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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27136 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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In last week’s thread there was extensive discussion on the retirement home employee shortage in the US. It made me ask myself: is it fair to say that elderly care in the US and Western countries in general is based on the unstated rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn if you have loving, caring children and grandchildren living nearby, visiting you regularly and looking after you if needed? That is, whatever system of care that is set up is not designed and should not be designed to basically prop you up and coddle you otherwise? It may sound cynical or too far-fetched to say it out loud, but looking at this issue from the outside, it’d explain many things. I imagine this is a general rule most Boomers also take as given, as they grew up in an age when childlessness and family dissolution/dislocation was much less normal than today.

I don’t think deserve is the word here. It’s simply not possible to have strangers care enough about an unproductive human being they are not related to in the same way that person’s own family would. And even in allocating resources by the government, there’s a push to austerity in care for unproductive people simply because there are always competing priorities for resources and QOL is expensive for relatively little real gain, doubly so if those benefitting cannot somehow reciprocate. And so with resources limited, and care provided for the least money you can get away with, you’re probably going to at best achieve a Soviet working class level existence— everything sort of minimally works, but tos not fancy and generally sort of works but not well.

No, they’re based on the unstated rule behind most of our institutions: “out of sight, out of mind.”

Just desserts don’t really come into it any more than they do for, say, natural disasters. If you think that’s unfair and irrational, I’ve got a bed net to sell you.

rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn

Outside of individuals who should be sentenced to life in prison, is there anyone not entitled to an upper-middle-class life, regardless of their life choices?

You need to define what "worth a damn" means. I haven't compiled what I usually see from leftists regarding what the elderly are entitled to, but once listed out, I'm guessing it's an upper-middle-class standard if you want to live in flyover country or a wealthy one if you want to live in an Alpha++ city.

For younger people, I see:

  • Unlimited world-class healthcare.
  • At least 40 hours of childcare per week.
  • No more than two children per bedroom, and older children should not have to share a room for as many children as you can have.
  • A safe, walkable neighborhood within biking distance of the downtown core.
  • A workweek of less than 40 hours, although I observe that this number is constantly decreasing. Let's be honest, jobs are optional because means testing is not allowed.
  • If you do want a job, then more than 6 weeks of paid vacation.
  • At least 3 months of paid parental leave (I've seen people advocating for a year).
  • If you do need a vehicle, it should not be a beater.
  • High-speed internet.
  • A smartphone.
  • Free college (should any education be paid for out of pocket?)

Considering that jobs are optional, it seems that everyone is entitled to the life of a trust fund kid.

You need to define what "worth a damn" means.

Not having to lie in bed for hours waiting for the Filipino nurse to come and wash you after soiling yourself. Not lying on the cold floor at an isolated part of the retirement home after accidentally tripping and falling, because nobody comes to help. Not going hungry all the time when you're so frail lying in bed that you cannot sit up and eat, because nobody helps out by feeding you. Not living in complete solitude and social isolation. I'm referring to this sort of stuff, just off the top of my head.

I'm inspired by Who By Very Slow Decay: I honestly think that modern societies are going to go the MAiD/Athenian route, more or less. As I understand it, any Athenian citizen could request a lethal dose of hemlock poison; permission had to be granted by the Athenian Assembly. It could be that elderly people with no children or grandchildren sometimes ask for their hemlock from the government.

Why were things different in the past?

  1. Closer families and more family support.

  2. Modern medicine. The frail elderly who would've been killed by pneumonia or a heart attack or stroke 100 or 200 years ago now are able to survive and as such more time and effort is spent taking care of them.

Life in a social democracy with more robust social services, in other words. Sounds great to me.

The problem is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

That's not really in evidence. The Nordic social democracies that are held up as exemplars may not be entirely what some of their external fans believe they are (in particular, they still have poor people, you still have to go to work, and they have high taxes on everyone, not just the rich), but they're not in danger of running out of money.

Do the Nordic social democracies provide to everyone:

  • Unlimited world class healthcare
  • 40 hours of (free) childcare a week
  • No more than two children per bedroom, and older children should not have to share a room for as many children as you can have

As far as I can tell the answer is "no" to all three. I assume the answer is the same for the rest of the list.

Yes, yes, and within reason.

This is very easily googleable or verifiable by either going there or asking anyone from those places.

That last one is iffy though; I was told (in Oslo, at least) that if you want a big house for any amount of money you are gonna have to be willing to move outside the metro area.

Unlimited healthcare? Any procedure you want, the government will cover 100%?

40 hours of free childcare a week does not appear to exist, but maybe I missed it.

Last one is just totally false as far as I can tell. If you make enough money, sure.

I don’t know about the others, but unlimited world class healthcare is not unlimited healthcare to the maximal extent possible.

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I'm middle-income in Finland, and we currently have two kids who both have their own bedroom and get 30 hours of free childcare for the older one per week. (Could be more but my wife doesn't want it, and wants to keep the younger one completely at home for a bit longer.) I'm not sure what "unlimited" means regarding health care in this context.

Do unemployed people also have 3+ bedroom apartments within biking distance of downtown?

There is a world of difference between your strawman and real existing social democracy societies to which many younger people in the us aspire to. And you can easily have tens of thousands affordable 3+ bedroom apartments near the downtown. You just need to accept the glory of the commie block! Or at least, it's variation more palatable to the western tastes.

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This is caused by the transition from the left being the party of workers against bosses, to being the party of students against workers.

The western college experience is that you move out of your parents house to a 1-star resort where your immediate needs have no short term sticker price, and you can get a stipend to live off of. This is treated as an entitlement by the people doing it and it’s perfectly reasonable on an individual/class level to advocate for the thing to which you’re already entitled to become higher quality/bigger. And it’s also perfectly reasonable to lobby for the entitlement to not end.

I don’t know what the solution is, but it’s obviously wrong.

Workers in my experience both as a union member and rep are quite fond of not having to pay for healthcare, having more vacation, childcare availability, time to spend with their kids, adequate pay for better housing and lifestyle, shorter hours, and getting free education. They fight quite hard to try and get such benefits in their contracts. Go back to before the majority of the populace went to college and you'll still find social democratic, labor and socialist parties with such demands in their party platforms.

it fair to say that elderly care in the US and Western countries in general is based on the unstated rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn if you have loving, caring children and grandchildren living nearby, visiting you regularly and looking after you if needed

I would say it's the exact opposite of what you're saying that is happening in western countries. They are places where you can spend all that wealth you earn with your DINK lifestyle on yourself during your 20s,30s and 40s without raising future taxpayers and still expect in your old age to be funded by the surplus generated by the children of those who sacrifised their own enjoyment for the next generation.

South Korea and Japan are the right way we should be treating old people who never had kids, not the west.

I doubt the problems with elderly care are that much different between the US or South Korea / Japan.

SK and Japan don't spend inordinate amounts of government money per capita on old people. South Korea's basic pension that everyone is entitled to is less than $3,000 a year, Japan's is less than $6,000. Here in the UK your basic pension is around £12,000 so over $14,000 per person. All three countries have similar costs of living. People's children are expected to care for them in old age, and if you didn't have children or they abandoned their filial responsibility then tough; there are extra programs to top up your income but they are deliberately kept at a basic enough standard that nobody would voluntarily put themselves or their parents through them if they didn't have to.

If you want a nice cushy retirement then you are free to save up for it yourself or have children who will take care of you in old age. Now they may very well screw you over in your dotage/your investments get wiped out in a recession but that's a risk you have to take, no different from the risk of being run over by a bus every time you go to work, and just as how you can mitigate bus run over accident risk you can mitigate this risk as well (have more children and instill proper filial values in them, invest more conservatively in a more diversified worldwide portfolio etc).

These things allow SK/Japan to keep thier welfare spend in check, SK spent 1/4th of the median OECD country as a percentage of GDP on pension benefits in 2007 according to Wikipedia and things haven't changed much since then. As a result SK/Japan are free to keep immigration levels low to preserve their native culture because they don't need more and more productive people to produce stuff that can be taken and given to the old, which is not a luxury westerners have.

The long term cost of the western welfare system will be the utter and complete replacement of the culture that gave rise to it in the first place. It's basically cultural darwinism in action and honestly a fascinating thing to watch play out in real time (see the recent straight up calls for violence in London in pro-Palestinian protests by the ascendent Muslim community and the lackluster governmental response because the government knows there is nothing it can do long term and it's best to not agitate these people in the first place). I for one am glad I get to experience it (on the right side).

You would expect the Asian norm of kids looking after you in retirement vs Western welfare state would lead to them having higher birthrates than us, but those societies have some of the lowest TFRs on earth.

Sure, you might well expect that but as we see it isn't true. Modernity of all stripes, even conservative modernity, really kills birth rates like nothing else. What is true though is that the lack of a welfare state allows them to continue functioning decently with low birth rates and low immigration rates in a way that is not possible for western countries that depend on immigrants propping up its welfare state.

With the exception of the infertile (or those whose spouse is infertile) and extremely ugly, I really don’t have much sympathy for people who don’t have children.

The assumption should be that unless you either have children (plural) and raise them well enough that they care about you, or you’re rich enough to get the platinum plan, $40k a month type nursing home, you’re going to have an awful end of life situation. But a lot of people are scared of bringing out the stick when it comes to raising birth rates.

With the exception of the infertile (or those whose spouse is infertile) and extremely ugly, I really don’t have much sympathy for people who don’t have children.

Hate to be hopping back on the hobbyhorse again. No, it's not the Hock. It's this:

Most people, except those who work in the healthcare industry or are connected to it in some way, simply do not understand that ~5% of the population are poor candidates for marriage and children. If you're looking at people from 18 to 45, most of that isn't because they wound up being burned in a house fire but are otherwise healthy and mostly functional. No. It's health problems that make people unattractive; you don't see them because they don't get out much. Two percent of people are intellectually disabled, one percent of people are schizophrenic, add in other physical disabilities, autoimmune conditions, and "is just a giant raging asshole" to the mix, and you have your five percent. Most of these people don't get out much.

As for the end of life situation: my parents have made it very clear to me and my younger sibling that they did not want us to spend time and energy taking care of them but rather that they wanted to go into a nursing home. I'd think that in a modern society we'd just adapt to increasing lifespan (but not similarly increased healthspan) by having essentially assisted suicide as more of a live option. I might drink hemlock if I couldn't wipe my own ass anymore.

It’s not that I disagree with that assumption. But the (supposedly severe) shortage of retirement home staff in the US surely isn’t affecting just the childless, the careless and the unserious, the unconcerned etc. The current social reality is atomization and geographical family dislocation/dissolution. We can decry it as degenerate and harmful etc., but it’ll still be the social reality for many people in the future. You can be a loving, responsible mother and grandmother, and still you’re likely to end up in a situation where your children and grandchildren are unable to look after you regularly even if they want to, for whatever reason.

Please also spare a thought for those who want children, but so far have failed to find a compatible romantic partner.

Please also spare a thought for those who want children, but so far have failed to find a compatible romantic partner.

Why? After all, given how often we're told how easy that task is to accomplish "if you really want it," then consider how much must be terribly, utterly wrong with those of us who consistently fail at it? So why spare any concern for such contemptible, defective losers. Who do we think we are, to think we're entitled to the spare thoughts of others, rather than deserving only their contempt for being so contemptible?

This but unironically.

If a low iq dude with a fucked up spine wants a middle class lifestyle and gets told "sucks to suck", why shouldn't that attitude extended to all of human existence? This is capitalist realism land, my dudes.

If you don't have something you want, by the dictates of the efficient market it can only be because you don't deserve to have it.

If you don't have something you want, by the dictates of the efficient market it can only be because you don't deserve to have it.

The Market provideth. Interesting way to cut this Gordian knot here.

The assumption should be that unless you either have children (plural) and raise them well enough that they care about you, or you’re rich enough to get the platinum plan, $40k a month type nursing home, you’re going to have an awful end of life situation.

Everything before "you’re going to have an awful end of life situation" is superfluous. Like how are a few kids who occasionally come and pity you, going to make the slow decay and daily pain of old age that much more bearable? It could be worse, they could take care of you, and you'll die knowing you ruined a portion of life of a still functioning human you love. When my grandma was in a retirement home, we made sure never to tell her that the value of her modest house had long ago been consumed by the cost, or she would have eaten the pills.

Why? I enjoyed hanging out with older relatives almost every week until they died, many people in traditional communities actually incorporate the elderly into daily life, they’re at the dinner table, at the park, in the garden, at the tavern having a beer with everyone else. They’re looking after grandchildren, they’re providing sage advice, they’re part of the family and community. I’m not talking about the last six months on your deathbed, I’m talking about what in many cases is the last decade or more of life.

You're describing those elderly that are still in good health, can still walk, have clear and intact minds etc. They aren't really relevant to this discussion. There's a large spectrum between being completely healthy and being on your deathbed.

The typical case for a whole lot of my relatives seems to be that they just stop doing much of anything. During their working years they worked and watched TV. Once social security kicks in they have enough resources to survive and entertain themselves mostly with TV, and that's what they do. If they wind up in a nursing home, they just have a smaller TV, possibly with headphones so they don't disturb a roommate.

I would like that vibrant multi-generational life, but it's not all up to me. Luckily my wife's family is the complete opposite of this.

If they're still in good shape, the childless can keep doing what they'd been doing the previous 70 years of their life. I'm talking about the time where they can't look after themselves, let alone grandchildren. When they become a burden, the fact that they can have their children share that burden is not really a plus. Maybe you haven’t experienced old age dementia. People who can’t walk ten paces unassisted without falling, who have no idea what you’re talking about most of the time, and who linger for years in pain and confusion.

As @BurdensomeCount says, in many cases (especially those that don’t involve dementia) there’s a long, slow decline between being old enough to retire, old enough to be elderly, old enough to maybe no longer be fully entirely independent (but also not useless or a vegetable) and old enough to need round the clock care.

‘Assisted living facilities’ in the US (etc) are full of people who could continue to play important, valuable and prosocial roles in their communities and families. That’s obvious in as much as these homes are often full of their own kind of communities, which the elderly recreate after being abandoned by their families.

I find your present idyllic view of our elders difficult to reconcile with your callousness towards them during covid, which was basically, why should society care at all about the economically unproductive?

My view of them during Covid was that sacrificing the entire economy to protect them was both futile and stupid, not that individual families (or nursing homes etc) couldn’t take steps to protect them. Firstly, most elderly people easily survived Covid, including nonagenarians and centenarians. Secondly, to me, life extension (past a point) is less important than quality of life. The failure state isn’t grandma dying during a global pandemic, sad as that is, it’s grandma spending the last decade of her life separated from her family and community. And most old people are pretty reasonable in my experience, they don’t want to see their children and grandchildren suffer to slightly increase their chance of living another handful of years.

I'd argue that lockdowns, in the way they were designed and enforced, didn't even end up protecting the elderly.

If they're still in good shape, the childless can keep doing what they'd been doing the previous 70 years of their life.

Unfortunately the childless complain if you tell them that they can't retire from their job, and without the money coming in from their job they can't keep doing what they've been doing for the past 70 years of thier life. There is also a period of time where people are perfectly capable of living a decent life in good shape but they wouldn't be able to work their full time jobs any more. This leads to them making less money that needs to be made up from somewhere, and that somewhere in western countries is by and large the state for most people becuase they don't have a proper culture of filial responsibility or didn't have children or even worse (this one boggles me), despite fully knowing they won't have anyone to take care of them in their old age, made absolutely zero efforts to save up extra money to build a buffer to live off of when they are retired.

When they become a burden, the fact that they can have their children share that burden is not really a plus.

And when you were a little child, you too were a burden, nothing more than a little shit machine, yet your parents elected to take it on instead of handing you over to CPS so the government could take it instead. In their old age it is now time for you to take care of them, doesn't have to be physically if you can't handle it (like advanced dementia, I wouldn't wish caring for a parent with that onto anyone), you can make monetary contributions to their care too (even in my homeland we do have specialised homes for the small fraction of people who become so senile they need a minder all day instead of dying earlier of the far bigger killers of heart disease and cancer).

Only a small proportion (rising, but still small) of people make it to that age where dementia makes taking care of them a huge burden on their children and our specialist care homes can handle it in the cases where things get to that point (of course how much you are willing to pay influences how good this specialist care home gets, from the most basic fully paid for government shit that probably takes a few years off your already dwindling future life expectancy up to and including having your own private trained servants take care of you in your own home, a distant relative of mine over 90 is getting this treatment right now). However in the large majority of other cases your children can easily take care of your needs at home until you're within a few months of death, at which point most of your costs are to do with the medical system rather than the social care system anyways.

And when you were a little child, you too were a burden, nothing more than a little shit machine, yet your parents elected to take it on instead of handing you over to CPS so the government could take it instead.

Or they handed you over to the kindergarten and then elementary school + after-school, which is basically the equivalent to the elderly being handed over to retirement homes. And this has been the social norm for many decades.

This is another weird thing about the western schooling system. Back home school ends at around 1pm for elementary+middle years and around 3pm for secondary school. After school activities exist but are rare and only take place a few days a week.

Regardless, even this this handing over of children is only for a few hours each day, in the end the children still live with their parents and spend more time with their parents than anyone else. That's absolutely not true for retirement homes, indeed I wouldn't call a situation where an elderly person was spending more time daily in the care of their children than with professionals to be anything like them being placed in a retirement home.

Placing you in a retirement home is more akin to handing you over to CPS with your parents giving you a visit for a few hours every other week.

The system isn't built this way, it just evolved. The idea that the state, not your children, would take care of you in your dotage would have seemed farcical not too long ago.

Nevertheless, I think the evolved system is a feature, not a bug. There are few incentives to have children. The birth rate has plummeted. The desire to be taken care of in one's old age is one of the few reasons that people can still give for having children.

For a society to spend a huge percentage of GDP to take care of its oldest and least productive citizens seems the epitome of decline. Payments and health care for seniors already represents by far the largest share of the federal budget.

I'm grateful that India has largely avoided the dissolution of the extended family and the associated problems that Westerners have been grappling with for the past, let's say 70 years or so.

It's not that it isn't happening, far from it, but most parents and grandparents can trust that they'll likely have a home with their children when they're too old to take care of themselves. In turn, obnoxious practises like kicking your kid out of the house when they turn 18 to fend for themselves would be considered scandalous here, you're expected to support your children till they have completed the lengthy period of schooling and higher education required for them to maximize their potential productivity (not that I don't think parents shouldn't have the right to do so, I simply think that's a terrible idea that should deserve scorn).

Of course, every week I encounter an elderly person wasting away, their children having abandoned the nest and flown off to fairer shores, worst case leaving this benighted land for the West. It's still not the expected outcome by an means. Even then, at least low skilled labor is cheap enough that most of them can afford attendants or caretakers.

Personally, while I come across as unabashedly pro-West in most regards, I find myself bound to criticize the most pernicious practises. Living with a large family can be stifling, but it has great benefit in terms of pure peace of mind. If you need to leave your kids at home, they usually have an uncle or aunt to keep an eye on them, often a grandparent or two, and cousins their own age to keep them company. If you fall sick, or lose your job, you know your kin will bat for you. Then you save money on buying a house, since a sufficiently large one can have room for an extended family to shack up together, though that's getting rarer as home ownership is increasingly a sign of personal status. (Once again, I'm not claiming any of this is utterly foreign in the West).

My grandpa, as healthy as can be possible at the ripe young age of 95, has been immensely lucky to have his kids and grandkids living with him for most of his life, despite the usual expectation that both of his daughters would eventually marry and move out to live independently if not with their husbands. I can't imagine he'd have lived this long if that wasn't the case, little can be more corrosive than loneliness. This is still unusual, it required son-in-laws who are uncommonly accepting of living somewhere where they're not the nominal head of household, even if nobody has ever brought that up as a negative where I've heard it. Maybe it was more uncommon a decade or two back.

Even as I prepare to leave myself, it eases my pain to know that my parents, while not as healthy as can be desired (mom's liver is on the way out, and I pray the sheer horror that is a liver transplant doesn't make me shy away if I'm the one who needs to donate)*, they're well educated doctors who can look after themselves for the next decade or two without me needing to lose sleep over them.

On the other hand, rearing kids as two working professionals in the UK fills me with a different kind of dread, and I have jokingly suggest that I drop them off shortly after birth with my Indian family until they're semi-autonomous. How the fuck do people manage that? I'm willing to take the blow in terms of lifestyle and free time that having kids requires, even two or three of them, but it's still daunting to the max. Oh well, at least I know I don't need to save for their college fund..

At any rate, this is all temporary. Our medicine is at an awkward stage where we can treat or mitigate many individual illnesses that would once have shuffled the elderly off this mortal coil, without being able to fix the underlying problem of aging. This has always been a doomed endeavor, akin to never doing preventive maintenance on an old beater and then replacing parts as they fail. Eventually it all catches up and the whole thing falls apart no matter how many times you change out the oil and put on a coat of paint.

I doubt we're solving aging in the remaining time till superhuman AGI, which ought to solve that problem shortly, even if only by killing everyone so there's no one around to grow old and decrepit, but steady advances in consumer robotics suggests that in a counterfactual world where we don't have a full blown Singularity in a decade or two, we're likely still not going to have the shortfall of people willing to accept shit wages for a shit job. Maybe we'll find other ways of improving the QOL of the elderly short of reversing their age, but I'm confident this state of affairs won't last, even if it's only going to get worse over the next few years.

*Scott's donation of a kidney appears trivial next to that, the odds of death are uncomfortably high, as are the sequelae, despite the liver being the only major organ that regenerate

and I have jokingly suggest that I drop them off shortly after birth with my Indian family until they're semi-autonomous.

This isn't the literal worst idea. If they are UK citizens and you don't want to pay extra to live near a good school it makes sense to send them back home to live with your parents for their primary education once they hit the age of 5 or so. Your parents would probably be made very happy to have little children running around the house they can play with. And this way you also avoid all the woke BS being spoonfed to your children in schools in the west.

Hence half jokingly! It might even be the best decision at the time, but it's hard to be sure until I'm a wage slave in the NHS. Childcare costs are exorbitant, until it's factored in from schooling.

While my parents currently declare (performatively) that I and my brother were enough to handle and they won't be saddled with more, well, evolution will have the last word when they're cooing and cawing over the grandkids haha. I just hope they're healthy enough that they can feasibly take that on.

It made me ask myself: is it fair to say that elderly care in the US and Western countries in general is based on the unstated rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn if you have loving, caring children and grandchildren living nearby, visiting you regularly and looking after you if needed?

On the contrary, I think you're building a big assumption in here, that countries could simply provide "quality of life worth a damn" to everyone living under their umbrella and are electing not to out of spite. Instead, as that thread covered, even providing a low-quality of life for someone that can't fully care for themselves is incredibly expensive and a massive burden on nations that are dealing with inverted population pyramids. I see this sort of thinking with regard to various supposed positive "rights" and it just seems utterly fantastical to me to think that there is sufficient state capacity to give everyone a nice life if only the affirmative choice were made.

As a practical matter, it is true that the main way for someone to have a quality of life that's worth a damn if they grow feeble is to have loving, caring children and grandchildren nearby. That this won't happen for everyone is a reminder that aging is cruel.

countries could simply provide "quality of life worth a damn" to everyone living under their umbrella and are electing not to out of spite.

That ingrained assumption completely blew my suspension of disbelief in Neill Blomkamp's Elysium.

Sure, medical care doesn't actually cost anything!! It's just the fault of the nasty bad evil rich capitalists who are selfishly refusing to treat every little twinge and hangnail of ten billion people!!

I felt dirty after having watched that.

I would expect that people who blame the evil ascended upper class of Elysium should in theory fully accept the repugnant conclusion, but I find that very few of them actually do.

On the contrary, I think you're building a big assumption in here, that countries could simply provide "quality of life worth a damn" to everyone living under their umbrella and are electing not to out of spite. Instead, as that thread covered, even providing a low-quality of life for someone that can't fully care for themselves is incredibly expensive and a massive burden on nations that are dealing with inverted population pyramids.

I haven't really had a chance to rigorously think through this, but I've occasionally had an economics thought experiment involving total economic output being measured in working hours, rather than hard currency: given that the law demands specific caregiver-to-resident ratios for these communities (the reasons for which are not unreasonable, in my opinion), we can quantify what fraction of our cumulative efforts goes into providing for our elderly and infirm. It seems reasonable that a society that spends more of its time this way isn't spending it on, say, fundamental research and technology. Ultimately it seems like technology is, other than demographics, our only way to improve this number in the long run.

On the other hand, that presupposes that research and invention is a better use of our time, which quite possibly isn't always the case: would you trade grandma for yet another cryptocurrency startup? So maybe this is just a derivative "increasing GDP doesn't reflect improving my societal preferences" complaint.

It seems reasonable that a society that spends more of its time this way isn't spending it on, say, fundamental research and technology.

It isn't really. Fundamental research and technology is hard, and almost nobody can actually meaningfully contribute to it. It's only getting harder as progressively higher-hanging fruit is picked. Meanwhile, almost everyone can help the infirm. It's just manual labour. As long as you're not a psychopath and not disabled, you can do it.

While I agree with your point and generally am opposed to simply handwaving away all the details on how exactly we will par for things, I think the USA might actually be an example where this is true.

The state has immense resources at it's disposal, and almost certainly could give a comfortable life to everyone if it tried to do so without raising taxes or the like.. Of course, this would require cutting costs in other areas, and more importantly it would require cutting cost disease and corruption. Tough to provide for your citizens when the budget is stretched to its limit on $200 aspirins and $100,000 sinecures.

It’s simply not a solveable problem in aggregate to provide a comfortable life for everyone.

You can provide a comfortable life for everyone who didn’t defect plus the wealthiest 1-2% who did. But lots of people hit defect, including in ways that seem sympathetic, and getting them to a comfortable life uses more resources than they generate. And the more comfortable everyone’s life is, the more resources it uses.

Let’s take the hypothetical childless septuagenarian moving into a nursing home. If he can’t afford the platinum plan, you can’t make him comfortable. And it’s worth noting that the platinum plan’s cost has as its main input the cost of low/semi skill labor- the more comfortable CNA’s are, the more it costs to keep our septuagenarian comfortable. There’s discussion on the tyranny of the rocket equation, but this is the tyranny of the diaper-changing equation.

I like the comparison to the rocket equation, but I still think the US is wealthy enough to make it work. US GDP works out to around 70k per person per year, which means it's a distribution and priority problem. The reality of the modern world is that one person putting in the effort can generate the resources to provide for 100 who hit defect. Is the problem easy to solve? No, but it's definitely possible (okay fine, maybe not to 100% completion, but 90% even would be fine.)

I would argue it shouldn't be solved, but that's a different matter.

It's only a "distribution and priority problem" if you assume doing the redistribution doesn't change the total. it does.

Of course, this would require cutting costs in other areas, and more importantly it would require cutting cost disease and corruption. Tough to provide for your citizens when the budget is stretched to its limit on $200 aspirins and $100,000 sinecures.

Isn't cost disease and corruption literally the hardest thing to cut in a democracy?

It feels like we'd need a crisis on the order of WWII to meaningfully move the needle on these things. Even then, I'm not hopeful. The last crisis (Covid) seemed to accelerate this form of corruption.

In a democracy generally? I don't think so. In our current state? Probably yeah.

I guess I just don't move problems that are in the "We could solve this if the leadership actually attempted to solve it" bin over to the "Literally impossible to solve" bin just because there's currently no political will to solve it.

COVID didn't work because it didn't really threaten the people who mattered. There was a small chance of dying for many of them, sure, but no chance of losing their high positions (which is far worse.) A proper war would do it I think, or a real severe resource shortage. Maybe a civil war even.

Covid wasn't on the order of WW2. It was very overblown, it was presented as a disaster when it was really almost a nothingburger. That kind of thing just lets the bureaucracy grab more power.

A true life-or-death situation like WW2, for all its awfulness, demands that you shape up. Look at the Soviet Union for example, after a few humiliating defeats, Stalin threw out almost all the ideology that had so dominated the 1930s. Poverty was no problem, even famines were no problem, ideology came first, but once the Nazis were threatening to conquer the whole mess, it really was a matter of survival, and Stalin stopped caring about ideology, only about what worked.

That said, you don't want such desperate circumstances instead of what we have now.

I see this sort of thinking with regard to various supposed positive "rights" and it just seems utterly fantastical to me to think that there is sufficient state capacity to give everyone a nice life if only the affirmative choice were made.

Unfortunately, the reasoning is very simple. Look at the group that is sympathetic and is suffering. Then look around and find another group that is less sympathetic and thriving. Well, obviously, you can solve the problem by taking from the second group and giving to the first. This works as long as there are less sympathetic people who are thriving.

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