Because it relies on the availability of compatible foreign workers. We're already nearing the point where Germany, NL, UK have absorbed the majority of the mobile Easter European workers. If this source runs dry, we'd have to look further away, to people from increasingly different cultures and increasingly different educational systems, with an increasingly more different language, etc.


More generally, what I meant when I said that it's a shitty model is the model currently practiced in Western Europe: increase the competitiveness of our own corporations by exploiting CHEAP foreign labor - more specifically, by exploiting the wealth gradient between West and East as well as North and South within the EU, so that we can find workers who are able to cope working here in North Western Europe, but for wages which would be too low to sustain a whole family living here.

Regarding Japan: maintaining the gross GDP while the population ages and eventually shrinks (note that the size of the workforce starts shrinking long before a decrease of the overall population sets in!) is no small feat, even if it looks unimpressive on paper. The key quantity for the living standard a country has (or could have given a good wealth distribution, looking at you, America) is GDP per capita. Maintaining the gross GDP in the face of a shrinking population implies a boost in productivity/GDP per capita.



----


When it comes to birthrates: I would tie this in to the debate about climate change.

1.: the planet cant sustain a population of 7++ billion people all living a "Western" lifestyle.
2.: reducing the living standard and consumption of everyone down to an ecologically sustainable level would be unacceptable, it would mean dropping down to the level of present-day Vietnam.
3.: therefore, the only acceptable long-term solution is for the mankind to downsize, in particular the resource-hungry residents of the industrialized countries.

Therefore, I am of the opinion that NA/Europe/East Asia shrinking is a good thing, it's desirable and necessary. We just have to find a way to deal with it from an "economic/social security system"-point of view.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 20 2020 10:16am

well, certainly not as long as science deniers like yourself keep opposing meaningful change and characterising the warnings and demands to finally address it as 'alarmism' and 'hysteria'...

that said, have a source for that?

+1





Common sense.

I just did this calculation myself - I took the day when our German newspapers said that we have exhausted our yearly carbon budget (27th of March in 2019), calculated the share of the year where this happened:

31+28+27 = 86
86/365 = 0.23561.

Then, I multiplied this number with the per capita emissions of our country, so that I get the per capita emissions we could have had such that the "exhaustion day" happens exactly at the end of the year, i.e. we're barely within 'budget'. Then, I looked up which country's per capita emissions came closest to this number, which at the time was Vietnam. When I repeated those steps a couple of minutes ago, Vietnam turned out to also be well above 'budget'.

According to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita
Germany had per capita emissions of 9.1 tons of carbon dioxide in 2019.

86/365*9,1 = 2.144.

Per capita emissions in Vietnam were at 2.8 tons according to this list, so we would have to go even further down the list, to Indonesia or Moldavia.


I am, of course, aware that this is an extremely crude and unscientific way of calculating this, I just wanted to get a quick and easy idea about the very rough magnitude.

well, that's what i thought, you're confusing living standard with co2 emission. guess what, the leader in the former category (denmark) has only about 36% of the co2 emissions per capita as the US (who are somewhere around 15th, depending on which index you prefer, in terms of quality of life). funny how that works right?

so you suggesting that we would have to drop our living standard and consumption to vietnam levels, is pure fearmongering, based on kidergarten 'science', on rigid assumptions that do not account for the fact that a change in our approach towards energy production, about environmental policies and consumption, can maintain a standard while simultaneously increasing sustainability.
now obviously even danish / german standards as of now are probably not achievable for the whole world, we undeniably DO live in priviledged places, but the whole "we would have to give everything up (bs), that simply won't happen (agreed), so we might as well not even try it (the desired but idiotic conclusion)" narrative is complete bogus. that's science denier propaganda. the koch brothers would love your posts.

Name one industrialized country that is neither blessed with tremendous topography for hydropower (like Austria or Norway) nor receiving the vast majority of its energy from nuclear power (like France) while at the same time having low per capita emissions.

Of course there is no one-to-one connection between the living standard and the carbon emissions, but there is clearly a very strong correlation. The inconvenient truth that you and climate change activists try to downplay is that the demands for net zero emissions or a carbon-neutral society are unachievable without either unrealistic amounts of technological progress or significant and tangible reductions in living standard.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 20 2020 12:10pm

you're once again not only misrepresenting my position (i am NOT claiming ZERO emissions is easily achievable, i am advocating for meaningful and transformative change, as opposed to the appeasement / denial strategies that are currently predominant in many of the richest nations, especially amongst conservatives), but also framing the discussion around the notion that the current status is simply the best we can do, which is absolutely factually incorrect.

the US has massive unused potential in terms of renewable energy production for example. it's business interests by industries (which btw are massively subsidised by billions of taxpayer money each year) that are exerting massive political pressure and trying to manipulate public opinion (and you are the perfect example to demonstrate how effective that is) to push the idiotic narrative that a shift towards renewable energy is simply not feasible without dropping our living standards to vietnamese levels or some ridiculous bs like that.

you're the one with the extreme and unreasonable position.

You aren't concerned about the welfare of migrants that are coming here and enjoying a higher quality of life even on minimum wage, you are petrified of immigrants changing the demography and culture of Western nations. No need to panic when the UK is 87% British and Germany is 76% Germans, my friend.

On the planet I disagree as technological advancement will provide efficiencies as the population increases. Higher pop also means more Bill Gates/Musk types that will pop up out of nowhere and change the way we consume goods and services. People were saying the same thing in the 1800's with the industrial revolution and were wrong because they didn't factor in advancements.

I do not, and never did, advocate for the bolded. Meaningful change without huge sacrifice is possible, and should be pushed for. My main gripe with the current debate about climate change is threefold:

- I disagree with the notion that climate change is unadaptable and that we therefore have to sacrifice unlimited amounts of wealth and convenience for mitigation.
- I disagree with the notion of transforming away from key technologies in the energy and mobility sector while the eco-friendly alternatives which are supposed to replace them are not even developed yet, or not ready for use on the necessary scale.
- I disagree with the notion that the climate change issue can be solved to a satisfying degree if everyone just tries hard enough and the whole world submits itself to what the climate activists are saying. I'm a pessimist when it comes to climate change, I believe that the task of reaching the goals from the Paris Climate Agreement is even more difficult than most activists or scientist suggest. I believe that the amount of change and sacrifice that would be necessary to reach the 2° goal, let alone the 1.5° target, would be neither desirable nor actually enforceable within democracies. In my humble opinion, gigantic distributional conflicts are therefore inevitable.


Simply put, I'm taking a middle of the road positon. Neither am I denying the existence of anthropogenic climate change or claiming that the status quo is the best we can do - nor am I a follower of Greta or the typical policies of Green parties. I am in favor of adopting eco-friendly alternatives where this is possible without causing significant collateral damage, and for ending subsidies for the fossil industries.



You are the one burying your head in the sand when you talk about "a shift towards renewable energy". A couple of wind turbines here, a couple of solar panels there, replace gasoline-driven cars with electric ones, eat less meat, and then everything will be fine - THAT is the real bullshit. Neither climate scientists nor most serious activists (read: not Greta and her gullible schoolkid parade) are calling for a shift towards renewables - they are calling for nothing less than a revolution, for a complete and total end to fossil energy and production, a complete and total transition of our entire economies and way of life - to happen ASAP, preferrably tomorrow. And that, that is just not gonna happen.


I'll admit that my comparison with Vietnam was a bit hyperbolic, but note that I was talking about the world reaching an "ecologically sustainable level" - and if one is to believe the climate scientists, then some feel-good half-measures like the Greens are proposing wont come anywhere close to being enough - they only serve to soothe the bad conscience of privileged lefties.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 20 2020 03:47pm

Those numbers are highly misleading since the older generations had virtually no migrants. Among the younger age cohorts, say those aged 0-39, the migrant share is already above 33% in both countries, and far above 50% in many bigger cities.




The problems of the early industrialization were social, and could be solved by organizing society in a different way. The problems associated with climate change and an exhaustion of natural resources are of a very different nature. In fact, a lot of the social problems that emerged between 1800 and 2000 were not structurally solved, they instead were rendered obsolete over time by increasing wealth - and this increasing wealth was generated on the back of an increasing exploitation of natural resources and higher fossil emissions.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 20 2020 04:05pm