Germany's declining population and the 600-pound gorilla

Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2013-08-15 01:29

Article here. The NYT once again runs an article on the declining population of someplace and talks almost exclusively in terms of decisions about reproduction that women are making and why. They don't even mention the other half of the human race necessary to procreate and what decisions they may be making about having babies-- and why. As long as the 600-pound gorilla gets ignored, it'll just stay there, keeping the babies away. Excerpt:

'There is perhaps nowhere better than the German countryside to see the dawning impact of Europe’s plunge in fertility rates over the decades, a problem that has frightening implications for the economy and the psyche of the Continent. In some areas, there are now abundant overgrown yards, boarded-up windows and concerns about sewage systems too empty to work properly. The work force is rapidly graying, and assembly lines are being redesigned to minimize bending and lifting.
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Germany, however, an island of prosperity, is spending heavily to find ways out of the doom-and-gloom predictions, and it would seem ideally placed to show the Continent the way. So far, though, even while spending $265 billion a year on family subsidies, Germany has proved only how hard it can be. That is in part because the solution lies in remaking values, customs and attitudes in a country that has a troubled history with accepting immigrants and where working women with children are still tagged with the label “raven mothers,” implying neglectfulness.

If Germany is to avoid a major labor shortage, experts say, it will have to find ways to keep older workers in their jobs, after decades of pushing them toward early retirement, and it will have to attract immigrants and make them feel welcome enough to make a life here. It will also need to get more women into the work force while at the same time encouraging them to have more children, a difficult change for a country that has long glorified stay-at-home mothers.
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Raising fertility levels in Germany has not proved easy. Critics say the country has accomplished very little in throwing money at families in a system of benefits and tax breaks that includes allowances for children and stay-at-home mothers, and a tax break for married couples.
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Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs. They say recent data show that growth in fertility is more likely to come from them.

“If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,” said Reiner Klingholz of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development.'

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Men. Guess what-- along with women, men actually think about whether they want to be dads. Or, more accurately, actually take the risk of becoming a dad, put up with the annoyances of same, and pretty much foot most of the bill, if not all of it. And guess what, Germany (and the Times), they're not NEARLY as into doing it as they used to be. And that's because the German legal system combined with German feminist influence on German women has made the whole thing very unattractive.

But go ahead: try new subsidy programs, open "free" day-care centers so German parents can let teenage girls raise their kids all day, heck, pay the German mothers to have kids-- it'll have as much effect. That's because most women who do want kids really don't want to be mothers without a mate, either because they want the emotional support or, more typically, the practical, financial, and social support having a mate gives them. So guess what: even if a German woman wants a kid, she's not nearly as likely to have one without a mate. And if she does have a child anyway without a mate, is she likely to have more than one? No. That's because single motherhood ain't easy. One's hard enough, why would you add another screaming kid to it?

So Germany (and America, and Spain, and France, and Russia, etc.) can do what it wants. As long as the 600-lb. gorilla of men-not-being-into-becoming-dads stays as well-fed as it is, that repro. rate's gonna stay good and under 2.1 for the foreseeable future. And so like it or not, Europe and America both had better learn to become a lot more accepting of new arrivals from outside their borders. Otherwise, who's gonna be around in 20 years to do the damn work? Or is the idea of implementing true "family court" reform and coming up with a new version of legal marriage that men can more comfortably live with just too radical a concept for the governments of so many western countries to handle?

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Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2013-08-15 02:38

Almost as if CNN and MANN coordinated ourselves. :) Well, maybe not quite, but...

http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/14/pf/cost-children/index.html

'From day care to the monthly grocery bill, the cost of raising a child is climbing at a rate that many families can't keep up with.
It will cost an estimated $241,080 for a middle-income couple to raise a child born last year for 18 years, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report released Wednesday. That's up almost 3% from 2011 and doesn't even include the cost of college.
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Amanda Holdsworth, who lives outside of Detroit with her husband and 22-month-old daughter, pay more than $1,000 a month for their daughter's day care center -- or nearly 15% of their monthly income. The costs are so high that they think twice about having a second child.
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"I have to reassure everybody there are other people who successfully have children," he said. "I personally have three. People figure out ways to make this work."'

Yeah, you can make it work. But you need to have a good job (or two), and you have WANT them to justify the cost to yourself. And oh yeah, if you're male? You have to be quite ready to throw dice.

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Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2013-08-15 04:01