The Invisible Infrastructure of Care: Vulnerability, Productivity, and Support for Redistribution

Care is foundational to human development and economic resilience, yet remains largely invisible in economic theory and policy. This paper presents a formal model in which support for redistributive care policies depends on three belief channels: the perceived publicness of care, its productivity, and its prosocial value. The model shows that public coordination reduces variance in received care, increasing the likelihood that vulnerability becomes productive. Empirically, we combine two approaches. First, we analyze World Values Survey data from 25 countries (2017–2022), linking individual attitudes to a novel folktale-based index that captures the cultural salience of care-related virtues versus harm-related vices. Countries scoring higher on this index show greater support for redistributive care; civic participation also plays an independent role. Second, an incentivized framing experiment in Italy reveals that framing care as a private responsibility reduces donations to a pooled care fund by 6–8 percentage points. Together, these findings suggest that institutions and shared narratives jointly shape attitudes toward care. Recognizing care as social infrastructure—and designing time regimes and services that foster trust—may be key to building resilient and inclusive economies.