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Does human care count as infrastructure? It’s now a big debate in the U.S., following President Joe Biden’s $ 2.3 million American Jobs Plan, which aims to repair the country’s ruined roads and bridges and strengthen its supply chains, but also improve sanitation and childcare systems, if you can call the small U.S. coverage mix “system”.
Under Biden’s plan, $ 400 billion would be spent on home health care, mostly for the elderly. Another $ 25 billion would go to support daycare. Almost all Republicans and some centrist Democrats are concerned about this expanded definition of infrastructure. Should “better rebuild” involve strengthening these services? I would say yes, and then some.
For starters, health is where the jobs of the future lie. Over the next decade, home health and personal care is expected to grow faster than other job categories, according to the labor department. This is partly due to demographic aging, but also because so many other jobs are automated.
This technology-based work stoppage will be painful for some, but not intrinsically bad. In the long run, based on historical experience, technology is a net creator of employment. But even in the short term, as economists Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan argue in their book The great demographic investment, “rich countries” will need all the automation we can get in the rest of the economy in order to properly increase productivity…[and]to compensate for what will be lost by the care of the aging population ”.
Welfare jobs will be those that remain at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. But, well done, they can release more productivity at the top. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that better health outcomes it could add $ 12 billion to world GDP by 2040, largely to improve the productivity of existing workers who suffer from health problems or have welfare responsibilities.
Women, in particular, have a lot to gain from investing more in the “welfare economy.” As Jay Powell, president of the US Federal Reserve, dit recently, the United States “used to lead the world in the participation of the female workforce, a quarter of a century ago, and we no longer do. Maybe that’s it [our childcare] policies have left us behind. “
Women also took an additional success during blocking. In general, they made up a disproportionate proportion of extra child care and household chores (don’t get me started on the impact it has on mental health). They were also more likely to be fired. In addition to the $ 25 billion in Biden’s infrastructure bill to improve child care centers, yes $ 39 billion more information for childcareers in the Covid help package. In an ideal world, this will expand and improve care work and allow better-educated women to perform more productive roles.
As with the $ 100 billion earmarked for schools, these investments improve human capital. It is increasingly the only type of capital that matters, as digital businesses simply do not require as much physical capital as companies in the old economy. The United States should also allow companies to nullify investment in worker training and other investments in people, as they currently do with machinery. This is something that almost every business and labor leader I know would support.
Done right, investing more in healthcare infrastructure could fuel innovation. The White House is concerned about supply chains, in part because manufacturing in general encourages more innovation and productivity than other sectors. But as manufacturing continues to automate, it will never re-create as many jobs as before, regardless of how supply chains are organized or restored.
Could the solidarity economy fill this employment gap? Experts such as Harvard economist Gordon Hanson, who studies the interaction between labor markets and their location, say that in some places it could do so. “The areas that bounce best usually have good universities or health complexes that can function as work engines,” Hanson says.
Can it seem fantastic to imagine that a residence or child care center can be a center of innovation in the same way as a large factory or R&D complex? Still, some are already.
Think of places like the Cleveland Clinic, a nonprofit medical center that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education. The subject of a Harvard Business School case study, has become a creator of national and international employment, but also a center of cutting-edge innovation in areas such as drug and device development and medical procedures. This is largely due to the use of mass data, digital platforms and robotics, but also working cross-sectionally inside and outside the clinic.
At the very least, investing more in health and education would increase the type of social capital that characterizes successful communities. We need so much more of that right now, everywhere. Only 1.5 percent of the World Bank Concessionary Grants they are for health and only 1.9% are for education.
In both rich and poor countries, investment still focuses primarily on physical capital. It is time to recognize that, perhaps more than any other form, human capital is the infrastructure of the 21st century.
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