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Volume 3, Issue 1

Productivity, Pandemics and the 'Care Economy': How Disabled People Became the Scapegoats for a Global Slowdown

Axel Andersen10 pages312 KB

Abstract

Commentators are increasingly blaming Australia's productivity slump on the NDIS, autistic children's therapies, and the 'care economy'. This paper commits the radical act of reading actual productivity data. We show Australia's productivity slowdown predates the NDIS by a decade and mirrors a global slowdown. COVID-19 produced a one-off productivity shock. We conclude that blaming autistic kids' OT sessions for a decades-long global productivity slowdown is methodologically unsound and ethically grotesque.

Full Article

10 pages

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