What does care mean? who exactly is paying for the Global Financial Crisis in term of care?

Valuing care and care work does not simply mean attributing care work more monetary value. To really achieve change, we must go further.

In this groundbreaking book, Emma Dowling charts the multi-faceted nature of care in the modern world, from the mantras of self-care and what they tell us about our anxieties, to the state of the social care system. She examines the relations of power that play profitability and care off in against one another in a myriad of ways, exposing the devastating impact of financialisation and austerity.

As the world becomes seemingly more uncaring, the calls for people to be more compassionate and empathetic towards one another - in short, to care more - become ever-more vocal. The Care Crisis challenges the idea that people ever stopped caring, but also that the deep and multi-faceted crises of our time will be solved by a simply (re)instilling the virtues of empathy. There is no easy fix.

The Care Crisis enquires into the ways in which the continued off-loading of the cost of care onto the shoulders of underpaid and unpaid realms of society, untangling how this off-loading combines with commodification, marketisation and financialisation to produce the mess we are living in. The Care Crisis charts the current experiments in short-term fixes to the care crisis that are taking place within Britain, with austerity as the backdrop. It maps the economy of abandonment, raising the question: to whom care is afforded? And what would it mean to seriously value care?

"Emma Dowling has written a book for our times: a meditation on care, its burdens and its possibilities. Dowling deftly weaves together theories of care with empirical interviews in order to understand how and why we care and the ways in which care can be the basis for radical politics in this time of crisis." - Akwugo Emejulu

"Health care policymakers and medical consumers alike will find [Downling's] arguments urgent-and in dire need of solution." - Kirkus Reviews

"A lucid and alarming picture of how political decisions have created roadblocks to better care. ... [A] passionate and persuasive call for reform." - Publishers Weekly

"Dowling is astute in her recognition that framing a social issue like care as a 'crisis' can be self-defeating, joining a 'cacophony of crisis' to which we are necessarily numbed." - Red Pepper

"An important and insightful study ... [The Care Crisis] succeeds in the delicate task of confronting the intricacies of a complex social problem in a manner that is lucid, accessible and forthright." - Resurgence & Ecologist

"Accessible ... The Care Crisis maps how austerity and deindustrialization, compounded by a fast-aging population, has led to a growing crisis of care." - The Indypendent

"Compelling and well-researched ... [The Care Crisis] renders visible an obvious correlation between the depletion of the welfare states since 2008 and the Western World's inability to respond accordingly to the Covid-19 pandemic." - Modern Times Review

"The triumph of this book is the excellent overview of care work under capitalism ... real care is fundamentally at odds with a system that cares about profit first and above all else - Emma Dowling has forensically delineated this truth in The Care Crisis." - International Socialist