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Another interesting cultural development here is that the scope of parental responsibility has started to extend into what is conventionally considered adulthood, obligating parents to pay for their child’s post-secondary education. By contrast, children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age. This privileges those who invest in financial instruments in lieu of having children, since the instruments will (at least in theory) provide the investor with the resources necessary to hire help in their old age.

> children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age

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.

>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.

None of this applies to Darwin though, he was wealthy and didn't need to think about "working the farm".

But apparently he needed to think about having to work for income to sustain a family.

Interesting, he doesn't portray his wealthiness in these readings, he seems to think kids might make him not have enough $ for books!

You can see the consequences of this playing out in highly developed countries

> 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.

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.

I think the more common scenario is the kid cares about the parent but is unable to financially assist them because they're being taxed 20-30% by "society" (who as a kid basically left them high and dry), in addition to paying a large amount for their own children due to society imposed costs like paying out regulatory / licensing / tax overhead for daycare which is now required because being a latchkey kid or going to unlicensed daycare is effectively illegal -- leaving nothing left over to assist the parents financially.

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.

It’s ok: you can just say you don’t like taxes.

Personally I prefer the low-tax individualistic model, but my point is that I would also defer that a high-tax model would also present balanced incentives if they better reciprocated an investment in children.

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.

Why do the kids need to assist their parents financially in order to assist them in their old age?

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.

[1] https://u.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html

Let's rewind and see how we got here:

>>>> 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.

>> I didn't believe 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,

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

A farm, in the middle of 19th century London ?

Charles Darwin actually only lived in London for a few years, and spent most of his life in what was at that time the county of Kent. Although in any case, as you say, his home did not involve a farm.