I do not think the drop in reproduction can be solely placed on the welfare state. Less people lived in cities before the welfare state and on a farm children were free labour. In cities they're pure cost. So the change in agriculture from family farms to giant industrial farms is also largely to blame.
Louise doesn't place sole-blame on that though, she's not talking about the fertility rates but the welfare state. Louise is very aware of the other reasons for lower fertility rates including housing costs, women in the workplace/careers, and more.
@@RichardEnglander The countries with the most generous welfare incentives geared towards child birth (like the Nordic countries) have somewhat better demographics and birth rates than most Western European countries though. Which could be an indication that the welfare state could help solve the problem instead of just causing it? (Note, I do not find any problem with the argument that the welfare state has contributed to lower birthrates)
@@iuliuscaesar9078 Indeed. So the generation who should procreate keeping hearing that the planet is dying and that humans are a cancer certainly aren't very incentivised from a safety aspect.
The tragic thing is in Japan there are many elder women dying alone and no one is noticing until someone smells it. The scary thing is I can see China just eliminating the elderly. Yes, Asian cultures place a very high value on parents and grandparents, but if it comes between a new Cultural Revolution and the end of CCP rule, the CCP will do the latter.
Did you ever see the exhibit "Bodies?" They were actual human bodies that had been sliced, diced, and torn to demonstrate the systems within them. Fascinating but creepy. Then you notice that they are almost all Asian men. Then you read up and realize that they are all CHINESE men. Then you find out that they are likely Chinese prisoners who had been killed by the state and then whose bodies had been sold... So do I think that the CCP is morally capable of artificially controlling/manipulating its population through campaigns of encouraging old people to self-delete, refusal of medical care to the very elderly, etc? 100%. I also believe that they would attack the problem from the other end if/when they can develop artificial wombs. I can totally imagine them creating baby farms with "synthetic" children. And while you're at it, wouldn't you want those children to be the fastest, strongest, most intelligent possible? This dystopian novel writes itself. And the scariest part is that it could very well become a documentary.
Elderly die alone in the West too, and remain undiscovered for weeks or days. The CCP don't care so much about the growing elderly population. What are they gonna do, vote their disapproval? It's young unmarried men that they fear the most
Hmmm I'm not sure the Chinese would do that. Chinese people are deeply attached to their grandparents. It's one of the few things about that society that I admire. But yes the CPC would do almost anything to stay in power. They've got a lot of dirty laundry to hide after all this time
The welfare state in Britain has been grossly mismanaged for decades. It was set up based on the principles of Full Employment and National Insurance contributions. Full Employment was abandoned in 1976 and structural unemployment imposed in the early 80s by monetarism the Tories knew very well wasn't going to bring down inflation but was going to shut down whole swathes of industry. As the party of big business, the Tories have always understood that (for once) Marx was actually correct that there is something called "the power of labour" - that is the ability of working people to negotiate better wages and conditions depending on labour market conditions, principally how many jobs there were versus how many people. Once mass unemployment was reimposed, our bargaining power collapsed Millions of people were thrown on the scrap heap, whole areas of the country died, huge social problems emerged and we spent a vast chunk of the North Sea oil money on social security to stave off mass insurrection Now after mass immigration - which is supposed to pay for our pensions but which very obviously won't and is about something far more nefarious - the welfare system is simultaneously hugely over-used and not particularly effective Some countries will manage their economic and demographic problems by focusing on getting through it together as a society, Britain will go down the American route of setting citizen against citizen, young against old, black against white resulting in appalling scenes and suffering which will shame the country for decades to come
Just today, I read an article according to which "Half of South Africa's population are 100% dependent on state welfare" Old people will ALWAYS be the majority of the voting population. The other major voting block will be immigrants. Both groups benefit massively from the welfare state, and both groups do not care that much about long term consequences (immigrants can leave for their home countries, and old people die) Neither of these groups will ever vote in favor of lowering pensions or welfare. And because it is always young people who are revolutionaries and radicals, if there are no young people, there is also not going to be any revolution. You will have an increasingly massive welfare state until the state collapses completely. And what comes afterwards nobody knows. Maybe socialism and even larger redistribution schemes. What I do know however is that the welfare state is going nowhere, consequences be damned. Even if it massively hurts our economy and long term survival
Unless one desides to challenge democracy. Welfare is an economical question. Having children is an economical question. Climate change is an unsolved question. The future is a mystery. The 1990's was a great time to live!
As a South African, I can confirm that we really do have more welfare recipients than we have registered taxpayers. We can afford this by giving each welfare recipient only just enough money to stop them from starving to death. It's genuinely only enough money to buy about 2000 cheap calories per day while living under a bridge.
South Africa is a deeply corrupt place and in no way similar to the UK. Britain has a vast welfare system for the banks, corporations and private landlords - it funnels hundreds of billions to private companies each year via subsidies, outsourcing, management fees, tax credits, housing benefit, asset guarantees, Quantitative Easing etc etc We wouldn't have so much spending on the public welfare system if we didn't deliberately keep 2 million people unemployed and didn't have mass immigration Our economic model is broken. It's collapsing in on itself and things are going to get very unpleasant. It didn't need to be like this but there you are
@@mietonen The 90s was also a time of massively high crime and the real emerging issues with all those people the Tories had thrown on the scrapheap. The 90s were when GATT and Maastricht were signed paving the way for hyperglobalisation
Where is the evidence that "old people don't care about the consequences"? Isn't this Remainer talk? Old people worry about their children and grandchildren. I saw an article about how the group of people most involved in political activity (of all stripes) are the over 60s. People who worked all their lives have every right to want to defend their pensions. If the system has been mismanaged, that's on those who were in charge. Young people actually aren't really revolutionaries. They're sometimes used by others to that end. Throughout most of human history, young people did as they were told. Now, they're being told to resent their grandparents rather than look at the structure of our economy and who controls it. It's almost evil, dividing families in this way. And fascinating that it's now the economic Right turning on the old because they know that the free lunch they've had for decades is under threat. Just goes to show what a fundamentally un-conservative movement it's always been.
I hope the welfare state doesn’t end. It need reform to be pro family and cost effective. But I did a lot of work I rural China. The amount of poverty is awful. Having some form of government assistance is great. People I think romanticize small government, instead of trying to create an effective government.
Bribing citizenry and loyalists with food and various hand outs, or special favours and privileges, has existed since pre-civilization and exists to some limited degree even in failed states. It will never go away completely. The warlord’s clan is supported in various ways. Rulers will always provide some kind of tangible benefit to their loyalists. Simply to maintain a power base. No altruism required. Believing this was a modern invention is silly. But the universality at current levels certainly will not persist. It will just revert to the standard more fractionated transaction for loyalty limited systems that have always existed.
1. The welfare state is failing because of the economic pursued over the last 45 years. It was set up based on two things: full employment and national insurance contributions In 1976 after a few years of serious inflation and labour disputes, full employment was abandoned on the instructions of the IMF. In 1979 as soon as the Tories came to power they broke the link between contributions and welfare payments. They did this because they knew how many people they were planning to make unemployed They then left millions of people and scores of towns to rot on social security payments funded by the North Sea oil money. It was a catastrophic waste of money and people and it produced extremely serious social problems which the Tories and their press then vilified as being solely the fault of those involved. "Welfare to work" policies were introduced in the early 90s as single mothers and other people were castigated as the Lawson boom came to an end and interest rates went up. The sick thing about this was that there simply wasn't enough work for all those deemed "scroungers". And there still isn't
2. New Labour came in and instead of pursuing full employment, they embarked on mass immigration which made the labour market situation worse and they allowed the millions of migrants to claim benefits as well. This produced huge resentment. They also decided to prop up low wage employers by paying out tax credits rather than raising wages. By the time the Tories returned to power, a very visible badly behaved underclass had developed and Osbourne was able to pin much of the anger which erupted after the banking crash on them. The spivs in the City were saved to the tune of a trillion pounds while an unemployed man with a spare bedroom was vilified. Now Tory party aligned journalists like Ms Perry feel extreme resentment that old people get pensions which she doesn't think she will. It isn't actually a question of demographics, it's a question of the economic model and how we chose to share out the national income I am very concerned that Ms Perry isn't prepared to think rationally about all this
@@vayu1302 The results were entirely forseeable once we stopped pursuing Full Employment and I am quite sure the economic Right and their friends in the press knew that. Is it really a coincidence that drugs became widely available in deindustrialised areas? Who launders all the money?
So, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Emmanuel Macron recently (this week, as I'm writing) made a speech in which he acknowledged the issue of falling birthrates in France (even though France still has among the highest birthrates in the developed world, it has recently dipped below replacement level). He concluded that the French should get the birthrate back on track. First observation : seeing the reaction of many people on the internet was honestly quite astonishing. Many seem to take it as a personal attack to suggest that - on the whole - families should make at least a couple of children. The fact that Macron used the phrase "rearming the birthrate" certainly didn't help the anti-militarist fringes of the population to agree to his point. I have never felt as much of a "doomer" as now witnessing people proudly proclaiming they will strive to never have children - both to "own the right" and because they hate their country and their people. Second observation : the big question is still up in the air. What measures will be put in place to encourage couples to have children? To be honest, I fear the current liberal government will at best apply common liberal solutions - giving more monetary incentives - while completely disregarding all the other contributing factors that push people to have children, or vice-versa. This is especially likely in France as anti-national, anti-moralist & libertarian discourse is especially strong in this country (although I guess the far right is also gaining a lot of traction at the same time). In particular, I wonder if any emphasis will be placed on couples getting together in the first place, since France, like other western nations, is currently witnessing a steep rise in singleness. Third observation : in terms of public discourse, it appears especially inappropriate to come at the issue of birthrates from a partisan perspective (which Macron's speech did). Left-wingers treat the speech as borderline fascistic, which could in fact disincentivize them from having children as a political statement - this might be good news for the Right in 50 years, but it won't be for the nation. Obviously this is while assuming that the current spat will actually have an effect, rather than people only making memes for a couple of days and then moving on to the next issue. I would also like to point out that coming at the issue as Macron did is likely to disguise a real problem as a politicking tactic - if this issue is to be brought to the public spotlight, I believe it should come from the civil society, rather than politicians. Final observation : as a former lefty on the path to moving further towards conservatism, I observe a teething issue with left-wingers, which is that they seem to dislike pushing their reasoning to its logical conclusion. I blame years of anti "slippery slope fallacy" propaganda, as well as intellectual discordance : refusing to see that things which sound or feel good in the short term will most likely lead to an ultimately bad outcome.
Welfare will exist, but the government will have to choose which direction it goes. I think if anything they'll need to shift the money down instead of up. If people want old people welfare and they're between 20 and 30, have 3 to 5 kids. That would singlehandedly solve the problem.
Ms Perry wrote a really spiteful tweet last year in which she mocked "boomers" for saying that they'd paid into the system all their working lives. Apparently this didn't matter because "the Treasury coffers are empty" Well, who emptied it Ms Perry? They weren't empty when Britain, America, the EU and Japan found 27 trillion to bail out their financial systems i.e the owners of those financial systems. They weren't empty when they found £500bn for COVID. They aren't empty for the vast transfers of wealth to private pockets that are outsourcing fees, PFI repayments, tax credits, housing benefit etc etc But anyway, this is ultimately an emotional issue. If one resents others getting something they don't think they will we should probably plan ahead for the tent cities
The government will never eliminate the State Pension. The future of the UK will be... 1/ Continue state borrowing for as long as sustainable. 2/ Raise taxes to whatever the population will accept (which won't be much more - we aren't Scandinavia). 3/ In the end, be forced to debase the currency. The UK Government's approach is actually more short-termist than you describe. The main reason for open borders is to increase GDP, which is the measure by which international lenders judge the viability of loans. As you mentioned, immigrants are net consumers of taxes, which is actually going to make the situation even worse. And that's without the human cost of low wages, high unemployment and unaffordable housing. We are in a death spiral and there really is no solution other than what politicians currently consider to be the unthinkable.
The issue is that it's not a money problem. At the end of the day the issue is a labor problem. It won't matter what the government does with the currency when there's not enough people to do all the work.
@@rathelmmc3194You're right, it's ultimately a productivity issue, but I didn't want to get into that much detail in TH-cam comments. Few would read it and fewer still would understand it.
@@ChefEarthenware That's fair. In easy words, the demographic dividend has already been paid to the Boomers and everyone else that follows is going to be bagholders. The only way out is to feed more people into the bottom of the pyramid.
We've been borrowing like there's no tomorrow for the last 30 years. Borrowing money provides a very nice earner to the financial class who get paid interest on the bonds. We actually allow banks to create money and then lend it to the government. Our national debt doubled in 2008 because we bailed out banks which were insolvent. That crash cost us £3 trillion according to the bank of England's own figures We have ALREADY debased the currency to pay for that. £885 bn in QE has been printed and gifted to the hedge fund boys. And STILL they are allowed to stow their profits in the tax havens. It's truly grotesque that "social conservatives" who claim to believe in "personal responsibility", "law and order" and "sound money" can ignore this
Blaming 'the welfare state' for low birth rates might be credible, if industrialized states like China and other Asian countries did not have low birth rates without a meaningful welfare state. I think it has more to do with industrialization itself, urbanization, the education of women, and modern culture which values putting off childbirth to have a career.
Probably more true, but we have to do something and what we can do is reduce the old age welfare programs. Give people back some money or better yet move that money down into the people who have children.
This is wrong because China also has welfare...they also have a pension system that is buckling under the weight of the population crisis. It wouldn't have taken much research to figure that out.
Yep none of the arguments make sense - it's just another line from Tory think tanks like the Centre for Social Justice. Have you ever noticed how they always talk about how they've raised the tax allowance for the poorest people and then in the next publication they're saying poorer people take more out of the state than they contribute?! ; ) You know how the Left have an up is down, blacks is white reaction to having their ideological BS pointed out? The same applies to the Tories when it comes to money
@@asecmimosas4536 It doesn't have welfare at all. It's an ultra capitalist society and not actually a nice one to live in contrary to all the hype At the end of the day it's a choice how we choose to share things out. But Britain is kind of famous now for being a country where no one cares about the elderly and I am quite sure some very unpleasant things are not too far away
Louise, you are on the right path as far as robots go, but just think of it in the inverse. It will be the robots programmed and designed to do specific types of labor - while looked after mostly by men - and much of the women's jobs will be replaced by A.I, freeing them up to look after the children. It will also prove really important for particularly youngish men to be involved in children's education and physical activity, so that the female dominated cradle to graduation influence doesn't recreate much of the problems that persist in society today (i.e. a woman cannot teach a boy how to be a man, because she isn't one, etc). 😌
"In other words, capitalistic relations combined with individualism knocks away the basis of high fertility, and if this is combined with a political and legal security so that one does not have to protect oneself with a layer of cousin, the sensible strategy is to have a few children and to educate them well."--Alan Macfarlane, 'The Invention of the Modern World" ch 8. An interesting book on the rise of modernity in mid-20th century (earlier for England). The ending of mortality as a population control through sanitation, medical care, interventions in infant mortality and the shift to fertility controls through birth control, abortion, but also late marriage, which was how population was limited in mid-19th century England. It appears modernity has run its course as to the individual creating themselves from the four spheres of social, ideolgical/religious, economic and political. And people are yearning for the ancien regime of the peasantry. Otherwise, how do you enforce family care of elderly without the obligations to the household, tribe, etc. It appears the mid-20th century was an inflection point in human history. But will women return to subservience to the family under the protection, and control, of the head of household? Children in the modern world are a cost and not an asset to working the farm and have no enforceable obligation to their parents.
Yes we do, women chasing careers then leaving it too late, hypergamy ie women wanting higher status men when they aint high status women, divorce laws stopping men from marrying, high divorce rate, women getting custody which puts men off, anti-natalism.. its mainly Feminism, which has destroyed the family unit@@TheOneAndOnly-o7c
Well, this will greatly affect women who live longer (they also save less). All the women following the strong and independent mantra will have to deal with the consequences as they age. Men as well, but men being alone is nothing new historically. The number of women that will have no family as they age will be unprecedented.
I predicted years back that in 10-20 years there was going to be an "empty womb generation" of (mostly millenial) women who are desperately alone and massively regret it, and warn the next generations
Next 20 years as women become more educated and flash with cash, they will price themselves out of the market, as less men become educated and flash with cash, most women are hypergamous they date up not down so maybe 40% will be single and childless. Society will dwindle because low birth rate.
As a woman who is financially independent the consequences are good. I’ve a take home income in retirement slightly higher than my full time salary. With a network of extended family and friends women usually do better in old age than men. Men being alone is worse news, as men’s social networks and support is twice as likely statistically to come from his wife than a woman’s from her husband. Thus widowers do significantly worse than widows
@advocate1563 Of course, there are outliers (most people aren't millionaires). I don't see how that changes my point. You may be fine, but what works for a minority does not mean it will work for the majority.
Well indeed. British people are quietly reviled for the almost total lack of interest that they take in their elderly relatives. Talk in particular to non-Western people. They're disgusted by it and they're quite right to be
An adult would have to quit their job to be an unpaid full time care provider. How do you expect regular folks to be able to do that when most married couples still need 2 full time incomes just to support their minor aged children?
Children are much less reliable to become care takers of their parents in current society because they are too entitled. Having children these days is a losing proposition financially with little reward. Nobody thinks about the impact of state economics when deciding to have children. People have children because it has been ingrained by our parents and general society that is what me must do..
Some kids have no choice to be to take care of their parents but yes in general we have become so extremely selfish at looking after our elderly that we are now rather famous for it
The welfare state was created on the expectation of an ever increasing body of slaves (young workers). And the illusion held up for 20 of the post war years as the Boomer generation grew. Then the anomaly of increasing marriage/children that started in the 1920s, but peaked in 1980 (in the US) started reverting to the 1910 norm in 2000 but kept going until in 2022, 25% of those born in 1982 have never married by age 40. Compared to 6% of those born in 1940 and 16% of those born in 1870.
Like when the banks blew themselves up and passed the consequences to everyone else? £3 trillion that cost us Like how the British state maintains a string of tax havens into which hundred of billions are stowed? Like when the Tories asset stripped the country selling off utilities built up by the British public over decades? Like when local services are outsourced to Capita and Serco which just so happen to be connected to the Tory party? Like when tax credits and housing benefit are used to provide a handy cushion for low wage employers and private landlords?
That’s a statement against an aging western world, rather than ‘the welfare state’ specifically? Even more so the British welfare state. Working classes have never been deterred by “financial incentives” to have children - even after contraception introduction (although impacted by religion, but you could then make a case for higher immigration to continue that). Even more so to think about what the welfare state looks like when their future child is 70+ years old. To what extent is Japan’s declining birth rates due to their welfare state? Particularly the impact of potential parents consuming the future welfare state and pension provision of their unborn 60 year old child? The NHS COULD become an impoverished service through decades of mismanagement - not because of an aging population. Even Beveridge, who designed the British welfare state as we know it knew all of this, beyond his initial report, in future publications. It’s only through mismanagement that future problems will occur. (Louis, UK, 32 - pending state pension 😂)
Ms Perry has become rather fixated on pensions and welfare since she grew tired of the Left and began to align herself with the Spectator and CSJ. But it's good because it alerts us to how the Establishment are going to play the forthcoming economic turmoil. They will even go so far as to turn families against each other while protecting their donors to the very end Older people find themselves vilified by the Left for voting for Brexit on the one hand and by the New Right for having pensions on the other. Not a nice pincer to be in
I agree with you on a lot but not this. Believe it or not politicians are people, a lot of them are advanced in age or of course have family members who are. However, even the most sinister politican depends on votes to keep their own job and cutting help to pensioners to nothing is a sure way to ensure they lose their seat. I do agree with NHS to an extent although I would argue it is more so the mismanagement of the NHS and the high dependency on locum staff than any money invested into it that is the issue.
Ms Perry has written / twitted a lot about pensioners because she feels hard done by in the London housing market - a situation which was produced by the economic interests behind the Spectator magazine and Conservative party not some old person in a humdrum town It's just another sign that the Tory way of doing politics is to always incite resentment between different sectors of society. Yes we know the Left does that too but there is something truly perverse about the "party of family values" trying to set grandchildren against grandparents in this way Britain's economic model is broken and has been for a long time. The country is run by a big business oligarchy and anyone who wants to try to change that would face massive capital flight. It is going to get very nasty
Of course there is. There's never been more wealth. People don't understand for example how the national debt is private saving for extremely wealthy interests. We actually pay them a very nice earner on those bonds and that system in turn props up all their fictitious paper wealth which imploded in 2008
@user-rk9it9hz6g One thing I will say about the welfare state is: I have a conspiracy theory about child benefit. Why did they persist paying it to new mothers with insufficient national insurance contributions? Given that they wanted to expand the immigrant population particularly Muslims, that's one reason. But I reckon they also realised by the 80s / 90s that the problem of a certain kind of woman having kids helped delegitimise the system I might be wrong in seeing intentionality but it certainly doesn't hurt the resentment agenda
Does that include the corporate welfare state which costs the country far more? People seem to forget what happened to people when it didn't exist. When the speculators blew up the economy in 1929 there was mass unemployment which got so bad there were hunger marches. When the Boar war was on, they weren't able to fill the army because so many working class young men were so unfit due to malnutrition
@@ankra12 Oh right and when the "fittest" rig everything in their favour what do the Libertarians say then? When Spiro Latsis ensured he got his mal investments bailed out by the Greek state while the Greek health service collapsed? Nothing. Because it's a fake ideology designed only to hack away at the socially useful parts of the State
Medical science will soon allow people to be produced artificially. I'm not saying this should happen, but it almost certainly will happen eventually. This makes the individual choice not to reproduce irrelevant to public policy. Rather than leaving a population's makeup to the arbitrary decisions of ordinary citizens, governments could simply calculate how many persons are demographically needed and then grow them (or stop growing them) to suit any given societal circumstances.
Humans have existed for roughly 100,000 years in their modern form, so we're talking about changes that will transpire in the blink of an eye, relatively speaking. Human trials of artificial wombs are presently under legal consideration in the US, and scientists have already succeeded in gestating other animals.@@thel1355
Soon? Also, this does not solve the problem our generation faces. Those 'artifically' created children do not exist yet. It takes 20 years+ for a child to even start becoming economically productive. Also, who is going to be looking after these children? And why will said children look after you?
True, but the nuclear family model is already collapsing (if not collapsed) with no sign of a rebound, and so fewer and fewer children in western nations will be raised in conventional families as it is. Across the first world, family formation is trending downward massively. Example from pew research: "In 1970, nearly 70% of American adults ages 25 to 49 were living with a spouse and at least one child. As of 2021 - the most recent year for which they have data - that's fallen to 37%." It may not be something to celebrate, but it seems inevitable that the entire family group model will go the way of the dodo--for mere lack of participants, if for no other reason. Increasingly, people simply don't live that way any more. Maybe they should, but that's another subject.@@MA-gu2up
Giving women effective birth control and a disposable income means that they sleep around up until their 30s and then try to form a long-term relationship. However, as they have burnt up their oxytocin and have slept with too many men they are then both psychologically and hormonally limited in their ability to form a long-term relationship. The ability to create stable families is then compromised.
The welfare state as you put it has many functions if I understand you right. As far as children or marage you will have to look at society. It would be nice if things where equil. But fertility rates dropping year over year and STDs with hypergomy and monkey branching leading to more infertility. Entitlement culture and the left behind. Population
I do not think the drop in reproduction can be solely placed on the welfare state. Less people lived in cities before the welfare state and on a farm children were free labour. In cities they're pure cost. So the change in agriculture from family farms to giant industrial farms is also largely to blame.
Louise doesn't place sole-blame on that though, she's not talking about the fertility rates but the welfare state. Louise is very aware of the other reasons for lower fertility rates including housing costs, women in the workplace/careers, and more.
@@RichardEnglander The countries with the most generous welfare incentives geared towards child birth (like the Nordic countries) have somewhat better demographics and birth rates than most Western European countries though. Which could be an indication that the welfare state could help solve the problem instead of just causing it? (Note, I do not find any problem with the argument that the welfare state has contributed to lower birthrates)
@@barsknos right, because 'welfare' means many things, in Nordic nations they have more pro-natalist policies, they aren't all direct but it helps.
There are multiple factors, that´s one of them, culture is another one, urbanism, housing and so on, even safety affects birth rate.
@@iuliuscaesar9078 Indeed. So the generation who should procreate keeping hearing that the planet is dying and that humans are a cancer certainly aren't very incentivised from a safety aspect.
The tragic thing is in Japan there are many elder women dying alone and no one is noticing until someone smells it. The scary thing is I can see China just eliminating the elderly. Yes, Asian cultures place a very high value on parents and grandparents, but if it comes between a new Cultural Revolution and the end of CCP rule, the CCP will do the latter.
Did you ever see the exhibit "Bodies?" They were actual human bodies that had been sliced, diced, and torn to demonstrate the systems within them. Fascinating but creepy. Then you notice that they are almost all Asian men. Then you read up and realize that they are all CHINESE men. Then you find out that they are likely Chinese prisoners who had been killed by the state and then whose bodies had been sold...
So do I think that the CCP is morally capable of artificially controlling/manipulating its population through campaigns of encouraging old people to self-delete, refusal of medical care to the very elderly, etc? 100%.
I also believe that they would attack the problem from the other end if/when they can develop artificial wombs. I can totally imagine them creating baby farms with "synthetic" children. And while you're at it, wouldn't you want those children to be the fastest, strongest, most intelligent possible?
This dystopian novel writes itself. And the scariest part is that it could very well become a documentary.
Elderly die alone in the West too, and remain undiscovered for weeks or days. The CCP don't care so much about the growing elderly population. What are they gonna do, vote their disapproval? It's young unmarried men that they fear the most
Hmmm I'm not sure the Chinese would do that. Chinese people are deeply attached to their grandparents. It's one of the few things about that society that I admire.
But yes the CPC would do almost anything to stay in power. They've got a lot of dirty laundry to hide after all this time
The welfare state in Britain has been grossly mismanaged for decades. It was set up based on the principles of Full Employment and National Insurance contributions.
Full Employment was abandoned in 1976 and structural unemployment imposed in the early 80s by monetarism the Tories knew very well wasn't going to bring down inflation but was going to shut down whole swathes of industry.
As the party of big business, the Tories have always understood that (for once) Marx was actually correct that there is something called "the power of labour" - that is the ability of working people to negotiate better wages and conditions depending on labour market conditions, principally how many jobs there were versus how many people. Once mass unemployment was reimposed, our bargaining power collapsed
Millions of people were thrown on the scrap heap, whole areas of the country died, huge social problems emerged and we spent a vast chunk of the North Sea oil money on social security to stave off mass insurrection
Now after mass immigration - which is supposed to pay for our pensions but which very obviously won't and is about something far more nefarious - the welfare system is simultaneously hugely over-used and not particularly effective
Some countries will manage their economic and demographic problems by focusing on getting through it together as a society, Britain will go down the American route of setting citizen against citizen, young against old, black against white resulting in appalling scenes and suffering which will shame the country for decades to come
Just today, I read an article according to which
"Half of South Africa's population are 100% dependent on state welfare"
Old people will ALWAYS be the majority of the voting population. The other major voting block will be immigrants. Both groups benefit massively from the welfare state, and both groups do not care that much about long term consequences (immigrants can leave for their home countries, and old people die)
Neither of these groups will ever vote in favor of lowering pensions or welfare. And because it is always young people who are revolutionaries and radicals, if there are no young people, there is also not going to be any revolution.
You will have an increasingly massive welfare state until the state collapses completely. And what comes afterwards nobody knows. Maybe socialism and even larger redistribution schemes. What I do know however is that the welfare state is going nowhere, consequences be damned. Even if it massively hurts our economy and long term survival
Unless one desides to challenge democracy. Welfare is an economical question. Having children is an economical question. Climate change is an unsolved question. The future is a mystery. The 1990's was a great time to live!
As a South African, I can confirm that we really do have more welfare recipients than we have registered taxpayers. We can afford this by giving each welfare recipient only just enough money to stop them from starving to death. It's genuinely only enough money to buy about 2000 cheap calories per day while living under a bridge.
South Africa is a deeply corrupt place and in no way similar to the UK. Britain has a vast welfare system for the banks, corporations and private landlords - it funnels hundreds of billions to private companies each year via subsidies, outsourcing, management fees, tax credits, housing benefit, asset guarantees, Quantitative Easing etc etc
We wouldn't have so much spending on the public welfare system if we didn't deliberately keep 2 million people unemployed and didn't have mass immigration
Our economic model is broken. It's collapsing in on itself and things are going to get very unpleasant. It didn't need to be like this but there you are
@@mietonen The 90s was also a time of massively high crime and the real emerging issues with all those people the Tories had thrown on the scrapheap. The 90s were when GATT and Maastricht were signed paving the way for hyperglobalisation
Where is the evidence that "old people don't care about the consequences"? Isn't this Remainer talk? Old people worry about their children and grandchildren. I saw an article about how the group of people most involved in political activity (of all stripes) are the over 60s.
People who worked all their lives have every right to want to defend their pensions. If the system has been mismanaged, that's on those who were in charge.
Young people actually aren't really revolutionaries. They're sometimes used by others to that end. Throughout most of human history, young people did as they were told. Now, they're being told to resent their grandparents rather than look at the structure of our economy and who controls it. It's almost evil, dividing families in this way.
And fascinating that it's now the economic Right turning on the old because they know that the free lunch they've had for decades is under threat. Just goes to show what a fundamentally un-conservative movement it's always been.
I hope the welfare state doesn’t end. It need reform to be pro family and cost effective. But I did a lot of work I rural China. The amount of poverty is awful. Having some form of government assistance is great. People I think romanticize small government, instead of trying to create an effective government.
Have you witnessed hordes of Grab Hags in China.
Bribing citizenry and loyalists with food and various hand outs, or special favours and privileges, has existed since pre-civilization and exists to some limited degree even in failed states. It will never go away completely. The warlord’s clan is supported in various ways. Rulers will always provide some kind of tangible benefit to their loyalists. Simply to maintain a power base. No altruism required. Believing this was a modern invention is silly.
But the universality at current levels certainly will not persist. It will just revert to the standard more fractionated transaction for loyalty limited systems that have always existed.
1. The welfare state is failing because of the economic pursued over the last 45 years. It was set up based on two things: full employment and national insurance contributions
In 1976 after a few years of serious inflation and labour disputes, full employment was abandoned on the instructions of the IMF. In 1979 as soon as the Tories came to power they broke the link between contributions and welfare payments. They did this because they knew how many people they were planning to make unemployed
They then left millions of people and scores of towns to rot on social security payments funded by the North Sea oil money. It was a catastrophic waste of money and people and it produced extremely serious social problems which the Tories and their press then vilified as being solely the fault of those involved.
"Welfare to work" policies were introduced in the early 90s as single mothers and other people were castigated as the Lawson boom came to an end and interest rates went up. The sick thing about this was that there simply wasn't enough work for all those deemed "scroungers". And there still isn't
2. New Labour came in and instead of pursuing full employment, they embarked on mass immigration which made the labour market situation worse and they allowed the millions of migrants to claim benefits as well. This produced huge resentment. They also decided to prop up low wage employers by paying out tax credits rather than raising wages.
By the time the Tories returned to power, a very visible badly behaved underclass had developed and Osbourne was able to pin much of the anger which erupted after the banking crash on them. The spivs in the City were saved to the tune of a trillion pounds while an unemployed man with a spare bedroom was vilified.
Now Tory party aligned journalists like Ms Perry feel extreme resentment that old people get pensions which she doesn't think she will. It isn't actually a question of demographics, it's a question of the economic model and how we chose to share out the national income
I am very concerned that Ms Perry isn't prepared to think rationally about all this
@@vayu1302 The results were entirely forseeable once we stopped pursuing Full Employment and I am quite sure the economic Right and their friends in the press knew that. Is it really a coincidence that drugs became widely available in deindustrialised areas? Who launders all the money?
So, I don't know if you're aware of this, but Emmanuel Macron recently (this week, as I'm writing) made a speech in which he acknowledged the issue of falling birthrates in France (even though France still has among the highest birthrates in the developed world, it has recently dipped below replacement level). He concluded that the French should get the birthrate back on track.
First observation : seeing the reaction of many people on the internet was honestly quite astonishing. Many seem to take it as a personal attack to suggest that - on the whole - families should make at least a couple of children. The fact that Macron used the phrase "rearming the birthrate" certainly didn't help the anti-militarist fringes of the population to agree to his point. I have never felt as much of a "doomer" as now witnessing people proudly proclaiming they will strive to never have children - both to "own the right" and because they hate their country and their people.
Second observation : the big question is still up in the air. What measures will be put in place to encourage couples to have children? To be honest, I fear the current liberal government will at best apply common liberal solutions - giving more monetary incentives - while completely disregarding all the other contributing factors that push people to have children, or vice-versa. This is especially likely in France as anti-national, anti-moralist & libertarian discourse is especially strong in this country (although I guess the far right is also gaining a lot of traction at the same time). In particular, I wonder if any emphasis will be placed on couples getting together in the first place, since France, like other western nations, is currently witnessing a steep rise in singleness.
Third observation : in terms of public discourse, it appears especially inappropriate to come at the issue of birthrates from a partisan perspective (which Macron's speech did). Left-wingers treat the speech as borderline fascistic, which could in fact disincentivize them from having children as a political statement - this might be good news for the Right in 50 years, but it won't be for the nation. Obviously this is while assuming that the current spat will actually have an effect, rather than people only making memes for a couple of days and then moving on to the next issue. I would also like to point out that coming at the issue as Macron did is likely to disguise a real problem as a politicking tactic - if this issue is to be brought to the public spotlight, I believe it should come from the civil society, rather than politicians.
Final observation : as a former lefty on the path to moving further towards conservatism, I observe a teething issue with left-wingers, which is that they seem to dislike pushing their reasoning to its logical conclusion. I blame years of anti "slippery slope fallacy" propaganda, as well as intellectual discordance : refusing to see that things which sound or feel good in the short term will most likely lead to an ultimately bad outcome.
Welfare will exist, but the government will have to choose which direction it goes. I think if anything they'll need to shift the money down instead of up. If people want old people welfare and they're between 20 and 30, have 3 to 5 kids. That would singlehandedly solve the problem.
Ms Perry wrote a really spiteful tweet last year in which she mocked "boomers" for saying that they'd paid into the system all their working lives. Apparently this didn't matter because "the Treasury coffers are empty"
Well, who emptied it Ms Perry? They weren't empty when Britain, America, the EU and Japan found 27 trillion to bail out their financial systems i.e the owners of those financial systems. They weren't empty when they found £500bn for COVID. They aren't empty for the vast transfers of wealth to private pockets that are outsourcing fees, PFI repayments, tax credits, housing benefit etc etc
But anyway, this is ultimately an emotional issue. If one resents others getting something they don't think they will we should probably plan ahead for the tent cities
Why isn't this more widely understood?
Nobody wants to think about it
@@zeno2501 Happy to think about it. Just not happy to have reductive arguments presented to me by people with an axe to grind
The government will never eliminate the State Pension. The future of the UK will be...
1/ Continue state borrowing for as long as sustainable.
2/ Raise taxes to whatever the population will accept (which won't be much more - we aren't Scandinavia).
3/ In the end, be forced to debase the currency.
The UK Government's approach is actually more short-termist than you describe. The main reason for open borders is to increase GDP, which is the measure by which international lenders judge the viability of loans. As you mentioned, immigrants are net consumers of taxes, which is actually going to make the situation even worse.
And that's without the human cost of low wages, high unemployment and unaffordable housing.
We are in a death spiral and there really is no solution other than what politicians currently consider to be the unthinkable.
The issue is that it's not a money problem. At the end of the day the issue is a labor problem. It won't matter what the government does with the currency when there's not enough people to do all the work.
@@rathelmmc3194You're right, it's ultimately a productivity issue, but I didn't want to get into that much detail in TH-cam comments. Few would read it and fewer still would understand it.
@@ChefEarthenware That's fair. In easy words, the demographic dividend has already been paid to the Boomers and everyone else that follows is going to be bagholders. The only way out is to feed more people into the bottom of the pyramid.
About right.
We've been borrowing like there's no tomorrow for the last 30 years. Borrowing money provides a very nice earner to the financial class who get paid interest on the bonds. We actually allow banks to create money and then lend it to the government.
Our national debt doubled in 2008 because we bailed out banks which were insolvent. That crash cost us £3 trillion according to the bank of England's own figures
We have ALREADY debased the currency to pay for that. £885 bn in QE has been printed and gifted to the hedge fund boys.
And STILL they are allowed to stow their profits in the tax havens. It's truly grotesque that "social conservatives" who claim to believe in "personal responsibility", "law and order" and "sound money" can ignore this
i can barely afford a dog. forget having kids. and glad i never did. not in this corrupt demented world.
What I miss with these people are for them to come up with an alternative that is more attractive than life in Eastern Germany in 1980?
Blaming 'the welfare state' for low birth rates might be credible, if industrialized states like China and other Asian countries did not have low birth rates without a meaningful welfare state. I think it has more to do with industrialization itself, urbanization, the education of women, and modern culture which values putting off childbirth to have a career.
Probably more true, but we have to do something and what we can do is reduce the old age welfare programs. Give people back some money or better yet move that money down into the people who have children.
This is wrong because China also has welfare...they also have a pension system that is buckling under the weight of the population crisis. It wouldn't have taken much research to figure that out.
The more educated/career driven women are, the less children they have, and Feminism pushes that heavily
Yep none of the arguments make sense - it's just another line from Tory think tanks like the Centre for Social Justice. Have you ever noticed how they always talk about how they've raised the tax allowance for the poorest people and then in the next publication they're saying poorer people take more out of the state than they contribute?! ; )
You know how the Left have an up is down, blacks is white reaction to having their ideological BS pointed out? The same applies to the Tories when it comes to money
@@asecmimosas4536 It doesn't have welfare at all. It's an ultra capitalist society and not actually a nice one to live in contrary to all the hype
At the end of the day it's a choice how we choose to share things out. But Britain is kind of famous now for being a country where no one cares about the elderly and I am quite sure some very unpleasant things are not too far away
Louise, you are on the right path as far as robots go, but just think of it in the inverse.
It will be the robots programmed and designed to do specific types of labor - while looked after mostly by men - and much of the women's jobs will be replaced by A.I, freeing them up to look after the children. It will also prove really important for particularly youngish men to be involved in children's education and physical activity, so that the female dominated cradle to graduation influence doesn't recreate much of the problems that persist in society today (i.e. a woman cannot teach a boy how to be a man, because she isn't one, etc). 😌
"In other words, capitalistic relations combined with individualism knocks away the basis of high fertility, and if this is combined with a political and legal security so that one does not have to protect oneself with a layer of cousin, the sensible strategy is to have a few children and to educate them well."--Alan Macfarlane, 'The Invention of the Modern World" ch 8.
An interesting book on the rise of modernity in mid-20th century (earlier for England). The ending of mortality as a population control through sanitation, medical care, interventions in infant mortality and the shift to fertility controls through birth control, abortion, but also late marriage, which was how population was limited in mid-19th century England.
It appears modernity has run its course as to the individual creating themselves from the four spheres of social, ideolgical/religious, economic and political. And people are yearning for the ancien regime of the peasantry. Otherwise, how do you enforce family care of elderly without the obligations to the household, tribe, etc.
It appears the mid-20th century was an inflection point in human history. But will women return to subservience to the family under the protection, and control, of the head of household? Children in the modern world are a cost and not an asset to working the farm and have no enforceable obligation to their parents.
THATS MISOGYNY! HOW DARE YOU!
We don't actually know why people are having less kids. People will choose their own reason based on their own personal hobby horse.
Yes we do, women chasing careers then leaving it too late, hypergamy ie women wanting higher status men when they aint high status women, divorce laws stopping men from marrying, high divorce rate, women getting custody which puts men off, anti-natalism.. its mainly Feminism, which has destroyed the family unit@@TheOneAndOnly-o7c
Well, this will greatly affect women who live longer (they also save less). All the women following the strong and independent mantra will have to deal with the consequences as they age. Men as well, but men being alone is nothing new historically. The number of women that will have no family as they age will be unprecedented.
I predicted years back that in 10-20 years there was going to be an "empty womb generation" of (mostly millenial) women who are desperately alone and massively regret it, and warn the next generations
Next 20 years as women become more educated and flash with cash, they will price themselves out of the market, as less men become educated and flash with cash, most women are hypergamous they date up not down so maybe 40% will be single and childless. Society will dwindle because low birth rate.
As a woman who is financially independent the consequences are good. I’ve a take home income in retirement slightly higher than my full time salary. With a network of extended family and friends women usually do better in old age than men. Men being alone is worse news, as men’s social networks and support is twice as likely statistically to come from his wife than a woman’s from her husband. Thus widowers do significantly worse than widows
Fortunately I'm a single female.multi-millionnaire. Don't worry, I won't be a burden on the state.
@advocate1563 Of course, there are outliers (most people aren't millionaires). I don't see how that changes my point. You may be fine, but what works for a minority does not mean it will work for the majority.
Hope not. Every country needs a safety net
except the more of a welfare state it is, the worse off people are
the worst part is, money is an abstract thing. it isn't real. we just made it up.
❤🔥❤🔥
I swear, now you're just being cruel.
Who says that children will be there for there aging parents.
Yes quite right. One can't expect ones offspring to take care one.
Well indeed. British people are quietly reviled for the almost total lack of interest that they take in their elderly relatives. Talk in particular to non-Western people. They're disgusted by it and they're quite right to be
@@Suchev-n3h Actually in most cultures all around the world it is indeed expected
An adult would have to quit their job to be an unpaid full time care provider. How do you expect regular folks to be able to do that when most married couples still need 2 full time incomes just to support their minor aged children?
Children are much less reliable to become care takers of their parents in current society because they are too entitled. Having children these days is a losing proposition financially with little reward. Nobody thinks about the impact of state economics when deciding to have children. People have children because it has been ingrained by our parents and general society that is what me must do..
Some kids have no choice to be to take care of their parents but yes in general we have become so extremely selfish at looking after our elderly that we are now rather famous for it
Eventually It Runs Out Of Other People's Money
The welfare state was created on the expectation of an ever increasing body of slaves (young workers). And the illusion held up for 20 of the post war years as the Boomer generation grew. Then the anomaly of increasing marriage/children that started in the 1920s, but peaked in 1980 (in the US) started reverting to the 1910 norm in 2000 but kept going until in 2022, 25% of those born in 1982 have never married by age 40. Compared to 6% of those born in 1940 and 16% of those born in 1870.
Feminism is Communism in a dress
Like when the banks blew themselves up and passed the consequences to everyone else? £3 trillion that cost us
Like how the British state maintains a string of tax havens into which hundred of billions are stowed?
Like when the Tories asset stripped the country selling off utilities built up by the British public over decades?
Like when local services are outsourced to Capita and Serco which just so happen to be connected to the Tory party?
Like when tax credits and housing benefit are used to provide a handy cushion for low wage employers and private landlords?
I dread to imagine what the UK will be like in the coming decades, the children of today do not appear to have a bright future ahead of the them.
No they're going to see everyone at each others' throats while the "feudal lords" are in their safe rooms
Well, can't feed 'em don't breed 'em. People will continue to not have kids as houses are not a place to live, but a line to go up.
That’s a statement against an aging western world, rather than ‘the welfare state’ specifically? Even more so the British welfare state.
Working classes have never been deterred by “financial incentives” to have children - even after contraception introduction (although impacted by religion, but you could then make a case for higher immigration to continue that). Even more so to think about what the welfare state looks like when their future child is 70+ years old.
To what extent is Japan’s declining birth rates due to their welfare state? Particularly the impact of potential parents consuming the future welfare state and pension provision of their unborn 60 year old child?
The NHS COULD become an impoverished service through decades of mismanagement - not because of an aging population.
Even Beveridge, who designed the British welfare state as we know it knew all of this, beyond his initial report, in future publications. It’s only through mismanagement that future problems will occur.
(Louis, UK, 32 - pending state pension 😂)
Bevan?
the more educated women are, the less children there are, its women who control reproduction, all these problems arise from womens choices
Ms Perry has become rather fixated on pensions and welfare since she grew tired of the Left and began to align herself with the Spectator and CSJ. But it's good because it alerts us to how the Establishment are going to play the forthcoming economic turmoil. They will even go so far as to turn families against each other while protecting their donors to the very end
Older people find themselves vilified by the Left for voting for Brexit on the one hand and by the New Right for having pensions on the other. Not a nice pincer to be in
I agree with you on a lot but not this. Believe it or not politicians are people, a lot of them are advanced in age or of course have family members who are.
However, even the most sinister politican depends on votes to keep their own job and cutting help to pensioners to nothing is a sure way to ensure they lose their seat.
I do agree with NHS to an extent although I would argue it is more so the mismanagement of the NHS and the high dependency on locum staff than any money invested into it that is the issue.
Ms Perry has written / twitted a lot about pensioners because she feels hard done by in the London housing market - a situation which was produced by the economic interests behind the Spectator magazine and Conservative party not some old person in a humdrum town
It's just another sign that the Tory way of doing politics is to always incite resentment between different sectors of society. Yes we know the Left does that too but there is something truly perverse about the "party of family values" trying to set grandchildren against grandparents in this way
Britain's economic model is broken and has been for a long time. The country is run by a big business oligarchy and anyone who wants to try to change that would face massive capital flight. It is going to get very nasty
@@OnlineEnglish-wl5rp no doubt they are going towards the German model of no one owning their homes.
@@niamh18 Aye but that's based on low rents and a far stronger social wheel!
There just isn't the money for it.
Of course there is. There's never been more wealth. People don't understand for example how the national debt is private saving for extremely wealthy interests. We actually pay them a very nice earner on those bonds and that system in turn props up all their fictitious paper wealth which imploded in 2008
@user-rk9it9hz6g One thing I will say about the welfare state is: I have a conspiracy theory about child benefit. Why did they persist paying it to new mothers with insufficient national insurance contributions?
Given that they wanted to expand the immigrant population particularly Muslims, that's one reason. But I reckon they also realised by the 80s / 90s that the problem of a certain kind of woman having kids helped delegitimise the system
I might be wrong in seeing intentionality but it certainly doesn't hurt the resentment agenda
Why do women lay on their backs to give birth? It seems counterintuitive.
It is.
Women lay on their backs, get ran through, then dont give birth nowadays
@@ankra12 But it doesn't have to be this way. I had two home births in a squatting position.
@@vanessat9309 You can choose that at hospital as well. Many different options beside laying on back.
I sincerely hope the welfare state is over
Survival of the fittest.
Does that include the corporate welfare state which costs the country far more?
People seem to forget what happened to people when it didn't exist. When the speculators blew up the economy in 1929 there was mass unemployment which got so bad there were hunger marches. When the Boar war was on, they weren't able to fill the army because so many working class young men were so unfit due to malnutrition
@@ankra12 Oh right and when the "fittest" rig everything in their favour what do the Libertarians say then? When Spiro Latsis ensured he got his mal investments bailed out by the Greek state while the Greek health service collapsed? Nothing. Because it's a fake ideology designed only to hack away at the socially useful parts of the State
Medical science will soon allow people to be produced artificially. I'm not saying this should happen, but it almost certainly will happen eventually. This makes the individual choice not to reproduce irrelevant to public policy. Rather than leaving a population's makeup to the arbitrary decisions of ordinary citizens, governments could simply calculate how many persons are demographically needed and then grow them (or stop growing them) to suit any given societal circumstances.
"soon"
Humans have existed for roughly 100,000 years in their modern form, so we're talking about changes that will transpire in the blink of an eye, relatively speaking. Human trials of artificial wombs are presently under legal consideration in the US, and scientists have already succeeded in gestating other animals.@@thel1355
They will need to be cared for until they grow up, though
Soon?
Also, this does not solve the problem our generation faces. Those 'artifically' created children do not exist yet. It takes 20 years+ for a child to even start becoming economically productive. Also, who is going to be looking after these children? And why will said children look after you?
True, but the nuclear family model is already collapsing (if not collapsed) with no sign of a rebound, and so fewer and fewer children in western nations will be raised in conventional families as it is. Across the first world, family formation is trending downward massively. Example from pew research: "In 1970, nearly 70% of American adults ages 25 to 49 were living with a spouse and at least one child. As of 2021 - the most recent year for which they have data - that's fallen to 37%." It may not be something to celebrate, but it seems inevitable that the entire family group model will go the way of the dodo--for mere lack of participants, if for no other reason. Increasingly, people simply don't live that way any more. Maybe they should, but that's another subject.@@MA-gu2up
Giving women effective birth control and a disposable income means that they sleep around up until their 30s and then try to form a long-term relationship. However, as they have burnt up their oxytocin and have slept with too many men they are then both psychologically and hormonally limited in their ability to form a long-term relationship. The ability to create stable families is then compromised.
Also men don’t want that stinking old muff near them the amount of dna that passed through it.
Women control reproduction and they fecked it all up
The welfare state as you put it has many functions if I understand you right. As far as children or marage you will have to look at society. It would be nice if things where equil. But fertility rates dropping year over year and STDs with hypergomy and monkey branching leading to more infertility. Entitlement culture and the left behind. Population