Can you talk to how these models then reproduce those kind of injustices around also paid care work?

Yeah, for sure.

So what we see is that still today, all over the world, without any exceptions, women are massively overrepresented in both unpaid and paid care.

So what that means is that if you are a woman, the chances are you're going to be spending a lot of your life looking after other people's bodies and minds, both for free in the home and also when you're at work.

And this means that you are, as a woman, you have a very large chance of doing work that is overlooked.

And what happens in two care work is that, in my opinion, we tend to talk about culture on one side and economics on the other, as if they are unrelated.

But what I show in the book is that it is this evil cycle where something is economically devalued, which is the case for care work, and then it becomes culturally devalued as well.

I know exactly what you're describing.

Yeah.

I think, uh, what that article kind of sparked in me was this idea of how do we measure what is value creating? And it was especially prescient to me, because just a year earlier, I had been in hospital for a whole week with a, an autoimmune illness, and the nurses I met there I think pretty obviously, I can say, saved my life.

And it became clear to me that the way that we speak about value and calculate value in politics struggles immensely with, uh, the work and the labor of taking care of people, both, uh, for a salary at hospitals-

Is it?

You hear it, you know, you know, culturally, you hear it all the time in kind of, you know, layman's, people saying it, you know, as a joke, but kind of meaning it a little.

And I think that what I describe in Deficit is that all through economic history, there has been this desire to measure value perfectly, and the way that they ca- went about doing that and ended up doing it was through prices.

So a banker making, you know, £10,000 a month is, in economic terms, more of a wealth creator or a value creator than a nurse making £3,000.

And I think that that, uh, is not aligned with how value actually works in the real economy, and it gives us a skewed image of what actually matters in an economy.