No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe | Hacker News Reader

No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe

nytimes.com

39 pointsb-man50 comments

One of my (rather cynical) friends predicts that liberal, secular, Western culture is going to die out in the long run. He thinks certain religious traditions that encourage children and families (traditional Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism) will survive, but not us. I argued it was a race--could our culture infect theirs before theirs outpopulated ours? It'll be interesting to see (in the ominous, "may you live in interesting times" sense of the word).

This assumes that a person cannot be born in a religious culture and convert to a more secular culture or vice versa.

[edit] Could the people down-voting please explain why this is not a valid point?

I argued it was a race--could our culture infect theirs before theirs outpopulated ours?

That sentence kind of implies what you said. I didn't downvote you (I can't because of how HN works) but I'd assume that's the reason why.

I see... I didn't interpret "could our culture infect theirs" as converting people over. I don't see it as something infective. There will naturally be a good deal of attrition. Makes sense, thanks.

Because globally it's a very very small number of people who do this, so for this article it barely matters.

China is secular and mostly atheist. Yet they have an over population problem.

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&ctype=l&s...

Secular, yes. Western and liberal? No.

But you can't just look at population, you have to take the derivative, maybe even the second derivative. What's the population growth rate, and how is that rate changing? That describes future demography. Whether you're currently overpopulated or not is just the status quo. It's the past.

Because of their one-child policy, China will also have an aging problem in 30 to 40 years time. Theirs may even get more of a problem, as their replacement rate may be (Chinese statistics are inaccurate, so it is hard to tell) lower than that in Europe.

I remember hearing that China's one-child policy only applies in the cities, not in the country. If China's rural population urbanizes they won't have a demographic problem--in fact, the one-child policy explicitly makes room for the rural population to urbanize, which is a big component of development and industrialization.

I was talking to my friend about the Muslim immigrant birthrate in Europe versus the natives and how it's a threat to Western culture, but he made the counterpoint that he thought Islam would schism like Christianity has, and therefore there's nothing to worry about.

The question is whether Islam will modernize and assimilate to liberal Western culture, not whether it will schism. A schism might even be net harmful--when Christianity schismed, Europe went through over a century of religious warfare.

Sometimes worry that this is a depressing answer to Fermi's paradox (Fermi's paradox asks why no intelligent life has been found, if the odds of it are so high):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Maybe when a species/civilization gets to a certain point of sophistication and intelligence, the motive to keep expanding (or even reproducing, apparently) stops, and they don't go on to colonize anywhere else.

Really, the only reason the Americas are so populated right now is because of crazy overpopulation in Europe at the time. If a new continent was discovered today (or if Mars was suddenly terraformed), how long would it take for it to be populated? Would it ever be?

It's not sophistication and intelligence. It's the cost of living.

I don't think it's that simple. Plenty of people living in poverty manage to have quite large families.

I think instead it's the desire to have children only if you can have them and still live a the level of comfort you desire. It used to be, that people had kids simply because it was the default, and everyone did. But now that society has advanced to the point that people are able to make different decisions, it seems like often the choice is, simply to not have them.

That's all I mean by sophistication--the ability to look at how you are living, and make those choices for yourself.

Exactly this. European governments have put various financial incentives in place for having kids, yet they're scratching their heads why they're not working.

At least in Austria, it pretty much doesn't matter how much your household earns, up to a certain level (it's somewhere around €2300/month net if I remember correctly), as long as you have at least 2 kids. The child benefits plus family tax breaks compensate for low income. The benefits are diminished (not just proportionally) at higher income levels, which basically means there's an incentive for poor people to have kids. Having a kid probably won't reduce your standard of living if it comes with a 50% raise or whatever. One parent dropping from full-time to part time will also have little to zero financial impact at that level.

At higher income levels, none of that is true. The jobs tend to be more demanding, working part time is hardly an option, and daytime childcare is expensive. The €100/month/child or so the government give you won't even get close to covering that.

I don't know if the incentives are working among those with lower income - they have more kids, but for all I know they would have more anyway, but the current setup is useless for encouraging reproduction across the board.

I don't know about Austria, but in the Netherlands there's a similar monetary compensation you get for each child; however, AFAIK it's not meant to "encourage" people to have more children. Rather, it's meant to make up for the increased cost of living once your family expands.

(There's a Dutch politician quoted in the article as saying that Dutch women should have more babies... it seemed awfully odd to me. Upon closer investigation, he was talking about cranking up the birth rate from 1.7 to 2.1.)

it's not meant to "encourage" people to have more children. Rather, it's meant to make up for the increased cost of living once your family expands.

Removing discouragement is the same overall as adding encouragement.

"Removing discouragement is the same overall as adding encouragement."

It may have the same effect, but it something entirely different. For example, would you argue that legalizing the sale of tobacco or alcohol is the same as encouraging people to smoke or drink?

I think it's pretty safe to say that paying cash for every child falls squarely in the category of "rewarding behaviour you wish to encourage", let alone subsidised housing, tax breaks and paid maternity leave. There are obviously degrees of encouragement or discouragement, but that's beside the point. Which, in case it wasn't clear, was that these measures only have a hope of working with low-income households as the advantage of fixed-size benefits (cash child benefits, paid maternity leave) diminishes proportionately, and the rest (tax breaks, housing) are inversely dependent on income.

It's not clear to me that legalization of those drugs would have the same effect as doing something else with the intent to encourage use of them. However, in the case of money, it's a little clearer: the only difference between giving someone extra money when they have another child and replacing money they spend on an extra child is what you say about it.

Now, it's true that what you say about it can have a real effect on choices and outcomes, but we don't really know enough to reliably predict what that effect is in the general case, so for practical purposes, I think we're better off assuming that the effects are negligible.

Right. The opportunity cost of having kids is much higher today than in the past.

This is one reason why concerns of overpopulation if we develop life extension technologies are overstated.

I think a large part of what it is, is the want for more. Once you reach a certain point of wealth, you realize just how possible it is to get just a bit wealthier, but doing so means putting off your kids for a couple years. And you get there, you now have a BMW... but now you want a nicer house, and everyone tells you about being living within your means, and the way everything looks right now, if you play your hands right, you can get that new house in just a couple years, if you put off your kid again... and repeat.

I have no actual proof of this, but it's just a generalization of some human behavior I notice. Namely, you get much more interested into a "game" once you invested a certain amount of effort/have a certain position. For example, someone of average fitness doesn't really care about shaving 20 seconds off their 5k, or that extra 5 pounds of benchpress. But the person who is waay more fit will invest incredible amounts of effort/time/focus into those goals.

> It used to be, that people had kids simply because it was the default

That's not really true in the long perspective. Everybody confuses the global post-war baby-boom with all of human history.

A large fraction of Europeans were historically childless. Most women did not get married until 30 or so. A substantial number of people joined celibate religious orders.

Another reason for having children other than just because that's the default is that if you manage to make it to old age, the ones most likely to take care of you are your children. This reason tends to not be as forceful when a social safety net is in place. Another use for children is as a cheap workforce for a family business. Child labor laws tend to discourage this, and there aren't as many family businesses anyway.

This. Children used to be indentured labor and a retirement plan for farmers, so having them was an economically rational investment. Now they're a luxury.

It's having enough intelligence(or education/awareness) to know that high cost of living would put more pressures on the parents and even the kids, if more kids were to be born, coupled with the existence of free will to take a decision/action (that is, not to have children) based on that awareness - which is causing the low birth rates.

A pattern that stuck me, across different countries and even different states within a country - the higher the education level generally is, the higher is the free will (or the desire to express it) and the capability to take independent actions to external pressures, the lower is the birth rate. Of course, this is putting it in simplistic terms.

I think this is true. I recently read "The Fates of Nations" by Paul Colinvaux, which was very interesting. One of his main points was that people are very smart about choosing how many kids to have, and they generally choose to have as many kids as they can afford. For richer people, it tends to be less, since they want to give their kids all the best: the best schools, the best daycare, set them up with a good start in life, etc. For poorer people, they don't spend as much on their kids. They don't worry so much about education because it's often out of their reach, so they have more kids since it doesn't cost them as much. (The book isn't so much about demographics as about how demographics have shaped history throughout time.)

Don't worry. 100% of people who don't have children won't contribute to next generation's gene pool. Natural selection will "fix" the problem quickly enough.

I think the selection would be based on how much parents enjoy having children. Those who enjoy having children would have 2+ kids and their genes would multiple. Others would slowly disappear. The change wouldn't be quick though. It would take at least few centuries to make somewhat noticeable gene pool correction.

I agree, its a depressing pattern but there is a a ring of truth to it - when a species/civilization gets to a certain point of sophistication and intelligence, the motive to keep expanding (or even reproducing, apparently) stops, and they don't go on to colonize anywhere else

May be the solution would be to colonize another planet fast enough, before we become sophisticated enough to march towards that 0 population eventuality.

I think the problem is integrating family life with the rest of your life. Right now both concepts are completely orthogonal, so when you start a family suddenly you have a much bigger management problem.

(I Am Not An Anthropologist, but) My understanding of traditional hunter gatherer societies is that women would keep on working even with a small baby. The baby could be strapped to the womans back, or simply kept close by, so that the woman could keep working but still have quick access to the baby to nurse it when needed.

When the child got older, they would have the entire tribe looking out for them, so there wasn't a need for constant micromanagement. We have daycares, but that only lasts half the day. After work the parents are expected to dedicate the rest of their night to supervising. That's a big (and unnatural) time commitment, in my opinion.

Women of Europe! We need to remedy this situation. I'll do my bit if you do yours. Email address is in my profile, please attach pictures.

(I kid, I kid. I've already done my share: the little one is expected next month).

Your share is 2.1 kids, not just one.

Fair point. I'll get right on it!

diversify your DNA portfolio.

Compare with this article from a few months back: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden.... . While this article isn't exclusively about just birth rate, it notes that Sweden has one of the higher birthrates in Europe. Looking at wikipedia, the birth rate for Sweden is still (what I suppose is) low, only 1.67, compared with the US at 2.09.

edit: just in case you aren't inclined to read through, the article is about granting fathers paternity leave.

Darn, and I thought it was going to be about Children of Men.

I think what all of these articles point to is that it's expensive or time consuming to raise kids, so people simply don't have them. It seems like the key to raising fertility rates is just to provide a good environment for parents to have them in, like giving leave to new parents and giving tax incentives or stipends to those who do. Then again, its probably more complex than this.

An interesting argument I've heard wrt to "high" western birthrate countries is that it has more to do with the societal roles of women. In both the United States and Sweden, women are generally told they can have both a career and become mothers, and while this view is not universally held in either country, it's a widespread belief. By contrast, in western nations with lower birthrates, the social views tilt towards women being told they can have a career OR become a mother, and that trying to be both is detrimental.

What tends to happen in nations when motherhood becomes an either-or proposition is, women opt to either forgo childbearing or chose to only have 1 child and then continue on with their career track. Whereas in countries with a broader view of motherhood, women who want both aren't guilted by society to stop at 1 or, and likewise fewer women face the choice of forgoing or limiting motherhood to pursue their career ambitions.

Generally there is a bounce. For a generation after women get the chance of a career, education etc the birth rate plumnets - this is the position Italy is in.

Then 20-30 years later those same women have reached positions in politics, industry, education etc where they can influence policy on childcare, maternity leave etc. Then the number of children goes back up - this is the state Scandanavia is in.

Germany is a little odd, remember that less than 20years ago it absorbed a 3rd world country which rather screws up it's stats.

Calling the DDR a 3rd world country is a little exaggerated in my opinion.

HN now with free hyperbole.

Inconvenient facts this article doesn't mention include the baby booms in France and the UK since 1998. Given that post-natal and social policies have a huge impact on birth rates and are set at a national, not EU, level, this report needs to be taken with a bucket (not a pinch) of salt.

This article is a bit of a slog (but well worth reading) -- I summarized the most interesting part to me (birthrates and why) here: http://quippd.com/show/4304/Where_have_all_Europes_babies_go...

Is this a problem? Overpopulation seems worse to me.

Yes, a big one, as the article explains: if you have a massive number of old people living on pensions / versions of social security, but not a lot of younger people working to produce goods and services, those old people are not going to be able to survive at the standards of living they'd like and b) over-taxed young people are going to be incentived to not work or leave.

These are not good things, especially because they have recursive aspects, as discussed.

That's a problem that will solve itself in a maximum of about 70 years.

No, it won't. If you maintain the same sub-replacement fertility rate, you'll end up with a stable inverted population pyramid, albeit a constantly shrinking one. Every generation will have too few workers to support too many retirees.

Children are a Ponzi scheme - you have lots of children to support you in old age (either directly in 3rd world or via social security in the 1st) This leads to over population - but screw them, you will be dead.

It's rather like some countries attitude to consuming natural resources, if we don't burn the oil first somebody else will

its literally a catch 22 situation, its a matter of what perspective (regarding the time factor) one is looking at.

Over population will cause pressure on the sustainability of resources on the planet, not to mention inefficient use of resources and resulting pollution.

Under population in a society will put other pressures on the sustainability of a society - more of the economic type and on a longer time frame. The pressures would be more about having a critical enough market size that can support enough jobs and hence a decent enough quality of life.

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