I appreciate the thought and rigor here. And I need a Cliff notes version to understand in a way I can effectively share with others. With this understanding do we need a new metric for something we might call “social capital” and new systems and institutions built on that? With missions to nurture and grow those value-based systems? I look forward to proposals here for what transitional steps might look like.
Thank you for reading and here’s what I can offer as a cliff notes version:
The national account is a scale. In 1934 the household was set on it and zeroed, so everything a person is made of reads as nothing and everything with a price reads heavier. The state has since measured the missing work in a second set of books and left it off the one that decides policy. Every worker, voter, and customer was made by that zeroed work.
Two things make it worse than an oversight. First, what makes a person is the same map as what moves one. The needs the developmental science named seventy years ago are the levers the feed, the food, and the app are built on. Last month a New Mexico court fined Meta $942 million for misleading the public about its platforms’ safety and endangering children. The jury gave the maximum the law allows, $5,000 per violation, and the judge called the company a public nuisance, comparing the harm to children to factory pollution. Meta’s profit that quarter was $15.85 billion. The most a court could say came to five and a half days of it, the company had already booked $2.4 billion for legal costs, and its price per ad rose 12% the same quarter. That’s what a need reads as on this scale: a lever, with the fine as a line item.
Second, the ledger favors the substitute by construction. Every time a paid thing replaces an unpaid thing, the number goes up, even when the paid thing is worse. Daycare counts and the mother doesn’t. The app counts and the friend doesn’t. The harm to a child reads zero and the therapy that follows reads plus. And since a child still takes eighteen years of a body in the room, care can’t get more efficient, so it reads worse every year that everything else does. Nobody has to decide it. The number decides it.
The same instrument reads a war: the body zero, the shell plus, the rebuilding plus again. Kuznets argued that war spending should be left out of the national product and lost. The economy improving is often the sound of destruction being repaired.
On a new metric: that’s the first thing everyone reaches for, and it’s where most prior attempts died. Time banks, Japan’s care-credit system for elders, the kibbutz, the communes. A ledger that only documents care changes nothing; most people in Japan’s system say they never intend to redeem their credits.
The one case that held, Twin Oaks, held because the care credit was the only currency there was. And “social capital” keeps the word that’s the problem.
Capital scales because it carries no record of what made it. It’s a number, and a number can grow by rule without ever settling with reality, and when it does settle, the people it never counted pay. Care can’t scale because care is the making. The hour is the product, and nothing survives it to be stored, lent, or compounded.
So the first steps are subtractions. Read the second set of books into the first; the numbers exist. Stop booking life at zero. Stop the industries that read a child’s needs as a resource. Drop the single-success story; no one was made alone.
Protect proximity, because a body delivers care to a body and nothing stands in for it. Institutions come after that. I’ll write up the prior-art record as its own post. The failures teach more than the plans.
And the accounting of this work as zero produces Lindsey Clancy. Women who are told their work is valueless come to resent their own children. When their child grows up and is successful, society tells them to cut off their toxic parents. If they instead are unsuccessful, society blames their parents. Without a relationship with God backing them up, being 'just' a mother is soul crushing. Not even to mention single mothers who are caught in never ending impossibilities.
The weight you’re describing is real, and women have carried it disproportionately while being denied its value and its necessity for most of recorded history and still now.
When relationship reads only as loss, when your time and effort are treated as invisible, and when your love is used as collateral to hold you in place, as it is for a caregiver whose love for her children is leveraged against her, hate is what follows. Hate is what happens when love is denied a return. A young child cannot repay the love and investment given to them and should never be asked to. That return was owed by the society that took all of it and offers nothing back, and somewhere in that nothing, love turns.
Agreed, and nothing in the comment says otherwise. It says the child owes nothing and must never be asked to pay. The debt sits with a society that took the care and returned nothing, and that’s where the hate goes. I described where it comes from. Where it’s permitted to land is a different question, and on that one we’re saying the same thing: never the child.
I appreciate the thought and rigor here. And I need a Cliff notes version to understand in a way I can effectively share with others. With this understanding do we need a new metric for something we might call “social capital” and new systems and institutions built on that? With missions to nurture and grow those value-based systems? I look forward to proposals here for what transitional steps might look like.
Thank you for reading and here’s what I can offer as a cliff notes version:
The national account is a scale. In 1934 the household was set on it and zeroed, so everything a person is made of reads as nothing and everything with a price reads heavier. The state has since measured the missing work in a second set of books and left it off the one that decides policy. Every worker, voter, and customer was made by that zeroed work.
Two things make it worse than an oversight. First, what makes a person is the same map as what moves one. The needs the developmental science named seventy years ago are the levers the feed, the food, and the app are built on. Last month a New Mexico court fined Meta $942 million for misleading the public about its platforms’ safety and endangering children. The jury gave the maximum the law allows, $5,000 per violation, and the judge called the company a public nuisance, comparing the harm to children to factory pollution. Meta’s profit that quarter was $15.85 billion. The most a court could say came to five and a half days of it, the company had already booked $2.4 billion for legal costs, and its price per ad rose 12% the same quarter. That’s what a need reads as on this scale: a lever, with the fine as a line item.
Second, the ledger favors the substitute by construction. Every time a paid thing replaces an unpaid thing, the number goes up, even when the paid thing is worse. Daycare counts and the mother doesn’t. The app counts and the friend doesn’t. The harm to a child reads zero and the therapy that follows reads plus. And since a child still takes eighteen years of a body in the room, care can’t get more efficient, so it reads worse every year that everything else does. Nobody has to decide it. The number decides it.
The same instrument reads a war: the body zero, the shell plus, the rebuilding plus again. Kuznets argued that war spending should be left out of the national product and lost. The economy improving is often the sound of destruction being repaired.
On a new metric: that’s the first thing everyone reaches for, and it’s where most prior attempts died. Time banks, Japan’s care-credit system for elders, the kibbutz, the communes. A ledger that only documents care changes nothing; most people in Japan’s system say they never intend to redeem their credits.
The one case that held, Twin Oaks, held because the care credit was the only currency there was. And “social capital” keeps the word that’s the problem.
Capital scales because it carries no record of what made it. It’s a number, and a number can grow by rule without ever settling with reality, and when it does settle, the people it never counted pay. Care can’t scale because care is the making. The hour is the product, and nothing survives it to be stored, lent, or compounded.
So the first steps are subtractions. Read the second set of books into the first; the numbers exist. Stop booking life at zero. Stop the industries that read a child’s needs as a resource. Drop the single-success story; no one was made alone.
Protect proximity, because a body delivers care to a body and nothing stands in for it. Institutions come after that. I’ll write up the prior-art record as its own post. The failures teach more than the plans.
Quick song first. A quick one.
Are you offering or requesting a song? I’m confused
Where is the song
Than
Thanks Mom
And the accounting of this work as zero produces Lindsey Clancy. Women who are told their work is valueless come to resent their own children. When their child grows up and is successful, society tells them to cut off their toxic parents. If they instead are unsuccessful, society blames their parents. Without a relationship with God backing them up, being 'just' a mother is soul crushing. Not even to mention single mothers who are caught in never ending impossibilities.
The weight you’re describing is real, and women have carried it disproportionately while being denied its value and its necessity for most of recorded history and still now.
When relationship reads only as loss, when your time and effort are treated as invisible, and when your love is used as collateral to hold you in place, as it is for a caregiver whose love for her children is leveraged against her, hate is what follows. Hate is what happens when love is denied a return. A young child cannot repay the love and investment given to them and should never be asked to. That return was owed by the society that took all of it and offers nothing back, and somewhere in that nothing, love turns.
For starters, if you resent your children, you leave them; you don't kill them.
Agreed, and nothing in the comment says otherwise. It says the child owes nothing and must never be asked to pay. The debt sits with a society that took the care and returned nothing, and that’s where the hate goes. I described where it comes from. Where it’s permitted to land is a different question, and on that one we’re saying the same thing: never the child.