Tackling the crisis of care for older people: lessons from India and Japan

"I'll start respecting the elderly when they stop bothering me with their email problems."

But old people did manage to produce a first-world country as successful as any other, get their language spoken all over the globe, vastly increase college education (which they thought was doing the young a favour), build a tech sector that pays wages considered ridiculous everywhere else on the planet, create the internet and basically give it away for free, give birth to and raise us, have much less racism and sexism than there were a few generations ago (although they both remain very real problems), avoid any wars that couldn't be fought with an all-volunteer military, and avoid destroying the world with nuclear weapons - something that seemed as inevitable, in its day, as global warming is today.

Thinking the old have done _nothing_ betrays something of an ignorance of history IMHO.

I suppose all those babies paid for their own housing, food, education, healthcare and vacations for up to 25 years before they were productive members of society?

EDIT:

BTW, if it weren't for the fact that tech pays 20x the hourly rate, I might even have stayed working in social places.

But I have also experienced the other side, like when a restaurant refused to let us in because we came with kids. They argued that their mostly elderly customers would feel disturbed by the noisyness of kids talking to each other.

People are living longer, immigration can't solve the problem, people are relatively healthy and wealthy, etc. but there is not enough babies entering at the bottom of the pyramid to grow into tax payers to continue funding the social systems.

Dystopian me sees a world where western governments will have to institute mandatory, two child per woman births, moratoriums on birth control, huge incentives for people with children under 18, and aggressive pushes for couples to raise adopted children and/or make new ones.

And yet, if everyone does it, then Asian countries will also end up with no community -- because all the young people will be in the West.

Already, rural parts of China and Thailand are depopulating as young people go to cities. The same in Eastern Europe. And the same, come to think of it, in the United States. What were once small towns and farming communities are now empty save for a Dollar Store and a few 50-year-olds. This would be a global-scale version of that same phenomenon.

The other issue is that this plan probably means you'll only be able to have a small family, simply because you're starting later. Over time that would also break the model. Hard for the kids to care for grandma when there are as many grandmas as kids.

But for an individual it seems like a decent plan. Except --

Well, it's a little more workable for a man, since in principle, if he's lucky, he can marry a younger woman and still have a family. But that has problems: An equal relationship is less likely, and she will be left a widow at some point. It probably just won't be as good a marriage as if you'd married your highschool sweetheart.

If you want to do geo- and cultural- arbitrage, it seems like, while harder to pull off, it might be better to do remote work and go to a traditional/low-cost country when you're younger.

Also I've witnessed first hand the Korean healthcare system at work via my wife, and it is by far not only less expensive, but also (maybe more importantly) less complicated. It's not perfect, but for the average person I'd greatly prefer it to the mess we have in the US.

Of course, South Korea also has its share of political issues both internally and externally. So it has also crossed our mind that perhaps we ought to think of obtaining citizenship or residency in a third country for when the "earning period" chapter of my life starts to close.

However I would argue that the vast majority of people are very selfish and do not have much more than a token amount of generosity beyond themselves or at least their immediate family.

Thus while not the ideal situation, some amount of mandatory force by society is the next best, imperfect, option I can think of.

I'm Korean, and it's been traditional in Korea for children to take care of their parents when the become old. Often times this meant multigenerational households where the elderly would live together with one of their adult children. But this too is changing, and today, quite a few of the elderly are either left alone or put into nursing homes.

Especially in countries where it has been traditionally implied that your children will take care of you when you grow old.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/29/china/china-millennials-marri...

This is why westerners will always be a gaijin.

The US simply doesn't have any protected leave at all, which is incredibly hostile to women trying to contribute to the labor force.

And then you meet Western people who adore, even feteshize Japan SO heavily without reflecting anything what is going on.

People have to understand that most of the things they love in Japan (cleaness, extreme degree of quality in customer service, orderliness) is due to those ultra conservative values and norms.

Hence, I am very critical towards Japan and I find people naive who one the one hand adore Japan so much (also the super conservative government) and at the same time hate the Chinese values, system and even people.

If you look statistics about young adults leaving home, and young adults who doesn't have a job (or don't earn enough to buy or rent a house), the correlation is pretty hard.

Completely agree with you. The "Trillion dollar question" is what to do and how to do it, once a "solution" is not enough, "democracies" have to find ways to enforce it.

Edit: Euthanasia is a solution that is starting to be sold by some politicians. I wonder if people really understand what's behind it.