Jessica Calarco — Why Women Are America’s Safety Net: The Hidden Cost of Caregiving

[00:00:00] Jessica Calarco: When I think about a social safety net, I tend to think about it not in terms of specific policies, because there’s lots of different things we could do on that front, but about what are we trying to achieve. And in that sense, what I would argue that a stronger social safety net should do is to allow everyone to live with dignity, you know, to have their basic needs met, including their needs for care.

[00:00:17] Jessica Calarco: Also, to allow everyone to have access to opportunities to ensure that when we do work hard, that we have access to opportunities that allow us. To have those chances to get ahead in society and that those aren’t unequally distributed to people on the basis of race or class or gender. And also to put in place the kinds of policies that would allow us to not only live with dignity and access opportunity, but contribute equitably and sustainably to a shared project of care.

[00:00:46] Intro: Do you think money takes up more life space than it should? On this show, we discuss with and share stories from artists, authors, entrepreneurs, and advisors about how they mindfully minimize the time and [00:01:00] energy spent thinking about money. Join your host, Jonathan DeYoe, and learn how to put money in its place and get more out of life.

[00:01:15] Jonathan DeYoe: Hey, welcome back on this episode of the Mindful Money Podcast. I’m chatting with Jessica Calarco. Jessica is a sociologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, an award-winning teacher. She’s a leading expert on inequalities in the family life and education. I wanted to have her on the podcast to discuss her book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. Portfolio Penguin 2024.

[00:01:38] Jonathan DeYoe: Jessica, welcome to the Mindful Money Podcast.

[00:01:40] Jessica Calarco: Thank you

[00:01:40] Jonathan DeYoe: so much for having me.

[00:01:42] Jonathan DeYoe: First, where do you call home? Where are you connecting from?

[00:01:45] Jessica Calarco: Yes, I’m here in Madison, Wisconsin.

[00:01:48] Jonathan DeYoe: Okay. And you’re not remote teaching living outta New York or anything like that?

[00:01:50] Jessica Calarco: No, no, no. I, I mean, I did grow up on the east coast.

[00:01:53] Jessica Calarco: I grew up in Pennsylvania and did my undergrad and graduate work there. Uh, but I’ve been in Wisconsin for the past two years, and before that I spent about a [00:02:00] decade in Indiana at the university there.

[00:02:02] Jonathan DeYoe: Oh, so you grew up in Pennsylvania? Mm-hmm. I’m just curious, what did you learn about. Money, entrepreneurship growing up.

[00:02:10] Jessica Calarco: Sure. So my parents were first generation college students themselves. They both kind of paid their own way through school and, and went to sort of local computer schools for college. My mom had me while she was in college, um, and ended up, I. Having to leave for a little while to navigate some of the challenges around having a young child and being a college student, which our society does not make particularly easy.

[00:02:31] Jessica Calarco: And so I think, you know, money and the desire to try to turn a college degree into a successful career was something that was very much a. On their minds, you know, raising a young child and trying to navigate life together. And so that was something that I think was very much part of the lessons of the household that I grew up in, was very much, you know, take advantage of the opportunities that are available to you.

[00:02:50] Jessica Calarco: And certainly the pressure to try to, to, to make something of yourself that comes with that as well. When I was a kid, my, my parents said they gave me an allowance. I could get 12 bucks a month, but I could put $2 a month [00:03:00] into savings. And I could get a return on that where I would get a 50% return on my investment if I saved it up all year before we, um, you know, went for the summer and then got to do some like fun things like go, would the arcades or go to the beach, that I could have that extra money.

[00:03:12] Jessica Calarco: I could have, not just that $24, but $48 that I could spend on vacation that I’d saved up all year from that $2 a month that I was putting into, into savings.

[00:03:22] Jonathan DeYoe: I’m curious, if you put in $6, do they still give you 50%? If you put in $12, do they give you 50%?

[00:03:27] Jessica Calarco: That’s a good question. It was only ever given to us as the option of you have to put in the $2.

[00:03:31] Jessica Calarco: I don’t know if there was a prorated option available, but that’s what, that’s what we were given as kids, so.

[00:03:36] Jonathan DeYoe: You, you were lucky. My kids have to put 50% into savings. They’re unlucky because they don’t have, they don’t have a 50% return. So,

[00:03:42] Jessica Calarco: you know,

[00:03:43] Jonathan DeYoe: tradeoffs.

[00:03:44] Jessica Calarco: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:45] Jonathan DeYoe: How does that experience translate into a lesson learned now that you’re an adult?

[00:03:50] Jessica Calarco: I think as a sociologist, I think I’m more mindful now than maybe I was as a kid of the kinds of challenges that people are up against in our society when it comes to being able to [00:04:00] save money. You know, even having the option of having enough resources. To be able to give an allowance to your kids is not something that all families are able to do, let alone, you know, keep food on the table or a roof over their heads.

[00:04:10] Jessica Calarco: And I think that, you know, is something that I’ve come to be increasingly interested in as a sociologist or, or what are the challenges that families face that might make it difficult to, to go to college, to get that degree, to get the kind of job that can provide stability for their families. And I.

[00:04:23] Jessica Calarco: Think that, you know, understanding of the kind of structural privilege that comes from, you know, being in that kind of position in society is something that I, you know, bring to my own relationship with money and to my kids, certainly in terms of the way that we talk about what we have and what we don’t have and what we can do financially and what we can’t.

[00:04:37] Jessica Calarco: And that’s, I think I’ve written in the past about how we don’t even do, we actually don’t do Santa Claus with our kids. In part because of the, the money message that it sends in terms of the way that things like the sort of myth around good kids get presents and bad kids get cold. What that can translate to in terms of perceptions of kids whose families might not be able to afford the Xbox or the kinds of gifts and how that can easily lead kids to make assumptions [00:05:00] about kids who come from less wealthy backgrounds, not being good kids in the way that those myths tend to tend to perpetuate.

[00:05:07] Jonathan DeYoe: Wow. I’ve never actually thought about that potential. Now I feel guilty about, about raising my kids with Santa Claus. I, I won’t go there. So before we look at the book, holding it together, can you tell us a little bit about the research that led to writing the book? I.

[00:05:20] Jessica Calarco: This book was not the book that I intended to write, in part because my early research had been on inequalities in education and I’d spent years kinda observing in schools following families and students and getting to know them in communities.

[00:05:32] Jessica Calarco: And I had my own two young kids in, in 2014 and 2017. And I wasn’t in a life place where I could do another ethnographic study and really embed in a community in that way. And so I was looking for a project that I. Could do both that involve more interviews as opposed to observations and that I could also get my students more involved in.

[00:05:49] Jessica Calarco: And the project that I developed at the time was a project that I thought of as sort of the best laid plans of parenthood. I was interested in how parents come to develop their ideas of the way that they want to raise their children and. Then what [00:06:00] happens when life intervenes often in these deeply unequal ways that make it hard for parents to be the kind of parent that they want to be.

[00:06:06] Jessica Calarco: And so I started with 250 pregnant women that we recruited from prenatal clinics in Indiana with a big survey about all the kinds of decisions that they planned to make for their new babies. And then we planned to follow those parents for the first two years postpartum, kind of checking in with them every six months to say, okay, what decisions did you actually make?

[00:06:23] Jessica Calarco: And let’s sit down and talk about it and see how did this play out for you? And what kinds of challenges have you faced in your lives? And so we started that project in 2018 and 2019, and so we were still in the field when the pandemic hit in 2020, and it became so apparent on the interviews that we were doing, particularly with mothers of young children at the time, how much of an impact Covid was having on.

[00:06:43] Jessica Calarco: Every aspect of their lives from, you know, childcare closures and school closures to job losses, to the kind of added burdens of, of having to make sure that, you know, grandma got her medication and neighbors got taken care of when they were sick. And so I did some pandemic recording around those kinds of, of topics, the [00:07:00] way that this work disproportionately falls to women.

[00:07:02] Jessica Calarco: And that ultimately led to this book that is aimed at understanding now how do we get here? How do we get to this point where we so often treat women? As our backstop, as our social safety net, as opposed to investing in the kinds of policies that would actually provide a more stable structure and a more equitable structure to allow that work of care of support to fall more equally along gendered lines.

[00:07:24] Jonathan DeYoe: You sort of touched on a few topics there, not vague, but, but could you talk about some of the statistics? I don’t like to go deep into statistics, but share a few highlights and sort of paint that backdrop for us.

[00:07:36] Jessica Calarco: Yeah, so women in the US do almost twice as much of the unpaid caregiving as men do, um, when it comes to taking care of children or the elderly or the sick and their families in their communities.

[00:07:45] Jessica Calarco: And they also do the vast majority of the underpaid caregiving roles in our society. They are 80 to 90 or. Cases more than 90% of the workers in fields like childcare and home healthcare, which are, you know, the backbone of our economy [00:08:00] in the sense that they provide care for those who are sick or too young to take care of themselves or who are elderly.

[00:08:05] Jessica Calarco: And yet those jobs are among the lowest paid jobs in our economy, uh, which is part of why women actually hold 70% of the lowest wage jobs in the US despite only being about a little bit less than 50% of the workforce as a whole. And so it suggests that, you know, women are, are really. Bearing the brunt, uh, both in terms of unpaid labor, the work that they’re doing at home, and in terms of when they are in the workforce, they’re disproportionately pushed into jobs that are deeply underpaid, and that especially impacts low-income women of color who are disproportionately in those kinds of underpaid caregiving jobs.

[00:08:38] Jonathan DeYoe: I wanna dig in. There’s this phrase that you’ve used, you know, other countries have social safety nets. The US has women. Why doesn’t the US have the kind of social safety net that other countries do?

[00:08:48] Jessica Calarco: Yeah, so other countries treat care as a collective responsibility, whereas in the US we expect people to take care of themselves.

[00:08:55] Jessica Calarco: And in the book, I trace this expectation back to the 1930s, essentially [00:09:00] in the wake of the Great Depression, wealthy business owners in the US didn’t want to pay for Franklin Roosevelt’s new deal. And so they started looking for ways to persuade as many Americans as possible that we could get by without the kind of social safety net that the New Deal was designed to provide.

[00:09:15] Jessica Calarco: And what they found at the time was a group of Austrian economists who were developing the theory of neoliberalism, which is essentially the idea that people and societies don’t lead social safety nets. Because if people don’t have that kind of protection, they will make better choices to keep themselves safe from risk.

[00:09:31] Jessica Calarco: Instead Now, this theory has been thoroughly debunked with data, but it became sticky. It became a sort of central idea of American politics and policymaking, in part because those same wealthy business owners set out to essentially fund a propaganda campaign. They imported those Austrian economists. To install them in high profile academic positions in the US They funded radio and television programs, things like General Electric Theater, which launched Ronald Reagan’s career and helped to spread this [00:10:00] idea that, you know, people can and should be able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

[00:10:04] Jessica Calarco: They don’t need the government to help them or protect them, you know, even in times of stress. And so this really created this American ethos that has. People skeptical of government and skeptical of the need for the kind of, you know, social safety net that many other countries take for granted. But the problem is that, you know, as much as we might like to think that we can take care of ourselves, you know, there are many in our society who can’t, the children and the sick and the elderly, and also there are plenty of us whose jobs don’t pay enough to be able to afford to take care of ourselves in those kinds of ways.

[00:10:33] Jessica Calarco: And so essentially what I show in the book is that we, we use women’s unpaid and underpaid labor. To help maintain the illusion of a DIY society, the illusion that we can get by without a social safety net, because instead of adequately funding that work or making it part of the formal system, we push it off onto women where it’s often hidden, you know, behind the closed doors of a home or you know, in a childcare center where workers are often deeply underpaid.

[00:10:58] Jessica Calarco: And where we don’t have to, you know, imagine [00:11:00] the kind of labor that’s going into this and where we can pretend that we’re all getting by on our own instead.

[00:11:05] Jonathan DeYoe: So I’m gonna ask a completely insensitive question. So we wanna look, whenever we see a problem, we wanna find the bad guy who’s doing it. And you kind of just said it’s the wealthy, the companies, how much of it is the men?

[00:11:18] Jonathan DeYoe: I.

[00:11:20] Jessica Calarco: So I talk about it in the book, this idea that this, this DIY model of society, this idea that we are supposed to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and take care of ourselves. It actually incentivizes all of us to push the work of care downstream. You know, someone more vulnerable than ourselves, and certainly for many.

[00:11:36] Jessica Calarco: Context of families. That means pushing the unpaid or underpaid work of care onto the women around them. You know, from husbands onto wives, from, you know, fathers onto mothers at the same time, because this kind of work is work that is not highly valued in our society, and if anything makes it harder to do the kind of paid work that is valued, it also.

[00:11:53] Jessica Calarco: Means that women with a little bit of privilege have an incentive to push that work onto other women who are more vulnerable as [00:12:00] well. And so this means that affluent white women often end up outsourcing things like childcare labor, things like home health, labor that they need for their early aging parents, things like house cleaning, that the work that it’s less expensive for them to, to pay someone else to do than to do themselves in terms of the opportunity costs.

[00:12:15] Jessica Calarco: For their jobs. And so they can only afford that kind of labor if it’s deeply underpaid. And in order for a, you know, college educated white woman to be able to do her job as an academic or in a business kind of setting, she often needs to rely on these other women who are underpaid for the kind of work that they are doing to take care of her kids or her home, or her aging parents.

[00:12:36] Jessica Calarco: And this creates a sort of moral bind just as it does for men. It incentivizes men to push that work onto someone else. And it does the same thing for women who are in relatively privileged positions as well. And so I think, yes, you know, there is a role for men to play, but I think we have to recognize that this isn’t just a gender problem.

[00:12:51] Jessica Calarco: This is a problem that’s baked into the structure of our society that makes care devalued labor, and that pushes that onto those who are disproportionately vulnerable, [00:13:00] whether that’s women in the family or women in society as a whole.

[00:13:03] Jonathan DeYoe: So this must take a toll, like how does this affect women long-term women in the workforce, et cetera.

[00:13:10] Jessica Calarco: Yes, very much so. I mean, certainly we see that, you know, we have higher rates of not only things like depression. I mean, certainly this takes a physical toll on women’s bodies. We see higher rates of maternal mortality and maternal morbidity. We see higher rates of poverty among women with children in the US than we see in high income countries that invest in stronger social safety nets.

[00:13:28] Jessica Calarco: We see this taking a toll in terms of women’s careers. We have lower rates of labor force participation among women, and particularly among mothers with young children compared to other countries that have invested more in things like paid family leave and universal childcare, and even things like healthcare that can create a toll for families as well.

[00:13:45] Jessica Calarco: And so I think there’s, there’s ways that this work is creating. Stress, especially for those women who are most vulnerable, but even for those who are in relatively privileged positions, show in the book how, you know, if you’re able to outsource some help with childcare or some help with elder care, or even help [00:14:00] with house cleaning, that there’s still often too much responsibility to go around in this kind of a DIY model where we all face so much stress and so much responsibility that it can take a serious toll, particularly on women’s health and wellbeing, but certainly for the men around them in some cases as well.

[00:14:15] Jonathan DeYoe: I mean, I read a lot. This could be just, I’m a guy and so the stuff that’s fed me by YouTube and everything else is directed at me. But I read a lot about how I. Uh, suicide rates among men, you know, depression among men is also sort of at an all time high. So is the cultural pressure to offload and push things downstream?

[00:14:34] Jonathan DeYoe: Is it affecting us all that way? Yeah,

[00:14:36] Jessica Calarco: absolutely. And, and I think this gets back to the idea that this DIY society, it’s such a precarious model. When we are tasked with, you know, being our own social safety nets, pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, that is an incredibly precarious position for all of us to be in.

[00:14:50] Jessica Calarco: And that kind of precarity creates tremendous stress and can create mental strain that can lead to mental health issues. And particularly for men. I think one of the challenges there is that in our society [00:15:00] we only allow gender to bend one way. We’ve told women over the course of decades. Like, you know, it’s okay to try to be a CEO.

[00:15:06] Jessica Calarco: It’s okay to want to have a career. In addition to, you know, having children and kind of being part of the community, we still only tell men that it’s acceptable to define themselves through their paid work obligations and by making as much money as possible to be that breadwinner for their families.

[00:15:20] Jessica Calarco: And so I think that creates enormous pressure on men. And it also creates feelings of competition in the sense that now as we do have women entering the workforce in larger numbers and competing for men. When it comes to positions in higher education or positions in the workforce, it can feel threatening if for men, that’s the only option available to them.

[00:15:39] Jessica Calarco: Identity wise, I talk in the book about ideal worker norms and, and this kinda gendered pressure on men to be the breadwinner, particularly in the absence of other acceptable identities like men can’t just. Be, you know, caregivers, if their wife is very successful. And if anything it can at least can’t in the sense of the way that they would be stereotyped for doing so.

[00:15:57] Jessica Calarco: And this creates a tremendous amount of pressure in the sense that our [00:16:00] society is also structured in ways that make it very difficult for men and women in in kind of. Different gender couples to make different choices that oftentimes the kinds of gender jobs that men do pay more than the kinds of gender jobs that women often fall into.

[00:16:13] Jessica Calarco: I talked to one couple, for example, where you know, he works in it and she’s a social worker and he makes $90,000 a year and she makes 30. And so when they had kids, it made sense Logistic. Ally for her to be the one to take time off and ultimately to leave her job, to stay home with the kids. You know, not because her work was any less valuable to society, but because the work that she was doing was simply paid less.

[00:16:34] Jessica Calarco: And this creates the kind of conditions where men can actually become susceptible. To oftentimes conservative messaging around gender because that message that, oh, well, she’s just happier at home, or, oh, it’s just natural for her to want to stay home makes them feel less bad. If they make those choices, you know, on financial terms to have their wife stay home, they can feel like, oh, well maybe this is just what’s best for everyone in the end.

[00:16:55] Jessica Calarco: I mean, it doesn’t have to feel like exploiting their wives. It can feel like doing what’s natural [00:17:00] instead.

[00:17:00] Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah. I’m feeling all kinds of guilt now, and so I’m gonna, I’m gonna set that aside for a second. Are you talking about Dennis? Is that Yes. Yes. When I, when I read this, I was, um, is that his real name?

[00:17:12] Jonathan DeYoe: Is he a real person? No,

[00:17:13] Jessica Calarco: he’s, he’s a real person. These are all pseudonyms though, uh, for privacy reasons.

[00:17:17] Jonathan DeYoe: Good, good. That’s, that’s good. As I was reading the way Dennis was responding to the questions, I was thinking, this guy’s really thick. He’s saying some things. I’m, I’m in Berkeley, California, like I moved from the Midwest to Berkeley, California.

[00:17:30] Jonathan DeYoe: I’ve lived here for almost 30 years, and it’s a different mentality. There’s a different structure of thinking. I’m still guilty to some of the stuff that you talk about in the book for sure, but I, I, I don’t think I’d answer the questions that way. He just sounded really like not. Even understanding that that was real.

[00:17:47] Jessica Calarco: Yeah, and I think it certainly gets at the idea that our culture is deeply siloed and that there are very different cultural expectations in different parts even of the US and that, particularly in parts of the Midwest, places like Indiana, where you know, evangelical [00:18:00] Christianity, where conservatism is much more prevalent, that these kinds of traditional gender ideas.

[00:18:04] Jessica Calarco: Run much deeper and are often much more entrenched in communities and in the way that people think and talk about gender roles. It becomes much harder, especially if that’s not the norm for people around you, to think outside the box in those kinds of gendered ways, that it can be very easy to fall into those kinds of tropes of thinking.

[00:18:20] Jessica Calarco: And I think if anything. What the research is also telling us is that for younger men, some of the sort of the podcast type messaging, the sort of media type messaging that they’re often hearing is pushing toward these more essentialist or kind of quote unquote traditional ideas around gender in ways that we’re starting to see a resurgence among younger men of more sexist attitudes, of more kind of buy-in kinds of tropes around gender and what sort of normal or natural women.

[00:18:45] Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah, and I, I think we could probably list off the top five folks on social media that, that are sort of progressing that or pushing those messages. So why aren’t men or women demanding a stronger safety net? I mean, I think that’s sort of not a fair question because we are demanding a stronger safety net.

[00:18:59] Jonathan DeYoe: We [00:19:00] see it every election cycle. We see we need more of this, we need national, you know, early childhood care, this kind of things. Why isn’t it happening?

[00:19:08] Jessica Calarco: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think there’s a couple things going on here, and part of it is that, yes, I mean, we live in a democracy, so we have to essentially vote into power.

[00:19:15] Jessica Calarco: Those kinds of politicians who would make those policies, and those are popular policies, things like universal childcare, things like paid family leave. But at the same time, and as I show in the book, that those same kinda billionaires and big corporations that helped to push us toward this DIY model in the first place.

[00:19:29] Jessica Calarco: Are often behind selling a set of myths that help to dilute us into believing that we can get by without this kind of stronger social safety net. And those same myths also operate to divide us not only by gender, but also by race and class and politics, in ways that persuade as many Americans as possible that even if they would benefit personally from a stronger social safety net, that maybe they should be skeptical of having one, because it might erode some of the.

[00:19:54] Jessica Calarco: Moral advantage or status advantage that they have over people who are a little bit worse off [00:20:00] than they are. And I, I show this in part by talking about, essentially what sociologists often talk about is the myth of meritocracy, which is anyone who works hard enough and is motivated enough should be able to get ahead in our society.

[00:20:11] Jessica Calarco: And. What the research shows on that front is that belief in this idea is ironically much more common in more unequal countries. So it’s much more prevalent in the US than in many other know high income countries. In part because it gives people a psychological way to make sense of why our society is as unequal as it is.

[00:20:29] Jessica Calarco: That’s part of the reason, but part of it is also that that myth of meritocracy for people who are relatively privileged, it. Allows them to feel secure in their privilege that, oh, I must have done something great, you know, to deserve the kind of economic advantages that I have. And so they don’t have to feel guilty about it or feel like they should maybe pay more in taxes to fund the kind of support systems that would make it more possible for everyone else to do well as well.

[00:20:51] Jessica Calarco: But even for people who are lower down on that socioeconomic ladder, that myth of meritocracy, that idea that, you know, if you just work hard, you can be successful. [00:21:00] It gives them hope, and it also gives them a sense of moral superiority over people who are just a little bit worse off than they are. I tell the story of this woman I.

[00:21:08] Jessica Calarco: Who I call April, who’s a a white evangelical Christian mom who is in a relatively low income situation. She’s a stay at home mom, and her husband is a pastor at their church and makes about $30,000 a year, and yet she’s very bought into this idea of meritocracy and very much believes that the stability that she has in her family, that the fact that they can get by on a relatively low income is because of their faith and their good choices.

[00:21:31] Jessica Calarco: And she even goes so far as to stereotype and to stigmatize mothers who she perceives as making you know, bad choices. What she talks about is hiring babysitters or going out and getting your nails done, and she sees this as well. They must just be making bad choices. If you’re reliant on the government for support, it must be because you’re not trying hard to ask.

[00:21:47] Jessica Calarco: And so that kind of oftentimes racialized stigma around. Things like use of welfare programs or other types of government social safety net programs is really deeply rooted in this kind of myth of meritocracy and allows even [00:22:00] people like April who would benefit from universal childcare, from a child tax credit, from the Universal paid family leave, she would benefit from those kinds of programs.

[00:22:08] Jessica Calarco: And yet she opposes all of them in part because you know, that opposition allows her to feel as if she’s somehow better than the people who are able to, you know, access the kinds of meager social safety net programs that we currently have.

[00:22:21] Jonathan DeYoe: I often talk about the source of my success being the messages I got as a kid.

[00:22:28] Jonathan DeYoe: I grew up pretty poor. And the messages I got a kid were the message you’re talking about. Work hard, work really hard. Work harder than anybody else. Stay long hours. Offer to do the work for free to get the job, work, work, work, work, work, and you will succeed. I did that. I came in at 6:00 AM I left at I.

[00:22:45] Jonathan DeYoe: 8:00 PM six days a week for four years. In the beginning of my career, I was told by my managers at the time it would do it. I was told, I am, and I did it, and it happened. I realized that’s an anecdote, that it’s not a statistic, and I, I, I get that, [00:23:00] but I know lots of those anecdotes and so. There is some function for meritocracy.

[00:23:06] Jonathan DeYoe: It’s not an entire myth.

[00:23:07] Jessica Calarco: Yeah. So I think so, absolutely. Yes. There is room for hard work and success is almost never possible without it. Right. But I think a difference between what is necessary and what is sufficient in the sense that oftentimes hard work is often a necessary condition. You know, what we see as success in our society, but whether or not that hard work.

[00:23:27] Jessica Calarco: On its own is what can get us there, is the question that remains open. And that’s what I would argue is what prevents us from being a true meritocracy. You know, even for people from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds, there’s luck that happens along the way. And certainly there’s plenty of people who do work incredibly hard.

[00:23:42] Jessica Calarco: I mean, research shows that some of the people who work the longest hours in our society are those with the lowest incomes. And so I think. Just presuming that hard work alone can get us to, or motivation alone can get us to success is where we run into trouble. That it’s not that hard work doesn’t matter, but that if we treat it as a guarantee, that’s when we can start to [00:24:00] kind of tip over from that myth into stereotypes and some of the blame that can lead to, you know, opposition to things like a stronger safety net.

[00:24:07] Jonathan DeYoe: Well said. I’ve had many podcast guests and, and many of them speak the way you speak and I ask that same question or roughly similar question and I always get put in my place in, in the right way. I appreciate that very much. What are the elements of a more appropriate social safety net that we might be able to do here?

[00:24:24] Jonathan DeYoe: I don’t think we’re gonna do what some of the things Northern Europe does. What could we do?

[00:24:28] Jessica Calarco: Yeah, I mean, I think when, when I think about a social safety net, I, I tend to think about it not in terms of specific policies because there’s lots of different things we could do on that front, but about what are we trying to achieve.

[00:24:37] Jessica Calarco: And in that sense, what I would argue that a stronger social safety net should do is to allow everyone to live with dignity. You know, to have their basic needs met, including their needs for care. Also, to allow everyone to have access to opportunities to ensure that when we do work hard, that we have access to opportunities that allow us to have those chances to get ahead in society and that those aren’t unequally distributed to people on the basis of race or [00:25:00] class or gender.

[00:25:01] Jessica Calarco: And also to put in place the kinds of policies that would allow us. To not only live with dignity and access opportunity, but contribute equitably and sustainably to a shared project of care. And essentially, if the first two are designed to allow people to participate in the paid economy, then this third piece is about preventing the paid economy from demanding too much of our time and energy and making it so that we don’t have the incentive or that the, you know, the resources or the.

[00:25:28] Jessica Calarco: The ability to be present in our communities, to be present in our families, to be present for the people around us. And so this is where things like, you know, not only paid family leave or paid time off come in, but also potentially things like four day work weeks or flexible work time, or guaranteed vacation time for workers where people have time to recharge, time to spend with their families, expectations around how many hours.

[00:25:50] Jessica Calarco: I know there’s some places like France have put in place restrictions around the number of paid work hours that you can do every week and have had. Success in terms of not only reducing the burden that [00:26:00] paid work places on people’s lives, but in creating a more equitable sharing of caregiving responsibilities.

[00:26:05] Jessica Calarco: You know, men and women in France not only do less unpaid caregiving than men and women in the US do, but do it more equally in the sense that there’s it, it’s not That situation of giving people more time at home leads to. More unpaid labor or to, you know, women just doing more, or even to men doing more than men in the US do.

[00:26:22] Jessica Calarco: It actually helps everyone because it’s the kind of situation where people can get support with meeting the kinds of care responsibilities that they have for their families and their loved ones, and they also have more time and energy to share those responsibilities equally and still do things like sleep and exercise and have fun time for themselves.

[00:26:39] Jonathan DeYoe: It sounds a little fantastical, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it when you hear yourself say it or it sound

[00:26:44] Jessica Calarco: like, and, and the irony is that like there are plenty of other places around the world that have figured this out already. It sounds fantastical, given the US context that we are currently in and given, you know, almost a century of this kind of DIY model of society that we’ve become so used to this idea that we’re not supposed to [00:27:00] have good things, that we’re supposed to be able to do it all on our own and not so.

[00:27:03] Jessica Calarco: Post to ask anyone else for help that the idea of, of needing and wanting help can seem fantastical in the process.

[00:27:09] Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah, I, I’m curious when somebody throws something at you, like, um, well, the average wage is higher than it’s ever been, and the median income is higher than it’s ever been. What do you do with that?

[00:27:20] Jonathan DeYoe: ’cause the numbers. Tell us a different story sometimes.

[00:27:24] Jessica Calarco: Yeah, certainly mean, I think average is tricky in the sense that we have a deeply unequal and stratified kind of a model. Median wage is a little, a little bit of a better tell in that sense. Uh, but certainly I think it’s often ignoring that the deep inequalities that exist within our economic system.

[00:27:37] Jessica Calarco: I mean, the fact that we still have states where the federal minimum wage is the minimum wage, including places like Indiana where a lot of the work in the book was done. You know, that’s the work that is. By the most vulnerable in our society. Only women, but people of color. In terms of, you know, the, the disproportionate impact there, what’s also ignored in the system in those kinds of discussions of wages alone are the deeply entrenched wealth inequalities that we have in the US that kind of swamp [00:28:00] the impact of income when it comes to the ability of people who have generational wealth to buy a home, to be able to go to college.

[00:28:06] Jessica Calarco: You know that those are creating increasing inequalities that are making it difficult even for workers with relatively high incomes. To be able to think about having kids themselves or think about buying a house someday. You know, some of the couples that we talked to for our research essentially said like, look, I, I have $300,000 in student loan debt because I not only went to college but got this master’s degree that I thought I needed to get this job.

[00:28:28] Jessica Calarco: And yet now I’m not sure, you know, I’ve had this one kid, but I don’t think I could afford childcare for a second kid, even though I make six figures. And so I think this is a situation where without, you know, substantial wealth to fall back on and with the kinds of debts that we expect people to take on in our current society, you know, income alone is often not enough, even for those who are relatively privileged.

[00:28:47] Jonathan DeYoe: So is it the billionaires and the big corporations that are standing in the way? And then why and how.

[00:28:54] Jessica Calarco: So in the book, I do what’s, what I, when I talk about is sort of a postmortem on build back better because this is such a strong case study [00:29:00] of what happens when money is allowed to get into politics in ways that influence outcomes and influence the kind of social safety net that we have.

[00:29:07] Jessica Calarco: And, and certainly I think we have to go back to even before the pandemic to think about things like the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which essentially allows, mm-hmm. And wealthy people to dump as much money into politics as they want, and to have basically untold influence. That doesn’t mean though, that, you know, that was 2010, certainly long before that, billionaires and big corporations have had huge sway over politics.

[00:29:29] Jessica Calarco: Betsy DeVos, the former Secretary of Education under President Trump in his first term, wrote this op-ed in 1997, where she said like, look, I’ve been accused of trying to essentially sway politics with all the money that I’m donating. And I used to push back against that, but now I’m just going to concede the point.

[00:29:42] Jessica Calarco: And that’s essentially what the research shows us. Is that even regardless of how it often gets talked about in the media, billionaires disproportionately skew conservative and conservative politicians disproportionately skew toward opposition to stronger social safety net programs. In part because these programs, as [00:30:00] we talked about with, you know, the New Deal, I.

[00:30:02] Jessica Calarco: The tax burden of a stronger social safety net to make it viable often means disproportionate resources coming from the most privileged in our society, from wealthy business owners, you know, wealthy people who pay their money through stocks and investments and all the things. And so what this means is that, you know, things like Citizens United mean that they can use the wealth that they have as leverage to prevent policy makers from putting into place the kinds of policies that would.

[00:30:27] Jessica Calarco: Build a stronger social safety net and increase their tax burden in the process. And that’s part of the why. The other piece of the why is that essentially there is a benefit to employers in our society to have people who are willing to take whatever job they can get, no matter how terrible or underpaid.

[00:30:45] Jessica Calarco: And I show in the book that oftentimes. That’s how we fill jobs, like childcare jobs or like home healthcare jobs, is by trapping women in so much precarity, particularly mothers with young children, that they have no choice but to settle for a less than ideal job or a less than ideal partner [00:31:00] in some cases.

[00:31:00] Jessica Calarco: And so this often happens when I. You know, we don’t have abortion protections. For example, I tell the story of one young woman who never actually wanted to be a mother herself, but who became pregnant in college unexpectedly. And her parents who are conservative Christians, persuaded her to keep the baby.

[00:31:16] Jessica Calarco: But they figured out once the baby was born that they couldn’t afford both college and childcare. And so she ended up dropping out of college and ended up. Eventually the best job she could find was a job in childcare. And even when she got promoted to assistant director of the center, she was still only making $25,000 a year.

[00:31:31] Jessica Calarco: And so, you know, this kind of path of precarity is how we push people, keeping people trapped in precarity as part of how we make the system viable, how we keep wages low in fields like not only healthcare and home healthcare. Care and, and childcare, but also things like food service and retail sales, that these are jobs that are, you know, overwhelmingly underpaid and that require exploited workers who essentially don’t have many options job wise.

[00:31:53] Jessica Calarco: And so I think there’s an interest in keeping the social safety net small and meer and that that, you know, that young mother, if we had things like a [00:32:00] strong welfare system that didn’t force her to find paid work, she might have been able to take care of her son on her own for a while and eventually finish college and go back and find a better job.

[00:32:08] Jessica Calarco: She wanted to be a nurse. And yet she was pushed into this kind of situation because the safety net that we do provide, you know, is far too mer instead. And so I think we have to think about the incentive structures that are built in so that this is how, you know, billionaires and big corporations often leverage their wealth to, to prevent those kinds of policies, both for the tax benefits they’ll get, and also to maintain this highly precarious workforce that can be pushed into or pulled out of jobs or, or forced to fill the jobs in our economy that very few people want to provide.

[00:32:36] Jonathan DeYoe: So how do they, I mean, what is the process that a company or a billionaire enhances the system that pushes people into the lowest paid jobs? I’ve never heard somebody talk about that as an intentional thing. Like we really need people to fill those low end jobs. I. So it’s How does it work?

[00:32:53] Jessica Calarco: So certainly.

[00:32:54] Jessica Calarco: So when President Biden came into office, one of his proposals under the Build Back better format was to raise minimum wages, [00:33:00] was to push for a national minimum wage of $15 an hour. And certainly some places already have that in place, but there’s big swaths of the country that do not. And that was one of the first components of the bill that was attacked and stripped away and ultimately not passed as any.

[00:33:13] Jessica Calarco: Part of the, you know, the various acts that went through Congress in the wake of build back better. And that was in large part because the same billionaires of big corporations that had donated large sums of money to Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 and later in, in 2020, were also dumping large amounts of money into Republican Congress.

[00:33:31] Jessica Calarco: People who voted against, you know, those bills, and also into the coffers of people like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema, uh, who were, you know. Then Democrats, now independents, who ultimately were persuaded to kill the bill and to prevent things like, you know, the $15 minimum wage. Things like universal childcare, things like universal paid family leave, that those were all initially stripped out of the bill and then ultimately those bills, the American Families Plan could have died on the Senate floor because it couldn’t get the votes that it needed.

[00:33:58] Jessica Calarco: Those same billionaires and big [00:34:00] corporations were the donors behind, you know, all of those votes. And some of the analyses that I show in the book Trace how the money that was. To put into cinema and manchin’s campaigns kinda ahead of the election and in the wake of those build back better discussions likely played a very strong role in persuading them to vote against those kinds of provisions and to keep them from ever being enacted.

[00:34:18] Jessica Calarco: And it’s those provisions, it’s not, not just the minimum wage laws, but certainly also things. Like the lack of paid family leave and the lack of universal childcare that make it very difficult for women to hold out for good jobs, and that often either first force them out of the workforce or to take whatever kinds of low paid jobs they can get.

[00:34:35] Jessica Calarco: And so it’s hard to find evidence of corporations explicitly saying, we need people trapped in, in low age situations. But when they’re voting against childcare, when they’re voting against paid family leave, when they’re voting against raising the minimum wages, that’s essentially what they’re doing is creating a, a precarious workforce that has, you know, very little choice about what kinds of jobs they take.

[00:34:52] Jonathan DeYoe: The intention is to maintain low cost. It’s not, we wanna push people in the crappy jobs. It’s, it’s, we want the lowest cost possible. Right. That’s the Okay. That makes, that makes sense. [00:35:00]

[00:35:00] Jessica Calarco: Yeah. And for most jobs, cost is labor. And so I think that’s where comes in a sense that oftentimes, you know, maximizing profits means keeping labor costs as low as possible, which means forcing people to take the low wages they can get, come.

[00:35:12] Jonathan DeYoe: Yeah, and this, this is a possibly a different avenue that would, would go down and probably talk for another hour on this. But at the same time, small business in the United States is having a difficult time competing with Amazon. And so, so the small restaurant, your local retail stores, their profit margins are like two, 3%.

[00:35:30] Jonathan DeYoe: They’re very, very low. And if you go from seven 50 to $50 an hour for their most expensive, you know, line item, you lose half of those small businesses. And that means more power to Facebook and more power to the marketplace on Google and more power to Amazon and more power to the big, big, big companies.

[00:35:49] Jonathan DeYoe: How do you sort of navigate that? How do you thread

[00:35:51] Jessica Calarco: that needle? And this is where it can’t just be one off policies in the sense that just working the minimum wage alone would absolutely tank small businesses. This is where we also [00:36:00] need things like universal healthcare. Healthcare costs are one of the biggest costs.

[00:36:03] Jessica Calarco: Yeah. You know, employers, you know, regardless of their size. And so this is a place where if you offload that responsibility, if you distribute the costs of that in a more equitable way, you know, we could not only reduce costs overall by virtue of the fact. That our current system directs so much of the cost that we pay for healthcare toward profits, uh, for shareholders, and not toward actually improving people’s health.

[00:36:23] Jessica Calarco: You know, that there’s lots of ways that we could restructure the system to reduce the burden on employers, reduce the burden on employees, and create better health outcomes in the end. You know, that’s the kind of policy that would help to level the playing field and make it easier for those same employers to be able to afford to pay more for labor because they don’t have to pay as much for things like benefits, costs.

[00:36:42] Jessica Calarco: When it comes to healthcare, and certainly the same thing for childcare right now, many companies, you know, are struggling to find good workers because we are in such a childcare shortage and such a childcare crisis in this country. And so if employers don’t have to be the ones to help their employees navigate those challenges, if they can trust that there is a solid [00:37:00] system.

[00:37:00] Jessica Calarco: With childcare that families can rely on, then they can, you know, be able to better support their workers and not have to factor that into the cost that they’re paying as well. And so I think there’s lots of ways that strengthening the social safety net that is publicly provided can help to ease the burden on employers and, and certainly make life better for small businesses too.

[00:37:18] Jonathan DeYoe: It’s seems very, very dark. What, what gives you hope?

[00:37:22] Jessica Calarco: What gives you

[00:37:23] Jonathan DeYoe: hope?

[00:37:24] Jessica Calarco: I mean, I think what gives me hope is that. The tenacity that people are willing to bring to caring for themselves and their loved ones in the sense that they care for as much as it is devalued in our society, is something that we still clinging to, and it is still something that links all of us together in ways that could be the basis of solidarity and could be the thing that that unites us and helps us to, you know, reject.

[00:37:50] Jessica Calarco: Those myths that divide us and dilute us. And the thing that we rally around to say, look, all of us will need care at some points in our lives, and almost all of us will [00:38:00] care for other people too. And so this is something that if we can see the value of and kind of use that shared identity as kinda participants in this shared project of care, you know, that gives me hope that this is a place where we can find solidarity and, and, and build the possibility of conversations for what a better future look like.

[00:38:17] Jonathan DeYoe: All right. That’s helpful. That’s a good, that’s a good way to, that’s a good way to bring it towards more of a close wave. Your magic wand. What’s the one policy that if you could say, let’s do this policy. This is the policy that have the biggest bang, and then this a secondary question is, what’s something that we’re doing right now that you should, we should stop doing?

[00:38:33] Jonathan DeYoe: So one thing to add, one thing to take away.

[00:38:36] Jessica Calarco: Oh gosh. So much of this is treating this as one-off policy solutions oftentimes just pushes the burden somewhere else. I mean, I think, you know, it’s hard to choose between, say, childcare and healthcare in the sense that both of those are such deep needs in our society.

[00:38:48] Jessica Calarco: I, if I could sort of wave a bigger magic wand and just say deeper investments in care. You know, treating care policies that treat care as a collective responsibility as opposed to an individual responsibility. And if that could include. [00:39:00] Healthcare, if that could include childcare, if that could include elder care, a set of policies that treat care as a collective responsibility would go a long way toward alleviating the inequalities that we have in our society and and improving health outcomes and wellbeing outcomes as well.

[00:39:13] Jessica Calarco: In terms of things to take away, I think what I would take away here is the means tested model of our existing social welfare programs in the sense that oftentimes the way that we do run. Social welfare programs, things like welfare, things like food stamps, things like Medicaid. We say that you have to have, you know, a very, very low income.

[00:39:30] Jessica Calarco: You have to be basically on the verge of homelessness or on the verge of not being able to have enough to eat in order to qualify for these kinds of programs. And in part because of that, we also, you know, wrap those programs in things like paid work requirements, um, you know, for women who are receiving welfare benefits, for example.

[00:39:45] Jessica Calarco: You know, this sounds good in theory. Like, you know, we should get people back to work as soon. The challenge with that is that it perpetuates the stigma around these kinds of programs. It creates this perception that, you know, people who are in this group know that if you need this kind of support, that you must not [00:40:00] be working hard enough that you know there’s something wrong with you, that you haven’t just kind of pulled yourselves up by your own bootstraps.

[00:40:04] Jessica Calarco: And so I think the more that we can move away from a sort of means tested model and toward a more universal model, things like universal child tax credits. Things like universal healthcare, universal childcare, uh, universal paid family leave, that it strips away this notion of having to prove that you deserve dignity and means that the kind of, you know, support that we all need to get by in our lives is something that we should be able to take for granted for all.

[00:40:28] Jonathan DeYoe: Beautiful. Just always. Before we close, I like to ask a couple go back to personal things. So what was the last thing you changed your mind about?

[00:40:36] Jessica Calarco: Oh, that’s a good question. Um, the last thing that I changed my mind about. It’s probably whether or not to go into the office today. It’s snowing here in Madison, and I was, I was, um, I’m down in my basement, um, in our guest room, in part because this is the, the quietest place where I could do a podcast recording.

[00:40:50] Jessica Calarco: My husband also works from home. Um, I thought about going into my office on campus. I was like, God, we’re gonna get two inches of snow today. I hate driving in the snow, so I’m just gonna hunker down in the basement. I’m literally sitting in the sleeping bag because it’s so cold in [00:41:00] my basement right now.

[00:41:00] Jessica Calarco: It’s 20 degrees outside, so can’t see my sleeping bag, but that, that’s what I’m sitting in to stay warm in the basement. So that’s the last thing I changed my mind about.

[00:41:08] Jonathan DeYoe: That’s, I love it. It’s very immediate. It’s just actually what, it’s, you know, what’s going on. It’s, it’s like top of mind. I love it. So is there anything people don’t know about you that you really want them to know?

[00:41:16] Jonathan DeYoe: I.

[00:41:17] Jessica Calarco: That’s a good question. I mean, I think I talk to people who are like, oh, you seem to have it together when you’re doing all this stuff. And, and I think, you know, acknowledging that there is a great deal of support that I have in doing the work that I do in terms of the research that I do, in terms of the teaching that I do.

[00:41:31] Jessica Calarco: And very lucky to have a partner who is very heavily involved with our kids, with our, you know, family life, with our home responsibilities. And certainly have benefited tremendously from the help of many other women as well in terms of. You know, childcare providers and people who’ve helped me in, in various parts of my life.

[00:41:46] Jessica Calarco: And so thinking about acknowledging the privilege on that front and saying that, look, this kind of work is not possible without that support. And certainly that my hope is that we can have a society where that work is more sustainable for all of us, but it’s not necessarily easy day to day [00:42:00] anyway.

[00:42:01] Jonathan DeYoe: Thanks, Jessica. How do people find you, find your research, connect with you, et cetera?

[00:42:05] Jessica Calarco: Sure. So my website is jessica calarco.com and I’m, I’m also on various social media platforms at the same handle. Um.

[00:42:11] Jonathan DeYoe: Great. I’ll make sure all that stuff in the show notes. I just wanna say thank you so much for coming on. It’s been a great conversation. I’ve learned, I learned a great deal. Appreciate it.

[00:42:17] Jessica Calarco: And thank you for, for reading the book and, and for inviting me. This is a really, a lovely and thoughtful conversation. Thank you.

[00:42:22] Jonathan DeYoe: Thank you.

[00:42:27] Intro: Thanks for listening. Full show notes for each episode, which includes a summary key takeaways, quotes, and any resources mentioned are available at Mindful Money. Be sure to follow and subscribe wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, and if you’re enjoying the content and getting value from these episodes, please leave us a rating and review at ratethispodcast.com/mindfulmoney. We’ll be sure to read those out on future [00:43:00] episodes.