Here is a figure which includes children, taken from Rice et al, "Intergenerational inequality and the intergenerational state", 2021:

doi.org/10.1007/s125...
rdcu.be/cylFh (full-text, view-only)

This figure is misleading. Notice how the chart does not include children, even though, as the article states:

"People receive benefits from the state as a child. They attend childcare paid for by government subsidies and they get a free (public) or subsidised (private) education."

10 beautiful libraries, including the State Library Of South Australia and State Library Victoria:

www.1000libraries.com/post/2025-to...

I've been having a fun time browsing through @chrispower.bsky.social's brief survey of the short story:

www.theguardian.com/books/series...

And, happily, the following books by Machado de Assis and Nabokov (both included in the survey) arrived in the post on Friday, just in time for the weekend!

ANU study: "Australians over the age of 60 have enjoyed a post-tax income similar to that of mid-career working age Australians"

Study's findings on post-tax income, 2018/19-2022/23:

Mid-career working age Australians: $125K
Australians over 60: less than this
Australians over 75: $100K (20% less)

Here is the figure from Varela et al. I assume the vertical axis should read "transfer payments minus taxes".

The figure does not cover the entire life cycle, because public transfers received by children (like school education) are grouped together with those received by their working-age parents.

Both papers include a figure that describes net public transfers (public transfers net of taxes) across the life cycle, where this difference can be seen.

Here is the figure from Rice et al.

In his book "Dimensions Of Urban Social Structure" (University Of Toronto Press, 1969), Frank Lancaster Jones makes some interesting observations on the value of social research that "states the obvious" or produces "commonsense" results rather than surprising ones: