Why American kids move out at 18 and Asian kids do not

Transcript

Why does an American kid leave home at 18 while an Asian kid is still living with his parents at 40? Everyone tells you it's culture, Americans value independence, Asians value family. That answer is comfortable and it's wrong. In 1601, England passed a law making it a legal duty for adult children to financially support their aging parents. Not a tradition, a statute. And for the next 300 years, the West lived exactly like Asia does now because before pensions existed, your children were your pension. That was the whole arrangement. You raised them, they fed you when you couldn't work, and every society on the planet ran it. The family wasn't sentiment, it was the retirement fund, the hospital, and the unemployment insurance in one building. Then watch what happened to that English law, abolished in 1948, the same year Britain introduced state welfare. America moved earlier, social security in 1935, Medicare in 1965, and the moment a government takes over, feeding and treating the old, the reason to stay in one house evaporates. Families didn't get colder, their job got taken away. Now look at the places where nobody took the job. Singapore has the maintenance of parents act. A parent over 60 who can't support themselves can take their own children to a tribunal and be awarded a monthly allowance. Parents can sue their kids. China, India, and Taiwan have their versions. That isn't culture written into law. That's a government saying openly that the family is still the pension system. So the family had better pay. And here's the part that ends the argument. America never actually repealed the obligation. More than half of US states still have filial support laws on the books. Pennsylvania has enforced them. The duty never left. It went to sleep because something else started covering the bill. So the 18 year old with his own apartment isn't more independent than the 40 year old in Mumbai. He is being subsidized quietly by a system his grandparents built and paid into. And the Asian family isn't clinging to anything. It's doing the job the American government took over for free in house with no budget. One system pays for old age in taxes. The other pays for it in proximity. In a career bent around a parent and never quite having your own life. Nobody escaped the cost. The West just found a way to be billed for it separately and started calling that freedom.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.