Nancy Folbre

I’m an economist with a particular interest in the time and money devoted to care provision—the production, development, and maintenance of human capabilities. I’m trying as hard as I can to understand the complexity of collective conflict and bargaining, a project that falls under the rubrics of intersectionality and stratification economics. Much of my research emphasizes the importance of public goods that can’t be accurately priced in the market but are crucial to our natural and social environments. Some specific questions that interest me: What determines the distribution of the costs of caring for dependents between women and men, families and taxpayers, poor and rich? How does our success in caring for one another shape larger economic outcomes? How can we develop more holistic measures of success in achieving sustainable economic growth?

These are the kinds of questions I explore in my forthcoming book from the University of California Press, Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First. My past books include The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values,

Who Pays for the Kids: Gender and the Structures of Constraint, and The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems. If you look for me online, you'll get a sense of my efforts to reach a non-academic audience through blog posts, narrated slides, and short videos. For a cool introduction to my work, check out a video produced by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, entitled "What is Work?