Getting old is a crisis more and more Americans can’t afford | Hacker News Reader

Getting old is a crisis more and more Americans can’t afford

seattletimes.com

26 pointse15ctr0n23 comments

Here in Germany around Munich we have quite a few cooperative communities for retirees where retired people live together, take care of each other, with some assistance from nursing staff or food delivery and so on if it's needed.

From what I have heard it works very well, is much more dignified because elderly people can take care of themselves, keeps people active and is significantly cheaper.

Lots of the crisis around the retired population seems to come from the degree with which it has been commodified. People isolated from their family or community, taken care of by strangers, no social life, no stimulation, just horrible.

In the US in particular it seems to be amplified by the dominance of the nuclear family.

There are some co-housing/intentional communities in the US but it's quite rare. The one I visited a couple of years ago had several what we would call townhouses surrounding a common area and a community center building in the center with a meeting area and a large community kitchen. The people I met who lived there were of all different ages from people with young children to retired folks in their 70s. There was a community garden area and even a small wooded area with a creek. Some of the residents were even doing beekeeping with a community hive. It seemed really nice, but, as I said, it's a rare living arrangement here.

Do you have a negative opinion of the nuclear family?

yes because the loss of the extended family and the multi-generational home in my opinion is one of the largest drivers of disintegration of our social fabric, not just for the old but also the young, and also a driver of inequality. The nuclear family benefits people who can outsource what were traditional tasks of the family or community to the market, while the poor have no such options. There's also a racial component with marginalized peoples often suffering strongest from the fragility that is the result of the loss of larger family structures.

I do. The nuclear family only works with a stay-at-home wife, a husband capable of always being employed with enough income to support four people (two adults, two kids, and a dog), and magically no one ever gets sick.

If one of those two providers gets sick or leaves, the system collapses. Either a maid or a pension (or both) is needed, and those are entirely outside the reach of the vast majority of Americans.

A more robust, anti-fragile system would involve support from either an extended family to help when things get hard, or a meaningfully robust set of public programs. The nuclear family has no support from extended family by default, and the public programs have been largely removed (as the article states).

The idea that nuclear families work is a lie. They don’t scale due to fragility.

The nuclear family is an artifice probably promoted by suburban land developers and durable goods manufacturers during the 40s and 50s or something.

Humans naturally live in extended families three or more generations deep.

Gee, yesterday I was just reading in Hegel's Philosophy of Right that properly speaking the nuclear family is the family.

I can't speak to other countries, but the United States has tended to be unusually mobile. That can make the extended family household hard to maintain.

I wish I were more sympathetic. But this generation:

- had cheap housing for years

- lived through a strong American economy

- had relatively cheap access to education

- had a cheaper tax burden

- many of them have pensions that are paid for by today’s workers

- spent most of their lives polluting the earth and not putting money aside for the cleanup

Not sure what other advantages this generation wants?

They're called the 'me generation' for a very valid reason...

Because people took Tom Wolfe way too seriously?

Perhaps, but you can see it with your own eyes. I hate generalizations as much as the next guy...but look at the change milenials ushered in. When I was a kid, it was unheard of for companies to have 'missions', nobody cared about recycling or the climate, etc.

As much flak as they get, I think milenials and whatever the gen after them are seem to be way more caring of others than the generations that preceded them.

I'm something like a xenial, so I don't group myself in well with them even.

Having grown up in the boom, when people sang along with Bob Dylan "Come mothers and fathers, throughout the land/And don't criticize what you don't understand/[etc.]", I am skeptical. Many of the boomers were unhappy with their parents' generation, portions of which wanted to--and sometimes did--cut off our hair and send us to Vietnam. A reaction followed, about thirty years later, when we noticed that the parents' generation was dying off, we felt bad about it, and we bought a lot of not very good books about their generation, sometimes called (by authors and publishers with an interest in it) "Th Greatest Generation".

Within the last five years, or at least the last ten, somebody published a book to prove that "The Greatest Generation" wasn't that great, and that it was the boomers who set e.g. the Civil Rights movement going. By most counts, the oldest boomers would have been about 10 when the lunch-counter sit-ins started, so I didn't quite understand this. But the author was a boomer, and I do understand the impulse to think well of one's generation.

As to your points: mission statements strike me as on the whole a crock. I have known boomers who worked very hard to make recycling practical. As for the climate, there is a post somewhere on HN now about the 1970s anticipation of a new ice age: it takes a while for better estimates to make it to the general public.

And social security. Millennial and younger generations would be wise to plan for retirement without it.

I suspect those who save wisely and privately saved for their retirement will see their nest eggs raided by the state if the public social security system collapses.

One of the reasons contributions made in to pensions in the UK are 100% tax free is because nobody trusts a future government not to double dip.

That's my fear as well. The last wall to topple is a straight tax on capital. Sure, they'll sell it as a tax on the uber rich just like they did with the income tax, but that threshold will drop drop drop until the middle class is paying out on both ends: tax on earned income + tax on everything you have. Every year.

As a US-er, everyone I've talked to regards me as overly cynical, but I think about Roth IRAs and to some extent all tax-advantaged retirement accounts the same way; that money is a fat target once it becomes politically expedient.

Because poor people didn't exist back then?

I know I am supposed to by sympathetic, but if youve left the bay area and been out in the rral world, you would know that most people do not save at all.

I used to sell RVs. I would say less than 20% of our clients could actually afford their purchase. By that I mean, people all ready in debt, but trying to max out their spending because having something leftover after bills and debts would be a waste.

I thought it was sort of an opposite; people in the Bay Area can't save, because they spent 4x their income on their rent. People in West East-Northington, Ohio can't save, because Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Denny's gutted their towns. So the only savings accounts are in Pittsburgh and Omaha.

Btw don't save in money. Save in stocks or bonds. The banks don't need your money for loans.

Cousin's parents spent entire life working. Kids moved out and now they have no one to take care of them. Elder care near them in $3000/mo per person. They can't afford that.

So vegetable life in a suburban house it is for them

There is no functional Economy and this is due to the policies in place that the outgoing generation supported or, in the least, did not violently protest. So, in that way it is expected. To watch from the cupola of privilege that we in the West resided in, the horrors of the world and think that, eventually that brute Market Logic would not fall upon us was incredibly cruel and naive. It is here now; as soon as you open the dimension of hollowed out and marked for death human - for example the entire Global South - it is only a matter of time before it comes to us. (Fanon; Mbembe)

I can relate to this. My parents are baby boomers and not in the best of health or in a good financial situation. Being privileged enough to be in the tech industry and doing relatively well financially, I can foresee my parents moving in and living with me to help with costs and assistance. As this generation continues to age, I suspect multi-generational households will become more common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com