- cross-posted to:
- childfree@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- childfree@lemmy.world
Three more EU member states — including the most populous, Germany — have joined the list of countries with “ultra-low” fertility rates, highlighting the extent of the region’s demographic challenges.
Official statistics show Germany’s birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN’s “ultra-low” threshold of 1.4 — characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse.
Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries — including Spain, Greece and Italy — that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman.
The fall in birth rates partially reflects the “postponement of parenthood until the 30s”, which involves a “higher likelihood that you will not have as many children as you would like because of the biological clock”, said Willem Adema, senior economist at the OECD.
Without immigration, low fertility rates mean a shrinking working-age population, adding pressures on public finances and limiting economic growth.
With young people reaching milestones, such as buying a house, later in life, the average age of EU women at childbirth rose to 31.1 years in 2023, a year later than a decade ago. The figure rises is 31.4 in Germany, and over 32 years in Spain, Italy and Ireland.
Austria reported a fall to 1.32 children per woman in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year. In Estonia, the rate hit 1.31 in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year.
Birth rates have fallen across Europe — even in countries such as Finland, Sweden and France, where family-friendly policies and greater gender equality had previously helped boost the number of babies.
In Finland, the birth rate was above the EU average until 2010, but it dropped to 1.26 in 2023, the lowest since the record began in 1776, according to official data.
France had the highest birth rate at 1.79 children per woman in 2022, but the national figures showed it dropped to 1.67 last year, the lowest on record.
Rates fell lower also in countries where they were already ultra-low, reaching 1.12 in Spain and 1.2 in Italy in 2023.
Guangyu Zhang, population affairs officer at the UN, called for governments “to put more family-friendly and gender-responsive policy measures in place”, saying this would enable women and men to have the multiple children that surveys claim they want.
Experts believe economic and political upheaval partly explain the trend of people having fewer children.
“You might have a job, but if you’re worried about losing it, or worried about inflation or worried about conflict in Ukraine, then you still might hesitate to have children,” said Ann Berrington, professor of demography at the University of Southampton.
Changes in social attitudes might also be at play.
Adema said: “The norms of what it means to be a good parent and how intensive you should participate in that are such that quite a few young people say: ‘Well, in addition to the fact that I don’t need children to be happy, it would also be a very difficult job for me to do, and I’m not sure that I can take that responsibility’.”
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Germany joins EU’s ‘ultra-low’ fertility club
… which, I believe, is a good thing. Fewer people means less strain on the environment, which improves life quality for all.
Without immigration, low fertility rates mean a shrinking working-age population, adding pressures on public finances and limiting economic growth.
In other words, a shrinking working-class population means fewer wage slaves, and that “hurts” the ruling class. (Note that their profits will still go up regardless, just a little bit less so.)
The labor market is a market - it is regulated by supply and demand. Less supply (workers) means higher price (wages).
The ruling class wants to make it look like “we’re headed for the disaster” if there’s fewer workers. Truth is, productivity has gone up in the last 60 years quite a lot, which means fewer people can do the same work. It’s just that we have to re-direct the labor from abstract enriching-the-few towards actually caring about the community, putting people in hospitals, schools, and communal infrastructure.
This would be true if immigration did not exist.
Why do they call it low fertility and not low reproduction? From the title, I thought this was about fertility.
It’s demographic terminology. Total Fertility rate (or TFR) simply refers to the number of births per woman in a given population.
Another factor not addressed is the erosion of Community while raising a child. You used to get support from everyone living around you. Now that the society in cities (where most people live) is fully atomised, people barely know their neighbour’s name, you are left alone. Even if you have money, you can only salvage this to an extent, by throwing money at the problem (maids, creches) but it’s not the same.
yes but, people in cities also used to live 3 families to a single room and start full time work at 10 years old…
I know in Spain the deposit (50k) for a two bedroom flat (250k) currently sits at about 30x the monthly median salary (1800€). People often save less than 10%.
People just can’t afford to have kids in these countries. When it takes you 25 years to save the deposit for a flat, there isn’t a need for many words to paint the story, the figures do all the work for you.
Other countries have different flavours of the cost of living crisis (e.g. needing to spend 20% of the salary for a commute into London, or people only being able to move out of their parents house when they’re in their thirties) but the end result is that it’s incredibly hard for people all across Europe.
My partner and I are both in the top 10% salary percentile for the UK and having a single kid would be a far greater burden than my parents had with three kids and a single salary. Not saying it’s not doable at our current salary, just saying the financial implications are drastically different to when people were having 2.3 kids on average.
I’m sure personal finances play a role but that’s not the whole picture. There’s all sorts of sociological factors involved (tertiary education, women entering the work force in mass, contraception, etc.) People just don’t want to have as many children as before, if any at all, and there’s almost no social pressure in the other direction. It’s a global trend.
BTW, I’m in Spain and your numbers are all over the place. Median monthly salary pre-tax is 2400€. Greater metropolitan areas are more expensive re housing, but salaries are also higher. Outside of those housing is dirt cheap. 75% of the population own their home, compared to 65% in the UK for instance.
Women entering the work force in mass
I don’t know why this isn’t pointed out a lot harder every time the topic comes up. It used to be normal for women to stop working when they had kids. Now for both sociological and economic reasons (it’s not just lost wages, it’s the resume gap), it’s become a rare phenomenon.
Even in countries with decent parental leave, it’s not enough to cover the harder years of parenting (0-3) and parents therefore have to shell out enormous sums to kindergartens which aren’t even open the whole year and whose workers are waaay underpaid and in shortage (which has caused quite a few child mistreatment scandals in my country).
There aren’t 50 ways around this issue. We have to provide strong incentives for people to have kids, which overcome the severe penalty that taking a couple years off work has on a career.
TL;DR socialize child care so having kids can be a burden-free choice
(I will also point out that urban design has an impact on the ability to raise children. When you live somewhere car-dependent, you’ll be driving your children everywhere, all the time and that is time consuming as all hell. My parents used to bike everywhere to get to their extracurriculars, but they did not even consider that a possibility for mine because the world had changed and the suburbs had become too dangerous for a child to roam alone on a bicycle)
Oh I meant post tax - median monthly pre tax is 1935€ according to this link which is based on data from INE, so as reliable as it gets. That’s about 1600€ net at a 17% tax rate, so maybe I’ve actually gone a bit over.
And yes, you can get a cheap house in a town 50 km away from Badajoz but then good luck breaking past 1000€ net salary.
Plus only 31% of people under 35 own their homes - most people covered by that 75% figure are not in birthing age anymore. In the UK, about 39% of under-35s own their home. Not that comparing any country to the UK is desirable in this aspect, as the housing crisis is particularly dire in the UK.
I’ve left out intentionally many things like generational wealth, remote working, etc because this is a comment on Lemmy, not an economy thesis. But my point still stands - it’s financially hard to have kids.
I agree with you on the other points though; it’s not the only factor.
My bad, I somehow thought that was the average.
Still, it’s apples and oranges. Minimum wage is 1323€, way over the 1k you mention, you’d pay no taxes on that, and you could buy a house for as low as 20k in a smaller sized city like Ponferrada.
I’m not saying it’s not hard, I’m just saying Spain’s housing situation is nothing like in other places like the Netherlands or Germany. Your example was just a bit disingenuous. You don’t buy a 250k flat if you’re on median wage. But you can buy one almost everywhere else. It’s kind of like comparing prices London and some village in Wales.
Spain is huge and extremely concentrated in a few places. The housing crisis in Madrid and Barcelona could easily be solved by decentralization and moving national institutions to other places.
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250k is not just Madrid and Barcelona. In fact, a friend just bought a 2 bedroom in Madrid for close to 400k and it’s not even within the M30.
250k is Oviedo, A Coruña, León, Zaragoza… I obviously don’t know the details for all the small cities but this is a pretty typical price. And of course, cities with higher prices also have higher wages and vice versa, but that’s rather obvious.
I feel you might be missing my point though. My intention wasn’t to go into the full detail of a specific country but rather to illustrate the general situation with an example.
My point is that different places in Europe have different flavours of a cost of living crisis. Be it expensive housing, be it mini jobs, be it needing to spend 5x the annual salary in a car, an unstable job market… There’s something in almost every country across Europe that makes it so that having a child isn’t an obvious, easy, natural thing to do, but rather an incredible burdensome financial commitment. This is happening to a generation already defined by financial distress, student debt, not being able to afford to live independently… So millennials are quite rightfully wary of large financial commitments.
(And again, this is just the financial angle, there’s of course more social/cultural reasons for people not to have kids; but in my opinion this is the biggest factor)
Flat in Oviedo, 11k euros. You’re welcome 🙄
I said Oviedo, not Trubia, a tiny village one train trip away 😂 are you from the area? My sister used to work in Trubia and communications are exceptionally poor. So yes, I’m aware you can find a flat in the middle of nowhere for that price. Also if you’re keen to invest the upwards of 40k that flat needs to bring it into the 21st century.
Oh, so you didn’t mean “flat in Oviedo”, starting flat since we are talking about young couples? You meant “large penthouse apartments in center of Oviedo, walking distance from everywhere, fully modernised, with all bells and whistles”. You should have said so.
Yeah, I agree with your point, it’s just that you chose a pretty bad example. I happen to know the northeast pretty well because I moved here and I could go into detail about Oviedo, León or Coruña but I really don’t care enough about it to argue my point any further. I hope you have a nice rest of your day :)
Minimum wage is 1323€, way over the 1k
Hahaha, I guess you are not used to the concept of “falso autonomo” and the fact that several companies pay for half a day while expecting you to work for the whole day.
It’s not legal, sure, but no one is challenging it and it’s the reality of a lot of Spaniards.
I am unfortunately. It’s also unfortunate that it happens everywhere else in Europe. Having lived in Germany the minijobs situation is kind of similar. I lived in London for a couple of years too and I remember shit like that happening with internships at the company I worked for at the time and friends working at bars BTW, if you know of cases like that, you should report them. There’s a government anonymous report system and they do check the reports.
But why would we revert falling birth rates? We’re still way too many people on earth.
“the economy” aka we need slaving people doing the work and “we are afraid of immigrants”
Because while low birth rates are a real thing that is happening (because of war, hunger, poverty, disease, climate change, and whatever other inequality), “overpopulation” is and always has been a (classist, ableist, racist) myth, to shift responsability away from capitalism, which is what causes war, hunger, poverty, disease, climate change, and whatever other inequality, for profit.
I disagree wholeheartedly. The fact that they are in some instances used by those with evil motivations does not negate their truth. And mostly the elite want more people rather than less people, as shown by nearly all dictators making abortion illegal and “inspiring” women to be broodmares.
Oh, hey everyone, this random on the internet disagrees with masses of research that I guarantee they didn’t even glance at, as well as observable reality (once and only if you’re willing to set your bias aside, that is), problem solved!
I don’t exactly see why you are so hostile, but I will not steep down to that level. I will instead explain my reasoning a bit more, maybe we can reach an interesting discussion yet.
I didn’t read all your articles, but I read two of those before, so you are kinda right in that regard.
My reasoning is not that it’s wrong in itself, mostly just unrealistic to achieve. I think it is easier for people to see that more people equal more destruction and stop having children than to change our system. Call me pessimistic, but I don’t think I will see a different system in my lifetime.
Second, reduced fertility is a normal process with increased living standards, due to the wish to enjoy life more by yourself instead of “limiting” yourself by having kids, especially multiple ones. Also, it’s not like people in the past had kids because they wanted to. It was mostly tradition, an economic investment and also maybe biggest thing: retirement planning. All of those are bad reasons for me. In my opinion, people should have children if they want to have them (and can care for them).
Third, as I wrote before, it’s not exactly a secret that people at the top need people below them to be at the top. You can extract more wealth from millions than from hundreds. With an oppressive system, the more persons there are, the better they oppress each other and you can extract wealth from them. That’s visible at nearly each point on our current worlds societies.
Fourth, and this is my biggest point: Earth is limited. There is a point where Earth can’t sustain more people. And while we are still away from that point, at one point it would be reached if the number of people grows continually. So at a certain point, the growth needs to stop either way. So why not stop slowly now and solve the systemic problems, instead of continuing on and running into the metaphoric problemwall headfirst and then wondering why it hurts so much?
And fifth: I’m not advocating for anything to “stop overpopulation”, because I think the problem solves itself if we don’t force people to have children (by making abortion illegal or the whole tradwife nonsense etc.). I’m just deciding not to have children myself and I don’t see a problem with falling birth rates that needs to be countered (yet).
Or to try and condense my political view in one question: why not try to limit suffering now by first solving our systemic problems instead of bringing even more children into our fucked up world.
Higher human development index and lower birth rates are correlated. So the opposite of war, hunger poverty and so forth.
Oh, so the people in your country aren’t avoiding having kids because it’s too expensive to either give up a salary, pay for childcare and bigger housing, or both? Or because they fear bringing a child in to a world being devastated by climate change and other inequality (which you oh so conveniently ignore)?🤔
But hey, don’t let reality get in the way of your bootlicking…
(E: also, thank you for demonstrating one of the classist ableist and racist aspects of the myth - the idea and implication that people who are having more kids are “less developed”, or that those who you do consider “developed” got that way by magic or “hard work”, and not by exploiting those who you consider “less so” and their countries resources, is the epitome of that. Get off your fucking high horse)
The “less developed” part is about child mortality which seems to have a direct, instinctive, link to fertility. Pretty much every single country on earth has reached a tipping point in that regard, though some are only at the beginning of their demographic transition. It’s not a sudden drop-off but takes a while.
For a datapoint, have a highly developed country – Cuba. Their birth rates have been falling since 1964, half a century post-revolution when the healthcare system really started to kick in, now they’re lower than in the US, which also has higher infant mortality.
“classist, ableist, racist” my ass, according to demography Cuba is more highly developed than the US. Maybe look at more data and fewer narratives.
On top of that there’s also cultural factors – Israel bucks the trend under perceived extinction pressure, South Korea is a country of incels and femcels and impossible expectations, compounding the effect. France is at about 1.8, way above Germany or Italy, I’d say it’s mostly policy. Cultural differences exist but at least in my estimation nothing drastic enough to explain the difference.
Fair enough. Your country is better, as unlike in mine children are not lazy but work for a living and support their parents.
EDIT: Sorry for the dark joke, but most countries in the world have below replacement fertility rates. The strongest correlation seem to be between women’s rights and health care. So basically as soon as women, who tend to do the care work, can say no to babys many choose to do so. Health care allows for people to have access tot he pill or condoms. That is why HDI has a close correlation then GDP, as HDI includes education, which allows women to have an independent income, and life expectancy, which is a decent indicator for health care. The third factor is income, which according to ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works would mean that rich countries would have more children, as they can afford them. Also clearly wrong.
In other words improving peoples quality of life, lowers birth rates, which solves overpopulation. I honestly can not think of a less classist, ableist and racist thing to be proven with data.
Because a) we’re not actually near much less over the sustainable population limit and b) our current gerontocracy is already bad enough. Both societies that grow or shrink too quickly have lots of inherent issues. If, for the sake of argument, we did have to shrink the population we should still only go for a birth rate as low as 1.8 thereabouts to avoid fallout.
Kids are too expensive nowadays, way too much of a poverty risk, and people don’t have enough time. Both are due to capitalist short-term interest. The ole story of mere aggregate microeconomics vs. macroeconomics and we’re not even at sociology and ecology yet which also disagree with the microeconomics.
fear of decline
Someone is going to have to take care for our elderly, and someone else has to pay for that. Immigration doesn’t really solve that long-term and comes with its own issues on top of that. We’d have to change our countries pretty radically to tackle this issue and I very much doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon.
Though I guess we would also need to change radically to get a birthrate at replacemen level.
Then, who pays for the generation that looks after the elderly? Does the next-next generation need to be even bigger?
Yeah, you don’t need a rising population to care for the elderly, just not a rapidly shrinking one. If we got our collective heads out of our collective asses we probably wouldn’t even need that, there’s still tons of bullshit jobs that could be automated away or just outlawed because they provide no value to society, but good luck sorting that out.
You don’t need replacement or growing rates to care for the elderly, 1.8 would be perfectly fine. South Korea has half that and yeah it’s gonna be a problem.
I can help them out if they need it
I wonder what the first two rules of “Ultra-low Fertility Club” are 🤔
First rule of „Ultra-low Fertility Club“: you don’t make children. Second rule of „Ultra-low Fertility Club“: you don’t make children.
aside from economic issues that we are actively choosing to have due to how society is structured around constant growth (spoiler warning, this is unsustainable), i honestly just embrace it, we don’t benefit from having so many people and not giving birth to tons of kids sounds great.
There’s plenty of kids up for adoption and with smaller populations there’s more space for everyone, we just need to fix more fundamental issues like wealth inequality which lets rich people keep having kids (pretty fucked up that rich people can buy the ability to have kids)
plenty of kids up for adoption
Maybe this is very country-dependent, but at least in the Netherlands that’s not the case at all (and adoptions from abroad get shady, like without the mother’s consent)
well that sounds like a fucking wonderful problem to have
Just come to the US, we cannot stop producing new pieces of shit by the barrel.
Yay for jesus!
Love the terms and conditions that forbid copying articles, followed immediately by a copy of the article. And wow, 1.4 children per woman is far below the 2 required to maintain a steady population. Hopefully the trend continues elsewhere, as overpopulation is rapidly becoming a big problem.
Overpopulation is a myth.
I point you towards another comment in another thread under this post, where someone already put it nicely:
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/15746786Yeah “overpopulation” is a myth because it sounds like “there are too many people”. That is not the case.
What is the case, however, that we would do everyone and ourselves a favor by producing fewer children.
1.4 is a pretty sharp decline, and afaik we’re not really seeing any serious overpopulation issues. We have enough food and houses for everyone, but can’t distribute them efficiently enough.
But flattening out more would be good, rather than growing 1% a year. Let’s get time to figure out better resource allocation, and get rid of fossil fuels before we have 10 billion people.
I think the issue is more that World War 2 was partially also caused by lots of young men having no jobs and being frustrated because of that.
Well-paying jobs are already on a decline in the US today, as can be felt by many people who need a second or third jobs to make ends meet.
If the problem intensifies in the future, we will run into the same situation as 1930 where we have huge lack of jobs, and we can counter-act that problem by reducing baby count.
