You could argue against it.

No, you’re right, rolling one’s eyes is a much better response.

All over the world, including the USA, economic growth leads to more education. All over the world more education, particularly of women, leads to lower fertility.

In rough terms current global fertility seems to be maximized at about the $5,000 per captia GDP and an eighth grade education for women.

The future may be different but from a strictly evolutionary point of view it doesn’t seem to pay to be too rich or too well educated.

Yep! But, guess what – the waste factor’s even worse in big organizations.

In pre-Gerstner IBM, the products of tens of thousands of people would vanish, and they would take thousands or tens of thousands of people to do what outside companies took 100 to do.

> yes, it does produce a lot of GDP, but too much of it is waste.

Production without waste is impossible. Because people make mistakes. And people run our companies, governments, and organizations.

The important thing is that you got paid and probably had a little fun, as hard as it was when the impending ill fates became apparent.

Apropos of the comment left by Glen Whitman of Agoraphilia below[1], I link to Tyler Cowen’s entry over at Crooked Timber’s recent symposium on Social Democracy, er The Primacy of Politics.

In the course of eulogizing the European Social Model, Ty…

Another angle:

Why Europe chooses extinction by Spengler:

Demographics is destiny. Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do. … In 200 years, French and German will be spoken exclusively in hell. …

Little enough has been said about the “how” but almost nothing about the “why” of Europe’s demographic suicide. Suicidal behavior is common among (for example) stone-age tribes who have encountered the modern world. One can extend this example to Tamil or Arab suicide bombers … . Here I draw on the German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), an existentialist of sorts. …

All religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man’s anxiety in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting, “I can’t hear you!”). The pagans of old faced death with the confidence that their race would continue. But tribes and nations anticipate their own extinction just as individuals anticipate their own death, he added: “The love of the nations for their own nationhood is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death.” Each nation, he wrote, knows that some day other peoples will occupy their lands, and their language and culture will be interred in dusty books.

The early Christian Church encountered a great extinction of peoples and their cultures through the rise and fall of the Alexandrine and Roman empires. … As nations faced extinction, individuals within these nations came face to face with their own mortality. Christianity offered an answer: the Church called individuals out of the nations and offered them salvation in the form of a life beyond the grave. … Christianity made possible the assimilation of thousands of doomed tribes into what became European nations. … By providing the pagans with a humanized God (and a humanized mother of God and a host of saints), Christianity allowed the pagans to continue to worship their own image.

Yet Christianity’s weakness, Rosenzweig added, lay in the devil’s bargain it made with the old paganism. … The result, wrote Rosenzweig, is that Christians “are forever torn between Jesus and [the medieval pagan hero] Siegfried”.

… For today’s Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter. … They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave. They have no passions except hatred born of envy. They hate America, a new kind of universality that succeeded where the old Christian empire failed. They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to Europe’s morbid temporality. They will pass out of history unmourned even by themselves.

Is the assumption made that the technocrats in the government would always be able to make the necessary adjustments within the confines of the model keep the model working sufficiently well? Would adjustments that alter the fundamental assumptions of the model like privatization be acceptable under the model? Would any adjustment that diminished the power of the technocrats be realistic?

Are you sure about the Netherlands’ female employment rate? 2005 OECD figures indicate that they are only two percentage points ahead of the US female population (74% v 72%), and given the traditionally very high support in the Netherlands for part-time female work, I would strongly suspect that a higher and possibly even far higher percentage of American women (and American mothers, in particular) are in full-time employment.