Obedience?

Here's an interesting article:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/08/20/lw.siblings.pay.you.care.parents/index.html

You will have noticed that I have a propensity to rant about the mechanical metaphor underlying science as well as the unreasonably profit-based economy. This article gives a very clear example of how profit/compensation can begin to infect life. I have heard professors and teachers complain about it, and this article is just another example: Americans always want tangible compensation.

I suppose I could make a conventional economic argument and suggest that the article should have calculated the debt that the average child accrues (by virtue of parental support) before he/she becomes financially independent. Add a reasonable market-based interest rate and it seems that you have a measure of what obligation you have to your parents. I suppose you'll have to also value the opportunity cost of having a child for each parent and factor that in (that's a lot of hours taken away from wage earning). Who knows what the actual number would be, though I'm sure it's a lot. And I guess you could even make arguments about who is a good parent based on the "investment" into the child, and who is a good child by who "pays down the debt."

But really, is it not becoming obvious just how impoverished family life must be to talk about things in these terms?

The argument that I would rather make is not economic at all. Call me an idealist, but putting a monetary value on these things seems reprehensible. It's true that we all have to balance the care we give to family members with all the other demands of life, but that balance should not be primarily an economic one. The temptation is one of finding an easily applied measure so that decision-making is clear-cut endeavor. But as with every other simple measure, it is a poor one to depend on. Constantly seeking an easier way to make difficult decisions does not necessarily parallel the desire to make better decisions.

Perhaps one's ability to make good decisions in these difficult situations without simplistic reduction (i.e., without saying "it really all boils down to how much you spent on me") is a better measure of how well that person was raised. But then we have to answer the question of how a parent's successes or failures should affect the care he/she receives in later life (or whether they should receive any at all) from their children. These are the sorts of questions that teach us about our society. The sad fact is that perhaps if parents make mistakes (or certain mistakes), then their children will not have gained the understanding that for them to revisit that failure on their parents in later life is itself a mistake. While it may be a parent's lot to suffer at the hands of a child, it is not his/her desert.

The same goes for others. Measuring people by economics is doomed to be an ethical failure. By that standard homeless people are worthless, and Donald Trump is a tremendous person.

Getting back to the CNN article. As we often do, we see the issue backwards. The problem is not that more people cannot be compensated for taking care of their aging families, or even that jealousy crops up in families over asymmetric inheritances, but that people feel that money is an acceptable currency in these situations at all.