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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 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.
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