Care underpins our society from childbearing to old-age, but it is not valued by capitalism because it is (usually) not commodified.
Emma Holten is a feminist economist and writer. Her book Deficit (2024) sold more than 50.000 copies in Denmark and has since become an international bestseller. She sat on the European Institute of Gender Equality Experts Forum as an expert in feminist economics, and is on Human Rights Watch’s advisory committee on Women’s Rights
Cross-posted from the Green European Journal
Green European Journal: The history of modern political theory is marked by a major omission – of bodies, their needs, and the necessity of caring for them. How did this omission come about?
Emma Holten: Enlightenment thinking was very much about liberating the individual – from hierarchy, from the ties of religion and superstition, from the bounds of class. Thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, for example, were very progressive in their belief that the individual has value in and of itself. That conviction became the building block of modern political theory, and it has been hugely important for feminism, too. However, it overlooked that individuals are connected not only in oppressive systems but also in positive relationships. Human beings exist only in the context of other human beings. But that interdependence disappeared.
This omission was most striking in the context of birth and family relationships. The whole story of what it takes to give birth and raise an individual completely disappeared, and we started making political theory about well-educated adults, as if they sprang up like mushrooms.
How did this original sin become so entrenched in modern economics?
Economics, too, had a noble ambition: to provide a clear description of the political system and to be able to quantify it. In the 1870s, this ambition culminated in the marginalist revolution, which was probably the most influential shift in the history of economics. Marginalism is based on the idea that you can use market prices to establish value. According to this theory, the market-clearing price is the perfect balance between supply and demand, between how much one wants to be paid for a product or service and how much someone else is willing to pay for it.
The obvious corollary is that if something doesn’t have a price, it doesn’t have value. Economics loses the ability to speak about things that don’t have a price, such as time spent with friends or in the home. The only way to measure the value of time spent at home caring for others or being cared for by others is to calculate how much you would make if you used that time in the market instead.
However, I don’t think price is a good measure of value in the market either. I spend a lot of time talking to nurses, caregivers for elderly people, and social workers, and when I tell them that economics measures their value by their salary, they are either shocked or start laughing. When you receive care, you don’t necessarily know what the value of that interaction is going to be; it only becomes visible in the long term. And if this interaction happens in the public sector, then the market is all the more unable to grasp its value. Economic methods find it much easier to understand the value of a car than the value of care, both paid and unpaid.
Why is this way of thinking about value so difficult to dispel?
Many of us grow up thinking that economics is like physics or chemistry. That it has always been the same, and we’ve always looked at value the same way. And this is a huge part of economics’ power. We don’t question it, because it would feel like questioning gravity. American economist Paul Samuelson famously said that he didn’t care who held political office as long as he got to write economics textbooks. Economics conditions the way we think about politics.
The rise of Thatcherism, of neoliberalism – the idea that the market comes before the state, and that the state’s responsibility is to take care of the market, not the people – has reinforced this influence. We let economists decide how much we should work, how much time parents should be able to spend with their children, what the optimal way to provide childcare is, or how to take care of nature. But these are fundamentally political questions. Their depoliticisation has exacerbated the dynamic whereby things that economics can value tend to be overvalued, while those it cannot value become completely valueless.
Dominant theories may be unable to account for the value of care in the economy, yet they assume a steady and abundant supply of care to sustain the economic system. How do you make sense of this paradox?
This is probably the central paradox in how modern economics deals with care. It has the idea that people are rational agents, act in their own self-interest, and are oriented towards the market. And so the provision of care, which largely falls outside the market, remains a blind spot. Economic theories tend to assume an endless supply of care, without a clear theory of how it is sustained.
Based on their own reasoning, women would never have children because it is completely irrational from a market perspective. Yet when birth rates decline, suddenly shock ensues. I sometimes wonder whether economists are angrier at women when they have children or when they don’t. If they do have children and need to work part-time, that’s expensive and doesn’t create enough value. But if they don’t have children, that suddenly becomes a huge issue for the economy.
When you study economics, the first thing you learn is the production function. How does a product come to be? In that function, there’s a variable called “L”. That’s labour power. But there is no acknowledgement of where it comes from; it’s just there. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about the poverty of the theories.
Feminist thinkers have challenged the approach that treats care as entirely outside the economic equation, but they haven’t always agreed on how best to make the case for it.
Feminist theorists, particularly Italian feminists like Silvia Federici, have been instrumental in showing that the undervaluing of care is a central part of capitalism. This applies to paid and unpaid care, to the public and the private sector alike.
The big question was: to price or not to price? Should we speak the devil’s language? Some feminist economists, especially in the early days of the field, argued that we should price unpaid care so we can include it in GDP and measure it. This was based on the reasoning that we can’t change the system, and so we need to use its language and its rules in our favour.
We’ve seen a similar logic at play in the environmental movement, where putting a price on a tree or a marsh seems to be the best way to protect it. But pricing ignores the relationships; it isolates and splits things up. And when you talk about nature, you cannot isolate and split. The same goes for care. The value of a mother, just like that of a tree, is not visible at the time of the exchange; it is long-term, and it is reciprocal: mother and child are changing one another. You cannot say that one is giving something to another, as if it were a simple transaction.
The home, in particular, has been a subject of controversy within feminist thought. Is it a prison or a shelter, a site of oppression and exploitation or one of liberation?
It is both. Historically, the home has been a site of extreme violence against women, and we can understand why so much of feminist thought was focused on getting women out of the home and getting them to make their own money. The dominant type of feminism, middle-class feminism, places a strong emphasis on achieving workplace equality between women and men. You can see this in EU strategies for gender equality, for example. That’s what takes up all the space. But many women, especially lower-class or migrant women who face exploitation, are actually fighting to get into the home, to have enough money to see their own children, to have time to rest. This is the double vision we need when we deal with care. The fight goes both ways. And for many people, home is also a place of liberation.
Meanwhile, we haven’t made a big enough effort to get men into the home. Sometimes, we have fallen into the trap of idealising men’s lives and framing them as free, equating paid work with freedom. But paid labour isn’t necessarily freedom. There are many men who are exploited or work in terrible conditions. Where’s the policy to liberate them?
Could the resurgence of “traditional” gender roles – as promoted in the “manosphere” and the “tradwife” online movements – be partly understood as a reaction to these failures rather than simply a backlash against women’s emancipation?
When it comes to care, many of the distinctions between right-wing and left-wing positions tend to collapse. Sometimes I see overlaps in places I didn’t expect. “Tradwives” and other socially conservative people often ask for the same things that progressive people ask for: more community, more time with children, less market dominance in our lives, more focus on love and social relationships, and a reaction against individualism. When I hear a conservative woman say that life is more than work, that what matters are the people we love, I find myself nodding. Then she might add that the man’s role is to dominate, and that’s where she loses me.
But we should not underestimate the potential to speak about these issues across differences. When I speak to nurses in hospitals, they suddenly realise they find common ground on this, even with people they usually disagree with politically. The devaluation of care is the core of both right- and left-wing anger right now.
Does the devaluation of care help explain Europe’s consistently low birth rates over the last few decades?
If I were to speak to a politician who cares about economic growth and wants women to have more children, I’d tell them to start by offering better childcare and longer parental leave. I was brought up in the 1990s and 2000s, thinking that we had gender equality, and women would live lives that were completely like men’s. Many of us were more educated than most men and made more money than many men. But when they had children, many in my generation were shocked to find out how much gender still mattered.
But I don’t think it’s just a matter of affordability. Birth rates are declining worldwide, regardless of the cost of living situation. This can be a good thing from a feminist perspective, especially if very young women are waiting longer to have children. But it also has to do with the types of societies we have created, where having children can be quite lonely and make it very difficult to spend time on anything else, including work and hobbies.
Do pro-birth policies focusing narrowly on economic incentives miss the point?
Economic theory and policymaking lack a theory of culture, but economics and culture go hand in hand. What we value economically tends to spill over into what we value culturally, and vice versa. The decision to have or not to have children is influenced by both cultural change and economic considerations. Yet when economists speak about demographics, they are at the limit of their theoretical capabilities because culture is simply not something they’re used to dealing with. In their market theory, there is no place for family choices. In a way, you could say that economics is supremely feminist in that rational market agents have no body and no gender. For many economists, I’m a consumer in the same way that a man is, at least until I become pregnant.
There are, of course, exceptions. Alice Evans, for example, has done a lot of empirical work, interviewing women around the world about their choices to have or not have children. She found that cultural factors, such as social media use, can have a major impact on reproductive choices because they give access to different types of women’s lives and different female cultures, showing that options other than having a family also exist. She calls this phenomenon “cultural leapfrogging”.
The Left seems more reluctant to talk about demographic crisis or decline. Is there a way of reframing the issue in a more progressive way rather than surrendering it to right-wing narratives and cultural panic?
Demographic decline is an umbrella term for many things, some of them good and others concerning. We should be extremely concrete in how we talk about decline and what we are worried about. My biggest worry is that, if the state retreats, the ever-expanding group of elderly people will have to be cared for by their daughters, as is already the case all over Europe.
But there’s also an opportunity to think creatively about how we adapt to the new demographic situation. We cannot leave these big decisions to the market – the state needs to play a big role, too. All over Europe, we’re already seeing major recruitment issues in hospitals because pay is so low. From a green perspective, more jobs in care can be good news because it is a very sustainable type of work, and one that is extremely useful to society.
Maybe the best way is to understand what we are going through as a care crisis, not a demographic one. It’s a new situation, and we need to adapt.
Pro-birth policies tend to focus on heterosexual couples or, at best, the nuclear family model with two parents raising children. Is it time we question this norm?
The family organisation of two parents raising children is actually quite unique in human history. It is the configuration that takes the least time away from the market because it is very steady and small; it requires little organising.
If you ask any feminist economist what her main policy goal is, she will probably choose a shorter working day, which means more time in the home. Of course, there can be downsides, and we see it in countries where family care has a bigger cultural role: women tend to make less money and be less independent, which in turn creates a patriarchal family structure. However, there’s also the upside that families are more connected and have closer relationships, so we need to strike the right balance.
This isn’t just about raising children. In Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe, we tend to just hide elderly people away. When someone cannot work anymore or is no longer self-sufficient, we don’t really want to see them; we don’t want them in the home. When I speak with Muslim feminists who have migrated to Europe, they tell me they find this to be extremely inhumane; they have a much more integrated relationship with elderly people in day-to-day life.
In the new demographic reality, opening up the home means not only more care for those who need it, but also more help with raising children – and this doesn’t mean the state shouldn’t play its role in providing care. But we have closed off the home too much, and I think we see it in the crisis of loneliness that many adults are facing.
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