This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Why don't we just give parents a direct financial claim on a portion of their children's income? Obviously there will be some details that need to be ironed out (maybe this portion goes to the state when one's parents die, to prevent perverse dynamics), but this seems straightforwardly incentive-aligned.
It seems almost too obvious. Do any countries anywhere do anything like this, surely this is a cultural custom somewhere?
I don't think this approach would work on a broader scale at all. If you have the kind of happy family and upbringing where there children would do this themselves without the law, you don't need it to be mandatory. On the other hand, if a child would actually need the forceful hand of the state to make them support their parents, there's a decent chance they won't be able to really support them - and if they could, there's a decent chance that they would refuse to for reasons that could be entirely legitimate. A child being forced to pay a portion of their income to the father that raped them or the mother who prostituted them for drugs would, in my opinion, be justified in refusing to work if it meant that they would be supporting those people. At the same time, it isn't like sharp and serious political disagreements between parents and children don't happen either.
More options
Context Copy link
I wouldn't be surprised if this had a net negative effect on fertility.
The debt would come due when the adult children were thinking of starting a family of their own. That's completely different from the traditional situation of helping one's elderly parents for free while living in their house, or them moving into their grown children's house and helping with the grandkids. The better and more together parents would probably just give the money back, but there would be deadweight loss from it passing through government accounting. Plenty of parents are still helping their grown children out a bit now and then into their 30s, voluntarily. The ones to keep it would probably be toe worst quality parents overall, or their well off kids would offer to help them voluntarily.
More options
Context Copy link
In China the state can punish you for failing to take adequate care of your elderly parents.
Interesting, say more?
These are called filial responsibility laws, and they also exist in America. An interesting effortpost could be made by someone investigating the extent to which they are enforced here - something Wikipedia is kind of vague about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws?wprov=sfla1
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Siphoning off children's income is too slow. Parents should be able to be able to take out massive loans using their young children as collateral. The debt gets passed on to the children if it isn't paid off. Would you rather be born into debt, or not be born at all?
Sounds like a quick way to create a generation willing to put the people in charge who say they're in debt the moment they're born around the nearest lamppost the moment they have the ability to do so.
In the U.S., taxpayers are already each born into $269k of debt, yet there isn’t any popular sentiment to lynch old people, welfare recipients, or the politicians who arranged this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This seems like a roundabout way to do things. Why involve the state at all?
One proposed reason for the fall in fertility is that people no longer think of children as an asset. When they get old, the state will take care of them. Of course, this is misguided and wrong and they will regret it when they're 80, but probably some people think that way.
But my kids will take care of me (I hope) because they love me, not because the state forces them to give me half their paycheck.
The dirty little secret was this basically failed in the US - rates of severe endemic poverty among old people were massive even pre-Depression, which is what led to support for Social Security in the first place. It turns out a lot of people either just don't care about their parents or are barely surviving on their own, that another mouth to feed may tip the scales.
So, yes, we have a less connected society, but severe endemic poverty among retirees basically doesn't exist and now there's a massive class of consumers who didn't exist. Win-win for the social democrats and the capitalists.
I wonder how much of this is genuine econometrics/history, how much was and is pure political posturing (either to drum up support for programs like SS or to maintain that general zeitgeist), and how much is just "actually, basically everyone was just poor back then". Looking at figures like this, I lean toward "everyone was just poor back then". James T Patterson wrote:
with some numbers that are in various year real dollars, comparing how different 'standards' for poverty have changed significantly over time. Were old people poor back then? Almost certainly; everyone was poor back then. It's the absolutely phenomenal success of American capitalism that has made us just absurdly wealthy in comparison that has been the major change. It's extremely difficult to 1) actually break out detailed age-based numbers in that era and tell a significant story about what did/didn't "work" in the context of universal poverty, and 2) have any sense for whether something "working/not working" in the context of universal poverty says much about a world where we have literally 10x more wealth.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link