Germany Fights Population Drop
nytimes.com
Germany Fights Population Drop
1–10 of 77 posts
Re: Germany Fights Population Drop
#2Hopefully the resulting labour crunch will encourage more automation.
Re: Germany Fights Population Drop
#3"in about fifty years Germanys population will fall by about twenty percent"
Wow, in 50 years robots will do most of the work. They will drive our cars and clean our houses. They are starting doing it.
In fact 50 years is so much time we could had done great breakthroughs like the discovery of nuclear fusion, or the manipulation of DNA so we remain young forever(and most people will not die from age).
I am more worried about what will happen THIS YEAR if Germany continues supporting USA invasion of Ukraine and Russia closes the gas key.
Re: Germany Fights Population Drop
#4Right now Germany hugely profits from immigration out of other European and overseas countries, bringing in more than 400.000 (net) immigrants in 2013 alone. The figure for 2014 will likely be even higher. If they can keep up this trend it will be able to compensate (to a large degree) the decline of the population caused by low birth rates. In fact, the 2008 demography report of the government (which brought the demographic issue to a large public awareness for the first time) (http://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Verfassung/Dem...) calculated with a net immigration rate of 300.000 people in the most optimistic case, so bringing in 400.000 people per year is really better than anyone could hope. Of course some people will again complain that foreigner will "steal their jobs", but the truth is that they might actually do great service to the country, even if their rate of unemployment should be higher than that of native Germans.
Re: Germany Fights Population Drop
#5Lets be honest.. the multi-cultural society brought on by leftists and feminists and foreigners leads people to give up on the future of their culture. These people don't want families with non-Germans and they don't want Germany to be non-German, but they are occupied by foreign cultures and they can't do anything to change it.
edit: Every German will upvote this comment
Re: Germany Fights Population Drop
#6"Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs."
In college I had a professor from East Germany that talked about this. The communists did a lot of things wrong, but one thing they got right was an impressive support system for working parents. The preschools and child care programs were excellent, and women were encouraged to work instead of staying home. After the wall fell, these support systems stopped, and his wife had to quit her job and stay home to take care of their kids. He thought it was such a waste of talent because his wife had a PHD and was also a college professor, but there were few other options at the time.
Re: Germany Fights Population Drop
#7German here. The initiative to provide a kindergarden for every child is quite a failure. It was decreed by the federal govt that every city (i.e. local govt) has to provide enough resources, but there simply aren't enough kindergarden workers for that (and not enough money to get more people to do that badly paid job).
As I see it, it was just an easy way to gain votes. It's easy to pass laws that your own government doesn't have to apply, but _someone else_.
Re: Germany Fights Population Drop
#8"Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs." In college I had a professor from East Germany that talked about this. The communists did a lot of things wrong, but one thing they got right was an impressive support system for working parents. The preschools and child care programs were excellent, and women were…
Right. Not just maternity leave, but general parental leave: Don't focus entirely on one gender, with the assumption that either gender is necessarily more focused on raising children. Allow single fathers to raise kids as well, without stigma or handicap, by making everything more available to all.
This dovetails nicely into marriage equality, which I don't know if Germany has yet, but I know it will if it temporarily does not.
Re: Germany Fights Population Drop
#9Lets be honest.. the multi-cultural society brought on by leftists and feminists and foreigners leads people to give up on the future of their culture. These people don't want families with non-Germans and they don't want Germany to be non-German, but they are occupied by foreign cultures and they can't do anything to change it. edit: Every German will upvote this comment
And that's Bild's perspective.
Re: Germany Fights Population Drop
#10"Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs." In college I had a professor from East Germany that talked about this. The communists did a lot of things wrong, but one thing they got right was an impressive support system for working parents. The preschools and child care programs were excellent, and women were…
Russia had the same support system (though lesser quality), but it endured to some degree even today. Unfortunately, it's so underfunded that there are waiting lists and rampant corruption that one has to endure in order to get a spot for the child. Moscow (as usual) is better off than the rest of the country, but even there it's a problem.
Living in US, that's a huge contrast for me and I'm not entirely sure what options are out there aside from paying private.