So, 18 months maternity/paternity leave, 180€ per month per child you have, plus tax breaks, plus better credit rating, plus 12 more sick days a year, plus subsidized kindergarten and daycare (with guaranteed daycare place from age 3 on), cheap whole-day school for children, and after-school care for them, is not enough?
What else are we supposed to do? Seriously? We have all this, and still birth rates below 1.2 children in Germany. Seriously.
Todays generation has less job security than the generation before.
Todays generation does not have a secured pension (like the generation before had).
It is expected of todays generation to be a life-long learner (if you are not, your economic value drops immediately and if your job gets terminated you fall back to the same support someone receives, who has never worked in their life before).
Affordable housing has decreased.
It is expected of both parents to work (tell me again why I should have children, if I rarely see them?).
Pressure on children has increased as there is less time at school and less time at Uni to learn the same things (do I really want to do this to my possible future children?).
Especially for women having a child still is very bad for your career. Also if you have a fixed-term contract (which there is an increasing number of, your maternity employment protection is severely limited).
Of course this is just an anecdote, but at least in my circle of friends, those with secured government jobs are the ones having the most children. I would love to see some large-scale data on this subject.
You're competing with jobs here, and you ask if 180€ a month is sufficient? And then you're surprised that women prefer to stay in the workforce?
So not only does 180€/month not substitute for a second salary, it doesn't substitute for the permanent hit to the second wage-earner's career caused by raising children.
The economic message is clear: raising children is intended to be a low-paid, part-time job done on top of a full-time career for economically non-valuable warm-fuzzies.
By the way, in Germany usually you are guaranteed to get back into your old job after the 18 months of maternity leave.
Artificial wombs. Group day-care. Have women donate eggs, men donate sperm and combine them randomly. Make it the duty of every person to be a parent to 2 to 3 children with fines for not doing their part until they hit 30/40 years of age. The babies will be born never knowing their biological parents. Then they're sent to child-raising facilities, either government or private, which are subject to strict regulation against mistreatment and indoctrination. Only the mega-rich, or very rural will afford/choose to have babies the usual way.
This seems to be the only choice in a society where everyone has to work 40 hours per week to secure a living for him/herself. If you had guaranteed basic income that can cover the cost of children, people could leave their position for one to two years, maybe do contracting work from home on the side. You will need very strict laws against discriminating against those who chose to have children. Or, you know, make making children a specialised industry like everything else.
It does however seem that the flow of the economy, the fact that no one is willing to slow down for anything, and everything needed to be finished yesterday, certainly hinders people from things such as having children. Companies simply see a mother on maternity leave as an employee that isn't producing, as cold as that sounds. It's sad how emotionless companies can be when they're focused solely on the dollar signs...
Fortunately, I'm pretty sure we'll run out of resources long before our greed for growth pushes us that far.
Edit: of course companies are emotionless. They aren't people. You should view any company of more than about 200 people as a super-organism. Every actor in the company acts in their own best interest, while kept in check by the people on top. The emergent behaviour is one of calculated exploitation.
and this phenomenon is not limited to white people, i.e. japan, korea, singapore, taiwan.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
My fiancee's pregnant coworker was told (we live in the USA, unfortunately) that she would have six weeks of unpaid leave after giving birth, followed by two weeks of short-term disability insurance, and then she could return to work or lose her job. This is for a salaried, postdoctoral scientist at a biotechnology company. In a related matter, the same HR employee who explained that policy says that he opposes the very idea of paternity leave -- and he's a male homosexual.
Likewise, the largest wage gap between men and women isn't actually a gap between men and women, it's a gap between men and mothers.
It takes two incomes to support a household these days, and yet society punishes women for childbearing as if it only took one. What did they expect would happen under these conditions, that people would stop responding to economic incentives "because babies"?
society doesn't 'punish' you for having children, having children is simply an expense somebody has to pay for, and nobody wants to do it.
you clearly don't want to pay the opportunity cost, as evidenced by your post, so what makes you think the employer wants to do it either? or the taxpayer?
Myself and my fiancee don't have children yet. However, you may kinda want us in society's gene pool. After all, I've got a damned resilient immune system, she's wonderfully empathetic, and we're both ferociously clever and hardworking individuals who valued our educations and actually want to contribute to society. Hell, we're even proud of paying our taxes, we both volunteer for things in our spare time, and we consider time spent on civic or community affairs to be well-spent.
I'd be fine paying the "opportunity cost" myself, but you see, I'm not the one with the uterus. Really, if we could get by and support a kid on one income per couple, we could easily just make some sacrifices of Nice Things, but we can't. Yes, we actually are stuck between living as fiscally responsible adults in the Dual Income No Kids class, and the precarity of the so-called "middle class" nowadays, in which one layoff or unexpected medical emergency can throw the whole family into poverty.
It's become: housing, children (with the entailed college funds, housing cost of good public schools, etc.), responsible preparation for a rainy day -- pick any two.
Elizabeth Warren was lecturing people about this a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GHg3GAeQ1Y
It reminds me of this fable:
I agree the article spends a lot of time implying what we shouldn't do and not much time at all saying what might make for effective policies, but it's hardly advocating Islamising Europe either.
I took two things away from the article. One is that the kind of pretty much deliberate social and economic marginalization of Muslim minorities in France is a terrible mistake. You can have a pluralistic egalitarian society without insisting that everyone has to dress, talk and behave exactly like white western Europeans all the time. Having an Imperial legacy and historic connections with extensive regions of the wider world isn't compatible with being culturally allergic to anyone who looks or acts foreign. We in Europe need to build strong cultural bridges connecting us to the Muslim minorities in our midst that are now also Europeans and deserve respect and support. I may take flak for this, because it turns my stomach to imply that France has any responsibility for the recent attacks, but frankly the French state is not doing it's job.
The second lesson is regarding our foreign policy in the Middle East. Keeping out of Syria and letting whatever happens just happen hasn't worked. The result has been a breeding ground for radicalization and chaos that has exacerbated the situation in Iraq, and lead to the biggest Refugee crisis Europe has seen since WW2. The Iraq war was awful and the political pressure to withdraw and 'bring the troops home' intense, but doing so was a horrible mistake. Once you're in, you're in for better or worse. We can't wash our hands of these conflicts and expect that the resulting mess will stay put and not affect us.
As a corollary, I think that our consistent policy that none of the borders in the Middle east are up for negotiation is a mistake. If the Sunni, Shia and Kurd regions of Iraq want to be separate states, they should have the freedom to do so. Trying to insist that the Sunni minority had to stay welded to a larger hostile Shia population was just asking for unending trouble. Partition isn't always the right answer, but in some situations it needs to be an option.
What state would be good example? What is good measure for succes here?
That would require blaspheming against the Austerity Gods.
Indeed. And there seems, to me, to be something nihilistic in the idea that Europeans should simply let immigrants replace them. Maybe instead, European nations should look into instituting domestic policies that encourage the population to maintain a healthy replacement rate.
The article appears to be implying that Western nations should not make war against Daesh because "that's what they want." Well, the status quo of surveillance, arrests, and half-hearted airstrikes isn't stopping them. There seems something profoundly suciidally nihilistic in the idea that Europe should simply do nothing different and simply be more and more welcoming as attacks happen in an attempt to appease extremists until at last Europe is no longer populated by Europeans.
On the timescale of centuries and millenia, it's amazing how little has changed in the past thousand years. This could be just another couple chapters in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Which, for those who don't know, covers mostly in later chapters the European nations and the various Muslim empires.)