Hacker News Reader

Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

We still hold the ideals of the enlightenement in high regard. Individualist freedom is the ultimate ideal, and it s very popular. The reduction of the populations is an inevitable development, and should be welcome. There seems to be a fear of depopulation, as if highly-populated places are doing better. They don't. The western world is inheriting immense amount of material resources which are divided in fewer hands

View on HN

Both in the US and Europe, the populations that have most embraced individualist freedom have become highly reliant on immigrant labor from places that don’t embrace those values. In the US, places like New Hampshire and Vermont are facing significant labor shortages that they can remedy only by importing people from Catholic countries. Same thing in Europe, except the labor force is Muslims. The reality of these “Enlightenment” societies is that they are only viable due to cultural and population arbitrage. I.e. you couldn’t viably have a “closed system” where everyone shared those values.

It’s not enough to say that a smaller population would be okay. Leaving aside the economic catastrophe from inverted population pyramids, why do you assume fertility rates suddenly increase in a highly individualistic society once the population shrinks by whatever level you consider acceptable?

but the point is not to be self-sustained, in the past it was colonialism, now its financial dominance. Immigration is a way to outsource childrearing

I agree, but you’re saying it like it’s a good thing. To me, a culture that is only sustainable through reliance on other societies that don’t share that culture is not anything to hold in high regard.

While I agree what we currently have in the west is not sustainable, I disagree the reason for it is individualism or Enlightenment. Other much less individualistic countries have the same or even worse problems with fertility (Japan, South Korea, China, Russia,...). To be honest without the technological development of western societies, which happened because of Enlightenment, the countries which have highest fertility rates today would have much smaller population rise if any, because most of the kids would die at child birth.

In my opinion the problem of low birthrate is because of (in random order):

- career obsession culture (you're a failure if you don't climb up the ladder, which has done a lot of damage especially to women in general)

- prolonged childhood (30s is the new 20s)

- prolonged education (spend a quarter of a century in child care and schools, mostly with people who themselves have no work experience outside those institutions)

- moral relativity and everything traditional is believed nonsense without even trying to understand it

It's a stretch to claim that the Latinos who immigrate to the US don't value individual freedom.

I didn’t say that. Latin America is an offshoot of European society as well. But they’re certainly less individualistic and more familial than Americans or Western Europeans.

Europe's demographics issue is worse than the US despite being less "enlightenment" or freedom influenced.

China/Japan/Korea are far less individualistic than the US but have much worse birth rates. Russia also has terrible demographics and doesn't fit into this narrative.

The determinants of birth rate are probably more mundane than that.

Birth control access Education Rapid industrialization Societal expectations around safety and parental involvement Women working Access to entertainment Cost of housing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com