The economics of care: Economic repertoires for analysing dilemmas in care

What is the value of care? This paper examines economic repertoires used to measure and evaluate care and by extension, the value of human life, social relations, and labour. Drawing on our respective ethnographic research on health insurance in Brazil and elder care in Ghana and the United States, we analyse economic repertoires of zero-sum thinking, sacrifice and obligations, and rights-in-people, all of which posit that there is a commensurability between the economic and the social, as well as discourses which make them incommensurable. This list is suggestive rather than exhaustive. Through these examples, we delineate a path forward beyond frameworks of hostile worlds, in which care and the economy (or capitalism or neoliberalism) are pitted against one another. We argue that putting capitalism at the centre of the analysis of care has obscured the ways people manage care and its associated conflicts, although we understand that capitalism provides a larger context in which people navigate decisions and actions. Instead, in this paper, we focus on how care generates dilemmas which force people to measure its value. The economic repertoires that they use to manage these dilemmas differ from those associated with capitalism, supporting theoretical work on the ways that capitalism, as an economic system, is hybrid and infused with non-capitalist repertoires and practices.