My two favorite journal entries:
"But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything."
"I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids and today I hate them worse than everything."
Me too Charles, me too.
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do.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.
"If marry — means limited, Feel duty to work for money."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>>> 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.
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
You lost me here. I don’t have children but I pay into Social Security. Why shouldn’t I get something back in retirement?
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.
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.
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? .
That’s not how Social Security works. The current Social Security beneficiaries made contributions to their seniors, not to me (their junior).
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.
You accused me of not understanding how Social Security works, not of how you think it should work.
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.
But I understand the sentiment.
Proven by modern science now. At least longer life.
It always blows my mind how many people, historically, married their cousins. I guess smaller towns had shallower gene pools.
I've been doing a fair bit of genealogy lately, and you can see on the family tree pretty clearly when people moved from from smaller, insulated communities to larger cities. Above that point, the tree fans out a lot less.
Right, clearly I meant close (1st and 2nd) cousins. At the end of the day, we are all related, but that's kind of a technicality.
"""but terrible loss of time. —""" !!!!
So ruthless in his calculus. One wonders if he was on the spectrum?
It is calculus, it is performed like calculus - it has to.
> When those difficult cases occur, they are difficult, chiefly because while we have them under consideration, all the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time; but sometimes some set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of sight. Hence the various purposes or inclinations that alternately prevail, and the uncertainty that perplexes us. // To get over this, my way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one pro, and over the other con. Then during three or four days consideration, I put down under the different heads short hits of the different motives, that at different times occur to me, for or against the measure. // When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavor to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to two reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons con, equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies, and if, after a day or two of further consideration, nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly
https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/08/14/darwin-list-pros-a...