Preventing the disintegration of the modern welfare state via economic collapse.
The problem of course is that you are correct. It’s a Catch 22 - the world as a whole really would be better off with fewer people, but sudden, abrupt demographic decline in developed nations can lead to variably and unpredictably bad chaos. Overall decline has to be managed smoothly and more evenly. That’s just incredibly difficult to do.
Which is why steady immigration from developing nations to developed nations, while simultaneously promoting modernization to depresses reproductive rates in those developing countries, is the best overall solution. You just have to figure out how to manage that in a way that minimizes societal backlash. Also extremely difficult to do. Witness this thread.
Essentially 100%. They’ve won; all they have to do now is consolidate their victory. Then they can reduce women to non-citizens, deport or kill anyone not a white Christian and fulfill all their other fantasies.
It’s convenient to dismiss opposition to policies you hold dear as irrational, but the reality is that like most things in life, immigration can have downsides as well as benefits: lower social cohesion, higher crime, increased competition for jobs and reduced pay for some groups (usually the poorest), increased competition for housing and services like doctors, the effect on schools of having a large number of ESL students, the effect on women of bringing in men with very misogynist attitudes, etc, etc.
It’s kind of like offshoring, in that the benefits are spread out through society and not obvious to the average person, while the disadvantages are very visible and concentrated in specific places - usually in poor neighbourhoods where large groups of immigrants settle.
Good leadership means listening to the people you want to lead, and taking their concerns and preferences seriously, rather than dismissing their negative experiences as irrational fears, and calling them bad people for talking about it. Would you vote for leaders that treated you this way? Who told you, for example, that your fears of antisemitism were irrational and bigoted, despite you frequently hearing comments that made you feel unsafe walking around your town?
No, I hold up Denmark as listening to their citizens and responding to their wishes. Denmark still has plenty of immigration, EU and non-EU. They recently took in a lot of refugees from Ukraine, as did most of Europe. 13.9% of the Danish population is foreign born, not very much lower than the 15.6% in the US. (The percentage in the UK is even higher than in the US.) Having a less disruptive and more measured immigration policy does not mean no immigration.
That’s called “blaming the victims”. We exploit immigrants, we abuse and demonize them so we can convince ourselves we are in the right to do so. Then we buy into your own rhetoric and drive them away, being surprised that the result is disaster.
As for “social cohesion”, social cohesion based on genocidal hatred is far worse than nothing.
So to be clear on an item of agreement: Denmark’s generous support is not enough to raise birthrate to rate that supports the system. They need immigration to bring in new young adults who will work and pay taxes. .
Good news to your way of thinking though. Fairly quickly these immigrants have acclimated to the Danish cultural low birth rate norm. Or less. Paradoxically the social supports may accelerate that process.
That’s very surprising. Normally it takes a generation or two for birthrates to fall to match the locals, and those of insular religious groups often remain high. Looking at Danish demographics, the largest group of non-Western immigrants is now Ukrainians, who, like most post-Soviet countries, already had a very low birthrate at home. Second biggest is Syrians, and Syria currently has a birthrate of 2.4 according to Google - much higher than Denmark, but not huge. Third are Turks, and Turkey is at 1.88; above Denmark, but still well below replacement. (Turkey has taken a lot of refugees from Syria itself, unlike the Gulf states.)
I wonder how much is due to being more selective with immigration? This is the dilemma. @Puzzlegal’s college educated Indians will immediately adapt to US cultural norms and have 1.8 children. The immigrants from Hong Kong coming to the UK will probably fit in well and be good for the economy, and are likely to have fewer children than natives. It’s exactly those groups who at least adapted to Western cultural norms, and therefore hardest to integrate and least productive, who continue to have high birthrates, because it’s those exact norms that are depressing them. Our societies simply aren’t sustainable.
On the contrary they are very productive, and aren’t allowed to integrate because of racism and general xenophobia. And they tend to have a high birthrate because high birthrates are associated with poverty, and they aren’t allowed to be anything but poor.
In fact for that reason I expect the birthrate to climb as more and more of the population becomes extremely poor.
Well, my family is extremely mixed, coming from the melting pot of the East End of London. My grandmother was Belgian, grandfather Scots; my generation and subsequent generations have partnered with various waves of immigrants over the past century, so we are part anglo-saxon, part Jewish, and part black (these categories overlap somewhat in interesting ways). And I’m quite happy to say we all have a good grounding in British culture - that is, eccentric, irreligious and instinctively cynical towards authority.
And relevant to this thread; the most recent generation in my family shows little enthusiasm for childbirth - we’ll need another wave of immigrants for that. I pour foul scorn on those idiots who want to keep Britain ‘pure’.
Proves my point. But wasn’t British culture always pretty eccentric, irreligious and cynical towards authority? Older generations still wanted children, so what changed?
IMO what changed worldwide is that people (and especially women) now have the choice to have fewer. As long as the choice exists, they’ll have few. It’s only when the choice is absent that the vast bulk of people will have many. Having many will always be present as a minority interest. But that’s not enough to get the whole population to replacement rate.
So if birth control is uninvented, if women have no permissible role in society except baby making and baby raising, if parents know that their children are their only hope of not starving in old age, well, then they’ll have lots of kids. Otherwise not.
Women had the choice to have fewer kids in the 50s, too. They just mostly chose to have 2 or 3 rather than many having none like today. The UK has a large fertility gap - women as a group say they want 50% more children than they actually have, and that mostly seems to reflect delays in starting a family. More time in education, taking time to get established in a career, the desire to reach milestones like buying a house that have become more difficult to achieve, and difficulty finding a partner probably all contribute, and are things we could look at changing as a society rather than going straight to banning contraception.
Just to be clear, that is not at all what I want. It’s rather the opposite; the formation of parallel communities and ghettos is something I want to avoid.
The pill wasn’t available until the 60s - and plenty of those women who had 2 or 3 or more kids didn’t want any and shouldn’t have had any but that was socially unacceptable.
I think you have to address opportunity cost. When women (mostly) couldn’t get good-paying jobs, she was sacrificing only a small amount of income (and likely a more menial, less-than-prestigious job) to have children and be a stay at home parent. When she can earn more, and move up the ranks, it’s a bigger sacrifice to have a career delayed or permanently derailed.
Of course, others are also correct to mention women being better able to control the fertility later. Firstly, of course, being able to do so without having to get a husband’s compliance (condoms - which some men don’t like) or planning ahead or interrupting a moment (condoms,diaphragms,cervical caps), which is inconvenient for both parties, and a certain subset of men would not consistently acquiesce to. Secondly, of course, it just becoming more socially acceptable for women to purchase birth control.
I haven’t read this thread for a couple of months. I’d like to say that the OP asks an empirical question, one that is subject to research. There’s a lot of research on how to decrease birthrates. Run those in reverse, and presumably the birth rate would increase. Unfortunately that would mean limiting availability of contraception, reducing job opportunities for women, and a number of other unpleasant choices. You can also try the French method of subsidizing children with state funds, though it tends to be expensive given its results. In Japan, they’ve formed a few communities for like-minded couples that want to have lots of kids. We could try that, but the results aren’t in yet.
One of the biggest puzzles in the policy world is how to raise fertility rates. Population aging is a huge problem, and moderately higher fertility is the only real solution to that problem. But no country so far has found affordable and effective pro-natalist policies:
[That’s a rough summary, somewhat contentious.]
…Or have they? On X, Carlos Mucha flags a couple of papers that suggest that if you allow men to avoid the draft by having kids, fertility rates go way up. For example, Bailey and Chyn (2021) find that the U.S. government policy of allowing men with kids to get out of the Vietnam War draft led to a very large bump in U.S. birth rates relative to countries like Canada that didn’t have a Vietnam War draft:
And here’s a chart:
The effect isn’t huge, but it appears to be real.
Obviously, going to war is probably not a viable strategy for raising the birth rate. But this piece of historical evidence suggests that while rewarding people for having more kids is of limited use, punishing them for not having kids may be a lot more effective.
Meaning that if fertility keeps trending down, I would expect to see nations try some fairly dystopian pro-natalist policies.
Here’s a variant. Put a 10% tax on all workers aged 19-29. Put the money into a sovereign growth fund. You get it all back if you have 2 kids by the time you’re 32. Or whatever. Otherwise you lose it (and the state keeps the funds). Of course, you can also avoid the tax if you volunteer for the frontlines against Oceania. We’ve always been at war with them after all.
Yes, and an example would be Romania during the 1980s and 1990s. They restricted abortion and contraception and taxed childless families. Many of the children were abandoned to orphanages, some (all?) of them horrific.
Ummm… No. The only socially acceptable career for women was to be a mother. My mother went to college in the 50s. She was told she could not write an honors thesis. “Because then we’d have to assign you an advisor, and that would be a waste of his time because you will just get married and have kids.”
Was it possible for a few mavericks to do something other than become mothers? Yes. But it was a very non-standard choice and it took a lot of perseverance and initiative.
(From a thing M4M quoted, not his words)
Exactly. In the 50s, women were severely punished by society for not having kids. So mostly, they did.
But wasn’t British culture always pretty eccentric, irreligious and cynical towards authority? Older generations still wanted children, so what changed?