The Granny State.
Ooh, I saw this the other day. Dysfunctional families having their spats go through totalitarian arbitration. This is gonna be fun to watch. 
Be right back, I have to call my grandma.
I really wonder what kind of piety do the elders expect to receive from economically blackmailed offspring, apart from a firm pillow press to the faceâŚ
On the other hand, being old and lonely sucks and every society has to evolve some mechanism to push the ungrateful, myopic brats into paying some attention to those who brought them up. We also use quasi-Confucian social shame to this end, to some degree.
*Confician.
But now when you visit granny she can say, âyouâre only visiting to get your credit score up.â How the hell do you enforce a law like this? It seems as vague as the various Bathroom Bills going around.
In unrelated news, the murder rate amongst retired people continues to riseâŚ
A bit of state intervention can be quite salubrious when the issue at hand is âthings that would be all kinds of criminal if they happened between strangers; and only the most unpleasantly retro among us still pretend are âmerely domestic mattersââ; since when a justice system is having a good day it knows something about dealing with assault, murder, child neglect, rape, or the high probability of these things; but anyone going to court to make someone have a better relationship with them is walking straight into a category error.
Unless the impecunious old people were paying their medical bills first; and scrimping everywhere else; or China has found a way of producing Suk doctors; I suspect that âdeaths from nonspecific natural causesâ are what Grandma and Grandpa should worry about.
This might just be a translation issue(Iâm arguably dangerously under-qualified for EN-US armchair lawyering; much less commenting on municipal laws in a language I canât read and a legal system non-trivially different from jurisdictions I have any familiarity with); but the one thing that strikes me as somewhat interesting from a âcompare the objectives of the law and how the right/duty/property is conceptualizedâ standpoint is that the law demands both emotional attention/visits/interaction and appears to have at least some vague expectation of financial support.
From an American context; it isnât alien that old people would want those things; but even if we were going to make supporting the aged the explicit duty of their offspring in particular(rather than Social Security/medicare/medicaid/etc. being a mechanism for old people in general to be supported by working age people in general; but without any âyour kid pays for you, my kid pays for meâ); Iâd be amazed if it would take the form of anything other than a framework much closer to the one used for child support; it is really striking that a legal obligation to visits/greetings/other nice-but-not-financial interactions would be created, rather than either a straightforward âif you can afford it and you arenât providing a wealth transfer of roughly desired-pension-size; you are in contraventionâ or a trickier but more nuanced âif you are allowing your parentsâ needs to go unmet for want of money, you are in contraventionâ standard.
Itâs the same sensation I get when reading about French copyright plans(or the EU-wide plans pushed by French agents). Nobody ever accused the Americans of lacking vicious copyright maximalists and some genuinely terrible plans RE: copyright; but for the most part when the Americans do it or lobby for it itâs all about the money. Seeing people who consider âdroit moralâ when conceptualizing copyrights, rather than âIntellectual propertyâ is always just a bit of a culture shock.
The fine tale of Judge Lisa Gorcyca seems approprate in this situation.
Send kids to juvie for refusing to have a friendly lunch with dear old dad? Seems legitâŚ
Well, the story I read had quotes much more like, âWhy would I want to visit my father? He was a bastard and verbally abusive while I was growing up.â
Apparently, China has just begun to reap the ârewardsâ from its one-child policy. No one wants to take care of old, angry retirees.
eta: I finally found the story I read earlier: Credit blacklist for Shanghaiâs disloyal children from the BBC.
Western culture did have a more or less codified obligation of filial respect and, essentially resultant, care for oneâs parents - itâs right there in the Decalogue, under nominal penalty of death.
Granted, this was hardly enforced to its strictest degree by the time the first millennium of the common era rolled around, but at least until the upheaval of the French revolution, some sort of a legal power of the pater familias over subordinate family members (i.e. all women and younger men) was commonplace.
I think itâs only been about four or five generations since this principle was entirely abandoned as an enforceable claim and it still vestigially survives in various estate statutes as an option to disinherit otherwise mandatory claimants on the basis of insufficient interest in the testator.
The shadow of the paterfamilias and various variants on âcovertureâ died unfortunately hard and late; but even those were only moderately binding as a substitute for a pension once daddy had become decrepit enough that his sons were paterfamilias material over households of their own; and his daughters had moved from being his chattels to somebody elsesâ. Direct filial piety orders (while still considered plausible enough to make moral appeals to) have died at least as hard as the theory that usury is bad, rather than a central component of any economy not based on banging rocks together.
I donât, and donât want to seem like I am, arguing with you on the âyes, the Chinese were hardly the only culture to come up with somewhat similar old-people-handling theoriesâ point; just that the idea that weâd use ours as legally binding even in comparatively routine cases seems dead enough that itâs a bit hard to imagine a domestic equivalent to this sort of proposal. Bits of it will probably linger forever within the crannies of estate law; but âCall Grandma or Experian and Transunion will trash your credit.â would cause some head explosions if proposed in seriousness(in thinking about it, also because of the implication that the âcredit ratingâ is a totally legitimate thing for the state to modify in order to turn the screws on someone; rather than a nominally-private financial industry risk management tool that the state makes only the most occasional and feeble attempts to even enforce basic safeguards on: In the case of traffic law, itâs accepted if disliked that insurance rates are effectively a major portion of the enforcement mechanism: most people consider tickets to be penny ante stuff compared to âpointsâ on your insurance; but the same attitude isnât present for credit scores).
Something like 30 states have filial responsibility laws. Itâs already on the books; there just hasnât been a need to enforce it.
Oregon law
âDuty of support: Parents are bound to maintain their children who are poor and unable to work to maintain themselves; and children are bound to maintain their parents in like circumstances.â Oregon Revised Statutes Chapter 109 Section 010
Source: http://www.bendbulletin.com/lifestyle/1626634-151/antique-law-can-require-oregonians-to-pay-parents#
I found the article quote, âThe country canât afford a robust state pension service for these eldersâŚâ, equally telling, considering it regards a country that just recently came to have the largest GDP in the world!
ETA: must be keeping up with those capitalist Joneses.
If Chinese credit reporting agencies perform anything like their willfully and egregiously incompetent Western counterparts â and I donât have any reason to think that they donât â shit like this will just serve to delegitimize them further.
Then again, any customer (i.e. the people ordering the credit reports, not the victims to whom they pertain) dumb enough to use a single numeric value to determine creditworthiness instead of going to the trouble of analyzing the why of that value deserves to have their market idiotically restricted. If a landlord or a used car dealer canât tell the difference between âhelplessly defaulted on usurious student loans taken out as a teenagerâ and âdeclared bankruptcy six times to escape frivolous consumer debtâ then theyâre at a competitive disadvantage to all the landlords and used car dealers who put the slightest modicum of effort into their fucking jobs.
Maybe Iâm being naĂŻvely optimistic though.
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