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Notes -
How do we meaningfully improve things for kids? Let them work at 10 yo again?
I don't think it needs to be quite that drastic (also, working youth not making enough to afford their own apartment tends to be a moral hazard, contributes to a 3.7-income trap, and as such needs barriers).
Anyway, there are ultimately 3 problems that stand in the way: infrastructure (transport required for even trivial tasks), safetyism (State abusable by concern trolls), and moral hazard (the people who create these problems are not the ones that will ultimately pay the price for them).
Some things (from "already done in some places" to "is politically very difficult") in the North American context:
Take steps like Utah has to limit the ability for concern trolls to use the State as a weapon against children walking down the street or playing in the yard. This should ease pressure on parents who do live in areas that have parks available but don't dispatch their children to them for fear of CPS. Dispatching your kid to run the odd errand now also becomes feasible, depending on location.
Fix the parks so that kids actually want to go to them and ensure technology is there to encourage meetups. Structures there don't have to actually be dangerous, but they do have to seem like it to be fun. Might require cleaning up tents.
Subsidize and improve medium-speed personal transport options (which should counter the suburb problem somewhat). The powered bikes that you can ditch at mass transit stops are a good start, but if you managed to issue every kid in a school district one (they're about as costly as a cheap laptop, and would cost about as much as a comparable technology deployment) you can dilute the inherent theft problem (not that technology doesn't already exist to just key students to their own bikes) and don't have to constantly re-buy them as they get taller. Traffic accidents will probably go up as a consequence of more bikes on the road, though, so it'll require a body politic that doesn't (for lack of a more polite term) instantly wuss out at the first couple of injuries with the new tech, and it's currently illegal in most polities.
Fix the education-social pipeline so people who've lost patience for school closer to when their biological need to belong to a society develops (about 16) can leave it and do something else that pays better than minimum wage, and harmonize training requirements for jobs with reality. If the best solution to crime reduction is "just give them a future; show them that participating will get them The Good Life(tm) in a reasonable timeframe", well, that would probably do it.
Re-creating the initial conditions for the "good life, back when kids were competent to do things we pretend they can't do now and didn't need to be hand-held through everything" isn't a panacea, but it's probably a good start. If the conditions are allowed to persist for long enough, and those conditions really were the cause of the former, then that emergent behavior should come back and we won't have to deal with so many nervous wrecks who "mysteriously" never developed the ability to do things on their own.
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