The European Population Crash

[mswas]

The population crash | Fred Pearce

Hoyerswerda, a town two hours beyond Dresden close to the Polish border, has lost half its population in the last 20 years. It is an ageing ghost town. The young and those with qualifications have left – young women especially. And those that remain have given up having babies. Hoyerswerda (known to its citizens as Hoy Woy) seems a town without a purpose, in a corner of Europe without a future.

On the windswept roof of the Lausitz Tower, the town’s only landmark, I meet Felix Ringel. A young German anthropologist studying at Cambridge University, he has passed up chances taken by his friends to investigate the rituals of Amazon tribes or Mongolian peasants. As we survey the empty plots of fenced scrub below, he explains that the underbelly of his own country seemed weirder and far less studied than those exotic worlds.

In its heyday in the 60s, Hoyerswerda was a model community in communist East Germany, a brave new world attracting migrants from all over the country. They dug brown coal from huge open-cast mines on the plain around the town. There was good money and two free bottles of brandy a month. But the fall of the Berlin Wall changed all that. It was here in 1989, in the towns and cities of Saxony, that the people of the east started moving west to capitalism and freedom. At the head of the queue were the young, especially young women.

I don’t really want to guide the debate here, but I just feel like the population crash in Europe is debate-worthy. So please, someone come and say something controversial.

[Marley23]

@mswas

The population crash | Population | The Guardian

I don’t really want to guide the debate here, but I just feel like the population crash in Europe is debate-worthy. So please, someone come and say something controversial.

That’s not how Great Debates (or the SDMB, really) works. If you have an idea you’d like to debate, post it. If not, I’ll be locking this.

[mswas]

@Marley23

That’s not how Great Debates (or the SDMB, really) works. If you have an idea you’d like to debate, post it. If not, I’ll be locking this.

I see, so not being a dick about it and moving it to the appropriate forum isn’t a possibility. Because as you know if it went to another forum it would be moved back to GD immediately.

And it’s also bullshit that GD doesn’t work like this. It does and always has. People post shit like that all the time without it being locked.

[Whack-a-Mole]

Is that a European population crash or just people abandoning a town?

Presumably those people who left are still, by-and-large, in Europe somewhere.

[Marley23]

@mswas

I see, so not being a dick about it and moving it to the appropriate forum isn’t a possibility.

Okay. If you’d rather insult me than come up with a debate, you’ve got yourself yet another warning and this thread is locked. (We don’t have a forum for “someone please debate this for me.”)