WARNING: RAMBLING, PHILOSOPHY, AND OPINIONMONGERING AHEAD
I have to say that I find it more than a little funny that we're basing big predictions about long-term economic growth on 3-month periods not living up to expectations.
Short-term thinking is the best sort of thinking, as everyone knows
Exactly, yuro response to demographics is the best short term thinking
Keep making bombs cos it's the kids of the future who'll get fucked the most lol
To be honest, I don't see immigration as a solution to demographic transition, but I also don't see it as a real problem unless it actually causes overload. Like, I guess it depends on what you see the issue as being with fewer young folks, whether you see it as being bad in and of itself because the country/ethno-nation-state/culture-language group is decling, or whether you see it as bad primarily because our economic and government support structures are designed around continuous growth and can't support elderly populations without young taxpayers (I'm absolutely certain there's enough money to go around and a lot of it happens to be located in the upper echelons of society, mind you).
It definitely seems to me like positing immigration as a solution to declining fertility rates is missing the point/not really viable long-term for three reasons, essentially.
A. Demographic transition comes for all, and as underdeveloped countries develop, their fertility rates will fall and have been falling, so all you're doing is redistributing population, essentially, without necessarily fixing the core problem (if one views it as such, and not everyone does; anti-natalism is an...odd...philosophy, but it exists, and then overpopulation is sortof a concern)
B. If the best and brightest, or simply most able or what-have you, are emigrating from their native countries to rich countries in search of opportunity, that's basically evaporative cooling of those populations, given how much of ability is genetic, and the fact that the environment is almost by definition not great in underdeveloped nations. Which means they'll remain less developed longer because the people who would be pushing them to modernity are all leaving.
On a similar note, though one I'm even less certain of (as it could just be luck, not ability, deciding which people can emigrate, for that first bit), from what I am given to understand, 'pressure valves' in organic/biologically based phenomena, tend to be overall not great. So basically from what I remember in a lot of countries the sheer amount of kids people end up having is difficult to support, which makes it difficult to get out of poverty, which makes it difficult not to have kids, and so on in a self-sustaining bad times. Now, I'm not certain whether having an outlet for that extra population is a good thing or not, since you're usually getting adults, not kids, so it's not actually helping anyone with that issue, at least, though more resources overall may be available as a result for those remaining, but it also might just prolong the issue by keeping it stable/from being forced to develop. This is basically wild speculation, though.
C. This feels like the hardest to explain bit...so, a country isn't quite just the people who technically are citizens of it. It is at least that, certainly, but it seems to me sometimes like people have this idea that potential citizens and existing citizens are the same thing, if that makes sense. But immigration solves the technicalities of the problem, the symptoms, without addressing the core or the root of it. The issue isn't 'we have fewer people than we want, so add more people', after all. Again, there's nothing particularly wrong with immigration, it's just...the reason we consider it a problem is that it affects the people who live in the country. Not because our statistic isn't as high as it could be. Bringing in people who didn't used to live in the country as a solution seems like one of those solutions like...I'm trying to find a good analogy. It's optimizing for the wrong variable. It's missing the reason we dislike it. The best thing I can maybe think of is if you're trying to help someone feel better when they're ill or depressed or something, and they see that you're worried about them so they just stop talking about it around you. They've solved the surface issue of you being worried about them, but you didn't want them to stop telling you, you wanted them to recover/be well.
I mean, obvious solution is to make it less of a burden to have children, which is an economic issue concerning graduate and just graduated-age adults. Also to not put societal expectations on people in either direction; don't have a pressure to ignore family for career (men are affected more than women by taking paternity leave and time off for children(my guess why is that women are the ones expected to do it, so if a man does it it's weirder to people), don't keep people out of the workplace if they don't want to be. More options for people; we can learn from the past without simply repeating it. Two-income households aren't much richer than single-income households were, if at all, thanks to the various costs for having children without someone continuously taking care of them and housework and another car and competition for housing in good neighborhoods, but they're much more fiscally unstable because they don't have the same flexibility that being able to put another person to work without needing to gives you, so it's harder to react to financial difficulties effectively without people burning out or getting so stressed that it cascades. Doesn't mean we should kick people out of workforce, just means we should take note of the fact that economic growth is still fairly good (especially if you take into account aging populations) while technological redundancy affects more and more people, and use it advantageously rather than screaming and crying about it.
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Topic: The friendly and polite Europe related terrible jokes thread (Read 1007957 times)