Care Abolition and the Regulation of Labor

This dispatch builds directly on Signal 003: "I'm Your Pusher". Read that dispatch first if you haven't already. This one goes deeper into what the chart reveals about the cycle itself.

In I'm Your Pusher the chart breathed and we left the wave alone. Fifteen years, seven institutions, a ratio that rose and fell and rose again and never once touched parity. The wave was the shape of the prose. It was not yet the subject.

It is now. The question this dispatch answers is the one the first chart could not. What force pulls the language to and fro? Several candidates presented themselves at first. Election cycles. Movement pressure. Generational handoff at the executive level. None survived close inspection. The series is too long for any single political cycle to explain it, and the ratchet — peaks at 12.0, then 12.6, then 14.2 — is not what political cycles produce.

The answer turns out to be more ordinary, and harder to look away from. The wave is the breathing of an economy. More precisely, it is the visible signature of a cycle that has a name.

The Philanthropic Human Resource Mining Cycle is a seven stage loop that converts public concern into institutional output without producing institutional change. The cycle is not a conspiracy. It is an economy. Each stage employs people. Each stage produces documents. Each stage justifies the next. The cycle does not need to be coordinated. It only needs to be funded.

Name the harm plainly. The harm has names. The Black children in Indianapolis whose ILEARN proficiency rates collapsed during the charter reform era are harmed. The first generation of Asset Based community practitioners who were defunded, demoralized, or absorbed into participation roles are harmed. The mothers who showed up to twenty community advisory meetings and watched their input get translated into vocabulary nobody at home uses are harmed. The young Black men who entered workforce development programs and emerged with credentials but no jobs are harmed. The neighborhoods that hosted engagement coordinators whose initiatives ended when the grant ended are harmed. The harm is documentable and the harm has names. The danger is most visible when the names are spoken.

Name the beneficiaries plainly too, because they are not villains. They are workers in a system, and that is what makes the system the thing: foundation officers whose careers advance with each cycle, consultants whose firms grow with each new initiative, university researchers whose tenure cases are built on grant funded studies of populations they do not live among, nonprofit executives whose compensation packages have grown faster than the wages of the people they serve, donor advised fund managers, convening venues, brand consultancies, impact measurement contractors. Every layer of the cycle has a labor market. Every labor market has people whose continued employment depends on the cycle continuing. This is the economy. The harm is not a side effect of the economy. The harm is the economy's product.

The Authorship Gap measured in I'm Your Pusher is not a measure of language. It is a measure of the cycle running. Stage 04 produces the documents. Stage 05 produces the vocabulary that calls those documents a victory. The ratio of participation language to authorship language is the ratio of stage 04 plus stage 05 over the substance the institutions never gave up. The wave is the cycle, made visible across time.

If the cycle is the mechanism, what runs it? The hypothesis was that the cycle is fueled by the philanthropic economy itself. When foundation grantmaking expands, more cycles run in parallel. When the labor market tightens and workers can leave, the cycle has to pull harder to retain its workforce, intensifying stages 04 and 05, tested below.

The two lines move together. Foundation giving rose from roughly $47B in 2011 to $110B in 2024. The Authorship Gap rose from 2.3× to 14.2×. The relationship is real but small samples demand modesty about how strong it is. Across twelve overlapping years the Pearson correlation between the two series is +0.59, with a 95 percent confidence interval of [+0.03, +0.87]. The point estimate is suggestive. The lower bound is just barely above zero. We are looking at directional evidence consistent with the cycle, not proof of it.

More telling is the relationship to the labor market. When unemployment falls and workers in the participation labor market have other options, the gap widens. The cycle has to pull harder to keep its workforce. Pearson r is −0.62 against unemployment. The strongest finding, and the one the mechanism predicts most cleanly, is the lagged relationship. This year's gap tracks last year's labor tightness at r = +0.64, with a confidence interval that excludes zero. Last year's funding environment shapes this year's vocabulary. Funding cycles take time to metabolize. The cycle takes time to ratchet.

And the cycle has had time. Twenty five years of this. Children who were five years old in 2000 are thirty now. They have lived their entire lives inside the cycle. The neighborhoods that were the original target sites are still target sites, except the target sites are gentrified and the targets are dispersed and the same institutions are convening to address the consequences of the displacement they helped engineer. The danger is not that this is new. The danger is that this is mature. The peaks are climbing because each cycle stacks on the last. 12.0 in 2013. 12.6 in 2019. 14.2 in 2024. The harm has had a generation to compound. The wave is not the sound of the cycle starting. It is the sound of the cycle running for a generation.

The Authorship Gap is not measuring rhetoric. It is measuring the distance between two labor markets that share an institution. The decision making labor market is credentialed, salaried, networked, mobile, economically secure. The participation labor market is precarious, hourly or stipended, geographically rooted, economically exposed. Stage 04 of the cycle produces documents in which the first market describes the second. Stage 05 produces the vocabulary that calls the description a victory.

When the philanthropic economy expands, more institutions can run more cycles in parallel. When the labor market tightens, the participation workforce gets harder to retain, and the cycle compensates with louder language about how much the institutions are listening. When ruptures hit, as they did in 2017 and 2021, the vocabulary briefly quiets because the script is broken. Then it rebuilds, more sophisticated than before, and the next peak is higher than the last.

The danger is not what the cycle does. The danger is what the cycle prevents. Every dollar that flowed into the participation labor market did not flow into mutual aid, into local economies, into Black owned businesses, into community land trusts, into worker cooperatives, into the kinds of repair the communities themselves have always known how to do when given the resources and the room. The relational infrastructure that already existed before philanthropy arrived has been steadily defunded or absorbed. The Zawadi Exchange model is not a niche experiment. It is what philanthropy displaced. We are now several generations into a civic ecology in which the cycle is the only available form, and the alternative protocols have to be rebuilt from memory.

And the cycle is governed by people who are not accountable to the people the cycle claims to serve. Foundation boards are appointed, not elected. Program officers are credentialed, not chosen. RFP categories are written, not asked for. The community whose name is invoked has no mechanism to redirect the resources that flow in its name. Philanthropy is the largest unaccountable concentration of governing power in American civic life. It allocates more resources, with less democratic input, than most state and municipal governments. The wealth that funds the foundations was, in large part, never taxed. The decisions the foundations make are not subject to vote. The communities the foundations affect have no recall. The vocabulary of partnership and collaboration and alignment and collective impact is doing the work of disappearing the question of who gets to decide.

This is what makes the cycle iatrogenic. Iatrogenesis is the harm caused by the healer in the act of healing. Charter school philanthropy reduced the test scores of the children it set out to lift. Workforce philanthropy locked participants into low wage credentialing tracks. Anti poverty philanthropy built a service economy whose continued funding depends on poverty not being solved. The harm is not incidental. The harm is the operating condition. The institution that produced the harm is the same institution funded to address the harm. The cycle does not solve. The cycle metabolizes.

The peaks are climbing. The troughs are climbing too. Each cycle the vocabulary gets better at sounding like surrender while functioning as consolidation. The job created the language. The language created the job. The substance is the appearance of substance. The harm has names. The beneficiaries have names. The cycle has had a generation to mature. The alternatives have been displaced. The decisions are unaccountable. The cycle is now visible, and the danger is what it has been doing while we could not yet see it.