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The very look and feel of families today is undergoing profound changes. Are public policies keeping up with the shifting definitions of “family”? Moreover, as the population ages within these new family dynamics, how will families give or receive elder care? Below, we highlight just a few social changes that are affecting the experiences of aging families.

The post When aging policies can’t keep up with aging families appeared first on OUPblog.

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By Elvin Lim

It is often said that the public debt is a burden we leave to our children and grandchildren. Even Barack Obama said the same when he was a Senator. Invoking children is a great way to make a moral argument without sounding moralistic, but it is a spurious way to make an economic argument in committing the fallacy that all borrowing is deferred charge.

The American people should know that it is not as if the $14 trillion public debt is owed to foreigners. Actually, Paul Krugman (not surprisingly, a Keynesian) thinks that the figure that matters is the debt (or federal securities) held by foreigners and institutions outside of the US, which is about $9.6 trillion. The remaining $5 trillion or so, called intra-governmental debt, is the debt the federal government owes to itself, such as in the form of debt owed to trust funds like Social Security. The cries against burdening our children and grandchildren are are illegitimate here. Borrowing by the federal government is itself a market transaction and an investment decision in which the lender forgoes the present use of her money, and purchases a security in return for interest. This interest is socially costless because it is simply a redistribution from all tax-payers to bond-holders. This is a transfer payment, not robbery.

What is missed in the intergenerational-robbery fallacy is that deficits actually help present working cohorts to invest in the increased supply of assets, generated by the debt. Far from being a burden to their children, the present working cohort are, if they are not also building tangible assets made possible by the money raised, at the very least saving for their retirement and doing their part to ensure that future generations are not called on to fund their retirement (either personally, or by public programs). We don’t even have to get into Keynesian arguments about how debt possibly increases aggregate demand and jobs to show that government borrowing in such instances does the exact opposite of burdening future generations. This is what makes government borrowing a potent instrument of fiscal (read “stimulus”) policy, and it is the real reason why deficit hawks are against it.

Debt sounds like a bad word only because we are falsely analogizing from the personal, or the household, to the public sphere. But what is prudent for the individual or the household is not necessarily prudent for the market. (That’s why the economy needs us all to go out and buy even if we don’t feel we should.) Yet the false analogizing isn’t too surprising if we recall that one strand of ideology in this country has always started off from the perspective if the individual, and the other, the collectivity. We can argue till the cows come home on the latter, but the idea that the public debt is always and entirely a burden to future generations is simply and certifiably fallacious. We are the children and grandchildren of people living during WWII, during which time the public debt as a percentage of GDP was even higher than what it is now, but I don’t think anyone will argue that we’re now paying off their debt.

OK wait, maybe some will.

Elvin Lim is Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan Un

0 Comments on If the public debt robs our children, we robbed the WWII generation as of 7/12/2011 5:56:00 AM

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(Childhood winter time memories stay with us wherever we go. May these recollections take you back and bring you home.)

"Remembering Winter"
(North Dakota Horizons, 2007)

Silhouetted sentries stare,
Standing leafless, stark and bare.

Snowflakes, on their wingless flights,
Swirl in winter wind that bites….

Silv'ry, golden strings of lights,
Star-filled skies on nippy nights.

Snowsuits, mittens, itchy tights,
Sledding, skating, snowball fights;

Steaming cocoa-whispered sips,
Smiles on children's rosy lips.

Sticky, frosted finger tips;
Scrumptious s'mores and chocolate chips;

Scents of winter in the air,
Sounds of children everywhere;

Stockings filled with special treats,
Stories Grandpa still repeats.

Simply said, though far you roam,
Special memories bring you home.

Julio Torres, Intern.

Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives: How Evolution Has Shaped Women’s Health written by Wenda Trevathan, Ph.D., a Regents Professor of Anthropology at New Mexico State University, we learn about a range of women’s health issues.  Trevathan’s hypothesis is that many of the health challenges faced by women today result from a mismatch between how our bodies have evolved and the contemporary environments in which we live.  In the following excerpt, Trevethan draws from Jane Goodall’s observations of primates to illuminate how grandmothers, by virtue of being present in the family, contribute to the growth of prosperity of the grandchildren and the family unit as a whole.

Grandmothers and Reproductive Success

Most long-lived, group-living mammals have in their social groups as many as three generations present at any one time. Examples include elephants, whales and many primates. For primates who live in matrilocal groups, that usually means three generations of females: Infants, their mothers, and their grandmothers. A famous example comes from Jane Goodall’s studies of a Tanzanian chimpanzee social group in which Flo, her adult sons Faben and Figan, and her daughter Fifi lived together. Flo was a high-ranking female and her presence had a number of positive effects on her offspring. For example, Fifi was able to stay in the troop into which she was born, whereas the more typical pattern among chimpanzees appears to be for young females to leave their birth troops at maturity. By staying with her mother, Fifi was also able to rise to a high status. She began reproducing much earlier than most chimpanzee females and not only set the record for reproductive success at Gombe, but one of her sons became the largest male ever recorded at Gombe. Two of Fifi’s sons rose to high status in the dominance hierarchy and her daughter began reproducing much earlier than Fifi did. There is little doubt that grandmother Flo’s status had an effect on her daughter’s (and thus her own) reproductive success. There is no evidence, however, that Flo contributed directly to the care and feeding of her grandchildren, although it is true that she was not in good health at the time Fifi’s first infant was born in 1971.

Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy notes that despite her reproductive success, Flo serves as a good example of why having offspring at later ages may not be a good way to achieve this success or why “stopping early” might be selectively advantageous. Flo reproduced for the last time when she was very old and in poor health, but that infant did not live long. Goodall proposes that this last pregnancy was so draining for her that she was unable to mother her other young offspring, Flint, and when Flo died, Flint died also, even though he as at an age when he should have been able to survive on his own. In fact, if Flo had stopped reproducing after Flint, he probably would have lived, perhaps going on to sire another offspring and increasing Flo’s reproductive fitness through her grandchildren.

Similar evidence that the presence of grandmothers has positive effects on reproductive success comes from observations of a number of other primate species. Again, it is not usually resources and direct care that older female grandmothers provide; rather, they help to defend the infants from other troop members (including infanticidal males) whose behaviors endanger them. In fact, observers report that grandmothers will often act even more vigorously in defense of infants than younger kin. Grandmother Japanese macaques make a significant difference in survival of their grandchildren through the first year of life. Furthermore, females have much greater reproductive success if they have living mothers, even when those older females are still r