> why taking care of the elderly, something humans have done since before recorded history
Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)
> it was your kids taking care of you when you get older
This oversimplification has never been true. Humans evolved in extended family groups generally between 30 - 300 people. And humans are far more promiscuous and willing to adopt chosen family than most will admit.
The nuclear family is a shockingly recent invention.
It doesn't negate the claim that parent made though. "Your kids" had a wider meaning (and still has in a lot of places) but the principle remains: an adult had to provide, and protect a limited number of (usually related) kids to be cared by those of them who survived later in life.
That's not how it works unless you try to say that adults in general are interested in kids survival. This would be true but it's not what drives larger efforts, and resources allocation. For that there are always related kids which get the most of one's resources, and other kids which may get something sometimes. And there are your elders and others' elders as well. Actually, there are plenty of countries where pensions either not a thing, or too small even for basics. I lived in some of them and I dare to say I know what I'm talking about.
Word. I haven seen so many misconceptions about our state here in these comments, planted in our consciousness by our capitalist system to justify its existence. This, that we don't naturally rely on mutually supporting each other, is one of them. That our elderly are useless and unproductive, is another one. That it will take people working until they are 70 and utterly worn out to provide the pitifully inadequate support our society provides our elderly and our poor, is yet another one. Such inhumane beliefs persist all while a tiny minority skim off a sizeable proportion of the the wealth our labor produces for themselves.
I think nearly all of it is starting with people not wanting to pay taxes (who blames them?) and reasoning backward from there. It doesn't seem like an attempt to have a consistent non-hypocritical worldview so much as an attempt to justify wealth hoarding which capitalism encourages and happily provides ideological tools for. Nevermind that by allowing ourselves to be split from each other and our extended family support structures, we are all becoming more vulnerable and in need of the very societal support some would rather withhold.
This is missing the elderly with no young to support them for whatever reason, so some level of government support is necessary. You can’t just have old people dying in the streets of course.
George Washington chose to found a country instead.
Beethoven and Chopin wrote some music.
Queen Anne united a Kingdom, and Queen Mary II assented to the 1689 Bill of Rights.
Frida Kahlo painted some art.
Virginia Woolf wrote some literature.
Helen Geisel edited Dr. Seuss.
Rosalind Franklin helped discover DNA.
Jean Purdy helped develop IVF.
All infertile due to no fault of their own.
Perhaps you should consider moving out of the country, avoiding classical music, literature, and art, foregoing all DNA-related medical developments and IVF, and meditating on empathy as you do so.
These people were outliers and they could pursue their passions and contribute to the societies because vast majority of adults were rearing a bunch of kids.
The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies, everyone wanted to be a George Washington or Rosalind Franklin and decided to pursue their passion. Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.
What part of 1/6 the population don't you understand? Is this ignorance willful?
> The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies... Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.
Biology seems to have incentivized reproduction heavily enough that we're sitting at 8.2 Billion humans worldwide.
"The human population has experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it was nearly 370,000,000." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
Wake me up when it actually starts shrinking.
Alternatively, if you think there's something you can do to incentivize reproduction more than sex, let me know, I'd like to be a first-round investor.
Obviously there's a sense in which a woman who's had children and now can't is "infertile" (though FAR more than one-sixth of women experience menopause). But it's not the sense being used by you and your parent commenter in this thread.
> The first red flag is they use the Newspeak "experience infertility".
It's this very new language from approximately the 17th century. And if you think real hard, you might find that you're a person who's experienced things too. Wow.
> If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile"
The phrase that particular source uses is "impaired fecundity" which makes perfect sense. No clue what you're on about. If someone is born with two legs and through some "experience" loses one, we might refer to that person as having "impaired mobility". Crazy.
What causes you to post such insanity? Isn't it embarrassing?
The page I linked to has a top-level section called "Infertility". It has a table with a column called "1 or more births". The data in the table say that a positive proportion of those women are infertile.
As I said the first time, there's a sense in which such a woman can be infertile and it is NOT the sense your parent commenter means.
I looked for references. Found the following which cites three references across 5 decades. It indicates that this practice was 1) rare even before it ended in 1939 2) considered repugnant by many Inuit 3) an alternative to starvation when there was no other choice.
I'm not sure what you meant to communicate by sharing this thought. That 100 years ago hunter gatherers in the harshest inhabited climate on the planet made some unfathomably hard decisions and did horrifying things to survive?
I don't see how that has any relevancy to what we do today in the richest most industrialized society in the world.
Some tribes in Papua New Guinea prior to 1960 practiced occasional cannibalism. Doesn't mean we should be eating our neighbors today.
Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)