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by spacebanana7 770 days ago
European countries must choose between Americanisation (becoming a nation of immigrations) or Japanification (becoming an elderly nation with plateauing economics) because of the low birth rates & high life expectancy.

I see the UK/France going for the former option and Poland/Hungary going for the latter. Will be interesting to see how Germany and Sweden decide.
2 comments
mytailorisrich 770 days ago
This is a false choice.

Population cannot grow forever, birth rates are dropping globally, and in fact birds rates are already below replacement rate in most developed countries.

So stagnant or decreasing population will happen, and I think actually should happen considering the global environmental crisis.

This does not imply plateauing economics. We need to start focusing on figures per capita, which means using education and technology to maximise productivity instead of relying on cheap human labour and overall GDP figures. What's important is for people to be better off individually.

Mass immigration is destroying homogeneous nation states in Europe, hence the backlash and hence why Eastern Asian countries do not want to follow down the same path.

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spacebanana7 770 days ago
> Population cannot grow forever,

I think the best case long term scenario is population stability.

> We need to start focusing on figures per capita

Even per capita figures are distorted by the fact that naturally declining populations imply ageing populations. So even in a technologically improving society where output per worker was increasing, per capita figures could decrease.

To be clear I don't think Japanification is inherently bad - individual quality of life can still improve despite unflattering macroeconomic numbers. But it still involves tradeoffs.

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mcntsh 770 days ago
They could also do better to incentivize their own people to have families. It doesn't have to be one of two sides of the neoliberal dystopian coin.
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spacebanana7 770 days ago
There's no recipe policymakers can follow to raise birthrates over extended periods of time. Sweden, South Korea and Poland have all tried generous financial supports that failed; the smaller Soviet republics tried authoritarian methods that failed.

Even nineteenth century France & Imperial Rome under Augustus don't appear to have been successful in raising birthrates, although I can't pretend to have great data for those examples.

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diordiderot 770 days ago
> generous financial supports

Hard disagree. The housing / labor markets systems are fundamentally broken and tossing what is effectively scraps at people won't cause them to have a second child in their one bedroom or move 1.5 hours away from their high status job

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spacebanana7 770 days ago
Intuitively that makes sense, but housing and labour markets don't seem to correlate much with fertility rates.

In a European context, France has much higher fertility than any of the Nordic countries despite higher unemployment and effectively the same housing affordability stats. More internationally the figures in Israel (pre Oct 2023) and Japan also go against the grain.

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mcntsh 770 days ago
Which generous financial supports are you talking about?
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spacebanana7 770 days ago
Extended maternity/paternity leave (especially in Sweden), child benefits (especially Poland), tax exemptions (e.g Hungarian income tax), subsidised or free childcare and more.
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mcntsh 770 days ago
Parental leave in Sweden is 80% of your salary and maxes out at 2500 a month for both partners... In Germany it maxes out at 1800. These aren't incentives since you'd be LOSING money by taking parental leave...

> child benefits

120-180 EUR a month per child doesn't even cover half the costs of a child.

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spacebanana7 770 days ago
The base case is to have no parental leave, not 100% of your current salary.

Historically that was the default when people had very positive fertility. In Israel & the US where fertility is higher there's even less generous setups than Sweden & Germany.

I suspect if you give people enough money they'll probably start having kids, but it's a very high number. Hungary is currently spending 5% of its GDP on fertility policies with little success [1]. Last year Poland's increase in its child benefit program alone cost 0.7-0.8% of GDP [2].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/poland-approves-child-b...

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