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- Jan 9, 2003
Europe's falling birth rate
- Thread starter BurbankHibee
- Start date
egb_hibs
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- Jul 2, 2002
We are scheduled to cross that line this year. From memory the UK is forecast to have a population of 70 odd million by the end of the century. Which doesnt sound a lot given its growth over the last 20 years until you learn it would lose 25 million and be 40 odd without migration.
jetsam1
Radge McRadge of Radge End
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- Apr 29, 2003
Potentially there is a skew in demographics due to the Boomers being unusually large as a generation and we are just correcting.
There are two big things in the West which is: Babies and young children simply survive more. Not that long ago the average age was low largely due to infant mortality and part of the drive for larger families.
You can't survive as a household especially when younger without two wages. This means problems come when there are small children as many of us don't have support networks (needing to move to get jobs) and employers can be unflexible still plus the astronomical cost of childcare (little getting to those employees of course who need close vetting and so on). Insecure rentals and property prices that are 5 times the average wage make affordability an problem.
Children are expensive to feed and clothe. Even using hand me downs and sharing clothes that are grown out of around the families (both of which we have done) it gets expensive simply as they grow quickly. Food. If you are trying to feed them properly quality ingredients can be expensive especially fresh veg in the winter.
Coercion of people to have more kids doesn't work and never has whenever tried basically due to the above. Hungary has tried with a number of high profile policies but the essential affordability and health implications for more than 2-3 kids are a major drag factor. They are basically saying that if you have more than 3 kids the mum is exempt from taxes, of course looking after all those kids means that she likely isn't working anyway........... And inflation wipes out any "savings anyway".
There are two big things in the West which is: Babies and young children simply survive more. Not that long ago the average age was low largely due to infant mortality and part of the drive for larger families.
You can't survive as a household especially when younger without two wages. This means problems come when there are small children as many of us don't have support networks (needing to move to get jobs) and employers can be unflexible still plus the astronomical cost of childcare (little getting to those employees of course who need close vetting and so on). Insecure rentals and property prices that are 5 times the average wage make affordability an problem.
Children are expensive to feed and clothe. Even using hand me downs and sharing clothes that are grown out of around the families (both of which we have done) it gets expensive simply as they grow quickly. Food. If you are trying to feed them properly quality ingredients can be expensive especially fresh veg in the winter.
Coercion of people to have more kids doesn't work and never has whenever tried basically due to the above. Hungary has tried with a number of high profile policies but the essential affordability and health implications for more than 2-3 kids are a major drag factor. They are basically saying that if you have more than 3 kids the mum is exempt from taxes, of course looking after all those kids means that she likely isn't working anyway........... And inflation wipes out any "savings anyway".
egb_hibs
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- Jul 2, 2002
Well there's the rub in a nutshell. You absolutely can't coerce people and government incentives have achieved next to zero wherever they have been tried. Not least due to the fact that the situation exists where things like housing and other elements of 'the cost of parenting' are high but also where they are not.
Survival of kids does indeed correlate with a reduction from large families, as does not relying on them to bring in the crops etc. But once you get below 'replacement rate' of 2.1 (0.1 covering now rare mortality plus infertile people, gay people and others who won't reproduce) then you have a problem.
Lower levels than that are enabled by welfare, which outsources caring for you in your dotage etc to other people's children. People that have kids haven't shifted that much in the number they have on average, the problem is more a rising number having none. This let's them live lives centred on themselves while free riding on their neighbours who absorb the massive cost and decades of work that keeps the show on the road. It also leaves the free loaders with far more disposable cash with which they can price families out of family homes etc. Though again, this selfishness persists where costs are not decisive.
In a nutshell, where you enable people to be self centred, many will choose it. One of the rocks on which socialism always founders.
But it doesn't work. Welfare depends on new generations to staff and fund it, and can't cope with large numbers of people it enables not to pay into its future, making that choice : in short, the system destroys itself.
Options available are:
- the slow (and then accelerating) death of welfare systems, and much else besides
- importing people who do not share our values to prop it up (as soon as they do share them they become part of the problem). This means societies in this position self-extinguish; again, first slowly then rapidly.
There isn't really a third option, though you have the usual sorts hoping AI and robots bail us out of reproducing, which is pretty dystopian to begin with . I have previously suggested a socialist solution of huge, levelling taxes on the childless by choice which compensate for the contribution they are avoiding to the system that enables them, and which counters the 'profitability' of free riding and could fund housing etc for those who are carrying the weight. In short, which address an inequality far greater than basic wealth differences for most bar the super rich. But noone wants this, perhaps especially socialists as the left are less likely to have kids and thus contribute to socialism.
British rates are down to 1.44. And if that is the total it will be lower for white British. In South Korea it is now below 1 - the problem is greatest where there is no Abrahamic (ie Jewish / Christian / Muslim) heritage. They stand to lose more than 80% of their population over two generations. It compounds and becomes unrecoverable before that as young people are crushed by trying to support much larger and aged populations. South Korea ends, basically.
For us, who unlike them use migration to counter, white brits become a minority by mid century, then rapidly run off. It seems reliable contraception, abortion (which on its own claims enough fledgling brits to resolve the problem) plus welfare is more effective at deleting populations than any weapon of war bar nukes.
Populist arguments on migration tend to focus on the other driver - cheap labour - and ignore this altogether thornier stuff. Because if there is a great replacement underway, and there is, first and foremost we did it to ourselves.
This is, of course, why euthanasia legislation is popping up everywhere. There are other motives for it of course, but this is 'why now'. Something will need done about the aged poor, who will be far more likely to have had kids than wealthier sorts who will be able to pay those kids to tend to them.
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- Joined
- Dec 30, 2006
Great post, and this is basically it.
It's sad really that the welfare state was undoubtedly founded with the best intentions imaginable. It's like a cosmic joke that it did in fact contain the seed of its own destruction from the off.
Alas, many simply don't want to hear what you've set out above. Perhaps the solution may be in the framing? As in, rather than it feeling/sounding like punishing those that opt out of replenishing the system, it could be presented more as aggressively incentivising people to have children and hence perpetuate things?
But then I find it hard to imagine the powers that be grasping that nettle; given it will have to be grasped alongside getting real about the tacit expectation of boomer-style 25/30yr retirements.
Archie
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- Jul 13, 2002
China’s Birthrate Plunges to Lowest Level Since 1949
China’s population fell for a fourth straight year and its birthrate tumbled as policymakers failed to slow a demographic crisis.
www.nytimes.com
jetsam1
Radge McRadge of Radge End
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2003
China’s Birthrate Plunges to Lowest Level Since 1949
China’s population fell for a fourth straight year and its birthrate tumbled as policymakers failed to slow a demographic crisis.
Never managed to reverse the one child policy........ If it became cultural?
I don't know how you go about reversing it really.
egb_hibs
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- Jul 2, 2002
They also have a big gender imbalance due to the one child policy causing people to get rid of daughters. We are legalising such practices in the UK now, mind.
I suppose the Chinese still have the option to go full old school communist and make contraception illegal and so on. Short of that they are onto plums I expect. Though sending their excess young men to colonise Africa is a crafty move - it was once speculated they'd need to start a war to get rid of them.
Jack
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- Nov 11, 2007
Not just Europe! Birth rates globally continue to fall! Even in China!
India and more generally Africa are still belting out loads of wains!
Maybe the human race has reached it peak
www.bbc.co.uk
India and more generally Africa are still belting out loads of wains!
Maybe the human race has reached it peak
China's birth rate hits record low as population continues to shrink
Beijing has been trying hard to encourage more young people to marry and have children.
www.bbc.co.uk
egb_hibs
Private Member
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- Jul 2, 2002
Yup. Israel the only western country that bucks the trend which points -along with many other things - to it being a cultural rather than economic phenomenon, once you are industrial / modern society.Not just Europe! Birth rates globally continue to fall! Even in China!
India and more generally Africa are still belting out loads of wains!
Maybe the human race has reached it peak
China's birth rate hits record low as population continues to shrink
Beijing has been trying hard to encourage more young people to marry and have children.
Without opening the usual snish snash they know that they need to reproduce to survive so they do - orthodox jews produce tribes everywhere, but the far more numerous secular Jews are like everyone else, except in Israel.
Asia is in total free fall. Islamic world still in the game. Places like the US and Ireland which were Christian till recently, way behind the rest of the west in crisis stakes, but now falling in line with norms in every respect.