ABSTRACT
The common American assumption, inherited from colonial times, reinforced by the Founding era, and continuing through the 1920s, was that each true family represented a continuum, with a past, a present, and a future—a living bond between the generations of a family. The true family was at least three-generational and assumed care for its frail elderly as a matter of duty and as an expression of its continuity. Indeed, adults in their productive years still understood in some manner the need they had to marry and successfully rear children themselves so as to provide for their own security. Authentic "intergenerational" reform, and rebuild incentives that truly favor both childbearing and family-centered elder care. Economists Isaac Ehrlich and Francis T. Lui have shown that a pay-as-you-go old age security system "discourages families' incentives for self-reliance", drives fertility ever downward, reduces savings, and damages "investment in human capital", meaning children.
