Department of Economics Working Paper A Road Not Taken? A Brief History of Care in Economic Thought By John B. Davis and Robert McMaster Working Paper 2019-02 College of Business Administration Forthcoming in European Journal of the History of Economic Thought A road not taken? A brief history of care in economic thought1 John B Davis* and Robert McMaster** *Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam, PO Box 15867, 1001 NJ Amsterdam, and Department of Economics, Marquette University, PO Box 1881, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881 E-mail:
[email protected] **Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ. E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract Care is central to the human experience and part of the social provisioning process. Adam Smith recogniZed this, associating care with sympathy. Later contributions in the political economy tradition also provide scope for an analysis of care, but none as developed as Smith’s. With the emergence of the current mainstream, care is marginaliZed. Kenneth Boulding’s analysis provides an opportunity to interrogate care in the economy, but he fails to explicitly acknowledge care. It is left to feminist economics to highlight the centrality of care. An implication is that it challenges the conventional rubric of economic organization predicated on self-interest. Keywords: care; Smith; feminist economics; Boulding; social provisioning JEL Classification: B10; B54; I00; Z00 1 We wish to acknowledge the highly insightful guidance and friendly criticisms of the editors and three reviewers of this journal. We have no doubts that they greatly improved the paper’s analysis and argument.