The caring services performed for dependent persons by professionals, family members, and friends are crucial for the functioning of the economy. Yet economists' notions of caring, its basic elements, and structural characteristics remain fragmentary. In this timely study, Maren A. Jochimsen presents an innovative analysis of caring, systematically integrating existing approaches and proposing a new concept for caring in economic theory. The author identifies the three components that make up a caring situation: motivation, reflecting the need and the responsibility to care; work, the hands-on caring activity; and resources, the material/financial basis and time to sustain a caring relationship. Complemented by a detailed analysis of hitherto neglected asymmetries in caring and their impact on economic theory, Jochimsen's concept lays bare the structures of care, defining central categories for its analysis and locating major coordinates for its social and economic organization. Careful Economics was written for scholars and professionals working in the fields of care and economics as well as those concerned with caring's relevance for public policy formation, women's studies, social work, and sociology. INDICE Preface. Acknowledgements. Part I: 1. Aim and scope of the work. Sketching the ground. The importance of caring as a subject for economic theorizing. Aim of the book. Structure of the book. 2. The analytical frame of reference. Basic characteristics of caring activities. Central conceptual assumptions. Part II: 3. Caring as the result of preferential choices. The conceptualization of caring in the utility-based concept of altruism. The concept of "household or family commodities". The scope of the concept. 4. Caring as the result of other choices. The conceptualization of caring within the economic concept of commitment. The scope of the concept. 5. Caring as the result of a caring motivation. The conceptualization of caring derived from motivation. The conc