Alison Gopnik: evaluation

Transcript context

…Very last question: what will you do next? The big thing that we’ve been working on now, as I mentioned a couple of times, is this project about caregiving. This speaks to the issues that we’ve been talking about with nurture and nature and what the effect of caregiving is. Caregiving’s fascinating because if you ask people, “What’s most important in your life? What are your greatest moral issues? What’s most meaningful to you?” They’ll say something about “Taking care of my kids, taking care of my elderly father, taking care of my spouse.” Yet, economics is a really good example where that doesn’t even show up in the GDP. All that work that we do, taking care of each other — it’s just completely invisible from an economic perspective. Even the fundamental structure of caregiving, which is that you’re giving resources to someone else to accomplish their goals exactly because they don’t have resources that are very different from the usual social contract power kinds of relations. Yet it’s been very, very understudied compared to all the other kinds of social relationships that we’ve studied. Obviously, since I’m someone who thinks about children and about taking care of children, that’s true, but I think it’s also true about taking care of elders. One of the things in the new book that I’m writing is going to be about thinking about elders and the role of — perhaps a bit autobiographical — but as we have more and more elders around too, what’s the role of elders? How are they working? How do we take care of them? How do they help take care of the rest of us? Alison Gopnik, thank you very much.…

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