We invest significantly more than these places in health- and social-care for our elderly, ...
That latter is questionable. Many families in the developing and even the 'less-developed' developed world invest far more in terms of time and money into their elderly. In some cases, that involves living in extended family units where children and grand-children are looked after by the elderly, and look after them in return.
They invest time instead of money, perhaps, but less of it given that their life expectancy is considerably shorter, and compelling children and grand-children to be care-workers is not 'family life' it's slave-labour. People being stuck in cramped living spaces because they do not have the financial wherewithal or infrastructure to move out of a communal home is also not 'improved family life', it's a slum.
...we have no more family breakdown issues than these places, we simply have people with the personal freedom to escape bad situations so they aren't stuck in these mockeries of family life, and we aren't lumped with the same levels of institutional corruption, societal superstition and subjugatory ideas like 'honour killings'.
along with the fact that often, these negative factors that you refer to have, never existed in the first place, where families work together to support each other and rely on each other to live.
Are you talking pre-industrial communities here? I'd question whether ideas like 'honour killings' did or didn't happen, but the sheer abject lack of education, health-care and personal autonomy would make that an horrendous way to live.
If you're talking places like sub-Saharan Africa or rural India then I'm afraid I just frankly disagree with your assessment of the reality.
Our culture is cleaner, freer, more open, more tolerant, more accepting and fairer than pretty much any of theirs, as is evidenced by the disparity in the number of them trying to get here to live compared to the number of people here trying to get there to live.
Is that why so many of our elderly 'ship' themselves out to the Med, to the Caribbean, to India, etc. to live out their last years.
The Meditarranean - you'll note they ship themselves out to other Western-style democracies on the North coast of the Med, rather than the North African places. Similar, advanced cultures. The Caribbean, built primarily along the same cultural lines, when they go to India it's typically to the suburban, Western-influenced areas.
Should I bother making my point when you make it for me?
O, you seem to have a very jaundiced view of life here in the West. I'm not saying that life in other, less-developed countries is necessarily better than here; what I am saying is that the two aren't reasonably comparable. We, in the West, lack important support systems that others have; they lack important support systems that we have. To a certain degree, those support systems are symptomatic of the nature of society. For instance, heart disease has a low incidence in many developing countries, whilst it is high here in the West; conversely, malaria has a high incidence in many developing countries and a low one here.
Heart disease is high in the west partly - only partly - because we have a richer (more enjoyable, some might say) diet, but primarily because other things that would kill people before heart disease had a chance to manifest just don't kick in. The same is true for cancer and other progressive, degenerative illnesses. The personal freedom that we value has supported an economic system that means we care for our disabled as a community - not leaving individuals to struggle with their own families in a system that doesn't give them capacity to do it.
A major part of our ability to do this is the fact that, during the Renaissance and early Industrial era our societies developed in areas that were geographically rich in resources, so the spare capacity was there to do it. Modern developments in transport, communications infrastructure and agricultural and manufacturing technology mean that these ideas could spread, easily, but we lack the will to spread them to people who lack the control of their own destiny to demand them.
O.
