Quote:
Originally Posted by Cowboy89
I'm sure our society will be quite a fine place to live in with offspring born to parents for financial planning purposes.
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I'm no anthropologist, but I think "financial planning" (in the form of 'let's have as many children as possible to share the work and look after us when we're old') was a motivation for people to have children pretty much since people started having children. It still is in many places. Not that I necessarily agree with tax-breaks for child bearing, but still.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cowboy89
What I meant when I used the term hedonism in Europe was rather a word to describe treating life as an experience soley for one's own personal gratification. Combine millions of people doing exactly that and you get low productivity, low birth rates, state envolvement in every facet of life ensuring that people do the least amount of bothersome work as possible, and societal decline. In other words as a society they're doing it to themselves.
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"treating life as an experience soley for one's own personal gratification"? What's that mean? That they only care about themselves, or that they don't do anything for supernatural purposes?
Northern Europe/Scandinavia are the healthiest, wealthiest, best-educated, longest-lived and most peaceful societies in the world. They wouldn't be there if they were all hopelessly selfish.