No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe

One of my (rather cynical) friends predicts that liberal, secular, Western culture is going to die out in the long run. He thinks certain religious traditions that encourage children and families (traditional Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism) will survive, but not us. I argued it was a race--could our culture infect theirs before theirs outpopulated ours? It'll be interesting to see (in the ominous, "may you live in interesting times" sense of the word).

Sometimes worry that this is a depressing answer to Fermi's paradox (Fermi's paradox asks why no intelligent life has been found, if the odds of it are so high):<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox</a><p>Maybe when a species/civilization gets to a certain point of sophistication and intelligence, the motive to keep expanding (or even reproducing, apparently) stops, and they don't go on to colonize anywhere else.<p>Really, the only reason the Americas are so populated right now is because of crazy overpopulation in Europe at the time. If a new continent was discovered today (or if Mars was suddenly terraformed), how long would it take for it to be populated? Would it ever be?

I think the problem is integrating family life with the rest of your life. Right now both concepts are completely orthogonal, so when you start a family suddenly you have a much bigger management problem.<p>(I Am Not An Anthropologist, but) My understanding of traditional hunter gatherer societies is that women would keep on working even with a small baby. The baby could be strapped to the womans back, or simply kept close by, so that the woman could keep working but still have quick access to the baby to nurse it when needed.<p>When the child got older, they would have the entire tribe looking out for them, so there wasn't a need for constant micromanagement. We have daycares, but that only lasts half the day. After work the parents are expected to dedicate the rest of their night to supervising. That's a big (and unnatural) time commitment, in my opinion.

Women of Europe! We need to remedy this situation. I'll do my bit if you do yours. Email address is in my profile, please attach pictures.<p>(I kid, I kid. I've already done my share: the little one is expected next month).

Compare with this article from a few months back: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden....</a> . While this article isn't exclusively about just birth rate, it notes that Sweden has one of the higher birthrates in Europe. Looking at wikipedia, the birth rate for Sweden is still (what I suppose is) low, only 1.67, compared with the US at 2.09.<p>edit: just in case you aren't inclined to read through, the article is about granting fathers paternity leave.

Inconvenient facts this article <i>doesn't</i> mention include the baby booms in France and the UK since 1998. Given that post-natal and social policies have a huge impact on birth rates and are set at a national, not EU, level, this report needs to be taken with a bucket (not a pinch) of salt.

This article is a bit of a slog (but well worth reading) -- I summarized the most interesting part to me (birthrates and why) here: <a href="http://quippd.com/show/4304/Where_have_all_Europes_babies_gone" rel="nofollow">http://quippd.com/show/4304/Where_have_all_Europes_babies_go...</a>

Is this a problem? Overpopulation seems worse to me.