22-03-2009: 养老

今天的问题是，养老责任置于社会更好还是置于子女更好？

之所以提出这个问题的原因是，我发现大致上社会养老福利越发达的地方，生育率越低；子女抚养成本越高的地方，生育率越低。这造成了许多西方国家移民生育率大大高于本土居民生育率的现象，和某些国家的本土居民人口下降问题。同时，也影响了西方国家对于子女的家庭约束，因为家长没有动力对子女教育投入太多精力。自然，望子成龙的心态到了极端也是不好的，但从我的角度看，对子女教育的重视对整个社会是有好处的。

总的来说，社会可以负担一部分养老责任，而子女也应该在此发挥他们的作用，应该有一个机制来让子女参与到养老中来。

附带八卦一则：人类更愿意相信八卦，这证明了八卦的确是人民群众喜闻乐见的新闻形式。（link：http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/323/5921/1617）
Abstract:

Reports

The Surprising Power of Neighborly Advice

Daniel T. Gilbert,^1* Matthew A. Killingsworth,¹ Rebecca N. Eyre,¹ Timothy D. Wilson²

Two experiments revealed that (i) people can more accurately predict their affective reactions to a future event when they know how a neighbor in their social network reacted to the event than when they know about the event itself and (ii) people do not believe this. Undergraduates made more accurate predictions about their affective reactions to a 5-minute speed date (n = 25) and to a peer evaluation (n = 88) when they knew only how another undergraduate had reacted to these events than when they had information about the events themselves. Both participants and independent judges mistakenly believed that predictions based on information about the event would be more accurate than predictions based on information about how another person had reacted to it.

¹ Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
² Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.