You are exactly not answering the question though.
It is easy to complain about energy dependence, struggles with immigration/integration and precarious national budgets, but the conditions for those weren't caused by recent decision in my view (instead, namely, lack of local oil/gas, unstable north africa/middle east and bad demographics with too many old people).
All those problems are really costly and difficult to solve. Sure, the EU could've tried a super-scale Messmer plan 20 years ago, and could then maybe rival current renewable power with nuclear output, but this would have been orders of magnitude more costly.
Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).
It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).
I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum.
If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.
>You are exactly not answering the question though.
WHich question did I not answer?
>weren't caused by recent decision in my view
No, but they could admit it was a fuckup of the political class, and tell us how they're planning to fix it, instead of gaslighting us for complaining about it and doing more mistake that further damage our economy. We can't stop the music chair song from playing just yet. Just one more round I promise.
How about the recent EU Mercosur trade deal? They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports. This is a totally new strategic blunder, they can't keep blaming the past anymore.
>Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).
This is disproven and untrue but has been repeated so many time it became the poster child argument of pro-illegal immigration EU propaganda. That open borders will magically save our economy. It didn't. Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.
Regarding Japan's economy, is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did, it got fucked starting from 1985 when the US forced them to sign the Plaza Accord in order to counter their massive trade deficit US had with Japan(and other powerful export economies), which increased the value of the Yen making Japanese imports suddenly expensive and uncompetitive. Then to combat this, the Japan central bank fucked up themselves by printing money like crazy with ultra low interest rates which instead of stabilizing the exports, caused a massive speculative real estate and golf membership(yes that's true) bubble which imploded in 1990, dealing the final blow to their economic growth since they ran out of levers to pull other than suppressing their labor into a losing race to the bottom with other low wage manufacturing economies of Asia. I recommend you read more on the Plaza Accord, it's pretty eye opening.
Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.
Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this? No. But they have the nerve to blame us for not having kids in a stagnating economy with crazy real-estate prices then gaslight us that salvation lies in illegal immigration instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.
>It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).
Good point. If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?
>I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum. If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.
yeah, the environment is important, but all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it. Great success. And even Europeans will stop caring about the environment when they won't be able to have a job, or afford to pay rent or heating anymore.
The "what policies should a perfect government have enacted instead, with hindsight". But your last post adds a lot on that front.
> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.
Hard disagree on this. Just consider two poster children for continuous positive economical growth: Poland and Vietnam. Did that economic outlook effect positive population growth? Clearly no (for both cases, and it's not even close).
My personal view: Easy access to contraceptives (people want to fuck more than raise children), and realignment of economical incentives: Children are no longer the default retirement plan (nor are they needed by the parents themselves as cheap workforce).
Both of those factors are icky to counteract for a modern democracy.
> If you already have high youth unemployment, why do you need to import illegal migrants? Just to lower their bargaining power further?
No, because those did not occur synchronously. The imported, lower-skill workforce was most needed earlier (pre 2000s), with the big youth unemployment problems mostly occuring later (2000s and after).
Immigration rates are also much easier to control than local birth rate, and, most importantly, dont suffer from a two-decade lag.
Restricting foreign workers would have most certainly been a big economic hit (this is somewaht obvious; because foreign workers are mostly raised and educated for free), especially for countries like Germany, even with perfectly boosting population growth at the perfect times to compensate.
> Case in point, Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.
Poland has been playing catchup inside a huge, wealthy, low-barrier market. Would their growth have been comparable if wages had started at a German level in 1990? IMO clearly not.
> all economic sacrifices EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked except now we made ourselves poorer for it
Two big problems with that view.
First: The planet "getting fucked" is not binary. If you want to limit warming to a somewhat reasonable degree (and the worst-case timelines are not reasonable), then action has to be taken at some point, and pretty obviously the biggest culprits need to get the ball rolling, or no one is ever gonna do anything.
Second: The EU has already fucked the planet much harder than any developing nation, China included, despite being not even half the population of India or China. You could make a case that the US is slightly worse, but thats completely irrelevant; the relative moral net-obligation on the EU to act is clearly pretty large already for a long time now, and a few outliers (US, oil states) being even worse does not absolve the Europeans from anything.
Lastly, those efforts to combat climate change clearly had already huge global effects. Or do you honestly think that massive Chinese buildout of solar/wind power would have happened without those technologies getting developed, refined and proven in Europe over the last decades?
I don't necessarily disagree with your outlook completely: I think a bunch of things could have been done better, especially refugee handling, and possibly immigration vs economy tradeoffs. But still: a lot of those decisions had to be made without hindsight, and I don't think expecting much better than what we got is reasonable.
You also have to consider that lots of those decisions were made in a different time (with different values/outlooks): It was much harder to let refugees become homeless, executed or starved when a lot of Europeans saw thair own past actions (=> colonialism) as a big driver for those crises (and I'd argue that this only really changed, somewhat justifiably, post Arab spring).
pick policies with the unfair benefit of hindsight (while staying somewhat democratically acceptable), what would a "perfect" government have done differently in the last twenty years
So, they'd have to be things that were democratically acceptable at the time.
For example: Germany in that period was never no way going to accept nuclear power. Their leadership regrets it in hindsight, but at the time, forcing it on the people would have been undemocratic.
> They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports.
20 years ago the biggest problem with the EU's farming system was massive overproduction.
Like, "newsworthy scandal" levels of overproduction.
> Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.
Poland mainly missed out on the downside of the global financial crisis, rather than being special otherwise. Few percent difference between Poland, Germany, Japan, Europe collectively, and the USA all around the same level.
> is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did
Europe did not in fact import millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare. This would have been a self-evidently stupid thing to do, which is why that is not what happened.
Europe did take around two million asylum seekers in total, before the pandemic. Important thing about asylum: they get sent back as soon as their homes stop being warzones, or sooner if they're deemed to have been taking the piss. Right now there's about 4 million Ukrainians, who would probably count as "second world" given the etymology; do you want to count them as "uneducated"? I wouldn't. But then, I have Ukrainian neighbours.
Economic migrants, who are important for the economy, are a bigger group. Mixing up asylum seekers and economic migrants because they're both "migrants" is as much of an error as declaring that all Canadians and Mexicans are "Americans" because they're from the continent of America.
> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.
If this were so, even royal families would not have had any kids before 1850, there certainly wouldn't be a massive population boom in e.g. India where they've only recently connected (almost) everyone to the electricity grid.
> Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this?
I was born in 1983. I remember being warned of overpopulation, there was literally zero public concern about a demographic crisis, and even in the last few years people are mostly warning this will affect us by the time I reach pension age.
I also remember ongoing press campaigns in the UK demonising single mothers.
> instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.
That's a new one.
You think there's a law banning people from criticising the lack of support for families? Have you seen, like, any election campaign ever? One reliable theme throughout, no matter how effective the policy would be if examined closely, is at least one party saying they support families.
> EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it.
China's also going green. India… isn't, but the pain point hits them much sooner than we expect it to hit us, so they probably will. Like, it becomes reliably lethal to work in parts of India before it's expected to make heatstroke deaths more than a passing headline in Europe.
The US was going green, then Trump happened. He's against renewables and doesn't believe in climate change, while also wanting to invade Greenland for reasons that only make sense if one or both of those are good bets; he insists on keeping coal plants open when the owners of those plants don't want that because gas is cheaper; he's lying a lot in general, but specifically by saying China doesn't use the renewables they're exporting. He's all over the place, wildly incoherent, and is mad enough he could lead to WW3 where none of this matters anyway (P(WW3 this year due to him)~=0.05).
It is easy to complain about energy dependence, struggles with immigration/integration and precarious national budgets, but the conditions for those weren't caused by recent decision in my view (instead, namely, lack of local oil/gas, unstable north africa/middle east and bad demographics with too many old people).
All those problems are really costly and difficult to solve. Sure, the EU could've tried a super-scale Messmer plan 20 years ago, and could then maybe rival current renewable power with nuclear output, but this would have been orders of magnitude more costly.
Hard cutting immigration, Japan style, would probably have led to comparable economic stagnation from insufficient workforce (see post 1990 Japan).
It is unclear to me if averting demographic change would've even been feasible at all, and even if it was, it would have come with a plethora of undesirable side-effects (e.g. insanely high youth unemployment).
I personally think that environmental policies are the absolute bare minimum. If you want to prevent worst-case global climate effects (say, +4°C global average temperature rise within the century) then what we are doing right now is not even enough.