You see the same sort of thing at the other end. In something like Montessori, older children will make lunch for the younger children. Or in Japan, children will clean their classrooms at the end of each day. When I was in elementary in Calgary, the crossing guards were 3-student teams selected from volunteer students in grade 6. Instead, we dedicate paid adult labour to all of that.

I don't understand all the causes. Some is labour rights history (freeing children from the mills was a social victory), some is weird labour bargaining (a child doing a union job is a scab), and some is class anxiety from parents (only servants should wash a floor). Not to mention that given a choice, the young and old alike will chose free servants over doing their own chores.

For seniors, another cause is the novelty of mass retirement. North America was very young until recently, and we could afford to extend retirement benefits to people who'd never paid a dime in because there were so few of them.

My instincts are egalitarian, so I believe it doing for myself. Silver plate is for suckers, unless you like to cosplay as the help for an afternoon. But the world is full of people who just _must_ have servants.

Japan's eldercare system has been held up recently as something Western nations should aspire to, but the reality is complicated:

https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-ca...

Basically - having supportive family take care of you is great, when you have supportive family. Not everyone does. Even in Japan, with a long Confucian culture, they had problems with elder care being too much for younger family members; with elderly being neglected and left to fend for themselves; and even with elder abuse and homicide. Now try applying that to America, where the social fabric is frayed, the norm since WW2 has been for children to move away from their parents in adulthood, and many people don't even have functioning intergenerational relationships at all.

Looks good thesis. supportive family is important factor. In 1990 to around 2015, Japan had been in notorious deflation, so there were no enough jobs for everyone, hiring women full time wasn't popular in early 90s (especially for not young people), and full-time housewife was somewhat popular. That's part of why supportive family existed. Now it's time to inflation finally, salary haven't increased much so women need to go work, we understand that we might live long and pension may become poor so retiring age is increasing, and worker shortage is now becoming a serious problem. Family support model no longer work.

Basically: The ones who are healthy enough to take care of others prefer to stay at home (where they often take care of a spouse).

Yeah, US model is that we prefer independent living for seniors as long as possible, then living with family, and only then assisted living (not that it always goes that way, but that tends to be the ideal) at which point not enough seniors in assisted living are capable of helping others for the Japanese model to work.

It’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem in the US—we try to keep seniors out of assisted living because it’s incredibly expensive and has a reputation for poor quality; those things are the case because they require lots of paid labor, but also don’t pay great, resulting in high costs but also often-not-great quality; so seniors who have other options tend not to enter assisted living, so capable seniors aren’t around to do any of the work that might reduce reliance of the system on paid labor…

Not just US, saw that in Germany with my grandma and now my parents.

"The Japanese Model", you mean old people dying alone in tiny apartments?