THE SUBSIDY

On what we gave that was never counted, and who was receiving it all along

There is a word I keep coming back to. Not a dramatic word — an economic one, the kind that shows up in policy papers and budget discussions and the dry language of how societies account for the movement of resources from one place to another.

The word is subsidy.

A subsidy, in economic terms, is a transfer. A situation in which one party receives a benefit at below-market cost because someone else is absorbing part of the actual cost. The recipient of a subsidy often doesn’t know they are receiving one. The cost is just... lower than it would otherwise be. The service is just... available. The person providing it has just... managed to make it work, somehow, through mechanisms that are not examined because the examination is inconvenient and the not-examining is free.

I want to talk about a subsidy that most of us have been running for most of our lives. One that nobody named, nobody counted, and nobody — including us — fully understood we were providing.

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Think about what it costs to replace the things many of us have provided, casually, continuously, as the background condition of every relationship and workplace and community we have ever moved through.

The emotional management — the reading of rooms, the sensing of tensions before they surface, the quiet work of keeping the temperature calibrated so that things don’t escalate into the kind of conflict that costs everyone more than the prevention did. If you tried to obtain this through formal channels — a therapist on retainer, a mediator on call, a consultant trained in organizational dynamics — you would pay a great deal of money for something approximating a fraction of what many of us have provided as simply the way we are.

The institutional memory — the knowing where things are stored and why decisions were made and which relationships need careful handling and what the history is. The employee who becomes, over years, the person everyone goes to when they need to understand how something actually works, as distinct from how it is supposed to work. If you tried to formalize this function, to hire for it deliberately, to compensate it at the rate it actually contributes — you would discover that it was worth considerably more than it was being paid.

The crisis absorption — the person who, when something goes wrong, becomes the stable point around which everything reorganizes. Who can hold the distress of a system in crisis without being destabilized by it herself. Or who can be destabilized by it and still function, because functioning is what she has always done, because there was no other option, because the crisis was happening and someone had to absorb it and she was there.

The coordination — not the formal kind, not the kind that shows up in job descriptions or gets compensated with a title, but the invisible coordination of the needs of people who are not communicating with each other but whose needs are, nonetheless, in relationship. The person who holds the whole picture because she is the only one who can see all of it. The labor of that holding, which falls between every formal role and responsibility, which lives in the gaps, which everyone relies on and no one counts.

These things have market value. They have significant market value. They are not free. They just appear free, because the person providing them has been absorbing the cost herself. In her nervous system. In her sleep. In the years that might have been spent differently.

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I want to be careful here about something, because I think it matters.

When I say that the labor was uncompensated, I am not saying it was unwillingly given. Much of it came from genuine care — from real empathy, real attentiveness, real investment in the people and systems being supported. The love was real. The commitment was real. The desire to be useful, to be needed, to contribute something that mattered — these were real, and they were not pathological, and I am not interested in an analysis that retroactively converts every act of generosity into a symptom.

But here is the thing about love and labor when they become entangled in this particular way: the love can be genuine and the extraction can still be real. These are not mutually exclusive. A person can care deeply about the people she is supporting and also be absorbing costs that should be distributed differently. A family or workplace or community can receive enormous value from one person’s labor and have absolutely no malicious intent while also never once asking what the labor costs or whether the current arrangement is remotely equitable.

Extraction does not require villains. It requires only that the labor be available, and that no one ask too carefully about what making it available costs the person providing it.

Systems sustain themselves on what they don’t examine. The care was there. It continued to be there. The system learned to route its needs through the reliable source, the way water finds the path of least resistance — not through intention but through the simple logic of what works.

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What fascinates me — what I find myself returning to, again and again — is the moment when the subsidy stops.

When she burns out. When she becomes ill. When she finally, for whatever combination of reasons, can no longer provide at the rate that had been established as normal. When the infrastructure fails.

The response, almost universally, is confusion. Genuine confusion. What happened to her? She was always so capable. She was always so together. There is no malice in the question. There is only a framework that cannot account for what it is seeing, because the framework was built without reference to what had been happening all along.

The subsidy had been running so long that its withdrawal looked like a failure. The extraction had been so thorough that its limit looked like a deficiency. The person was the same person she had always been. What changed was only that the account, finally, had run out.

And here is what I want to say about that, as clearly as I can:

Running out is not failure. Running out is arithmetic. Running out is what happens when a system spends faster than it replenishes, for long enough, regardless of how capable or committed or generous the person running it is. You cannot will your way out of a depleted account. You cannot be resilient enough to make an unsustainable arrangement sustainable. You cannot try harder at a problem that effort alone cannot solve.

The account was always going to run out. The only question was when.

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I have been thinking about what it would mean to take this seriously — not as a personal insight, not as a thing individuals recognize about their own lives and then manage more skillfully going forward, but as an accounting problem. A structural problem. The kind that requires structural responses.

Because the subsidy is not incidental to the systems it has been supporting. It is load-bearing. The families and workplaces and communities that have been running on this labor are not going to stop needing what it provided just because the person providing it has reached her limit. The needs will continue. The question is what happens to them — whether they get redistributed, formalized, compensated, and met in ways that don’t concentrate their cost in one person’s body. Or whether the system simply finds another source and the process begins again.

Individually, the most useful thing I know to do with this is name it. Not as a complaint, not as an accusation, but as a description — an accurate account of what the arrangement actually is, so that it can be seen clearly enough to make genuine choices about it.

What am I providing that has not been counted? What would it cost to obtain elsewhere? Who is receiving the benefit of this, and do they know? Is the current arrangement sustainable, and if not, what would a sustainable version look like?

These questions don’t have easy answers. But they are the right questions. And for a long time, many of us were not asking them — because we didn’t have the framework to understand that we were the ones absorbing the cost, or because the framework we were given told us that absorbing it was simply what good people do.

It is what good people do. It is also, when it is one-directional and unexamined and structurally reproduced across a lifetime, a form of extraction. Both things are true. The goodness doesn’t cancel the extraction. The extraction doesn’t cancel the goodness.

It just means the accounting has never been done.

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I have been doing this accounting, in various forms, for several years now. It has taken me places I didn’t expect — into feminist economics and disability studies and the philosophy of knowledge and the particular experiences of women who were never supposed to need anything at all.

What I found, in that accounting, is the subject of something I have been writing for a long time. I’ll tell you more about it soon.

For now, I just wanted to name the subsidy. To say: this is a real thing, it has a real structure, and the cost has been real even when it was invisible.

You knew it in your body before you had words for it.

This is me, trying to give you some of the words.