Aside: I love the show Connections with James Burke and highly recommend it. Many of the threads weaved in the show come start near this time period because the labour crunch required machines otherwise there just wouldn't have been enough labour to run the society left.
"in about fifty years Germanys population will fall by about twenty percent"
Wow, in 50 years robots will do most of the work. They will drive our cars and clean our houses. They are starting doing it.
In fact 50 years is so much time we could had done great breakthroughs like the discovery of nuclear fusion, or the manipulation of DNA so we remain young forever(and most people will not die from age).
I am more worried about what will happen THIS YEAR if Germany continues supporting USA invasion of Ukraine and Russia closes the gas key.
Right now Germany hugely profits from immigration out of other European and overseas countries, bringing in more than 400.000 (net) immigrants in 2013 alone. The figure for 2014 will likely be even higher. If they can keep up this trend it will be able to compensate (to a large degree) the decline of the population caused by low birth rates. In fact, the 2008 demography report of the government (which brought the demographic issue to a large public awareness for the first time) (http://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Verfassung/Dem...) calculated with a net immigration rate of 300.000 people in the most optimistic case, so bringing in 400.000 people per year is really better than anyone could hope. Of course some people will again complain that foreigner will "steal their jobs", but the truth is that they might actually do great service to the country, even if their rate of unemployment should be higher than that of native Germans.
Usually, immigration is good for the economy and for everyone who lives there. Germany is pretty cheap country to live in (food is probably the best and cheapest in Europe to come by, but salaries also are rather low, esp. compared to the US), IMHO probably due to the many immigrants.
We also need more qualified workers, as everyday I see German dumbos who are seriously unqualified for their job ;-)
But yes, if the day should come that German dumbos should be replaced with skilled people from Spain, Turkey, or Greece, many people might end up very pissed.
Edit: if you vote me down, maybe you'd like to elaborate on where our opinions or observations differ?
Lets be honest.. the multi-cultural society brought on by leftists and feminists and foreigners leads people to give up on the future of their culture. These people don't want families with non-Germans and they don't want Germany to be non-German, but they are occupied by foreign cultures and they can't do anything to change it.
I am generalizing for the people who don't have families because they see Germany being handed over to foreigners in the future. You do not agree with my opinion? That is fine.
But it is not xenophobic to say that people want to keep German families German. Did you know that China has less than a million immigrants in the entire country? Maybe it is time you respect your people, too. Your group of 4 sounds like some xenophile party.
With this article we have the sexual relations of Germans strewn about and we are expected to just sit back and let the whole world morph the demographics of a nation they aren't a part of. I don't agree with it.
"Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs."
In college I had a professor from East Germany that talked about this. The communists did a lot of things wrong, but one thing they got right was an impressive support system for working parents. The preschools and child care programs were excellent, and women were encouraged to work instead of staying home. After the wall fell, these support systems stopped, and his wife had to quit her job and stay home to take care of their kids. He thought it was such a waste of talent because his wife had a PHD and was also a college professor, but there were few other options at the time.
Right. Not just maternity leave, but general parental leave: Don't focus entirely on one gender, with the assumption that either gender is necessarily more focused on raising children. Allow single fathers to raise kids as well, without stigma or handicap, by making everything more available to all.
This dovetails nicely into marriage equality, which I don't know if Germany has yet, but I know it will if it temporarily does not.
Russia had the same support system (though lesser quality), but it endured to some degree even today. Unfortunately, it's so underfunded that there are waiting lists and rampant corruption that one has to endure in order to get a spot for the child. Moscow (as usual) is better off than the rest of the country, but even there it's a problem.
Living in US, that's a huge contrast for me and I'm not entirely sure what options are out there aside from paying private.
I think this is the biggest gap in western governments currently, and huge productivity boosts could be had if they solve this problem. Especially in the US.
It's incomprehensible that a parent should have to pay thousands per month just to be able to have a child and work at the same time.
Paid maternal leave is not the big issue! After six months of leave, the problem remains that a child needs to be looked after and cared for while the mother returns to work.
It's incomprehensible that a parent should have to pay thousands per month just to be able to have a child and work at the same time.
Why is it incomprehensible? Watching a kid takes time, time costs money. Someone has to pay for it. Maybe you don't think it's right that the parent should be the one to pay for supervision of their kid, but I'm still lost as to how you arrived at "incomprehensible".
It's incomprehensible that it still works this way in a modern economy. The eventual financial benefit of the child goes to society, not the parents, therefore it follows that society should bear the initial financial cost.
There is no eventual financial benefit to having children for society. Our lives would be much better if the population of the Earth was smaller. The oil would last longer, food would be cheaper as we could farm only the most fertile easily-cultivated land, less competition for housing, etc, etc.
I'm young and child-less, so I'm not speaking out of experience, but I really see no reasons why we should be encouraging people to be able to work while having kids. Instead, I think we should enable them to not work and have kids. 50 years ago, it was more than possible to sustain a family with only a single working parent. Nowadays, this doesn't seem even remotely possible (hell, many families barely survive with 2 working parents!). Furthermore, it's not like we're facing a shortage of workforce problems - we're facing unemployment problems. If we could enable e.g. 30% of the workforce (hopefully dads as well - I would love to stay at home instead of working) to stay at home with kids instead, not only would that solve the unemployment issues, but it would also be hugely beneficial for the children's development!
Edited to add: I actually come from a country where most adults worked even 50 years ago. However, when I was young, my grandmother was already retired, so she was able to take care of me and my brother until we started school. Still, I wish my parents had been able to spend more time with me when I was little, and I wish I'll have that opportunity with my kids.
I think it's considered healthy these days for children to spend time away from their family in the care of others. It helps to develop a sense of individuality and independence from the parents at a younger age. Plus, from what I've heard, sometimes the parents and the children just need a break from each other.
Yes, this can be done by taking the kid to a park or other social activities, but two working parents is a perfectly acceptable option too. Daycare isn't unbeneficial to a child.
I have friends and family who work in primary education and they all say it's immediately obvious which children have two working parents. The kids without a full time homemaker have far more developmental problems.
Children with working parents is one group. Children with developmental problems is another group. There is surely some overlap, but that is far from saying that children with working parents will always have developmental problems. I can point to some people I know and say "they're an only child" based on the way they behave, but that's ignoring the millions of 'only child's who have no behavioral problems or the millions of people from multi-child households who still have difficulty functioning in normal society.
There is certainly more to a child's behavior than whether their parents were working or staying at home. There might be a strong correlation to households with two working parents and households with other developmentally-stunting factors like parental illiteracy or low education levels, low levels of parental involvement, etc, but I'm sure you would have a tough time proving to any level that, with all other factors remaining the same, two working parents cause more damage to a child than having a stay-at-home parent.
For what it's worth (as long as your anecdotal experience means something to you), my brother-in-law is a college administrator and my sister is a first grade teacher and they have two children who don't seem to have any developmental issues. But my sister has kids in her class with a stay-at-home parent who certainly do.
What? As a father of (soon to be) three children this sounds really odd to me. My kids have always loved going to daycare and I've never heard of it causing any developmental problems. On the contrary my own experience is that daycare really accelerates kids development.
Most children in Sweden have two working parents and start daycare when they are around a year old. Daycare in Sweden is considered part of the school system and the teachers working there have (approximately) the same education as 'regular' school teachers.
Edit: Also, as a related fact in this discussion, in Sweden children that are behind in learning to speak (language development) can actually receive special permission to spend _more_ time in daycare to help speed up their language learning.
From what I've read, research suggests that children from higher quality daycares had higher vocabulary scores, but worse social/behavioral problems (academic habits, more impulsiveness, risk-taking).
That's a very simplified observation of a complex reality. Not all daycares are created equal: The National Institute of Child Health Development[1] found that most daycare operations are "fair" or "poor". Only 10% are "high-quality".
Obviously the details are what matter in each case: a caring parent at home is far better than a crowded day-care. Conversely, a great daycare can help with a bad home situation.
It's a fair point, I was trying to come up with a concise way to refute "but it would also be hugely beneficial for the children's development!" because I'm not sure that's entirely true. There's nothing I've seen saying that, everything else staying the same, a parent at home is massively more beneficial than a child in daycare. The most important thing is parental involvement, and that can be done with or without daycare. A stay-at-home parent who doesn't engage their child is just as bad as two working parents who do the same.
I agree that we shouldn't be so eager to turn our kids over. My wife stays home with our children and I can't imagine turning that responsibility to someone else. Sure it's a sacrifice financially, but the social benefits are huge, especially while the kids are small.
I worry that the reason East Germany was so "progressive" in this regard is that they were trying to flatten the social structure to simply the individual and the State. With no communities, families or churches, there's no framework on which to challenge the propaganda of the State.
This times a hundred. My sister stays home to care for her children and people in our area(DC) act like it's unbelievable. Edit: or worse, they assume she is barefoot and pregnant and chained to the stove.
I wouldn't have children with someone unless one of us was willing to take care of the children AT LEAST until school age. I don't think it's evil or sinful or anything to put your kids in daycare, but I am very very glad I grew up with a stay at home mother. Summer daycare(or day camp every single week all summer) just sounds way way too structured(insofar as it has to be, because it has to work around the structured adult schedules of working parents) for children.
The problem is that when a parent drops out of the workforce for 5 years-7 years (until the kid[s] are old enough for school), it's very difficult to just come right back in. This is why most people don't quit their jobs once they have kids.
Two important factors here are social responses and a financial issues. Anecdotal: my wife is often the recipient of derision when she mentions she stays at home with the kids, as though she should be out working. (Personally I think her job is far harder than mine!)
Similarly, we often meet people who claim to want to stay at home, but can't afford to. Meanwhile they have nice cars, iPhones, etc. In reality they're working to maintain a standard of living, not because they need to. Choices, choices.
AFAI have heard, East Germany still has much better child support infrastructure than West Germany. They also have a different culture. Women in or from the East tend to marry younger and get children earlier in their lives than Western women. I think that's a good thing, and also implies fewer medical complications related to birth, healthier kids, etc.
Norway has an excellent subsidized preschool program. It is called it kindergarten here, but is for children age 1-5. Children start public school at age 6 and most parents have paid leave for one parent or the other for a child aged 0-1.
The kindergarten prices are based on a sliding scale (with a maximum fee), so even a single mother with a relatively low paying job can afford it and rich people don't pay absurd amounts either. The result is that almost all parents work, it is frowned upon to be a "stay at home mom," and single mothers do not struggle so terribly, like in the US where there is very little childcare support.
The other result is that Norway is one of the few countries in Europe with a positive growth rate (not even counting immigration). One could argue that the other factors like paid maternity/paternity leave help, but the affordable child care seems much more important to most parents I know here.
German here. The initiative to provide a kindergarden for every child is quite a failure. It was decreed by the federal govt that every city (i.e. local govt) has to provide enough resources, but there simply aren't enough kindergarden workers for that (and not enough money to get more people to do that badly paid job).
As I see it, it was just an easy way to gain votes. It's easy to pass laws that your own government doesn't have to apply, but _someone else_.
Imo, it's worth it though. Having universal kindergarden caused a mini baby-boom in Quebec when it was initially put in place. Having good daycare is hard and extremely stressful to parents. My productivity at work soared when I finally had proper daycare for my kid.
However, it's systematically under attack from the government since. It's politically easier to cut kindergarden budgets rather than health services or corporate welfare. Another important need is for better parental leave so that both parents can raise their children and have a full time job.
Coming from the US, the idea that kindergarten is not required seems odd to me. I was going to say that kindergarten is required here in the US, but I thought I should double check that just to be sure. I was pretty surprised by the results. Only 16 of the 50 states require kindergarten as part of the mandatory (compulsory) education [1]. The state where I went to school doesn't require kindergarten, but my very very poor family still sent me to school at age 5.
So yeah, I guess we don't require kindergarten, but I've never encountered anyone in the US who did not attend kindergarten. So it still sounds odd that Germany doesn't have universal kindergarten zumal das Wort ist Deutsch.
Kindergarten covers children aged 3 to 6 in Germany, while school starts at 6 (with some variance allowed based on individual development). In any case, when entering school, kindergarten is a thing of the past.
School teachers prefer kids to go to kindergarten for the social and verbal skills they acquire there, but it's not mandatory.
Funny that you say that, since the USA is a country where in many states even school is not mandatory. Why should kindergarten be?
In Germany school is mandatory until you're 16 (if I'm not mistaken), but kindergarten is completely optional. Most people - if they can afford it - would send their kids there, though, because it gives them (the parents) more time off, and it's good for the kids to spend some time with other kids.
There are public and private kindergartens here (same with schools), and for the public ones the price depends on the parents' income. It seems that the costs vary by county and by the number of kids you have (as an example I found this page: http://www.netmoms.de/magazin/kinder/kindergarten/kosten-fue... ). Looks incredibly cheap (I'm honestly surprised), so maybe it's time to plan for some offspring.
"Yet, with hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs unfilled, some executives believe"
I wonder if this is actually true or if its like the typical American sob story of we can't get PHD's to work for minimum wage so we need to outsource.
A bit of both. There is a certain shortage, but I hear that tune for 15 years or so now (that is, across two tech booms and one bust).
The difference is in the objective: Our tech lobbyists (luckily quite incompetent) would like to reduce the minimum mandatory wage for skilled immigrant workers which exists to avoid pressure on locals.
As if even lower wages make working in Germany more attractive to skilled labor that can choose between countries - including the US (where at least the gross pay is noticeably higher for skilled jobs).
Society needs fresh blood to work, pay taxes, pay our retirement pensions, but the bill is still stuck upon the individuals that choose to have children. Only crazy people have children nowadays.
Most don't, obviously. He's still right, though: kids financially benefit the wider society, but most of the initial costs are borne by the individual parents. And since statistically speaking, having kids doesn't make you any happier (and at least temporarily makes you less happy), having kids does seem rather irrational on its face.
Quote: "... children—proles (from Latin proli, "offspring")—were listed instead of their property; hence, the name proletarius, "the one who produces offspring"."
In Rome the proletariat were nothing less than baby factories. Many were completely indoctrinated in this role, regarding it as their duty.
And this class has existed, with different names, to the present.
An individual, or any group of individuals, should be able to sustain themselves by their own work, as long as there are enough resources in the environment (or ecosystem).
Given that children are not self sustaining, individuals, or rather couples, but even more so, groups of individuals (villages, tribes, countries), should be able to get even more resources than their own need by their own work, so as to feed their children, their women and their olds. Or better, capitalize resources so they can feed themselves when they're old.
A society that would really need fresh blood, that had too many taxes or retirement pensions to pay, and where women cannot bear children because they have to work to sustain themselves, since men aren't retributed enough to feed their families all by themselves, those societies are beyond failure. They have effectively failed. It's done.
But I'm not sure that's the case in Europe or in the USA. I still think that there are enough resources, and even more than ever, given techological and scientific progress; eg. 200 years ago, 98% of the population had to work to feed the remaining 2%; nowadays 1% of the population has to work to feed the remaining 99%; therefore people should be able to work productively 4 days a year (not at those useless jobs), and earn enough resources to feed himself. Working 12 more days a year, he should earn enough resource to feed his wife and two children. Similarly, to shelter and clothe oneself shouldn't require much more work. All the rest goes to pay taxes of all kinds, that we shouldn't have to bear with.
This is an editorial comment disguised as objective reporting:
"But bogged down with failed banks and dwindling budgets, few are in any position to do anything about it."
The reasoning is something like "We can not save ourselves from collapse because we are collapsing." This is not a serious line of reasoning. Whenever people are faced with 2 problems, they need to make a decision about which problem is more urgent. If you honestly feel that problem B is more important than problem A, then you have a good reason to allow A to become worse so as to do something about B.
I could make an analogy to heart disease: aspirin can help lower the risk of a heart attack, but it has a risk itself: internal bleeding. Is aspirin worth the risk? That is something to be decided by a doctor and the patient. One needs to carefully weigh the risks of both decisions. One needs to examine all of the circumstances. However, where the risk of heart attack is serious, then the medical establishment is in agreement that it is better to take aspirin than to run the risk of a heart attack.
Exactly the same reasoning should apply to Germany and the issue of population. Which issue is more pressing, the issue of national debt, or the issue of declining population? One can make an argument either way, however Germany has a level of debt that is better than France, Italy, and many other European nations:
More so, Germany's public debt is less of an issue than it seems because the public is itself not highly indebted (as opposed to the public in the USA, which carries immense private sector debts).
If you project Germany's debts 50 years in the future, the situation seems bleak, because of rising retirement costs -- but that problem exists exactly because of the low birth rate, so if it was possible to solve the low birth rate, then the debts in 50 years would cease to be a problem.
The reality is, Germany has the financial resources to take some action against the low birth rate, if it wanted to. While there are important issues to be discussed, both pro and con, the financial arguments tend to be fake arguments.
Germany is restrained in its actions because of the continuing cultural force of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche". Aggressive action to raise the birth rate would automatically mean a change in the private sphere of life. More so, it would likely mean a revolution in the social status of women, and there are many in Germany who are wary of changes in gender relations.
Between the years 1874 and 1899 my great grandmother gave birth to 16 children. My family lived on a farm in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At that time, children as young as 5 were used for farmwork. A child as young as 12 could bring in a surplus -- they were, in a sense, "profit centers". Over the last 150 years children have transformed from units of production to units of consumption. Raising a child is now very expensive, and it is against the law for children to do any work that might offset their cost. Because of that, people have cut back on the number of children they have. Whereas my great grandmother had 16 children, most of my friends are content to have 1 or 2 children. Nowadays, having 3 children seems like a large family.
If Germany were serious about lifting the birth rate, it could take aggressive action to mitigate the costs of raising children. I am sure each of us can imagine some program that we think might work: free day care for children of all ages, or a huge bonus at birth such as $100,000, or some method of feeding children such that food is effectively free for children, and parents are saved the cost.
The important thing is to imagine what aggressive action would really look like. It would make some people flinch: their instinct would be that whatever program you suggest, the program is "too e...
We are not poorer now, but as you pointed out, children have gone from being profitable to being a burden, so no matter how much money we may have, there is less incentive to have children.
I'm also thinking that back in the day, your children were your retirement plan, so better have enough of them to make sure you will be taken care of. But now that the state is our retirement plan, even less reason to have kids.
Do you honestly feel that, in the entire nation of Germany, there are no families that are constrained primarily by money, when considering how many children to have? Given the way population tends to accumulate over time, you only need to convince 15% of those women who have already given birth to have 1 extra child, to raise Germany's birth rate back up to the replacement level. The question then is, are there those families who might like to have another child, if the cost was less of a burden? To borrow a phrase from economics, such policies seek to influence those families "at the margin", that is, those families that are considering having another child, and for whom some extra subsidy might be exactly what is needed to influence their decision in a positive direction. As in sales, there is no need to go after those who would never buy your product. There is no need to go after those women who are happy to be childless. The focus of pro-natalist policies is always to influence those who are open to the idea and who can be persuaded with some form of help.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I don't think. I'm just pointing out that I don't think people having less kids means that they are poorer. As you pointed out, kids have gone from being profitable to being a cost, so it doesn't really matter how rich or poor people are, they will have less kids. Unless, I guess, the state heavily subsidizes, and it seems that this article is saying that the efforts thus far to increase fertility via subsidization have proved too little.
But actually, I think the general theory is that people have less kids precisely because they are richer as opposed to being poorer, since they don't need kids in order to labor on the farm and don't need kids to pay for the parents retirement.
Children have always been expensive, haven't they? But I think that's more of a cultural issue - people prefer consumption to investing in raising kids.
And working children don't usually bring in lots of money, but back in the day they would care for their elderly parents, which was a good reason to have kids.
I think it's not mainly about money (why do Germany's academics have the fewest children?), but about creating a children-friendly climate and a culture where raising children is considered a good thing and not just a burden that keeps you from consuming. Children and modern consumer culture - bad fit.
> I think it's not mainly about money (why do Germany's academics have the fewest children?), but about creating a children-friendly climate and a culture where raising children is considered a good thing and not just a burden that keeps you from consuming.
This is so interesting; I was thinking about this exact problem (consumerism vs. child rearing) the other day after noticing some anti-child undertones on Reddit. Some themes I saw were workplace discrimination toward women in their 20's ("Why should I have to pay to train a female employee when she's highly likely to get pregnant and leave? I'd rather just hire a male."), shaming parents experiencing financial hardship ("It doesn't matter if you got cancer; you should have accumulated more savings before deciding to have kids!"), and an overall positive view of a child-free lifestyle ("All of our friends with kids are poor now -- I'm happy without kids so I can buy whatever games and gadgets I want.").
I just find it weird that people can forego such a defining element of any life form (reproduction) for the sake of consuming more "things". To take it to the extreme, could consumerism lead to the end of the human race?
Well, on one point I do agree: you should have your life/finances sorted out (meaning: positive cash flow, enough to raise kids) before you have kids. Everything else is just irresponsible.
Generally, it's a personal decision. However, consumer people might well remove themselves from the gene pool this way. The problem is that their culture is everywhere, and all kids catch that virus in school ("mom/dad, Timmy has a PS4, when do we get one?", "I also need to collect all Pokemon, or I'm not cool.") and want to grow up to be models/popstars/celebs or other meaningless things. Here's hoping my (future) kids will grow out of that phase quickly.
> I think it's not mainly about money (why do Germany's academics have the fewest children?), but about creating a children-friendly climate and a culture where raising children is considered a good thing and not just a burden that keeps you from consuming. Children and modern consumer culture - bad fit.
The cost to give birth is multiple times lower than somewhere like the US, the cost to raise again multiple times lower than the US, children are given much greater independence (freedom of movement and choice comes much earlier). Granted somewhere such as the US with an increasing rather than decreasing population, has little incentive to create a child-friendly climate. In Germany however this problem has made it very child friendly.
Second, the comment on "consumption" is a critique that may apply to humanity as a whole but largely German is very low in the list of OECD countries when it comes to economies based on consumption.
While most of US population growth is AFAIK due to immigration, and traditional WASP families have a rather low growth these days, that used to be different, due to cultural differences. Germany has been low pop-growth for a long time now (also excluding some immigrants).
Still, I think consumer culture is what's keeping growth low, in most industrialized countries these days. (I may be wrong.) I'm not sure how high or low Germany's consumption level is in absolute numbers, but I think it might look low because the country is producing/exporting so damn much.
the idea of consumption as a stint to growth i could relate to from the perspective of: cultures more consumed with self give less reason for growth. From another perspective: in a society that worships the self child-bearing is a product of boredom or issues with self-confidence? But it just doesn't fit entirely.
German here, living in the suburbs of a 250k people city, and I got 4 daycares within walking distance, which each provide care between 7am and 4pm – which is enough, as the average German only works from 8 to 14 (6h/day).
Another german here who's lived in Stralsund, Berlin, Darmstadt, Hannover. I know exactly nobody who has a full and/or decently-salaried position and can get by with 6 hours a day. The norm is 8 hours, 30 minutes, due to the mandated lunch break.
> “If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,”
I think that's exactly backwards. Afghanistan has the highest birthrate. The less gender equality, the higher the birthrate. You get astronomical birthrates in the Hasidim and Islamic parts of Africa where women hold a subservient place to their husbands and have a constrained gender role. The Nazis had some success raising the birthrate by promoting and elevating stay-at-home motherhood, not by promoting equality.
I think there's a strong case to be made that banning women from colleges and professions would dramatically raise the birthrate. I'm not advocating this, I'm just saying it's what the data suggests. The more professional status is available to women the less they reproduce. This is very clear all over the world across cultures.
It's so obviously not true between developed countries and across time. The more traditional the gender roles (opposite of "equality") the higher the birth rate. I would have to see the data before I even believed the claim that within an industrialized nation more "equal" couples have more kids. I highly doubt it.
On the other hand, we could imagine, given the kind of occupations we can dedicate ourselves to productively nowadays, that the "professionnal" and economic environments wouldn't be detrimental to the birth rate and the families.
Basically, if you work not because you need it, but because you have something to contribute, you should be able to do that while raising a family at the same time.
Ie. I think that citizen revenue would help greatly in this aspect.
Something that is rarely mentioned in these articles it's Germanys regressive policy on dual citizenship (i.e. only permitted in rare circumstances) this makes a country unattractive for long term immigration. While this may not be such an issue for intra EU migration, it certainly seems to cause issues with Turkish immigrants. It's a much bigger jump to naturalize if that means giving up your previous citizenship
I think at this point it is pretty clear that the dramatic population decline in Europe (started late 20th century but has accelerated since the 60s) is not something that can be solved by money nor does it seem to have to do with life style choices (the first and second world war did not do much to change the overall trend[1]).
One fascinating book I read a couple of years ago compared Western European nations with each other vs the "European counterparts that settled America", i.e. the Caucasians in North America. It's interesting that in this particular comparison America (main difference: less social welfare, more individualism, more religion) still has the highest of all ethnic Caucasian birthrates approx. 2.4 [2]
One economist's work that is very interesting to follow on this topic is Gunnar Heinsohn[3] who publishes his findings in intriguing essays usually backed by a lot of statistics and numbers.
But back to the article: the whole topic raises a couple of important fundamental questions:
What do you mean by "Germany's" birth rate plummeting? The population overall, of course, has been steady for the most part and was recently admitted publicly by the ministry of federal statistics (a few years back) [4] Germany itself will be a majority Muslim country by 2050. So the population itself will probably not change or not much, it will rather turn into a different cultural entity, one with a small and shrinking "original" ethnic group (similar to the Japanese, for instance) but being replaced by a (mainly) Turkish/Middle Eastern cultural group that will incorporate their own beliefs and traditions into the aging German society and probably eventually dominate it (it is, after all, just a number's game).
It's also not really a workforce problem as the article alluded - some here have already pointed out increases in productivity and automation that might offset these issues. The whole notion of population decline is inherently a cultural/ethnic question IMHO - even if a desire to shrink the population to improve the quality of life is your goal and immigrant birth rates fall over time: the fact of the matter remains this that you might be looking at a new "Voelkerwanderung" and all that comes with it.
Personal anecdote: I used to work for an IT company in Germany about 10 years ago - I had roughly 40 co-workers in an age-range of 20 to 40 (I was 25 at that time). I was the only one with 2 kids - nobody else had kids! Zero. My colleges had dogs, cars, expensive vacations and lived for the most part in those parts of town that shielded them nicely from the mass immigration taking place in what they called "(immigrant) ghettos". The life style benefits were non-negotiable for most of them but left not much for kids either (taxation is tough if you have to fund healthcare and mass immigration :-). The girls were brought up to loathe the idea of being a mother (and all the single mothers at the edge of society were an effective warning sign). So they were all headed for their careers, making it near impossible to have their first child before the age of 30-35. Not much time left after that. The climate in the bigger German cities that attract all those young and bright Germans looking for work is quite detrimental to raising children as well: very often our experience was that kids were seen as nuisance (in the US we had quite the opposite experience which might be one reason for the difference in birth rates - the US provides (in many emotional daily interactions) a way more supportive place to raise children than Western Europe).
At this point, sadly, it seems to me that population growth is linked to (a lack of) education and / or religious indoctrination. It does not seem to make much of a difference when some European countries pump millions into their social projects to support families (Sweden, France) or when they do not (Germany, Britain) - the birth rate decline is almost the same for all of these countr...
I'm currently mired in biology and I think an interesting point can be made. We talk of 2 types of reproducers: R and K[0]. R is cockroaches; have just thousands of babies. K is Blue Whales; have 1 or 2 and nurture the hell out of them.
It seems that in the 1800s, we were more R type than we are today. We had lots of children (though not thousands) and weren't all that concerned with education, welfare, or health as to each one. At least in comparison to today.
Now, we seem to be much more K type. We take care of our children to an incredible degree. Mortality is very anomalous in child birth, it is rare in the 1st world to encounter an illiterate person, all but the true wackos get vaccines, etc. As a consequence, it takes a lot of time and resources to raise a child. Heck, we are even talking about the 20's being years of 'extended adolescence'[1]. I don't know if this is a mistake of correlations and causation, but they sure do seem linked.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadAside: I love the show Connections with James Burke and highly recommend it. Many of the threads weaved in the show come start near this time period because the labour crunch required machines otherwise there just wouldn't have been enough labour to run the society left.
Wow, in 50 years robots will do most of the work. They will drive our cars and clean our houses. They are starting doing it.
In fact 50 years is so much time we could had done great breakthroughs like the discovery of nuclear fusion, or the manipulation of DNA so we remain young forever(and most people will not die from age).
I am more worried about what will happen THIS YEAR if Germany continues supporting USA invasion of Ukraine and Russia closes the gas key.
We also need more qualified workers, as everyday I see German dumbos who are seriously unqualified for their job ;-)
But yes, if the day should come that German dumbos should be replaced with skilled people from Spain, Turkey, or Greece, many people might end up very pissed.
Edit: if you vote me down, maybe you'd like to elaborate on where our opinions or observations differ?
edit: Every German will upvote this comment
So they stop having children with other Germans. Makes sense.
Please stop generalizing people using their nationality.
I am a German and I certainly do not agree with your views.
But it is not xenophobic to say that people want to keep German families German. Did you know that China has less than a million immigrants in the entire country? Maybe it is time you respect your people, too. Your group of 4 sounds like some xenophile party.
With this article we have the sexual relations of Germans strewn about and we are expected to just sit back and let the whole world morph the demographics of a nation they aren't a part of. I don't agree with it.
In college I had a professor from East Germany that talked about this. The communists did a lot of things wrong, but one thing they got right was an impressive support system for working parents. The preschools and child care programs were excellent, and women were encouraged to work instead of staying home. After the wall fell, these support systems stopped, and his wife had to quit her job and stay home to take care of their kids. He thought it was such a waste of talent because his wife had a PHD and was also a college professor, but there were few other options at the time.
This dovetails nicely into marriage equality, which I don't know if Germany has yet, but I know it will if it temporarily does not.
Living in US, that's a huge contrast for me and I'm not entirely sure what options are out there aside from paying private.
It's incomprehensible that a parent should have to pay thousands per month just to be able to have a child and work at the same time.
Paid maternal leave is not the big issue! After six months of leave, the problem remains that a child needs to be looked after and cared for while the mother returns to work.
Why is it incomprehensible? Watching a kid takes time, time costs money. Someone has to pay for it. Maybe you don't think it's right that the parent should be the one to pay for supervision of their kid, but I'm still lost as to how you arrived at "incomprehensible".
But why?
I'm young and child-less, so I'm not speaking out of experience, but I really see no reasons why we should be encouraging people to be able to work while having kids. Instead, I think we should enable them to not work and have kids. 50 years ago, it was more than possible to sustain a family with only a single working parent. Nowadays, this doesn't seem even remotely possible (hell, many families barely survive with 2 working parents!). Furthermore, it's not like we're facing a shortage of workforce problems - we're facing unemployment problems. If we could enable e.g. 30% of the workforce (hopefully dads as well - I would love to stay at home instead of working) to stay at home with kids instead, not only would that solve the unemployment issues, but it would also be hugely beneficial for the children's development!
Edited to add: I actually come from a country where most adults worked even 50 years ago. However, when I was young, my grandmother was already retired, so she was able to take care of me and my brother until we started school. Still, I wish my parents had been able to spend more time with me when I was little, and I wish I'll have that opportunity with my kids.
Yes, this can be done by taking the kid to a park or other social activities, but two working parents is a perfectly acceptable option too. Daycare isn't unbeneficial to a child.
There is certainly more to a child's behavior than whether their parents were working or staying at home. There might be a strong correlation to households with two working parents and households with other developmentally-stunting factors like parental illiteracy or low education levels, low levels of parental involvement, etc, but I'm sure you would have a tough time proving to any level that, with all other factors remaining the same, two working parents cause more damage to a child than having a stay-at-home parent.
For what it's worth (as long as your anecdotal experience means something to you), my brother-in-law is a college administrator and my sister is a first grade teacher and they have two children who don't seem to have any developmental issues. But my sister has kids in her class with a stay-at-home parent who certainly do.
Most children in Sweden have two working parents and start daycare when they are around a year old. Daycare in Sweden is considered part of the school system and the teachers working there have (approximately) the same education as 'regular' school teachers.
Edit: Also, as a related fact in this discussion, in Sweden children that are behind in learning to speak (language development) can actually receive special permission to spend _more_ time in daycare to help speed up their language learning.
One relevant source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17381797
That's a very simplified observation of a complex reality. Not all daycares are created equal: The National Institute of Child Health Development[1] found that most daycare operations are "fair" or "poor". Only 10% are "high-quality". Obviously the details are what matter in each case: a caring parent at home is far better than a crowded day-care. Conversely, a great daycare can help with a bad home situation.
[1] https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/documents/seccyd...
I worry that the reason East Germany was so "progressive" in this regard is that they were trying to flatten the social structure to simply the individual and the State. With no communities, families or churches, there's no framework on which to challenge the propaganda of the State.
I wouldn't have children with someone unless one of us was willing to take care of the children AT LEAST until school age. I don't think it's evil or sinful or anything to put your kids in daycare, but I am very very glad I grew up with a stay at home mother. Summer daycare(or day camp every single week all summer) just sounds way way too structured(insofar as it has to be, because it has to work around the structured adult schedules of working parents) for children.
Similarly, we often meet people who claim to want to stay at home, but can't afford to. Meanwhile they have nice cars, iPhones, etc. In reality they're working to maintain a standard of living, not because they need to. Choices, choices.
The kindergarten prices are based on a sliding scale (with a maximum fee), so even a single mother with a relatively low paying job can afford it and rich people don't pay absurd amounts either. The result is that almost all parents work, it is frowned upon to be a "stay at home mom," and single mothers do not struggle so terribly, like in the US where there is very little childcare support.
The other result is that Norway is one of the few countries in Europe with a positive growth rate (not even counting immigration). One could argue that the other factors like paid maternity/paternity leave help, but the affordable child care seems much more important to most parents I know here.
As I see it, it was just an easy way to gain votes. It's easy to pass laws that your own government doesn't have to apply, but _someone else_.
However, it's systematically under attack from the government since. It's politically easier to cut kindergarden budgets rather than health services or corporate welfare. Another important need is for better parental leave so that both parents can raise their children and have a full time job.
So yeah, I guess we don't require kindergarten, but I've never encountered anyone in the US who did not attend kindergarten. So it still sounds odd that Germany doesn't have universal kindergarten zumal das Wort ist Deutsch.
[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/statereform/tab5_3.asp
School teachers prefer kids to go to kindergarten for the social and verbal skills they acquire there, but it's not mandatory.
In Germany school is mandatory until you're 16 (if I'm not mistaken), but kindergarten is completely optional. Most people - if they can afford it - would send their kids there, though, because it gives them (the parents) more time off, and it's good for the kids to spend some time with other kids.
There are public and private kindergartens here (same with schools), and for the public ones the price depends on the parents' income. It seems that the costs vary by county and by the number of kids you have (as an example I found this page: http://www.netmoms.de/magazin/kinder/kindergarten/kosten-fue... ). Looks incredibly cheap (I'm honestly surprised), so maybe it's time to plan for some offspring.
I wonder if this is actually true or if its like the typical American sob story of we can't get PHD's to work for minimum wage so we need to outsource.
The difference is in the objective: Our tech lobbyists (luckily quite incompetent) would like to reduce the minimum mandatory wage for skilled immigrant workers which exists to avoid pressure on locals.
As if even lower wages make working in Germany more attractive to skilled labor that can choose between countries - including the US (where at least the gross pay is noticeably higher for skilled jobs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat
Quote: "... children—proles (from Latin proli, "offspring")—were listed instead of their property; hence, the name proletarius, "the one who produces offspring"."
In Rome the proletariat were nothing less than baby factories. Many were completely indoctrinated in this role, regarding it as their duty.
And this class has existed, with different names, to the present.
Or else, we're failing as a species.
An individual, or any group of individuals, should be able to sustain themselves by their own work, as long as there are enough resources in the environment (or ecosystem).
Given that children are not self sustaining, individuals, or rather couples, but even more so, groups of individuals (villages, tribes, countries), should be able to get even more resources than their own need by their own work, so as to feed their children, their women and their olds. Or better, capitalize resources so they can feed themselves when they're old.
A society that would really need fresh blood, that had too many taxes or retirement pensions to pay, and where women cannot bear children because they have to work to sustain themselves, since men aren't retributed enough to feed their families all by themselves, those societies are beyond failure. They have effectively failed. It's done.
But I'm not sure that's the case in Europe or in the USA. I still think that there are enough resources, and even more than ever, given techological and scientific progress; eg. 200 years ago, 98% of the population had to work to feed the remaining 2%; nowadays 1% of the population has to work to feed the remaining 99%; therefore people should be able to work productively 4 days a year (not at those useless jobs), and earn enough resources to feed himself. Working 12 more days a year, he should earn enough resource to feed his wife and two children. Similarly, to shelter and clothe oneself shouldn't require much more work. All the rest goes to pay taxes of all kinds, that we shouldn't have to bear with.
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
In my opinion that is a very inefficient way to talk about demographics.
"But bogged down with failed banks and dwindling budgets, few are in any position to do anything about it."
The reasoning is something like "We can not save ourselves from collapse because we are collapsing." This is not a serious line of reasoning. Whenever people are faced with 2 problems, they need to make a decision about which problem is more urgent. If you honestly feel that problem B is more important than problem A, then you have a good reason to allow A to become worse so as to do something about B.
I could make an analogy to heart disease: aspirin can help lower the risk of a heart attack, but it has a risk itself: internal bleeding. Is aspirin worth the risk? That is something to be decided by a doctor and the patient. One needs to carefully weigh the risks of both decisions. One needs to examine all of the circumstances. However, where the risk of heart attack is serious, then the medical establishment is in agreement that it is better to take aspirin than to run the risk of a heart attack.
Exactly the same reasoning should apply to Germany and the issue of population. Which issue is more pressing, the issue of national debt, or the issue of declining population? One can make an argument either way, however Germany has a level of debt that is better than France, Italy, and many other European nations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_deb...
More so, Germany's public debt is less of an issue than it seems because the public is itself not highly indebted (as opposed to the public in the USA, which carries immense private sector debts).
If you project Germany's debts 50 years in the future, the situation seems bleak, because of rising retirement costs -- but that problem exists exactly because of the low birth rate, so if it was possible to solve the low birth rate, then the debts in 50 years would cease to be a problem.
The reality is, Germany has the financial resources to take some action against the low birth rate, if it wanted to. While there are important issues to be discussed, both pro and con, the financial arguments tend to be fake arguments.
Germany is restrained in its actions because of the continuing cultural force of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche". Aggressive action to raise the birth rate would automatically mean a change in the private sphere of life. More so, it would likely mean a revolution in the social status of women, and there are many in Germany who are wary of changes in gender relations.
Between the years 1874 and 1899 my great grandmother gave birth to 16 children. My family lived on a farm in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At that time, children as young as 5 were used for farmwork. A child as young as 12 could bring in a surplus -- they were, in a sense, "profit centers". Over the last 150 years children have transformed from units of production to units of consumption. Raising a child is now very expensive, and it is against the law for children to do any work that might offset their cost. Because of that, people have cut back on the number of children they have. Whereas my great grandmother had 16 children, most of my friends are content to have 1 or 2 children. Nowadays, having 3 children seems like a large family.
If Germany were serious about lifting the birth rate, it could take aggressive action to mitigate the costs of raising children. I am sure each of us can imagine some program that we think might work: free day care for children of all ages, or a huge bonus at birth such as $100,000, or some method of feeding children such that food is effectively free for children, and parents are saved the cost.
The important thing is to imagine what aggressive action would really look like. It would make some people flinch: their instinct would be that whatever program you suggest, the program is "too e...
I'm also thinking that back in the day, your children were your retirement plan, so better have enough of them to make sure you will be taken care of. But now that the state is our retirement plan, even less reason to have kids.
But actually, I think the general theory is that people have less kids precisely because they are richer as opposed to being poorer, since they don't need kids in order to labor on the farm and don't need kids to pay for the parents retirement.
And working children don't usually bring in lots of money, but back in the day they would care for their elderly parents, which was a good reason to have kids.
I think it's not mainly about money (why do Germany's academics have the fewest children?), but about creating a children-friendly climate and a culture where raising children is considered a good thing and not just a burden that keeps you from consuming. Children and modern consumer culture - bad fit.
This is so interesting; I was thinking about this exact problem (consumerism vs. child rearing) the other day after noticing some anti-child undertones on Reddit. Some themes I saw were workplace discrimination toward women in their 20's ("Why should I have to pay to train a female employee when she's highly likely to get pregnant and leave? I'd rather just hire a male."), shaming parents experiencing financial hardship ("It doesn't matter if you got cancer; you should have accumulated more savings before deciding to have kids!"), and an overall positive view of a child-free lifestyle ("All of our friends with kids are poor now -- I'm happy without kids so I can buy whatever games and gadgets I want.").
I just find it weird that people can forego such a defining element of any life form (reproduction) for the sake of consuming more "things". To take it to the extreme, could consumerism lead to the end of the human race?
Generally, it's a personal decision. However, consumer people might well remove themselves from the gene pool this way. The problem is that their culture is everywhere, and all kids catch that virus in school ("mom/dad, Timmy has a PS4, when do we get one?", "I also need to collect all Pokemon, or I'm not cool.") and want to grow up to be models/popstars/celebs or other meaningless things. Here's hoping my (future) kids will grow out of that phase quickly.
The cost to give birth is multiple times lower than somewhere like the US, the cost to raise again multiple times lower than the US, children are given much greater independence (freedom of movement and choice comes much earlier). Granted somewhere such as the US with an increasing rather than decreasing population, has little incentive to create a child-friendly climate. In Germany however this problem has made it very child friendly.
Second, the comment on "consumption" is a critique that may apply to humanity as a whole but largely German is very low in the list of OECD countries when it comes to economies based on consumption.
Still, I think consumer culture is what's keeping growth low, in most industrialized countries these days. (I may be wrong.) I'm not sure how high or low Germany's consumption level is in absolute numbers, but I think it might look low because the country is producing/exporting so damn much.
We have lots of bad things, specially in the current times, but I would say day care options in Portugal are way better for working parents.
Having the option to drop the children between 8 am and 6pm is already a big help.
I think that's exactly backwards. Afghanistan has the highest birthrate. The less gender equality, the higher the birthrate. You get astronomical birthrates in the Hasidim and Islamic parts of Africa where women hold a subservient place to their husbands and have a constrained gender role. The Nazis had some success raising the birthrate by promoting and elevating stay-at-home motherhood, not by promoting equality.
I think there's a strong case to be made that banning women from colleges and professions would dramatically raise the birthrate. I'm not advocating this, I'm just saying it's what the data suggests. The more professional status is available to women the less they reproduce. This is very clear all over the world across cultures.
> "If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is that in developed countries, the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,”
Basically, if you work not because you need it, but because you have something to contribute, you should be able to do that while raising a family at the same time.
Ie. I think that citizen revenue would help greatly in this aspect.
One fascinating book I read a couple of years ago compared Western European nations with each other vs the "European counterparts that settled America", i.e. the Caucasians in North America. It's interesting that in this particular comparison America (main difference: less social welfare, more individualism, more religion) still has the highest of all ethnic Caucasian birthrates approx. 2.4 [2]
One economist's work that is very interesting to follow on this topic is Gunnar Heinsohn[3] who publishes his findings in intriguing essays usually backed by a lot of statistics and numbers.
But back to the article: the whole topic raises a couple of important fundamental questions: What do you mean by "Germany's" birth rate plummeting? The population overall, of course, has been steady for the most part and was recently admitted publicly by the ministry of federal statistics (a few years back) [4] Germany itself will be a majority Muslim country by 2050. So the population itself will probably not change or not much, it will rather turn into a different cultural entity, one with a small and shrinking "original" ethnic group (similar to the Japanese, for instance) but being replaced by a (mainly) Turkish/Middle Eastern cultural group that will incorporate their own beliefs and traditions into the aging German society and probably eventually dominate it (it is, after all, just a number's game). It's also not really a workforce problem as the article alluded - some here have already pointed out increases in productivity and automation that might offset these issues. The whole notion of population decline is inherently a cultural/ethnic question IMHO - even if a desire to shrink the population to improve the quality of life is your goal and immigrant birth rates fall over time: the fact of the matter remains this that you might be looking at a new "Voelkerwanderung" and all that comes with it.
Personal anecdote: I used to work for an IT company in Germany about 10 years ago - I had roughly 40 co-workers in an age-range of 20 to 40 (I was 25 at that time). I was the only one with 2 kids - nobody else had kids! Zero. My colleges had dogs, cars, expensive vacations and lived for the most part in those parts of town that shielded them nicely from the mass immigration taking place in what they called "(immigrant) ghettos". The life style benefits were non-negotiable for most of them but left not much for kids either (taxation is tough if you have to fund healthcare and mass immigration :-). The girls were brought up to loathe the idea of being a mother (and all the single mothers at the edge of society were an effective warning sign). So they were all headed for their careers, making it near impossible to have their first child before the age of 30-35. Not much time left after that. The climate in the bigger German cities that attract all those young and bright Germans looking for work is quite detrimental to raising children as well: very often our experience was that kids were seen as nuisance (in the US we had quite the opposite experience which might be one reason for the difference in birth rates - the US provides (in many emotional daily interactions) a way more supportive place to raise children than Western Europe).
At this point, sadly, it seems to me that population growth is linked to (a lack of) education and / or religious indoctrination. It does not seem to make much of a difference when some European countries pump millions into their social projects to support families (Sweden, France) or when they do not (Germany, Britain) - the birth rate decline is almost the same for all of these countr...
It seems that in the 1800s, we were more R type than we are today. We had lots of children (though not thousands) and weren't all that concerned with education, welfare, or health as to each one. At least in comparison to today.
Now, we seem to be much more K type. We take care of our children to an incredible degree. Mortality is very anomalous in child birth, it is rare in the 1st world to encounter an illiterate person, all but the true wackos get vaccines, etc. As a consequence, it takes a lot of time and resources to raise a child. Heck, we are even talking about the 20's being years of 'extended adolescence'[1]. I don't know if this is a mistake of correlations and causation, but they sure do seem linked.
http://www.gapminder.org/
Hans Rosling's TED talks are just so good here for extra material too.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
[1] http://www.primermagazine.com/2013/live/wasting-your-20s-wit...