The Coming Care Economy: When Private Troubles Become a Public Issue

The Coming Care Economy

The economy everyone depends on is the one almost no one talks about.

While headlines obsess over AI disruption and tech unicorns, a quieter crisis is unfolding in kitchens, nursing homes, and daycare centers across the globe. The Care Economy—the vast network of labor that feeds, heals, raises, and supports every human being—is buckling under the weight of demographic shifts, austerity politics, and profound undervaluation.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: your burnout isn't a personal failure. It's a structural one.

This analysis uses C. Wright Mills' sociological imagination to pull back the curtain on why the daughter juggling eldercare and a career, the single mother priced out of quality childcare, and the home health aide working for poverty wages are all experiencing symptoms of the same systemic breakdown. It traces the roots of this crisis through global care chains, the gendered "second shift," and the deliberate defunding of public care infrastructure.

But it doesn't stop at diagnosis. The article maps concrete pathways forward: universal care infrastructure, platform cooperatives, living wages for care workers, and migration policies built on dignity rather than exploitation.

Who benefits from keeping care invisible? And what would change if we finally made it visible?

Download the full article to explore the structural forces reshaping care—and the collective solutions that could transform it from a private burden into a public investment.