I’ve been reading how many European countries like France, Italy, and Denmark have declining populations and they blame the fact that the young couples are either going childless or at the most having just one child. This in the face that Europe has such a good safety net and support for families (ex. free education, healthcare, mothers time off work).
Sadly the opposite of this is where the immigrant communities often have several children and this is a cause for worry about the future.
Their are many Europeans on this board. What do you think?
The declining birthrate argument is not the whole explanation. Yes, there are declining birthrates because raising children in the middle class of a postindustrial high-tech/service economy is expensive, there are not as many jobs for them when they grow up, and the safety net means you don’t need them to care for you in your old age.
This applies as well to Japan, and to middle-class Americans of all ethnicities.
It does not have the same effect in every country. And in many cases it’s in reality a concern about the declining birthrate of the people you want to stay in the majority.
Imo, the whole point of immigration is future tax payers, otherwise the entire welfare state model falls apart - it has to be a pyramid shape, and with people living longer the pyramid keeps getting higher.
The country that seems likely to be the first to really have to face the consequences is Japan - the double whammy of very low immigration, and longest living.
Consider this: if you’ve been told all your life that the best you can hope for is to marry a hard-working man and have lots of children, that’s probably what you’ll aspire to do. Similarly, if you’ve been told that a god-fearing man will give his wife lots of children, and those children are what you’ll need to help around the farm and care for you in your old age, you’ll have lots of children.
But when you can support yourself without getting married, or have the option to get educated, or have a career, or you know you can provide for your own retirement, suddenly having to care for some screaming poop-machines that cost more than a new car each year sounds a lot less appealing.
The Japanese, Americans, and Europeans are all experiencing a period where the entire population is education with a wide range of careers available, outside of “housewife” and “farmer”, and one of the many effects is that fewer children are being had.
The Japanese have it especially bad, since their corporate culture includes extremely long hours that make the idea of raising child in absentia even less appealing.
I don’t have a problem with immigrants having more children than Spain-born citizens, kids are kids and the children of immigrants are Spanish kids. They may be able to speak a language which hadn’t been heard in our streets when I was a child, or be a color which I didn’t encounter until I went abroad, but they are as Spanish as my nephews.
Many of us have strange ideas about getting a responsible partner before having kids (I still have neither and don’t expect that to change). Combine that with nasty economic situations (when I graduated college, official unemployment not including people less than two years out of a degree was 25%) and it kind of complicates things. People my age were having their first at the same time as people my almost-a-decade-younger brothers, during the fat cow years. Then the cow went on a crash diet and many couples faced a complicated choice: have that second or third they’d considered “now”, when the older one(s) are of a good age for interaction, or wait until the economy gets better again? Some went one way, some went another.
As someone with no ambition to have any, I’m amazed that so many people still do.
Ever since 2007 unemployment under young people has been very high, and those who work typically don’t get a long term contract and/or are paid very little, making it hard to get a place of their own. That kind of stuff could easily make a couple postpone having children, so maybe the numbers will rebound a bit as the babyboomers retire and a few years later vacate their ample premises, opening up the job and housing markets to younger generations.
But with very few exceptions, the trend has been downwards. So if the population halves every century, in 3300 years we could be extinct. Which would arguably be for the best.
I don’t know if it’s so much a political desire as it’s a cultural and ethnic desire. I mean, if you’re white, from France, and strongly identify as “French”, I can imagine that you’re pretty horrified and terrified about the thought that in decades to come, the majority of people in France will be of immigrant descent, and that “Frenchness”, or by extension traditional France won’t exist anymore, at least in your eyes.
I don’t necessarily think it’s a racist thing, so much as it’s a culture-ist thing, combined with a sort of vague suspicion that while at the moment, a lot of immigrant families are assimilating into their greater European cultures, if there’s a certain critical mass, assimilation will cease, and they’ll sort of be their own non-European culture within the country.
Economic uncertainty or economic retrenchment are both bad for near-term birth rates.
Europe since 2008 (7 years now) has experienced far worse economic times than has the US. And even before the Crunch of 2008 some countries there had been having a hard time.
That’s not the whole story, but it’s a big chunk of it.
Prosperity is the answer, I think. It’s true all over the world, once prosperity arrives, (most people can afford a home, no matter how meagre, food, have steady employment no matter if it’s manual labour, and can educate their children, etc.), the birth rate drops. Because they want a better life for their children, to pay for higher education, etc. So they have two kids instead of eight. Also whereas in poverty the woman had no job so looking out for many children was possible in a way that a working woman could never manage. Also in the west birth control is not just available but not socially frowned upon.
How is it not self evident that in western countries biology needn’t be destiny?
Why is this a cause for worry about the future? When I have kids, I’m likely not to be living in the country I was born in - I’m British, currently living in Belgium. Will that make my kid(s) a problem for Belgium, in your view? It would seem to, given the above… Or did you mean only some types of immigrant?
As to why people aren’t having as many kids, I think the answer is likely bits of two things: one is that lots of people are facing increased financial and employment instability and insecurity after the economic crisis, so are putting off having kids until they’re more stable, which is taking a while. And the second - and I think bigger - cause is that people have more options now. Women have more choices as to what to do with their lives than “being a housewife and mother”, and so more of them are choosing other things. Which means less babies than in the past.
Actually, this is wrong (or more precisely, it’s right only up to a certain level). The lowest fertility rates in the world are in countries like South Korea and Greece. Once you get more prosperous than SK/Greece, people start having more children again. The lowest fertility rate in Europe tends to be in the poorer countries.
I think there are mostly three causes here.
It’s too expensive to raise children and the state doesn’t provide enough support. (In my perfect world, families would have much less responsibility for childrearing, both financially and time-wise, and the state would have much more).
People vary somewhat in their child-friendliness, and in the past this wasn’t a trait that was much selected on, because reliable birth control didn’t exist. Now that your fertility is much more directly impacted by your desire to have children, “desire to have children” is going to be selected for. So fertility rates will probably increase again, in the long run, just not anytime soon.
I do think there are cultural pressures in the west nowadays that militate against childrearing, but that’s probably the least important explanation. As with most things, biology and economics are more important.
Oh, I’m extremely worried about it. I think cultural and ethnic diversity is usually not a good thing for societies, and the particular problem in Europe is that a lot of the high fertility immigrants are Muslims.
The one issue that worries me about it is ever increasing stratification. If the established people who typically have better paying jobs have only a few kids, starting later they build much more wealth, and spread it out less when they die. The immigrants , who often have less well paying job due to language and education issues, have many kids build little wealth, and spread it wider at death.
It leads to an strongly stratified society which combined with the fact there are cultural and racial components to the sides, makes a dangerous situation.
