The Care Economy with Ai-jen Poo (2023)

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Given the Labor Day holiday, we're republishing one of our favorite episodes. From the original description: Every day in the United States, 10,000 people turn 65, according to the UN Population Division. We are about to have the largest older population ever. At the same time, nearly 4 million babies are born every year, leaving many Americans juggling caring for young children and aging parents. Caregiving is often cast as nonproductive labor, despite the incredible mental, emotional and physical toll it can take. It’s increasingly clear that more resources are urgently needed to support caregivers. How can we rethink our social and economic policies to ensure that more people can age with dignity? Ai-jen Poo is president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and executive director of Caring Across Generations. She is also author of the 2015 book “The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.” She joins WITHpod to discuss her personal experiences that led her to be an activist, the need for more infrastructure to support caring for aging populations, the care economy and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think the problem here is that we've been taught that care is an individual personal
0:08.0	responsibility and if you can't figure it out, it's your failure, it's your fault.
0:14.8	You didn't save, you didn't buy the long-term care insurance, you're a bad parent, you
0:19.3	don't have the right job.
0:21.0	And actually, this is a collective social need we have as a society.
0:27.9	Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
0:34.2	Well, most of the people that listen to this podcast know because I do talk about my family
0:44.3	a lot.
0:45.3	Kate and I have three kids, 11, 9 and 5 and Kate, I talk about it a lot because she's
0:52.7	the best.
0:53.7	Kate is a love professor and she hosts a podcast and she also writes in your times and
0:56.9	she does a million different things and she's like the most productive human being I've
0:59.9	ever encountered in my life.
1:01.4	And I host all of them with Chris Hayes, a weeknight at MSNBC and I had this podcast and I
1:05.8	do some other things on Brian McGill Book.
1:07.5	People are like sometimes like, well, how do you do all that?
1:09.8	And the answer is we are lucky enough to make enough money that we can get, you know,
1:16.8	we can hire amazing people to provide childcare in the times when we can't be around our kids.
1:23.1	That's, I mean, that's the number one answer to that.
1:25.8	We also live in a city where my parents live.
1:28.5	So we have grandparents as well.
1:31.3	They come down like once a week or so.
	...

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