by myrmidon | 2026-01-16 14:52:50+00:00
> WHich question did I not answer?

The "what policies should a perfect government have enacted instead, with hindsight". But your last post adds a lot on that front.

> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.

Hard disagree on this. Just consider two poster children for continuous positive economical growth: Poland and Vietnam. Did that economic outlook effect positive population growth? Clearly no (for both cases, and it's not even close).

My personal view: Easy access to contraceptives (people want to fuck more than raise children), and realignment of economical incentives: Children are no longer the default retirement plan (nor are they needed by the parents themselves as cheap workforce).

Both of those factors are icky to counteract for a modern democracy.

> If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?

No, because those did not occur synchronously. The imported, lower-skill workforce was most needed earlier (pre 2000s), with the big youth unemployment problems mostly occuring later (2000s and after).

Immigration rates are also much easier to control than local birth rate, and, most importantly, dont suffer from a two-decade lag.

Restricting foreign workers would have most certainly been a big economic hit (this is somewaht obvious; because foreign workers are mostly raised and educated for free), especially for countries like Germany, even with perfectly boosting population growth at the perfect times to compensate.

> Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.

Poland has been playing catchup inside a huge, wealthy, low-barrier market. Would their growth have been comparable if wages had started at a German level in 1990? IMO clearly not.

> all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked except now we made ourselves poorer for it

Two big problems with that view.

First: The planet "getting fucked" is not binary. If you want to limit warming to a somewhat reasonable degree (and the worst-case timelines are not reasonable), then action has to be taken at some point, and pretty obviously the biggest culprits need to get the ball rolling, or no one is ever gonna do anything.

Second: The EU has already fucked the planet much harder than any developing nation, China included, despite being not even half the population of India or China. You could make a case that the US is slightly worse, but thats completely irrelevant; the relative moral net-obligation on the EU to act is clearly pretty large already for a long time now, and a few outliers (US, oil states) being even worse does not absolve the Europeans from anything.

Lastly, those efforts to combat climate change clearly had already huge global effects. Or do you honestly think that massive Chinese buildout of solar/wind power would have happened without those technologies getting developed, refined and proven in Europe over the last decades?

I don't necessarily disagree with your outlook completely: I think a bunch of things could have been done better, especially refugee handling, and possibly immigration vs economy tradeoffs. But still: a lot of those decisions had to be made without hindsight, and I don't think expecting much better than what we got is reasonable.

You also have to consider that lots of those decisions were made in a different time (with different values/outlooks): It was much harder to let refugees become homeless, executed or starved when a lot of Europeans saw thair own past actions (=> colonialism) as a big driver for those crises (and I'd argue that this only really changed, somewhat justifiably, post Arab spring).