The Care Economy

Vlad Bunea: Your new book, The Care Economy, reads as a thoughtful meditation about the human condition, a fireside lesson about the purpose of our economic system, and an invitation to construct a very different new kind of economy. The concept of care also appears to be a soft overture to a grand battle with capitalism. As you describe it, capitalism is incapable by design to offer genuine care for those in need. What is hiding behind this failure of capitalism to offer care? Is it just the pursuit of growth?

Tim Jackson: A soft overture to a grand battle. Yes, I quite like that characterisation. Although perhaps it doesn’t quite do justice to the damage that capitalism routinely imposes on care. And yes, that damage does have something to do with the relentless pursuit of growth, the obsession with having more and more. Let me describe it this way. If we think about prosperity simply as the accumulation of wealth then growth is a dynamic that makes sense for us. But if, as many wise voices have suggested and many ordinary people discover for themselves, prosperity is first and foremost about health and wellbeing rather than wealth, then a very different dynamic comes into play. Health is not about having more and more. It’s all about achieving balance. And the dynamic force that allows us to find that point of balance is exactly, in my view, what we call care. When we’re caught up in the pursuit of more, we fail to recognise the point of enough. We go rushing past the point of balance without even recognising that we’ve done it. Trampling over the possibilities for care in the process. But it’s not just in mistaking wealth for health that capitalism tramples all over care. Care demands attention: attention to needs; attention to each other; attention to the point of balance. And attention demands time. People’s time. That’s a deep problem for a capitalism because people’s time (their labour) represents a cost to the producer. It has to be subtracted from the profit margin. So capitalism selects in those activities from which it can squeeze out time and maximise profit (manufacturing, technology, AI, finance for instance). And it selects out those like care – and craft and creativity – where it can’t. Just to be clear, that’s not an occasional or an accidental characteristic of capitalism. It’s a design feature.

VB: You write in the book: “Care is good. Care is so central to life that it takes the form of something instinctive. Care is something powerful enough to cross between species. And by demonstrating care we aim to become good by association. To prove we care is to lay claim to a moral position that goes broadly unquestioned. To admit to not caring is to forgo our moral worth.” Meanwhile, the Ecological Footprint Initiative has released the 2025 National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, according to which humans, as a global society, are in ecological overshoot. We would need to degrow our ecological footprint at an annual rate between 2.5% and 3.1% per year until 2050 to achieve balance. All while considering justice and fairness. Which brings us to care and degrowth. What does this all mean for our lifestyles? What is the role of the state in this grand scheme?

TJ: First off, let me explain that my characterisation that ‘care is good’ and that ‘by demonstrating care we aim to become good by association’ is not my personal position on care. Rather it is a description of the moral framing of care in society. One of my arguments is that we collectively assume care to be ‘morally unassailable’ like goodness or friendship or bravery or love. But when something is morally unassailable it becomes analytically useless. And what’s worse, it can also be easily abused. ‘I care for patients by prescribing them opioids (even though I know they will become addicted.)’ or ‘I care for my political friends by sending them bombs (to drop on the children of their enemies.’ These claims are attempts to prove the morality of certain acts. Instead of this morally laden version of care, I prefer to think of care as a dynamic principle, specifically a restorative force that constantly guides us towards balance and brings us back to health. Only when an action satisfies this principle can it legitimately be called care. Otherwise, it’s just moral posturing.

But you asked me about the role of the state. To some extent that role follows from my more functional definition of care. If care is ‘just’ about moral worth, you could argue that the state should stay out of it, or at best simply provide the forum for airing moral debate. But if care is the restorative force that brings us back to health and keeps us in balance - both as individuals and as a society - then the role of the state must be to aid and nurture and support that restorative process. Government is society’s mechanism for achieving collective wellbeing. Public health must always be amongst its top priorities. And so too must be the process that maintains and restores our health: namely, care.

The same is true of course for the question of environmental health. When, as you say, our ecological footprint is so far out of balance, then care must entail bringing it back into balance. Returning us to ecological health. And there, as with physiological health, the state has an absolutely fundamental role to play.

VB: With government as society's mechanism it seems a crucial step is mobilising opinion so that government do their job. How do you think about whether or not we have an individual responsibility to persuade others about the necessity to reshape fundamentally our economic system? Should we actively engage with others? Do we wait for a critical mass of humans to achieve this realization on their own?

TJ: I think people often already do realise that things aren’t working as they should. There’s already a latent and rising concern over our broken healthcare, our dysfunctional food systems, the damage done by big pharmaceutical companies, the extractivism of our financial markets, the injustice and inequality propagated in the name of economic growth.

So yes, of course we should engage with others. Engage and inform and understand the concerns of ordinary people. But perhaps we also have to realise that the simple narrative that ‘governments can’t act until people vote for them to do so’ isn’t quite so straightforward as it seems. Quite often, ordinary people can very quickly come to an understanding both about the problem and about what needs to be done. And yet it still doesn’t happen. Policy creeps forwards infinitesimally slowly and sometimes even slips backwards. And that means we have to face up to the possibility that our governments are not always doing their job. They’re not always representing the best interests and the wellbeing of the population as a whole. Sometimes they are listening too much – and even colluding with – financial and corporate interests that promise growth but deliver ill-health and social distress.

Of course we need a more informed, a more engaged, more active population. But we also need better government. We need to hold our elected representatives to account and remind them that, as Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘the care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only task of good government’.

Photo by Marlis Trio Akbar