What the economy pays for

In almost every organisation I’ve worked in, there has been one person the whole place quietly leaned on. She was rarely the most senior person in the room. She noticed when a new starter was drowning and sat with them before it turned into a resignation, smoothed things over after a meeting went badly, remembered who was going through a hard time at home, and kept the unwritten knowledge of how things actually worked long after the people who wrote the processes had moved on. Sometimes it was a he, but more often it was a she, and more often still it was someone who couldn’t bring themselves to let things fall.

None of it was in her job description. At review time she was measured on her deliverables like everyone else, and the rest came back as a compliment: you’re so good at that, everyone loves working with you. It rarely came back as a promotion or a pay rise. When she eventually left, usually exhausted, the loss showed up everywhere and in no report at all. Meetings got sharper, people started drifting away, and the culture everyone had assumed was just the way things were turned out to have been her.

The same work happens at home, without even the compliment. The parent who holds a household together, the daughter who drives across town three times a week to look after an ageing father, the partner who keeps track of everyone’s appointments and moods and needs: all of it is work the rest of life depends on, and none of it is paid.

The more you care, the more you can be asked to carry.

Through a systems lens

Here I step back from the story to look at the system it belongs to, how the same pattern shows up elsewhere, and where it sits in the Coherence Framework.

To understand why, it helps to be explicit about what our economy does reward. In most Western economies success is measured by GDP, which counts the value of goods and services that are bought and sold. Whatever rises gets called growth, and growth is treated as the goal. Inside companies the same logic becomes revenue, margin and returns to shareholders, reported every quarter, and inside teams it becomes individual output that can be counted, compared and credited to one person. Speed and scale are rewarded, and ownership most of all.

What the measure can’t see matters just as much. Cutting down an old forest adds to GDP, and so does cleaning up after a car crash. A parent raising a child adds nothing, and neither does a neighbour looking in on an elderly man who lives alone, or a colleague who stops a team from falling apart. The rules for national accounts draw a boundary around what counts as production, and the care people give each other at home sits outside it. Whatever has no price is treated as a free input, the same way the economy treats clean air and a stable climate, as something that will always be there to draw on. It clicked for me in September, listening to Katrine Marçal ask who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner.

The scale of what sits outside that boundary is enormous: Oxfam puts women and girls’ unpaid care work at US$10.8 trillion a year, and PwC valued unpaid work in Australia at around a third of the formal economy. When care does move into the market, it tends to arrive at the price it had at home, which was nothing. That’s part of why childcare, aged care and nursing, work done overwhelmingly by women, stay so poorly paid relative to how much depends on them.

The ripple runs through whole lives. The parent who steps back from paid work to care takes a lower income, slower progression and less in retirement savings, and the cost compounds for decades. The person who holds an organisation together absorbs the conflict, the repair and the emotional weather of the place until something gives, and when it does, the system reads it as a personal failing: she should have had better boundaries. I’ve watched versions of this play out in every organisation I’ve worked in, the energy and care of the most committed people drawn back into the very system they were trying to change. Care is the one input the system never has to pay for, so the people who care most end up carrying most.

This is the layer where an organisation’s values either become real or quietly stay decorative: what it actually rewards. An organisation can say it values culture, collaboration and wellbeing while still promoting on individual output and measuring success by the quarter. That gap is drift, and the people who feel it first are the ones holding the culture together.

Shifting it means moving the boundary around what counts. At the scale of the economy, that’s what the wellbeing economy and Doughnut Economics are trying to do, which I wrote about in What is the economy for? Inside organisations it can start smaller, by naming the work of holding things together, writing it into roles and resourcing it properly, and rewarding it when decisions about pay and promotion get made. At home it looks like policy that treats care as the foundation it is, rather than a private arrangement for someone to absorb.

Care has never been free. Someone has always been paying for it, usually in time and health they don’t get back, and the question is whether we keep sending that bill to the people least able to refuse it.