From Caregiving to Mutual Aid: All Goodwill Has a Price, and Caregivers Deserve a High One

In a recent video, Lang Xianping recounted that when his mother was 90, she suffered terribly from constipation. None of the children was willing to handle this 'dirty job,' and in the end they had to offer ten times the price before a caregiver would provide the physical care.

On the surface Professor Lang's story reflects a family's ethical predicament, but in truth it is the market economy's ultimate calibration of the value of a service. Every cent that caregiver took home was a reasonable price for enduring filth and taking on risk — this is not the collapse of family feeling but the triumph of market law: when everyone is calculating whether something is 'worth it,' price becomes the only truth by which the value of a service is measured.

The same logic holds in online mutual aid. Online critical-illness mutual aid platforms are essentially converting offline 'personal loans' into online 'fund mutual aid.' Participants pay a few yuan, or a few tens of yuan, each month; it looks like 'giving charity,' but in fact they are buying an option on 'possible future help.' Just as the caregiver trades labor for payment, donors trade money for psychological satisfaction and social credit — both are exchanging quantifiable resources (time or money) for risks beyond their control.

The deeper connection is this: the rise of online mutual aid is precisely because traditional mutual aid through services has failed. When relatives are no longer willing to wipe down an elderly person's body, when relatives and neighbors no longer lend each other money, people turn to money to build a new network of mutual aid. This model is cold, but it is more efficient than moral coercion — it acknowledges that goodwill has a cost, just as a caregiver's wages acknowledge that dirty work commands a premium.

The essence of the market economy is to turn all resources into tradable goods. Mutual aid through services and mutual aid through funds are simply two sides of the same coin: the former exchanges physical effort, time, and skill for a sense of security; the latter exchanges currency, credit, and data for the right to survive. When we accuse family feeling of being corroded by money, perhaps we should think from another angle: it is precisely the mutual aid of money and services that lets the humblest service provider and the frailest patient at last find dignity in an exchange of equals.