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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.
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.
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.
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