The first step is to convince people who grew up with the western "individualism and freedom are the most important" culture why they should care about elderly that they are not directly related to.
Those old people who have lots of family that cares about them will be fine in any case. So the "problem" are those old people that are socially isolated and went all-in on the governments' promises of public retirement care. But now we're finding out that the old retirement system is too expensive for the young generation to handle, plus the young were taught not to care about anyone but themselves...
It is really common in the gay community for people to not have children and to struggle throughout their working years. While many get help from family from childhood to early adulthood it is still common for gay people to either get kicked out of or flee from their homes and families at or before official adulthood.
It seems like punishing people for not having children and not being consistently successful in their working life is going to leave a lot of old people destitute. That is not necessarily a simple cultural issue.
I am a non westerners relatively young person. I am in a western country to only make money. When I retire I will go back to Asia.
Western country like USA is good for competition and individualism and you can make a lot of money because of it, and then you bring the money back to Asia, and retire in Asia, where everything is cheaper and community is stronger than in western country.
I think about this plan a lot. It feels like a way to "hack the system".
And yet, if everyone does it, then Asian countries will also end up with no community -- because all the young people will be in the West.
Already, rural parts of China and Thailand are depopulating as young people go to cities. The same in Eastern Europe. And the same, come to think of it, in the United States. What were once small towns and farming communities are now empty save for a Dollar Store and a few 50-year-olds. This would be a global-scale version of that same phenomenon.
The other issue is that this plan probably means you'll only be able to have a small family, simply because you're starting later. Over time that would also break the model. Hard for the kids to care for grandma when there are as many grandmas as kids.
But for an individual it seems like a decent plan. Except --
Well, it's a little more workable for a man, since in principle, if he's lucky, he can marry a younger woman and still have a family. But that has problems: An equal relationship is less likely, and she will be left a widow at some point. It probably just won't be as good a marriage as if you'd married your highschool sweetheart.
If you want to do geo- and cultural- arbitrage, it seems like, while harder to pull off, it might be better to do remote work and go to a traditional/low-cost country when you're younger.
> And yet, if everyone does it, then Asian countries will also end up with no community -- because all the young people will be in the West.
Not to mention the impact on prices in those countries.
Over the long term, lots of young people starting their careers (i.e. low net worth) would leave the country to seek good jobs abroad, and only return at the end of their successful careers (i.e. high net worth). All that extra wealth would drive up prices, making it even harder on locals.
> If you want to do geo- and cultural- arbitrage, it seems like, while harder to pull off, it might be better to do remote work and go to a traditional/low-cost country when you're younger.
Wasn't this the whole idea of "digital nomadism" which seemed to be popular in the 2000s? Now that remote work is popular, we'll probably see a resurgence.
> Wasn't this the whole idea of "digital nomadism" which seemed to be popular in the 2000s? Now that remote work is popular, we'll probably see a resurgence.
Yeah, could be. That said, the same force that allows remote work (COVID) also prevents travel, or at least makes it less attractive. We'll have to see if the remote work stays after the COVID leaves.
Also, don't they all just go to Bali anyway? ;-)
There is also a question of -- are you actually becoming part of the community you're joining? For example, I hear a lot of guys (it seems to be mostly guys) who've gone to Puerto Rico have encountered a ton of resentment. It doesn't help that many fit a "crypto bro" stereotype (or is that just the media reports?).
One of the more positive versions of this (though not without problems) has been the "back to Africa" movement. Although there's sometimes resentment, mostly I get the impression that people are received well (also, there's a choice: racism here or resentment there?). And, the thing that makes me feel a little more positively about it than "nomadism" is that this is done with an intention to stay, integrate, and invest.
(I also think some of the negative reaction comes from negative perceptions of Western culture. When the arrivals turn out to be chaste respectful people who are not on drugs, I suspect opinions change. That was certainly the case in India for a while, where it was unfairly assumed that Americans were worthless hippies who slept around too much. Well, India did get its share of hippies, so I can understand...)
I guess you also do see these things happen in an idiosyncratic way, usually as a result of marriage. For example, a European web developer who meets a Jamaican and moves there to be closer to her family, stuff like that.
> Not to mention the impact on prices in those countries.
I am a Korean-American US citizen. My wife is a South Korean citizen. Initially we thought it was natural for her to gain US citizenship, but we've now decided otherwise - both for reasons similar to what you mentioned, and also because the US seems to be in a downward spiral politically.
Also I've witnessed first hand the Korean healthcare system at work via my wife, and it is by far not only less expensive, but also (maybe more importantly) less complicated. It's not perfect, but for the average person I'd greatly prefer it to the mess we have in the US.
Of course, South Korea also has its share of political issues both internally and externally. So it has also crossed our mind that perhaps we ought to think of obtaining citizenship or residency in a third country for when the "earning period" chapter of my life starts to close.
> the young were taught not to care about anyone but themselves
as were the old.
Social Security won't have funding issues for almost a decade but there is no political will now, especially among the elderly, to find a solution to this problem
With current birth rates in westernized countries, I'm surprised any of these social services will still be around in two decades.
People are living longer, immigration can't solve the problem, people are relatively healthy and wealthy, etc. but there is not enough babies entering at the bottom of the pyramid to grow into tax payers to continue funding the social systems.
Dystopian me sees a world where western governments will have to institute mandatory, two child per woman births, moratoriums on birth control, huge incentives for people with children under 18, and aggressive pushes for couples to raise adopted children and/or make new ones.
The politics around allowing immigration are complex and controversial though. Som e people will fight tooth and nail to prevent more of the "others" from coming into their country. I'm not just referring to the US and Europe.
Look at Japan for example. Immigration has been touted by Western think tanks and pundits as a solution to their demographic problems, but instead they've chosen to go all in on automation and robots to attempt to solve it.
I expect Korea to follow the same path. Probably China too. A lot of East Asian countries that are at the bleeding edge of the demographic bomb place extremely high value on population and cultural homogeneity. The West would probably label that as racism.
I would imagine such aggressive measures (i.e. forcing of anything) would occur first in a certain other countries before it happens in the West - if it ever does. I would also not be surprised if the West would implicitly choose to implode first before sacrificing an iota of "freedom and individuality".
Outside the West, I also would not be surprised if some countries/cultures would implicitly choose to implode before sacrificing their homogeneity.
America is never going to "force" people to have children, but it may ramp up transfer payments to those who do. The Child Tax Credit was a big part of the Biden agenda, for example. So is, AFAICT, subsidized daycare and such.
(If more aggressive payments by other countries are any indication, this will have approximately zero effect on people's decisions.)
In typical EU cities the default housing option is a small 2 bedroom / 1 bath flat. That makes it awkward to have more than one child. Admitting more immigrants further increases competition for very limited housing supplies. Building more housing in those cities would probably be a good idea but realistically it's not going going to happen on any large scale.
Social Security will still be around in two decades. They'll just increase the retirement age again, raise taxes, and cut benefits in order to close the financial gap.
I would imagine such aggressive measures would occur first in a certain other countries before it happens in the West - if it ever does.
I would also not be surprised if the West would implicitly chooses to implode first before sacrificing an iota of "freedom and individuality". As the saying goes, "give me liberty or give me death", or that famous Benjamin Franklin quote about trading freedom for security.
"individualism and freedom are the most important" is not incompatible with caring for the elderly or your family.This is a misconception that people think of individualism as equivalent to being selfish.The best generosity and care one could provide is from his own conscience and goodwill, not doing it out of necessity or as a requirement.This was vastly pushed in EE where people would hijack Christianity or any generous aspect of a religion in order to promote their ideological umbrella of the system.
The problem we have in the Europe with elderly (see Italy or other countries with similar demographics) is precisely >because< we think everyone should have at least 2-3 of their last decades of life lived in a comfortable environment where any agency is bad agency.This is overall a bad look on life and you even some young people behave like this, because "the system will provide".We put the futures of people under promises and hypotheticals.
If you want the reverse take a look at cultures that think in the opposite fashion: SK,eastern cultures,or maybe Japan(though i'm least familiar with that, and what consists as "elderly" continues to increase);Now even there you have a lot of problems, but problems are inevitable and that is precisely the argument and reason of why we should strive to behave less "civilized" - as in staying comfortable -. The reality of life is that it is constantly degrading, generations who went through war always understand this and seem "superhuman" to later generations who grew up in peace.It's not about war and conflict between people but war against the degradation of life.
I agree with you in that the best care that can be provided is one through genuine goodwill.
However I would argue that the vast majority of people are very selfish and do not have much more than a token amount of generosity beyond themselves or at least their immediate family.
Thus while not the ideal situation, some amount of mandatory force by society is the next best, imperfect, option I can think of.
I'm Korean, and it's been traditional in Korea for children to take care of their parents when the become old. Often times this meant multigenerational households where the elderly would live together with one of their adult children. But this too is changing, and today, quite a few of the elderly are either left alone or put into nursing homes.
Well, we western youth have certainly inherited a huge national debt, crumbling infrastructure, an upcoming climate catastrophe, a political system in deadlock, and geopolitical rivals of vast and rising power. No doubt about that.
But old people did manage to produce a first-world country as successful as any other, get their language spoken all over the globe, vastly increase college education (which they thought was doing the young a favour), build a tech sector that pays wages considered ridiculous everywhere else on the planet, create the internet and basically give it away for free, give birth to and raise us, have much less racism and sexism than there were a few generations ago (although they both remain very real problems), avoid any wars that couldn't be fought with an all-volunteer military, and avoid destroying the world with nuclear weapons - something that seemed as inevitable, in its day, as global warming is today.
Thinking the old have done _nothing_ betrays something of an ignorance of history IMHO.
It's true that (e.g.) France hasn't reaped the benefits of getting their language spoken all over the globe, but they certainly have increased college education, the internet, and no major wars. And they also managed to introduce other benefits, like quality healthcare for all.
Most of the positives you list were achieved by people long dead. The generation that fought WW2 are now (at least) 95. They have my respect.
Below them are a much much bigger block of 60+ old people. They dedicated their lives to the opposite: narrowing educational access,destroying the generous labour market they inherited, stopping people accessing housing, some are even trying to reintroduce Nazi-ism.
C'mon, Boomers were also in the Civil Rights movement. Yeah they're not the Greatest Generation. Yeah they're maybe too individualistic (whether on the left or the right). But if you're going to talk about the far right you should at least acknowledge how many of them were on the left.
I suppose all those babies paid for their own housing, food, education, healthcare and vacations for up to 25 years before they were productive members of society?
Politicians. It's one thing to issue bonds to pay for much needed infrastructure at the time. It's quite another thing to issue bonds to pay the interest on existing bonds. Our governments have kicked the can since the 80s. If you issue a 20 or 30 year bond you are saying I'm not paying for this, but kids born today are definitely good for it.
Not all debt is bad but our government is using it poorly. A 30 year bond on a bridge with 60 year lifespan is good debt. A 30 year bond on 2 expensive, 20 year wars with no positive objective is bad debt.
It's more like I'll have capacity to help the elderly when I've paid off the huge student loans they dumped on me, got a house in the ridiculous market they setup and found a job worth having in the labour market they built...
That, too. My uncle could buy his house for 3 months of salary. It was cheap and made from wood and he had to put in lots of work to make it nice, but good luck just buying the land nowadays for that price.
That said, the horrible housing market is in my opinion mostly due to foreign mafia/dictator/oligarch investment through shell companies. The most expensive areas in London are all sold, but empty...
You're not wrong. But that isn't the only issue. It is also true that if we keep helping people who give nothing back, well just end up with lots of people who give nothing back...
Personally I think the correct line here is personal responsibility and fairness. OAPs have have had huge opportunitied. Until we've given the same to everyone else, they can wait.
> But now we're finding out that the old retirement system is too expensive for the young generation to handle
I had read somewhere that, long long ago people who retired at, say 60 would probably eventually die by 65.
In that case the retirement system, pensions, savings etc would work because they only need to be supported for a few years.
However, as the healthcare system across the world increased, people are now living much longer lives and hence they need to be supported longer. This stresses the existing retirement mechanisms.
Mid 30ies. But I used to work in a government retirement home for a year just because I was curious about it. And the loneliness in there is depressing.
EDIT:
BTW, if it weren't for the fact that tech pays 20x the hourly rate, I might even have stayed working in social places.
But I have also experienced the other side, like when a restaurant refused to let us in because we came with kids. They argued that their mostly elderly customers would feel disturbed by the noisyness of kids talking to each other.
My spouse is working in a government run long term care home. The conditions are bad and so is the pay. We're not the only couple like this I know, and at this point I feel like techs high salaries are indirectly subsidizing the system.
Meanwhile my significant other works in our state government granting public money to help needy elderly people have somewhere to live out the rest of their lives.
The amount of money these places get per individual is fucking staggering, like $15k per month, every month. What does that get you? Like a shitty bed in a shitty room with shitty daily food and 1/10th of a nurse, who, like you said, is paid garbage.
But don't worry, some rich fucker's portfolio is doing great now that the elderly had to sell everything they've ever earned to afford end of life care, instead of letting their family, children, or even the next generation inherit it.
UK comparison: my mother spent the last few months of her life in an Alzheimer’s care home 3 miles from the family home, and that was “only” £1,000/week.
Owing to the pandemic, I wasn’t able to see the place in person, but it looked pleasant enough on video call.
My thoughts on the topic after reading the article, which made gold points, especially on the low internal migration rate and women not working, but staying at home and taking care of household and family.
The West has followed the path of freedom and free markets. The smallest unit in society is the individual, not the family (like in Asian countries). Freedom here is being celebrated, also by having the kid "finally" moving out at 18+. Those who stay are not doing it for cultural, but mostly for economical reasons.
Taking care of elderly people is not very "cool" here in Germany. My friends haven't called or visited their grandmas for many months, while my Chinese friends try to use their holidays to visit home. They are also planning longterm how to move closer together and incorporate those thoughts into the partner selection.
The Western approach is different and get often "it's me and it's my happiness".
> My thoughts on the topic after reading the article, which made gold points, especially on the low internal migration rate and women not working, but staying at home and taking care of household and family.
Japan is absolutely horrible to its women. Women are expected to take care of their family, their own elderly relatives and their husband's elderly relatives. It's one of the many reasons why so many Japanese women are refusing to marry and have families.
Maybe the US doesn't have it right, but, with respect to its women, Japan has it very wrong.
The biggest problem with the US is that you need a car to do anything. This includes things from basic groceries to the doctor. That's terribly limiting to the elderly.
Just one data-point, but my Japanese friend who lives in Japan just finished up her ONE YEAR maternity leave, so there are definitely a few things that they do much better than the US. The 6 weeks before the due date is also required by law to be protected leave as well, but most places do more.
The US simply doesn't have any protected leave at all, which is incredibly hostile to women trying to contribute to the labor force.
Big corps are tend to be good, small local corps tend to be bad for maternity leave. They don't want employee to leave even though it's guaranteed right and they don't pay salary but insurance pay some money.
CORRECT! And this is what perplexes me so much. I lived in Japan and saw this with my own eyes, it was such an ultra conservative society, especially in respect how women are treated.
And then you meet Western people who adore, even feteshize Japan SO heavily without reflecting anything what is going on.
People have to understand that most of the things they love in Japan (cleaness, extreme degree of quality in customer service, orderliness) is due to those ultra conservative values and norms.
Hence, I am very critical towards Japan and I find people naive who one the one hand adore Japan so much (also the super conservative government) and at the same time hate the Chinese values, system and even people.
It might be that this is so fetishized in western culture precisely because there are many people who are conservative but cannot find a socially appropriate outlet for it. Try saying "The man should work to feed the family, the woman should raise the kids." on American TV ;) But I'm sure there are Americans (of both genders) who feel like that is how they would want their marriage to be.
Similarly, Japanese women are usually portrayed as very submissive in Anime and Japanese movies. Probably, some people find that sexually attractive, or else they wouldn't do it.
Looking at what westerners desire of Japanese culture might be a good way to find suppressed urges in the western culture. Whether or not we as society decide to act on that knowledge is a different question.
I think there are a lot of people who just don't notice the problematic things because they're looking at Japanese culture through a telescope that only shows the bit they like.
If you just like Studio Ghibli films, or giant robots fighting each other, you might not notice that the police in Japan have a suspiciously high confession rate because it doesn't explicitly appear in the small portion of Japanese culture they're looking at.
I studied Japanese and met maybe a hundred people that love Japanese culture.
I never met any who would approve of the sexism, xenophobia or crazy work culture. Most people love the aesthetics, literature, history, architecture, food, music...
I think you are describing a certain far-right weaboo subculture, but that's just a pocket of 4chan inanity.
When Trump became POTUS, I couldn't find anyone in my social circle who liked him. But apparently, roughly half the country did.
Similarly, I've yet to meet someone who thought Brexit would be a good idea.
What that shows me is that the bubble is very real and that people with those views are hidden from me.
"Do you think it is, or is not, morally wrong for a couple to have a baby if they are not married?" 47% of Americans say "morally wrong". That is very conservative in my opinion.
The American misconception of democracy is that the majority decides the way. This is why I dont like the system. The Europeans are making it much better, because they force parties to have coalition. The European democracies are not doing what the majority wants, but assures that the minorities are not left behind.
Just because many many people voted for Trump or the Brexit it doesn't make this good or right.
You seem to have a misunderstanding of how democracy works in Europe. There are many different countries in the continent and only some of them have parliamentary systems; others operate more like the USA (and there's even a dictatorship or two). In a parliamentary system a party that wins an outright majority can form a government on their own and do what they want; parties are only forced to form coalitions when they lack a majority.
> American misconception of democracy is that the majority decides the way
I don't understand, a large part of the last 20-30 years of American elections have been an entire outrage over how a such a small amount of people can have such outsized results in elections because of how the system is structured. Its literally the opposite of your take.
Majorities don't decide the way in US. Even a president can be elected without being the most voted by the majority of citizens, due to the crazy delegate system.
> But I'm sure there are Americans (of both genders) who feel like that is how they would want their marriage to be
They're entitled to live like that if they want, so long as it doesn't turn into socially and structurally coercing everyone else to live like that.
I'm sure it's very convenient for a lot of people if women were to be forced back out of the workplace and economic independence to be guilt-tripped into caring roles for the rest of their lives, but a lot of people put a lot of work into digging their way out of that and are not keen to see it undone.
>They're entitled to live like that if they want, so long as it doesn't turn into socially and structurally coercing everyone else to live like that
Yet people routinely advocate for subsiding what we want and penalizing what we don't in damn near every other public policy context, transportation, energy, housing, etc, etc, etc.
So how do you reconcile this? Surely those people who want a conservative lifestyle have just as much right to try and get society to do what they want on the issues they care about as any (to pick an example) the people who want us to reduce outsourcing of manufacturing to countries with less environmental protections do?
It's perfectly possible to craft policy that makes life easier for households with one working parent and one stay at home parent without doing anything to specifically restrict women. Crafting policy in such a manner would be all but necessary since we live in an age where same sex marriage is widely accepted. Heck, it could be as simple as a well crafted tax credit.
What is far harder than crafting the actual policy is having a discussion about the policy without things devolving in exactly the direction you're bringing it.
Edit: Now that I think about it policy that promotes married couples with a single stay at home parent would likely go a long way toward un-screwing the people who've been screwed out of stable households for several generations due to welfare and state assistance rules that highly dis-incentivize marriage.
The social conservative positions I have seen in the US for the past few decades have been only about limiting women’s rights. I have not seen anything come out about helping families with one stay at home parent and one working parent.
Nothing about healthcare reform, minimum wage laws, or parental leave policies. You have to have two working parents to afford the volatility of income, which in the US was also tied to healthcare, and still is in some sense (until Democrats helped changed that with ACA, not the people that call themselves conservatives).
Reducing this volatility for families is not the “conservative” position in the US.
You must be a westerner. This is a very common westerner comment its very textbook, so textbook that Asian mindsets are tired responding to it. Please try to understand the mindset in Asia first. For example, do women in Japan really want career more vs becoming a house wife? You will be surprised at the answer.
As someone raised by non westerners, every single woman cousin of mine chose to become financially independent. And why would they not? Who wants to live under the thumb of someone else?
Ignore my anecdote. The proof is the simple fact that wherever women are allowed to financial independence, they choose to take if.
I have had this conversation come up many times before and the people always say that their daughter in law is their daughter and everything that is theirs is hers. So then I tell them, well, they should have no problem signing over their assets to her, and they clam up pretty quickly.
But why can there only be one answer? Could it not be some women would like to be a house wife and some would like a career? If so, its not good that society makes one of these options very hard.
In the same comment you can read:
> Those who stay are not doing it for cultural, but mostly for economical reasons.
If you look statistics about young adults leaving home, and young adults who doesn't have a job (or don't earn enough to buy or rent a house), the correlation is pretty hard.
Good article, but does anybody else feel weird about the:'what can these countries teach us'? It would be fine in a BBC article, where it is clear who is 'us', but in nature? I would feel the us vs india would be bad enough, but Japan? People from Japan publish regularily there, Japan is one of the bigger players in science.
Sometimes I have to step back and note the whiplash of future predicted problems.
When I was a kid, it was overpopulation. Then it became overpopulation combined with the prospect of automation taking all of our jobs. Now, very suddenly as it seems to me, we’re talking about declining population and a labor shortage.
Depends what you are talking about. If the topic is pollution or climate change, then total energy consumption is the problem, which inevitably leads to overpopulation being the problem.
If the topic is how much of society’s resources should be allocated to maintaining quality of life for those who cannot by themselves, perhaps due to old age, then a labor “shortage” will be the problem. More accurately, it is about which proportion of society’s resources should go towards supporting those who need assistance, changes which show up as changes in prices for labor.
I am not too fond of the idea of using society’s resources to keep people of very advanced age living longer and longer with poor quality of life. This rationing of resources will exacerbate due to reduced birth rates compared to previous decades, in conjunction with increasing lifespans and medical interventions.
> I am not too fond of the idea of using society’s resources to keep people of very advanced age living longer and longer with poor quality of life.
Completely agree with you. The "Trillion dollar question" is what to do and how to do it, once a "solution" is not enough, "democracies" have to find ways to enforce it.
Edit: Euthanasia is a solution that is starting to be sold by some politicians. I wonder if people really understand what's behind it.
Assisted suicide. My grandpa lost his last kidney at 95 and was then picked up and dropped off for dialysis 3 times a week in the early 2000s. For a few years this went on, must have been tens of thousands of dollars or even $100k+ of labor and medical services, in those days. Paid for by future taxpayers.
He should have been given an option to go peacefully.
Yeah, I'm taking that option regardless. I have friends who feel the same way. We'll do what needs to be done when the time comes. I've been a firm believer in better living through chemistry. Good ol chemistry will come in handy once again when it's time to die.
Those old people who have lots of family that cares about them will be fine in any case. So the "problem" are those old people that are socially isolated and went all-in on the governments' promises of public retirement care. But now we're finding out that the old retirement system is too expensive for the young generation to handle, plus the young were taught not to care about anyone but themselves...