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“But we have seen that this does not work. What is needed is a broad range of measures that make it easier for people to build a future in their own country, instead of having to look for opportunities elsewhere, and to have the number of children they desire.”
That’s pretty much it, make housing affordable again so that people can feel safe enough to have children
Yeah the state of things in much of the western world is ridiculous
Oh fuck we need to get birth rates back up!
Ok well let’s do something meaningful to make it affordable to live, let alone procreate
Sorry best we got is austerity and an unchecked real estate market
https://ifstudies.org/blog/higher-rent-fewer-babies-housing-costs-and-fertility-decline
This post argues that housing costs are a factor, though also not the main one (rather, they find that the main factor is declining marriage rates, which is probably harder for policymakers to change).
This is our real issue nowadays that marriages (or lifelong partnerships) are only for love. No more marriages out of duty or arrangement.
Not saying I support any kind of arranged marriage or one that is made rather unwillingly.
But this is simply something we have to live with now. Either accept lower populations and birth rates or try to boost them some other way. Boosting them is a lot harder than just giving people more money. Our western cultures hamper relationships and potential offspring.
Thanks for this link - plots fit my expectations, very useful to quantify such correlation factors. However the examples are only for ‘developed’ countries - would be interesting to see similar for rest of the world. How are the trends in African cities, for example ? Maybe indoor living space (for kids to play) is more important in cold climates (or when there are too many cars on streets! ) ?
They’d have a better shot if Younger Europe took a crack at it.
Basicly as soon as you cross what is now considered middle income status a countries birth rate has dropped below replacement. This has been true for both capitalism and communis, democracies and dictatorships and for every single culture in the world. So it is a good idea to help potential parents to have children, but lets not kid ourself, natural population growth is not going to happen once a country dropped below replacement for a few years.
The only way to transform a country with a naturally declining population into population growth is with migration.
That being said labour shortages are hardly an awfull problem to have. We come from decades of low wage growth, but massive capital gains in the richer countries. At the same time the economy grew. So this is a great oppurtunity to balance the system again. We also have all the great infrastructure built over decades, which we just have to maintain, and still develop great new technologies. So gdp per capita is propably not going to drop, but wages might rise. So it is possible that most Europeans benefit of this.
Also important to say it, but right now of all continets only Africa has a above replacement birth rate. China is well below it, South America is about at it and even India is there right now. Globally birth rates are dropping. Population growth is going down even in absolute numbers. In 1990 the global population grew by 92million people, whereas in 2021 it was only by 62million. Since people do live for some decades this is going to take some time, but in many countries populations will peak around 2050. It really depends on fixing Africa to get it down.
Oh and for anybody wondering. Global emissions per capita are relativly stable. This is going to help a lot to tackle climate change.
As a Japanese I feel so weird to see FP fall for this BS.
For context, Japan rejected immigration and advocated the same nonsense (look at the result). The good thing was that, until today, I haven’t seen western mainstream media fall for this nonsense.
Now FP is starting to follow the Japanese narrative. I wonder if it has anything to do with it being owned by a notorious Japanese newspaper (Nikkei). The Economist is also influenced by Nikkei, afaiu, and recently praised Japanese economy without considering negatives. It’s even weirder because the actual mood inside Japan on economy is still pessimistic.
Anti immigration is not a new postion for Western news media at all. Trump and many others got elected on these platforms.
The issue is that the baby boomers. A large generation born after WW2, when Europe as a whole still had higher birth rates, is retiring right about now. So there is a massive decline in the size of the workforce. So we already see unemployment falling in many regions and regions with high rate of employment are starting to have issues finding qualified personal. The right is anti immigration and lacks a proper answer for that and they need one to get donors. So that is the “solution”. It is also hardly new to Europe at least.
I disagree. Although right wings have been anti-immigration for long, centrists like FP did not spew the illusion that the birth rate can be improved without immigration.
Nah fuck that. There is no need for more people.
The thing is, kids don’t bring labor for roughly the first 25 years.
They are trying this already 25 years ago since they are literally dying … it’s interesting how the most closed and rich countries have the top aging issues . Even the poor countries are starting to have a low birth rate, but for a different reason , their reality . The problem I think is long traditional capitalism . Without population growth we are doomed to stop evolving as a society. Having a child and being a good parent the the most honorable thing a human can do.
Without population growth we are doomed to stop evolving as a society.
Nonsense. You don’t need more people in a new generation for that generation to have new ideas.
Not to mention that we are at a point where the resources of our planet just aren’t enough to give everyone a high living standard, especially once climate change causes more droughts and destroys some current places as human habitats.
The planet has capacity to feed this and far more population . The issue is capitalism and bad administration , greed and bad strategy. There even A LOT of free space for people to live, we are gathered in big cities and that also affects everything .
No, the issue is that most people don’t understand exponential growth. If you have even 5% population growth your population doubles roughly every 14-15 years. Growth itself is simply unsustainable.
I have the feeling speaking of percentage paints an incorrect picture. 5% yearly growth doesn’t sound much, but this might require a very high rate of children per person.
Let’s say we have 80 men and women, i.e. population of 160 evenly distributed between 1 and 80 years. Everyone dies at 80, every woman gets 3 children at 28. This means next year we loose 2, gain 3, i.e. have a growth rate of 1/160~0.6%. In 28 years, we have 1.5 women giving birth to 4.5 pops, i.e. 2.5/188~1.3%. Were it 4 children per woman, it would be 1.2% in the first years, 6/216~2.1%
You can roughly approximate the doubling time for a given percentage by dividing 70 cycles (years in case of annual growth) by the percentage. So 1% annual growth doubles the population every 70 years. 2% every 35 years. So pick whatever percentage you think is a realistic growth rate.
That malthusian bullshit. We have the resources for everyone to live comfortably. But a suv a 1kg/day of meat per person is not high standard, it’s consumerism bullshit.
Even if you reduce consumption significantly, at most you can cut down the consumption by a fixed factor less than 100% (since you can’t make everyone consume literally nothing). Meanwhile population growth increases resource consumption exponentially. At 1% the population doubles roughly every 70 years, at 2% every 35 years, at 5% every 14-15 years. Growth is unsustainable in a quite literal sense of the word.
I’m not an advocate of growth. Consumerism and capitalism are stupid and suicidal for mankind.
But malthusianism is still as stupid as it was in the 15th century.
Human population won’t grow infinitely first. Which means there isn’t an infinite amount of resources to find. And second, there is also space where we can go. Not to fuel stupid consumerist shit but simply to expand our hirzons and universe.
There are more philosophies to see the world through than just growth and degrowth.
Without population growth we are doomed to stop evolving as a society
With continued population growth we are doomed to strip this planet of any remaining resources necessary to sustain modern civilization. Endless growth in a world of finite space and resources is madness. There has to be a way to stabilize at some point and that point was probably billions of people less than we have right now.
Having a child and being a good parent the the most honorable thing a human can do.
Bullshit
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no don’t do that babies are annoying
