Another interesting cultural development here is that the scope of parental responsibility has started to extend into what is conventionally considered adulthood, obligating parents to pay for their child’s post-secondary education. By contrast, children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age. This privileges those who invest in financial instruments in lieu of having children, since the instruments will (at least in theory) provide the investor with the resources necessary to hire help in their old age.

Is that actually a contrast though? Parents are generally considered to have some moral obligation to help their kids pay for college, but no legal obligation. Children are (generally?) considered to have some moral obligation to help out their elderly parents (in my family at least), but no legal one.

> Children are (generally?) considered to have some moral obligation to help out their elderly parents (in my family at least), but no legal one.

The level of this is very culture-specific, with a gamut spanning from "children have no responsibility for their parents once they're independent" to "of course the first destination to send cash once you've made it is your folks". The two cultures I've lived among (German and Korean) are very different in this regard.

My personal take is that you should only have children if it's something you actually want to do and consider its own reward, with no expectations on "ROI".

The policy question of whether this is also the correct society-wide social contract to adopt is very valid, though.

If you look at real life reality though -- the argument for stuff like public schooling almost always a dominating piece is "we will educate the kids so society can get a good ROI." That not only the kids are better off, but the people around them will be too. Sure it's nice that the kid gets something out of it, but public schooling would not get as much support as it does were it not for what society gets out of it.

Society never actually holds themselves to the moral standards they demand upon parents. But people are people, people respond to incentives, and individual parents are no different than society in this regard. The position now, and the mass rejection of parenthood, I think in part reflects the outcome of this hypocrisy and doublespeak.

In Canada you cannot get subsidized student loans if your parents’ income is too high. You can’t get student loans at all unless they co-sign. If they don’t want to pay and you want to go to school you have to cut off communication and convince a judge you have no relationship.

There is case law which establishes a legal precedent obligating (usually divorced) parents to provide tuition for post-secondary education. I’m not aware of any such case law obligating a child to care for his aging parents.

> children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age

I don't know which country you are talking about, but at least in France and Belgium they do.

Parents do not have an obligation to pay for their children's post-secondary education though (but they have to provide for them if they are not financially independent).

Single people in Belgium often complain that they are more taxed than families and that it's some kind of injustice.

>Single people in Belgium often complain that they are more taxed than families and that it's some kind of injustice.

On face this is true in the US. If you dig down into it in the slightest though, at least for a middle class family, it is extremely misinformed.

Society puts all kinds of burden on the parent that they would not otherwise have to spend

1) Car seats, safety equipment,

2) Employment and corporate taxes, regulatory overhead (including any government-imposed insurance and bond requirements), and licensing costs on daycare. And daycare is required because in US leaving children alone is illegal and providing unlicensed childcare for money is also in many cases illegal. (this one likely completely eats up the child tax credit)

3) Taxes charged on items of utility for the child, often even food.

If you are a single person you are not paying sales taxes for all the shit a kid consumes, you are not paying all the overhead taxes of childcare and child healthcare workers, you are not paying for all the costs associated with licensing requirements of child services providers, you are not paying sales taxes for car seats and all those goodies. You are also paying increased property taxes for the real estate the child needs, although this one is less questionable since you are more likely to consume public schooling which is usually a major component of that.

When you sum it all up I have zero doubt whatsoever a middle class parent pays way more in extra taxes and government imposed overhead than they get in tax breaks. And this is ignoring the fact that the single people in the end still ultimately benefit from the pyramid scheme we have going where social security is paid upward, and the investment to make that possible is mostly born on parents who in the end get the same stake on the returns as someone who did not raise a kid much beyond the scraps taken out of their property taxes.

None of this applies to Darwin though, he was wealthy and didn't need to think about "working the farm".

Interesting, he doesn't portray his wealthiness in these readings, he seems to think kids might make him not have enough $ for books!

But apparently he needed to think about having to work for income to sustain a family.

I think he was saying working working like a neuter bee (as in just working without any kids of your own) won’t do. So the opposite interpretation. Everyone has to work after all, kids or no kids.

Another quote then:

"If marry — means limited, Feel duty to work for money."

You can see the consequences of this playing out in highly developed countries

> And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard

consider the following: if your children don't care about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the primary reason.

To put it in words close to finance: it is not an early cash investment in daycare and food, but lifelong kin work, that is rewarded with emotional bonds and long term dividends.

Living together in multi-generational homes facilitates kin work, there i agree, but it is not a strictly necessary requirement.

There are also other effects at work, especially psychological. Many adults don't grasp that their elders have increased demands, because they are used to see them in a providing role. They understand it on a abstract and logical level, it is so obvious and well known, but to truly understand it on a personal level is far more difficult. In the same way people growing older often try to stay in this providing role as long as possible, as they for many years defined themselves through it.

There comes a time in life when easter invitations switch direction. If you live together on a farm, this changes gradually.

Why do the kids need to assist their parents financially in order to assist them in their old age?

In my experience friends and family have helped take care of elderly parents without that. I help my parents without giving them money.

Even if the elderly are destitute they generally have social security and medicare. If you need to you temporarily move in with them or they move in with you.

Also latchkey kids are very much so legal in most states: ~37 states have no statutory age limit. Your real issue there is probably liability if something does go wrong.

And unlicensed (license-exempt) daycare is perfectly legal in many (most?) states, usually with limits on the number of children and the location. In my state you can legally pay (or not) the stay-at-home mom neighbor with kids to watch your kid after school and she doesn't need a license.

I agree with the idea that smaller family sizes and cultural changes (outside of some communities like immigrants) have led to child raising changing in negative ways compared to communal approaches.

And I agree the financial calculus of having kids does not lean in favor of having kids (mainly because of high cost of living compared to wages, especially in certain regions).

But the rest of it doesn't seem to have strong supporting evidence. While personal income tax rates in the US can be high compared to some countries, overall tax burden as a % of GDP (25.2%) is below average (33.9%) [oecd].

I don't think there is any evidence that shows family size changes or multi-generational living are correlated with tax rate. That's usually correlated with other factors like women's wage employment/rights/education/ethnicity.

And the return value of a society where life expectancy at birth is not in our 40s seems pretty good.[1] There's no left over money from taxes you didn't have to pay if you or the family members you would spend it on are already dead.

[1] https://u.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html

Let's rewind and see how we got here:

>>>> And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard

>>> consider the following: if your children don't care about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the primary reason.

>>I think the more common scenario is the kid cares about the parent but is unable to financially assist them b

>Why do the kids need to assist their parents financially in order to assist them in their old age?

For one, the law says the kids have to support the parents, writ large, in a pooled scheme via SS. If you don't pay it, IRS agents seize your bank account and possibly even bust down the door and put you in a tiny cell. So we're not starting with the premise as a question. It is the current reality.

Now, I don't have a personal belief that kids should have to support their parents, but to philosphically hold that means they shouldn't have to pay SS to them either. The difference between children paying parents individually and writ large is just different mechanisms (collective vs familial), so if you agree with the collective system you already agree children should be forced to pay the parents.

Now, to be clear -- I didn't believ in the premise that if someone doesn't pay their parent, that it means the child doesn't care about them. I don't understand why the respondent said that vicious straw man, but I totally object to it. But I replied based on their fiction so I could address the underlying point about support without a further argument.

Ultimately elderly do need support. Children are ofter going to want to support the elderly. My point is that it would make more sense to tie that elderly support to investment in children so the incentives are in place to put a good investment in children and also to ensure people don't just free ride by rejecting children or helping children but then gladly gobbling up the dividends of the investment. This incentive system can be fixed by either an individual or collective approach but the bastardized system where we privatize the investment and socialize the dividends presents the worst moral hazards and anti-natal outcomes.

>> I didn't believe in the premise that if someone doesn't pay their parent, that it means the child doesn't care about them. I don't understand why the respondent said that vicious straw man,

Children who emotionally care about their parents but are financially unable to assist are rarely going to say

> go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard

i did not build that strawman, you did, i just set it on fire

It’s ok: you can just say you don’t like taxes.

Personally I prefer the low-tax individualistic model, but my point is that I would also defer that a high-tax model would also present balanced incentives if they better reciprocated an investment in children.

The argument for taxes is usually something along the lines of forming a society, but society is almost totally gone when you make the investment in a child to become productive but then magically appears as soon as the kid is productive. As we are finding out this bastardized model is not working out for kids or parents.

A farm, in the middle of 19th century London ?

Charles Darwin actually only lived in London for a few years, and spent most of his life in what was at that time the county of Kent. Although in any case, as you say, his home did not involve a farm.

> Tax the shit out of the kid, spread the social security benefits around to everyone including people that didn't raise any children.

You lost me here. I don’t have children but I pay into Social Security. Why shouldn’t I get something back in retirement?

I think you're looking at this with a misunderstanding of how SS works. You didn't pay hardly any SS to the youth that will support you from which you will make your demands. Rather you reciprocated to the investment made by elders that raised you.

The money you paid the elderly in SS is gone. The question is what proportion of the investment in the youth did you make that will pay you. Probably some, but likely less on average than a parent/guardian.

I understand exactly how social security works. You’re conflating “youth” with “offspring” and “elders” with “parents”.

I haven't conflated them, it's just that it's required that you misunderstand in order to continue on with the fiction that the youth owe you the money you paid into our elders. That doesn't make any sense. Your premise that you're getting back what you paid in only makes sense if you look at it that you actually paid something into the people paying you, which in practice is the investment in the youth becoming productive. Which you definitely do, just on average non-parents do not do it as much as parents.

It just does not make any sense whatsoever non-parents would get the same stake in SS that parents do. It makes 0 sense at all, as the system is currently set up, and I suspect is responsible for a large part of the moral hazard where people grab SS made possible by investment in children but reject children, basicaly renegging the investment but grabbing the dividends. This is part of the reason why I think SS is a broken system, and as we are finding out is likely destined for bankruptcy as the population pyramid inverts.

You still haven’t explained how you made this leap from elders to parents. That’s not the same thing. Social security benefits are based on how much you pay in, not how many children you have.

Because it's not just parents that raise children, it's our elders. You're paying property taxes to raise the children. You are contributing to society in ways that aid children. To the extent that your logic holds, you definitely do not deserve nothing. When you pay SS up to the elders you are in effect paying dividends on the investment they made in you, finally paying back into what they spent on you. The paying back happens when you pay SS, that's you settling the reciprocal arrangement. It makes no sense the youth (or if you insist, other people's children) would owe you for settling the reciprocation to your own elders.

My stance has and remains that the payoff from children, if it is to be violently enforced at the hand of the taxman as it is now, should be proportional to the investment, there is no reason to restrict that to just parents, it just happens to be that parents generally make the lions share of the investment.

>You still haven’t explained how you made this leap from elders to parents

It's a leap to refer to social security benefits as paid to (at least on average by far) our elders? .

> When you pay SS up to the elders you are in effect paying dividends on the investment they made in you

That’s not how Social Security works. The current Social Security beneficiaries made contributions to their seniors, not to me (their junior).

>That’s not how Social Security works

And thus you understand. That's my whole point! That is my objection! But to be clear I didn't say that's how SS works, I said that's how the reciprocation works -- I did not say that's when you pay back the SS money elders paid you (they didnt) but rather their investment. I clearly explained SS flows upward.

The flow of investment in the youth is largely from private individuals to youth. [privatized]

But the flow (dividends) the other way is largely through SS upwards. [socialized]

That's my whole point! It's a terrible system because the reciprocation encourages free-riders and poor incentives for investment in the youth, as the ROI is poorly coupled to those making the investment.

> I think you're looking at this with a misunderstanding of how SS works.

You accused me of not understanding how Social Security works, not of how you think it should work.

>You lost me here. I don’t have children but I pay into Social Security. Why shouldn’t I get something back in retirement?

Because you seem to think you're owed something 'back' when in fact the people you're asking something 'back' weren't people that you paid SS to.

What's more accurate is that SS is you paying the elderly back for their investment, not that you somehow create a debt for the children because you paid SS to the elderly. Your position there made zero sense.

Any debt you think you're owed 'back' from children who will pay you SS would be created when the children actually received something from you -- i.e. being raised, schooled, etc. Not created because you paid a 3rd party.