Fertility Rates: Is Western society self sustaining?

[HLMencken]

Your question is terribly flawed as Western society is in fact spreading all over the world, beyond just N America and W Europe. So the fact that NA and WE have neg growth rates does not mean western society has committed suicide when most of the world is becoming more and more like western society. Western society is not synonymous with native-born European/American population size.

[Dr. Strangelove]

This seems like a good thing to me. Much better than mass starvation, plagues etc.

[TomCollins]

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Well, this is a politics forum. If a society is committing suicide, it's probably not a good social model.

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What does "society committing suicide" mean? Too many brown people?

[FlFishOn]

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Western society has chosen slow cultural suicide. The reasons are many and few. The many include birth control, selfishness, high taxes forcing women to work and some others. The few is simply the growth of secularism. Godless people tend to have a lot less kids.

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Yeah. Why can't we go back to the good ole' days where women knew their place and everyone lived by the bible.

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I'm sorry, but is that what you think will pass for debate? Sadly, after a public education in this century it's likely that's above average. Sad indeed.

[FlFishOn]

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Within 1 generation imigrants are fully integrated into the host nations society (speaking in broad terms).


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If I could believe that I'd change my opinion on the future 180 degrees. I don't believe it anymore. Multi-cultural poison is well spread. Assimilation is no longer the prefered choice.

[xorbie]

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Western society has chosen slow cultural suicide. The reasons are many and few. The many include birth control, selfishness, high taxes forcing women to work and some others. The few is simply the growth of secularism. Godless people tend to have a lot less kids.

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Yeah. Why can't we go back to the good ole' days where women knew their place and everyone lived by the bible.

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I'm sorry, but is that what you think will pass for debate? Sadly, after a public education in this century it's likely that's above average. Sad indeed.

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you make point: "rise in secularism and various women's rights issues (working, birth control) have created sitution where society is committing suicide."

i make retort: "things were much worse in societies in which these conditions did not exist."

yes, this is what constitutes debate.

[TomCollins]

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Within 1 generation imigrants are fully integrated into the host nations society (speaking in broad terms).


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If I could believe that I'd change my opinion on the future 180 degrees. I don't believe it anymore. Multi-cultural poison is well spread. Assimilation is no longer the prefered choice.

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Do you have any proof? 3rd Generation Latino Immigrants are 0% Spanish Primary Language. Almost every other statistic measured is in line with immigrants of previous generations. If you want to get rid of those WOPs too, that might be understandable.

[Copernicus]

In the late 60s, early 70s the mantra was "Zero Population Growth", and at the time 2 children per family was seen as the optimal rate to prevent "overpopulation".

The fertiity rate in the USA has remained pretty steady in the 2.05 to 2.1 range over that time. However increases in longevity resulted in that being more than sufficient to replace deaths, and insufficient to keep the population from aging. The result, after average out the baby boom and echoes etc is a working population that will be unable to produce enough to support the needs of the total population.

Immigration is not a solution because the contribution to GNP of the average (legal) immigrant is far below the average for the same age domestic producer. Illegal immigration further exacerbates the problem with an overall zero contribution. (Its actually negative but we'll call it zero to avoid another illegal immigration hijack).

A good portion of the apparent shift of wealth toward the upper end is the natural result of those demographic changes...not some failing of capitalism, tax cuts for the wealthy and other political rallying cries.

Technology has filled the productivity gap so far, but I wonder where the next great leap is going to come from.

[Arnfinn Madsen]

In Norway the government has realized that we will not be able to sustain our society with Norwegian-born people. We will need a constant influx of immigrants just to keep the economy running (currently they speak about a 1% yearly rate). It is really no problem, there are plenty of dysfunctional countries who have the opposite problem, so we can keep on doing it this way for a long time to come.

About cultural suicide, it is a constructed problem. Almost nobody wants the society as it was 30 years ago, so the culture we lost during the last 30 years can not actually have been worth keeping. 30 years ago they looked with that perspective on 60 years ago. In 30 years time our current culture is going to be seen as inferior to the one that has developed then. It is impossible and unwanted to keep things constant.

[Propertarian]

I don't understand why you are so concerned about GNP. GNP growth has been shown to contribute little to human well-being once a society reaches what I would call 'affluence', which most western countries reached by the 1950s-60s
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