4 ms·

Below replacement birth rates seem to be a feature of developed economies. It’s not difficult to understand “why” but the more pertinent question is “what to do

Below replacement birth rates seem to be a feature of developed economies. It’s not difficult to understand “why” but the more pertinent question is “what to do about it”. The West (starting with America and now, increasingly, Europe) has decided to make up for the shortfall with immigration (oddly, while also discouraging large families internally). The East (Japan and South Korea at this point) have largely gone the opposite direction with public health campaigns encouraging having children. I don’t know how it’s playing out in SK, but so far in Japan it seems to be failing pretty miserably. The jury is still out on if the Western strategy is viable long term since massive immigration is clearly resulting in issues with social cohesion and increasing domestic unrest.

inglor_cz 4y ago
Europe borders the Islamic world, which had a population boom until very recently. (Nowadays many Islamic countries hover around 2 kids per woman.) So the immigrants are naturally coming from the Islamic world. The resulting clash of values is tremendous, because Islam and (post-)modern liberalism diverge very strongly on many societal and political issues. Hispanic immigrants into the US are nowhere near as "culturally foreign". They speak a different language, but the cultural distance between them and other Americans is much smaller.
faeriechangling 4y ago
I don't know if there's massive social cohesion issues in the west, everything seems pretty peaceful to me and with a few bumps in the road multiculturalism seems to be successful. The only significant issues I saw were during the European migrant crisis.
- trafficante 4y ago
  I didn’t say the issues were massive, just that they were present (I did accidentally type “massive immigration” a sentence earlier, it should have been “mass”). And yeah I agree with you and the other person who replied: immigration is more of an issue for Europe than it is for the States.

inglor_cz 4y ago

Europe borders the Islamic world, which had a population boom until very recently. (Nowadays many Islamic countries hover around 2 kids per woman.) So the immigrants are naturally coming from the Islamic world. The resulting clash of values is tremendous, because Islam and (post-)modern liberalism diverge very strongly on many societal and political issues. Hispanic immigrants into the US are nowhere near as "culturally foreign". They speak a different language, but the cultural distance between them and other Americans is much smaller.

faeriechangling 4y ago

I don't know if there's massive social cohesion issues in the west, everything seems pretty peaceful to me and with a few bumps in the road multiculturalism seems to be successful. The only significant issues I saw were during the European migrant crisis.

trafficante 4y ago
I didn’t say the issues were massive, just that they were present (I did accidentally type “massive immigration” a sentence earlier, it should have been “mass”). And yeah I agree with you and the other person who replied: immigration is more of an issue for Europe than it is for the States.