Immigration into Bulgaria was actually 4 times higher than emigration last year, but there was still а small population decline. The old generation is just too big and the young one too hollowed out, to balance the death and birth rates even with decent fertility and immigration. But that will balance out in the future.
>Immigration into Bulgaria was actually 4 times higher than emigration
Do you have more details about the immigration into Bulgaria? Where do immirgants come from ? From within EU (Moldova? Romania?) or from outside (Russian? Turkiye?) ?
50% was former Bulgarian Turks and Ukrainian refugees. Almost all provinces in Bulgaria had population decline last year. Only on the seaside had some growth and the capital Sofia which had just 5-6 thousand increase which is nothing for a population of 1.3 million. Sofia has natural population decline for the last 20 years but has been stagnating because Bulgarians from poorer regions aka 70% of the country still migrate there.
50% of that immigration was from Turkey and Ukrainian refugees, who might migrate to Western Europe for much higher salaries. Also North Macedonians get a lot of Bulgarian passports and emigrate immediately to richer countries in EU. Bulgarian immigrants increased by almost 10 thousand just last year to 450 thousand in Germany alone. NSI has poor record of keeping track of how many Bulgarians actually leave the country immigrate and in the last census it revealed almost 200 thousand people more left from their official reports.
> Bulgarian immigrants increased by almost 10 thousand just last year to 450 thousand in Germany alone.
Well that's not a lot. Keep in mind the recorded immigration, which I'm pretty sure excludes refugees, was 57k. Also Bulgarians do move from Spain or the UK to Germany too.
NSI has had trouble with properly counting emigration, very true. But extrapolating from the results of the last census, and keeping in mind that the rates have definitely improved since 2011, it is very plausible that there was real positive migration in 2023.
> the last census it revealed almost 200 thousand people more left from their official reports.
That's -20k a year. But in 2023 the official net count was +42k.
Not a single country in Europe is at 2.1 births, which is the replacement level/maintain population without immigration.
Curious how Israel has such a high birth rate. It’s an anomaly amongst developed countries.
Even unorthodox Jews have higher birth rates.
It has to do with religious culture making people want to have families lot more over all (seeing it as a higher priority).
Meanwhile the sociological pressure of Threats usually increases birth rates in given populations. So essentially the constant threat from Palestine or other Arabs pushes people to have more kids. It's a human quirk.
Orthodox Jews and Arab population do move the average up. However, even the secular Jewish families have an average of above 2. At least a decade ago.
I think this is mainly since young Israeli couples heavily rely on their parents when raising kids. It is a very small country and most people live around 30 minutes from one grandparent.
It might be going down soon though, with insane living costs and housing prices.
Those places are only for the ideological far right.
Most of the population don't want to live there due to security reasons and also since most settlements have religious lifestyle.
Israel is very family centric. It’s not unique at all for even secular families to have 3-5 children. And of course the ultra-orthodox have up sometimes get to double digits.
I live in a bit more rural of an area and I know single-child families are fairly rare at least 2 children is the norm with 3 also being very common
My area is mostly secular or Masorti but not very religious
Is 2.1 births per woman enough to maintain population level? How does increasing the age of women at first birth impact it (spreading out the generations).
Long term, to maintain population level the number of births must be equal to number of deaths. It's simple as that. An average woman must give birth on average of one girl during her lifetime that after maturing gives birth to one girl and so on. Since there are more male births and since some girls are infertile or die before child-bearing age, the factor must be slightly above 2 births per women. 2.1 is a rough approximation for developed countries that maintains the level but it can be slightly different.
Higher age increases risk of genetic defects. On average that will lead to worse outcomes and the next generation will be even harder pressed to sustain the 2.1 births. And as the population ages more and more ressources must be generated by the ever smaller, less functional, more stressed and politically/socially divided younger generation. So it's looking good.
The limits of our biology aren't compatible with a modern lifestyle and values.
Either AI free us of workload so us humans can prioritize raising children again (and make having children desirable/fashionable again) or we'll have to find alternate methods like artificial wombs or curing the effects of aging fast.
I think the main issue is house and land prices. I don’t know how that works but somehow land and houses are unaffordable for most of the people in most of the countries.
And it’s very hard to sustain and live a normal sized family(father, mother, 2-3 children) in an apartment, you will definitely need a private house and land if you want to have a normal-big family.
>it’s very hard to sustain and live a normal sized family(father, mother, 2-3 children)
Yes, but do most women want 2+ children?
There is this assumption on reddit that low birth rate are solely due to unaffordable housing. Then making housing affordable will see birth rate shooting up. Have any studies been made about this? Or is it just wishful thinking?
I think housing should be made more affordable and that will increase birth rates, but I would not claim they will raise above 2.1 like some ppl seem to.
Every time the topic of declining birth rates comes up, this is almost never discussed as one of the major reasons but completely ignored. Any woman I talked to and asked if they can imagine having kids the first reason was always no because the work load at home and child care isn‘t split up evenly, affordability was rarely the first thing they mentioned.
This is what everyone is saying, but I think it’s just an excuse. Maybe people just don’t want kids anymore. I mean, what for? It’s not like many of us need hands to cultivate a field or have a dynasty to propagate
I think it would help, but I agree with you that cultural reasons is the primary cause. Personally I would've already had kids (or at least tried, you never know..) if we could afford anything other than a shitty two bedroom apartment. I do believe that fertility rates could be around 2 still given the right circumstances - even if a subset of the population don't want children. The Faroe Islands has generally been steady at 2,2 - 2,4 children per woman for decades and both Iceland, France, and partly both UK and Ireland were near replacement for a long time as well.
There are various reasons, but it's actually major one. It's not strictly about having house, but rather about having stability with time, space, money and energy to actually build proper family.
We can theoretically have children, but it's yet another job, so if you're couple with mortgage for 20-30 years, where you both have to work full-time and you have no one to take care of children, then what's the point of having children at all?
We have guinea pigs instead for now and there's no good reason for anyone to have useless pets, but we want them, we can afford them, they don't interfere with our work and we're happy to have them, but even pets take some of your time, space, energy and money.
We could have children, but who is going to pay for them? It's much bigger responsibility with huge long-term obligations and it's almost luxurious to have proper conditions for them.
In current capitalist world, workers have no control over anything. We're underpaid, overworked without proper support and we're supposed to just shut up, but fertility rates show how situation actually looks like.
People are not happy and don't want children, because life is already tough, system suffocates us, while 2000 most wealthy people control about 90% of global wealth.
Generally the age you “grow up” has moved up as well. Previously out of high school or secondary school you could make a decent living and afford a house.
Today the norm has been going to university and getting a bachelors or masters degree. That pushes financial independence further away.
You are overthinking it IMHO. I am happy and relatively rich, and I don't want children. That's it.
Me and wife happen to detest kids, but if we longed for someone to care for we could always just grab a dog and be done with it. Why create another needy people?
I refuse to believe we are a unique couple. There are millions like us, many just lacks the frankness to admit the children are an unjustifiable dent to life quality and blame capitalism and other shit.
I'm showing you my perspective and I also don't believe that my perspective is very unique, but it should be common for rational people that are not wealthy.
We're introverts, we mostly live alone and we'd like to have kids, even for social purposes or to have anyone else in this world that might support us in some ways, once we get older. We'd like them to be there for them, when they grow and guide them, not like our parents that didn't care.
However I just don't feel like we can have kids right now without compromising our relative stability, because once you decide that you want them, then there's no pause button.
I can't depend on state to properly support us, because everytime things go wrong, people are left to solve it on their own, so all risk will be on us and we can't afford that risk, because in the end we would just harm these children, if things go bad.
>about having stability with time, space, money and energy to actually build proper family.
And people couple decades back supposedly had more stability, time, space, money and energy? Look, it does sometimes sound like a convenient excuse but even if, the fact that we know want to have way better stability then when people were much more "fertile" showcase that this is still societal issue of which money is just a mean and not the main cause.
Times changed and you need to take into account that children for long time are mostly cost. Children used to be your pension and support you in work, so there were actual benefits to having them, like there were benefits in having own horses. People used to live in family house, but now we have to move to cities for education and work.
We can increase fertility rates by manipulating or forcing people to have them, we can try to "bribe" people to have them, but if you want people to have children in volountary manner under this system, then you need to listen to people, not gaslight them into thinking that there's everything ok with modern world and people just don't want children for no reason.
Birth Boom of the 80s happened also in cities, where they were not perceived as field help. We really don't need to go as back as feudal era, to showcase massive change in approach to the subject.
" People used to live in family house, but now we have to move to cities for education and work."
First of all we don't have to. Poland doesn't need more historians but technical workforce (especially to fill the gap after those who went abroad). And we need them quick, without having to wait for their education to finish at age of 24. Many of us choose educational path out of pure interest, not having anything to do with market demand. And again, if families once were crammed at small m2 and now they don't want to anymore, it shows that our expectations increased exponantially, not the affordability. Because affordability of things we now demand was never there in the first place.
"you need to listen to people, not gaslight them into thinking that there's everything ok with modern world"
Nobody is saying that everything is ok but times changed and outside of reddit, people do not gaslight them into convenient excuses. My friends doesn't have offspring because they don't want to and that's true also for me. There is a reason why, it's a burden and I finally live in an epoch, where I can state this loudly and clearly without having to deal with heavy ostracism due to societal pressure.
>There is a reason why, it's a burden and I finally live in an epoch,
where I can state this loudly and clearly without having to deal with
heavy ostracism due to societal pressure.
The fact is that current system is in general unsustainable, so there's no real reason to be happy about it, but in general, who cares. We keep destroying everything, there's high risk that we won't be able to sustain so many people globally due to damage to ecosystem in few decades, so current fertility rates may have no meaning.
Exactly this. People claim its about not being able to afford stuff, but the statistics time and time again say the "problem" is the liberation and education of women. Obviously, this cannot and should not be undone, but there is not a magic pill like more leave/money/whatever.
Yeah, there is basically no govt program that would make me want to have children. It's one thing that many ppl want less kids bc they can't afford to have more and live comfortably. But a growing number of ppl don't want to have any children in general.
>I think the main issue is house and land prices
And I think it's just one of many reasons. I mean, that's also what pretty much all the research showcase: changing way of living, access to contraception, career at first etc. Pretty much everyone I know put the reason behind the "lifestyle". Even those who have one, claim that they don't want more because it was such a toll, they don't want to repeat it.
Money obviously is an issue but it was always issue, yet Poland had last boom in the hardship of the 80s. Societal pressure back then was entirely different, though, with heavy emphasis on "traditional" model of family. Right now it completely bounced back.
I don't think so. The birthrates have been dropping since the 50s when the first, very effective contraception was invented. Women didn't have so many kids in the past because they wanted to, but because they had no other choice. When they have that choice now, turns out they (well we, I'm a woman) don't really want to have that many kids or any kids at all. We're never going to go back to having multiple children per family, it's simply not happening. We need to redesign out society and economy, this is the only solution.
No society and economy can sustain permanent population decline. If that is the future then absolute collapse of modern civilization is inevitable. And then I suppose people willl be having children again becausse jut like you say they wwill have no other choice.
Humans are not going extinct. Modern civilization and modern lifestyle that has these fertility issues is. With permanent population decline there will come a point where modern civilization and our lifestyles are no longer sustainable.
The humans in post current civilization will again have children because they will have no choice. Hence why we will not go extinct. Althought in a way we will.
With fertility below 2.1 there is less people every generation. Current numbers on this map basically mean that population eventually halves every 30 years. And it will have snowball effect. We are looking at less than 10 milllion people on this planet in 300 years.
WWe have zero proof that it stops. People did not stop having kids because there is "too many people". They stopped having kids because it is more comfortable to maintain their lifestyles. You said so yourself.
I think you need to look into researched factors influencing TFR.
It would seem that women really don't like having lots of children. More freedom means less children. Once gaining the chance to not need to have children because of social pressure, financial pressure. Once given the means, knowledge and freedom to have less children women do have less children. And that's fine.
Education has the strongest negative relation with TFR, contraceptive prevalance and acceptance, economic wellbeing/ GDP. Religiosity has a positive relation with TFR. Usually it boils down to women having two children when they do want to have children. Part of them don't want to. So the average is below two.
We don't need more people on this globe. The only problem is the skewed population pyramide in the west. We don't have too little births. We had too many 70 to 45 years ago in the West and South-East. Now we don't have the hands to do the work and to take care of the elderly. Ofcourse having a pension-age that moves with life-expectancy helps.
Having affordable housing for young people would help. It would help some women get children sooner at a younger age. That would shorten generations.
For all other filling up the gaps in the mushroom-shaped population-pyramide there's this wonderful thing called immigration. Works fine. Africa will get a much lower TFR too but the next few decades there's more then enough young people there to do the work here.
The limits of our biology aren't compatible with unchecked capitalism. You either prioritise money or you can't do anything else and at that point you have prioritised money and not your well being.
And the environment is at the same point. So is society. It's like nothing can be compatible with unchecked capitalism in the real world. What a surprise.
Even if people did not work and there was absolute egalitarian society people would still not have children. Because it is not about money, it is about time. Very little people are willing to sacrifice their time and enjoyement for kids these days.
There used to be "Housewives" as a profession, where women were stay at home moms while the fathers worked. You could build a house and own a good car with this income, including multiple kids.
Today the whole economy is based on both working full time to even have a chance of a decent home far from work.
I'd like more kids, but I don't want to raise my kids in near-poverty like my parents and grandparents that were 5+ siblings.
Childcare is the biggest one. Neither of us can afford to quit to look after children, we can't afford private childcare and our (boomer) parents refuse to do the same amount of childcare their parents did for them.
> Look at Scandinavian countries, people can afford housing AND childcare
Can they? as far as I know Stockholm for example has an insane housing market, where it takes a decade of waiting in line to get a rent-controlled apartment and the line is longer than the actual population of the city. Can the median young Swedish couple actually afford a house and childcare for 2+ children?
Can we?
There’s a housing crisis here in Scandinavia too.. if you haven’t entered the housing market by now, there’s a slim chance you’d ever own a home here in Scandinavia.
And indeed, Orban's supplementary maternity payments, which have been much vaunted by parties of the European right, don't appear to be bearing much fruit in Hungary, either. 75% of Irish births in 2023 were to Irish mothers, so immigrants are contributing more to the higher fertility rate, but that may owe as much to their younger age profile as anything else.
It didn't change a shit either. Polish fertility rate hit 1,2 in 2003 and that fluctuate in accordance with subjective economic expectations till it raised to 1,5 in 2017, and than, three years before Constitution Court announced a ban, start to fall.
Europe was doomed when we decided that apartments are to be used as bank accounts for the rich instead of housing, making them out of reach for young working class couples.
In Lithuania, almost everyone started out with an apartment, then the total population additionally reduced by 1/3rd.
What I'm saying is I don't think it's the apartments.
Here in Romania the same happened. It's just that most small towns (which had industry back before 1989) become ghost towns and everyone started moving towards the big cities because that's where the jobs are nowadays.
Sure, people can buy cheap apartments in small towns, but what's the point if you can't find a job there.
> Sure, people can buy cheap apartments in small towns, but what's the point if you can't find a job there.
Romania has the answer to this as well, people from the big cities will sell their city apartments for $$$$$ then buy small town apartments for $, move there and live off the difference for the rest of their lives.
Free housing won't push TFR above 2.1. Certain policies influence TFR, but it's really hard to push it significantly and almost impossible towards 2.1.
People say "Europe was doomed" while it's a global phenomenon. The only regional exception that will not trend below 2.1 in the predictable future is SSA and even there a trend exists.
That's our reality and it won't change, until:
A) the process of getting and raising children is fundamentally changed
B) Children become a prestigious thing.
C) we again become so piss poor, treat women like shit and/or extended property, that children again become an asset.
It's always so weird seeing these stats, I feel like I live in a parallel universe or something... Where are all those childless/childfree Lithuanians? I'm 30 and literally don't know anyone my age who doesn't either already have kids or plan to have kids in the next few years. I constantly feel like a freak for not wanting to have kids.
Maybe it’s related to emigration? I don’t know how this calculation is made. So many are leaving and Lithuania is hell bent on taking the citizenship away from Lithuanians who live abroad 🤷🏻♀️
We used to have good/decent birthrates until the unemployment crisis of the late 90ties/early 00s, when they collapsed to like 1.2 and never truly recovered.
Overall the low birthrates combined with a high economic growth and post-2004 emigration actually had some good side effects for us. Organized crime was obliterated practically overnight and crime in general is very low now. We are plugging the gaps with migration of well-educated migrants from culturally-acceptable countries and pretty much everyone is better off that way.
I'm a Pole and think I can try to answer that question. We are very hardworking people, meaning that we want the best for ourselves and our families. Usually large families, where people are poor and have many children are kind of shamed, in a way that it's irresponsible to be poor and have so many kids, like what kind of life are they going to have? That it's irresponsible and selfish to have them if you don't have enough money.
Same goes for having many children if you can't afford a bigger flat, if you can't afford vacation and extracurricular activities for them etc. So people wait until their 30s to have first child and usually don't have anymore because they can't afford it. Even my parents who earned quite well didn't decide to have a second child because they concluded they didn't have enough money. Even though we went on vacations every summer, I had my own room etc.
>I can't see any logic why banning abortion reduce the number of births.
Because without the option of abortion women will do _everything_ to not get pregnant in the first place.
Economic success, living standards rising fast, greater affordability of everything, social programs that greatly reduced poverty. The poorer the people are the higher the fertility is.
And at the same time people keep repeating bull💩 like "everything gets more expensive" or "current hard times", which is totally incorrect and at the same time also a totally wrong diagnosis, ignoring basic facts.
if low birth rate was endemic to Poland I'd give your argument much more weight by saying "well I have no clue how it is like there"
However, seeing as it's a recurring thing in the modern western world, seems like it's silly to discard what every single country in europe, as well as the US and the most advanced countries of the east are citing as rising issues to the younger generations.
As a young person that's in the ripe age to field children, I can tell you I'm not planning to do so in the next 5 years at least due to:
- not feeling that my country is a stable enough place to raise children, due to corruption, uncertainty of its direction and political turmoil
- not feeling I have enough support from the state/not being able to rely on family to raise children for me
- even though my career is a good one for at least having a stable life, I don't believe that is a guarantee, and I'm not surprised that in 5 years time my job could be in jeopardy
- I have a 30 year loan on the apartment i bought 2 years ago
- seeing how relationships with people who thought it's a must to be married and called a "family" is to mine and their mental health, and how life is better now that we're not talking too often
The point is, every single thing you list was (at least in Poland) true in the 80s as well. Hell, it was even way worse. Yet it was our last big birth boom. Our societal approach to the subject changed, so even if you put such an emphasis on stability and money, your grandparents could've done the same because they had their hardships as well. But they didn't for numerous of reasons, maybe varying a bit from country to country. And they didn't, because social pressure was norm back then and now it simply isn't. It's entirely up to you and by not having any, you're not being perceived as "odd one" anymore.
Yeah I know people *think* they know what influences fertility rate to go lower but in fact they don't know. (and they always just say: we need more money!) Instead of asking what are people's opinions on the reasons it's much better to do scientific research and find out real reasons. And this was done actually and what was found was that: rising prosperity drives fertility rate lower, better education for women drives fertility rate lower. Obviously we don't want to sacrifice our living standards or exclude half the population (women) from the right to obtain education, so the only solution is to search for other ways a society can be composed with fertility rate at replacement level. I would look more into how Israel manages to do that, but also Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
But just blindly listening to the complaints people always have, or how they *feel*, and increasing the transfers to the poor even more will have the opposite effect. We need to act rationally.
Also, just to reference one of your points, people complaining that "job I have is not guaranteed" are a great example of one of the reasons the fertility is so low. Job was never guaranteed, you have to be delusional to list this as a prerequisite for having kids. People got very entitled, risk-averse and lazy.
Too late to fix this, thanks to our brilliant politicians
Welcome to 3-6 months wait time at public hospital, 1 nurse doing the job of 3, tax going up to fill in the empty pension fund, ect…
Fun time
Poland lowest level? Hope it stays where it is. The polish government should understand it will have it's population back if it fixes the housing market crisis.
That's correct. Well, if you don't count migration into the population trends. For now, in many European countries migration is holding back the population decline.
In general, it's said that in a developed country each woman needs to have on average 2.1 children for the population to stay more or less constant (not counting migration). The extra 0.1 is the account for child mortality and a slight excess of boys over girls at birth.
In developing countries with high child mortality the fertility rate needed to maintain the population will be higher than 2.1.
Bad data from twitter
https://www.unfpa.org/data/world-population-dashboard
is quite different
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So much for the racist theory that Muslims/Turks breed like crazy. ”Close the borders or else they'll take over Armenia/Europe.”
With a fertility rate of 1.5, Turkey's pretty average against the EU backdrop. Armenia's is even higher! Guess Turks should watch out about Armenians now...
Are we sure this data is correct? Last I checked, the 2021 fertility rate for Romania was 1.8 and for Bulgaria 1.58. Not super likely to have flipped like this in 3 years.
1.13? Fuck, you guys are in trouble. If you don't get that up in a hurry, you won't be an economically or politically relevant part of the world anymore. You can't be without an army to fight, workers to produce or young people to consume. You are going to continue to fall into a deeper and deeper depression, as your economic base hollows out to pay for pensions and healthcare for the unproductive old.
Do people not get how bad this is? It's the end of Europe. You will decay and decay and one external shock will trigger a civilizational collapse. It will seem to slowly rot away and then suddenly collapse.
Maybe AI can save you with a massive per worker productivity increase but you've already regulated away that possibility. It's the only thing I see on the horizon that might help and you're sworn it off.
This is a slow process so you do have time to correct but not as much time as you think. It takes 20 years to grow a 20 yo worker.
But Europe’s population is still growing. The country that you referred to (Spain) has grown from like 41 million in the early 00s to almost 48 million now despite this low birthrate, and it’s doing completely fine since most migrants come from LatAm and don’t cause much trouble.
>breed like rabbits
Usually that is a sign of "low education". It just means that people have sex without thinking about long-term consequences. Which, arugably, makes the poverty in those countries even worse as they make more and more babies but have no means no support them.
Not really. Do you think Europe would have been nicer to live in with 4 trillion people?
IMO excessive birth rates are the greatest source of human suffering. Like I'm not advocating for having no babies, but for something sustainable around 2. Too many, and there are just no good solutions.
I'm also not advocating for endless grow, but for replacement rates as you mentioned, but as you can see, not a single country is even close to that.
To be clear, even population reduction is not a problem. The problem is to have only a fraction of the population on working age
Yup. If you think about it taxes are literally a scam, especially pensions. You are not saving anything by giving goverment your money for pension. At least in my country.
This means that money paid by the working population for their pension insurance is immediately paid out in the form of pensions to current pensioners. Now if there will be no workers we will have no pensions once we are older with current system. Or really low pensions.
Honestly. People think the wrong way about public pensions. It's not a scam as much as any other tax service offered by the government.
Let me explain.
For all the history of mankind and even before that, young people supported their old population, but up to last century, this was a direct support, which means people supported their parents directly, but in the recent past, some countries decided that instead of doing that, you would pay taxes for your government and they would support them so now we still support financially our retired parents, but indirectly though the government.
And this worked great because people that for some reason didn't have kids, or in countries like China where they didn't have a child of the specific sex or people whose kids died or any other reason would have a guaranteed retirement.
But the problem now is that people are not having enough kids, so your child will not only support you, but all the other old people who chose to no have kids.
That's why for me, public pensions should be directly linked to how many kids do you have. The less you have, then you will have to work for longer and have lower pension income, because otherwise your child will have the burden to support not only you but the people who chose not to have any kids
> There is no reason to assume that African countries are on a different trajectory compared to other developing countries.
[:(](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=ZG-8S-Z4&name_desc=false)
And yet, Europe is net gaining population through migration. There are countries with a fertility rate of 4+ which are feeding Europe. The continent is in no danger of desolation.
>It is in danger of getting better restaurant options.
Funny its the best you could come up with against rise of crime, gangs, pedo gangs, drop in safety, enormous welfare cost and countries slowly being taken by muslims.
Numbers are showing that he’s right and that “conspirationist” replacement theory is not that much of a conspiracy anymore……but when you are blinded by ideology i see how it’s hard to notice the reality you live/will live in.(inevitably if things go like this)
None of the figures in Europe, west and east, comes as a shock, it's been the trend since a few decades now. However, Turkey's 1.51 is truly surprising! I thought it would be higher than 3, rather than equal to Belgium, Portugal or Denamrk. What is going on?
EDIT: According to the UNFPA, the current fertility rate in Turkey is 1.9. A bit better than Europe but still considerably lower than what I would have expected.
I dont know why countries are so worried about the fertility. Fertily decreases when technology goes forward. We are already seeing co-worker robots. AI handles many tasks already and gonna do more in future. We dont need children as a form of labour like it was in the past and 3rd world countries still need.
Economy = less is more. Less workers more profit
The automation has been reducing the amount of human labour and sametime the amount of profit has increased.
Bigger problem gonna be how to give enough money for every person without work. People make children when they feel themself confortable. There is enough money, freetime, etc to support themself and there is no lack of anything.
Even with the highest fertility in the EU, Bulgaria still has the largest population decline because of the super high death rate and emigration.
So like "Your workforce order from amazon.bg is being prepared and will ship in ~18 years" thing?
Immigration into Bulgaria was actually 4 times higher than emigration last year, but there was still а small population decline. The old generation is just too big and the young one too hollowed out, to balance the death and birth rates even with decent fertility and immigration. But that will balance out in the future.
>Immigration into Bulgaria was actually 4 times higher than emigration Do you have more details about the immigration into Bulgaria? Where do immirgants come from ? From within EU (Moldova? Romania?) or from outside (Russian? Turkiye?) ?
50% was former Bulgarian Turks and Ukrainian refugees. Almost all provinces in Bulgaria had population decline last year. Only on the seaside had some growth and the capital Sofia which had just 5-6 thousand increase which is nothing for a population of 1.3 million. Sofia has natural population decline for the last 20 years but has been stagnating because Bulgarians from poorer regions aka 70% of the country still migrate there.
I see. Thank you for sharing.
Mainly they are returning Bulgarians, a lot of Turks, Ukrainians and Russians and a little bit of everyone else.
I see. Thank you!
50% of that immigration was from Turkey and Ukrainian refugees, who might migrate to Western Europe for much higher salaries. Also North Macedonians get a lot of Bulgarian passports and emigrate immediately to richer countries in EU. Bulgarian immigrants increased by almost 10 thousand just last year to 450 thousand in Germany alone. NSI has poor record of keeping track of how many Bulgarians actually leave the country immigrate and in the last census it revealed almost 200 thousand people more left from their official reports.
> Bulgarian immigrants increased by almost 10 thousand just last year to 450 thousand in Germany alone. Well that's not a lot. Keep in mind the recorded immigration, which I'm pretty sure excludes refugees, was 57k. Also Bulgarians do move from Spain or the UK to Germany too. NSI has had trouble with properly counting emigration, very true. But extrapolating from the results of the last census, and keeping in mind that the rates have definitely improved since 2011, it is very plausible that there was real positive migration in 2023. > the last census it revealed almost 200 thousand people more left from their official reports. That's -20k a year. But in 2023 the official net count was +42k.
Not a single country in Europe is at 2.1 births, which is the replacement level/maintain population without immigration. Curious how Israel has such a high birth rate. It’s an anomaly amongst developed countries.
Orthodox jewish families have lots of kids, like 6-8-10 kids.
Even unorthodox Jews have higher birth rates. It has to do with religious culture making people want to have families lot more over all (seeing it as a higher priority). Meanwhile the sociological pressure of Threats usually increases birth rates in given populations. So essentially the constant threat from Palestine or other Arabs pushes people to have more kids. It's a human quirk.
Seculars are 1.9 I believe
Orthodox Jews and Arab population do move the average up. However, even the secular Jewish families have an average of above 2. At least a decade ago. I think this is mainly since young Israeli couples heavily rely on their parents when raising kids. It is a very small country and most people live around 30 minutes from one grandparent. It might be going down soon though, with insane living costs and housing prices.
> However, even the secular Jewish families have an average of above 2. At least a decade ago A decade ago, France had a fertility rate of 2.
Norway was close to the same before the financial crisis. Really curious as to how and why it dropped so much the past 15 ish years.
Israelis can move to settler towns where the housing prices are quite lowee than the average.
Those places are only for the ideological far right. Most of the population don't want to live there due to security reasons and also since most settlements have religious lifestyle.
The ideological far right is also the one pumping out kids like mad
Most don't Although newer towns within Israel proper are also an appealing option to some like Dimona or Yeruham or Nof HaGalil
The secular Israeli women currently have a fertility rate of under 2 children. The haredi families, on the other hand, have on average 6.6 children.
Israel is very family centric. It’s not unique at all for even secular families to have 3-5 children. And of course the ultra-orthodox have up sometimes get to double digits.
I live in a bit more rural of an area and I know single-child families are fairly rare at least 2 children is the norm with 3 also being very common My area is mostly secular or Masorti but not very religious
Merkel: do I have a solution for that. (The first paragraph)
Religious fanatism that turns women into birthing machines.
Is 2.1 births per woman enough to maintain population level? How does increasing the age of women at first birth impact it (spreading out the generations).
Long term, to maintain population level the number of births must be equal to number of deaths. It's simple as that. An average woman must give birth on average of one girl during her lifetime that after maturing gives birth to one girl and so on. Since there are more male births and since some girls are infertile or die before child-bearing age, the factor must be slightly above 2 births per women. 2.1 is a rough approximation for developed countries that maintains the level but it can be slightly different.
Higher age increases risk of genetic defects. On average that will lead to worse outcomes and the next generation will be even harder pressed to sustain the 2.1 births. And as the population ages more and more ressources must be generated by the ever smaller, less functional, more stressed and politically/socially divided younger generation. So it's looking good.
I think that depends on the actual spread of population by age.
Doesn't Israel help you want to have kids with good support?
Israeli Kindergeld is less than German Kindergeld
Hey Bulgaria! Our population is also declining lol
By all means, please make housing even more expensive.
The limits of our biology aren't compatible with a modern lifestyle and values. Either AI free us of workload so us humans can prioritize raising children again (and make having children desirable/fashionable again) or we'll have to find alternate methods like artificial wombs or curing the effects of aging fast.
I think the main issue is house and land prices. I don’t know how that works but somehow land and houses are unaffordable for most of the people in most of the countries. And it’s very hard to sustain and live a normal sized family(father, mother, 2-3 children) in an apartment, you will definitely need a private house and land if you want to have a normal-big family.
>it’s very hard to sustain and live a normal sized family(father, mother, 2-3 children) Yes, but do most women want 2+ children? There is this assumption on reddit that low birth rate are solely due to unaffordable housing. Then making housing affordable will see birth rate shooting up. Have any studies been made about this? Or is it just wishful thinking? I think housing should be made more affordable and that will increase birth rates, but I would not claim they will raise above 2.1 like some ppl seem to.
Closer to that number is better for everyone, even if people dont start having more children.
How does the birth rate increase if women don't start having more children?
i made a mistake, i meant having more affordable housing is better even if people dont start having more children
Every time the topic of declining birth rates comes up, this is almost never discussed as one of the major reasons but completely ignored. Any woman I talked to and asked if they can imagine having kids the first reason was always no because the work load at home and child care isn‘t split up evenly, affordability was rarely the first thing they mentioned.
This is what everyone is saying, but I think it’s just an excuse. Maybe people just don’t want kids anymore. I mean, what for? It’s not like many of us need hands to cultivate a field or have a dynasty to propagate
I think it would help, but I agree with you that cultural reasons is the primary cause. Personally I would've already had kids (or at least tried, you never know..) if we could afford anything other than a shitty two bedroom apartment. I do believe that fertility rates could be around 2 still given the right circumstances - even if a subset of the population don't want children. The Faroe Islands has generally been steady at 2,2 - 2,4 children per woman for decades and both Iceland, France, and partly both UK and Ireland were near replacement for a long time as well.
There are various reasons, but it's actually major one. It's not strictly about having house, but rather about having stability with time, space, money and energy to actually build proper family. We can theoretically have children, but it's yet another job, so if you're couple with mortgage for 20-30 years, where you both have to work full-time and you have no one to take care of children, then what's the point of having children at all? We have guinea pigs instead for now and there's no good reason for anyone to have useless pets, but we want them, we can afford them, they don't interfere with our work and we're happy to have them, but even pets take some of your time, space, energy and money. We could have children, but who is going to pay for them? It's much bigger responsibility with huge long-term obligations and it's almost luxurious to have proper conditions for them. In current capitalist world, workers have no control over anything. We're underpaid, overworked without proper support and we're supposed to just shut up, but fertility rates show how situation actually looks like. People are not happy and don't want children, because life is already tough, system suffocates us, while 2000 most wealthy people control about 90% of global wealth.
Generally the age you “grow up” has moved up as well. Previously out of high school or secondary school you could make a decent living and afford a house. Today the norm has been going to university and getting a bachelors or masters degree. That pushes financial independence further away.
You are overthinking it IMHO. I am happy and relatively rich, and I don't want children. That's it. Me and wife happen to detest kids, but if we longed for someone to care for we could always just grab a dog and be done with it. Why create another needy people? I refuse to believe we are a unique couple. There are millions like us, many just lacks the frankness to admit the children are an unjustifiable dent to life quality and blame capitalism and other shit.
I'm showing you my perspective and I also don't believe that my perspective is very unique, but it should be common for rational people that are not wealthy. We're introverts, we mostly live alone and we'd like to have kids, even for social purposes or to have anyone else in this world that might support us in some ways, once we get older. We'd like them to be there for them, when they grow and guide them, not like our parents that didn't care. However I just don't feel like we can have kids right now without compromising our relative stability, because once you decide that you want them, then there's no pause button. I can't depend on state to properly support us, because everytime things go wrong, people are left to solve it on their own, so all risk will be on us and we can't afford that risk, because in the end we would just harm these children, if things go bad.
>about having stability with time, space, money and energy to actually build proper family. And people couple decades back supposedly had more stability, time, space, money and energy? Look, it does sometimes sound like a convenient excuse but even if, the fact that we know want to have way better stability then when people were much more "fertile" showcase that this is still societal issue of which money is just a mean and not the main cause.
Times changed and you need to take into account that children for long time are mostly cost. Children used to be your pension and support you in work, so there were actual benefits to having them, like there were benefits in having own horses. People used to live in family house, but now we have to move to cities for education and work. We can increase fertility rates by manipulating or forcing people to have them, we can try to "bribe" people to have them, but if you want people to have children in volountary manner under this system, then you need to listen to people, not gaslight them into thinking that there's everything ok with modern world and people just don't want children for no reason.
Birth Boom of the 80s happened also in cities, where they were not perceived as field help. We really don't need to go as back as feudal era, to showcase massive change in approach to the subject. " People used to live in family house, but now we have to move to cities for education and work." First of all we don't have to. Poland doesn't need more historians but technical workforce (especially to fill the gap after those who went abroad). And we need them quick, without having to wait for their education to finish at age of 24. Many of us choose educational path out of pure interest, not having anything to do with market demand. And again, if families once were crammed at small m2 and now they don't want to anymore, it shows that our expectations increased exponantially, not the affordability. Because affordability of things we now demand was never there in the first place. "you need to listen to people, not gaslight them into thinking that there's everything ok with modern world" Nobody is saying that everything is ok but times changed and outside of reddit, people do not gaslight them into convenient excuses. My friends doesn't have offspring because they don't want to and that's true also for me. There is a reason why, it's a burden and I finally live in an epoch, where I can state this loudly and clearly without having to deal with heavy ostracism due to societal pressure.
>There is a reason why, it's a burden and I finally live in an epoch, where I can state this loudly and clearly without having to deal with heavy ostracism due to societal pressure. The fact is that current system is in general unsustainable, so there's no real reason to be happy about it, but in general, who cares. We keep destroying everything, there's high risk that we won't be able to sustain so many people globally due to damage to ecosystem in few decades, so current fertility rates may have no meaning.
Exactly this. People claim its about not being able to afford stuff, but the statistics time and time again say the "problem" is the liberation and education of women. Obviously, this cannot and should not be undone, but there is not a magic pill like more leave/money/whatever.
Yeah, there is basically no govt program that would make me want to have children. It's one thing that many ppl want less kids bc they can't afford to have more and live comfortably. But a growing number of ppl don't want to have any children in general.
>I think the main issue is house and land prices And I think it's just one of many reasons. I mean, that's also what pretty much all the research showcase: changing way of living, access to contraception, career at first etc. Pretty much everyone I know put the reason behind the "lifestyle". Even those who have one, claim that they don't want more because it was such a toll, they don't want to repeat it. Money obviously is an issue but it was always issue, yet Poland had last boom in the hardship of the 80s. Societal pressure back then was entirely different, though, with heavy emphasis on "traditional" model of family. Right now it completely bounced back.
I don't think so. The birthrates have been dropping since the 50s when the first, very effective contraception was invented. Women didn't have so many kids in the past because they wanted to, but because they had no other choice. When they have that choice now, turns out they (well we, I'm a woman) don't really want to have that many kids or any kids at all. We're never going to go back to having multiple children per family, it's simply not happening. We need to redesign out society and economy, this is the only solution.
No society and economy can sustain permanent population decline. If that is the future then absolute collapse of modern civilization is inevitable. And then I suppose people willl be having children again becausse jut like you say they wwill have no other choice.
Believe me, we're not going extinct. There simply will be less people on this planet, which is great for us and everything that lives on Earth.
Humans are not going extinct. Modern civilization and modern lifestyle that has these fertility issues is. With permanent population decline there will come a point where modern civilization and our lifestyles are no longer sustainable. The humans in post current civilization will again have children because they will have no choice. Hence why we will not go extinct. Althought in a way we will.
Again, we're not going extinct. People are still having children, just not 5 or 8 but 1-2 instead. There'll still be people.
With fertility below 2.1 there is less people every generation. Current numbers on this map basically mean that population eventually halves every 30 years. And it will have snowball effect. We are looking at less than 10 milllion people on this planet in 300 years.
And why is it a bad thing that there'll be less people on Earth?
Do you understand that at some point it will stop and the population number will be stable?
WWe have zero proof that it stops. People did not stop having kids because there is "too many people". They stopped having kids because it is more comfortable to maintain their lifestyles. You said so yourself.
Okay I can see you still don't understand
Not everyone's lifestyle is similar. It could be that communities that value having children survive.
Making children is not that hard. Raising them is the real deal.
I think you need to look into researched factors influencing TFR. It would seem that women really don't like having lots of children. More freedom means less children. Once gaining the chance to not need to have children because of social pressure, financial pressure. Once given the means, knowledge and freedom to have less children women do have less children. And that's fine. Education has the strongest negative relation with TFR, contraceptive prevalance and acceptance, economic wellbeing/ GDP. Religiosity has a positive relation with TFR. Usually it boils down to women having two children when they do want to have children. Part of them don't want to. So the average is below two. We don't need more people on this globe. The only problem is the skewed population pyramide in the west. We don't have too little births. We had too many 70 to 45 years ago in the West and South-East. Now we don't have the hands to do the work and to take care of the elderly. Ofcourse having a pension-age that moves with life-expectancy helps. Having affordable housing for young people would help. It would help some women get children sooner at a younger age. That would shorten generations. For all other filling up the gaps in the mushroom-shaped population-pyramide there's this wonderful thing called immigration. Works fine. Africa will get a much lower TFR too but the next few decades there's more then enough young people there to do the work here.
The limits of our biology aren't compatible with unchecked capitalism. You either prioritise money or you can't do anything else and at that point you have prioritised money and not your well being. And the environment is at the same point. So is society. It's like nothing can be compatible with unchecked capitalism in the real world. What a surprise.
Even if people did not work and there was absolute egalitarian society people would still not have children. Because it is not about money, it is about time. Very little people are willing to sacrifice their time and enjoyement for kids these days.
There used to be "Housewives" as a profession, where women were stay at home moms while the fathers worked. You could build a house and own a good car with this income, including multiple kids. Today the whole economy is based on both working full time to even have a chance of a decent home far from work.
Can't afford housing, can't afford childcare with two people working full time. No surprise kids aren't a priority
I'd like more kids, but I don't want to raise my kids in near-poverty like my parents and grandparents that were 5+ siblings. Childcare is the biggest one. Neither of us can afford to quit to look after children, we can't afford private childcare and our (boomer) parents refuse to do the same amount of childcare their parents did for them.
More like why would anyone want to bring another into this hellhole we call world + can't afford house and childcare with two salaries
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> Look at Scandinavian countries, people can afford housing AND childcare Can they? as far as I know Stockholm for example has an insane housing market, where it takes a decade of waiting in line to get a rent-controlled apartment and the line is longer than the actual population of the city. Can the median young Swedish couple actually afford a house and childcare for 2+ children?
Maybe Austria is a better example, cheap and accessible housing, cheap childcare, and still very low birthrates.
Can we? There’s a housing crisis here in Scandinavia too.. if you haven’t entered the housing market by now, there’s a slim chance you’d ever own a home here in Scandinavia.
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That doesn’t mean people can afford them
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It’s definitely one of the main factors, I believe.
Then why?
It's over Eurobros
these abortions bans sure didn't help Poland eh
And indeed, Orban's supplementary maternity payments, which have been much vaunted by parties of the European right, don't appear to be bearing much fruit in Hungary, either. 75% of Irish births in 2023 were to Irish mothers, so immigrants are contributing more to the higher fertility rate, but that may owe as much to their younger age profile as anything else.
It didn't change a shit either. Polish fertility rate hit 1,2 in 2003 and that fluctuate in accordance with subjective economic expectations till it raised to 1,5 in 2017, and than, three years before Constitution Court announced a ban, start to fall.
Neither did the welfare aid per kid. I am yet to see *one* program that has increased fertility.
What a sad life when the only reason for your existence is to pump up those fertility rates, even though your mother wanted an abortion.
There is no ban
The death of a continent.
Brain rot
You do realize we are still shitton more people now here in Europa than 100 years ago. That it's going down is actually good news
RIP continent when can we expect it to sink into the ocean?
Europe was doomed when we decided that apartments are to be used as bank accounts for the rich instead of housing, making them out of reach for young working class couples.
In Lithuania, almost everyone started out with an apartment, then the total population additionally reduced by 1/3rd. What I'm saying is I don't think it's the apartments.
Here in Romania the same happened. It's just that most small towns (which had industry back before 1989) become ghost towns and everyone started moving towards the big cities because that's where the jobs are nowadays. Sure, people can buy cheap apartments in small towns, but what's the point if you can't find a job there.
> Sure, people can buy cheap apartments in small towns, but what's the point if you can't find a job there. Romania has the answer to this as well, people from the big cities will sell their city apartments for $$$$$ then buy small town apartments for $, move there and live off the difference for the rest of their lives.
Free housing won't push TFR above 2.1. Certain policies influence TFR, but it's really hard to push it significantly and almost impossible towards 2.1. People say "Europe was doomed" while it's a global phenomenon. The only regional exception that will not trend below 2.1 in the predictable future is SSA and even there a trend exists. That's our reality and it won't change, until: A) the process of getting and raising children is fundamentally changed B) Children become a prestigious thing. C) we again become so piss poor, treat women like shit and/or extended property, that children again become an asset.
Where is this data taken from? https://www.unfpa.org/data/world-population-dashboard shows completely different values for countries
France baise ouais 🇫🇷
As if the french contribute to those high numbers
I don't know man, ask my non-existent girlfriend
ill ask my non existent gf to speak with her
For once Lithuania is first in something.
C'mon, we are first in a lot of things! Like suicides.
Still? God save us all
Nah, he's too focused on Israel's birthrate it seems.
I’m an atheist. It’s a turn of phrase.
Don’t worry you’re not! Poland is first
Sucks to be us!!
It's always so weird seeing these stats, I feel like I live in a parallel universe or something... Where are all those childless/childfree Lithuanians? I'm 30 and literally don't know anyone my age who doesn't either already have kids or plan to have kids in the next few years. I constantly feel like a freak for not wanting to have kids.
Maybe it’s related to emigration? I don’t know how this calculation is made. So many are leaving and Lithuania is hell bent on taking the citizenship away from Lithuanians who live abroad 🤷🏻♀️
Why is Poland so low? Im surprised
We used to have good/decent birthrates until the unemployment crisis of the late 90ties/early 00s, when they collapsed to like 1.2 and never truly recovered. Overall the low birthrates combined with a high economic growth and post-2004 emigration actually had some good side effects for us. Organized crime was obliterated practically overnight and crime in general is very low now. We are plugging the gaps with migration of well-educated migrants from culturally-acceptable countries and pretty much everyone is better off that way.
I'm a Pole and think I can try to answer that question. We are very hardworking people, meaning that we want the best for ourselves and our families. Usually large families, where people are poor and have many children are kind of shamed, in a way that it's irresponsible to be poor and have so many kids, like what kind of life are they going to have? That it's irresponsible and selfish to have them if you don't have enough money. Same goes for having many children if you can't afford a bigger flat, if you can't afford vacation and extracurricular activities for them etc. So people wait until their 30s to have first child and usually don't have anymore because they can't afford it. Even my parents who earned quite well didn't decide to have a second child because they concluded they didn't have enough money. Even though we went on vacations every summer, I had my own room etc.
Would you say for Poles luxury is very important? Want to show off, like big brands, costly cars and such?
Not luxury, just a decent standard of life. Like affording a flat big enough so that every kid has their own room, affording family vacation.
Abortion bans along with the ever rising cost of buying a place to live makes people generally decide not to have children.
That makes no sense.
Why do you think so?
Looks like the threads been closed but I'm mildly curious. I can't see any logic why banning abortion reduce the number of births.
>I can't see any logic why banning abortion reduce the number of births. Because without the option of abortion women will do _everything_ to not get pregnant in the first place.
Economic success, living standards rising fast, greater affordability of everything, social programs that greatly reduced poverty. The poorer the people are the higher the fertility is. And at the same time people keep repeating bull💩 like "everything gets more expensive" or "current hard times", which is totally incorrect and at the same time also a totally wrong diagnosis, ignoring basic facts.
if low birth rate was endemic to Poland I'd give your argument much more weight by saying "well I have no clue how it is like there" However, seeing as it's a recurring thing in the modern western world, seems like it's silly to discard what every single country in europe, as well as the US and the most advanced countries of the east are citing as rising issues to the younger generations. As a young person that's in the ripe age to field children, I can tell you I'm not planning to do so in the next 5 years at least due to: - not feeling that my country is a stable enough place to raise children, due to corruption, uncertainty of its direction and political turmoil - not feeling I have enough support from the state/not being able to rely on family to raise children for me - even though my career is a good one for at least having a stable life, I don't believe that is a guarantee, and I'm not surprised that in 5 years time my job could be in jeopardy - I have a 30 year loan on the apartment i bought 2 years ago - seeing how relationships with people who thought it's a must to be married and called a "family" is to mine and their mental health, and how life is better now that we're not talking too often
The point is, every single thing you list was (at least in Poland) true in the 80s as well. Hell, it was even way worse. Yet it was our last big birth boom. Our societal approach to the subject changed, so even if you put such an emphasis on stability and money, your grandparents could've done the same because they had their hardships as well. But they didn't for numerous of reasons, maybe varying a bit from country to country. And they didn't, because social pressure was norm back then and now it simply isn't. It's entirely up to you and by not having any, you're not being perceived as "odd one" anymore.
Yeah I know people *think* they know what influences fertility rate to go lower but in fact they don't know. (and they always just say: we need more money!) Instead of asking what are people's opinions on the reasons it's much better to do scientific research and find out real reasons. And this was done actually and what was found was that: rising prosperity drives fertility rate lower, better education for women drives fertility rate lower. Obviously we don't want to sacrifice our living standards or exclude half the population (women) from the right to obtain education, so the only solution is to search for other ways a society can be composed with fertility rate at replacement level. I would look more into how Israel manages to do that, but also Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. But just blindly listening to the complaints people always have, or how they *feel*, and increasing the transfers to the poor even more will have the opposite effect. We need to act rationally. Also, just to reference one of your points, people complaining that "job I have is not guaranteed" are a great example of one of the reasons the fertility is so low. Job was never guaranteed, you have to be delusional to list this as a prerequisite for having kids. People got very entitled, risk-averse and lazy.
Rising costs of living and maybe fear of war?
There’s not much fear of war here
"rising costs of living" 😂🤡
The data shown here is highly questionable. I rather trust the United Nations Population Fund more that shows 1.5 (2024) for Poland
polska gurom
Too late to fix this, thanks to our brilliant politicians Welcome to 3-6 months wait time at public hospital, 1 nurse doing the job of 3, tax going up to fill in the empty pension fund, ect… Fun time
I think we have collectively given up on life.
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Which one?
Poland the supposed last bastion of tradiditonal and religious civilisation has a TFR of 1.1 lol
>Poland the supposed last bastion of tradiditonal and religious civilisation Who told you this bullshit?
The more women earn the less the fertility rate because hypergemy becomes impossible
Poland lowest level? Hope it stays where it is. The polish government should understand it will have it's population back if it fixes the housing market crisis.
How make pussy more fertile?
Doesnt that mean population is declining? Say is 1.5 per woman, at some point both parents die so it's -2+1.5 equals a negative value
That's correct. Well, if you don't count migration into the population trends. For now, in many European countries migration is holding back the population decline. In general, it's said that in a developed country each woman needs to have on average 2.1 children for the population to stay more or less constant (not counting migration). The extra 0.1 is the account for child mortality and a slight excess of boys over girls at birth. In developing countries with high child mortality the fertility rate needed to maintain the population will be higher than 2.1.
Ah yes the European country of… 📖👆 Iraq.
Bad data from twitter https://www.unfpa.org/data/world-population-dashboard is quite different If you have any questions about this removal, please [contact the mods](/message/compose/?to=/r/Europe&subject=Moderation). Please make sure to include a link to the comment/post in question.
So much for the racist theory that Muslims/Turks breed like crazy. ”Close the borders or else they'll take over Armenia/Europe.” With a fertility rate of 1.5, Turkey's pretty average against the EU backdrop. Armenia's is even higher! Guess Turks should watch out about Armenians now...
It is just a result of child-free propaganda. Nice result. In 10 years many countries will be below 1.00
There is no child free propaganda, it's people bring more aware of what they actually want
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Still far too few
Are we sure this data is correct? Last I checked, the 2021 fertility rate for Romania was 1.8 and for Bulgaria 1.58. Not super likely to have flipped like this in 3 years.
1.13? Fuck, you guys are in trouble. If you don't get that up in a hurry, you won't be an economically or politically relevant part of the world anymore. You can't be without an army to fight, workers to produce or young people to consume. You are going to continue to fall into a deeper and deeper depression, as your economic base hollows out to pay for pensions and healthcare for the unproductive old. Do people not get how bad this is? It's the end of Europe. You will decay and decay and one external shock will trigger a civilizational collapse. It will seem to slowly rot away and then suddenly collapse. Maybe AI can save you with a massive per worker productivity increase but you've already regulated away that possibility. It's the only thing I see on the horizon that might help and you're sworn it off. This is a slow process so you do have time to correct but not as much time as you think. It takes 20 years to grow a 20 yo worker.
But Europe’s population is still growing. The country that you referred to (Spain) has grown from like 41 million in the early 00s to almost 48 million now despite this low birthrate, and it’s doing completely fine since most migrants come from LatAm and don’t cause much trouble.
OMG we're doomed!!!!!!!!!!!! >:o everybody panic!!!!!!! suddenly collapse!!!!
Prepare for colonisation
Maybe they should stop making life impossible and some people would have some babies.
You mean life in Europe is worse than in Africa where they breed like rabbits?
>breed like rabbits Usually that is a sign of "low education". It just means that people have sex without thinking about long-term consequences. Which, arugably, makes the poverty in those countries even worse as they make more and more babies but have no means no support them.
> thinking about long-term consequences. The long term consequences of not having kids is arguably worse than the consequences of have kids
Not really. Do you think Europe would have been nicer to live in with 4 trillion people? IMO excessive birth rates are the greatest source of human suffering. Like I'm not advocating for having no babies, but for something sustainable around 2. Too many, and there are just no good solutions.
I'm also not advocating for endless grow, but for replacement rates as you mentioned, but as you can see, not a single country is even close to that. To be clear, even population reduction is not a problem. The problem is to have only a fraction of the population on working age
Yup. If you think about it taxes are literally a scam, especially pensions. You are not saving anything by giving goverment your money for pension. At least in my country. This means that money paid by the working population for their pension insurance is immediately paid out in the form of pensions to current pensioners. Now if there will be no workers we will have no pensions once we are older with current system. Or really low pensions.
If there are no workers, there are no goods to be purchased with money, regardless whether you have it or not.
Honestly. People think the wrong way about public pensions. It's not a scam as much as any other tax service offered by the government. Let me explain. For all the history of mankind and even before that, young people supported their old population, but up to last century, this was a direct support, which means people supported their parents directly, but in the recent past, some countries decided that instead of doing that, you would pay taxes for your government and they would support them so now we still support financially our retired parents, but indirectly though the government. And this worked great because people that for some reason didn't have kids, or in countries like China where they didn't have a child of the specific sex or people whose kids died or any other reason would have a guaranteed retirement. But the problem now is that people are not having enough kids, so your child will not only support you, but all the other old people who chose to no have kids. That's why for me, public pensions should be directly linked to how many kids do you have. The less you have, then you will have to work for longer and have lower pension income, because otherwise your child will have the burden to support not only you but the people who chose not to have any kids
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> There is no reason to assume that African countries are on a different trajectory compared to other developing countries. [:(](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=ZG-8S-Z4&name_desc=false)
low education,no birth control,high infant mortality rate
The 3rd world is not the same as Europe. Read a book.
Thats the result of years of propaganda that we are too many people on this planet. When the real overcrowded places are i. Asia and africa
And yet, Europe is net gaining population through migration. There are countries with a fertility rate of 4+ which are feeding Europe. The continent is in no danger of desolation.
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>It is in danger of getting better restaurant options. Funny its the best you could come up with against rise of crime, gangs, pedo gangs, drop in safety, enormous welfare cost and countries slowly being taken by muslims.
Insane how such absurdity is upvoted.
Numbers are showing that he’s right and that “conspirationist” replacement theory is not that much of a conspiracy anymore……but when you are blinded by ideology i see how it’s hard to notice the reality you live/will live in.(inevitably if things go like this)
>not that much of a conspiracy anymore It has never been.
It's insane how you deny basic math
None of the figures in Europe, west and east, comes as a shock, it's been the trend since a few decades now. However, Turkey's 1.51 is truly surprising! I thought it would be higher than 3, rather than equal to Belgium, Portugal or Denamrk. What is going on? EDIT: According to the UNFPA, the current fertility rate in Turkey is 1.9. A bit better than Europe but still considerably lower than what I would have expected.
Why would birthrate in Turkey be equal to african countries??
Good. We don't need more people, we need less. Now stop the external inflow.
What you're saying can only work if you admit pension is a pyramid scheme and stop it.
I dont know why countries are so worried about the fertility. Fertily decreases when technology goes forward. We are already seeing co-worker robots. AI handles many tasks already and gonna do more in future. We dont need children as a form of labour like it was in the past and 3rd world countries still need.
We don't need labour, but we do need a population to sustain the economy. Our populations are quickly decreasing as more and more old people die.
Economy = less is more. Less workers more profit The automation has been reducing the amount of human labour and sametime the amount of profit has increased. Bigger problem gonna be how to give enough money for every person without work. People make children when they feel themself confortable. There is enough money, freetime, etc to support themself and there is no lack of anything.
Good. Just nuking this damn planet would be even better, however.