MOTHERS Council Member Valerie Young had a chance to interview Riane Eisler via email. Here's our interview with the author.
Q: What is "caring economics"?
Riane: Caring economics gives visibility and value to the most important human work -- the work of caring and caregiving. There's lots of talk about valuing families and caring for children, but present economic policies and practices fail to include caregiving work when it is done in households as "productive work." Not only that, professions that do not entail caregiving are uniformly paid more in the workplace that those that do.
So plumbers (the people to whom we entrust our pipes) get paid 5 to 10 times more per hour than childcare workers (the people to whom we entrust our children). Once we take the real value of caring work into account, we can meet the goal of economics: promoting human well being and development, starting in childhood. We can also change the shameful fact that in our rich nation, according to U.S. government statistics, women over the age of 65 -- most of them caregivers or former caregivers -- are twice as poor as men of the same age group.
Q: What is the most valuable element of our post-industrial economy?
Riane: Caring economics is good for women, men, children -- and the economy. And giving visibility to caregiving is particularly important as we move into the post-industrial knowledge/information economy, when economists tell us that the most important capital is "high quality human capital."
What most of them, however, ignore is that the high quality human capital requires good caregiving of children -- a fact today empirically shown by findings from neuroscience. This is yet another reason a caring economics is urgently needed.
Q: What is the outcome if the current system of economic measures is not changed?
Riane: For women, one outcome is a high poverty rate. Yet while, for example, we have tax credit for children, we don't have caregiver tax credits -- again a policy decision that keeps the people who care for children in families invisible and (along with lower earnings for women over their life spans) fails to reward them for this work in ways that put food on the table and a roof over people's heads.
For families, not including caregiving in economic measures translates into social and economic policies that do not adequately support families. Moreover, this failure puts our economic future in jeopardy.Other industrialized countries have national policies such as paid parental leave, stipends for caring for children in families, and heavy investment in high quality early childhood education. As a result, they have a less stressed population and better economic health.
We need "a caring revolution" for the sake of our children, our families, and our economic future.
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