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The fact that the EU’s replacement rate is 1.59 children per couple and the continent needs substantial levels of immigration to maintain a productive workforce

by blfr 11y ago

The fact that the EU’s replacement rate is 1.59 children per couple and the continent needs substantial levels of immigration to maintain a productive workforce The idea here is that all people are the same, and all you need to do is shoehorn enough to keep the economy going. Beyond the complete lack of humanity in the outlook that we are like barrels of brent, it's simply wrong. If this was the case, the entire world would already look like Europe and there would be no waves of migration. It's also bizarrely narcissistic to think that ISIS care about how Europeans feel about Islam or how Muslims are treated since according to OP they will be replacing locals anyway.

Amezarak 11y ago
> Beyond the complete lack of humanity in the outlook that we are like barrels of brent, it's simply wrong. Indeed. And there seems, to me, to be something nihilistic in the idea that Europeans should simply let immigrants replace them. Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate. The article appears to be implying that Western nations should not make war against Daesh because "that's what they want." Well, the status quo of surveillance, arrests, and half-hearted airstrikes isn't stopping them. There seems something profoundly suciidally nihilistic in the idea that Europe should simply do nothing different and simply be more and more welcoming as attacks happen in an attempt to appease extremists until at last Europe is no longer populated by Europeans. On the timescale of centuries and millenia, it's amazing how little has changed in the past thousand years. This could be just another couple chapters in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Which, for those who don't know, covers mostly in later chapters the European nations and the various Muslim empires.)
- simonh 11y ago
  >The article appears to be implying that Western nations should not make war against Daesh because "that's what they want."... I agree the article spends a lot of time implying what we shouldn't do and not much time at all saying what might make for effective policies, but it's hardly advocating Islamising Europe either. I took two things away from the article. One is that the kind of pretty much deliberate social and economic marginalization of Muslim minorities in France is a terrible mistake. You can have a pluralistic egalitarian society without insisting that everyone has to dress, talk and behave exactly like white western Europeans all the time. Having an Imperial legacy and historic connections with extensive regions of the wider world isn't compatible with being culturally allergic to anyone who looks or acts foreign. We in Europe need to build strong cultural bridges connecting us to the Muslim minorities in our midst that are now also Europeans and deserve respect and support. I may take flak for this, because it turns my stomach to imply that France has any responsibility for the recent attacks, but frankly the French state is not doing it's job. The second lesson is regarding our foreign policy in the Middle East. Keeping out of Syria and letting whatever happens just happen hasn't worked. The result has been a breeding ground for radicalization and chaos that has exacerbated the situation in Iraq, and lead to the biggest Refugee crisis Europe has seen since WW2. The Iraq war was awful and the political pressure to withdraw and 'bring the troops home' intense, but doing so was a horrible mistake. Once you're in, you're in for better or worse. We can't wash our hands of these conflicts and expect that the resulting mess will stay put and not affect us. As a corollary, I think that our consistent policy that none of the borders in the Middle east are up for negotiation is a mistake. If the Sunni, Shia and Kurd regions of Iraq want to be separate states, they should have the freedom to do so. Trying to insist that the Sunni minority had to stay welded to a larger hostile Shia population was just asking for unending trouble. Partition isn't always the right answer, but in some situations it needs to be an option.
  - vlehto 11y ago
    >French state is not doing it's job What state would be good example? What is good measure for succes here?
- programmernews3 11y ago
  > There seems something profoundly suciidally nihilistic in the idea that Europe should simply do nothing different and simply be more and more welcoming as attacks happen in an attempt to appease extremists until at last Europe is no longer populated by Europeans. It reminds me of this fable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Qw5xVn7c0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Qw5xVn7c0
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >Indeed. And there seems, to me, to be something nihilistic in the idea that Europeans should simply let immigrants replace them. Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate. That would require blaspheming against the Austerity Gods.
- kuschku 11y ago
  > Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate. So, 18 months maternity/paternity leave, 180€ per month per child you have, plus tax breaks, plus better credit rating, plus 12 more sick days a year, plus subsidized kindergarten and daycare (with guaranteed daycare place from age 3 on), cheap whole-day school for children, and after-school care for them, is not enough? What else are we supposed to do? Seriously? We have all this, and still birth rates below 1.2 children in Germany. Seriously.
  - lagudragu 11y ago
    These are mostly economical solutions. The problem however seems to be on a sociographic level.
  - FeepingCreature 11y ago
    Honestly, no. That's not enough. You're competing with jobs here, and you ask if 180€ a month is sufficient? And then you're surprised that women prefer to stay in the workforce?
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      You're also dealing with a labor market that punishes people who actually take their maternity/paternity leave, or who actually leave the labor force to raise children, by simply never letting them back into a career-track position ever again. So not only does 180€/month not substitute for a second salary, it doesn't substitute for the permanent hit to the second wage-earner's career caused by raising children. The economic message is clear: raising children is intended to be a low-paid, part-time job done on top of a full-time career for economically non-valuable warm-fuzzies.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        > You're also dealing with a labor market that punishes people who actually take their maternity/paternity leave, or who actually leave the labor force to raise children, by simply never letting them back into a career-track position ever again. By the way, in Germany usually you are guaranteed to get back into your old job after the 18 months of maternity leave.
- woah 11y ago
  The only reason that Daesh exists is the idiotic and pointless wars that have been waged by the US and Europe in the Middle East. Destroying governments and airlifting in weapons is handing them victories and arming them. Their existence is the result of 15 years of a "war on terror". And your conflation of low birth rates in Europe with the topic of war is a symptom of very confused thinking.
nightspirit 11y ago
> The fact that the EU’s replacement rate is 1.59 children per couple and the continent needs substantial levels of immigration to maintain a productive workforce > The idea here is that all people are the same, and all you need to do is shoehorn enough to keep the economy going. Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans. Solving the underpopulation problem by constant import of uneducated masses from all over the world is going to cost more and more, both in terms of the peta-man-hours needed to teach them functioning in new reality (language barrier for a start) and in terms of things going wrong when the former fails. I mean, what are these guys supposed to do here? Join the rat race, stop reproducing and replace themselves with who-knows-whom 100 years down the line? Despise this culcure and blow stuff up? Something else?
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans. We know why, it's just an inconvenient truth. More women are choosing careers over having more children. To maintain a stable population, each woman has to have an average of two children. But that's the average; many will be infertile or homosexual or never find a mate or choose to never have children or only have one. So a great many would have to have more than two children to balance the average; many of our parents had five, six, seven, eight siblings because their mother's entire life consisted of raising children. It's not easy for a family to raise five or more children while both parents work full time, so hardly anybody does that and the average falls below the population replacement rate. That's the why. How to fix that without going back to the Old Ways is not a trivial problem.
  - ownagefool 11y ago
    You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children. Anecdotally, my other half would love to have children but I want to delay it right now because of finances. We live in the south-east of England so this is how things look:- We have a nice 2 bedroom terrace that costs £500,000. I earn a good living but we're hardly living in luxury. The bank of mum and dad aren't rich, thus I struggle to pay that down. This could perhaps be attributed to woman joining the workforce, a lack of building, and a political lanscape that setup property as invesments. She wants children to go to private school that may cost £9000-£30000 per year, with an oppertunity cost of upto £2,000,000 per child. This can probably be attributed to the nigh on impossibility to get your kids into a good performing state school and grammer schools being given the shaft after our parents had their turn. She wants them to have a dad, but Men are afraid of commitment due to the litigious nature of break-ups which screw them over. I'm not saying Dads shouldn't pay for their kids, just they shouldn't be paying £4,000,000 for an ex-wife to keep the advantages of marriage whilst the man no longer gets anything in return There's probably many more problems because the birthrate is fairly low right around Europe but these are some pretty big negatives for middle class men to commit to having children, at least not until they have their lot in life, which means there's less time to have more than 1-2.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vixen99 11y ago
The lack of humanity will emerge soon enough if the practical problems of servicing massive government debt and supporting a European-style welfare system are not solved by having sufficient taxpayers on the ground to fund these outgoings.

by blfr 11y ago

Amezarak 11y ago

> Beyond the complete lack of humanity in the outlook that we are like barrels of brent, it's simply wrong. Indeed. And there seems, to me, to be something nihilistic in the idea that Europeans should simply let immigrants replace them. Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate. The article appears to be implying that Western nations should not make war against Daesh because "that's what they want." Well, the status quo of surveillance, arrests, and half-hearted airstrikes isn't stopping them. There seems something profoundly suciidally nihilistic in the idea that Europe should simply do nothing different and simply be more and more welcoming as attacks happen in an attempt to appease extremists until at last Europe is no longer populated by Europeans. On the timescale of centuries and millenia, it's amazing how little has changed in the past thousand years. This could be just another couple chapters in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Which, for those who don't know, covers mostly in later chapters the European nations and the various Muslim empires.)

simonh 11y ago
>The article appears to be implying that Western nations should not make war against Daesh because "that's what they want."... I agree the article spends a lot of time implying what we shouldn't do and not much time at all saying what might make for effective policies, but it's hardly advocating Islamising Europe either. I took two things away from the article. One is that the kind of pretty much deliberate social and economic marginalization of Muslim minorities in France is a terrible mistake. You can have a pluralistic egalitarian society without insisting that everyone has to dress, talk and behave exactly like white western Europeans all the time. Having an Imperial legacy and historic connections with extensive regions of the wider world isn't compatible with being culturally allergic to anyone who looks or acts foreign. We in Europe need to build strong cultural bridges connecting us to the Muslim minorities in our midst that are now also Europeans and deserve respect and support. I may take flak for this, because it turns my stomach to imply that France has any responsibility for the recent attacks, but frankly the French state is not doing it's job. The second lesson is regarding our foreign policy in the Middle East. Keeping out of Syria and letting whatever happens just happen hasn't worked. The result has been a breeding ground for radicalization and chaos that has exacerbated the situation in Iraq, and lead to the biggest Refugee crisis Europe has seen since WW2. The Iraq war was awful and the political pressure to withdraw and 'bring the troops home' intense, but doing so was a horrible mistake. Once you're in, you're in for better or worse. We can't wash our hands of these conflicts and expect that the resulting mess will stay put and not affect us. As a corollary, I think that our consistent policy that none of the borders in the Middle east are up for negotiation is a mistake. If the Sunni, Shia and Kurd regions of Iraq want to be separate states, they should have the freedom to do so. Trying to insist that the Sunni minority had to stay welded to a larger hostile Shia population was just asking for unending trouble. Partition isn't always the right answer, but in some situations it needs to be an option.
- vlehto 11y ago
  >French state is not doing it's job What state would be good example? What is good measure for succes here?
programmernews3 11y ago
> There seems something profoundly suciidally nihilistic in the idea that Europe should simply do nothing different and simply be more and more welcoming as attacks happen in an attempt to appease extremists until at last Europe is no longer populated by Europeans. It reminds me of this fable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Qw5xVn7c0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Qw5xVn7c0
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>Indeed. And there seems, to me, to be something nihilistic in the idea that Europeans should simply let immigrants replace them. Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate. That would require blaspheming against the Austerity Gods.
kuschku 11y ago
> Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate. So, 18 months maternity/paternity leave, 180€ per month per child you have, plus tax breaks, plus better credit rating, plus 12 more sick days a year, plus subsidized kindergarten and daycare (with guaranteed daycare place from age 3 on), cheap whole-day school for children, and after-school care for them, is not enough? What else are we supposed to do? Seriously? We have all this, and still birth rates below 1.2 children in Germany. Seriously.
- lagudragu 11y ago
  These are mostly economical solutions. The problem however seems to be on a sociographic level.
- FeepingCreature 11y ago
  Honestly, no. That's not enough. You're competing with jobs here, and you ask if 180€ a month is sufficient? And then you're surprised that women prefer to stay in the workforce?
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    You're also dealing with a labor market that punishes people who actually take their maternity/paternity leave, or who actually leave the labor force to raise children, by simply never letting them back into a career-track position ever again. So not only does 180€/month not substitute for a second salary, it doesn't substitute for the permanent hit to the second wage-earner's career caused by raising children. The economic message is clear: raising children is intended to be a low-paid, part-time job done on top of a full-time career for economically non-valuable warm-fuzzies.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      > You're also dealing with a labor market that punishes people who actually take their maternity/paternity leave, or who actually leave the labor force to raise children, by simply never letting them back into a career-track position ever again. By the way, in Germany usually you are guaranteed to get back into your old job after the 18 months of maternity leave.
woah 11y ago
The only reason that Daesh exists is the idiotic and pointless wars that have been waged by the US and Europe in the Middle East. Destroying governments and airlifting in weapons is handing them victories and arming them. Their existence is the result of 15 years of a "war on terror". And your conflation of low birth rates in Europe with the topic of war is a symptom of very confused thinking.

nightspirit 11y ago

> The fact that the EU’s replacement rate is 1.59 children per couple and the continent needs substantial levels of immigration to maintain a productive workforce > The idea here is that all people are the same, and all you need to do is shoehorn enough to keep the economy going. Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans. Solving the underpopulation problem by constant import of uneducated masses from all over the world is going to cost more and more, both in terms of the peta-man-hours needed to teach them functioning in new reality (language barrier for a start) and in terms of things going wrong when the former fails. I mean, what are these guys supposed to do here? Join the rat race, stop reproducing and replace themselves with who-knows-whom 100 years down the line? Despise this culcure and blow stuff up? Something else?

AnthonyMouse 11y ago
> Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans. We know why, it's just an inconvenient truth. More women are choosing careers over having more children. To maintain a stable population, each woman has to have an average of two children. But that's the average; many will be infertile or homosexual or never find a mate or choose to never have children or only have one. So a great many would have to have more than two children to balance the average; many of our parents had five, six, seven, eight siblings because their mother's entire life consisted of raising children. It's not easy for a family to raise five or more children while both parents work full time, so hardly anybody does that and the average falls below the population replacement rate. That's the why. How to fix that without going back to the Old Ways is not a trivial problem.
- ownagefool 11y ago
  You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children. Anecdotally, my other half would love to have children but I want to delay it right now because of finances. We live in the south-east of England so this is how things look:- We have a nice 2 bedroom terrace that costs £500,000. I earn a good living but we're hardly living in luxury. The bank of mum and dad aren't rich, thus I struggle to pay that down. This could perhaps be attributed to woman joining the workforce, a lack of building, and a political lanscape that setup property as invesments. She wants children to go to private school that may cost £9000-£30000 per year, with an oppertunity cost of upto £2,000,000 per child. This can probably be attributed to the nigh on impossibility to get your kids into a good performing state school and grammer schools being given the shaft after our parents had their turn. She wants them to have a dad, but Men are afraid of commitment due to the litigious nature of break-ups which screw them over. I'm not saying Dads shouldn't pay for their kids, just they shouldn't be paying £4,000,000 for an ex-wife to keep the advantages of marriage whilst the man no longer gets anything in return There's probably many more problems because the birthrate is fairly low right around Europe but these are some pretty big negatives for middle class men to commit to having children, at least not until they have their lot in life, which means there's less time to have more than 1-2.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

vixen99 11y ago

The lack of humanity will emerge soon enough if the practical problems of servicing massive government debt and supporting a European-style welfare system are not solved by having sufficient taxpayers on the ground to fund these outgoings.