What really makes the economy run? The unpaid labor of caregiving.

Care, unpaid labor, and why the GDP is missing one big data point

Quick Note of Thanks

First, thank you so much to everyone who signed up for the Substack - I really appreciated hearing from so many and hope that I can use this space for more writing and reporting on this topic that affects so many people. (And a special shout out to the people who helped get this Substack up and running - you know who you are!)

If we want to change the policies surrounding caregiving, it means understanding it’s value. But what if it’s valued at zero? That’s what the Gross Domestic Product would have us believe in many instances. This newsletter today will explore a bit about why that is - and what would need to be done to change it. 

Creating a Gross Domestic Product - Nix the Caregiving Please

One of the most brutal truths about caregiving is that since it is often done without any compensation, we put very little value in it.

Yes, it might look like work, but did anyone make any money today? Because that’s the question that matters for calculating GDP and overall economic health.

Eighty years ago, two British economists, Richard Stone and James Meade, devised a method of national income accounting and created the Gross Domestic Product, a way to measure goods and services bought and sold. GDP is one of the main indicators that economists and policymakers use to judge the health of the economy, yet it excludes work performed for which no money was exchanged. Caring for a child, an elderly relative or a sick spouse didn’t count when measuring the economic health of a country. 

Child birth is another example of “unpaid labor” - yet we know it is necessary for any functioning economy to continue to exist. And yet, the people giving birth aren’t given any credit for doing so when calculating GDP. This woman having her Caesarean section here - does she get paid time off to recover and bond with her baby? Does she have insurance to pay those doctors? Why are we even having to ask these questions? Photo by Amit Gaur on Unsplash

But even at its inception in the 1950s, there were vocal critics who argued that excluding unpaid labor from this measurement was a grave miscalculation. Unpaid labor, whether it be collecting firewood and hauling clean water in developing countries, or birthing and caring for children in literally every country, was fundamentally necessary to a nation’s economic success. 

I wrote about the absurdity of unpaid labor, GDP and the gender wage gap for Fortune last year, and came across the fact that Phyllis Deane, Meade and Stone’s research assistant, argued for the need to include unpaid household labor in the GDP. Even back then - during the heyday of nuclear family and single breadwinners - someone was saying this GDP calculation was not such a good idea. Neither economist heeded her advice. Deane died in 2012, at the age of 93, having seen so many changes in the way women work and care, and yet the GDP metric remained unchanged. 

(I spent a decent amount of time on google trying to get a good photo of Phyllis Deane, but this is the best I found.)

By failing to count unpaid work, the current GDP calculation creates a hidden tax on millions of unpaid workers—primarily caregiving women, the stay-at-home mothers and daughters who are forced to reduce hours or leave jobs to care for children or parents. One estimate shows family caregivers lose $300,000 in lifetime earnings, which cuts into social security contributions, pensions, stable retirements, and other benefits.

Could we change it? 

TL;DR: Yes, we could change it.

There is a current U.S. system that already measures unpaid labor: the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the agency that works alongside the U.S. Census to measure population growth and trends. Data from the American Time Use Survey informs economists of how people spend their time, so it’s possible to track unpaid labor alongside paid work. 

I spoke with Misty Heggeness, a former economist at the U.S. Census, who explained that there is an existing system called “Accounting for Household Production in the National Accounts.” This is an alternative measure to GDP that incorporates household production. “Part of the problem of household economics and economics of care is that we don’t have a strong traditional method of systemically measuring activity in a household,” she said. Heggeness has her own book out in 2025, “Swiftynomics: Women in Today's Economy” and if you have a minute, please feel free to take her survey to help build on the knowledge and experience of workers in today’s economy. (The survey closes on April 19th).

But do we want to?

This has always been the concern about caregiving and much of our unpaid labor tasks - why do we consistently devalue it?

Is it because it’s considered women's work - and women make less money than men?

Is it because much of it is performed by women of color, who make even less than their white counterparts?

Or is it because we are socialized to believe that caregiving is up to individuals, and not the country, as evidenced by our lack of social safety nets like paid family leave and subsidized child care?

There is some good news on this - the Department of Labor commissioned a report on how the government could measure household production, and economists at Bard College released a report this past month detailing how such measurements could be taken. The report calls such work “nonmarket consumption” which is a very fancy way of saying “caregiving and household tasks.”

For things to change, it requires rethinking the way we view care and how it’s valued. Maybe that means changing the GDP - but it also may mean asking how policymakers view and value care when voting this November. 

(I am relatively new to Canva, but trying to find ways to illustrate written points, so here goes.)

What I’m Reading:

—> Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman. I loved her first book, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. when it came out 10 years ago, but Help Wanted may be even better. Waldman spent several months working logistics in a big box store and she infuses a lot of those details into her prose, as well as a dozen characters trying to survive working for minimum wage with unpredictable schedules and not enough hours. Highly recommend this read - and if you can’t get the book, here are two write ups of the novel and the author which can give you a feel for why it’s different from the usual autofiction out there. 

—> This article in The Cut, “The Case for Marrying an Older Man”. While I don’t have an actual opinion on the age disparity between people who pair up, this particular paragraph (below) struck a chord - why the way in which we work and bear children can offer insight into why many of us feel constantly out of sync and exhausted. 

“To be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged […] We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her […] When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins.” 

Photo by Courtney Hedger on Unsplash

And a thank you:

*Adding a bit of gratitude to this space each week. This week’s thanks is for Lindsey Stanberry, for being an all-star editor and writing friend, and for encouraging me to get this Substack up and running. I highly recommend signing up for her Substack as well.