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For house economics, I'm pretty sure the way we break off into independent nuclear families contributes to the loss of familial wealth. Each generation, a family has to start from near zero to raise their kids, especially since the last generation need their savings to retire.
In retirement, spending goes up - with more time to use, more people want leisure activities like travel, which costs. Atop that, medical expenses go up with age. Thus the model of saving not only to not work, but to "enjoy the golden years". It's the dream of independent living.
But achieving that sort of savings is difficult, especially if you are among the non-professional class. Lacking that savings, you often live a life of bare existence - the work years but without work. And more often than not you find yourself needing to rely on your kids.
The kids have their own families and are saving for retirement. But they don't want to leave mom and pop to die, so they have to eat into their own retirement to care for them - either taking on the equivalent of another kid, or getting the daycare that is senior living.
This ensures they won't have much to leave to their kids who are now in the unenviable position of just continuing the cycle, the cycle of seeking out independence while collapsing into halfhearted collectivism at the (inevitable) weak points.
Honestly, along with the necessary wider economic reforms, normalizing a form of inter-generational living AND work environment is necessary here. This would be a rejection of the independence model in favor of a responsibility model.
The independence model is that we work and live to be on our own - usually with a spouse, but ultimately in our own bubble. The responsibility model is that we work and live so as to become responsible for our family - the patriarch and matriarch of what we've borne.
In the responsibility model, the final task of the patriarch and matriarch are to hand off their responsibility to the upcoming generation, to become the vessels of wisdom while other now execute the good of the family. Seeing this responsibility continue is the familial goal.
This also needs to manifest in our work - we need not work to save for retirement; we ought work to build up the wealth of the family. For many, this will mean achieving the work to care for the young, the adult workers, and the post-working elderly of the family.
If a family pools the earnings of 2 or 4 full time workers, using one house and one set of utilities (perhaps a bit larger and expensive than the norm, but not 2x or 3x more), it could allow for much more leisure among more non-workers - stay-at home parents, aunts, and uncles.
Or, if you pooled more earnings, a faster rise in living conditions - upward mobility of a large family with it's network of influence instead of solely the individual in their career.
You wouldn't need a massive savings pool in such a model. So long as the income is enough to care for the three generations, you have a basic economic engine that will allow for the "unproductivity" of children and the elderly (neither are unproductive, but that's another topic).
Savings would still occur, but truly for rainy days or for leisure expenditure.
Multi-generational living and work would also contribute to more leisure-members of a family - adults who need not work, so can be the ones who help with children, care for mom and pop, or volunteer.
Multi-generational living and work would also contribute to more leisure-members of a family - adults who need not work, so can be the ones who help with children, care for mom and pop, or volunteer.
Of course, more members would only occur if birth rates went up - something necessary to ensure we have enough family able to care for family. Bare replacement rate ensures only that a couple will turn into their parents' caretaker as soon as the kids are off.
This would also be a remedy for the constant harping of Church's to "find volunteers". Besides the retired (often too old), the current model allows few volunteers. Everyone's working, because everyone has to in order to be independent (and save to ensure they remain so).
Such a way of living would also help to contribute to a more collectivist attitude in our larger economic structure - recognizing our work and our life as a shared familial thing, will overflow in seeing work and life as a socialized (pun intended, tankies!) reality.
The current societal structures push against this, no doubt - they need to change to foster this. It's not a chicken-and-egg issue, it's a both-and.
The impetus for a grassroots move to such living is obvious - do it to the best of your ability! But there are other means.
The impetus for a grassroots move to such living is obvious - do it to the best of your ability! But there are other means.
More cities should subsidize the building of multigenerational houses. Corporations should have (return to!) more involvement with the family - a bit of nepotism, favoring hiring family members, might actually be good.
Entertainment should REPRESENT knit together, multigenerational families. We often portray this as a "minority" phenomenon or something done "back then", both part of the independence narrative. This should be a normalized thing, seen among classes of all sorts.
Those of us who treasure the kind of leisure we think independence gives us should think especially hard about this. Our leisure is often bought at the price of crappy jobs or subsidized by family or society. And often unfulfilling as we lack the training to enjoy true solitude.
Far better to be a leisure-member of a family with 2 or 3 full time incomes - helping with the family chores will be a worthy price to pay for the leisure-with-others it will reap.
