Care

Children, elderly people and the sick need carers. In the old days the family took care of the day-to-day care. Everybody lived on a farm where there was enough space for everybody.

Nowadays we live in towns, in houses stuffed with things. The house I am living in offers room to some more people, if they are willing to sleep on the floor, but there is no more room for their “stuff”. Benches, couches, book cases, desks and computer take up all the space. We also have our own cheese cutter, just like the neighbors. Nice, all that stuff just for one person...

The down side is that, because my girlfriend and I live together, grandpa and grandma live elsewhere. Every generation in a separate “box”, like Native Americans call the White man’s houses. And yes, when granny needs help and grandpa can’t do it, Home-care is called.

And their work is valuable, priceless, mostly done by women. But the baby boom of the 1947 generation is coming towards this Home-care like a Tsunami... in about 10 or 15 years. Reports predict that we’ll have, depending on the region, between 20 and 25% of the generation in their twilight years. How many people are needed to care for them?

A lot of people put aside a nest egg or built up a pension. For all the others home-care will be too expensive. People will, more or less by necessity, take their parents in their homes. And look after them themselves.

In the Euro-economy manual labour is relatively expensive and so it’s not profitable to get this kind of care. Colourcash is a lot more “economical” here because manual labour as a whole is a lot more economical. Bernard Lietaer tells us there is a Japanese complementary money system that is so successful that people prefer to be taken care of by someone paid for from within the system than someone paid for by the insurance company. The more personal approach and rapport are said to be the deciding factors.