3rd July 2008, 9:32 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:I'm reading the article as I go, but that guy is frickin' racist. He's actually afraid of the noble line of Europeans being destroyed by horders of foreign devils breeding like rabbits? Seriously? That's seriously one of the most biggetted things I've heard in a long time? THAT counts as a "concern"? He's afraid european "culture" is going to be replaced? Ugh! How disgusting! It's just how things go you idiot!
Well first, of course, the article says that immigration is in fact not a long-term solution, because the longer most immigrants stay in European nations, the more their birthrates fall in line with European norms, and over time those people too will get top-heavy with far more old people than young.
I'm not sure if you were talking about it, but you perhaps do raise an important issue, though... do you mean the part where it talks about European fears of increasing Islamic minorities in their countries?
Actually, if you don't ever follow the news from Europe, that's a HUGE, HUGE continent-wide issue, with lots of justifiable things backing the side which wants to limit the amount of Muslims allowed in. Racist? Perhaps... but it would be more accurate to phrase it differently.
The problem is, essentially, that Islamic and Christian cultures are very, VERY different and do not get along well at all. In America, we have a very small Islamic minority... but I was talking about this article with my dad today, and he pointed out, what if Mexico was Islamic, and it was US getting millions of Islamic immigrants? If you think the Mexican immigration issue is big now... if things were like that, it'd be exponentially, EXPONENTIALLY larger. Because Islamic culture is so, SO different from Western culture that when the two come in close contact there IS conflict.
Christianity used to be a lot like Islam. The more you look at the medieval Christian church, the more you see parallels with modern Islam. The difference is, Islam never had a Reformation and never secularized. Chrisitianity did. The world would almost undoubtedly be a better place if Islam had done that too... but it didn't. And so, it is a very, very conservative religion. The Turks are one thing -- Turkey is one of the most moderate or the most moderate Islamic country, and Europe has enough problems with it -- but Arabs and North Africans and others... they come to Europe, but they refuse to integrate or agree with modern liberal Western cultures. This creates a huge disconnect and increasingly massive social problems.
England, France, and the Netherlands particularly are having the most problems with Muslim immigrants. This is, I am sure, largely because they are some of the very few European nations that actually allow significant amounts of immigration; most others allow in only token numbers of people, like Japan as well for instance. But what do you do with people who not only refuse to become part of your culture, they actively work to undermine it? Remember things like the killing of that Dutch filmmaker a couple of years ago, after he made an anti-Islamic movie detailing the horrible violence and murder Islamic women face daily (violence and murder at the hands of their family members, that is)?
Read this for some on that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Go...irector%29
What are you supposed to do with people who truly believe such radical things and refuse to modernize? Western thought says that all are entitled to their opinion, but what about people who refuse to acknowledge the truth of that concept... very challenging issues.
Anyway, to the subject of the thread...
This is the most important paragraph in the article, I'd say:
Quote:So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Having read the rest, here's my thoughts on it. The article goes on and on about what certain nations are doing to address the population decline "crisis", and the end finally actually introduces scientists who have the only opinions that actually matter. What do they have to say? The same thing most scientists who have chimed in have to say, population decline is a GOOD thing, and these financial woes only matter because the previous generation was so frickin' large relative to the declined one. The idea that someone would guilt trip someone else for deciding they'd rather not have kids is rather disturbing.
I'm with the scientists on this one. Population reduction in Europe and Asia, well certain parts, is a good thing. The article also points out that America doesn't actually have this going on. Yes if population growth decreases, it'll eventually result in population decline, but it isn't quite there yet and really I'm not sure we can expect a continued trend in the US.
However, world wide it is still on a massive rise, and we will likely pay the price for other nation's silly levels of reproduction.
ASM already covered a lot of good reasons why you are wrong, but I can say some things too.
First, as ASM says, you, just like those people in the end talking about how it's not so bad, completely ignore the first, most important issue with population decline in a culture with a long lifespan: What to do when you have twice as many old people who want to be retired than young people working!
Obviously, that is an impossible situation. You need at least as many or more people working than you have retired. America is actually growing and has massive problems funding healthcare... can you possibly imagine how hard that would be for a rapidly shrinking country with twice as many old people as young?
Essentially, there are only two solutions: Greatly extend required working years (60? 65? There's absolutely no way it'll be able to stop there, it'll have to keep going up), and cut benefits. Most European countries will probably have to do both... but they really want to care for old people and have socialized medicine that guarantees everyone the right to health care! They're absolutely right that in a modern state it should be a right, not a privilege... but it's incredibly hard to sustain in shrinking countries. It's a HUGE, HUGE problem which will hit Europe, Japan, South Korea, and any other major shrinking countries really, really hard in the coming century unless they very quickly modernize their views of women to allow for working mothers, and modernize their views of men to allow for them to do more of the housework.
Because if you read the article properly, you'd know that those are the two keys to the higher birthrates of the American and Northern European cultures' higher birthrates. The cultures which reject those two things, like Spain, Italy, Greece, South Korea, or Japan, suffer low birthrates as a result. Women won't have children when having them is too much of an economic burden and hurts your lifetime salary amount earned too much, as it would be if you have to quit your job and do all the housework (and childcare) as soon as you have children.
And yes, as ASM says you continue to completely ignore the facts of the maps I posted a month ago, or the fact that maximum world population estimates have been estimated down and down and down every time they are made... the days when people thought massive overpopulation would cripple the world are mostly over. Even if the entire world fully liberalized its views of gender to match their modernization of society and reduced the underpopulation crisis that is currently affecting all those East Asian and South European nations (and Eastern European too, for slightly different reasons), that would only nudge them up to maybe replacement level at best, not above. And as every nation modernizes its birthrates immediately begin to plunge; it is true that a few nations are still rapidly growing, but between increasing birth-control and family planning efforts and the (coming incredibly tragic) effects of global warming, that, I believe, is only temporary.
Perhaps some shrinkage would not be bad, as it is true that some countries are very highly populated, but at some point you MUST level off your population decline or your country will cease to exist.