r/europe • u/Ok_Conference7012 • 6d ago
Data Europe less total births than US despite having 100M more people
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u/LameFernweh 6d ago
In Berlin, Germany, the rents skyrocketed in the last 10 years. Faster than anywhere in the world. There are housing crises in many desirable places (not just Europe) but we see entire generations being priced out of the property market.
In one year the Berlin rents increased by almost 20%. Meanwhile the salaries stagnate. The end of the tech bubble meant that even the people that were very well paid can't afford to buy anything. An apartment that's a new construction, on the far outskirts of the city (Berlin's huge, think 1h commute) suitable for a family with one kid, is about 600,000 EUR - 650,000 EUR.
Who can afford this?
Im very privileged and have what can be considered a much above average income and I can only dream of owning a 30m2 shithole to retire in.
So kids? Lol no.
40h work weeks with massive overtime, the need for dual income households just to make ends meet, skyrocketing property prices and cost of life in general make it impossible to even consider children for many.
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u/Eynie2595 5d ago
I think the reality is now that you just can't really own your own property in a city, even less in a place like Munich or Berlin. On the other hand on the countryside a family member bought a house (1200 sqm lot) with a garage for two cars which can easily house a family and including renovation doesn't pay more than 500k. We live in Baden-Württemberg and have quite strong industry here (Zeiss, Bosch, voith etc) but you also live in the middle of nowhere. I think the politicians should make villages and small towns more attractive so that more people want to live there and not all pouring into city's and fighting over finite resources.
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u/Group_Happy 5d ago
The way to make small villages and towns more attractive are making them bigger. People live where they work. Enable more people to do remote work (internet and jobs in general) and people start living where they want not where they need to be to work.
Make companies able to produce on the countryside so not all companies are in or around a few hotspots. People will move where they can find work (many jobs are not able to be done remotely).
Having nothing to do in the middle of nowhere is bad for a lot of people. If the smaller towns get bigger they will receive some clubs and things to do so other people might not be discouraged to move there either.
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u/NetQvist 5d ago
I think the politicians should make villages and small towns more attractive so that more people want to live there and not all pouring into city's and fighting over finite resources.
But but.... centralization and saving money! /s
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u/WorkFurball Estonia 5d ago
Careful, you'll have someone else jumping in to say that elsewhere people living in dumpsters are having loads of kids so that's just an excuse. I don't think they can fathom that some people actually would care about their kids' well-being.
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u/LameFernweh 5d ago
Poorer places have, typically, less education, less family planning, lessened access to contraception. Culturally, very often kids are seen as old age security or an extra labor force.
The perceived cost of children is seen as lower in poorer societies and higher in richer ones. I'm not an expert but I feel like that's what's at play here.
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u/fatbunyip 5d ago
In Cyprus locals have been pushed out of the market in favour of foreign buyers of high end properties.
The rental market is even more fucked because of the triple whammy of "luxury" apartments with sky high rents, Airbnb removing housing from the market and immigration flooding the low end of the market (loads of substandard apartments have been converted to illegal rooming houses).
Absolutely mental situation.
But GDP is rising so yay I guess?
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u/angeltabris_ Ireland 6d ago
Yeah i cant afford to piss nevermind have a baby
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u/Jokkitch 6d ago
Literally this.
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u/bigboipapawiththesos Utrecht (Netherlands) 5d ago
Friend of mine recently got pregnant and really wants to keep it; problem is she’s living with 5 roommates.
She’s 30…
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u/ralphy1010 6d ago
Is Europes pullout game that much stronger than ours? Eek 😬
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u/BlueHeartbeat Realm of Europa 6d ago
On the other hand, the very fact that you're trying with pullout might be the reason why you have more births.
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u/Lollipop126 6d ago
Actual question, does this data count the UK pullout in 2020?
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u/DisparityByDesign The Netherlands 6d ago
I’m pretty sure sexual education being better in EU helps a lot
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u/BidnyZolnierzLonda 6d ago
You know not the entire Europe looks like Netherlands, right? Western Europe =/ Europe
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6d ago
It’s varies vastly depending on country. There are countries in Europe who are complete opposites.
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u/Classic-Exit4189 Albania 6d ago
No its the economy being worse
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u/Kilapo69 6d ago
I don't disagree that the economy is better (if you ignore the inevitable debt default), but countries with better economies tend to have less babies
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u/The_Dutch_Fox Luxembourg 6d ago
It's not that simple.
Advanced economies tend to have less babies, but advanced economies doing well obviously have more babies than when the economy is doing bad.
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u/rileyoneill United States of America 6d ago
It can also be focused on conditions for people in their 20s. The economy could be doing really well on paper but most of the economic gains are going to people 50+ (people who as a cohort don't have kids). If people in their 20s are doing well enough to where your average man working the average job, making the average income, an afford a home and for his wife to stay at home during her mamma years, young people will start families.
When housing is so expensive that it takes two partners each working full time to afford a tiny apartment, they have far fewer kids. The rich parts of the US are doing great, but if you are a young 20 something in that area you can't afford a place to live on the jobs available to you.
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u/The_Dutch_Fox Luxembourg 6d ago
Definitely right about that too.
But I don't think most gains are going to the 50+, I mean yeah they have it MUCH better than current 20 year olds.
However, what I see is happening is a wealth transfer of epic proportions. The middle-class that had dominated our economies from the 1950's until the 1980's has slowly declined until ~covid, and is now on the verge of collapsing entirely.
The overwhelming majority of the economic gains are being made by the top 1%, the top 10% is stable, and anything below that is seeing their standsrds of living collapse.
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u/tyger2020 Britain 6d ago
This seems like wishful thinking more than anything.
The highest birth rates in the western world are France/US/Ireland (1.6) and UK (1.55) sure their economies are relatively good, but Germany (1.46), Netherlands (1.44) and Norway (1.42) are all lower despite having arguably better economies.
On top of that, it is a negligible difference.
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u/gehenna0451 Germany 6d ago edited 6d ago
but advanced economies doing well obviously have more babies than when the economy is doing bad.
There is literally no evidence that this is true. In fact the reason for the higher birth rates of the US is the growing (by both birth and immigration) Hispanic population which does worse than Whites and Asian Americans economically.
Religiosity, in particular Catholicism and Islam or Orthodox Judaism are strong predictors of higher birth rates, pretty much nothing else matters.
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u/DisparityByDesign The Netherlands 6d ago
I think there’s more than one cause, but economy is definitely one of them
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u/Classic-Exit4189 Albania 6d ago
Yeah its also the housing. America builds more suburban housing which are more convenient for young couples trying have kids. No one wants to raise 2 kids in an apartment. Also the fact that rural usa is more religious than most parts of europe.
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u/UnblurredLines 6d ago
Eh, I have two kids and live in an appartment, as do many of my neighbours. Wouldn't mind a house with a yard but that's not really important as far as having kids.
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u/rileyoneill United States of America 6d ago
Both Europe and the US had a drop in fertility in the 1960s-1970s. A major difference between the US and Europe though was that we had a recovery in the 1980s and were at near replacement from like 1990 to 2007. A big contributor was that there were lots of tract homes being built. Suburbia has a host of major problems, but at the time it was affordable (like, less than 50% after adjusting for inflation of today's prices, and some place more like 70%) and was growing as a place for young people to move to and have kids.
Suburbia sucks, but at least every kid had their own bedroom and bathroom and Dad was able to afford this working a regular job with a mortgage that was only 25% of his income.
We have largely slowed down our housing construction with by far the fewest number of homes being built was the 2010s and now 2020s. So we have our own housing crises.
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u/cozidgaf 6d ago
I’m traveling in Europe now and seriously shocked about the prices of everything. Granted I’m in the touristy areas but still the prices are like 80-100% of US VHCOL prices and I can bet Europe and especially Central Europe is not paying US VHCOL wages. So no idea how it is sustainable to rely either entirely on foreigners spending money or for locals to spend that kinda money on eating out or shopping at mini marts even if occasionally.
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u/fallsdarkness 6d ago
*fewer
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u/clovis_227 Brazil 6d ago
Stannis?
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u/JaFuiBanidoDoReddit 6d ago
Are they going to tarif us on this too?
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u/Lisiat 6d ago
Actually yes. On Japan people without kids will have to pay more taxes. The capitalism machine will get everything from you on a way or another
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u/strange_socks_ Romania 6d ago
That's not what he meant. He didn't say "tax", he said "tariff" because he meant the US will tariff Europe for having fewer kids. You know, the thing that's been on the news constantly in the last few months, the thing Trump keeps doing, undoing and doing again?!
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u/BeeWeird7940 5d ago
This is true basically everywhere. You get a tax break when you have dependent kids at home.
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u/zavorad 6d ago
Let’s quickly raise taxes! This must help!
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u/pixsector 6d ago
Politicians in my country like to raise taxes every year. The result – the debt keeps growing, GDP growth is falling to zero, and the birth rate is also sharply declining.
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u/zavorad 5d ago
Duh.. what did they expect? It’s a known trick: when people have barely enough for themselves, buried under crippling debt that’s the best environment to bring the child in! Obviously. (/s)
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u/Subj3ctX 6d ago edited 6d ago
Source?
Also shouldn't say Europe if you're talking about the EU (i assume), they're not the same thing.
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u/Academic-Flan-2316 Austria 6d ago
must be talking about the eu, as europe has over twice as many ppl as the us
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u/Ramenastern 6d ago
Probably, but then no, because that assumption makes the whole graph utterly senseless. The EU's predecessor organisations only consisted of six countries in 1960 (Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands) and those certainly didn't have 7 million more births than the US at the time.
The EU kept changing and even lost a member, so for any such graph to make any sort of sense you'll have to take the members at a given point in time and then add up their births along the timeline. This graph doesn't say if that is actually what was done here, and even if it was, it doesn't say what point I time was used to determine what countries to actually consider.
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u/AfricanNorwegian Norway 6d ago
and those certainly didn't have 7 million more births than the US at the time.
What they most likely have done is take all the EU countries at present at looked at the data for them all as the EU is now, going back. Not looking at the data for the EU and its predecessors as it was then.
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u/Academic-Flan-2316 Austria 6d ago
and that is exactly why data like this is most often presented in relative terms, i.e. births per mother, unless the one presenting the data has some agenda and fits the parameters to suit their particular needs. anyways, this graph is pretty useless for the reasons you listed.
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u/Jeppep Norway 6d ago
*EU. Europe (the continent) has way more than 100 mill people more than the US (country).
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u/DiscoKeule 6d ago
Maybe that's because everyone is fucking miserable. But I know how to fix that! Turn housing into an investment vehicle, that'll solve it!
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u/peopeopeopeo10 6d ago
And in Europe a big contribution is coming from migrants
We can make jokes as much as we want about americans living in car dependent spread out cities, in huge houses, with their debt-based relationship with money, but the way the new generations of europeans are living doesn't make it possible to become a parent
We're living crammed in no space in hugely populated cities, we cant afford rent so we live with parents a lot longer, then we go to shared housing, then we spend everything on rent on our own apartment, or in some countries we still buy a very small house/apartment
I'd be very surprised if europeans born after year 2000 will ever have children, I think the rates will drop a lot more.
Only people who still make children are migrants, look in like Belgium or Sweden the percentage of children from migrant families, they're very high. Nothing wrong with migrants of course, good people more than welcome, but they come from a different cultural background that doesn't always match the european one so this will cause more social issues
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u/We_Are_Nerdish 6d ago
EU has simular problem like Japan with more and more people leaving towns to get jobs and education in cities they can't afford to start a family due to high cost of housing and living that would be able to..
A lot of towns have had small companies, speciality business, schools, stores and places close that would allow you to stay local. And that results in having to go to a central place like a city or large town for a lot more people to get their needs.
Everything gets more expensive to live because houses in towns are also getting impossible to afford on a normal salary, because either they are bought up by corporations or boomers holding on to them untill they die and letting them go to waste.
I know so many 70+ folks living in large homes that can house a family 5+ people.I have friends with kids, but only because they really wanted them while making compromises to everything in their lives or can heavily rely on grandparents to cover while they both work full time.
So yeah.. the main reason non western migrants are having more kids, culturally 'family' will take of each other.
That's just no really the case for a lot of western ones that aren't well-off and/or have a very traditional gender roll balance where it's possible to have kids.Especially since millennials and generations after started getting the short end of the economic stick,
First with several wars after 2001, the crash in 2008 and then all the bullshit compounding since then. 2020' pandemic.
And even if the US is a different country, we are dealing with the current political fallout and right wing shift since 2016.
clearly the vast amount of us also actively chose to not fuck up our lives in ways we aren't ready for.. let alone that of a child that didn't have a choice in being born. Why the fuck would we want to have kid if we can barely deal with live on a daily basis.18
u/Prodiq 6d ago
The economics is not the main issue. Its the lifestyle.
I'm from eastern Europe - in the early 90s the economy was shit, really shit. You really had to get creative on what to make for dinner, you didn't have any money for entertainment, getting foreign fruit was a real treat and a special occasion, pretty much everyone during the summer was getting vegetables, fruits, berries and preserving that stuff for winter etc. etc.
But everyone was having kids, lots of people had 2-3 children in the family. So if the economy was that shit that people literally would spend their summer holidays going to the countryside to get fruits and vegetables for winter because they simply couldn't afford to buy a lot of those things in the winter, why people were having children?
If the economy was the biggest reason, we would have been talking about the birth rates 20 years ago...
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u/WorkFurball Estonia 5d ago
why people were having children?
Because they were stupid. My parents didn't use any protection and my dad said "Oh it can't happen that easily", well it sure did.
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u/CherryPickerKill 6d ago
We're living crammed in no space in hugely populated cities, we cant afford rent so we live with parents a lot longer, then we go to shared housing, then we spend everything on rent on our own apartment, or in some countries we still buy a very small house/apartment
You're describing most countries, many of which have higher birth rates.
The main factors pushing people to have children are how religious and patriarcal their society is.
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u/Prodiq 6d ago
Totally this. Its a lifestyle change. I wrote in another reply that in the 90s in eastern Europe the economy was totally shit and nobody could afford anything, but people were having way more children than now.
If you look at the 60s, 70s, 80s and so on - for young people it was expected of them to get married and have children in their 20s. If you were 30+, alone without children people were starting to look at you weirdly and thinking whats the problem. Nowadays being a 30+, not married without children is viewed by the society as totally fine.
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u/Knarkopolo Sweden 6d ago
I had to scroll way too far for this.
We've observed for years that the more secular a society is the fewer children they have.
Europe will not solve this problem.
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u/Charlesinrichmond 5d ago
I live in America in a 700m2 house in the city center. I've never understood why Europeans think its a bad thing... we certainly don't
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u/peopeopeopeo10 5d ago
I'm jealous actually
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u/Charlesinrichmond 4d ago
its nice. The heating bill is the worst, but luckily electric is cheap here
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u/stephano_RC Portugal 5d ago
It's shit to live in the EU, can't buy a fkn house how the hell am I supposed to have kids? Might as well kill myself to raise the births per capita
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6d ago
The US has more immigrants and religious communities with high birth rates.
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u/p5y European Union 6d ago
Those religious communities with high birth rates aren't what you want to build the future of a country on.
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u/Postroika249 6d ago
Scary to imagine the future generation of the world being split between Christian and Muslim crazies
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u/bot_upboat 6d ago
Birth decline is going to become an issue on par with climate change.
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u/BreadSniffer3000 Germany 6d ago
Not on par. Way worse.
Countries like South Korea will literally be at the brink of extinction within this century, and if it continues like this for countries like Italy, Spain, or Poland, their economies gonna collapse at some point.
The only reason Germany economically survived the last 50 years while having a birth rate of ~1.4 per woman is solely thanks to massive amounts of highly skilled people coming here from southern and eastern europe.
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u/Haunting-Detail2025 6d ago
I’d throw in China too. They aren’t going to face anything as dire as South Korea in the near future of course, but it’s becoming increasingly unlikely they’ll ever catch up with the US in GDP and this might be their economic peak for the next 5-10 years before their population really starts graying out
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u/RGV_KJ United States of America 6d ago
Chinese will be old before they become rich.
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u/Haunting-Detail2025 6d ago
Yeah it’s not just the projections, the stats we have right now are pretty grim too. They’re already shrinking and their working age population has dropped by nearly 100 million people since its peak.
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u/Cautious-Tax-1120 6d ago
Yup. China's population rose quickly, but it's going to fall just as quick. By 2100 they are projected to be between 600-700 million people (half of what they are now) and have a median male age of a little over 64 years old. Meaning the average Chinese man will be retirement age.
They have to find a way to rapidly transition from a manufacturing / export economy to a consumption / service economy before that time comes.
It will be exceedingly difficult to manage that without a valuable real estate market. Wealthy Chinese already own multiple properties now worth next to nothing, and there is a massive oversupply of housing before accounting for population decline. It will be interesting to see what they decide to invest their money in, because it won't be real estate.
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u/Stleaveland1 6d ago
>Wealthy Chinese already own multiple properties now worth next to nothing
You mean the average Chinese household wealth that was invested ~70% in real estate and a third of the Chinese GDP is now worth next to nothing, not just the wealthy.
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u/BreadSniffer3000 Germany 6d ago
One child policy effect on fertility and gender distribution is really gonna bite them in the ass, yeah.
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u/Transporter5000 6d ago
If you look up the birth rate in china over time, you can't even see when the policy took effect or when it ended. If anything the decline started declining faster after it ended. I'm convinced the policy was not so much the cause of cultural change as an effect of cultural change that made it sound like a good idea at the time.
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u/Beat_Saber_Music 6d ago
It wasn't the one child policy which achieved the fertility rates in any meaningful way, it happened largely in spite of it outside of cities where the policy was more effective compared to the countryside where the majority of the Chinese population lived.
It was contraceptive and sexed investment by the government, as well as urbanisation/wealth growth during the 1980s onwards which drove the Chinese birthrate to plummet so drastically. Nothing is a better contraceptive than wealth turning children from an investment to a cost.
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u/Glarenya 6d ago
I don't know if extinction is the end result of a low birthrate, given almost every country has sections and subcultures that have differing birthrates, it's more likely to lead to a sharp decline in urban population in the short term but then slowly rebound once the groups (likely more rural/religious/anyone who values large families) become the majority.
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u/ChromosomeDonator 5d ago
Correct. Too many people -> everything too expensive -> can't afford kids -> people die out -> no longer overpopulated -> things get cheaper -> people afford to live and have children again.
This is a problem that fixes itself, but it will NOT be pretty with the pension and senior care crisis. The system was flawed and unsustainable from the start when it was based on ever growing population.
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u/RGV_KJ United States of America 6d ago
Isn’t the outlook for Germany bad as well like the rest of Europe?
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u/BreadSniffer3000 Germany 6d ago
Yeah, but Germany still has a lot of net influx of people, both from europe and from outside.
And our fertility rate isn't as bad as others, it just declined earlier.
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u/Ill_Refrigerator_593 6d ago
It's bad for most of Europe but France, the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, & Luxembourg are predicted to show population growth to 2100 with the rest likely to decline in population.
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u/RandomGuy-4- 6d ago
countries like Italy, Spain, or Poland, their economies gonna collapse at some point
I doubt their economies will collapse. They will probably turn into a Japan-like economy that keep getting smaller but never collapses. In our case (Spain), we will go through some tough times in 10 or so years when our largest generation ever reaches retirement age, but after that we will turn into either a Florida-style or Brazil-style multiethnic society and keep growing as long as there are latin americans and africans willing to move here. It is the obvious path we are being lead to and there isn't much choice other than Japanifying as well.
All in all, most of Europe will become pretty economically irrelevant throughout the 22nd century as other less aged markets develop and new population titans rise in Africa. Europe has had a solid 500 years of being the leading continent (well you could argue India and China were still the biggest economies of most of that time period, but they didn't have much power projection while the europeans were conquering foreign continents) but it seems the continent is irremediably headed into a "dark age" so to speak. It will probably go back to being relevant at some point in the future due to being in the middle of every other continent, but it will take a while and so many changes that it won't look anything like our current day Europe by that point, much like how current day China is nothing like the previous versions China that were regarded as superpowers.
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u/LaurestineHUN Hungary 6d ago
African countries birthrate is also declining. Only a few country grows, all agricultural.
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u/RandomGuy-4- 5d ago
Their birthrate is declining but still above replacement. Current projections only have them reach below replacement at the end of the century, by which point there will be multiple countries at the 200-300 million population mark and some like Nigeria will have around 500 million. Africa as a whole is projected to become around 40% of global population (currently they are around 20%), which will put them at around the same inhabitants as asia.
Ofcourse, this are just projections and they have been too optimistic (as in, prodicting birthrates to fall more slowly than they ended up doing), but you get the idea.
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u/Competitive_Waltz704 Spain 6d ago
Not Spain, not in the foreseeable future at least. We have a pool of 400-500M people that share a language and culture with us and live in objectively worse countries by most metrics (gdp, hdi, safety...), there's always gonna be people that will want to migrate here.
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u/RandomGuy-4- 6d ago
We'll see how long that lasts since latin america has pretty terrible birth rates as well. The ones who have the infinite immigration cheat nowadays is France because of their African ex-colonies. Our benefit is that most latin americans feel closer to spanish culture than an african to french culture, so we might still get a solid immigration pull.
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u/Memory_Leak_ United States of America 6d ago
France doesn't seem to want migrants from their ex-African colonies though whereas Spain seems much more receptive to immigration from their ex-colonies in the Americas.
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u/BreadSniffer3000 Germany 6d ago
Yeah, Spain kinda got the jackpot demographics wise.
As long as Southern America stays the way it is, at least.
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u/Jokkitch 6d ago
Then capitalists need to wake the fuck up and help make a world worth living in.
“Birth decline” is just blaming poor people for the riches crimes once again.
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u/larrylegend1990 6d ago
Rich people blame poor people for everything.
“Do your part for the environment”, as Katy Perry and Bezos fly their private jets all over the world.
How about government start taxing the rich and helping the dying middle class
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u/Negative-Highlight41 6d ago
Either the EU and the individual states does something about the housing, like Sweden in the 60/70s (Folkhemmet), or we are going towards stagnation and death.
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u/Undernown 6d ago
Also note that America has like twice the land mass of Europe. There are some countries, like in the Benelux, who are simply running out of physical space to build enough houses on.
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u/NativeEuropeas Czechoslovak 6d ago
This has less to do with "bad economy" and more to do with multiple converging factors.
First economic:
- Children used to be an asset in agrarian economy. Having children was existential for family survival
- Modern capitalism + urbanization flips the script. Children are not assets. Education, housing, health care, all extra costs. Urban life makes large family financially punishing.
- Pensions and welfare makes children no longer your necessary survival.
Societal - social media + aspiration.
- Everywhere we are constantly brainwashed with success of other peeps that we're trying to emulate. Success, money, freedom, travel, self-optimization. Parenthood is the exact opposite of that.
- Being a parent can come into clash with having a successful career
- We want to prolong adolescence, it can only be done if parenthood is delayed.
- Children are no longer "destiny" but just one of many lifestyles to choose from.
The hypothetical solutions, brace yourselves, none of these will seem ideal and some are outright dystopian and extreme:
- (The worst possible solution) Cancel the welfare and pensions. Force old people into streets, force young people to breed to avoid the same fate. (I personally hope we never resort to that but I wouldn't be surprised if some late stage corporationist authoritarian regime implements it)
- Censorship on social media, control over the pro-success capitalist narrative, a new type of propaganda that supports family life. (Honestly, I cannot imagine this to be a likely scenario. It would require too much of a societal change. Might be possible in very authoritarian countries like North Korea)
- Technological advancements in artificial breeding programs, children bred in pods, establishment of orphanages for these parentless children. Dystopian as hell, but so far the most likely solution in the western world where personal freedoms want to be maintained.
- Some form of AI and robotic automation that will alleviate the labor shortages.
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u/Potential-Focus3211 6d ago edited 6d ago
Or you forget a 5th hypothetical solution, doing too little until it's too late, or governments and individuals not even caring about it at all until it becomes too late, and then they can shift the blame on to the next person because most politicians short careers usually don't even last as much to be accountable or acredited for any longer-term efforts
This is also why the housing shortage crisis rarely ever gets adressed with long-term solutions of increasing the actual underlying supply and eventually get to the point where we could have home owners and home renting asset owners actually start to compete for home buyers, rather than the other way around. Instead we just subsize demand and throw money at the inflationary cycle
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u/Krebota The Netherlands 6d ago
Hate the AI response, but you also missed the most obvious solution: make it more profitable to have kids. It's way less extreme than "cancel the welfare and pensions" but it is as simple as moving subsidies to where they are needed.
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u/historicusXIII Belgium 5d ago
Hungary spends 5% of its GDP on family subsidies, to the point that they pushing themselves into a potential debt crisis, and it's not having any longterm affect.
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u/volchonok1 Estonia 6d ago
The amount of subsidies needed to make kids not just profitable, but at least not a net-loss for parents is insane. You'd need to cover not only things like childcare but also housing since having kids requires buying bigger house.
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u/AugustaEmerita Germany 6d ago
That's just not going to happen. Materially, the stuff the state redistributes comes from the production generated by all people who work in a country. The trouble with your idea is that child-bearing and working age mostly overlap, in other words, you'd be taking money/resources from working people to ... distribute them back to working people to have children?
Subsidies or social welfare work because you take from a large source population and redistribute to a smaller target population, in some cases even just a single institution, like a company. You can't subsidize the broad mass of people you expect to have children.
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u/NativeEuropeas Czechoslovak 5d ago
Just because it's in bullet points doesn't mean it's AI.
Bullet points make the text easier to read and digest my points clearly, and it increases the chances of interaction with other redditors.
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u/historicusXIII Belgium 5d ago
Also an increase in individualism. We don't help eachother out anymore. In traditional societies (still seen among some immigrant communities, which is why they tend to have higher birth rates) it's expected that other people help share the burden of raising kids. But nowadays it's even a burden to get your own parents to look after your offspring.
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u/chaotic-kotik South Holland (Netherlands) 5d ago
One way to improve things is egg freezing. People should be educated about it and it should be free. Many women decide to have children later in life when they have more financial security. It's unfair to force everyone to have kids in their twenties given that we have the technology to do it much later in life.
Another option is to pay families who have kids. Raising kids is a full time job that contributes to society so why not.
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u/NomadDK 6d ago
As much as people say that it's a result of being able to afford it, it's worth noting that richer countries will always make fewer babies than poor ones.
Take Africa, South America, Asia... There you'd still easily find families with 4-5+ kids. It's a necessity to make that many, both due to mortality rates as well as just getting more workforce out there to support the family. And also to take care of you when you get old.
But take Europe, having children is not a necessity at all anymore. There is no monetary gain or strategy with having kids. It's rather something you get if you just want one for the sake of being a family, or by accident, and most families only have 1-3 kids at most. In fact, unlike in poor countries, it's actually a disadvantage at almost every turn to have children. Our kids seldom start young with working (they go to school full time instead), and it's usually just their own money for buying candy and games with, and saving up for their future, rather than supporting the family.
Dropping birth rates isn't only because of being less able to afford it, but also just because that's how our society has progressed. Go back some decades/centuries, and European families would also have 4-5+ kids
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u/KernunQc7 Romania 6d ago
A continent full of geriatrics has no room for the young. More news at 11.
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u/Guisasse 5d ago edited 5d ago
I do not say this as an insult, but It’s known that lower education throughout the population universally leads to higher pregnancy rates. Just take a look at the US fertility and pregnancy census. All the red states (which are usually the ones on the bottom of all education parameters) top the charts.
People are having children they cannot afford to actually take care of, but they’re (literally) too dumb to realize, and the child ends up growing up in a dysfunctional home.
This is not surprising at all
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u/DPSharkB8 6d ago
Does anyone on reddit know how to correctly use the words "less" or "fewer"?
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u/Ralfundmalf Germany 6d ago
US birthrate is about to fall. Migrants are a group with very high birthrates per woman and migrants are getting forcefully removed en masse right now.
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u/mosisimo 5d ago
I’ve seen many comments blaming the economy for people not having children, but let’s not fool ourselves. The reason is more cultural than economic. Having a family and children is no longer seen as a core value, and it is often viewed as a hurdle to personal freedom. Compared to the past, many people have become more focused on themselves, preferring to spend their time on personal stuff rather than raising children and that is the real reason.
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u/AskeVisholm 6d ago
We seriously need to start Mangioni a couple of politicians and CEOs, so our countries become liveable again.
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u/sweetcinnamonpunch Switzerland 6d ago
If you can't afford more than a one room apartment, it's probably influencing your decision to have kids.
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u/Lopendebank3 6d ago
Maybe if there were Houses to get, if we could afford it, we would get childeren.
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u/AdNo4129 6d ago
One civilisation goes another one comes along.
No seeiously I dont think that having less people on Earth is sctually that bad.
The consumerism right now is completely out of control. We are “thriving” on the back of poor factor workers.
If we get a hold of our consummerism maybe we could have money for kids, but truth is that most people just dont want that.
The collective soul is probably tired from all the wars and poverty, we are in our “just let me live, Ive had enough” era.
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u/primax1uk United Kingdom 6d ago
When we're told to not have kids unless we can afford it. Don't complain when we don't have kids because we can't afford it.
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u/Powerful_Artist 5d ago
Cant afford a decent house, cant afford a reasonable retirement plan, worried about the cost of basic living essentials, and theres no way I could add the cost of raising a child on top of that. Not to mention, it almost feels cruel to bring a child into this world tbh.
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u/drswizzel Denmark 6d ago
well if people can barely take care of them selv with rent food and that stuff why the hell would people get kids? now force everthing to be 20% less in overall cost and we gonna see that sky rocket.
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u/Wolfhart German/Polish 6d ago
I don't know about USA, but in Poland there is growing problem of people and companies buying out real estate as an investment to either rent or even just hold it to sell later.
Someone like me, who earns 4500 pln net (~1000 euro) as a Delphi programmer have no way to buy a flat or home, so how could I even think about having kids?