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

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.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-gdp-growth?tab=lin...

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).