Comment by ty6853
1 month ago
In those those days though I'm not sure the calculus of working for the sake of the children was quite the same.
You might have kids, and then they work the farm, then you manage the farm and slowly the children take over the manual labor and hard work of it. In old age the investment in the children pays off and a reciprocal relationship is formed where you take care of the grandchildren and your own children take care of you.
Now that is flipped on its head. The parent makes the lions share of the investment in the child, but the benefits of the child is largely socialized. Want daycare, food, recreational, extra-cirricular activities -- basically anything other than public schooling you pay taxes for already? Go fuck yourself.
But once the children is grown up, well well well we are a society here! Tax the shit out of the kid, spread the social security benefits around to everyone including people that didn't raise any children. 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 -- it is only morally right when all of society does the exact same thing to the kid.
There is every possible incentive in today's society to encourage others to have kids, ensuring your own retirement, but to reneg on doing it yourself because some other poor bastard can front most the costs and then you can tax the shit out of the kid for your retirement / social benefits. I think children were a rational decision in Darwin's day, now they are definitely not, because you are on the sucker end of a tragedy of the commons deal.
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.
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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.
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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.
I think the more common scenario is the kid cares about the parent but is unable to financially assist them because they're being taxed 20-30% by "society" (who as a kid basically left them high and dry), in addition to paying a large amount for their own children due to society imposed costs like paying out regulatory / licensing / tax overhead for daycare which is now required because being a latchkey kid or going to unlicensed daycare is effectively illegal -- leaving nothing left over to assist the parents financially.
If you killed off social benefits, desirable or not, there would be lot more left over for intra-familial support and the incentive would come back for people to invest in their own children. Or alternatively under a more society-driven system, make a proportional societal investment in children to what you ultimately take from them so that the incentives are not skewed. Ultimately the issue here is not individualistic or social systems for raising children but rather shoving almost all the costs on the individuals and then totally changing the system to being societal as soon as society can extract benefit.
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
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It’s ok: you can just say you don’t like taxes.
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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”.
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