Julie Nelson makes what I see as a very good point about:

Elephants in the Room | TPMCafe: the present and coming crisis in care. Mainstream economics assumes that people are autonomous agents. Yet everyone is only one car accident, or a few decades (in one direction or the other) removed from being a dependent patient, child, or frail elderly person. Traditionally, women were expected to take care of all these “messy” lives, as (low-status, and low-paid or unpaid) nurses, mothers, and daughters. Health care in the U.S. is a joke, unless you have a lot of money (or access to the kind of health insurance enjoyed by tenured economists). Hospitals continually complain of “nursing shortages” and understaffing puts patients in danger. With an aging population, these issues are going to get worse, not better.

Meanwhile, child care quality is nowhere near what it should be, and lack of affordability leaves many children outright dangerous (non)care, and parents frazzled. Some people in this world--notably prime-age men with money, and wives and sisters to do family care--can pretend for a while that they are autonomous. It’s time for some effort to be put in on studying the economic lives of those who aren’t...

What head of what $30 billion organization said this about "disparate impact" a couple of years ago?:

Twenty or twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women... in this field. Now the people... when that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old. If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female, twenty or twenty-five years ago. And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to. And that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same conversation in almost any high-powered profession.

What does one make of that? I think it is hard--and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively--to say that there are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect--and this is harder to measure--but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women.

That's not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe....

Another way to put the point is to say: What fraction of young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don't want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week? What fraction of young men make a decision that they're unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week? And to observe what the difference is. And that has got to be a large part of what is observed.

Now that begs entirely the normative question... is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity?... [T]hose are all questions that I want to come back to. But it seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that something of the sort that I am describing has to be of significant importance...