German births fall to lowest since postwar records began in 1946

Posted by cambeiu@reddit | anime_titties | View on Reddit | 62 comments

Non-paywalled article here.

This is not a developed world phenomenon. This is not a Western world phenomenon. This is a GLOBAL phenomenon. China, Mexico, Brazil, India, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam, Argentina, Iran, Thailand, Indonesia, The Philippines, Colombia, Malaysia, etc...are all at or bellow population replacement. The only places that are still having high birthrates are sub-Saharan Africa and parts of central Asia.

There is no single driver to this demographic collapse, as this is happening in rich and poor countries alike. It is happening in countries with massive social-welfare safety nets and subsidies and in countries with none of those. It is happening in secular countries and in highly religious countries alike. It is happening in countries with harsh working conditions and in countries that provide generous vacations and strict laws against overtime work.

Income inequality does not seem like a good explanation either. Brazil ranks #178 on the equality index, Chile ranks at #174. They both have the same fertility rate as Switzerland and Australia, which rank at #22 and #23 respectively on the income equality scale. Also, Jamaica, Thailand, Mauritius, and the United Arab Emirates have lower fertility rates than Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands or Canada.

Does not seem to be a cost of living issue either, as even families making north of $700K/year are having fewer children.

Scandinavian countries, countries like Singapore, Japan and South Korea have invested massive amounts of money trying to revert birthrates declines with not much to show for it. Singapore for example virtually guarantees affordable housing for all of its citizens, plus free schooling, affordable medical care, etc... and still has one of the lowest birthrates in the planet. No country has yet figured out how to reverse the trend, but many are trying.

This is not an issue with capitalism either. Non-market economies like Cuba and North Korea are facing the same crisis.

Cuba to Women: Please Have More Babies

Video Shows Kim Jong Un Crying Over North Korea's Lack of Babies

Also, the issue here is no wanting more people on Earth to sustain "infinite growth". It is not that we need to be 10 billion, 20 billion people in order to prosper. We don't. Maybe we would be fine if we reverted back to say...3 billion people globally. The problem we are facing is the pace of the decline. When birthrates fall off a cliff, as we are seeing now, you end up with a massively large old population that needs to be supported by an ever declining young population. We don't know how to run a society with more retirees than working people, or with more sickly people than healthy ones. In the entire history of humanity, this scenario has never happened.

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jollywood87@reddit

I mean, I teach a high school geography class and learned all I know from textbooks, but we literally teach kids the correlation between education/development levels of a country and their birth rates. the trend across the world is that the more educated and wealthy a society becomes, the less children they have. the entire western world, along with japan, korea and china, have seeing pretty consistent decrease birth rates for years

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Mal_Dun@reddit

The best explanation that I learned so far is that is that is not just "development" but in industrialized societies, kids are not an economic factor for the individual, but become a "luxury good"

Think about it: Just 2 generations earlier a lot of people were farmers, so kids were necessary to keep the show running, and before we had social services people needed kids to take care of them after they couldn't work anymore.

Nowadays, kids are a cost factor not help.

However, there are ways to counter the trends: Pre-Macron France had 2.0 kids per women, and the GDR also had better birth rates. In both cases the reason was dedicated family policies.

In the GDR there were workplace kindergardens at the workplace and women had support programs that didn't stifle their career.

I am not endorsing communism here, but that was the one thing they got right and should be get more attention when we do something.

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PaoloCalzone@reddit

Child support is the key.
It's been destroyed here in France (end of the advantageous tax regime, childcare hard to obtain either at all or with sufficient quality, increasing need for private education in God forsaken areas), with ln too of that massive transfers from people working towards retirees, in the form of pensions but also of rents/real estate prices. It's insane.

I fully understand that a sizeab'e chunk of the population just opts out.

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ThatHeckinFox@reddit

For the past sixteen years, here in Hungary, people with kids have been getting preferential treatment. We don't have universal taxation anymore, as anyone who has at least two kids is tax free for life. On top of getting dunked full of subsidies.

We still are not growing

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Mal_Dun@reddit

Hungary is a special case tho. If you look at birth rates and population growing and compare them with other European countries somehow Hungary takes the cake.

The brain drain Orban caused also didn't help

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bellysavalis@reddit

Nearly every couple I know in Ireland in their 20s would have kids if they could afford stable housing and the cost of living wasn't so high

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cambeiu@reddit (OP)

Thailand - Per capita GDP (PPP) = $24K, fertility rate = 0.87 children per woman

Switzerland - {er Capita GDP (PPP) = $96K, fertility rate = 1.6 children per woman

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tallazhar@reddit

Immigration percentage per population Switzerland ~4-5% Thailand ~1% https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigration-by-country Maybe immigration pushes fertility rates? But this is also just another, single data point, may be relevant, may not be.

In my personal opinion, we shouldn't focus on investigating the causes so much as how we handle the decline. Our goal cannot be to try and reverse population decline at all costs. I don't have THE solution, either, but growth for growth's sake can't be it.

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drink_bleach_and_die@reddit

The issue is that any kind of scenario where fertility rates remain drastically below 2.1 (so like 1.5 and below) involve elderly people starving or working to death in the medium term, once the working age cohort drops sharply, as maintaining pension systems for more than a handful of years will be impossible even if every billionaire is taxed into oblivion and every productive resource nationalized. And even if they were to find a way to balance that budget, there won't be nearly enough healthcare workers to meet the increased demands of the rapidly aging population. The only way out of this, without increasing fertility, would be to drastically increase productivity and automation on a scale well beyond what even the most optimistic predictions point to. Which would be much harder than just getting people to have 2 kids again. And that's not growth, that's just stagnation.

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ThatHeckinFox@reddit

It will be a hard period for sure, but that bad? I think sweden or norway, one of the scandinavians, kinda solved this by funding pensions from investments not taxes.

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cambeiu@reddit (OP)

Our goal cannot be to try and reverse population decline at all costs.

I agree. But lots of people will try to use the demographic crisis to push their own agenda as a solution, be it a return to "traditional family values" or "housing subsidies" or whatever. Understanding the causes or at least that there is no single cause will hopefully help deflect some of that.

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ThatHeckinFox@reddit

I think we would need more datapoints. Switzerland might be a small outlier.

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Beliriel@reddit

Switzerland has a lot more relative (immigrants per citizen) immigration and most immigrant women have more children than a Swiss-originating woman. Adjusted for immigration background the stats look a fair bit different.
1.2 is still quite above Thailand but you also compare absolute income and not relative income. Rent prices in Switzerland are slightly less than triple the prices in Thailand and you also have mandatory insurance.
So a single adult person with a 2-bedroom apartment is looking at $450-800 in Thailand. In Switzerland a cheap 2-bedroom starts at 1200CHF ($1500) and goes up to over 2000CHF($2500) (those are rather expensive though). Also you have to pay insurance by law, which is another 350CHF($450). So you see how the relative expenses aren't that much different?
Switzerland has an advantage when it comes to food and electronics. Those prices are fairly similar.

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geissi@reddit

Comparing two random countries isn't very conclusive.

Looking at larger datasets shows that

Total fertility rate (TFR) is lower with longer average education for females, higher GDP per capita, higher contraceptive prevalence rate, and stronger family planning programs.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7036237/

Interestingly, western Europe seems to be the outlier in these statistics.

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cambeiu@reddit (OP)

Interestingly, western Europe seems to be the outlier in these statistics.

Lots of outliers by your logic. In Latin America for example Uruguay, Argentina, Costa Rica and Panama should have the lowest TFR by far, and they don't.

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Important-Agent2584@reddit

to be fair, the femboys are probably skewing the numbers there

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Jersey_2019@reddit

😂😂

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unclear_warfare@reddit

Switzerland's has been lower for a lot longer

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RGB755@reddit

For a long time that was the correlation seen in data, particular women’s education, but developing countries are now also seeing the same shift.

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fiction8@reddit

That's mostly right, but what the textbook doesn't want to say is that the correlation is between birth rates and the education/wealth levels of women. When women have more access to other paths in life besides babymaking, they choose fewer pregnancies overall. And they start having children later in life.

This isn't a bad thing, but the world's misogynists would probably cause an uproar over it if they didn't have to read research papers to comprehend the evidence.

Alternative structures to society that don't depend on the standard population pyramid will become extremely important in the coming decades.

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RGB755@reddit

Well the borderline tautological truth is that children are not economically valuable.

More significantly, it’s a reversal of their value in agrarian, non-specialist economies. It also goes a long way towards explaining why we see this across so many different societies.

In the early 1900s, having kids means: - They help with labour in factories or on farms. Maybe even the family farm if I’m quite lucky.

They help me take care of grandma and grandpa who live in close proximity to me, and who I personally still need to take care of
My kids, along with their kids, will help take care of me in old age one day.
I have little or no pension, so more kids mean an easier retirement
Children don’t cost nearly as much as today. Quite the opposite, the extra set of hands for menial labour often means they become economically productive in early to middle childhood
I have limited means of alternative entertainment. 99% of people spend 80% of their time not travelling, not partying, not watching movies and pursuing other pastimes. In the USA for example, the government has ambitions like electrifying rural farms and putting a “chicken in every pot [at the family dinner table]”, even well into the 1930s.

Most people 100 years ago were not getting take out after work, flopping on the couch, and watching a movie. Not to bash those things at all - just to underline, the world has completely changed.

Nowadays, kids cost money, cost time, need financial and other support well into their twenties, and increasingly into their thirties. There is no economic ROI. With pensions and welfare, the need for direct caretaking has fallen away massively. It lets people prioritize their lives away from children, so that’s exactly what they do. IMO, if anything, the globality of the trend shows that people don’t actually want a ton of kids, all else being equal. We prefer to spend our time and resources on living our lives. If we have an excess of either, maybe we want to put some of it towards kids, but virtually nobody will choose to consciously lower their quality of life in order to have kids.

Ironically, that’s the exact sentiment echoed by people who complain about the cost, too. Realistically, if having kids was truly somebody’s #1, be-all end-all goal, they would have them. Period. Doesn’t matter if you can afford a house or fancy clothes, etc. You want kids, so you’d have them. What we’re seeing with the affordability argument is, IMO, a pretense. Agai, not judging, just observing that it’s really a veiled way of saying “If I had more money and time to put towards kids and knew I didn’t have to change my quality of life, then I might put that money ad time towards children.” The only issue is that what’s observed in data once the money is there, is: “Wow, I have more money and time, let me pursue meaningful things to me, children would just lower my now heightened baseline quality of life.”

That’s, IMO, the crux. People don’t want kids. People want to live fulfilled lives. For some, having kids is part of that. For many it isn’t. And that’s perfectly okay, it’s just something governments need to plan for.

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nottheone414@reddit

This has little to do with affordability or low wages/high prices.

Look at Norway, a country which has free childcare, free education, free healthcare, and unlimited unemployment benefits. You literally cannot fail or become destitute in Norway.

And yet Norway's birth rate has fallen dramatically since 2000 and is below even the USA, a country which has zero social safety net.

So it's really not just about money and cost of living.

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mrgoobster@reddit

I think the evidence suggests that, if given total control over the decision, a large percentage of women simply do not want to have children. And the ones that do, often do not want very many.

Developed nations have simply stumbled onto that truth.

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CatzioPawditore@reddit

I think this is true..

I live in a country with a robust social welfare system. I have a good job with a lot of security, and so does my husband. We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood. We are absolutely set for kids.

And what's more, I really, really, want kids too.. I do not, however, want a lot of kids. Our second is born just a few weeks ago, and we'll either stop here or mayyyybe go for number three. But, chances are we won't..

I love being a mother. A parent. Someone who provides safety, love and hopefully some wisdom as well. I don't particularly enjoy being a brood mare with so many kids that I won't be able to have a relationship with any of them. I want a few deep parent-child relationships, rather than many shallow ones.

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drink_bleach_and_die@reddit

2 or 3 is perfectly fine from a long term demographic point of view. The issue is when the average person goes for one or none. If we can't find an equilibrium where the average woman wants to, and eventually does, have at least 2, our societies will fade away and the only ones that remain will be those that deny women their bodily autonomy. So it's a top priority problem.

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12Fox13@reddit

Well, at least in my country, these 2-3 children/woman will have no jobs (thanks to AI and corporate greed), will fight over what’s left of housing in the few areas where you can still maybe find work (while especially the rural areas are left to wither and die) or will be send to some war or other over increasingly scarce ressources. On top of that, we have a “ruling class” that is hellbent on breaking everything, stealing from everyone, and basically just killing the planet.

Sounds awesome.

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drink_bleach_and_die@reddit

Resource scarcity is generally severely overblown. The planet has enough physical space, soil and freshwater to keep hundreds of billions, if not trillions of people alive. Environmental damage from pollution and waste is a larger problem but here too people severely underestimate both the resilience of the planet's ecosystems and the speed at which technology shifts towards less damaging alternatives for energy and consumer goods.

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12Fox13@reddit

The planet has enough physical space, soul and freshwater to keep hundres of billions? if not trillions of people alive.

Got a source for that? Because not every square meter of the planet is inhabitable by humans. And if you look at current human colonization, we already occupy all the space in which we can actually live.

Also, we aren’t even capable of feeding and housing the 8 billion people we currently have. Why add even more? This is just delusional.

Why do we need trillions of humans? Like, seriously, why do we have to occupy every square meter of the planet?

We have polluted and trashed this planet beyond recognition and probably healing.

I’m sorry, I can’t take you seriously here. We as a global society have so many problems of our own making, just throwing more and more people at it while not solve a single one of them. Well, yeah, it will keep the pyramid scheme that is pensions going, I guess that’s worth it or something.

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Withermaster4@reddit

There is something that always bothers me about the "end of civilization" argument

When I was growing up I was told that overpopulation was an insolvable problem. The earth was going to over flow with humans and there wouldn't be enough to sustain them, our population growth was exponential.

Since then many countries birth rates have dropped and now people are panicking that the world will run out of people and it is an insolvable problem.

My unfounded belief is that if we talk about the phenomenon over time socially people will feel more pressure to have kids and the birthrates will rise. That hasn't happened in Korea or Japan. I'm very interested to see if it does. I think most people want society to continue and I think if people feel social pressure to have kids their entire lives than it's likely that they will want to.

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ThisIsMyFloor@reddit

It's because capitalism requires constant growth in order for the money to flow upwards, Despite tremendous technological advancements that require less labor of the people, work hours don't change, The capitalists earn money from our labor. So we can't decline in population even though it would absolutely be better for the world. It's the same cause for unemployment, it's a necessary system in capitalism in order to keep labor costs down. (also why immigrants are vital; to compete with the lower class) If population declined the people could demand more money for their labor, that is absolutely not allowed.

In actuality it isn't negative if population starts declining and it would be better for the planet and for the people living.

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Soonhun@reddit

It has happened in Korea. The consistent rise in its birth rate is above what was expected, even taking into account the predicted generational echo. The question is for how long momentum can continue.

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cambeiu@reddit (OP)

It increased from 0.75 to .08. Even if it eventually almost triple to 2.4, it would still be too little too late for the already heavily inverted demographic pyramid they have.

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Soonhun@reddit

Is your point, then, that once it hits a certain low number, a reversal does not matter and we should just give up? It would have to increase to .8 from .75 at some point.

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drink_bleach_and_die@reddit

At this point the issue is that even a baby boom right now won't save them from massive trouble in the next 20 years, as the amount of people retiring will massively outpace the number of new people entering the workforce until then and cause immense strain on the economy and services. So even the best case scenario would feature a massive depression before things get back to normal. And that would require way, way more of a jump than a +.05 per year one. If not, they're screwed. And people don't seem to notice the urgency of the situation, because if they did, they'd be breeding like crazy, unless they literally don't care one bit about their own survival 30 years from now, which is logical for the elderly but not for the young

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cambeiu@reddit (OP)

I am in no position to tell what we should or should not do. I am stating a mathematical reality that when your median age is 47 years old, even tripling your 0.7 is not enough to resolve a top heavy demographic pyramid.

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rollandownthestreet@reddit

Yes, your second paragraph is currently happening. We’ve killed off more than 90% of wildlife worldwide and are only a decade worth of locked in feedback loops away from billions of people being affected by famine.

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imrzzz@reddit

I say this every time the topic comes up and every time it's dismissed, argued, downvoted but I'll try again.

As a social class women are treated like shit, and even more so when they become mothers.

This shit treatment varies wildly from place to place, but occurs in every country, relative to the way men are treated, as a social class.

When women, as a large population, have even the tiniest amount of agency and control over their reproductive choices, they inevitably choose fewer or no children.

I mean, would you have lots of kids if you were doomed to a future of fewer personal/professional opportunities and a lifetime of carrying the mental, physical, emotional, and often financial load of your entire family as well as being expected to maintain your own health, social connections, and an unreasonable standard of physical attractiveness? And that's just the baseline, it can get much worse and often does.

Sure, lots of women want children, but actually making the leap to having them? It's a bad deal.

But we still sit around and scratch our heads saying "gee, it's a mystery, maybe it's the economy?"

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RGB755@reddit

You’ve identified a way in which the (IMO) actual driver intersects with women’s empowerment, but I don’t think making attribution to women’s rights alone makes sense. We see similar declines in countries with low women’s rights too. If it were strongly correlated, then we should see the most repressed societies have higher birth rates, but we don’t.

The fact is that children are now almost universally a financial burden, whereas before they were helpful for mostly manual labour societies and an economic safety net in old age for community-value, close-knit family units. (Large families under one roof, where elderly are cared for by their children and grandchildren). Add to that better means of contraception along with knowledge of how to apply it, and the resulting trend makes a lot of sense.

No economic or other incentive for kids, lots of ways to avoid having them, plus knowledge and the ability to choose against them. It intersects well with women’s rights too, because that’s a further disincentive, particularly for women who want a career.

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lolidkwtfrofl@reddit

In my private circles, mostly it's women wanting the kids, not men.

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fiction8@reddit

Reddit doesn't like to hear that TFR can't be solved with more vacation time and higher wages, but you're correct. Research has been trying to point this out for a while.

What we're seeing is a global phenomenon, and it's not going to stop. Neither should it, because one of the strongest correlations for TFR is a negative one with women's education/freedoms. Unsurprisingly, the more women are able to access and experience the modern world, the less they want to destroy their bodies in the primes of their lives by popping out several babies.

The only solutions in the coming century that aren't morally appalling are going to be more effort put towards automation (for labor-less support of the elderly and basic functions of an economy like food production) or perhaps non-uterine pregnancies. Test tube babies don't seem feasible to me but I'm not an expert on where the science is for that.

True automation, with access guaranteed to the public, is the way forward.

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Mal_Dun@reddit

historically the GDR is an interesting example for this.

Historical data shows that actively supporting women and offering child care at the work place can go a long way in raising birth rates.... surprise

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CatzioPawditore@reddit

It's not so much that woman don't want to 'destroy their bodies' , it's more that when women also enter the workforce (which goes hand in hand with education) the option to not work becomes economically unfeasible fast.

There aren't many families I highly educated nation that can afford single income families.

Ánd the fact that men don't emancipate quickly enough to step in with the new reality in which money is brought in by both partners so 'being the breadwinner' doesn't cut it anymore as a selling point for male partners.

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Guaire1@reddit

The city of Nagi in Japan managed to get a fertility rate far higher than replacement level by implementing pro natalist policirs that no one would consider morally reprehensible. Therr just needs to be the political will to implement these policies

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cambeiu@reddit (OP)

Several demographers have suggested that Nagi's policies likely just attracted Japanese people who already wanted kids to go there, and that instituting the same policy nationwide probably wouldn't yield birth rates that are as high as in Nagi.

Also important to remember that Nagi is a town of 5K people, so hardly representative of the whole Japan.

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Guaire1@reddit

Several demographers have suggested that Nagi's policies likely just attracted Japanese people who already wanted kids to go there, and that instituting the same policy nationwide probably wouldn't yield birth rates that are as high as in Nagi.

I really doubt its as simple as that since people have historically, mograted away from Nagi.

And even if true, its worth a fucking try. Making life for those who want to have children easier will at least have some positive effects.

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Cynical_Tripster@reddit

This is from a 14 year account with no posts before 2 months ago and no comments before 2 days ago. That is really odd. Especially considering other factors beyond padding the word count for the comment to pass

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DrRatio-PhD@reddit

The only solutions in the coming century that aren't morally appalling

Fingers crossed, but

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bookmonkey786@reddit

This really is something universal this is happening across all demographics. There is a small handful of low pop density counties where the birth rate is actually rising, but otherwise its down across the board. I dont see a way out that isn't horrific in the long term.

I could just be grasping at straws but my purely speculative reasoning is that with communication and the large dense population, we've triggered a inbuilt biological mechanism that suppresses desires to have kids, cities have always been population sinks that rely on the rural to keep them filled, but the rural pop didn't have much contact with the city before modern communications. The large population and modern communication putting everyone in contact with everyone spread the survival instinct that there are too many people around and we should stop breeding, it could be a backup survival mechanism to ensure population didn't over harvest an area over the very long term. Maybe the mouse utopia experiment had a point. Between that and easy contraceptives and the improving rights of women, it is making that effects more pronounced.

I see 2 endings to that path and both are horrific. One, we let it happen naturally, and global society goes into a long, slow, and painful decline to population and technological level where women feel like they need to have children to keep things going, two we try to stop it and women are enslaved and force them back into the kitchen. It might be both.

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stonerbobo@reddit

We already know how to deal with this - stop funding retirement at the high levels we do. Its just that the retirees comprise most of the government and the voter base. We're all paying into retirement funds for boomers to go on vacation, and those funds will be bankrupt or severely restricted when we're in retirement.

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FBWSRD@reddit

What Australia did 30 years ago was brilliant. Basically employers had to pay a certain percentage of your wage into a retirement (Started at 3%, now its 12%) no matter if you are full time, part time or casual. Before that it was an optional benefit for some workers. But it means that everyone funds their own retirement, and you only get the age pension if you have under a certain income and under a certain amount of assests. Now that we've had such a long time with everyone having a retirement fund the demand on the age pension is decreasing over time. In about 10-15 years we will start getting retirees who have had compulsory super their whole working lives and it is gonna make a big difference. But this requires having a smart government 30 years ago, but hey, the second best time is now.

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coleto22@reddit

We are over the effective carrying capacity. Homes are historically unaffordable. What are the leaders expecting? "Have children! No, no homes to live in, just children!

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marxistopportunist@reddit

We are phasing out all finite natural resources this century, so the plan to lower birth rates had to start last century (education etc. played a role, but nothing compared to the housing crises in every developed nation).

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superviewer@reddit

TLDR did a couple videos about this...

Presence of microplastics in the body, endocrine system, reproductive system, all that...

Decrease in penis sizes in recent decades...

Decrease in sperm counts in recent decades...

All the different chemicals and things over the generations are adding up, and now things are due.

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superviewer@reddit

Same. I knew years ago there's no way I could have a kid given this planet.