#93: who pays for the future?

on the miscategorization of public goods

Good morning,

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about actions that don’t yield immediate results, but are worth investing in for the future.

Small, personal examples: saving a book for a season it will land deeper; training my anxious dog now, to help us navigate the toddler years ahead; nurturing new skills for work I’ve not quite imagined yet; gaining literacy in a new way of thinking before actually knowing how to apply it.

I find this kind of work deeply satisfying. Taking the long-view is rarely gratifying in the short-term. It never gets applause or recognition. But it’s foundational in the same way a building cannot come up without a solid base.

Yet training ourselves to invest in longview, culture-shifting work can feel very difficult in a productivity-focused work culture. When I feel alone with the questions in my head, I remind myself there are structural reasons for this isolation: knowledge work outside academia has no professional infrastructure beyond publishing pathways that serve elite audiences; I've spent three decades being conditioned to achieve and demonstrate measurable growth; invisible work that happens in private is hard to discuss or find models for; we lack vocabulary for valuing care or creative work, and without words, it's hard to sustain motivation.

So I've been collecting words to build my own vocabulary. Today, I want to share a question that I have found the most helpful so far: What if certain kinds of work feel unsupported because we've miscategorized them?

Looking for Miscategorization

Miscategorization shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. Beyond personal and cultural barriers, there's a larger reason why long-view work feels so unsupported: We've systematically reframed certain forms of care and knowledge-building as private choices or individual burdens, rather than shared public responsibilities. Here are two examples.

Example 1: Social Reproduction

I first came across the term "social reproduction" when I was introduced to feminist economics through my work with IAFFE. I was captivated by the idea that the work of sustaining daily life is also what keeps society running—so much so that I ended up taking a course on it at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. The more I learned, the more I realized why feminist economists rely on this concept to explain why so much essential work ends up invisible and undervalued.

In a recent New York Times piece, Emma Goldberg discusses the work of economist Nancy Folbre, who argues that our so-called "fertility crisis" isn't about selfishness or cultural decline—it's the direct result of a society that refuses to support caregiving.

She writes:

“There’s a point at which, if you just keep ratcheting up the price of doing something that’s socially valuable, if you just keep ratcheting up the private costs, eventually people give up,” Dr. Folbre said. Today’s plummeting fertility rates suggest that potential parents are doing just that.

Economists have long had a response to that precise problem: When private costs lead to underproduction of something with social value — solar panels or electric cars, for example — the government helps pay for their production with subsidies, tax credits or other incentives.

Could we really do that for parenting? The scale of the problem means that it wouldn’t be cheap. But, Dr. Folbre and other experts argue, it would be worth it.

In other words, the problem isn't declining birth rates. The problem is that society has offloaded the work of reproduction onto individual families while stripping away the infrastructure that makes that work sustainable.

Example 2: Civic Infrastructure

Reading this immediately reminded me of a 2021 piece by Darryl Holliday, who makes what I think is a parallel argument about journalism: Local news isn't dying because people don't want information—it's dying because we've treated journalism as a private market good rather than civic infrastructure.

In his words:

For decades, we have invested so much time, money, and hope in the idea that a small group of individuals who are experts in their field can solve the enormous, complex challenge of building and supporting an informed citizenry. But the longer I’ve worked in this industry—and the more I’ve grappled with the core questions of what and who makes journalism in the public interest—the more clearly I’ve seen the error of this thinking.

This is not a problem that journalists can solve on our own. The best response to the current crisis in journalism is to get more people involved, at a level at which everyone is willing and able to participate. Not just as news consumers, but as distributors and—most important—producers of local information.

Just as we wouldn't expect roads or water systems to be profitable, we shouldn't expect information systems to sustain themselves through market forces alone. Yet we've organized journalism around advertising revenue and subscription models, rather than recognizing it as essential democratic infrastructure.

The Pattern

These examples sit side-by-side in my brain because they reveal the same destructive pattern: essential forms of care have been reframed as private goods when they should be public goods—perhaps even shared civic responsibilities.

What strikes me is how many other fields this extends to: environmental stewardship, education, elder care, mental health support, even media literacy… all treated as individual responsibilities rather than collective investments.

The Personal as Infrastructure

Living in this space between institutional work and private life (doing full-time care and knowledge work), I'm starting to feel, viscerally, that when we treat care work as private burden rather than public good, we erode the foundations of collective life.

Framing things this way has helped me understand why I feel so committed to my own long-view posture in daily life. The choice to spend time, in small ways, on the far future of my personal life feels akin to investing in stronger public infrastructure. Training my anxious dog isn't just about my family's convenience—it's about creating a household capable of modeling calm for a small person who will eventually move through the world. Gaining literacy in new ways of thinking isn't just professional development—it's preparation for cultural shifts I can sense but can't yet name and will inevitably have to guide young ones through.

These investments feel isolating precisely because we've been taught to see them as private choices rather than contributions to shared infrastructure. But what if we understood them differently? What if the work we do in private to prepare for uncertain futures is actually a form of civic engagement? What if building the muscle for collective long-term wellness in private can help me bring it to bigger public work when the time is right?

I'm still working through the implications of this, so I’ll leave you with a question: Where in your life are you investing in something that won't yield immediate results—but matters anyway?

Happy Tuesday,

Jihii