we choose to ignore it, we’re choosing a hollow version of ourselves. But if we commit to valuing care, we’re investing in a society that’s truly sustainable.

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Let’s make care visible. Let’s make it count. And let’s build a future where the essential work of care is not just acknowledged but truly valued.