I would love economists to start recognizing there's such a thing as a "supply side multiplier" effect when it comes to subsidizing or investing in the #caregiving economy. (Thread follows... should be a blog post someday...) https://twitter.com/mboteach/status/1381652375694368771

Not only would we create new and better paid (hence higher quality) jobs for caregivers, but those in turn free up people (mostly women) who are currently unpaid caregivers for family (their kids or elderly parents) to enter the workforce...

Just like there is an interdependency (or an "and so on" effect) on the demand side of the economy when the government hands out cash to stimulate demand, so there is an interdependency on the labor supply side of the economy...

We have *seen* this happen before our own eyes, in the negative direction, during this pandemic recession. But economists aren't used to measuring things that do not show up in the market economy or aren't captured by very aggregate economic statistics...

And that is also why we aren't seeing economic modeling of this "supply side multiplier" I'm talking about, and why we even see some economists and certainly politicians scoff at the idea of the #caregiving economy or the #careeconomy as economic "infrastructure"...

But it's really the most fundamental of economic infrastructure we can imagine. There's that old economic(?) saying that "if we build it, people will come." But the "people will come" part is exactly what's been most severely constrained during the pandemic...

And the most severely limited even before the pandemic, when people in real life choose to stay at home to take care of family because no good-enough child or elder care options exist in the current caregiving market...

And because we haven't seen these caregivers working in the market before, we don't see or count their productivity in "potential GDP"...

So please stop laughing at the #careeconomy being labeled as part of economic #infrastructure. And stop saying that investing more in caregiving is only being "too generous" to families and will only create inflation...

Economists and policymakers are way early on the learning curve on this subject to know what they're talking about. There's so much we need to study better at a more granular level. But I think there's no time to waste. Let's start learning by doing and as we go along. (end)