The Hidden Economics of Food - Part 4: The Invisible Economy

The Flavor You Can’t Name

Anchovies are the secret ingredient in dishes that don’t taste like anchovies.

Caesar salad dressing contains anchovies, though most people would deny it tastes “fishy.” Worcestershire sauce is built on fermented anchovies. Many pasta sauces and stews include a small amount of anchovy—dissolved into the sauce until unidentifiable.

The anchovies provide umami: that savory depth that makes food satisfying without announcing its presence. You notice when it’s missing, even if you can’t say what’s gone.

Care work in the economy is similar. Invisible, unacknowledged, but essential to everything else functioning.

What GDP Doesn’t See

Gross Domestic Product measures the market value of goods and services produced. It’s the primary way we assess economic success.

But GDP has a blind spot: it only counts what’s bought and sold.

Consider two scenarios:

Scenario A: A parent stays home to raise children, cook meals, clean the house, and care for aging grandparents.

Scenario B: That parent works full-time, paying for childcare, meal delivery, house cleaning, and elder care.

In Scenario B, GDP is much higher—all those services are now market transactions. In Scenario A, the same work is done, but it’s invisible to economic statistics.

This isn’t a technical problem. It’s a choice about what counts.

The Numbers We Don’t Count

When economists do try to quantify unpaid care work, the numbers are staggering:

Global estimate: Unpaid care work is worth $10-13 trillion annually—about 10-15% of global GDP.

Time spent: Women globally do 76% of unpaid care work, spending 4.5 hours daily on average compared to men’s 1.5 hours.

Value in the US: If counted at market rates, American women’s unpaid domestic work would equal roughly $1.5 trillion annually.

This is the anchovy in the economic sauce—essential but unacknowledged.

Why Care Disappeared

The invisibility of care work has a history.

In pre-industrial economies, household production was obviously productive. Families made their own clothes, preserved their own food, built their own houses. “Women’s work” produced measurable, essential goods.

Industrialization moved production outside the home. Factories made clothes. Shops sold food. Work became what you did for wages somewhere else.

Domestic labor became “not work.” Caring for children became a natural female function rather than labor. The ideology of “separate spheres” cast the home as outside the economy—a realm of love, not labor.

This was always fiction. The “home” never stopped being a site of production. It just became production that capitalism didn’t want to pay for.

The Care Crisis

Several trends are colliding:

Aging Populations

In rich countries, populations are aging rapidly. More elderly people need care. Fewer young people are available to provide it. Who will do this work?

Women in the Workforce

Women’s labor force participation increased dramatically over the 20th century. But the care work didn’t disappear—it got squeezed, outsourced (often to poorer women), or simply didn’t get done.

The Care Penalty

Women who do care work—whether paid or unpaid—pay an economic price:

• Mothers earn less than childless women (the “motherhood penalty”)

• Care workers are underpaid relative to jobs requiring similar skills

• Career interruptions for caregiving create lifetime earnings gaps

The market systematically undervalues care, and women disproportionately bear that cost.

Decline of Extended Families

When multiple generations lived together, care work was distributed across more people. Nuclear families—or single-parent families—concentrate care burden on fewer shoulders.

Why Care Is Undervalued

Several factors combine to keep care work cheap or unpaid:

Love Is Supposed to Be Free

We associate care with love and family. Paying for care seems to commodify sacred relationships. This ideology makes it harder to demand fair compensation for care work.

“Anyone” Can Do It

Care work is seen as unskilled—just “what women do naturally.” This ignores the actual skills involved: emotional labor, medical knowledge, logistics, teaching, and more.

The Workers Lack Power

Care workers are disproportionately women, immigrants, and racial minorities. They often lack bargaining power. Care recipients can’t easily refuse to be cared for. Care workers can’t easily strike—who would care for the children or elderly?

Market Failures

Care has unusual economic characteristics:

• You can’t know the quality until it’s done

• The recipients (infants, dementia patients) can’t evaluate it

• Trust relationships matter more than price signals

• Underproviding care has massive negative externalities

Markets handle these badly. But we’ve organized care through markets anyway.

The Infrastructure Problem

Care work is infrastructure—like roads and electricity. It enables all other economic activity.

Without someone raising children, there will be no future workers. Without someone caring for the sick, workers won’t recover. Without someone feeding and clothing workers, they can’t show up.

But unlike roads and electricity, we don’t treat care as public infrastructure requiring public investment. We treat it as private responsibility—primarily women’s responsibility.

This is like expecting each business to build its own roads. Some could. Most couldn’t. And the overall system would work much worse.

Counting Care

What would change if we measured care work?

GDP Would Rise

If unpaid care were counted, GDP would increase substantially—10-15% by most estimates. This wouldn’t make anyone richer in real terms, but it would change our picture of the economy.

Recessions Would Look Different

During economic downturns, paid work declines but unpaid care often increases (as families substitute away from purchased services). Our current statistics miss this.

Growth Would Look Different

“Economic development” that pushes women into low-paid work while their care work goes undone or gets dumped on other women isn’t as successful as GDP suggests.

Policy Would Shift

If we measured the care economy, we might invest in it: universal childcare, elder care support, family leave policies. Currently, these are “spending.” They might be reframed as infrastructure.

Care as Economic Strategy

Some countries have made care investment a development strategy.

Nordic countries provide universal childcare and generous parental leave. Women’s labor force participation is high, and so is fertility—because the state shares the care burden.

Japan and South Korea, despite wealth, have low fertility and limited care support. Women face a stark choice between career and family. Many choose career. Population decline follows.

The care economy can be a source of employment. As aging populations need more care, care work will grow. Countries that organize this well will thrive. Countries that hope families (meaning women) will handle it for free will struggle.

The Anchovy’s Lesson

Anchovies don’t need credit. They dissolve into the sauce, providing flavor without recognition.

But care workers aren’t anchovies. They’re humans whose labor is essential but invisible. Whose economic contribution is massive but unmeasured. Whose skills are sophisticated but undervalued.

The economic system that ignores care work isn’t describing reality—it’s choosing what to notice. And that choice has consequences.

When care is invisible:

• Women’s contributions are systematically undervalued

• Care workers are underpaid

• Care crises are not recognized until they’re severe

• Policy neglects the infrastructure of human thriving

We can choose differently. The first step is seeing what’s already there—like the anchovy flavor you suddenly recognize once someone tells you it’s in the sauce.