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Notes -
Inter-generational responsibility
Sometimes I have these moments when I realize I've got a big hole in my mental models for other people. This came up a few weeks ago, but I didn't get around to posting about it because other stuff happened.
The hole in this case is inter-generational responsibility. To what extent are parents responsible for the actions of their kids, or kids responsible for the actions of their parents. And how much of that responsibility carries across multiple generations.
My answer has always been something like "kids are never responsible for the actions of older generations, and parents are mostly responsible for the actions of their kids while they are guardians of those kids, but most of that responsibility goes away when the child reaches adulthood". I thought this was close to most people's take, but I'm pretty certain its not. I had all the clues and information I needed to put this together sooner, I just didn't. So any comments that basically say "how are you so stupid that you only just now figured this out" my response is yeah yeah yeah, whatever, congrats on being so smart, I was busy noticing and caring about other things.
Evidence I had but didn't really put together:
Anyways, now that I am unmoored from my previous set of assumptions, I'm not really sure where to set anchor again. I'm curious what people here believe in terms of inter-generational responsibility, and what you think the general consensus is on inter-generational responsibility.
In partial defense of my original view and thinking it was standard ... the US legal system mostly seems to take the same viewpoint. Deviations by other countries legal systems is often something that is noticed and gets commented on. Like North Korea still doing full family punishments, or Singapore having a built in legal responsibility for kids to take care of their parents in old age, or the grown adult in Italy that sued his parents for not continuing to treat him like a kid.
But the political system doesn't so clearly take the same viewpoint. Welfare and social security are mainly paid for by the currently young and healthy to the current old and infirm. Debt is taken on by the federal government, and that debt will inevitably be paid off by the children of those alive today.
Treating people as individuals is one of those secret sauce things that the modern Anglosphere takes for granted but which isn't that common globally or historically and which is part of what makes modern society work.
In terms of establishing democracy and capitalism, individualism has been great. And clearly more clannish attitudes haven't stopped birth rate declines elsewhere (looking at you Southern Europe, nobody's having kids when you live with your momma until you're 32). That said, I think a little intergenerational responsibility can be a good thing. Sam Kriss' excellent feature describes elderly retirees in Florida 'absconding from their duty as old people, which is too be a link between the past and the future'. I think old people sticking around to care for children and give them a sense of belonging is something tragic to lose, of course, that requires the young people to stick around too, which can't be taken for granted any more.
I skimmed the piece. I read the first few paragraphs, already starting to doze. Then I got to this line:
So guy goes to the Villages, already having made up his mind, and then just riffs on his own confirmation bias for 10 dreary pages.
I guess it's well-written, if you like that sort of Atlantic Monthly/New Yorker style. But it comes off as that most self-righteous and common form of virtue signal – the worry that someone, somewhere might actually be happy.
The Villages is a pretty interesting place from the perspective of urban development, and contains a lot of the things that liberals say that they want. We need more interesting experiments like it, and less sneering from depressed would-be novelists.
I've got a young child and my parents live interstate in the Australian equivalent of a Floridian retirement community.
We're fortunate to have the resources between us to enable visits back-and-forth with minimal stress, but I do definitely feel that it makes it hard to ensure the grandkids have as deep a bond with their grandparents as I'd ideally like. Also in my case my parents moved away a few years ago before grandkids were 'on the table', and as an unfathomably young parent in my demographic of 29 years old, that has to be somewhat increasingly common these days. I'm pretty sure if grandchildren were an ongoing concern prior to the move that it would have been enough to change the plans.
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