With that in mind, I propose that a third feature of caring societies is a form of government which gives ordinary people of good will the power to change unbearable conditions through political participation and collective action. (By "unbearable," I mean conditions and systems which are unhealthy, inhumane, exploitive, discriminatory, environmentally irresponsible, and/or predictably result in selective shortages of care and well-being for less advantaged groups). The United States has an exemplary form of participatory government -- at least on paper. Yet caring citizens depend on a triage approach to manage the effects of social problems in their communities -- we volunteer at soup kitchens, donate goods and food to those in need, and build homes for displaced and disenfranchised families through projects like Habitat for Humanity. To ignore the pain of those around us is unthinkable -- and even in the healthiest societies, people have urgent and chronic needs which are best met through emergency services and direct support. But in the US, we have a history of political resistance to investing in the type of social infrastructure that would improve the odds for those at risk -- which today, includes a growing number of middle-income workers and families.
It's important to know that the "ordinary people of good will" I've mentioned are not the ones who are dragging their feet. The majority of Americans want universal health care, and national surveys find that most US adults support policies guaranteeing workers paid sick days and income replacement when they take time off for family and medical needs. But despite the fact that we live in a democratic society, it's pretty clear that what most Americans think carries very little weight with decision-makers. No society can eradicate the tendency of capitalist systems to tip toward power hoarding and plutocracy, but caring societies take steps to buffer the effects of market forces in the interest of fairness and progress, and manage to regulate labor conditions and fund human services without the economy going down the drain (see: Finland and Denmark). Caring societies depend on vibrant economies (as well as effective protection from threats), but can only exist where the political commitment to economic growth and social welfare is evenly balanced.
Which winds back to the issue of public policy. In recognizing caregiving as a primary human activity, caring societies account for the fact that caring for others is time consuming; location dependent (care must be provided in the place where people who need care are situated); requires physical labor, mental planning, and investment of material resources; and cannot always be combined with competing activities. Public policies in caring societies recognize that when the time, labor, and resources available for caregiving fall below a certain level, the quality of care suffers and may fall below the level of sufficiency. (This is true in every setting where care is provided, from households and day care centers to hospitals and elder-care facilities.) Without consistent and adequate care, people who need care have a low quality of life and poor health, social, and mortality outcomes, which reinforces inequalities between groups with access to sufficient care and those who are struggling. In all societies, care and well-being gaps track along racial, class, ethnic, and gender lines, but disparities in well-being are particularly glaring in the United States compared to other industrial countries. Caring societies adopt an array of regulations, development programs, health and education policies, and social insurance strategies to narrow the divide.
Since the end of World War II, countries in Western and Northern Europe have done a much better job of closing the gap than the United States, which presently favors cultural reform over structural approaches to resolving chronic social problems (such as allocating funding to abstinence-only education and marriage promotion to reduce teen pregnancy and child poverty, or underwriting programs to educate employers about the bottom-line benefits of workplace flexibility to reduce gender disparities in employment outcomes). The reason the US lags so far behind other industrial countries in supporting working families is culturally complicated. One reason is that Americans regard caregiving as a responsibility which is properly confined to the private sphere. This makes it easier for politicians to perpetuate a kind of willful ignorance about reality of human dependency, and for economist to disown care as a trivial by-product of a voluntary transaction -- something that "just happens" when people feel love, empathy, or good will toward others, rather than a deliberate, productive effort which requires the right conditions to ensure good outcomes. Remnants of resistance to racial and gender equality -- which are more widespread today than most people imagine -- are an added factor in the family-unfriendliness of US social policy.
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