German birth rate continues to decline

What's wrong with carrots in the shepherds pie? I always do that and I have a great sense of taste!

no, i said some motivations were in mind, ie conscious, others are subconscious.

she's having a dig at my insistance on making shephard's pie this evenign and putting carrots in it instead of er preferred mushrooms and corn (blech..)

Sounds like a bad tarrot card reading

For me it meant that for the first time women could REALLY control their fertility. That translated to many things...
1. being able to have sex with different people and not having to marry someone because you were knocked up (only recently can one be a single mom without shame)

2. Getting to get married and start families LATER...this is very important in controlling populations.

3. Being able to get educated, as you do not have three rug-rats clinging to your ankles, and that leads to the point I made before about the direct correclation between the education of women and decreased numbers of children

4. The pill offered women a sense of independence, a window to life outside of just being a mom. Women clearly have taken advantage of this in the past 40 years.

So what's more important - society's long term well being or just the independence of the women within it?

yes but the pill was still only tool for this and not the root cause.

nice argument but the wrong end of the stick, mate. full emancipation only happened after women were given control of birth planning, it has nothing to do with pensions. medical science and its advancement have given us that, and its to be applauded. infant mortality rates are drasticly down and the ability to stretch the biological childbirth window are much more important. at the classical childbearing age of say 22 who the hell is making rational descisions about old age? thats where your argument falls flat on its feet. young women, and it is women who control what is happening which is fair enough, delay and cosequently by such actions reduce the number of children, not because future care is sorted but to live their lives. I've yet to of heard of anybody saying "i dont want children now because my pension is secure".it does though however explain why couples who are then nearing the end of the productive window can make the descision to remain childless easier, therefore resisting the urge to pop one off quick.

i totaly agree with you. who the hell puts corn and mushrooms in shepards pie.

it is the cause. the welfare state existed for a good generation before the pill, and the birth rate remained stable.

However, the pill would not have been needed so widely if people still needed many many children to a) secure the genes and b ) to provide economic welfare. Which was the tool and which was the motivator?

Birth control existed before the pill. The pill made things easier, yes and was certainly a factor but it probably would not have had as much an impact if we had still relied on children as much as in previous generations.

edit: see my post about delayed effect of the welfare state. The full welfare state existed 20 years before the pill. one generation. things don't change that quicky

Well, I put mushrooms in, mainly because I do a vegetarian version. But corn? (by which I suppose you mean sweet corn/Indian maize) - that's madness!

Edit: to make this post vaguely on-topic, my take on the pill is that it makes women slaves to the medical/pharm industry. Another consumer relying for decades on a daily ingestion of chemicals that have potentially harmful side-effects and give the doctors an excuse for frequent invasive examinations of your body as if you were ill or something. A drug to ward off the 'disease' of pregnancy.
On the other hand, it's better than being banged up by a one-night stand.

Not really sure what your point is here? Hardly see the independence of women as a negative factor in society's long term well being. In fact I believe just the opposite.

i will be making it with peas, carrots, onions and minced lamb. A bit of garlic, worcester sauce and stock for seasoning. no sweatcorn or shrooms in sight. we shall, however, make it according to ER's recipe next time.

Good points!

This thread is about population rates and has become a cooking thread, talk about off topic.

Anyway it is making me very hungry despite increadible nausea.

Umm being dead is a good point is it ?
If society does not reproduce at a sufficient rate then surely it dies.
That's the point (of the whole thread as I saw it).

Dare I mention that I add a teaspoon of marmite too?

yeah, and the bottles need tops that old fogies can open easily and hold and pour without spilling. The taste is irrelevant but the gassy part isn't, that is important. I'd also remove the alcohol but not necessarily point this out.

The world is hardly running out of reproducing people.

No but this society is - again - read the thread title.

so the pill was subconsiously created to deter over population, a contraceptive conspiracy? OG your wrong and as said are doing some dodgy card reading here. the decline in birth rate in our society is directly linked to medical advancment. birth control before the pill was in the MANS hands or rather on another piece of his anatomy and was terribly unreliable, the man and contraceptive. this was the paradigm shift.

is that such a problem? And you can 'import' people if you want to

@Parnell
No its stabilising, its reached the population density its happy with and its correcting to a slightly lower level at what it is now, finding an equilibrium of sorts.

When we are down to the last few german breeding pairs then we can worry but thats a long way off I think.

depemds, really. 90 million people is still a sufficent basis to not panic yet from a genes pool point of view. Plenty of time yet to sort things out. We will however face an inverted population pyramid for many generations to come. This will bankrupt the welfare state, unless soenthing radical is done. And lo and behold, a motivation for having children re-appears.

Ummm u think any society in the world has successfully managed population importation do you ? I'd say it's MORE than a problem.

USA? Australia?

New Zealand

you're the brew master. im just a brand guy. you brew it i brand it!


why do you feel taste is irrelervant? if as your good lady has said you taste diminshes, you'll require more taste to compensate. the over salting is a good example. if beer stops tasting like beer, you wont drink it surely. (well some of us still do )

I don't think the issue is genetics - it is preservation of a form of society - take Afghanistan - regardless of what the US and chums wish to do there the majority of the peeps subscribe to hard Islamic teaching - seemingly uncaring that they are brutally oppressing their own - so in subscribing to democracy - and therein being defacto subject to the will of numbers a society will experience some issues. As an example - one nut in a population of millions is still just a nut - put a couple hundred nuts together however and you've got a thesis and a fledgling micro-society... someone post up some pics of those guys in London with the placards "Freedom ... go to hell" and see what I'm talking about here.

Australia - look at the race riots on Sydney's beaches this summer.

USA is no doubt ahead - but why is that ? Because they FORCE incoming populations to accept their creed and they brainwash their kids - all in the name of the good of their society - what else do you call reciting oaths of allegiance on a daily basis at high school level ?

Brainwashing good ? Probably not - and certainly not palatable to Europeans - but in truth neccessary to avoid society fractionation rather than cohesion.

wrong. a motivation to push all welfare into private hands. you can not turn back the developments of the last half century, not just medical but expectational such as space per head in a house etc, product developments such as transport etc . womens age of first bith is roughly now at 30 instead of 22. in ten years it'll probably be 32. there just isnt enough time to reproducee four kids anymore. simple. if anything the collaps of the welfare state will cause a decrease in birth as both parts of the couple will be forced to concentrate on wealth development - ie work - in order to offset this.

you know it is funny, but I am from the U.S. and never recited the PLEDGE of allegiance in highschool.

Another of the many misconceptions surrounding American culture.

I'm pretty sure we never said the pledge of allegiance past elementary school (age 11 or 12.) Certainly not in high school.

That's strange - US chic here at work seems to think that it was required - like my Bostonian cousins.