Comments by "" (@FOLIPE) on "Will the Fertility Rates in Europe Rise Again?" video.

  1. I think fertility rate will never get to 3+ again, consistently, except with a complete social change which is not necessarily desirable. However, fertility in mid 2s it's definitely possible, as fertility was held at reasonable levels in some urban and high income áreas for decades and still is at reasonable levels in some areas of developed countries. I think there is a necessity of a cultural change, but mostly economic reforms are what drive fertility. Firstly, there needs to be a change of the structure of economic incentives that stimulate having a child instead of childlessness (from taxes to employment, pension to inheritance law). I think land and urban reform would be key as well, built around the idea of a continuous process that grants every generation access to land and housing. We know, for instance, that fertility in the US grew right before the subprime crisis (probably because of high employment, optimism, and of course easy access to buying a house). With these twin reforms to guarantee access to space to build a family, and in the case of land an economic incentive for having children, fertility is sure to rise (rural areas already do have higher fertility than urban areas as is). That plus other the reforms (ex. special pension laws or taxes on childlessness) might nudge fertility above the famed 2.1. The impact of gender relations on fertility in an urban society is more uncertain, as if you look at relatively conservative societies like the east asian ones, fertility is at rock bottom. For Latin America, I think the fix is relatively easy: land reform. If people are given an opportunity to back to the countryside, they will (it's not like life in the urban areas is so good for most people). If that happens, fertility would almost surely rise, the question is how much and how many people would be resettled. Certainly the conditions in the countryside would have to be improved too, to maximize the impact. Ideally the policy would come along an urban reform too, so people in the cities can afford housing and those become less of a population sink than now.
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  2. I doubt this helps much. The cost of a child is much more than 2000 euros
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  3. Those were times in which everyone had children, so it was normal. There was a network of incentives to have them including family structures, the way housing and labour worked. Fertility collapsed in Poland after the end of the socialist regime, so it wasn't so hard to have children there, then.
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  4. Where are immigrants from in Danmark ?
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  5. Unless you are in your 80s, the people who feared the opposite scenario when you were a kid were poorly informed.
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  6.  @klif4755  I don't know about the specifics of Sweden. One would have to look if those benefits are enough to change the incentives for most families of if they are just a strap on an open wound. Generally (and definitely in Latin America) rural families have higher fertility rates than urban families, and suburban families also tend to have higher birth rates than families in core Metropolitan areas. The scope of the differences changes between countries, though (and in some european countries rural fertility is so depressed it's LOWER than urban one). Access to cheap housing and good employment opportunities also raised fertility at least in the US in the pre-2008 context. Argentina also had 2.3+ fertility rate for decades until their recent crisis since 2012. So I do think there's something to look at there - but its not about just giving a small bribe for people to have kids, it's about creating an environment that fosters and where it makes sense to have kids. It's like building a transit-oriented city and not a car-oriented city, a transit-oriented city isn't just a car-oriented city plus a 2000 euros tax break to use your bike
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  7. The idea that hyperconservativism would do anything is so laughable, people who say it don't 1. Look at Saudi Arabia, and 2. Realize that without the modern stuff you'd live a much worse life. People won't chose that en masse. But as for your proposal, why would fertility rise with polygamy? It would on avarage mean less parents per children, só higher relative cost of raising them
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  8. I think only economic structural shifts aligned with some cultural change could change fertility (which btw isn't much different in Thailand). The cultural "religious" arguement ignores fertility collapsed in religious Latin America and Middle East.
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  9. Possible but it seemed that way for Argentina for a while, however, it dropped further with time, especially after the 2015 and subsequent crisis
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  10. I don't think East Asia, especially China, is on the same situation as Europe. One has to remember that, there, elders are not highly productive and the economies grew significantly above 2% in the last generations. So the pension system is not as burdened and won't be as burdened as in europe for a couple generations, as new generation make much more than elders will receive. For the very same reason you won't see shortages of workers in those countries, at least for high productivity sectors - thats not where the elders are.
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  11. ​ @Tintin-jg9qt  I think you are disconsidering two things there: urbanization and when the demographic transition started in these countries. The thing with Turkey is that it was very rural until recently, while Bulgária modernized and westernized earlier with communism and so on. Bolivia is still has 30% of their people in the countryside! Thailand is an expection probably due to how they count what is rural or not, but they have a massive metropolis which usually have lower birth rates than smaller towns. Now, I accept culture matters a lot, but that's not the main factor. Of course when everyone is high fertility or everyone is lot fertility, culture starts increasing in relative importance. But the main difference. Between Bolivia or Turkey and Bulgaria is urbanization, modernization, when thee demographic transition started etc. And those economic factors interplay with culture too. So much so a country like France has higher fertility than Malaysia, albeit almost the same
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