8 ms·

Germany Fights Population Drop

55 points by soundsop 12y ago

VLM 12y ago
"Yet, with hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs unfilled, some executives believe" I wonder if this is actually true or if its like the typical American sob story of we can't get PHD's to work for minimum wage so we need to outsource.
- cheepin 12y ago
  Well, if the jobs were worth filling, they would be filled, right?
- pgeorgi 12y ago
  A bit of both. There is a certain shortage, but I hear that tune for 15 years or so now (that is, across two tech booms and one bust). The difference is in the objective: Our tech lobbyists (luckily quite incompetent) would like to reduce the minimum mandatory wage for skilled immigrant workers which exists to avoid pressure on locals. As if even lower wages make working in Germany more attractive to skilled labor that can choose between countries - including the US (where at least the gross pay is noticeably higher for skilled jobs).
aianus 12y ago
Hopefully the resulting labour crunch will encourage more automation.
- jimktrains2 12y ago
  Worked in the Middle Ages after the Black Death. Aside: I love the show Connections with James Burke and highly recommend it. Many of the threads weaved in the show come start near this time period because the labour crunch required machines otherwise there just wouldn't have been enough labour to run the society left.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
"in about fifty years Germanys population will fall by about twenty percent" Wow, in 50 years robots will do most of the work. They will drive our cars and clean our houses. They are starting doing it. In fact 50 years is so much time we could had done great breakthroughs like the discovery of nuclear fusion, or the manipulation of DNA so we remain young forever(and most people will not die from age). I am more worried about what will happen THIS YEAR if Germany continues supporting USA invasion of Ukraine and Russia closes the gas key.
ThePhysicist 12y ago
Right now Germany hugely profits from immigration out of other European and overseas countries, bringing in more than 400.000 (net) immigrants in 2013 alone. The figure for 2014 will likely be even higher. If they can keep up this trend it will be able to compensate (to a large degree) the decline of the population caused by low birth rates. In fact, the 2008 demography report of the government (which brought the demographic issue to a large public awareness for the first time) (http://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Verfassung/Demografie/Demografiebericht/demografiebericht_node.html http://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Verfassung/Dem...) calculated with a net immigration rate of 300.000 people in the most optimistic case, so bringing in 400.000 people per year is really better than anyone could hope. Of course some people will again complain that foreigner will "steal their jobs", but the truth is that they might actually do great service to the country, even if their rate of unemployment should be higher than that of native Germans.
- thejdude 12y ago
  Usually, immigration is good for the economy and for everyone who lives there. Germany is pretty cheap country to live in (food is probably the best and cheapest in Europe to come by, but salaries also are rather low, esp. compared to the US), IMHO probably due to the many immigrants. We also need more qualified workers, as everyday I see German dumbos who are seriously unqualified for their job ;-) But yes, if the day should come that German dumbos should be replaced with skilled people from Spain, Turkey, or Greece, many people might end up very pissed. Edit: if you vote me down, maybe you'd like to elaborate on where our opinions or observations differ?
funthree 12y ago
Lets be honest.. the multi-cultural society brought on by leftists and feminists and foreigners leads people to give up on the future of their culture. These people don't want families with non-Germans and they don't want Germany to be non-German, but they are occupied by foreign cultures and they can't do anything to change it. edit: Every German will upvote this comment
- cbd1984 12y ago
  And that's Bild's perspective.
- pedrosorio 12y ago
  "These people don't want families with non-Germans and they don't want Germany to be non-German" So they stop having children with other Germans. Makes sense.
  - funthree 12y ago
    Giving up never makes sense. I still speak the truth.
    - funthree 12y ago
      We downvote the continuation of the German family.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- akr 12y ago
  > Every German will upvote this comment Please stop generalizing people using their nationality. I am a German and I certainly do not agree with your views.
  - funthree 12y ago
    Generalizing is what demographers do. Generalizing based on nationality is not wrong. You are an outlier.
jobu 12y ago
"Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs." In college I had a professor from East Germany that talked about this. The communists did a lot of things wrong, but one thing they got right was an impressive support system for working parents. The preschools and child care programs were excellent, and women were encouraged to work instead of staying home. After the wall fell, these support systems stopped, and his wife had to quit her job and stay home to take care of their kids. He thought it was such a waste of talent because his wife had a PHD and was also a college professor, but there were few other options at the time.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  Right. Not just maternity leave, but general parental leave: Don't focus entirely on one gender, with the assumption that either gender is necessarily more focused on raising children. Allow single fathers to raise kids as well, without stigma or handicap, by making everything more available to all. This dovetails nicely into marriage equality, which I don't know if Germany has yet, but I know it will if it temporarily does not.
  - kuschku 12y ago
    In Germany men can also go into maternity leave, so yeah, we got that.
- sologoub 12y ago
  Russia had the same support system (though lesser quality), but it endured to some degree even today. Unfortunately, it's so underfunded that there are waiting lists and rampant corruption that one has to endure in order to get a spot for the child. Moscow (as usual) is better off than the rest of the country, but even there it's a problem. Living in US, that's a huge contrast for me and I'm not entirely sure what options are out there aside from paying private.
- cylinder 12y ago
  I think this is the biggest gap in western governments currently, and huge productivity boosts could be had if they solve this problem. Especially in the US. It's incomprehensible that a parent should have to pay thousands per month just to be able to have a child and work at the same time. Paid maternal leave is not the big issue! After six months of leave, the problem remains that a child needs to be looked after and cared for while the mother returns to work.
thejdude 12y ago
German here. The initiative to provide a kindergarden for every child is quite a failure. It was decreed by the federal govt that every city (i.e. local govt) has to provide enough resources, but there simply aren't enough kindergarden workers for that (and not enough money to get more people to do that badly paid job). As I see it, it was just an easy way to gain votes. It's easy to pass laws that your own government doesn't have to apply, but _someone else_.
- mgbmtl 12y ago
  Imo, it's worth it though. Having universal kindergarden caused a mini baby-boom in Quebec when it was initially put in place. Having good daycare is hard and extremely stressful to parents. My productivity at work soared when I finally had proper daycare for my kid. However, it's systematically under attack from the government since. It's politically easier to cut kindergarden budgets rather than health services or corporate welfare. Another important need is for better parental leave so that both parents can raise their children and have a full time job.
- freehunter 12y ago
  Coming from the US, the idea that kindergarten is not required seems odd to me. I was going to say that kindergarten is required here in the US, but I thought I should double check that just to be sure. I was pretty surprised by the results. Only 16 of the 50 states require kindergarten as part of the mandatory (compulsory) education [1]. The state where I went to school doesn't require kindergarten, but my very very poor family still sent me to school at age 5. So yeah, I guess we don't require kindergarten, but I've never encountered anyone in the US who did not attend kindergarten. So it still sounds odd that Germany doesn't have universal kindergarten zumal das Wort ist Deutsch. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_3.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_3.asp
  - TulliusCicero 12y ago
    IIRC Kindergarten isn't as narrowly defined in Germany as in the US; in Germany it also covers pre-school years.
  - 12y ago
epx 12y ago
Society needs fresh blood to work, pay taxes, pay our retirement pensions, but the bill is still stuck upon the individuals that choose to have children. Only crazy people have children nowadays.
- hnal943 12y ago
  Do you think people choose to have kids out of obligation to "Society?"
  - TulliusCicero 12y ago
    Most don't, obviously. He's still right, though: kids financially benefit the wider society, but most of the initial costs are borne by the individual parents. And since statistically speaking, having kids doesn't make you any happier (and at least temporarily makes you less happy), having kids does seem rather irrational on its face.
  - lutusp 12y ago
    In a word, yes. Let me remind you of the meaning of "proletarian". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat Quote: "... children—proles (from Latin proli, "offspring")—were listed instead of their property; hence, the name proletarius, "the one who produces offspring"." In Rome the proletariat were nothing less than baby factories. Many were completely indoctrinated in this role, regarding it as their duty. And this class has existed, with different names, to the present.
- informatimago 12y ago
  This is all wrong. Or else, we're failing as a species. An individual, or any group of individuals, should be able to sustain themselves by their own work, as long as there are enough resources in the environment (or ecosystem). Given that children are not self sustaining, individuals, or rather couples, but even more so, groups of individuals (villages, tribes, countries), should be able to get even more resources than their own need by their own work, so as to feed their children, their women and their olds. Or better, capitalize resources so they can feed themselves when they're old. A society that would really need fresh blood, that had too many taxes or retirement pensions to pay, and where women cannot bear children because they have to work to sustain themselves, since men aren't retributed enough to feed their families all by themselves, those societies are beyond failure. They have effectively failed. It's done. But I'm not sure that's the case in Europe or in the USA. I still think that there are enough resources, and even more than ever, given techological and scientific progress; eg. 200 years ago, 98% of the population had to work to feed the remaining 2%; nowadays 1% of the population has to work to feed the remaining 99%; therefore people should be able to work productively 4 days a year (not at those useless jobs), and earn enough resources to feed himself. Working 12 more days a year, he should earn enough resource to feed his wife and two children. Similarly, to shelter and clothe oneself shouldn't require much more work. All the rest goes to pay taxes of all kinds, that we shouldn't have to bear with. http://www.thevenusproject.com/ http://www.thevenusproject.com/
deleted 12y ago
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rikacomet 12y ago
Aside from the main debate, I'm a bit surprised to not find visual representation of the said data. No pie charts, flow charts or bar diagrams :/ In my opinion that is a very inefficient way to talk about demographics.
lkrubner 12y ago
This is an editorial comment disguised as objective reporting: "But bogged down with failed banks and dwindling budgets, few are in any position to do anything about it." The reasoning is something like "We can not save ourselves from collapse because we are collapsing." This is not a serious line of reasoning. Whenever people are faced with 2 problems, they need to make a decision about which problem is more urgent. If you honestly feel that problem B is more important than problem A, then you have a good reason to allow A to become worse so as to do something about B. I could make an analogy to heart disease: aspirin can help lower the risk of a heart attack, but it has a risk itself: internal bleeding. Is aspirin worth the risk? That is something to be decided by a doctor and the patient. One needs to carefully weigh the risks of both decisions. One needs to examine all of the circumstances. However, where the risk of heart attack is serious, then the medical establishment is in agreement that it is better to take aspirin than to run the risk of a heart attack. Exactly the same reasoning should apply to Germany and the issue of population. Which issue is more pressing, the issue of national debt, or the issue of declining population? One can make an argument either way, however Germany has a level of debt that is better than France, Italy, and many other European nations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_deb... More so, Germany's public debt is less of an issue than it seems because the public is itself not highly indebted (as opposed to the public in the USA, which carries immense private sector debts). If you project Germany's debts 50 years in the future, the situation seems bleak, because of rising retirement costs -- but that problem exists exactly because of the low birth rate, so if it was possible to solve the low birth rate, then the debts in 50 years would cease to be a problem. The reality is, Germany has the financial resources to take some action against the low birth rate, if it wanted to. While there are important issues to be discussed, both pro and con, the financial arguments tend to be fake arguments. Germany is restrained in its actions because of the continuing cultural force of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche". Aggressive action to raise the birth rate would automatically mean a change in the private sphere of life. More so, it would likely mean a revolution in the social status of women, and there are many in Germany who are wary of changes in gender relations. Between the years 1874 and 1899 my great grandmother gave birth to 16 children. My family lived on a farm in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At that time, children as young as 5 were used for farmwork. A child as young as 12 could bring in a surplus -- they were, in a sense, "profit centers". Over the last 150 years children have transformed from units of production to units of consumption. Raising a child is now very expensive, and it is against the law for children to do any work that might offset their cost. Because of that, people have cut back on the number of children they have. Whereas my great grandmother had 16 children, most of my friends are content to have 1 or 2 children. Nowadays, having 3 children seems like a large family. If Germany were serious about lifting the birth rate, it could take aggressive action to mitigate the costs of raising children. I am sure each of us can imagine some program that we think might work: free day care for children of all ages, or a huge bonus at birth such as $100,000, or some method of feeding children such that food is effectively free for children, and parents are saved the cost. The important thing is to imagine what aggressive action would really look like. It would make some people flinch: their instinct would be that whatever program you suggest, the program is "too expensive". But, to repeat the point I made above, the financial arguments are nonsense. If you believe that Germany faces crushing debts in the future because of rising retirement costs, then raising the birth rate is the solution to Germany's financial problems. But if you believe that the money simply doesn't exist, and that we are, in 2014, unable to do what my great grandmother did in the late 1800s, then the entire narrative of the Industrial Revolution needs to be re-examined, because you are suggesting that we are all poorer now than we were 120-140 years ago. Ask yourself, do you honestly believe that today's technology has left us poorer? Most economic historians would argue that, even with the reduction of child labor, most families are better off today than they were 120-140 years ago. If you assume that more per-capita wealth exists in the world now than circa 1880, then it should be possible to pay families for the cost of raising 3 or 4 children.
a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
> “If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,” I think that's exactly backwards. Afghanistan has the highest birthrate. The less gender equality, the higher the birthrate. You get astronomical birthrates in the Hasidim and Islamic parts of Africa where women hold a subservient place to their husbands and have a constrained gender role. The Nazis had some success raising the birthrate by promoting and elevating stay-at-home motherhood, not by promoting equality. I think there's a strong case to be made that banning women from colleges and professions would dramatically raise the birthrate. I'm not advocating this, I'm just saying it's what the data suggests. The more professional status is available to women the less they reproduce. This is very clear all over the world across cultures.
- TulliusCicero 12y ago
  Nah, you can fix the sentence by adding what was unspoken but assumed: > "If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is that in developed countries, the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,”
  - a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
    It's so obviously not true between developed countries and across time. The more traditional the gender roles (opposite of "equality") the higher the birth rate. I would have to see the data before I even believed the claim that within an industrialized nation more "equal" couples have more kids. I highly doubt it.
- informatimago 12y ago
  On the other hand, we could imagine, given the kind of occupations we can dedicate ourselves to productively nowadays, that the "professionnal" and economic environments wouldn't be detrimental to the birth rate and the families. Basically, if you work not because you need it, but because you have something to contribute, you should be able to do that while raising a family at the same time. Ie. I think that citizen revenue would help greatly in this aspect.
- 12y ago
pacaro 12y ago
Something that is rarely mentioned in these articles it's Germanys regressive policy on dual citizenship (i.e. only permitted in rare circumstances) this makes a country unattractive for long term immigration. While this may not be such an issue for intra EU migration, it certainly seems to cause issues with Turkish immigrants. It's a much bigger jump to naturalize if that means giving up your previous citizenship
novalis78 12y ago
I think at this point it is pretty clear that the dramatic population decline in Europe (started late 20th century but has accelerated since the 60s) is not something that can be solved by money nor does it seem to have to do with life style choices (the first and second world war did not do much to change the overall trend[1]). One fascinating book I read a couple of years ago compared Western European nations with each other vs the "European counterparts that settled America", i.e. the Caucasians in North America. It's interesting that in this particular comparison America (main difference: less social welfare, more individualism, more religion) still has the highest of all ethnic Caucasian birthrates approx. 2.4 [2] One economist's work that is very interesting to follow on this topic is Gunnar Heinsohn[3] who publishes his findings in intriguing essays usually backed by a lot of statistics and numbers. But back to the article: the whole topic raises a couple of important fundamental questions: What do you mean by "Germany's" birth rate plummeting? The population overall, of course, has been steady for the most part and was recently admitted publicly by the ministry of federal statistics (a few years back) [4] Germany itself will be a majority Muslim country by 2050. So the population itself will probably not change or not much, it will rather turn into a different cultural entity, one with a small and shrinking "original" ethnic group (similar to the Japanese, for instance) but being replaced by a (mainly) Turkish/Middle Eastern cultural group that will incorporate their own beliefs and traditions into the aging German society and probably eventually dominate it (it is, after all, just a number's game). It's also not really a workforce problem as the article alluded - some here have already pointed out increases in productivity and automation that might offset these issues. The whole notion of population decline is inherently a cultural/ethnic question IMHO - even if a desire to shrink the population to improve the quality of life is your goal and immigrant birth rates fall over time: the fact of the matter remains this that you might be looking at a new "Voelkerwanderung" and all that comes with it. Personal anecdote: I used to work for an IT company in Germany about 10 years ago - I had roughly 40 co-workers in an age-range of 20 to 40 (I was 25 at that time). I was the only one with 2 kids - nobody else had kids! Zero. My colleges had dogs, cars, expensive vacations and lived for the most part in those parts of town that shielded them nicely from the mass immigration taking place in what they called "(immigrant) ghettos". The life style benefits were non-negotiable for most of them but left not much for kids either (taxation is tough if you have to fund healthcare and mass immigration :-). The girls were brought up to loathe the idea of being a mother (and all the single mothers at the edge of society were an effective warning sign). So they were all headed for their careers, making it near impossible to have their first child before the age of 30-35. Not much time left after that. The climate in the bigger German cities that attract all those young and bright Germans looking for work is quite detrimental to raising children as well: very often our experience was that kids were seen as nuisance (in the US we had quite the opposite experience which might be one reason for the difference in birth rates - the US provides (in many emotional daily interactions) a way more supportive place to raise children than Western Europe). At this point, sadly, it seems to me that population growth is linked to (a lack of) education and / or religious indoctrination. It does not seem to make much of a difference when some European countries pump millions into their social projects to support families (Sweden, France) or when they do not (Germany, Britain) - the birth rate decline is almost the same for all of these countries (again, I am talking native population, not immigrants) [5]. Conclusion: Religion might be one(?) way that natural selection ensures a population's continued growth - I like to be proven wrong, but I can't think of a nation where the growth rate is high and Atheism and Enlightenment reigns the day. A positive outcome would be a gently declining population overall on planet Earth that becomes supported by automation and a growing population on Mars while leaving violent fanaticism in the past... --- [1] http://www.trykkefrihed.dk/interview-a-continent-of-losers.htm http://www.trykkefrihed.dk/interview-a-continent-of-losers.h... (could not find a better one, but there are numerous essays describing his theory of "youth bulge" on the web [2] http://www.pop.org/content/fertility-decline-in-western-europe-1727 http://www.pop.org/content/fertility-decline-in-western-euro... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Heinsohn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Heinsohn [4] http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/german-population-plunge-irreversible-federal-stats-office-admits http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/german-population-plunge-ir... [5] http://www.pewforum.org/files/2012/07/MDII-graphics-webready-90.png http://www.pewforum.org/files/2012/07/MDII-graphics-webready...
Balgair 12y ago
I'm currently mired in biology and I think an interesting point can be made. We talk of 2 types of reproducers: R and K[0]. R is cockroaches; have just thousands of babies. K is Blue Whales; have 1 or 2 and nurture the hell out of them. It seems that in the 1800s, we were more R type than we are today. We had lots of children (though not thousands) and weren't all that concerned with education, welfare, or health as to each one. At least in comparison to today. Now, we seem to be much more K type. We take care of our children to an incredible degree. Mortality is very anomalous in child birth, it is rare in the 1st world to encounter an illiterate person, all but the true wackos get vaccines, etc. As a consequence, it takes a lot of time and resources to raise a child. Heck, we are even talking about the 20's being years of 'extended adolescence'[1]. I don't know if this is a mistake of correlations and causation, but they sure do seem linked. http://www.gapminder.org/ http://www.gapminder.org/ Hans Rosling's TED talks are just so good here for extra material too. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory [1] http://www.primermagazine.com/2013/live/wasting-your-20s-with-a-purpose-how-to-use-extended-adolescence-to-your-advantage http://www.primermagazine.com/2013/live/wasting-your-20s-wit...

55 points by soundsop 12y ago

VLM 12y ago

"Yet, with hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs unfilled, some executives believe" I wonder if this is actually true or if its like the typical American sob story of we can't get PHD's to work for minimum wage so we need to outsource.

cheepin 12y ago
Well, if the jobs were worth filling, they would be filled, right?
pgeorgi 12y ago
A bit of both. There is a certain shortage, but I hear that tune for 15 years or so now (that is, across two tech booms and one bust). The difference is in the objective: Our tech lobbyists (luckily quite incompetent) would like to reduce the minimum mandatory wage for skilled immigrant workers which exists to avoid pressure on locals. As if even lower wages make working in Germany more attractive to skilled labor that can choose between countries - including the US (where at least the gross pay is noticeably higher for skilled jobs).

aianus 12y ago

Hopefully the resulting labour crunch will encourage more automation.

jimktrains2 12y ago
Worked in the Middle Ages after the Black Death. Aside: I love the show Connections with James Burke and highly recommend it. Many of the threads weaved in the show come start near this time period because the labour crunch required machines otherwise there just wouldn't have been enough labour to run the society left.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

"in about fifty years Germanys population will fall by about twenty percent" Wow, in 50 years robots will do most of the work. They will drive our cars and clean our houses. They are starting doing it. In fact 50 years is so much time we could had done great breakthroughs like the discovery of nuclear fusion, or the manipulation of DNA so we remain young forever(and most people will not die from age). I am more worried about what will happen THIS YEAR if Germany continues supporting USA invasion of Ukraine and Russia closes the gas key.

ThePhysicist 12y ago

Right now Germany hugely profits from immigration out of other European and overseas countries, bringing in more than 400.000 (net) immigrants in 2013 alone. The figure for 2014 will likely be even higher. If they can keep up this trend it will be able to compensate (to a large degree) the decline of the population caused by low birth rates. In fact, the 2008 demography report of the government (which brought the demographic issue to a large public awareness for the first time) (http://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Verfassung/Demografie/Demografiebericht/demografiebericht_node.html http://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Verfassung/Dem...) calculated with a net immigration rate of 300.000 people in the most optimistic case, so bringing in 400.000 people per year is really better than anyone could hope. Of course some people will again complain that foreigner will "steal their jobs", but the truth is that they might actually do great service to the country, even if their rate of unemployment should be higher than that of native Germans.

thejdude 12y ago
Usually, immigration is good for the economy and for everyone who lives there. Germany is pretty cheap country to live in (food is probably the best and cheapest in Europe to come by, but salaries also are rather low, esp. compared to the US), IMHO probably due to the many immigrants. We also need more qualified workers, as everyday I see German dumbos who are seriously unqualified for their job ;-) But yes, if the day should come that German dumbos should be replaced with skilled people from Spain, Turkey, or Greece, many people might end up very pissed. Edit: if you vote me down, maybe you'd like to elaborate on where our opinions or observations differ?

funthree 12y ago

Lets be honest.. the multi-cultural society brought on by leftists and feminists and foreigners leads people to give up on the future of their culture. These people don't want families with non-Germans and they don't want Germany to be non-German, but they are occupied by foreign cultures and they can't do anything to change it. edit: Every German will upvote this comment

cbd1984 12y ago
And that's Bild's perspective.
pedrosorio 12y ago
"These people don't want families with non-Germans and they don't want Germany to be non-German" So they stop having children with other Germans. Makes sense.
- funthree 12y ago
  Giving up never makes sense. I still speak the truth.
  - funthree 12y ago
    We downvote the continuation of the German family.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
akr 12y ago
> Every German will upvote this comment Please stop generalizing people using their nationality. I am a German and I certainly do not agree with your views.
- funthree 12y ago
  Generalizing is what demographers do. Generalizing based on nationality is not wrong. You are an outlier.

jobu 12y ago

"Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs." In college I had a professor from East Germany that talked about this. The communists did a lot of things wrong, but one thing they got right was an impressive support system for working parents. The preschools and child care programs were excellent, and women were encouraged to work instead of staying home. After the wall fell, these support systems stopped, and his wife had to quit her job and stay home to take care of their kids. He thought it was such a waste of talent because his wife had a PHD and was also a college professor, but there were few other options at the time.

cbd1984 12y ago
Right. Not just maternity leave, but general parental leave: Don't focus entirely on one gender, with the assumption that either gender is necessarily more focused on raising children. Allow single fathers to raise kids as well, without stigma or handicap, by making everything more available to all. This dovetails nicely into marriage equality, which I don't know if Germany has yet, but I know it will if it temporarily does not.
- kuschku 12y ago
  In Germany men can also go into maternity leave, so yeah, we got that.
sologoub 12y ago
Russia had the same support system (though lesser quality), but it endured to some degree even today. Unfortunately, it's so underfunded that there are waiting lists and rampant corruption that one has to endure in order to get a spot for the child. Moscow (as usual) is better off than the rest of the country, but even there it's a problem. Living in US, that's a huge contrast for me and I'm not entirely sure what options are out there aside from paying private.
cylinder 12y ago
I think this is the biggest gap in western governments currently, and huge productivity boosts could be had if they solve this problem. Especially in the US. It's incomprehensible that a parent should have to pay thousands per month just to be able to have a child and work at the same time. Paid maternal leave is not the big issue! After six months of leave, the problem remains that a child needs to be looked after and cared for while the mother returns to work.

thejdude 12y ago

German here. The initiative to provide a kindergarden for every child is quite a failure. It was decreed by the federal govt that every city (i.e. local govt) has to provide enough resources, but there simply aren't enough kindergarden workers for that (and not enough money to get more people to do that badly paid job). As I see it, it was just an easy way to gain votes. It's easy to pass laws that your own government doesn't have to apply, but _someone else_.

mgbmtl 12y ago
Imo, it's worth it though. Having universal kindergarden caused a mini baby-boom in Quebec when it was initially put in place. Having good daycare is hard and extremely stressful to parents. My productivity at work soared when I finally had proper daycare for my kid. However, it's systematically under attack from the government since. It's politically easier to cut kindergarden budgets rather than health services or corporate welfare. Another important need is for better parental leave so that both parents can raise their children and have a full time job.
freehunter 12y ago
Coming from the US, the idea that kindergarten is not required seems odd to me. I was going to say that kindergarten is required here in the US, but I thought I should double check that just to be sure. I was pretty surprised by the results. Only 16 of the 50 states require kindergarten as part of the mandatory (compulsory) education [1]. The state where I went to school doesn't require kindergarten, but my very very poor family still sent me to school at age 5. So yeah, I guess we don't require kindergarten, but I've never encountered anyone in the US who did not attend kindergarten. So it still sounds odd that Germany doesn't have universal kindergarten zumal das Wort ist Deutsch. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_3.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_3.asp
- TulliusCicero 12y ago
  IIRC Kindergarten isn't as narrowly defined in Germany as in the US; in Germany it also covers pre-school years.
- 12y ago

epx 12y ago

Society needs fresh blood to work, pay taxes, pay our retirement pensions, but the bill is still stuck upon the individuals that choose to have children. Only crazy people have children nowadays.

hnal943 12y ago
Do you think people choose to have kids out of obligation to "Society?"
- TulliusCicero 12y ago
  Most don't, obviously. He's still right, though: kids financially benefit the wider society, but most of the initial costs are borne by the individual parents. And since statistically speaking, having kids doesn't make you any happier (and at least temporarily makes you less happy), having kids does seem rather irrational on its face.
- lutusp 12y ago
  In a word, yes. Let me remind you of the meaning of "proletarian". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat Quote: "... children—proles (from Latin proli, "offspring")—were listed instead of their property; hence, the name proletarius, "the one who produces offspring"." In Rome the proletariat were nothing less than baby factories. Many were completely indoctrinated in this role, regarding it as their duty. And this class has existed, with different names, to the present.
informatimago 12y ago
This is all wrong. Or else, we're failing as a species. An individual, or any group of individuals, should be able to sustain themselves by their own work, as long as there are enough resources in the environment (or ecosystem). Given that children are not self sustaining, individuals, or rather couples, but even more so, groups of individuals (villages, tribes, countries), should be able to get even more resources than their own need by their own work, so as to feed their children, their women and their olds. Or better, capitalize resources so they can feed themselves when they're old. A society that would really need fresh blood, that had too many taxes or retirement pensions to pay, and where women cannot bear children because they have to work to sustain themselves, since men aren't retributed enough to feed their families all by themselves, those societies are beyond failure. They have effectively failed. It's done. But I'm not sure that's the case in Europe or in the USA. I still think that there are enough resources, and even more than ever, given techological and scientific progress; eg. 200 years ago, 98% of the population had to work to feed the remaining 2%; nowadays 1% of the population has to work to feed the remaining 99%; therefore people should be able to work productively 4 days a year (not at those useless jobs), and earn enough resources to feed himself. Working 12 more days a year, he should earn enough resource to feed his wife and two children. Similarly, to shelter and clothe oneself shouldn't require much more work. All the rest goes to pay taxes of all kinds, that we shouldn't have to bear with. http://www.thevenusproject.com/ http://www.thevenusproject.com/

deleted 12y ago

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rikacomet 12y ago

Aside from the main debate, I'm a bit surprised to not find visual representation of the said data. No pie charts, flow charts or bar diagrams :/ In my opinion that is a very inefficient way to talk about demographics.

lkrubner 12y ago

This is an editorial comment disguised as objective reporting: "But bogged down with failed banks and dwindling budgets, few are in any position to do anything about it." The reasoning is something like "We can not save ourselves from collapse because we are collapsing." This is not a serious line of reasoning. Whenever people are faced with 2 problems, they need to make a decision about which problem is more urgent. If you honestly feel that problem B is more important than problem A, then you have a good reason to allow A to become worse so as to do something about B. I could make an analogy to heart disease: aspirin can help lower the risk of a heart attack, but it has a risk itself: internal bleeding. Is aspirin worth the risk? That is something to be decided by a doctor and the patient. One needs to carefully weigh the risks of both decisions. One needs to examine all of the circumstances. However, where the risk of heart attack is serious, then the medical establishment is in agreement that it is better to take aspirin than to run the risk of a heart attack. Exactly the same reasoning should apply to Germany and the issue of population. Which issue is more pressing, the issue of national debt, or the issue of declining population? One can make an argument either way, however Germany has a level of debt that is better than France, Italy, and many other European nations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_deb... More so, Germany's public debt is less of an issue than it seems because the public is itself not highly indebted (as opposed to the public in the USA, which carries immense private sector debts). If you project Germany's debts 50 years in the future, the situation seems bleak, because of rising retirement costs -- but that problem exists exactly because of the low birth rate, so if it was possible to solve the low birth rate, then the debts in 50 years would cease to be a problem. The reality is, Germany has the financial resources to take some action against the low birth rate, if it wanted to. While there are important issues to be discussed, both pro and con, the financial arguments tend to be fake arguments. Germany is restrained in its actions because of the continuing cultural force of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche". Aggressive action to raise the birth rate would automatically mean a change in the private sphere of life. More so, it would likely mean a revolution in the social status of women, and there are many in Germany who are wary of changes in gender relations. Between the years 1874 and 1899 my great grandmother gave birth to 16 children. My family lived on a farm in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At that time, children as young as 5 were used for farmwork. A child as young as 12 could bring in a surplus -- they were, in a sense, "profit centers". Over the last 150 years children have transformed from units of production to units of consumption. Raising a child is now very expensive, and it is against the law for children to do any work that might offset their cost. Because of that, people have cut back on the number of children they have. Whereas my great grandmother had 16 children, most of my friends are content to have 1 or 2 children. Nowadays, having 3 children seems like a large family. If Germany were serious about lifting the birth rate, it could take aggressive action to mitigate the costs of raising children. I am sure each of us can imagine some program that we think might work: free day care for children of all ages, or a huge bonus at birth such as $100,000, or some method of feeding children such that food is effectively free for children, and parents are saved the cost. The important thing is to imagine what aggressive action would really look like. It would make some people flinch: their instinct would be that whatever program you suggest, the program is "too expensive". But, to repeat the point I made above, the financial arguments are nonsense. If you believe that Germany faces crushing debts in the future because of rising retirement costs, then raising the birth rate is the solution to Germany's financial problems. But if you believe that the money simply doesn't exist, and that we are, in 2014, unable to do what my great grandmother did in the late 1800s, then the entire narrative of the Industrial Revolution needs to be re-examined, because you are suggesting that we are all poorer now than we were 120-140 years ago. Ask yourself, do you honestly believe that today's technology has left us poorer? Most economic historians would argue that, even with the reduction of child labor, most families are better off today than they were 120-140 years ago. If you assume that more per-capita wealth exists in the world now than circa 1880, then it should be possible to pay families for the cost of raising 3 or 4 children.

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago

> “If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,” I think that's exactly backwards. Afghanistan has the highest birthrate. The less gender equality, the higher the birthrate. You get astronomical birthrates in the Hasidim and Islamic parts of Africa where women hold a subservient place to their husbands and have a constrained gender role. The Nazis had some success raising the birthrate by promoting and elevating stay-at-home motherhood, not by promoting equality. I think there's a strong case to be made that banning women from colleges and professions would dramatically raise the birthrate. I'm not advocating this, I'm just saying it's what the data suggests. The more professional status is available to women the less they reproduce. This is very clear all over the world across cultures.

TulliusCicero 12y ago
Nah, you can fix the sentence by adding what was unspoken but assumed: > "If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is that in developed countries, the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,”
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  It's so obviously not true between developed countries and across time. The more traditional the gender roles (opposite of "equality") the higher the birth rate. I would have to see the data before I even believed the claim that within an industrialized nation more "equal" couples have more kids. I highly doubt it.
informatimago 12y ago
On the other hand, we could imagine, given the kind of occupations we can dedicate ourselves to productively nowadays, that the "professionnal" and economic environments wouldn't be detrimental to the birth rate and the families. Basically, if you work not because you need it, but because you have something to contribute, you should be able to do that while raising a family at the same time. Ie. I think that citizen revenue would help greatly in this aspect.
12y ago

pacaro 12y ago

Something that is rarely mentioned in these articles it's Germanys regressive policy on dual citizenship (i.e. only permitted in rare circumstances) this makes a country unattractive for long term immigration. While this may not be such an issue for intra EU migration, it certainly seems to cause issues with Turkish immigrants. It's a much bigger jump to naturalize if that means giving up your previous citizenship

novalis78 12y ago

I think at this point it is pretty clear that the dramatic population decline in Europe (started late 20th century but has accelerated since the 60s) is not something that can be solved by money nor does it seem to have to do with life style choices (the first and second world war did not do much to change the overall trend[1]). One fascinating book I read a couple of years ago compared Western European nations with each other vs the "European counterparts that settled America", i.e. the Caucasians in North America. It's interesting that in this particular comparison America (main difference: less social welfare, more individualism, more religion) still has the highest of all ethnic Caucasian birthrates approx. 2.4 [2] One economist's work that is very interesting to follow on this topic is Gunnar Heinsohn[3] who publishes his findings in intriguing essays usually backed by a lot of statistics and numbers. But back to the article: the whole topic raises a couple of important fundamental questions: What do you mean by "Germany's" birth rate plummeting? The population overall, of course, has been steady for the most part and was recently admitted publicly by the ministry of federal statistics (a few years back) [4] Germany itself will be a majority Muslim country by 2050. So the population itself will probably not change or not much, it will rather turn into a different cultural entity, one with a small and shrinking "original" ethnic group (similar to the Japanese, for instance) but being replaced by a (mainly) Turkish/Middle Eastern cultural group that will incorporate their own beliefs and traditions into the aging German society and probably eventually dominate it (it is, after all, just a number's game). It's also not really a workforce problem as the article alluded - some here have already pointed out increases in productivity and automation that might offset these issues. The whole notion of population decline is inherently a cultural/ethnic question IMHO - even if a desire to shrink the population to improve the quality of life is your goal and immigrant birth rates fall over time: the fact of the matter remains this that you might be looking at a new "Voelkerwanderung" and all that comes with it. Personal anecdote: I used to work for an IT company in Germany about 10 years ago - I had roughly 40 co-workers in an age-range of 20 to 40 (I was 25 at that time). I was the only one with 2 kids - nobody else had kids! Zero. My colleges had dogs, cars, expensive vacations and lived for the most part in those parts of town that shielded them nicely from the mass immigration taking place in what they called "(immigrant) ghettos". The life style benefits were non-negotiable for most of them but left not much for kids either (taxation is tough if you have to fund healthcare and mass immigration :-). The girls were brought up to loathe the idea of being a mother (and all the single mothers at the edge of society were an effective warning sign). So they were all headed for their careers, making it near impossible to have their first child before the age of 30-35. Not much time left after that. The climate in the bigger German cities that attract all those young and bright Germans looking for work is quite detrimental to raising children as well: very often our experience was that kids were seen as nuisance (in the US we had quite the opposite experience which might be one reason for the difference in birth rates - the US provides (in many emotional daily interactions) a way more supportive place to raise children than Western Europe). At this point, sadly, it seems to me that population growth is linked to (a lack of) education and / or religious indoctrination. It does not seem to make much of a difference when some European countries pump millions into their social projects to support families (Sweden, France) or when they do not (Germany, Britain) - the birth rate decline is almost the same for all of these countries (again, I am talking native population, not immigrants) [5]. Conclusion: Religion might be one(?) way that natural selection ensures a population's continued growth - I like to be proven wrong, but I can't think of a nation where the growth rate is high and Atheism and Enlightenment reigns the day. A positive outcome would be a gently declining population overall on planet Earth that becomes supported by automation and a growing population on Mars while leaving violent fanaticism in the past... --- [1] http://www.trykkefrihed.dk/interview-a-continent-of-losers.htm http://www.trykkefrihed.dk/interview-a-continent-of-losers.h... (could not find a better one, but there are numerous essays describing his theory of "youth bulge" on the web [2] http://www.pop.org/content/fertility-decline-in-western-europe-1727 http://www.pop.org/content/fertility-decline-in-western-euro... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Heinsohn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Heinsohn [4] http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/german-population-plunge-irreversible-federal-stats-office-admits http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/german-population-plunge-ir... [5] http://www.pewforum.org/files/2012/07/MDII-graphics-webready-90.png http://www.pewforum.org/files/2012/07/MDII-graphics-webready...

Balgair 12y ago

I'm currently mired in biology and I think an interesting point can be made. We talk of 2 types of reproducers: R and K[0]. R is cockroaches; have just thousands of babies. K is Blue Whales; have 1 or 2 and nurture the hell out of them. It seems that in the 1800s, we were more R type than we are today. We had lots of children (though not thousands) and weren't all that concerned with education, welfare, or health as to each one. At least in comparison to today. Now, we seem to be much more K type. We take care of our children to an incredible degree. Mortality is very anomalous in child birth, it is rare in the 1st world to encounter an illiterate person, all but the true wackos get vaccines, etc. As a consequence, it takes a lot of time and resources to raise a child. Heck, we are even talking about the 20's being years of 'extended adolescence'[1]. I don't know if this is a mistake of correlations and causation, but they sure do seem linked. http://www.gapminder.org/ http://www.gapminder.org/ Hans Rosling's TED talks are just so good here for extra material too. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory [1] http://www.primermagazine.com/2013/live/wasting-your-20s-with-a-purpose-how-to-use-extended-adolescence-to-your-advantage http://www.primermagazine.com/2013/live/wasting-your-20s-wit...