Maybe I should have said it isn't obviously bad or some new, modern evil that we just invented. It's how human social groups that take care of their non productive elderly have always operated.
The futurology trackers have "breakdown of intergenerational solidarity" as a possibility with no given time frame. It really didn't occur to me how implicated the nation state is in this until you pointed out the fact (in retrospect, glaringly obvious) that this function of family life has been subverted by government.
Do you mind dropping a link to what you're referencing? I haven't heard of it.
But yeah, I do see it as a potential systemic problem. Because the care for the old has become so massively socialized, we also find ourselves in a situation where it becomes individually advantageous to not do the personal sacrifice of having and raising children. Not only is having children a huge financial burden, but it's also a huge time commitment. And when you don't get to primarily benefit from you own children's productivity, that burden isn't as highly rewarded as it has been in the past.
I think we're starting to see this break down in many first world countries that don't have a replacement birth rate. I could see the reactions being one of...
2) increase the social reward for having and raising children. We already do this to some extent, e.g. the child tax credit.
3) develop non family oriented baby mills. Basically state run institutions that raise (and possibly even incubate with artificial wombs) children at an industrial scale. Brave New World is a classic example of this taken to the extreme. We already do this to some degree with public schools and face increasing calls to expand it with free preschool. If we can figure out how to produce healthy, well adjusted members of society with the greater efficiency of 1 adult "parent" to 30 children, like we do in school, rather than 2 parents to 1-5ish children, then we'll probably do it. Currently, it doesn't appear that we can do that, judging by the outcomes of orphanages.
I'm not sure this sentence make any sense. The same could be said about slavery. Is slavery not necessarily bad because it's the way it's always been?