Kurzgesagt is a YouTube channel that often puts out short, informative videos on physics, astronomy, and biology. But whenever they post a video about a societal issue, it becomes evident that they suffer from the same gaping knowledge hole as most other academics. They seem to know nothing about Praxeology and Austrian Economics. This makes them miss the forest for the trees.
In their video about Germany's demographic crisis, they make the following claim in the first few minutes:
"The demographic collapse tearing up the generational contract may soon destroy one of Germany's greatest achievements — its welfare state."
They then explain that young Germans are having fewer children than their parents and grandparents, and that this will lead to a collapse of the pension system and the welfare state. The proposed solutions involve some combination of incentivizing higher birth rates and increasing skilled immigration. They do admit it's a slow-moving crisis that politicians have long been aware of but have been reluctant to address, largely because the largest voting bloc, older Germans, would bear the cost of any reform.
But they never ask the one question that matters: why are birth rates declining in the first place?
The welfare state they praise at the beginning of the video IS THE CAUSE of the declining birth rates.
People vote for what they believe is good for them personally. Politicians know this and deliberately make promises they can't keep, pushing the costs onto the next generation through money printing and national debt.
Before big welfare states, families had to support themselves. They were incentivized to work hard and produce children who would one day support them in old age. When the state stepped in and promised to replace that function through taxation, the incentive evaporated. This is not an empirical observation, but a logical consequence of how incentives work.
Nordic birth rates are also falling. Sweden's has dropped sharply in recent years, and Sweden has already partially reformed its pension system away from pure pay-as-you-go, precisely because the structure was unsustainable. The direction of travel is the same everywhere the state has made this promise.
When the supposedly oppressive patriarch “the father” was replaced by the actually oppressive state, the incentives shifted in every direction. The higher tax burden forced wives into the workforce and into the tax base, making larger families harder to afford. The more families struggled financially, the more they voted for government handouts, leading to even higher taxes. Add to this the hidden tax of inflation, which governments were forced to rely on after another one of their own bad decisions, abandoning the gold standard.
In truth, the welfare state was always a scam. An empty promise from politicians with one purpose: to turn their subjects into dependent, loyal voting cattle.
All of these effects are entirely predictable through deductive reasoning from first principles. Most academics believe empiricism is the only valid tool for understanding the social world. It is not. Just as mathematics and logic are a priori sciences, so too is economics. You do not need a dataset to understand that removing an incentive reduces the behavior it was incentivizing. No government-funded university will teach this, because academics are as reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them as anyone else.
The problem is not that people are having fewer children. The problem is the institutionalized system of retarded incentives that the state has spent a century constructing for its own benefit.
Read Rothbard,
@Kurz_Gesagt!
The German population is rapidly aging and facing a growing imbalance between the number of workers and retirees. Is there a way to avoid the demographic collapse and if so, how? Watch our full video to find out:
kgs.link/Germany