Why Nations Fail

And why carers are tired

Why Nations Fail (And Why Carers Are Tired)

I’ve been reading many anti-feminist Facebook posts lately that all basically say the same thing.

“You’ve arrived now, women of Australia. You’re allowed to vote. You can have bank accounts. You can even become lawyers, executives and Prime Ministers if you want. Civilization somehow survived women having opinions. Barely. And yet you are STILL unhappy. What exactly do women even want anymore?”

Well. I’m glad you asked.

Let me answer from the perspective of a mother. A carer for my severely disabled child. A former tax lawyer. But also simply from observing mothers — and increasingly fathers — generally.

Australia loves carers in the same way it loves nurses, teachers and firefighters. Which is to say we constantly call them heroes while quietly building entire economic systems around the assumption they will continue functioning indefinitely using only caffeine, guilt and a vague sense of moral obligation.

And to be clear, this is no longer entirely a gendered issue. Plenty of carers are men too — sons caring for ageing parents, husbands caring for disabled partners, fathers supporting children with additional needs. Most people receiving care in disability and aged care systems are also men.

But even as caring becomes more shared across genders, the invisible labour surrounding it remains profoundly undervalued.

Recently I’ve been reading Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Their central argument is that societies thrive when institutions are inclusive — when ordinary people broadly share in security, opportunity and the benefits of the systems they sustain. Societies stagnate when institutions become extractive — when one group quietly absorbs enormous burdens while others disproportionately benefit.

And the more I read it, the more I think modern economies are often quietly extractive toward carers.

Australia’s economy relies on enormous amounts of difficult human labour simply appearing inside families for free.

Looking after children. Disabled people. Elderly parents. Mentally ill relatives. People with dementia. Children who do not sleep. People with acquired brain injuries.

This work is absolutely essential for society to function. Yet much of it remains economically invisible.

A truly extractive institution says:

“We desperately need this labour. But we will structure society so the people doing it absorb most of the cost privately.”

That starts sounding familiar very quickly.

Carers often lose income, superannuation, career progression, retirement savings, sleep, health, relationships and social status. Meanwhile the broader economy benefits enormously because governments would collapse financially if every hour of unpaid family care suddenly had to be replaced at market rates.

And extractive systems are often stable precisely because the burdened group has very little bargaining power.

Carers are fragmented, exhausted, time-poor and isolated. They cannot easily strike. They cannot simply “exit the market” because the person they care for is usually their child, spouse, parent or grandparent.

That makes carers politically weak despite being socially essential.

Every Mother’s Day and Carers Week we all emerge briefly to say “mothers are amazing” before immediately asking them to fill out seventeen forms proving their child still has autism, remember library day, source an orange shirt for Harmony Week by tomorrow morning, and stay up all night with a vomiting child while sick themselves.

All while feeling vaguely guilty about asking their husband for help because he has a “real” job.

Women are constantly told modern life is easier now. And in many ways it obviously is. Washing machines are objectively preferable to beating clothes against rocks in rivers. Antibiotics are excellent. Feminism was broadly an outstanding call despite what some man holding a fish in his profile picture has informed me online.

But I don’t think most women are describing a desire to return to the 1950s.

I think they are describing the feeling of becoming the default project manager of human existence.

Even in loving families with good men and no additional care needs, women often become the person whose nervous system absorbs everything first.

The child is sick. The birthday present hasn’t been bought. The daycare forms are due. The child has no socks. Someone needs vaccines. The school excursion form is missing. The support worker cancelled. The GP appointment overlaps with the swimming carnival. Somebody needs cupcakes tomorrow. The dog has diarrhoea. The grandparents need transport to an appointment. The child is emotionally dysregulated.

Women are Australia’s backup operating system.

And after absorbing all this information like a highly stressed administrative sponge, society then asks women why they seem anxious.

A mystery for the ages.

The interesting thing is that carers are often not even asking for glamorous things.

Most are not demanding yachts. I personally have not conned the government into giving me a private jet in YEARS.

They are asking for highly radical luxuries like:
being able to attend a medical appointment without coordinating a military operation;
having support workers actually arrive;
not needing to explain permanent disabilities every eleven minutes;
and perhaps one hour occasionally where nobody screams “Muuuuuum” through a locked bathroom door while another child destroys the kitchen.

And this is not just disability care.

You see versions of the same exhaustion everywhere mothers of young children gather.

The mother awake at 2am mentally calculating whether the baby’s cough sounds “hospital enough.”

The woman trying to answer work emails while simultaneously locating a missing school hat and cutting toast into emotionally acceptable triangles.

Then society acts stunned when carers report lower happiness levels. When birth rates fall.

“Could it be sleep deprivation? Social isolation? Financial penalties? Endless bureaucracy? Career destruction? Marital strain? Constant hypervigilance?”

No no.

Must be resilience mindset.

Have they tried yoga?

Or Pilates? Gives you that nice toned body to keep your husband interested.

And the strange thing is that many carers do actually find caring deeply meaningful. They love the people they care for fiercely.

But meaning and happiness are not the same thing.

Medieval monks probably had meaning too. They still looked exhausted.

I think one of the biggest policy mistakes modern societies make is treating care like a private hobby families spontaneously chose for personal enrichment, rather than the load-bearing wall of civilisation.

And modern economies have quietly intensified this contradiction.

For decades economists celebrated labour mobility and women entering the workforce. We were told to move cities — sometimes countries — for opportunity, maximise productivity and become globally competitive.

Which absolutely created enormous benefits. Companies gained workers. Governments gained tax revenue. Household incomes rose. Entire industries became dependent on female labour. Housing markets became calibrated around two incomes.

But there was a hidden trade-off.

Historically, care was partly subsidised by proximity.

Grandmothers lived nearby.
Aunties picked children up from school.
Cousins babysat.
Families absorbed shocks together.

Then we built an economy where people move away from their support networks for work and acted shocked when childcare became expensive and parents became exhausted.

You cannot economically celebrate labour mobility, dual-income households and women’s workforce participation while morally complaining about subsidised childcare.

Society already benefited enormously from women working and from the erosion of older support structures that once made unpaid care easier.

And if mothers with children suddenly stopped working tomorrow, society would not “heal.”

It would seize up.

Hospitals would lose nurses, doctors and allied health workers.
Schools would lose teachers.
Childcare centres would lose educators.
Aged care and disability services would lose staff.
Retail, universities, public service and small businesses would all take enormous hits.

Tax revenue would fall.
Household incomes would collapse.
Mortgage stress would explode.

The irony is that mothers of severely disabled children already show us what happens when care demands force one parent out of the workforce entirely.

The career disappears first.
Then the superannuation.
Then the professional identity.

Suddenly one income has to carry everything.

Which also traps many fathers.

People often imagine the traditional provider role as some glorious masculine arrangement where men stride nobly into offices while women bake sourdough in sunlit kitchens.

I hate to break this to you, but the people online making family life look like this usually have a team of gardeners, cleaners and nannies quietly operating behind the scenes.

In reality many fathers end up working enormous hours under relentless financial pressure while barely seeing the children they are supposedly providing for.

The mother becomes trapped inside unpaid labour.
The father becomes trapped inside paid labour.
And both can end up strangely alienated from the actual fruits of their work.

One parent is physically present but exhausted.
One parent is financially supporting the family but missing huge parts of family life entirely.

Meanwhile society quietly benefits from both sacrifices while calling them “personal choices.”

Australia actually contains both inclusive and extractive instincts simultaneously.

Medicare, public education, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Carer Payment and respite services are all fundamentally inclusive ideas. They represent society partially recognising that care is not merely a private family issue but essential social infrastructure.

But then the extractive dynamics creep back in through bureaucracy and design.

Parents are repeatedly required to “prove” permanent disabilities that are obviously permanent.

Systems quietly assume mothers will reduce workforce participation when children need more support.

Superannuation is structured around uninterrupted full-time employment even though large sections of society perform economically essential unpaid labour for years at a time.

Carer payments are small and cut off at relatively modest household incomes.

Huge amounts of unpaid administrative labour are required simply to navigate support systems.

And many schools and workplaces still operate on the assumption that somewhere in the background there exists an infinitely flexible “backup parent” available to absorb every illness, therapy appointment, emergency pickup and disruption.

An actually inclusive care system would not merely provide emergency assistance after carers collapse.

It would recognise care itself as productive infrastructure that allows the rest of society to function.

As Acemoglu and Robinson argue, nations succeed when institutions distribute risk broadly and allow ordinary people to sustainably participate in society. They stagnate when systems concentrate rewards in one part of society while quietly offloading the human costs elsewhere.

And you can already see the long-term risks emerging.

Extractive systems often function for a surprisingly long time because people compensate privately.

Grandmothers help.
Mothers reduce paid work.
Fathers work longer hours.
Families absorb burnout internally.

Love and obligation keep the system running long after the economics alone would have caused collapse.

But eventually the cracks spread outward.

Participation falls.
Fertility falls.
Trust falls.

And social resentment rises because people begin feeling that society is quietly feeding off their private sacrifice while pretending it is merely a personal lifestyle choice.

Which is increasingly what many carers — and honestly many parents generally — are trying to articulate.

We are not asking for luxury.

We want reliable childcare.
Flexible work that is actually flexible — for both genders.
Schools that can genuinely support children instead of outsourcing all complexity directly into mothers’ frontal lobes.
Medical systems where parents are not personally acting as the National Broadband Network of healthcare communication.

We want careers that can pause and restart without permanent economic destruction.
Superannuation that continues accumulating during caregiving.
Partners who carry equal cognitive load rather than “helping” once assigned tasks by Head Office.

We want backup.

Because in the end, one of the biggest things carers, mothers — and increasingly fathers — probably need is social recognition that this is work.

Not just “love,” although it is that too.
Not “resilience.”
Not “journey.”

Actual economically essential labour holding up entire sections of society for free.

History shows humans can survive very hard things if they feel supported, respected and not completely alone.

What breaks people is feeling invisible while doing them.