Posted on 05/21/2017 9:37:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
As a newly married man in Singapore many years ago, my hairdresser once asked me when my wife and I were going to have our first child. I replied, like many people do even today, that it was too expensive to have a child and to bring one up. He said that people who were earning a fraction of what we were and living in a one-room flat were still able to have two children and bring them up, and so could we.
It is a truism that we put up with hardships to do things we want to do while making a lot of excuses to justify what we don’t want to do.
Travelling between northeast Asian countries such as Japan and Hong Kong and Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and the Philippines, one is struck by children running all over the place in public places in the generally poorer Southeast Asian nations and the grim old people walking stiffly in north Asian societies. Affluent Singapore, though in Southeast Asia, is an exception, but even within Singapore it is the less affluent Singaporeans who seem to be having more children.
Personal experience and statistics show that merely giving a bigger flat to an average Hong Kong family won’t solve the problem of demographic extinction that is looming over the city, which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, at 1.2.
Societies are like individuals, too; some are energetic and outward-looking during periods of their life, while at other times, “anomie” takes over. That’s when individuals and societies go through life depressed and fearful while trying to hide it with empty indulgences, whether it is drinking or shopping, which one American philosopher called “joyless hedonism”.
(Excerpt) Read more at scmp.com ...
Interesting observation from the article:
Among the current European leaders without children are Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Theresa May, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of European Commission.
Children are even seen as a nuisance by some in Northern Europe. Many restaurants in Germany will not allow children in but are happy to accommodate pet owners and their dogs! However, it is something of a mystery why Italy, where the “Italian Mother” is celebrated and whose main religion is Catholicism, also has a low birth rate.
Re; your very last sentence, wondering why Italy has such a low birth rate; What is the rate of unemployment in most Italian cities? Are many Italian adults worried about losing their jobs to illegal aliens or robotic systems of downsized industries? This may have something to do with fewer births in this country.
the leviathan state is to great extent responsible for children being seen as a burden rather than a asset
Having lived around in Europe, I will offer this analysis.
In the early part of the 1900s...birth-control was introduced to women. Various groups were against the distribution of the information. A lot of women were tired of the six to ten children routine.
What you see after 1945 is a lessened society (two world wars has killed off a fair number of the general population), and given opportunities for women in the work place. Respect for birth control now became a topic among women.
Professional jobs (lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc) started to become a big reality in the 1960s and 1970s. Women married later on, and started to look more at one or two kid families.
Taxation increased along the way, and today....you will notice a hefty cost (19-percent sales tax is routine in most European countries). Add in the cost of heating choices (oil or gas). Go out and talk rental prices on a 3-bedroom apartment in cities like Hamburg or Koln....most people will be challenged to pay the hefty rental cost.
You can go back to the 1970s and see where governments started to get worried about this, and try to offer ‘tax credits’ as some incentive to have more kids. Well, that was a total failure. Today, the same idiots are trying to offer totally-free child-care and kindergarten seats, if you vote the ‘right’ party into office (this means a hefty amount of taxation to be created to pay for the child-care seats).
For those who think that Muslims come into Europe and practice the five to ten kid routine...that’s a joke. When all you have is a marginal skill to earn your wage, you can’t afford the three or four bedroom apartments in major urban areas. These families all end up in the clinic and get birth control advice, and end up practicing it.
Society, in the end, dumped hefty taxes and high cost into the formula, and people reacted....producing less kids. I did a spreadsheet a couple of months ago with the current German birth-rate, with no anticipated change, and no big improvement on the trend with immigration. In about 1,200 years, the 82-million population of Germany will eventually reach the last 10,000 Germans. Demographic suicide is already on the doorstep.
How about this?
I am a late Boomer.
I looked into the mirror starting in my 20s and asked myself “want another you?”
My mirror said “nope.”
My first marriage (thank God) never challenged that answer.
My second marriage (currently 25 years and going strong) we were both too old and we both had no desire. So I took the proper steps.
It doesn’t take a room of psychologists, anthropologists and God help us all, finger-wagging busybodies to determine my reasoning.
Just didn’t wanna. Neither did my wife.
The fact that most birth defects are a result of older people well after proper child-bearing years of the 20s to early 30s (ready for incoming anecdotes to presented as proof) is a discussion for another day.
Child free is just because we don’t find child bearing something we want to do. If it is the end of human civilization so be it.
To the fecund the spoils be.
Not really; they don’t admit millions of Mexicans and Muslims. They will just have fewer people, not die as a people.
For a day in Feb, German news got all hyped up because there was a .01-percent bump up on the birth-rate noted over the past year....which they tied to the incoming immigrant crowd.
The thing is...if you look across the last three years...for immigrants, migrants and asylum-seekers...I think the ratio is like 7 men to each women, that comes in. It’s better statistics for the under-18 crowd...but there’s just nothing that’s going to change the birth-rate.
I read a piece last month which noted that you’d need a 2.1 birth-rate to just maintain things at a balanced rate. Anything below 2.1 means your population is decreasing. Portugal with it’s 10.3-million population is probably looking at 5-million within the next fifty years. With my spreadsheet, you can figure they will be down to the last 10,000 residents in about 600 years.
I think modern cities cause people to cross over that point where their behavior changes and will eventually cause a human population collapse. This past generation has raised the living standards of billions of people, especially in Asia. But it has caused a massive demographic migration into cities. Asians now live in mega cities, in 30 story apartment buildings. Africa is now doing the same thing.
An aging population from the baby boomers has its challenges.
partial update
Mark Steyn ( https://www.steynonline.com/7788/leading-by-example )
Yet the fact is that, with the arrival of President Macron in the charmed circle, the leaders of Europe's biggest economies and of all the European members of the G7 are childless: Germany's Angela Merkel, Britain's Theresa May, Italy's Paolo Gentiloni, and now France's Macron.
This would have been not just statistically improbable but all but impossible for most of human history. Whatever Euro-politics is about, it's not, as Bill Clinton was wont to say, the future of all our children. Indeed, of the six founding members of the European Union - France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg - five are led by childless prime ministers: joining Merkel, Gentiloni and Macron at the no-need-for-daycare Euro-summit are the Dutch PM Mark Rutte and the Luxemburger Xavier Bettel. Mark Rutte is single and childless. Xavier Bettel of Lux is married, but gay and, hélas, for the moment without progeny.
Indeed, it would have been a clean sweep of all six of the EU's founding members - a non-procreative sextet - had not Charles Michel succeeded another gay PM, Belgium's Elio di Rupo. While M di Rupo also remains unblessed by any visit from the Euro-Stork, M Michel has managed to sire a brace of moppets. So that's two kids between six prime ministers.
We have too many people so we have less kids...
Oh no, we need workers to pay for govt pyramid schemes...
Lets import people from third world...
But now they have kids like rabbits in the welfare state...
They don’t want to join our cultured ways...
They want to behave like savages. ..
OH WELL.....
Ultimately it is the woman making these choices and in advanced societies, women have other options. In hard economic times, couples save for their own security first before considering having children. In the fifties and sixties in the U.S., taxes were relatively low and jobs were plentiful, so women could afford to stay home with the kids. Another consideration, a culture needs men who will make a commitment to the family, or the woman will not make a commitment to bring his children into the world.
>I believe John B. Calhoun had it right, but was ahead of his time. His experiments on rodent populations showed that given a population where all the rodent’s needs were met, but limited in space, the population would never stabilize. It would eventually completely collapse.
>I think modern cities cause people to cross over that point where their behavior changes and will eventually cause a human population collapse. This past generation has raised the living standards of billions of people, especially in Asia. But it has caused a massive demographic migration into cities. Asians now live in mega cities, in 30 story apartment buildings. Africa is now doing the same thing.
Space has nothing to do with it. Mexicans have no problems having 10 kids in a very small area.
The primary factor in the number of kids is how liberated a given group’s women are. Not very liberated = lots of kids. Highly liberated = very few kids. This is why immigrant populations who don’t let their daughters join the host culture like Muslims in England have very high birthrates compared to the locals.
Child free is just because we don’t find child bearing something we want to do. If it is the end of human civilization so be it.
Not everyone should have children, or feel compelled to adhere to social norms about children and families. WE all have choices about how to live our lives, and if you and your wife are happy with your choices, I certainly wouldn’t say anything about that.
There are social norms in many area of life. I’m sure most of us can think of a few such norms which we don’t follow.
Child free is just because we don’t find child bearing something we want to do. If it is the end of human civilization so be it.
Not everyone should have children, or feel compelled to adhere to social norms about children and families. WE all have choices about how to live our lives, and if you and your wife are happy with your choices, I certainly wouldn’t say anything about that.
There are social norms in many area of life. I’m sure most of us can think of a few such norms which we don’t follow.
Gi's came home...the GI bill was going strong...men could get jobs in plants..and with the plants rolling, people making money, people wanted to have children...it was a sign of prosperity...
and the Church....Catholic churches were full and having big families was the ideal....
my mother tells the story that the local priest would notice if you had an empty year or two...as in , what happened here?...no baby?...
it was a happy time...lots of optimism...
I don't think there is optimism today with the young people...
That’s what socialism does. Now it’s also not an option to have both parents working. Due to high taxes you need two salaries to bring home 1.
The government creates the crisis then says they need to import cheap labor to fix it.
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