Integration is the central story every government in Europe is preaching. It doesn't seem to be happening (and where it does, not nearly fast enough to matter).
Now you might say "so they don't have your culture, big deal". No, that's not what I mean.
I mean middle eastern sections in big european cities have unemployment rates that are only a little better than middle eastern cities, and that simply won't work. Effectively, with the numbers as they are, immigrants are largely a negative influence, purely economically speaking: they're a drag rather than a gain.
Needless to say, given the political climate shift currently going through Europe, nobody likes reporting this, as it seems rather unlikely to improve anything.
Europe doesn't quite know what to do with the massive influx of new faces. Governments say 'integration' but they shove them off into corners of the city because they can't afford to take the city housing from the established population.
America was literally built by people showing up and carving out a life for themselves. There is something about the culture that offers more room for that to happen once you arrive.
But if we're going down that road, Second - America has been absorbing and integrating millions of people throughout its history and has only been the wealthier for it.
Population deceleration is a global crisis and virtually nobody is talking about it. It could mean the end of Western civilization.
Our governments are built upon the assumption that the population will continue to increase, that there will be more taxpayers tomorrow to shoulder the burden of today’s spending. When the population begins to decrease in a few decades, every successive generation will have a lower standard of living than the one that proceded it. Having children will become more expensive which will lead to even more decline. Western countries will enter a death spiral and might never escape.
You're implying that technology won't be able to increase productivity. One of the biggest topics people are talking about is automation taking jobs, so why do we need to worry about population size?
Human population grows exponentially, earth has finite resources. Constant population growth is suicidal.
A component of which is the observation that real production growth has been essentially zero since the 1980s. So clearly you can have technological advances without any productivity growth.
> Human population grows exponentially, earth has finite resources. Constant population growth is suicidal.
Not nearly as suicidal as population decline, obviously.
More nuanced, there are plenty of species, and races within species, that refuse to have their population grow. It doesn't end well.
> So clearly you can have technological advances without any productivity growth.
A little perspective is required. From the 1860’s to the 1960’s we went from candles and horses to computers and the moon landing. In the past 50 years nothing comparable to electricity, automobiles, flight, space flight, antibiotics, refrigeration, computers, telephones, radio, nuclear power, etc. has been invented. We have only refined technology invented by our great grandparents. Our civilization is stagnant and incapable of producing the kind of people who can move us forward. And, when the population begins to decline, we’ll begin to regress. Our great grandchildren might only read about airplanes in books.
Earth (global) problem is overpopulation. Depopulation is only a problem for western civilization/highly developed countries. Ask India, China or African countries do they need more citizens.
I'm 33 and my spouse is 31, we just had our first child. Of our 20 or so closest white friends, there are exactly two couples with babies. Most aren't even married yet.
This is in NYC so I expect that we're outliers, but given that fertility starts declining significantly around 35, I've got to imagine our friend group won't even be close to the replacement rate. So unless we're not just outliers but extreme outliers, I've got to imagine that fertility will decline even more over the next five years or so. We're just now getting to the point where it's time for the folks who graduated during the great recession and/or who work in the gig economy to start having kids, so to whatever extent economics play a role I don't think we've hit the bottom of the trough yet.
Agree. Student loan debt, lack of geographic distribution well-paying jobs, high cost of living by rentier capitalists in the places where those jobs exist means a crash in family creation. It takes comfort to start a family.
The article does report this. The problem seems to be much more a lack of ability to have children (or a perceived lack of ability), more so than a lack of will.
Yeah, it seems like more and more people are delaying kids until it’s “now or never” scenario. Not good. Have kids as early as possible because of the work and energy involved.
It’s not just fertility that declines, but IQ and a rise in birth defects.
The political implications are pretty interesting. It doesn't seem like rural areas are "replenishing" at all, thus, getting older, which seems to coincide with being generally more conservative and typically more "protective".
Also, rural areas don't seem to see much positive economic development these days. Thus, it's likely that the rural vote will become even more distrusting of central authority and extreme in general.
It sure seems like the political divide in the US will only deepen further, and be susceptible to even more external manipulation.
What I didn't consider previously is that the opiate epidemic may also be adding fuel to the fire.
The major demographic story of the century will be peak population. For the first time in the history of civilisation population will fall year after year instead of growing. All sorts of economic things that people take for granted will be questioned. Its much harder to fund pay-as-you-go retirement programs if the workforce size is decreasing. How much of GDP growth is dependent on population growth? You have to expect a decrease in average investment returns when populations shrink. Etc. Etc.
I love a click-bait headline and identity politics for its own sake as much as the next person but there's little mention of controlling for age or inter-state migration.
Of course more white people are dying in AZ, FL, and other places white people with the means tend to retire to. Of course more white people are dying than being born in places that are mostly white and young people are moving away from (rural areas).
This could just be written “The baby boom are dying”. The baby boom was always a one-off event, not a sustained change in behaviour. And given the ridiculously poor choice they’ve made, whilst we’ll undoubtedly miss those we love, collectively they will not be mourned.
This phenomenon and a host of other's happening in U.S currently are the reasons why trump was elected.
Edit: relax people I'm black not racist what I mean to say is that the rise of China's economy and the dwindling influence of whites in the sphere of things globally is what brought trump to power
If by "peculiarity" you mean "intentional design" to prevent tyranny of the majority, and by "seize power", you mean peaceful formal transfer of authority, then yes, you're correct.
I thought Trump got 304 votes to Clinton's 227? /s-ish
You are complaining because Trump didn't win the popular vote. The popular vote doesn't matter. Winning states matter. Each state gets a certain number of votes that that state determines how to allocate to any candidate. Most states choose to give those votes to whomever got the most votes in the state.
It does not have to be this way.
Hell, we've had a president win the election that didn't win either the popular or electoral vote.
The US is a federal republic with founding fathers who knew that democracy is mob rule. The electoral college exists so the biggest states cannot vote in their own best interests, leaving small states automatically losing because they have less people.
California has the highest population state of 38 million people. Trump wanted to bring manufacturing jobs back to the Midwest. Californians will not vote in the interest's of the "fly over states"
Everyone has a 'reason' why Trump was elected, but for some reason people can only see this in a post-hoc fashion. How many people were talking about 'the reason Trump will be elected' before Nov 8th 2016? It's easy to backport your beliefs onto known events, but you really have no basis for believing it to be a better than random predictor of the future.
I frankly don't get what the problem is. The tax reform was a given (Ms. Clinton was also talking about it). The borders thing was a given (Obama was already doing most of it, including separating children by the way), and as for the wall paid by Mexico ... I'm not seeing it, nor do I see the chances in a good light. The trade war with China ... again ... started by Obama, and Hillary was certainly not talking about rolling it back. So again this would have been a difference in degree at best, certainly not a turnaround (and euhm ... I actually agree with the trade-war. The situation with China for the past 10 years simply cannot continue).
With Trump the rhetoric changed quite a bit. But that's about it.
You are getting downvoted ... one wonders what those people think. On the first sight you would think that those people would not want Trump to get elected (or re-elected).
But is doing that downvoting likely to increase or decrease the chances of votes for Trump ? I'm pretty sure it's increasing those chances.
So that brings the question ... are these people stupid ? Not wanting to discuss (and hopefully fix) the reason Trump got elected is not going to help.
I'm assuming what they mean is something mentioned in the article:
> What does it mean for the political map? Some experts say that rapid demographic change became a potent issue in the 2016 presidential race — and helped drive white voters to support Donald J. Trump.
I'm white. As I watch the news I can't help but think maybe this isn't such a bad thing. All I see are white people bashing people of color, and other white people standing on the sidelines doing nothing concrete to stop it. [edited for clarity]
> Is this a round about way of saying 'if all the white people died it would fix our problems'?
Nope, I've seen racism perpetrated by people of every color to know that wouldn't solve anything. I guess it's an emotional response to the situation in our country today. I'm frustrated and sad that people who look like me have done and are doing so much bad stuff to people of color.
When you boil it down, much of the bad that's being done is in the name of "preserving the white race" or some such. I don't think it's a bad thing to preserve the memory of my ancestors, but if the only way to do that is to hurt other people I don't think it's worth it.
Yes, as can be clearly seen on the street in Mumbai ... or the Damascus (or frankly, the same thing can be seen in Paris). And those are just the ones I've visited.
Even assuming your view represent the real situation (things that I don't believe) do you think that other races (I still use the term despite race not being scientifically a real thing for humans) will do differently?
Whites don't have to be in a majority to cause misery :)
Exhibit A: South Africa.
More specifically - even if whites continue to constitute a smaller and smaller portion of the US population, it is likely that whites will continue to have an outsized influence on the nations politics and economy through entrenched power structures.
This kind of comment isn't allowed here, regardless of how wrong someone else is. And unfortunately you've posted many other comments that break this site's guidelines (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
HN is not a site for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology you favor. We've warned you about this repeatedly. If you can't or won't use the site as intended, we're going to have to ban you, so would you please fix this?
Older people are not as productive or innovative as younger people.
Therefore, there will be fewer things produced and less to go around for "the remaining people."
The only reason the United States hasn't seen a shrinking population (and stagnating economy) like much of Europe and Japan is due to immigration:
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/11/10/16631980/fertili...