Europe is dying on its feet, but mass immigration is not the answer
by David Kurten, TCW:
While the EU flounders from crisis to crisis, whether it is to do with Greek debt or rising crime in Germany and Sweden, Europe as a whole is facing a problem that attracts much less attention. It is dying on its feet, as an even cursory glance at its current demographic profile tells you.
Until the mid-twentieth century the demographics of most European countries were like many African countries today: a pyramid. The largest age group was the newly-born, with successively fewer people in each year group through to the most elderly. But around 1960, something unprecedented happened in Britain: the birth rate plummeted – so much so that Britain’s demographic profile today looks more like a tower. Today there are roughly the same number of people in each year group from 0 to 55.
In other European countries the collapsing birth rate is even more dramatic. There are far fewer children than there are middle-aged people, with the result that the native population is declining with increasing rapidity. Germany’s demographic profile, for example, looks more like a diamond.
An ever increasing ageing population means far greater demands for health and social care in the future. It needs many more young people to become doctors, nurses and carers if the current travails of our health system are not to get a whole lot worse.
If politicians are open about the unsustainability of this problem, they are far less so when it comes to pensions, most of which operate on the basis that you pay in for 40 years, then when you retire younger people who are still working take over the paying out. This is essentially a classic Ponzi scheme, which works when there are about 20 working people for every pensioner. No longer. Today there are fewer than 3 working people per pensioner and the ratio is reducing fast.
Bean counters and technocrats have known about this for years. Their solution has been to encourage rapid, mass immigration to bulk up the bottom of Europe’s collapsing demographic diamonds and to turn them back into pyramids.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
