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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

The fact that the EU’s replacement rate is 1.59 children per couple and the continent needs substantial levels of immigration to maintain a productive workforce

The idea here is that all people are the same, and all you need to do is shoehorn enough to keep the economy going. Beyond the complete lack of humanity in the outlook that we are like barrels of brent, it's simply wrong. If this was the case, the entire world would already look like Europe and there would be no waves of migration.

It's also bizarrely narcissistic to think that ISIS care about how Europeans feel about Islam or how Muslims are treated since according to OP they will be replacing locals anyway.

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> Beyond the complete lack of humanity in the outlook that we are like barrels of brent, it's simply wrong.

Indeed. And there seems, to me, to be something nihilistic in the idea that Europeans should simply let immigrants replace them. Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate.

The article appears to be implying that Western nations should not make war against Daesh because "that's what they want." Well, the status quo of surveillance, arrests, and half-hearted airstrikes isn't stopping them. There seems something profoundly suciidally nihilistic in the idea that Europe should simply do nothing different and simply be more and more welcoming as attacks happen in an attempt to appease extremists until at last Europe is no longer populated by Europeans.

On the timescale of centuries and millenia, it's amazing how little has changed in the past thousand years. This could be just another couple chapters in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Which, for those who don't know, covers mostly in later chapters the European nations and the various Muslim empires.)

>The article appears to be implying that Western nations should not make war against Daesh because "that's what they want."...

I agree the article spends a lot of time implying what we shouldn't do and not much time at all saying what might make for effective policies, but it's hardly advocating Islamising Europe either.

I took two things away from the article. One is that the kind of pretty much deliberate social and economic marginalization of Muslim minorities in France is a terrible mistake. You can have a pluralistic egalitarian society without insisting that everyone has to dress, talk and behave exactly like white western Europeans all the time. Having an Imperial legacy and historic connections with extensive regions of the wider world isn't compatible with being culturally allergic to anyone who looks or acts foreign. We in Europe need to build strong cultural bridges connecting us to the Muslim minorities in our midst that are now also Europeans and deserve respect and support. I may take flak for this, because it turns my stomach to imply that France has any responsibility for the recent attacks, but frankly the French state is not doing it's job.

The second lesson is regarding our foreign policy in the Middle East. Keeping out of Syria and letting whatever happens just happen hasn't worked. The result has been a breeding ground for radicalization and chaos that has exacerbated the situation in Iraq, and lead to the biggest Refugee crisis Europe has seen since WW2. The Iraq war was awful and the political pressure to withdraw and 'bring the troops home' intense, but doing so was a horrible mistake. Once you're in, you're in for better or worse. We can't wash our hands of these conflicts and expect that the resulting mess will stay put and not affect us.

As a corollary, I think that our consistent policy that none of the borders in the Middle east are up for negotiation is a mistake. If the Sunni, Shia and Kurd regions of Iraq want to be separate states, they should have the freedom to do so. Trying to insist that the Sunni minority had to stay welded to a larger hostile Shia population was just asking for unending trouble. Partition isn't always the right answer, but in some situations it needs to be an option.

>French state is not doing it's job

What state would be good example? What is good measure for succes here?

> There seems something profoundly suciidally nihilistic in the idea that Europe should simply do nothing different and simply be more and more welcoming as attacks happen in an attempt to appease extremists until at last Europe is no longer populated by Europeans.

It reminds me of this fable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Qw5xVn7c0

>Indeed. And there seems, to me, to be something nihilistic in the idea that Europeans should simply let immigrants replace them. Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate.

That would require blaspheming against the Austerity Gods.

> Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate.

So, 18 months maternity/paternity leave, 180€ per month per child you have, plus tax breaks, plus better credit rating, plus 12 more sick days a year, plus subsidized kindergarten and daycare (with guaranteed daycare place from age 3 on), cheap whole-day school for children, and after-school care for them, is not enough?

What else are we supposed to do? Seriously? We have all this, and still birth rates below 1.2 children in Germany. Seriously.

These are mostly economical solutions. The problem however seems to be on a sociographic level.

Honestly, no. That's not enough.

You're competing with jobs here, and you ask if 180€ a month is sufficient? And then you're surprised that women prefer to stay in the workforce?

You're also dealing with a labor market that punishes people who actually take their maternity/paternity leave, or who actually leave the labor force to raise children, by simply never letting them back into a career-track position ever again.

So not only does 180€/month not substitute for a second salary, it doesn't substitute for the permanent hit to the second wage-earner's career caused by raising children.

The economic message is clear: raising children is intended to be a low-paid, part-time job done on top of a full-time career for economically non-valuable warm-fuzzies.

> You're also dealing with a labor market that punishes people who actually take their maternity/paternity leave, or who actually leave the labor force to raise children, by simply never letting them back into a career-track position ever again.

By the way, in Germany usually you are guaranteed to get back into your old job after the 18 months of maternity leave.

advanced, wealthy, egalitarian societies simply do not produce babies because nobody really needs them and they're extremely expensive both in actual cost and opportunity cost, especially for females. sure you can shift the cost from the family to the taxpayer or employer, but that doesn't actually remove it.

and this phenomenon is not limited to white people, i.e. japan, korea, singapore, taiwan.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

It is not the fact that nobody needs them. It is rather that members of such societies delay this step (to an uncertain extent) due to having a large amount of possible/alternative life choices, which sadly a negative consequence of such a blossoming society.

It's not that people delay having children, it's that society punishes having children.

My fiancee's pregnant coworker was told (we live in the USA, unfortunately) that she would have six weeks of unpaid leave after giving birth, followed by two weeks of short-term disability insurance, and then she could return to work or lose her job. This is for a salaried, postdoctoral scientist at a biotechnology company. In a related matter, the same HR employee who explained that policy says that he opposes the very idea of paternity leave -- and he's a male homosexual.

Likewise, the largest wage gap between men and women isn't actually a gap between men and women, it's a gap between men and mothers.

It takes two incomes to support a household these days, and yet society punishes women for childbearing as if it only took one. What did they expect would happen under these conditions, that people would stop responding to economic incentives "because babies"?

i'm a business owner operating on thin margins and no outside funding. why should i be forced to pay for leave if one of my employees decides to have a baby? what if i'm a small company that simply can't afford it?

apparently all the benefits that exist in europe and asia still don't work, so i'm not really sure what your point is here, other than you want some free money for having a baby.

society doesn't 'punish' you for having children, having children is simply an expense somebody has to pay for, and nobody wants to do it.

you clearly don't want to pay the opportunity cost, as evidenced by your post, so what makes you think the employer wants to do it either? or the taxpayer?

His / her point is that de facto the industry takes a point of view biased on an economical perspective towards the situation. (Your answer ironically does reflect this as well). The benefit of having children is to have a family and to, in a more biological sense, have offspring which ensures your dna remains within the society. Having a family takes time and enforcing a young parent (especially a person with such a background) to start working in a relative short amount of time is very taxing on their personal life. A better possible solution would be to let the young parent have the ability to work home for a couple days, rather than just giving the option to be fired.

Let me brag a little bit.

Myself and my fiancee don't have children yet. However, you may kinda want us in society's gene pool. After all, I've got a damned resilient immune system, she's wonderfully empathetic, and we're both ferociously clever and hardworking individuals who valued our educations and actually want to contribute to society. Hell, we're even proud of paying our taxes, we both volunteer for things in our spare time, and we consider time spent on civic or community affairs to be well-spent.

I'd be fine paying the "opportunity cost" myself, but you see, I'm not the one with the uterus. Really, if we could get by and support a kid on one income per couple, we could easily just make some sacrifices of Nice Things, but we can't. Yes, we actually are stuck between living as fiscally responsible adults in the Dual Income No Kids class, and the precarity of the so-called "middle class" nowadays, in which one layoff or unexpected medical emergency can throw the whole family into poverty.

It's become: housing, children (with the entailed college funds, housing cost of good public schools, etc.), responsible preparation for a rainy day -- pick any two.

Elizabeth Warren was lecturing people about this a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GHg3GAeQ1Y

i think "having other options" is a pretty good definition for "not need".

I can only speak from a German perspective but the real problem from my point of view is that in todays world everything seems as if it is going down slope.

Todays generation has less job security than the generation before.

Todays generation does not have a secured pension (like the generation before had).

It is expected of todays generation to be a life-long learner (if you are not, your economic value drops immediately and if your job gets terminated you fall back to the same support someone receives, who has never worked in their life before).

Affordable housing has decreased.

It is expected of both parents to work (tell me again why I should have children, if I rarely see them?).

Pressure on children has increased as there is less time at school and less time at Uni to learn the same things (do I really want to do this to my possible future children?).

Especially for women having a child still is very bad for your career. Also if you have a fixed-term contract (which there is an increasing number of, your maternity employment protection is severely limited).

Of course this is just an anecdote, but at least in my circle of friends, those with secured government jobs are the ones having the most children. I would love to see some large-scale data on this subject.

The few generations before were the only generations ever to have job security. I suspect it was because Europe was so devastated by the war (and so many of the previous generation were dead), that the economy couldn't help but grow.

Industrialise child raising, like everything else.

Artificial wombs. Group day-care. Have women donate eggs, men donate sperm and combine them randomly. Make it the duty of every person to be a parent to 2 to 3 children with fines for not doing their part until they hit 30/40 years of age. The babies will be born never knowing their biological parents. Then they're sent to child-raising facilities, either government or private, which are subject to strict regulation against mistreatment and indoctrination. Only the mega-rich, or very rural will afford/choose to have babies the usual way.

This seems to be the only choice in a society where everyone has to work 40 hours per week to secure a living for him/herself. If you had guaranteed basic income that can cover the cost of children, people could leave their position for one to two years, maybe do contracting work from home on the side. You will need very strict laws against discriminating against those who chose to have children. Or, you know, make making children a specialised industry like everything else.

I certainly hope there is some sarcasm intended with this. A world where raising children is turned into an industry (makes me think of Orwell's 1984) is one that I would not enjoy being a part of.

It does however seem that the flow of the economy, the fact that no one is willing to slow down for anything, and everything needed to be finished yesterday, certainly hinders people from things such as having children. Companies simply see a mother on maternity leave as an employee that isn't producing, as cold as that sounds. It's sad how emotionless companies can be when they're focused solely on the dollar signs...

Not so much sarcasm, as cynicism... I mean it, if the current employer-employee dynamic persists, either you need women to sacrifice their career, or pay someone to bear your children. Which you then have no time to raise, so you pay someone to do it for you. You can find a certain parallel with characters in novels who are children of rich people who are never home and thus the child is raised by the wet nurse/maid/etc. If you do the same at scale, it should be cost-effective and probably the only option.

Fortunately, I'm pretty sure we'll run out of resources long before our greed for growth pushes us that far.

Edit: of course companies are emotionless. They aren't people. You should view any company of more than about 200 people as a super-organism. Every actor in the company acts in their own best interest, while kept in check by the people on top. The emergent behaviour is one of calculated exploitation.

The only reason that Daesh exists is the idiotic and pointless wars that have been waged by the US and Europe in the Middle East. Destroying governments and airlifting in weapons is handing them victories and arming them. Their existence is the result of 15 years of a "war on terror". And your conflation of low birth rates in Europe with the topic of war is a symptom of very confused thinking.

> The fact that the EU’s replacement rate is 1.59 children per couple and the continent needs substantial levels of immigration to maintain a productive workforce

> The idea here is that all people are the same, and all you need to do is shoehorn enough to keep the economy going.

Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans.

Solving the underpopulation problem by constant import of uneducated masses from all over the world is going to cost more and more, both in terms of the peta-man-hours needed to teach them functioning in new reality (language barrier for a start) and in terms of things going wrong when the former fails.

I mean, what are these guys supposed to do here? Join the rat race, stop reproducing and replace themselves with who-knows-whom 100 years down the line? Despise this culcure and blow stuff up? Something else?

> Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans.

We know why, it's just an inconvenient truth. More women are choosing careers over having more children.

To maintain a stable population, each woman has to have an average of two children. But that's the average; many will be infertile or homosexual or never find a mate or choose to never have children or only have one. So a great many would have to have more than two children to balance the average; many of our parents had five, six, seven, eight siblings because their mother's entire life consisted of raising children.

It's not easy for a family to raise five or more children while both parents work full time, so hardly anybody does that and the average falls below the population replacement rate. That's the why.

How to fix that without going back to the Old Ways is not a trivial problem.

You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children.

Anecdotally, my other half would love to have children but I want to delay it right now because of finances. We live in the south-east of England so this is how things look:-

We have a nice 2 bedroom terrace that costs £500,000. I earn a good living but we're hardly living in luxury. The bank of mum and dad aren't rich, thus I struggle to pay that down. This could perhaps be attributed to woman joining the workforce, a lack of building, and a political lanscape that setup property as invesments.

She wants children to go to private school that may cost £9000-£30000 per year, with an oppertunity cost of upto £2,000,000 per child. This can probably be attributed to the nigh on impossibility to get your kids into a good performing state school and grammer schools being given the shaft after our parents had their turn.

She wants them to have a dad, but Men are afraid of commitment due to the litigious nature of break-ups which screw them over. I'm not saying Dads shouldn't pay for their kids, just they shouldn't be paying £4,000,000 for an ex-wife to keep the advantages of marriage whilst the man no longer gets anything in return

There's probably many more problems because the birthrate is fairly low right around Europe but these are some pretty big negatives for middle class men to commit to having children, at least not until they have their lot in life, which means there's less time to have more than 1-2.

> You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children.

The problem is that it's not just one problem. Almost everything is set up to economically discourage two-income families from having more children. After everything you've mentioned, the second income financially disqualifies you from many childcare and other benefits available to single-income families while progressive taxation, sold as targeting the wealthy, instead swallows the money a middle income family could have used to pay for those things out of pocket.

And after the government has laid claim to most of the second income, what's left becomes the baseline for the cost of living. More families now have two incomes so it takes two incomes to afford a home in a good school district.

It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children?

> It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children.

NRA is a narrow, single-issue lobby, not a general lobby for interests of a broad demographic (which even "middle-class families with children" is.)

And, really, everyone pays sort of vague lip service because its a large demographic, but no more than that because its not a large voting bloc. Particularly, its not a group that has a common set of policy preferences and consistently votes predominantly based on that shared set of preferences.

Its not like there aren't lobbying organizations that promote themselves as promoting the interests of "families with children"; but none of them really represents the majority of that demographic, because there is no clear voting bloc to represent.

> Maybe it's time to start thinking why people who end up living in the West are unwilling to reproduce, despite having the highest standard of living ever available to humans.

Not "despite", but "because".

In an agricultural society, you need lots of children because you need a lot of hands working the farm. If you're dirt-poor in an industrial society, you need lots of children so they can all work in factories to earn money for the family. In any society with a high infant mortality rate, you need to have even more children because you can expect a lot of them to die young.

In the modern West, we're not subsistence farmers or dirt-poor factory workers, and almost all of our kids survive to adulthood. We don't have lots of children because we don't need to have lots of children.

There's also the fact that in many poor nations, there simply isn't enough of a social safety net to take care of you in your old age. The surest form of insurance is to have as many kids as you can and count on some or all of them to support you when you're no longer able to work.

With SS, Medicare (in the US), etc. even though you won't live in luxury, you at least have some kind of income coming in in your retirement years.

There are many reasons why I do not personally want children.

Some are political or philsophical that would take too long to explain here but I suppose one big reason is that I just flat-out do not like being around children.

There are no economic or personal incentives that would change my mind on this matter and from what I understand, the number of people thinking this way (the not wanting kids in general part, not the not liking them part) has gradually increased over the years as living standards have improved and more people are able to fulfill other goals and personal ambitions.

The lack of humanity will emerge soon enough if the practical problems of servicing massive government debt and supporting a European-style welfare system are not solved by having sufficient taxpayers on the ground to fund these outgoings.

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