Reviews

The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values by Nancy Folbre

aegagrus's review

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3.25

Words like "clear", "intuitive", or "lucid" often lie at the upper limit of credible praise due to an economist's writing. Nancy Folbre's writing is more than just lucid. It's compelling, warm, and thoroughly hers. Folbre is also particularly good at weaving dissociated strands of information into very tight conceptual packages and models. Even if all of the facts in question are already known, the elegance with which she fits them together may be novel. 

The Invisible Heart effectively demonstrates the practical and theoretical problems which arise when we try to fit care work into a market. For instance, ingrained social norms and the "prisoner of love" effect change market participants' preferences over time. It's difficult to objectively assess the "quality" of care work, or its diffuse effects. Caring requires person-specific non-standardized knowledge. Labor power is systematically limited by institutions like the family, or by the difficulty of actions such as strikes. 

Turning to the history of welfare provision and care organization, The Invisible Heart lags somewhat. Some of the basic stories are a little too well known at this point: the inadequacies of GDP, the regressive nature of benefits, tax credits, and school funding. There are some valuable insights into the specifically gendered nature of these dynamics (e.g. issues with the ways in which child support is enforced, issues with taxing married couples' income jointly). However, it often seems as though these insights are given short shrift in favor of a more general history which is not particularly unique to this book. 

In the book's closing sections, Folbre's stances are quite explicit. Globalization, marketization, and changes in social norms have created deep inadequacies in communal sentiment and care work. Neither "patriotic protectionism", which seeks to reverse globalization, nor social conservatism which would bolster the supply of care work by increasing the degree to which women are artificially pressured to specialize in it are real solutions. You cannot just increase compensation for care labor (in ways which might trap women in those sectors), nor can you just strive towards more equitable divisions of labor (which doesn't address care work's systematic undervaluing). You have to do both. For Folbre, this means a shift towards market socialism, limited social ownership, and a careful mix of tax incentives and state investments oriented towards a more robust and equitable care sector. 

It is worth noting that this is a rather dated book at this point, some of the specifics rendered inaccurate by changes in the landscape of social services. It's also a book which is sometimes unfocused, which devotes too much time to rehashing general arguments at the expense of providing specific insights, and which is not always charitable in the models of conventional economic thinking with which it takes issue. However, The Invisible Heart is a strong resource for improving theoretical and practical understandings of care work's economic position, presents a number of useful policy insights, and is an enjoyable and accessible basis for engagement with Folbre's eminent work which has carried on from the publication of this book to the present. 

carlyrang's review

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5.0

I’ll never stop recommending “The Invisible Heart”... I recommend it to everyone but especially to all the women in my life! It was healing for me to read because I have been thinking about these ideas for years but didn’t know how to articulate them. This book made me rethink everything I thought I knew about economics and how society treats women’s work and workers.
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