Care Inflation

The inflation no one wants to talk about.

You can be forgiven for thinking that the Great Inflation Story is how a recent once-in-a-century pandemic, combined with a senseless war, combined with monopolistic price-gouging, temporarily drove prices up by less than ten percent, prompting calls to crush worker power and suppress wages in order to “reduce demand” for scarce goods:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/14/medieval-bloodletters/#its-the-stupid-economy

But for all the attention we gave to this transient inflation, there has been precious little alarm over the soaring inflation in “Care Labor” — daycare, preschool, nursing homes and medical services — whose price growth has outpaced the Consumer Price Index (CPI) every year since 1997

Care inflation has severe knock-on effects for the rest of the economy. When workers can’t find someone to look after their kids, their elderly relatives, or a sick or disabled partner, they are often forced out of the workforce, or they give up good jobs and accept lower wages and worse working conditions so they can take the time to do care labor.

Writing for The American Prospect, Nancy Folbre unpacks the causes and effects of this massive, long-term inflation, and offers a compelling explanation for why it garners so little attention (spoiler: because…