Comments by "Jasper Mooren" (@jaspermooren5883) on "Europe’s Fertility Crisis Explained" video.

@aituk it's a weird paradox, in poor countries you indeed see that the poor get more children, but in rich countries it's the opposite. There are 2 reasons for this: anti conception is often not readily available in countries with really high fertility, and we see very unsurprisingly that fertility massively declines with a rise in the availability of anti conception. When getting children becomes a choice rather than a fact of life if you want a sexually active life, you do see that people are just not willing to significantly decrease their standard of living, not for themselves and not for their potential children. People compare their standard of living to their neighbours, not people on a different continent or people who lived 100 years ago.
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Yeah the problem is that the government is kinda 20 years too late. Making kids right now is just gonna make the problem even worse for the next 20-25 years (more kids means you need more teachers, more people in childcare etc). But the main problem is that it is almost impossible to have any influence over this in a rights based democracy. Housing is definitely a factor though that the government can do something about: if you can't buy a house you can't afford kids, or at least at the level that people want to.
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@9delta988 well currently the Netherlands is still growing due to immigration, there's even actually a crazy shortage in housing in the Netherlands (even worse than many other places in the world, there are literally people living with their parents because there are no houses available, whether you can afford them or not). So I'd welcome a downfall in house prices.
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Yeah, it's a temporary solution but at least delays the problem by several decades. Automation is the other solution, but that needs to be associated with political and economical reform.
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@llanieliowe794 gay rights, while ethically super important, have basically no bearing on fertility rates. It's only a few percent of the population, and it's not by making gay sex illegal all LGBT+ people are suddenly getting 10 children. As far as I'm aware even in countries like the UAE you are not forced to have a relationship with someone from the opposite sex, you're 'just' not allowed to have one with someone of the same sex. And even the UAE is indeed not taking the absolutely despotic measures you'd need to take to actually be able to influence fertility to a significant degree. I'm talking about measures like forced fertilisation, which as far as I'm aware not a single country does. These kind of measures of course have some very extreme ethical concerns attached and would almost certainly, and rightfully so, cause massive revolts.
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@NLTops if you look before WW2 it's not actually a big boom, it's just a massive downturn in 1940 (for obvious reasons) with a huge spike in 1945-1950. But if you average out the entire 40s is actually not that high (compared to today, yes, but it's not really a big boom in that sense). It's just a generation that got kids a couple years later, because if avoidable at all, you don't want to go into labour while worrying your house is getting bombed. You see this trend basically every single war that has lasted years ever. It's just that WW2 is the only war within Dutch borders that some people still lived through. After WW1 there was a similar baby boom, albeit delayed a year due to the spanish flu (and was significantly less noticeable in the Netherlands compared to surrounding countries, since the Netherlands was neutral in WW1). So while the baby boom is a big deal in the cultural zeitgeist (which might influence politics to be fair) it's not significant as a voting block, since it's just a couple of years and unless you are talking about policies for things like education, policies tend to affect much larger age brackets than that (even explicitly age based policies like pensions still apply to 20-30 years of people). It's really disingenuous to imply that somehow boomers are to blame.
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@PhthaloJohnson I don't know where you are from, but in most European countries they are absolutely short on staff. In the Netherlands for example there have been more job opportunities than people without jobs for close to a decade now (unemployment is at like 3% and that's mostly people that are in between jobs or people that are really hard to employ). The job market I grew up with is not why should we hire you? It's why should I work here?
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@LudvigIndestrucable particularly expats are indeed a really big problem in the countries where they originate from, it's called brain drain. The countries where they are going to in principle actually benefits the country, it's people you didn't have to invest in at all (they already had things like basic education, often even university degrees in the case of expats), but are contributing to society. The problem is integration and availability of basic infrastructure (like housing) for the influx of people, but that is a very solvable problem.
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@danielwebb8402 problem is cost of living went up so much that most people (or at least a lot of not most) need 2 jobs to be able to live together. A lot of people wish they were able to afford to not have a job. And yes, people were much poorer in the past, but it has almost become impossible to live that way today. Without a smart phone I literally cannot do my job for example. Most people live in a much bigger house than historically, but just try to find a small one, it's nearly impossible and for those that do exist have so much exploded in price that they are barely cheaper anyway. For some people, yes it is a conscious choice to not have children while they could, which is their fundamental human right btw to make that decision. For a lot of people it is also the fact that they couldn't live a modern life (most of those people, at least in Europe, don't even own a car at all, let alone 2) if they got children, and that is a very different equation than in times of the atomic family where a single person working was the norm and more then enough to afford basic necessities like food and a place to live. I'm not saying those times were better, I think you would have a hard time making a case to say they did, but it was significantly easier to run a household on 1 paycheck than it is today, at least for those who make less than modal income, which, by definition, is 50% of the population. You can't just take 1 parameter and say that is the problem, when you are talking about something so complex as human history and culture. What I'm presenting here is also just 1 of the many reasons it's not that simple.
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@NLTops I'm 28 years old btw, not a boomer by any stretch of the imagination. You did just blame people for getting too much children, which I frankly find ridiculous. And I say that a 28 year old with no kids or the prospect towards them in the next several years at least, if ever. And I just said that boomers is not the problem, because like I said the baby boom was relatively short period that more represents a bust following a boom than any actual real increase in fertility. What is mostly to 'blame' is the massively increased quality in healthcare over the last 70 years. Just look at cancer alone. If you got that 70 years ago it was more or less guaranteed that you'd day in less than a year. Nowadays we see many patients that can live years, if not fully get cured from cancer. Of course people still die from it, but the advancements are massive. Additionally of course as I previously mentioned, the rise of anti conception in the 60s massively changed fertility rates. There is nothing even close to being as good of a predictor for fertility than the availability of anti conception is. So a steady decline in fertility over the last 60 years in combination with increased health quality is much more to blame than the parents of baby boomers getting too much children.
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