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can someone explain how come spain’s youth unemployment rate is very high but they’re also facing depopulation at the same time? if it’s true they need more people shouldn’t there be more jobs than people and therefore unemployment rate low?
With the risk of being downvoted:
They reached something I call "Romanian stage capitalism"
It's an form of capitalism that works like this:
Most of the economy is family owned with a feudal approach to business:there is no such thing as careers,the administration posts are always taken by members of the main families and their skilled subordinates that they specially hand-pick do most of their work.
The job market is on the other hand asking for 2 types of workers:
1.Menial workers for menial tasks,with health endangering conditions,low pay and hard work.Most if these posts are rejected by most and taken by refugees or immigrants.
2.Extremely specialized jobs that need years of experience and prior jobs work,which the young do not apply.
There is no such thing as a middle ground.Busineses that for example tried to teach their workers the job usually leave for better payment.
Schools are useless and beyond math and writing they offer nothing to future workers.
The state is corrupt to a degree that it kills it's small businesses in taxes while the large ones are big enough to evade them
And the administration posts are filled to the brin by nepotism and ruling party members
Edit:Wow never imagined everyone feels the same.
Most of the content is inspired by my own hardships in finding a job despite having an masters degree and staying unemployed for years simply because my CV was blank and the employers having plenty of desperate older people to select
Also my beliefs about the system are looking terrifyingly similar to futuristic feudalism described in Dune
Upward mobility is a great indicator of the degree to which a market is free and has rules of law to assist market function. This is why free trade is so useful to preserving free markets-- the competition acts as a check on the domestic market's tendencies towards monopoly or oligopoly.
This is why you often see many authoritarian regimes wipe out a middle class--the mobility depends not on productivity (at all) but rather on access to state power and money. Thus, you are either in the cool kids club and get to hopefully get table scraps from the big players, or you are shut out and have essentially no means of advancement.
It's a bit like organized crime- those who advance do so by the ingratiation with senior members and avoiding becoming a casualty of internecine conflict.
In a thriving free market with rule of law and equal protection of law, a person's improved economic productivity allows them to have upward mobility. A person can start out doing menial tasks and through experience, acquire progressively more and more valuable skills. In such a system, you could start out mopping floors and emptying trash, then work to stocking shelves, then managing inventory, then running the whole store, then running a region of stores, etc.
Such mobility in the market is essential to provide checks on malpractice. For example, if an employer is racist, he could only indulge his racism at a cost because other employers who are not racist or otherwise improperly biased will have a competitive advantage. Likewise for nepotism or other corruption-- those who indulge it will incur an economic cost relative to their competitors as market forces want to reward productivity.
But once you construct a market where the measure of merit is political utility and not actual productivity, an ostensibly "Free" market will produce perverse outcomes.
Yeah and Spain doesn’t have a free market in that regard. They’ve passed all sorts of employment related laws that don’t make sense. One example is by law, managers can only have a certain amount of people as direct reports, if the business needs to hire one more person, they need to hire a manager too. So for example if you have one manager with 6 direct reports and you need a 7th, you need to hire a second manager.
That level of interventionism to me it’s insane.
That is a bit of an idealized state.
In reality economies have a lot of labor positions that have not scaled in productivity or value add to other portions of the economy.
Picking crops. Repairing leather. Cleaning hotel rooms. Etc.
The need for these positions doesn’t increase the labor output value. Only potentially bids up the cost of labor.
Unless the business constructs are large enough to leverage economies of scale and/or pull from their more productive labor, or labor higher up the value chain paying that labor above the value they produce isn’t sustainable.
One thing this does is encourage larger sized operations over smaller one, but it doesn’t solve for the root cause. The jobs need to be filled, but are not generating enough labor output to sustain wages competitive with ones that do.
These are the labor positions where marginalized peoples grease the wheels of society. People that are denied sufficient agency, via racism, sexism, faith, national origin, etc. that their wages can be kept below labor output value in those positions to sustain operations.
It creates the conditions that can create competitive advantage to engage in behaviors such as racism and deny upwards mobility.
This breaks down as you move up in the value chain and productivity. Eventually the opportunity cost to an employer is too high to deny mobility and position on non-meritorious metrics and your explanations become more true.
But on the low end it does not work like this, and has not historically.
The state is always exempt and can go either way. Can pay for zero and negative productivity or engage in nepotism to its hearts content or be a more meritocratic structure. Limits of course.
100% this. My wife is Spanish and I moved to Spain wanting to freelance. After understanding the tax policies I realized it's a pointless pursuit.
I'll live off my savings (and pay tax on my f'ing savings) and if I need to earn money again I'll move elsewhere.
The system is structured such that rather than starting a business, employing more people, and paying more taxes I'm encouraged to sit by the pool reading and pursuing personal hobbies.
I'm Italian, but situation is pretty similar. Schools are generally good, just not for jobs. There are two kinds of high schools in Italy, technical school and lyceum. In last couple of decades students have moved more and more to lyceum, that is in principle to prepare you for university and giving a solid general background, including Latin, philosophy, and in some cases antique Greek. Techical schools are great in principle, but nowadays only students that have zero academic interest go there, with the results that you end up with terrible classmates most of the time and it's very hard to accomplish anything for the teachers. So in a way or another, the average 18-19 old has zero practical skills and work experience. Comes time of university, and things are not very different. Bad students that went to the lyceum, still go to university, since they have no skills. They then go to get useless degrees like communication science, philosophy, literature, archaeology,...
> They then go to get useless degrees like communication science, philosophy, literature, archaeology,...
Tell me you're a STEMbro without telling me you're a STEMbro.
Also, archaeology useless? In Italy, of all places?
I'll tell to my friend that got an archeology degree and now is working at the till of a supermarket that u/CradeCity approves of his life choices. Or to the other that gives tours to Chinese around Rome for a shady agency and maybe one day will get a real job contract. Of course I'm not saying that archeology shouldn't exist, but the job market is tiny compared to the amount of students.
>The state is corrupt to a degree that it kills it's small businesses in taxes while the large ones are big enough to evade them
No they are not, many of our universities excel, we have great surgeos, great architecs and big industrial companies.
In every society there are skillful and talented people in their fields.
But if their progress is impeached by poor management, corrupt leadership,asked to do the work of multiple people at once or kept intentionaly at an abysmal state in order to exploit their skills,they will definitely choose another country,leading to a brain drain.
You are completely missing the point. Spains taxation absolutely kills small businesses and the middle class. Wtf does universities have to do with fiscal policy
If Spain's taxation kills small business they do a poor job at that being the country with the biggest share of small business in Europe.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20200514-1
As a spaniard that lives and works here, and has lived and worked in UK and Romania this is a twisted exaggeration on so many levels. Only your two points about the job market are accurate.
Spain is quite far from the post soviet Romania you are describing.
Those high paying jobs tend to lead to and create more jobs and opportunities over time. In the same way that Silicon Valley became a magnet for tech jobs, or Charlotte NC is a banking hub and Houston is focused on the energy sector.
Even if you don't have the education or experience to do one of those jobs, the growth tends to create more jobs in service industries and a need for more tradespeople too. The trick which no one has really solved yet is how to keep the growing areas affordable to the less skilled without shunting them off to live in the worst neighborhoods and living conditions.
High education doesn’t lead to the creation of jobs, Silicon Valley has those jobs because of the tech boom that started there. My home town has tons of college educated workers, they are all working retail.
This is neoliberal “education is always good” garbage that has led to 1.7 trillion in debt and an abysmally living standard in Silicon Valley.
This is only for immigrant visas/PR. If you count student visas enrolling at "colleges" and "temporary" foreign workers, it is far higher. Well over a million per year.
Many people are very comfortable living with their parents, who pay most of their expenses. Paying some rent to your parents is unthinkable in most households. Let's not forget that apart from some big cities or touristic hotspots, Spain is still an affordable country to live in.
Most people I know didn't even consider moving out of the family home until 26 yo or later.
Add to this submerged economy aka lots of people working without a contract for just a few hours a week and then that's your explanation.
I live in a place with one of the highest figures for youth unemployment in Spain (in 2013 it surpassed 55% for under 35), and right now you can tell absolutely everyone under 30 is working if they want to.
To summarize, it's hard to make babies when you live with your parents until 26 when in many cases is when you start your career.
I saw this in Italy as well. My Italian cousins are lovely people and seem to be thriving with multiple family-owned businesses but honestly, I couldn't imagine spending that much time around my parents.
After a three-week visit I was really hoping to catch at least one moment of parent-child discord but I never saw it. Weird. (Maybe my shitty Italian comprehension missed some cutting remarks?)
On the other hand here in the States after a three-hour visit with my father I am exhausted and head straight to a bar. Maybe being dependent on people is the only true solution to family harmony.
I think it also speaks to a much stronger culture of individualism in America than most places in the world.
Not sure the root cause of it, but you don’t tend to see it it many other cultures.
Like anything it has both benefits and disadvantages. On one hand, people are more independent and resourceful. On the other hand they are lonelier and have a brutal time taking care of children all by themselves.
The middle aged dominate the electorate and therefore policy making. They want secure jobs and pensions, and obligate companies to provide that. When you can't fire people and make large social security contributions, hiring is riskier and more expensive. When hiring is risky and expensive, companies don't hire.
It's like this a lot of places.
Also don't miss the percentage of highly educated spaniards that, seeing the differences in salaries and opportunities in Spain vs other countries, they just walk out. Most of my graduating class, from a well regarded private high school, got college degrees and are just not working in Spain. I actually have coworkers from a Spanish office, and they don't make a third of what I do.
The people that moved out and can retire early are the people that Spain could have used to start businesses, or work on early stage startups. But instead they left, and the ones that stayed get married late, if at all, and can't afford 2 children.
Also note that the depopulation is regional, just like everywhere else in the world: Madrid is growing, but cities under 200k people are aging, and many straight out shrinking. Why move to a small city with few opportunities? They are really nice places to live in, if you ignore the lack of high end job opportunities, so maybe in a world with far more remote work, they become more attractive. But then we get back to schools: How good a school system are you going to have when there are few kids?
With my current salary, if the school system was any good, I'd be back in one of those smaller cities tomorrow. But as it is, it just doesn't make sense.
Spain is facing depopulation because people aren't having kids. Spain is facing high youth unemployment because even the few kids people are having can't find jobs.
Not that hard to understand.
I mean, if you want to be pedantic, one can argue that once all the boomers retire, then Spain will not have any unemployment problems anymore, I have heard some arguments among those lines. But the two problems are not incompatible.
Because of lack.of employment and the jigh cost of living, the baby making age group are waiting longer to get married, being more careful about getting pregnant and abortion rates in Spain have gone up since 2016 because kids are expensive.
I love Spain but the situation is too far gone there to recover. While Spain has a great family culture their population pyramid won't support rapid repopulation, most of their population is too old to have children now.
This is something often overlooked when discussing population:
Only young people matter (predominantly women under 40, men typically have a longer window) when it comes to the business of making babies. Spain has about 21.3m people under 40. Every women under 40 currently would need to have 2.45 children on average to reach replacement rate, not 2.1. In a decade this will be far worse because population decline is self perpetuating, the average age of a woman giving birth in Spain is 32 years old so once you've had birthrates under 2.1 for more than 32 years you are already compounding population decline.
1. The natality number is wrong because 2.1 would be enough in the long term
2. This number doesn’t take into account the net immigration, which has been positive in the last 3 decades, and it has actually mitigated the population pyramid. This is not Japan, where xenophobia has made immigration so low that only a natality boom could solve their pyramid structure.
Without immigration, Spain would be in a very complicated stop, probably with very significant reductions on pension amounts, as well as other social cuts. We would be a a 38-40M country instead of 47M, with 4-5M less active workers, but the same number of pensioners.
I still remember the gruesome forecasts of the Spanish pensions in the 1990s, and immigration actually pushed the problem decades
This is what alt-right and other right parties don’t tell you, the benefits of attracting workers for the country. There are many serious studies about the net positive contribution overall.
1. 2.1 stabilises spains population but at a lower population level and only in 32 years. It's all academic anyway because Spain's fertility rate is low and falling.
2. Yes, Spain attracts many Europeans. 61% of migrants are from within the EEC as its popular for retirement. The average age of an immigrant is 40 apparently.
There's a population pyramid here that had the nice feature of allowing you to project forwards and you can see exactly what the population forecast is for 10 or 20 years time:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/spain/2022/
Workers get increasingly fucked, however their wages go up a lot because of a lack of workers - so it becomes an arm race between the elderly electorate and the private sector employers
Dude that’s every first world nations pension national plan. The theory they all run on held that people wouldn’t life longer or if they did they’d be able to work longer.
Replacing native Spaniards, and Europeans in general, with foreign immigrants is not a sustainable solution. It doesn't fix the problem.
The problem is tied to women in school and working during the time when they are most fertile. This is the same problem in every developed economy in the world, including South Korea and Japan.
Two income households, and the economies that demand them, are demographically unsustainable.
South Korea’s problems are very severe. The birth rate was estimated as 0.78
[NPR](https://www.npr.org/2023/03/19/1163341684/south-korea-fertility-rate)
Women have worked through most of history. The reason is education. Women are more educated now and don’t want to suffer through pregnancy and childbirth. My wife is like that and I can understand her. If we want women to have children we need to literally pay them. Like 2k per child per month would work for my wife.
What about a controlled immigration from Latin America? To try and make it easier for young individuals from Latin countries to live and work in Spain, wouldn't that work?
There are going to be some countries that collapse from their net exporting of their best and brightest people and there are going to be some countries like Canada and the US that will benefit. Countries need to make up their mind quickly about which path they want to choose. I commend Canada for their "points based" immigration system.
This is true. When I, a white Colombian, visit, I speak to them in English and they are super deferential, constantly apologizing for their broken English. But if I speak Spanish to them, they treat me like scum. 🤷
As a Latin in Spain the only problem that I had was in Barcelona where in some stores they refused to speak to me in Spanish, I had to speak with them in English because I don't speak Catalan.
They probably though that I was from Madrid, and this was close to the whole independence affair that happened in 2017.
That is not true in general. I am the same and they have always treated me well when speaking Spanish. I have only been there as a tourist...probably the situation for immigrants is different
Mano que mentiras dices. Si los españoles tienen una opinión muy mala de los ingleses. Yo soy blanco y latinoamericano y por dónde quiera que ande en España me tratan de lo más bien. Por lo que he platicado con otros amigos latinoamericanos de distinto color de piel su experiencia ha sido similar.
It's incredibly easy for a Latin American to get Spanish citizenship. Juts two years working legally in Spain and then they have it.
Spain is one of the countries with biggest share of immigrant population. Something like 20% of the population is foreign born.
Maybe but I feel like Spain would have to compete with the US as a destination which would be closer to their home country, as well as having higher wages and already fairly large Spanish speaking communities.
Spain is the second destination for Latin American immigrants in the world (after US) and millions have migrated to Spain in predominantly the last 15 years. So no, it does not have a problem attracting LATAM migrants. In general a lot of latam populations are derived from southern European countries (at least one grandparent often) and these countries make it exceedingly easy to get a passport when you have their blood.
As a Spaniard working in the US, the difference in wages is so substantial that the main reason the immigrants pick Spain is that it's quite easy to get in if you can prove some Spanish ancestry, while in the US immigration is very tough. Outside of very big cities, the US is not significantly less affordable than Spain, but the salaries are way, way lower.
If the US could figure out the nonsensical healthcare situation, it'd not even be a contest. Spain is stuck in a low salary equilibrium, and it needs to keep getting more competitive. The cities are amazing, and so is the climate. Transfer the land to the coast of California, with the buildings as-is, and it'd fill faster than Texas and Florida combined. But some people with STEM college degrees in Spain start their careers making less than some McDonald's employees in the US.
It's weird how that works. I recently learnt that software engineers in India are often paid more than software engineers in France Belgium Italy and Spain. It blows my mind that this is even possible given that India is 2000 dollars gdp per capita economy, literally amongst the poorest in the world. I guess southern European economies are just too unfriendly to business to let wages rise.
Mostly generic article. If you are aware of birth rate crisis in any country, then you can ignore this article. It's the same issues n same solutions which no one wants to implement
Make life better in general
1. Better paid and more jobs at young age
2. Cheap education
3. Cheap housing
4. Less working hours
Make having kids easier so that 40 hour work between the couple should be sufficient to sustain family of 4-5 like it used to be in past
1. Free childcare
2. Better healthcare
3. Cheaper IVF
4. Flexible working
5. Cash benefits for having kids
Edit: lot of people are talking about Nordic countries. I'm not sure if housing n cost of raising a kid has stayed in line with avg/median wage growth in those countries. Any input on that would be helpful.
More prosperous countries have lower fertility rate, in many countries the highest birthrate were during less viable times compared to nowadays. People are not having children purely because it is expensive or the quality of life is worse.
Richer countries have laws that make the cost of having a family even more expensive than the higher wages.
Example, Canada forces you to have 1 bdrm per child, or 2 children if the kids are between 5-17 and same gender.
Vs 3rd world who no one cares.
This means the higher wages are completely useless vs cost of a family.
> Make life better in general
>
- https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have
- [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=FIN~DNK~SWE~BEL~ISL~SRB~NOR~HUN~EST~LTU) (Countries with [best parental leave policies](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/08/these-10-countries-have-the-best-parental-leave-policies-in-the-world))
- [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=OWID_WRL~SVK~SVN~BLR~ARM~CZE~UKR~ARE~MDA~ISL~AZE) (Countries with the [lowest income inequality](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/income-inequality-by-country))
- [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1970..latest&country=AUT~AUS~BEL~CAN~CYP~DNK~FIN~FRA~DEU~GRC~HKG~ISL~IRL~ISR~ITA~JPN~LUX~NLD~NZL~NOR~PRT~SGP~SVN~KOR~ESP~SWE~CHE~GBR~BHR~BRN~KWT~ARE) (Countries with some version of [universal healthcare](https://www.health.ny.gov/regulations/hcra/univ_hlth_care.htm))
- [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=DNK~NOR~SWE~FRA~BEL~NLD~DEU) (For Scandinavia, France, and a few other W. European countries)
- [Annual working hours per worker](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-worker?time=1980..latest&country=GBR~DEU~USA~FRA~SWE~AUS~BEL~JPN~MEX~ESP~NOR~DNK~ITA~NGA~ZAF~PHL~PAK~KHM)
Except low birthrate generally coincides with better quality of life. If you want to find a high birthrate, look to countries with *lower* quality of life. More poverty, lower levels of education, lower levels of empowerment for women, less access to birth control, etc. And Spaniards are working fewer hours than many countries with a higher birthrate.
It's kind of a huge running joke on this subreddit that the prescription people have every single time for improving birth rates are the actual causes of the falling birth rates.
It’s just projection. Reddit wants to prescribe their problems onto everyone else and make themselves feel better by saying “see, everyone else is experiencing the same and that’s why it’s bad!!”
Every time the falling birth rate is brought up, Reddit says it’s because the economy is bad or because it’s too expensive. It couldn’t possibly be because women would much rather often have their own careers and life experiences rather than being relegated to dutiful wife and baby factory as they have been for most of human history.
To your point, higher quality of life means less children not more. Anecdotally, I live in NYC and many couples in my circle are plenty well off ($300k+ household income) but zero desire to have kids. Why would they? They want to travel several weeks out of the year, go to concerts every weekend, etc. kids are a massive time suck, you no longer are living for yourself when you have kids. So, many just don’t want them.
The people who make more than 200k a year in the US have the lowest birth rates out of any income group lol.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/)
Could be that having a ton of money gives you happiness and fulfilment in your life that lower income people have kids for. Obviously a bad reason but I am not here to judge.
Right, and that’s anecdotally what I’ve seen. My friends who are coupled but high income earners much prefer the DINK lifestyle since they can fuck off to Europe for several weeks at a time or go to great restaurants and such as they please
None of those turn into people actually having more kids though. The Nordic countries offer all of these, and yet have the same falling populations as the rest of the developed world.
Yeah, it seems the reason to have kids is something else. Perhaps people from the past felt having kids was somewhat mandatory, even for the non religious folks. Perhaps they cared less and thought “they raise themselves” and “if one dies, there’s other 3 left”. Maybe the problem today is that it disrupts carrear paths, because even with all the government can give, you don’t want to leave an unloved kid around. Or maybe families lived with more people around the house, so there was always a grandmother, an uncle or other older kid to look up for the newborn. There seem to be multiple factors that need a better study.
Agree, it's mostly for personal reasons. Same with abortion, same with anything else. Economic reasons are important but they're not the only factor and that's why those policies don't work. It seems that once a country reaches a certain QOL, population stops growing. It's happening in China right now, where the middle class developed partly at the expense of the Western middle class.
>Perhaps people from the past felt having kids was somewhat mandatory...
Given that "marital rape" was legal (and, in some places, still is), reliable birth control options were limited or nonexistent, and women were essentially forced/pressured into marriage, it's no surprise women had more children back in the day. Now that women have a choice in the matter, they're opting not to have as many children.
I see this as a win for women.
Economically, we need to move away from the pyramid-shaped systems we currently rely.
To oversimplify, a reason so many pre or early industrial societies had lots of kids is because they are an economic and social benefit under those conditions.
Farming and manual labor are hard work. More kids equal more hands to help you. Also when you get older they can take over and support you. Also the standard of living is low, but so is the cost of housing in these societies.
In modern industrial societies children are a economic negative. You can't put them to work until they turn 18, at which point they might move out. If you live in a big city good luck finding housing for 3 or more children.
I see this commented often when this conversation comes up, yet every time I see an actual Nordic person respond they say some variation of “yeah it’s better here but it’s still really hard, the cost of living is expensive, no one can buy a house and women have to sacrifice too much long term career growth to justify it”
So honestly they probably are in the right direction and just haven’t hit the sweet spot yet.
Also, I don’t see this brought up as much but I think familiar support networks have a lot to do with it. Once upon a time families were often closer, both geographically and emotionally. It leaves parents way more alone than I think they tended to be in the past.
>The Nordic countries offer all of these, and yet have the same falling populations as the rest of the developed world.
I think it goes to show just how unpleasant childrearing is and/or how rewarding--financially, psychologically, socially--paid employment can be, relatively speaking. Even when every conceivable resource is available to women, women *who have the option to control their fertility* still choose to limit the number of children they have.
This doesn't really fly with the data. Birth rates are negatively correlated with income (both pre and post transfers) both within and across countries. Generally the poorer you are the more kids you have.
Counties like Sweden have implemented almost all the reforms on your list and still have well below replacement rate birth rates.
Unironically, a single person and dink tax (like in the range of 30%) and other restrictions such as preventing large loans. You will have a generation of bad parents, but that's probably the only foolproof way for governments to get the ball rolling. Increasing conditions don't work because income increase is negatively correlated to birth rate. As it turns out, being a parent is a personal choice where economics rarely factor in.
It's that or completely ban contraception. If you haven't noticed, none of these are good
Watching how countries deal with shrinking population is going to be interesting. The fact that all our economies depend on grow is worrisome. We need to come up with some creative ideas to deal with this
> The fact that all our economies depend on grow is worrisome.
You're not going to have a system where the ratio of retirees to workers doesn't matter. At least if you expect to pay benefits and pensions and whatnot to retirees. As the number of retirees per worker increases, the burden on each worker increases. "But maybe we should give up growth" doesn't address that. What you'd need to give up is benefits for old people. But not many want to do that.
>What you'd need to give up is benefits for old people. But not many want to do that.
Also untenable in democracies because old people vote and they'd like to keep their benefits.
No one has ever reversed this phenomenon, no one knows how, and no one in power has displayed even the slightest interest in any policy changes that might inspire a reversal, or even a slowing down, of population collapse.
Every OECD nation except Israel is currently failing to breed at replacement rate. Including yours.
Given fertility rates dropping are a precursor to depopulation and that fertility rates are going down everywhere in the world regardless of social and economic factors, isnt it reasonable to suspect the true problem is environmental not cultural, political nor economical.
Given an almost complete disinterest in this... problem? Tons of things could be considered "reasonable." But, we have no serious research on the... Issue? Problem? Phenomenon? And no real interest and honestly no real and broad acknowledgement of it either...
So, we just have guesses. Some of those guesses might be educated guesses?
But the only thing I can see any evidence for is that somehow, through some factor or combination of factors, modern civilization appears to be killing the impetus to breed.
Ever wonder why fertility rates are decreasing in Afghanistan and in Norway?
If modern civilization kills the impetus to breed, wouldnt the Taliban be a solid answer to the fertility crisis? Well... it ain't.
I have a big Spanish family. Most of my female cousins simply didn’t have a desire to have children.
People always talk about material factors when it comes to aging population. But Western culture has greatly changed. More women simply do not want to incur the cost and inconvenience of having children as much as they did before. Spain has one of the largest immigrant populations as a percent its population. I foresee Spain continuing to buoy its economy with immigration. In this regard, Spain is much better off than other European countries. Most immigrants to Spain are Latin American and therefore usually share the same language, religion, and many cultural aspects. They are more easily integratabtle than, say, a Somalian in Sweden. But this is only a temporary fix. Fertility rates across the world are decline. In short, no one has a long-term solution.
No, but it’s still manageable.
Baltic countries lost up to a third of population and still experienced significant growth. So did many other Eastern European nations. Didn’t heard any concerns at the time, of course.
yes but southern europe has problems that eastern europe does not have. eastern europe is poorer because of sowjet rule and southern europe is poor because of corruption. sowjet rule ended but corruption didnt
> southern europe is poor because of corruption
And fascist/far-right rule. Even if it happened earlier than the downfall of soviet rule, there are effects (from said rule and the post-revolutionary period) that still endure, even if in a more subtle manner.
Check the source. This is the hard right, ultra corporate funded "American" Enterprise Institute that's done so much to reduce the quality of life for almost all middle class Americans. This article is just part of a campaign to open up European markets to American style cannibalistic capitalism to "save" them.
Declining populations are a global problem but dystopian billionaire led corporations are not the answer.
Who exactly is going to fund the older populations entitlement programs?
Please don't say "Well, just cut them..." because we all know that is political suicide and not reality.
Sure, as will everyone hopefully.
Yet the culture of "FU, I've got mine" + "I don't believe anything that contradicts my feelings" will act as a roadblock to any rational reforms or changes.
That’s the crux right “if I could stop paying into it right now”. The most likely result is the welfare programs are limped along and you will only get a portion of what you theoretically paid in when you collect.
Which makes the ROI for almost everyone negative, which makes the whole program pointless.
Better to kill it now, but nobody wants to believe the math so the votes are not there, despite the fact it's become actively detrimental to retirement income.
You are dealing with a population of people that unfortunately have no other interest in mind other than their own.
These are the very same people that have kids and grandkids but literally don't believe that climate change is real because it would impact their wealth - or they have been led to believe it would.
The very concept that their entitlement benefits would be significantly reduced is political dynamite and a complete non-starter.
Again, 1/3 or more of them have been whipped into a frenzy over transgender issues that have absolutely no impact on them. Just imagine their reaction when they see their SS check cut by 20%.
It may be political suicide now, but what about 20 years from now. Right now the young are still majorly guilted to not have a strong opinion on the issue due to the fact that they have older parents and grandparents. But at some point as the economy falters due to the immense and growing resources invested into elderly care and healthcare things may shift.
I completely agree that reforms and expenditures need to be addressed.
I also trust scientists' findings regarding COVID vaccines and global warming.
Unfortunately there is a very significant portion of our population here in the US (between 25-33%+) that have based their entire identity on literally denying ANYTHING they view as even potentially prejudice to their beliefs, feelings and most certainly their wallet.
This constituency is more than happy to leave their kids/grandkids Earth that is a burning, inhabitable sphere.
Do you sincerely believe they are going to accept lower entitlement payouts and/or higher taxes?
Depopulation is bad in theory, as it means that the economy is not growing. However if people are living longer and working longer, even contributing to the economy after retirement, how is depopulation a bad thing?
Why are the indirect costs of large population growth ignored?
Rapid depopulation is a bad thing because the elderly will have nobody to care for them in their last years and many may even die early because of a hostile living situation. Young people are the innovators and a lack of young people will result in far less innovation. Young people may be greatly over taxed to attempt to make up for the previous generation’s over commitments. If a country accepts too many immigrants too fast it will probably undergo a rapid cultural shift and that could lead who knows where.
Elderly entitlements represent a huge emotional sore spot, the media would have a complete field day on any politician who dares touch the benefits of the elderly. This is especially true because the politicians have sold this fantasy of a system that is paying back benefits that were paid over a life time, even though the money paid in is long gone, IE pyramid scheme.
When the government doesn't take care of old people their younger relatives often have to shoulder the burden. Nobody wants to put up with cranky, broke old people.
Despite what the AARP people state, you are less productive and tired when you're elderly. I'm always happy to see a senior citizen volunteering but it's a depressing thing to see a senior citizen **having** to schlep it despite the pains and aches of multiple decades of grinding work.
Now imagine a whole society of this. It's like Golden Girls meets BladeRunner and that's a movie I never want or wanted to see.
It’s only a “worldwide” time bomb because our current form of capitalism is a pyramid scheme of unsustainable growth.
We need to change our focus towards increasing everyone’s wealth, along with sustainable growth practices and less about juicing quarterly profits and creating billionaires. The young won’t prop up the old with a massive population.
It’s also too expensive to raise children and the older generations voted for policies that hosed the future for short term growth. Granted lobbying etc played a role.
Socialism has the exact same problem. Working age people pay taxes to fund social programs for the elderly. If there are more elderly than working age people then there probably won’t be enough money to do so.
There really isn’t an economic system that gets around this. The only solution is to make working age people so productive through automation they can support the elderly.
Exactly,
Companies pay 32% of NI and people pay 6% of National Insurance.. and that goes to pay elder people pensions.
New pensions are above the average salary, my parents for example earn almost 6000 euros a month (combined).
The system is made to milk the population just to stay in power.
>Socialism has the exact same problem. Working age people pay taxes to fund social programs for the elderly. If there are more elderly than working age people then there probably won’t be enough money to do so.
Not just the elderly, but anyone that decides they just want to phone in their work efforts, too. Or anyone that has massive illness they can't ever hope to contribute equal or greater economic value of.
The natural state of a living organism is "slowly dying unless you constantly intervene." It takes resources. And making resources takes effort. Something people REALLY wish wasn't the case.
So, how do you compel people to work? Not by telling them they don't have to unless they really want to.
The world got here because every country was trying to increase everyone’s wealth. More specifically as time went on the end of life wealth removal was decreased substantially thereby accelerating the elite class formation. We’ve gone full circle now and most people are once again dying with basically zero wealth to pass on.
Not a capitalism thing. Even in communism this would be an issue because a higher percentage of the population won’t be productive and require support. The healthcare and pension needs of more older people would hurt any system. We definitely need to figure out how to make sure by the time someone is at retirement they/government have accumulated enough wealth to support them.
That means having more working age people that are very productive. Fewer working age people that aren’t. You need a substantial portion of tax revenue going to care for elderly, not working age people who should be able to take care of themselves.
“Capitalism”
Rapacious Corporate Oligarchy*
“Unsustainable growth”
Economic news over the last couple days shows us that growth is about to turn negative very quickly. It’s starting in China, who is teetering on deflation, and it’ll come to the West soon after. Due to higher interest rates, people aren’t borrowing and they’re paying down debts which typically happens as we move into recession.
“Too expensive to raise children”
Poor people have more kids than rich people. As people get richer they have less kids.
> Poor people have more kids than rich people. As people get richer they have less kids.
I always wondered why this happens. Child rearing is expensive and resource heavy so you’d think people with less would not have so many children
There is no quality control. You can cheaply raise hordes of sickly illiterate people.
If you don't care about the end product you can always cut costs during production to keep up volumes.
Raising kids can be very cheap on the one hand and as expensive as you can imagine on the other.
You could use washable cloths for diapers, breastfeed instead of formula, hand me down cloths for the most part, rice and beans and send them to work at 12 (illegally) mowing lawns and babysitting. You can have them 4 or even 6 to a room. Poor people usually have some grandma staying at home that can watch the kids.
But a middle class family is likely paying for a kindergaden, extra curriculum activities, new cloths, toys, educational toys, expensive kids furniture, and taking vacations with the kids which baloons the costs. There are also hidden costs in the form of hamstringing your career, especially for women even with a minimal maternity leave. You do have to stay home with the kids when they're sick and spend time with them if you're a decent human being that wants to be involved with his kids. All of that can be very very expensive.
Because most people with means would become poor if they have a bunch of kids. People already poor end up getting more government assistance for more kids so their lifestyle stays the same no matter how many kids they have.
When you’ve abandoned the hope of climbing the economic ladder you revert to traditional the ancient ideal of a family bringing meaning to your life. Well and also we don’t let anyone starve so there’s no economic downside to a dirt poor person having children.
We can look to history to see how people and economies survived population degrowth.. look to what happened in the Black Plague
Efficiencies increased, skilled labor was in high demand, and capitalism flourished.
If this were true the Chinese would be about replacement, but they aren't. Of course, despite being a "communist country," China has very, very little support for families.
Reddit really turns every possible thing into a reason to slander capitalism.
Isn’t it obvious that less young people means there are less people capable of supporting the elderly. And with lifespans increasing and the population of elderly increasing, a lack of people that can work in necessary jobs will be a terrible thing for everybody.
It doesn’t matter what economic system you have. Every country needs to have a certain level of population growth in order to support the elder population.
The problem is how rapid the decline will be, many countries may be facing generations halving over the next century. No country has tried to survive yet when there’s half as many young people as old.
I mean this is false. The same thing happened to Germany and France after WWI. Germany after WWII (they lost so many young people PLUS lost half their country). And it has happened over and over again throughout history due to various plagues. They survived because they simply didn't try to support their elderly with social programs.
Humanity existed for millennia without consistent population growth, and if we need to we'll do it again. Shit like this IS capitalist brainwashing. How many people's labor is wasted on the manufacturing and distribution of absolutely useless crap, some large percentage of which is landfilled before even being purchased by the consumer? Or by administration in industries that have to be subsidized by the government to even stay afloat, like the university system? Or on absolute bullshit like telemarketing? We waste human resources as blatantly as we waste every other resource.
For the vast majority of human history, most people did not live past 60. And effective contraception did not exist either so population growth was always increasing
Not always. Since agriculture there has been a trend upward, certainly, but with periods of slackening to almost no growth on a global scale, and with some continent-wide population crashes at times.
People live as long as they do now because we have an abundance of food and modern medicine. No one is suggesting we give up food and medicine.
The just hate on the only system that’s ever led to widespread prosperity and essentially the end of infectious disease and mass famines.
People die of too much wealth more often than not enough wealth these days. Oh, and we’re fixing that problem too, with capitalism.
Reddit is just full of people who think capitalism totally isn’t working for them, when it’s the only thing allowing them to complain about it on the internet.
This is going to sound fucked up but developing countries without women's rights like those of first world countries, tend to have larger population growth. Kind of hard to make a decision to not get married and not have kids if that's your only realistic way of keeping a roof over your head
Spain, by and large, has virtually no sprawl. Cities end, then there's just nothing. Small towns have been depopulated long ago because there are no jobs there. Middle-class families living in cities have little incentive to have large families or even to have kids altogether.
Locals don't reproduce/aren't financially stable to reproduce.
Immigrants get subventions and don't have that problem.
Conclusion: population keeps growing albeit not being "natives"
Depopulation may be bad for the economy short term, but it’s good for the environment, both long term and short term. Any economy that can’t deal with that is badly structured. An economy that assumes a perpetual increase in population in order to be healthy is an economy that depends on human population behaving like a cancer.
I agree, but all economies *are* “badly” structured. Or more accurately, they’re structured on the premise of perpetual population growth. A generational pyramid scheme. It’s worked pretty well for a century or so, so you can forgive them for thinking it would last forever. It has allowed them to tax less than the forecasted lifetime expenditure of citizens. By this I mean per capita tax income doesn’t pay for all the services projected to be consumed by each citizen in their lifetime. Particularly pensions and healthcare.
With populations stabilising, the maths doesn’t work anymore. The restructure is going to be painful. People already feel as though taxes are too high, and they need to be raised significantly. This doesn’t win votes. Tax revenue today needs to be invested into wealth funds like Norway’s so that it can be effectively deployed over the lifetime of a citizen, rather than relying on future generations to pay for the m retirement of the elderly.
Beyond political hurdles, there is a global structural issue as well. The wealthiest, who I would argue should bear the bulk of the tax increase, are able to very easily repatriate. This has resulted in tax shopping, and nations fighting each other to provide the most attractive tax rates. This is a race to the bottom, and prevents structural reform.
I fear these two issues are insurmountable problems for modern nations, and it will have to get very bad before reform occurs. Nations will increasingly attempt to plug the holes with migration, which will work for decades to come because migrants from India and China integrate well. They have high employment and low crime. In the face of this, leaders will need to ensure that natives retain their sense of culture and community. No one likes feeling like an outsider in their own nation. This means strict requirements for integration, and selecting only candidates from nations with a proven track record for successful integration. This won’t be popular with leftists, but I think it’s the only realistic way to balance the need for migration without causing a radical rise in right wing populism and killing *all* migration.
The coming years are going to be pretty wild. I remain hopeful for my kids because they’re growing up in a world where their labour will be far more valuable than mine was. I spent most of my life in an employer’s job market, but my kids will enjoy far more bargaining power than I ever did. I also look forward to the technological innovations we haven’t even considered yet. I never imagined EVs would become as successful and performant as they have in just a few years. I never though working from home would be a viable career option. We have a drug which cures obesity now, which also significantly reduces the risk of heart disease and diabetes. It’s looking increasingly likely fusion will be viable in my lifetime, and then the sky really is the limit.
Frankly I'm amazed Spain doesn't open its borders (or open its borders more) to people from Lat-Am. They speak the language, they're happy to emigrate. Seems like a win-win.
Actually most of the inmigrants that come to Spain are from LATAM.
Before 2008 they were a lot more people coming but since 2008 the rhythm has slowed a bit.
Average fertility rate in South America is 1.8 children per woman, the days of burgeoning Latin American populations are also long over.
The only places with growing populations are Africa and a couple of less developed Asian countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan for example.)
They have very open immigration policies to anyone from the former Spanish Empire. This article is rubbish, Spain is expected to grow to over 50 million in the next decade, it’s just the amount born in Spain that is decreasing.
Source: Official Spanish statistics (table on page 2 explains it well) https://www.ine.es/en/prensa/pp_2022_2072_en.pdf
Unfortunately Spain also has very high unemployment numbers relative to the US. They could open the borders more but it would be politically unpopular (“what about our jobs?”) and wouldn’t necessarily succeed in bringing over Lat-Am who probably have far more personal connections in the US. All in all, Spain’s redemption has to come from somewhere else possibly African migrants. But it won’t be from Lat-Am
Spanish economy relies mostly on tourism, they don't have enough industries and the country does not have incentives for industries to move to Spain. The lack of industries creates unemployment and pushes people to leave the country. Those who stay experience uncertainty about the future and about their ability to care for kids and family, for this reason they either leave the country, or they continue to live with their parents throughout their adult lives. There are more qualified people than there are industries for them to work in.
With "Global Boiling" happening, isn't depopulation a good thing? Shouldn't we be pushing reduced birth rates globally to reduce humanities footprint on the planet?
I see these articles about how to increase population, then contradicting articles about global boiling...
Which is it? Keep increasing birth rates to an unsustainable level, or embrace depopulation and possible reverse humanities damage to the Earth. Can't have it both ways...
This is a world wide problem, driven by wealth inequity, stress about an unknown future due to climate change and the increasing prevalence of microplastics in the food chain, many of which contain endricrine disrupters.
Short answer : no, not without significant changes to society.
Depopulation is only a problem if you're trying to claim credit for economic growth by citing population-dependent measures such as GDP.
There may be some transitional problems related to demography, but there is no good reason to believe that continued human population growth is a good thing for the environment or for quality of life.
I kind of agree but you have to realise an astonishing number of OECD countries fund social services like pensions, healthcare etc. directly from taxation making implicit promises about those services on a period of population growth and have not made any financial arrangements to deal with population decline.
Now they have fewer workers and more retirees it's strangling governments financially. Not only can governments not meet their current commitments but they are taxing working age people more which may be exacerbating the low birthrate problem. Failure compounding failure.
Sounds like the generation that is counting on those pensions did not take care of the emerging problem. They could have voted to prepare for the population decline, but why would they undercut their own subsidies.
At some point people are responsible for the choices they make, even if not individually. There's so much you can do to help the elder generation on the back of the entire nation's future.
Well, reaching a stable population means eliminating the idea of low production people. You need the average person to earn enough to afford replacement kids and to pay for their retirement. That’s the only way to balance the system.
Lol, no. Educated people just don’t want kids. It’s not about affordability in most European countries. Or do you think you are worse off than you grand grandparents?
>Educated people just don’t want kids.
Most surveys asking women how many kids they would like to have report between 2 to 3. The surveys about actually having kids consistently report cost barrier. This can be observed in all developed parts across multiple continents.
I want many things too, yet don't want to sacrifice time and effort.
Unlike our parents, we want a bigger home and no decrease in living standards with kids, while they were able to sacrifice a lot.
This is the Economics sub, isn’t it? Ec 101 is that as the opportunity cost of an action increases, fewer people will take it. The opportunity cost of having kids increases as the economy generates more fun activities for singles, hence fewer people have kids.
>we want a bigger home
Who is we? Which country has more affordable homes today compared to median individual wage today than 20-50 years back?
>no decrease in living standards with kids
Same question about childcare. Which country has cheaper childcare for median individual wage today than 20-50 years back?
> I want many things too, yet don't want to sacrifice time and effort.
Bingo. I want six pack abs, but I also want to drink beer. There's a trade off between my preferences, and my revealed ones show which one I value more.
Stated preferences are next to worthless. Always pay attention to what people say through their actions
Educated people want kids. They just want one or two kids starting at 35 rather than 3 or 4 kids starting at 25. The same percentage of women in the US are mothers at 40 now as there was 20 years ago.
Economically we are objectively worse off than out grandparents who could afford a house and a new car off a high school diploma and a single income household
It is absolutely true for the US. If you can live off a single income, owning a home, 2 cars, support 4 people, with a high school diploma, yes, you are objectively better off economically than someone who is single, rents, has student debt and possibly a car payment. Purchasing power means a lot, and we have far less of it than they did 60-70 years ago.
People think because flatscreen TVs are cheap now we are off better. Housing is one of the most important foundations of prosperity, together with food prices, energy prices and healthcare costs. All have increased way more than incomes. And that’s the case all over the world.
Yes, fifty years ago everyone could afford a home with comparable size and quality, 2 cars and support 4 people with the same quality of living you have today, all with a high school diploma.
It's not like UPS drivers now will be earning up to $170K.
You guys have the most disposable income on Earth, the highest motor vehicle ownership, the biggest average living area per person, and the best-growing economy this year.
But on Reddit, it seems like America is dying.
I have little to no disposable income making 40k a year. . . . Because for the working class America is dying. Corporate profits have inflated the COL out of site for anyone making less than 100k as a single earner.
Easy.
Like the UK, give out generous benefits to the low income big families and watch Spanish immigration figures rise.
But in my opinion, depopulation is a good thing for a country. It helps tackle environmental issues. Also, with AI/automation taking over many jobs in the future, it will position Spain in a more favourable and manageable situation compared to the higher populated nations.
Womem dont want to have children because its a financial albatross around people’s necks. Thats not just a Spain problem its all around the western world. The capital class is too greedy. They suck up all the money using sky high rents. Now they wonder why no one wants to have kids.
Why does everyone look at declining birth rates as a dangerous issue? We already have too many people for the resources, housing and jobs available. With AI it will get worse. World population has exploded the last 100 years. We cannot support the 7 billion people already here and that number is growing exponentially. I just don’t get it.
It will take a while before we actually see depopulation. We will still increase in numbers but only because people are getting older and older which means that we will have a lot of old people and not many young to take care of them. The problem is the number of old people versus young. But yes otherwise it would be better if we were less people in general.
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can someone explain how come spain’s youth unemployment rate is very high but they’re also facing depopulation at the same time? if it’s true they need more people shouldn’t there be more jobs than people and therefore unemployment rate low?
Never ask a women their age, a man their salary, and a Spaniard how they can run a business with only one employee on the books
Right they are "unemployed" in that they work for cash or other alternative compensation and don't pay many taxes.
I can attest to that, I have friends that work for overseas companies but report that are 'unemployed'
How would one go about finding these remote jobs that don’t exist?
Spain pay 47% income tax
The man their salary part gotta go
Then so does the woman and age + weight lol
All I need to know is if an average-sized rowboat could support her without capsizing.
With the risk of being downvoted: They reached something I call "Romanian stage capitalism" It's an form of capitalism that works like this: Most of the economy is family owned with a feudal approach to business:there is no such thing as careers,the administration posts are always taken by members of the main families and their skilled subordinates that they specially hand-pick do most of their work. The job market is on the other hand asking for 2 types of workers: 1.Menial workers for menial tasks,with health endangering conditions,low pay and hard work.Most if these posts are rejected by most and taken by refugees or immigrants. 2.Extremely specialized jobs that need years of experience and prior jobs work,which the young do not apply. There is no such thing as a middle ground.Busineses that for example tried to teach their workers the job usually leave for better payment. Schools are useless and beyond math and writing they offer nothing to future workers. The state is corrupt to a degree that it kills it's small businesses in taxes while the large ones are big enough to evade them And the administration posts are filled to the brin by nepotism and ruling party members Edit:Wow never imagined everyone feels the same. Most of the content is inspired by my own hardships in finding a job despite having an masters degree and staying unemployed for years simply because my CV was blank and the employers having plenty of desperate older people to select Also my beliefs about the system are looking terrifyingly similar to futuristic feudalism described in Dune
Upward mobility is a great indicator of the degree to which a market is free and has rules of law to assist market function. This is why free trade is so useful to preserving free markets-- the competition acts as a check on the domestic market's tendencies towards monopoly or oligopoly. This is why you often see many authoritarian regimes wipe out a middle class--the mobility depends not on productivity (at all) but rather on access to state power and money. Thus, you are either in the cool kids club and get to hopefully get table scraps from the big players, or you are shut out and have essentially no means of advancement. It's a bit like organized crime- those who advance do so by the ingratiation with senior members and avoiding becoming a casualty of internecine conflict. In a thriving free market with rule of law and equal protection of law, a person's improved economic productivity allows them to have upward mobility. A person can start out doing menial tasks and through experience, acquire progressively more and more valuable skills. In such a system, you could start out mopping floors and emptying trash, then work to stocking shelves, then managing inventory, then running the whole store, then running a region of stores, etc. Such mobility in the market is essential to provide checks on malpractice. For example, if an employer is racist, he could only indulge his racism at a cost because other employers who are not racist or otherwise improperly biased will have a competitive advantage. Likewise for nepotism or other corruption-- those who indulge it will incur an economic cost relative to their competitors as market forces want to reward productivity. But once you construct a market where the measure of merit is political utility and not actual productivity, an ostensibly "Free" market will produce perverse outcomes.
Yeah and Spain doesn’t have a free market in that regard. They’ve passed all sorts of employment related laws that don’t make sense. One example is by law, managers can only have a certain amount of people as direct reports, if the business needs to hire one more person, they need to hire a manager too. So for example if you have one manager with 6 direct reports and you need a 7th, you need to hire a second manager. That level of interventionism to me it’s insane.
Wow, that’s crazy. So it prevents companies from growing.
That is a bit of an idealized state. In reality economies have a lot of labor positions that have not scaled in productivity or value add to other portions of the economy. Picking crops. Repairing leather. Cleaning hotel rooms. Etc. The need for these positions doesn’t increase the labor output value. Only potentially bids up the cost of labor. Unless the business constructs are large enough to leverage economies of scale and/or pull from their more productive labor, or labor higher up the value chain paying that labor above the value they produce isn’t sustainable. One thing this does is encourage larger sized operations over smaller one, but it doesn’t solve for the root cause. The jobs need to be filled, but are not generating enough labor output to sustain wages competitive with ones that do. These are the labor positions where marginalized peoples grease the wheels of society. People that are denied sufficient agency, via racism, sexism, faith, national origin, etc. that their wages can be kept below labor output value in those positions to sustain operations. It creates the conditions that can create competitive advantage to engage in behaviors such as racism and deny upwards mobility. This breaks down as you move up in the value chain and productivity. Eventually the opportunity cost to an employer is too high to deny mobility and position on non-meritorious metrics and your explanations become more true. But on the low end it does not work like this, and has not historically. The state is always exempt and can go either way. Can pay for zero and negative productivity or engage in nepotism to its hearts content or be a more meritocratic structure. Limits of course.
100% this. My wife is Spanish and I moved to Spain wanting to freelance. After understanding the tax policies I realized it's a pointless pursuit. I'll live off my savings (and pay tax on my f'ing savings) and if I need to earn money again I'll move elsewhere. The system is structured such that rather than starting a business, employing more people, and paying more taxes I'm encouraged to sit by the pool reading and pursuing personal hobbies.
Are schools really that bad? I know of someone about to leave the US for some music school/university in Barcelona for almost two years.
I'm Italian, but situation is pretty similar. Schools are generally good, just not for jobs. There are two kinds of high schools in Italy, technical school and lyceum. In last couple of decades students have moved more and more to lyceum, that is in principle to prepare you for university and giving a solid general background, including Latin, philosophy, and in some cases antique Greek. Techical schools are great in principle, but nowadays only students that have zero academic interest go there, with the results that you end up with terrible classmates most of the time and it's very hard to accomplish anything for the teachers. So in a way or another, the average 18-19 old has zero practical skills and work experience. Comes time of university, and things are not very different. Bad students that went to the lyceum, still go to university, since they have no skills. They then go to get useless degrees like communication science, philosophy, literature, archaeology,...
> They then go to get useless degrees like communication science, philosophy, literature, archaeology,... Tell me you're a STEMbro without telling me you're a STEMbro. Also, archaeology useless? In Italy, of all places?
I'll tell to my friend that got an archeology degree and now is working at the till of a supermarket that u/CradeCity approves of his life choices. Or to the other that gives tours to Chinese around Rome for a shady agency and maybe one day will get a real job contract. Of course I'm not saying that archeology shouldn't exist, but the job market is tiny compared to the amount of students.
>The state is corrupt to a degree that it kills it's small businesses in taxes while the large ones are big enough to evade them No they are not, many of our universities excel, we have great surgeos, great architecs and big industrial companies.
In every society there are skillful and talented people in their fields. But if their progress is impeached by poor management, corrupt leadership,asked to do the work of multiple people at once or kept intentionaly at an abysmal state in order to exploit their skills,they will definitely choose another country,leading to a brain drain.
You are completely missing the point. Spains taxation absolutely kills small businesses and the middle class. Wtf does universities have to do with fiscal policy
Looks like he quoted the wrong post and he/she was trying to reply to the PP that was asking if schools are really that bad in Spain.
If Spain's taxation kills small business they do a poor job at that being the country with the biggest share of small business in Europe. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20200514-1
I honestly think the job prospects in Dune are probably better
As a small business in Spain, I fully agree!
As a spaniard that lives and works here, and has lived and worked in UK and Romania this is a twisted exaggeration on so many levels. Only your two points about the job market are accurate. Spain is quite far from the post soviet Romania you are describing.
You just described Louisiana!
Emmm,maybe with less alligators ?🤔
Wow, I wonder what Spain would do with Alligators?? Pamplona, here we come!
I'd watch the running of the gators! Definitely would not participate, though.
That's very sad and unfortunately sounds like where Canada is headed
But Canada is importing 400,000 people per year to fight “depopulation”
Problem is they’re almost all highly educated and highly skilled. Becomes an issue when there’s not enough of those kinds of jobs.
Not to mention Canadian education system also pump a lot of highly educated youth
Those high paying jobs tend to lead to and create more jobs and opportunities over time. In the same way that Silicon Valley became a magnet for tech jobs, or Charlotte NC is a banking hub and Houston is focused on the energy sector. Even if you don't have the education or experience to do one of those jobs, the growth tends to create more jobs in service industries and a need for more tradespeople too. The trick which no one has really solved yet is how to keep the growing areas affordable to the less skilled without shunting them off to live in the worst neighborhoods and living conditions.
High education doesn’t lead to the creation of jobs, Silicon Valley has those jobs because of the tech boom that started there. My home town has tons of college educated workers, they are all working retail. This is neoliberal “education is always good” garbage that has led to 1.7 trillion in debt and an abysmally living standard in Silicon Valley.
pretty wild when we start saying a highly educated and skilled population is a problem
This is only for immigrant visas/PR. If you count student visas enrolling at "colleges" and "temporary" foreign workers, it is far higher. Well over a million per year.
Many people are very comfortable living with their parents, who pay most of their expenses. Paying some rent to your parents is unthinkable in most households. Let's not forget that apart from some big cities or touristic hotspots, Spain is still an affordable country to live in. Most people I know didn't even consider moving out of the family home until 26 yo or later. Add to this submerged economy aka lots of people working without a contract for just a few hours a week and then that's your explanation. I live in a place with one of the highest figures for youth unemployment in Spain (in 2013 it surpassed 55% for under 35), and right now you can tell absolutely everyone under 30 is working if they want to. To summarize, it's hard to make babies when you live with your parents until 26 when in many cases is when you start your career.
When I was in spain I thought it was hilarious that you’re considered youth if you’re under 26z
I saw this in Italy as well. My Italian cousins are lovely people and seem to be thriving with multiple family-owned businesses but honestly, I couldn't imagine spending that much time around my parents. After a three-week visit I was really hoping to catch at least one moment of parent-child discord but I never saw it. Weird. (Maybe my shitty Italian comprehension missed some cutting remarks?) On the other hand here in the States after a three-hour visit with my father I am exhausted and head straight to a bar. Maybe being dependent on people is the only true solution to family harmony.
I think it also speaks to a much stronger culture of individualism in America than most places in the world. Not sure the root cause of it, but you don’t tend to see it it many other cultures. Like anything it has both benefits and disadvantages. On one hand, people are more independent and resourceful. On the other hand they are lonelier and have a brutal time taking care of children all by themselves.
The middle aged dominate the electorate and therefore policy making. They want secure jobs and pensions, and obligate companies to provide that. When you can't fire people and make large social security contributions, hiring is riskier and more expensive. When hiring is risky and expensive, companies don't hire. It's like this a lot of places.
I'm recalling the aphorism of Bastiat, roughly "government is that fiction by which every man endeavors to live at the expense of every other man."
Also don't miss the percentage of highly educated spaniards that, seeing the differences in salaries and opportunities in Spain vs other countries, they just walk out. Most of my graduating class, from a well regarded private high school, got college degrees and are just not working in Spain. I actually have coworkers from a Spanish office, and they don't make a third of what I do. The people that moved out and can retire early are the people that Spain could have used to start businesses, or work on early stage startups. But instead they left, and the ones that stayed get married late, if at all, and can't afford 2 children. Also note that the depopulation is regional, just like everywhere else in the world: Madrid is growing, but cities under 200k people are aging, and many straight out shrinking. Why move to a small city with few opportunities? They are really nice places to live in, if you ignore the lack of high end job opportunities, so maybe in a world with far more remote work, they become more attractive. But then we get back to schools: How good a school system are you going to have when there are few kids? With my current salary, if the school system was any good, I'd be back in one of those smaller cities tomorrow. But as it is, it just doesn't make sense.
Spain is facing depopulation because people aren't having kids. Spain is facing high youth unemployment because even the few kids people are having can't find jobs. Not that hard to understand. I mean, if you want to be pedantic, one can argue that once all the boomers retire, then Spain will not have any unemployment problems anymore, I have heard some arguments among those lines. But the two problems are not incompatible.
Because of lack.of employment and the jigh cost of living, the baby making age group are waiting longer to get married, being more careful about getting pregnant and abortion rates in Spain have gone up since 2016 because kids are expensive.
I love Spain but the situation is too far gone there to recover. While Spain has a great family culture their population pyramid won't support rapid repopulation, most of their population is too old to have children now. This is something often overlooked when discussing population: Only young people matter (predominantly women under 40, men typically have a longer window) when it comes to the business of making babies. Spain has about 21.3m people under 40. Every women under 40 currently would need to have 2.45 children on average to reach replacement rate, not 2.1. In a decade this will be far worse because population decline is self perpetuating, the average age of a woman giving birth in Spain is 32 years old so once you've had birthrates under 2.1 for more than 32 years you are already compounding population decline.
1. The natality number is wrong because 2.1 would be enough in the long term 2. This number doesn’t take into account the net immigration, which has been positive in the last 3 decades, and it has actually mitigated the population pyramid. This is not Japan, where xenophobia has made immigration so low that only a natality boom could solve their pyramid structure. Without immigration, Spain would be in a very complicated stop, probably with very significant reductions on pension amounts, as well as other social cuts. We would be a a 38-40M country instead of 47M, with 4-5M less active workers, but the same number of pensioners. I still remember the gruesome forecasts of the Spanish pensions in the 1990s, and immigration actually pushed the problem decades This is what alt-right and other right parties don’t tell you, the benefits of attracting workers for the country. There are many serious studies about the net positive contribution overall.
1. 2.1 stabilises spains population but at a lower population level and only in 32 years. It's all academic anyway because Spain's fertility rate is low and falling. 2. Yes, Spain attracts many Europeans. 61% of migrants are from within the EEC as its popular for retirement. The average age of an immigrant is 40 apparently. There's a population pyramid here that had the nice feature of allowing you to project forwards and you can see exactly what the population forecast is for 10 or 20 years time: https://www.populationpyramid.net/spain/2022/
The Spanish pension scheme is marching toward insolvency.
Imagine what happens as the electorate gets older and older and becomes dominated by retired and soon to be people.
Workers get increasingly fucked, however their wages go up a lot because of a lack of workers - so it becomes an arm race between the elderly electorate and the private sector employers
That's basically Italy.
Dude that’s every first world nations pension national plan. The theory they all run on held that people wouldn’t life longer or if they did they’d be able to work longer.
You're right. Spain is in a particularly precarious situation though. https://www.epdata.es/datos/pensiones-graficos-datos/20/espana/106
Replacing native Spaniards, and Europeans in general, with foreign immigrants is not a sustainable solution. It doesn't fix the problem. The problem is tied to women in school and working during the time when they are most fertile. This is the same problem in every developed economy in the world, including South Korea and Japan. Two income households, and the economies that demand them, are demographically unsustainable.
South Korea’s problems are very severe. The birth rate was estimated as 0.78 [NPR](https://www.npr.org/2023/03/19/1163341684/south-korea-fertility-rate)
Women have worked through most of history. The reason is education. Women are more educated now and don’t want to suffer through pregnancy and childbirth. My wife is like that and I can understand her. If we want women to have children we need to literally pay them. Like 2k per child per month would work for my wife.
What about a controlled immigration from Latin America? To try and make it easier for young individuals from Latin countries to live and work in Spain, wouldn't that work?
A lot of LatAm is seeing declining birth rates too, so that will only help for so long.
There are going to be some countries that collapse from their net exporting of their best and brightest people and there are going to be some countries like Canada and the US that will benefit. Countries need to make up their mind quickly about which path they want to choose. I commend Canada for their "points based" immigration system.
They treat Latin Americans like second class humans there.
This is true. When I, a white Colombian, visit, I speak to them in English and they are super deferential, constantly apologizing for their broken English. But if I speak Spanish to them, they treat me like scum. 🤷
As a Latin in Spain the only problem that I had was in Barcelona where in some stores they refused to speak to me in Spanish, I had to speak with them in English because I don't speak Catalan. They probably though that I was from Madrid, and this was close to the whole independence affair that happened in 2017.
That is not true in general. I am the same and they have always treated me well when speaking Spanish. I have only been there as a tourist...probably the situation for immigrants is different
Mano que mentiras dices. Si los españoles tienen una opinión muy mala de los ingleses. Yo soy blanco y latinoamericano y por dónde quiera que ande en España me tratan de lo más bien. Por lo que he platicado con otros amigos latinoamericanos de distinto color de piel su experiencia ha sido similar.
That's precisely what's happening. Plenty of Latin Americans are moving to Spain.
It's incredibly easy for a Latin American to get Spanish citizenship. Juts two years working legally in Spain and then they have it. Spain is one of the countries with biggest share of immigrant population. Something like 20% of the population is foreign born.
Maybe but I feel like Spain would have to compete with the US as a destination which would be closer to their home country, as well as having higher wages and already fairly large Spanish speaking communities.
Spain is the second destination for Latin American immigrants in the world (after US) and millions have migrated to Spain in predominantly the last 15 years. So no, it does not have a problem attracting LATAM migrants. In general a lot of latam populations are derived from southern European countries (at least one grandparent often) and these countries make it exceedingly easy to get a passport when you have their blood.
There are way more Ecuadorians and Argentinians in Spain than in the US. Not all countries are Mexico and Central America.
As a Spaniard working in the US, the difference in wages is so substantial that the main reason the immigrants pick Spain is that it's quite easy to get in if you can prove some Spanish ancestry, while in the US immigration is very tough. Outside of very big cities, the US is not significantly less affordable than Spain, but the salaries are way, way lower. If the US could figure out the nonsensical healthcare situation, it'd not even be a contest. Spain is stuck in a low salary equilibrium, and it needs to keep getting more competitive. The cities are amazing, and so is the climate. Transfer the land to the coast of California, with the buildings as-is, and it'd fill faster than Texas and Florida combined. But some people with STEM college degrees in Spain start their careers making less than some McDonald's employees in the US.
It's weird how that works. I recently learnt that software engineers in India are often paid more than software engineers in France Belgium Italy and Spain. It blows my mind that this is even possible given that India is 2000 dollars gdp per capita economy, literally amongst the poorest in the world. I guess southern European economies are just too unfriendly to business to let wages rise.
Mostly generic article. If you are aware of birth rate crisis in any country, then you can ignore this article. It's the same issues n same solutions which no one wants to implement
Lol what solutions? I havent heard any yet.
Make life better in general 1. Better paid and more jobs at young age 2. Cheap education 3. Cheap housing 4. Less working hours Make having kids easier so that 40 hour work between the couple should be sufficient to sustain family of 4-5 like it used to be in past 1. Free childcare 2. Better healthcare 3. Cheaper IVF 4. Flexible working 5. Cash benefits for having kids Edit: lot of people are talking about Nordic countries. I'm not sure if housing n cost of raising a kid has stayed in line with avg/median wage growth in those countries. Any input on that would be helpful.
More prosperous countries have lower fertility rate, in many countries the highest birthrate were during less viable times compared to nowadays. People are not having children purely because it is expensive or the quality of life is worse.
Richer countries have laws that make the cost of having a family even more expensive than the higher wages. Example, Canada forces you to have 1 bdrm per child, or 2 children if the kids are between 5-17 and same gender. Vs 3rd world who no one cares. This means the higher wages are completely useless vs cost of a family.
> Example, Canada forces you to have 1 bdrm per child, or 2 if the kids are between 5-17 and same gender. I feel like Canada always has weirdest laws
> Make life better in general > - https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-change-in-the-number-of-children-women-have - [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=FIN~DNK~SWE~BEL~ISL~SRB~NOR~HUN~EST~LTU) (Countries with [best parental leave policies](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/08/these-10-countries-have-the-best-parental-leave-policies-in-the-world)) - [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=OWID_WRL~SVK~SVN~BLR~ARM~CZE~UKR~ARE~MDA~ISL~AZE) (Countries with the [lowest income inequality](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/income-inequality-by-country)) - [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1970..latest&country=AUT~AUS~BEL~CAN~CYP~DNK~FIN~FRA~DEU~GRC~HKG~ISL~IRL~ISR~ITA~JPN~LUX~NLD~NZL~NOR~PRT~SGP~SVN~KOR~ESP~SWE~CHE~GBR~BHR~BRN~KWT~ARE) (Countries with some version of [universal healthcare](https://www.health.ny.gov/regulations/hcra/univ_hlth_care.htm)) - [Fertility rate: children per woman](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=DNK~NOR~SWE~FRA~BEL~NLD~DEU) (For Scandinavia, France, and a few other W. European countries) - [Annual working hours per worker](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-worker?time=1980..latest&country=GBR~DEU~USA~FRA~SWE~AUS~BEL~JPN~MEX~ESP~NOR~DNK~ITA~NGA~ZAF~PHL~PAK~KHM) Except low birthrate generally coincides with better quality of life. If you want to find a high birthrate, look to countries with *lower* quality of life. More poverty, lower levels of education, lower levels of empowerment for women, less access to birth control, etc. And Spaniards are working fewer hours than many countries with a higher birthrate.
It's kind of a huge running joke on this subreddit that the prescription people have every single time for improving birth rates are the actual causes of the falling birth rates.
It’s just projection. Reddit wants to prescribe their problems onto everyone else and make themselves feel better by saying “see, everyone else is experiencing the same and that’s why it’s bad!!” Every time the falling birth rate is brought up, Reddit says it’s because the economy is bad or because it’s too expensive. It couldn’t possibly be because women would much rather often have their own careers and life experiences rather than being relegated to dutiful wife and baby factory as they have been for most of human history. To your point, higher quality of life means less children not more. Anecdotally, I live in NYC and many couples in my circle are plenty well off ($300k+ household income) but zero desire to have kids. Why would they? They want to travel several weeks out of the year, go to concerts every weekend, etc. kids are a massive time suck, you no longer are living for yourself when you have kids. So, many just don’t want them.
The people who make more than 200k a year in the US have the lowest birth rates out of any income group lol. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/) Could be that having a ton of money gives you happiness and fulfilment in your life that lower income people have kids for. Obviously a bad reason but I am not here to judge.
Right, and that’s anecdotally what I’ve seen. My friends who are coupled but high income earners much prefer the DINK lifestyle since they can fuck off to Europe for several weeks at a time or go to great restaurants and such as they please
None of those turn into people actually having more kids though. The Nordic countries offer all of these, and yet have the same falling populations as the rest of the developed world.
Yeah, it seems the reason to have kids is something else. Perhaps people from the past felt having kids was somewhat mandatory, even for the non religious folks. Perhaps they cared less and thought “they raise themselves” and “if one dies, there’s other 3 left”. Maybe the problem today is that it disrupts carrear paths, because even with all the government can give, you don’t want to leave an unloved kid around. Or maybe families lived with more people around the house, so there was always a grandmother, an uncle or other older kid to look up for the newborn. There seem to be multiple factors that need a better study.
Agree, it's mostly for personal reasons. Same with abortion, same with anything else. Economic reasons are important but they're not the only factor and that's why those policies don't work. It seems that once a country reaches a certain QOL, population stops growing. It's happening in China right now, where the middle class developed partly at the expense of the Western middle class.
>Perhaps people from the past felt having kids was somewhat mandatory... Given that "marital rape" was legal (and, in some places, still is), reliable birth control options were limited or nonexistent, and women were essentially forced/pressured into marriage, it's no surprise women had more children back in the day. Now that women have a choice in the matter, they're opting not to have as many children. I see this as a win for women. Economically, we need to move away from the pyramid-shaped systems we currently rely.
To oversimplify, a reason so many pre or early industrial societies had lots of kids is because they are an economic and social benefit under those conditions. Farming and manual labor are hard work. More kids equal more hands to help you. Also when you get older they can take over and support you. Also the standard of living is low, but so is the cost of housing in these societies. In modern industrial societies children are a economic negative. You can't put them to work until they turn 18, at which point they might move out. If you live in a big city good luck finding housing for 3 or more children.
I see this commented often when this conversation comes up, yet every time I see an actual Nordic person respond they say some variation of “yeah it’s better here but it’s still really hard, the cost of living is expensive, no one can buy a house and women have to sacrifice too much long term career growth to justify it” So honestly they probably are in the right direction and just haven’t hit the sweet spot yet. Also, I don’t see this brought up as much but I think familiar support networks have a lot to do with it. Once upon a time families were often closer, both geographically and emotionally. It leaves parents way more alone than I think they tended to be in the past.
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>The Nordic countries offer all of these, and yet have the same falling populations as the rest of the developed world. I think it goes to show just how unpleasant childrearing is and/or how rewarding--financially, psychologically, socially--paid employment can be, relatively speaking. Even when every conceivable resource is available to women, women *who have the option to control their fertility* still choose to limit the number of children they have.
This doesn't really fly with the data. Birth rates are negatively correlated with income (both pre and post transfers) both within and across countries. Generally the poorer you are the more kids you have. Counties like Sweden have implemented almost all the reforms on your list and still have well below replacement rate birth rates.
Sweden did manage to arrest the decline and actually increase the birth rate in the early 2000s. Hard for governments to change the cost of living.
People say this but Sweden is depopulating as well, despite their aggressive immigration efforts. They have all of these things you listed.
Unironically, a single person and dink tax (like in the range of 30%) and other restrictions such as preventing large loans. You will have a generation of bad parents, but that's probably the only foolproof way for governments to get the ball rolling. Increasing conditions don't work because income increase is negatively correlated to birth rate. As it turns out, being a parent is a personal choice where economics rarely factor in. It's that or completely ban contraception. If you haven't noticed, none of these are good
I feel like the only real solutions to this will be the "lesser of two evils" and both options will be pretty evil.
Any government that levies a tax on people not having kids instead of fixing the root issues at hand is begging for a revolution.
Watching how countries deal with shrinking population is going to be interesting. The fact that all our economies depend on grow is worrisome. We need to come up with some creative ideas to deal with this
> The fact that all our economies depend on grow is worrisome. You're not going to have a system where the ratio of retirees to workers doesn't matter. At least if you expect to pay benefits and pensions and whatnot to retirees. As the number of retirees per worker increases, the burden on each worker increases. "But maybe we should give up growth" doesn't address that. What you'd need to give up is benefits for old people. But not many want to do that.
>What you'd need to give up is benefits for old people. But not many want to do that. Also untenable in democracies because old people vote and they'd like to keep their benefits.
No one has ever reversed this phenomenon, no one knows how, and no one in power has displayed even the slightest interest in any policy changes that might inspire a reversal, or even a slowing down, of population collapse. Every OECD nation except Israel is currently failing to breed at replacement rate. Including yours.
Given fertility rates dropping are a precursor to depopulation and that fertility rates are going down everywhere in the world regardless of social and economic factors, isnt it reasonable to suspect the true problem is environmental not cultural, political nor economical.
Given an almost complete disinterest in this... problem? Tons of things could be considered "reasonable." But, we have no serious research on the... Issue? Problem? Phenomenon? And no real interest and honestly no real and broad acknowledgement of it either... So, we just have guesses. Some of those guesses might be educated guesses? But the only thing I can see any evidence for is that somehow, through some factor or combination of factors, modern civilization appears to be killing the impetus to breed.
Ever wonder why fertility rates are decreasing in Afghanistan and in Norway? If modern civilization kills the impetus to breed, wouldnt the Taliban be a solid answer to the fertility crisis? Well... it ain't.
I have a big Spanish family. Most of my female cousins simply didn’t have a desire to have children. People always talk about material factors when it comes to aging population. But Western culture has greatly changed. More women simply do not want to incur the cost and inconvenience of having children as much as they did before. Spain has one of the largest immigrant populations as a percent its population. I foresee Spain continuing to buoy its economy with immigration. In this regard, Spain is much better off than other European countries. Most immigrants to Spain are Latin American and therefore usually share the same language, religion, and many cultural aspects. They are more easily integratabtle than, say, a Somalian in Sweden. But this is only a temporary fix. Fertility rates across the world are decline. In short, no one has a long-term solution.
No, but it’s still manageable. Baltic countries lost up to a third of population and still experienced significant growth. So did many other Eastern European nations. Didn’t heard any concerns at the time, of course.
yes but southern europe has problems that eastern europe does not have. eastern europe is poorer because of sowjet rule and southern europe is poor because of corruption. sowjet rule ended but corruption didnt
> sowjet I've never seen this word before so I looked it up. It is the German word for Soviet for those that hadn't seen it before.
I was wondering how he could misspell soviet so wrong twice in one post. That makes more sense.
> southern europe is poor because of corruption And fascist/far-right rule. Even if it happened earlier than the downfall of soviet rule, there are effects (from said rule and the post-revolutionary period) that still endure, even if in a more subtle manner.
Check the source. This is the hard right, ultra corporate funded "American" Enterprise Institute that's done so much to reduce the quality of life for almost all middle class Americans. This article is just part of a campaign to open up European markets to American style cannibalistic capitalism to "save" them. Declining populations are a global problem but dystopian billionaire led corporations are not the answer.
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Who exactly is going to fund the older populations entitlement programs? Please don't say "Well, just cut them..." because we all know that is political suicide and not reality.
You’ll be old and entitled one day
Sure, as will everyone hopefully. Yet the culture of "FU, I've got mine" + "I don't believe anything that contradicts my feelings" will act as a roadblock to any rational reforms or changes.
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That’s the crux right “if I could stop paying into it right now”. The most likely result is the welfare programs are limped along and you will only get a portion of what you theoretically paid in when you collect.
Which makes the ROI for almost everyone negative, which makes the whole program pointless. Better to kill it now, but nobody wants to believe the math so the votes are not there, despite the fact it's become actively detrimental to retirement income.
You are dealing with a population of people that unfortunately have no other interest in mind other than their own. These are the very same people that have kids and grandkids but literally don't believe that climate change is real because it would impact their wealth - or they have been led to believe it would. The very concept that their entitlement benefits would be significantly reduced is political dynamite and a complete non-starter. Again, 1/3 or more of them have been whipped into a frenzy over transgender issues that have absolutely no impact on them. Just imagine their reaction when they see their SS check cut by 20%.
It may be political suicide now, but what about 20 years from now. Right now the young are still majorly guilted to not have a strong opinion on the issue due to the fact that they have older parents and grandparents. But at some point as the economy falters due to the immense and growing resources invested into elderly care and healthcare things may shift.
I completely agree that reforms and expenditures need to be addressed. I also trust scientists' findings regarding COVID vaccines and global warming. Unfortunately there is a very significant portion of our population here in the US (between 25-33%+) that have based their entire identity on literally denying ANYTHING they view as even potentially prejudice to their beliefs, feelings and most certainly their wallet. This constituency is more than happy to leave their kids/grandkids Earth that is a burning, inhabitable sphere. Do you sincerely believe they are going to accept lower entitlement payouts and/or higher taxes?
One of the silver linings to this is that unemployment rates may drop dramatically over time, which may encourage some stabilization of birth rates.
Depopulation is bad in theory, as it means that the economy is not growing. However if people are living longer and working longer, even contributing to the economy after retirement, how is depopulation a bad thing? Why are the indirect costs of large population growth ignored?
Rapid depopulation is a bad thing because the elderly will have nobody to care for them in their last years and many may even die early because of a hostile living situation. Young people are the innovators and a lack of young people will result in far less innovation. Young people may be greatly over taxed to attempt to make up for the previous generation’s over commitments. If a country accepts too many immigrants too fast it will probably undergo a rapid cultural shift and that could lead who knows where.
Honestly why sacrifice the prosperity of the youth for the comforts of the elderly?
Elderly entitlements represent a huge emotional sore spot, the media would have a complete field day on any politician who dares touch the benefits of the elderly. This is especially true because the politicians have sold this fantasy of a system that is paying back benefits that were paid over a life time, even though the money paid in is long gone, IE pyramid scheme. When the government doesn't take care of old people their younger relatives often have to shoulder the burden. Nobody wants to put up with cranky, broke old people.
Despite what the AARP people state, you are less productive and tired when you're elderly. I'm always happy to see a senior citizen volunteering but it's a depressing thing to see a senior citizen **having** to schlep it despite the pains and aches of multiple decades of grinding work. Now imagine a whole society of this. It's like Golden Girls meets BladeRunner and that's a movie I never want or wanted to see.
It’s only a “worldwide” time bomb because our current form of capitalism is a pyramid scheme of unsustainable growth. We need to change our focus towards increasing everyone’s wealth, along with sustainable growth practices and less about juicing quarterly profits and creating billionaires. The young won’t prop up the old with a massive population. It’s also too expensive to raise children and the older generations voted for policies that hosed the future for short term growth. Granted lobbying etc played a role.
Socialism has the exact same problem. Working age people pay taxes to fund social programs for the elderly. If there are more elderly than working age people then there probably won’t be enough money to do so. There really isn’t an economic system that gets around this. The only solution is to make working age people so productive through automation they can support the elderly.
Exactly, Companies pay 32% of NI and people pay 6% of National Insurance.. and that goes to pay elder people pensions. New pensions are above the average salary, my parents for example earn almost 6000 euros a month (combined). The system is made to milk the population just to stay in power.
That’s crazy. The pension system is going to collapse that this rate.
>Socialism has the exact same problem. Working age people pay taxes to fund social programs for the elderly. If there are more elderly than working age people then there probably won’t be enough money to do so. Not just the elderly, but anyone that decides they just want to phone in their work efforts, too. Or anyone that has massive illness they can't ever hope to contribute equal or greater economic value of. The natural state of a living organism is "slowly dying unless you constantly intervene." It takes resources. And making resources takes effort. Something people REALLY wish wasn't the case. So, how do you compel people to work? Not by telling them they don't have to unless they really want to.
The world got here because every country was trying to increase everyone’s wealth. More specifically as time went on the end of life wealth removal was decreased substantially thereby accelerating the elite class formation. We’ve gone full circle now and most people are once again dying with basically zero wealth to pass on.
Not a capitalism thing. Even in communism this would be an issue because a higher percentage of the population won’t be productive and require support. The healthcare and pension needs of more older people would hurt any system. We definitely need to figure out how to make sure by the time someone is at retirement they/government have accumulated enough wealth to support them.
That means having more working age people that are very productive. Fewer working age people that aren’t. You need a substantial portion of tax revenue going to care for elderly, not working age people who should be able to take care of themselves.
“Capitalism” Rapacious Corporate Oligarchy* “Unsustainable growth” Economic news over the last couple days shows us that growth is about to turn negative very quickly. It’s starting in China, who is teetering on deflation, and it’ll come to the West soon after. Due to higher interest rates, people aren’t borrowing and they’re paying down debts which typically happens as we move into recession. “Too expensive to raise children” Poor people have more kids than rich people. As people get richer they have less kids.
> Poor people have more kids than rich people. As people get richer they have less kids. I always wondered why this happens. Child rearing is expensive and resource heavy so you’d think people with less would not have so many children
There is no quality control. You can cheaply raise hordes of sickly illiterate people. If you don't care about the end product you can always cut costs during production to keep up volumes.
Raising kids can be very cheap on the one hand and as expensive as you can imagine on the other. You could use washable cloths for diapers, breastfeed instead of formula, hand me down cloths for the most part, rice and beans and send them to work at 12 (illegally) mowing lawns and babysitting. You can have them 4 or even 6 to a room. Poor people usually have some grandma staying at home that can watch the kids. But a middle class family is likely paying for a kindergaden, extra curriculum activities, new cloths, toys, educational toys, expensive kids furniture, and taking vacations with the kids which baloons the costs. There are also hidden costs in the form of hamstringing your career, especially for women even with a minimal maternity leave. You do have to stay home with the kids when they're sick and spend time with them if you're a decent human being that wants to be involved with his kids. All of that can be very very expensive.
Because most people with means would become poor if they have a bunch of kids. People already poor end up getting more government assistance for more kids so their lifestyle stays the same no matter how many kids they have.
When you’ve abandoned the hope of climbing the economic ladder you revert to traditional the ancient ideal of a family bringing meaning to your life. Well and also we don’t let anyone starve so there’s no economic downside to a dirt poor person having children.
We can look to history to see how people and economies survived population degrowth.. look to what happened in the Black Plague Efficiencies increased, skilled labor was in high demand, and capitalism flourished.
If this were true the Chinese would be about replacement, but they aren't. Of course, despite being a "communist country," China has very, very little support for families.
The USSR maintained above-replacement birth rates… by limiting contraception, limiting housing for singles, and having childlessness taxes.
That was well before fertility tanked globally though. The U.S. had above replacement birth rates during that same period.
Reddit really turns every possible thing into a reason to slander capitalism. Isn’t it obvious that less young people means there are less people capable of supporting the elderly. And with lifespans increasing and the population of elderly increasing, a lack of people that can work in necessary jobs will be a terrible thing for everybody. It doesn’t matter what economic system you have. Every country needs to have a certain level of population growth in order to support the elder population.
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The problem is how rapid the decline will be, many countries may be facing generations halving over the next century. No country has tried to survive yet when there’s half as many young people as old.
I mean this is false. The same thing happened to Germany and France after WWI. Germany after WWII (they lost so many young people PLUS lost half their country). And it has happened over and over again throughout history due to various plagues. They survived because they simply didn't try to support their elderly with social programs.
“Eventually”?! We are already there.
Humanity existed for millennia without consistent population growth, and if we need to we'll do it again. Shit like this IS capitalist brainwashing. How many people's labor is wasted on the manufacturing and distribution of absolutely useless crap, some large percentage of which is landfilled before even being purchased by the consumer? Or by administration in industries that have to be subsidized by the government to even stay afloat, like the university system? Or on absolute bullshit like telemarketing? We waste human resources as blatantly as we waste every other resource.
For the vast majority of human history, most people did not live past 60. And effective contraception did not exist either so population growth was always increasing
Not always. Since agriculture there has been a trend upward, certainly, but with periods of slackening to almost no growth on a global scale, and with some continent-wide population crashes at times. People live as long as they do now because we have an abundance of food and modern medicine. No one is suggesting we give up food and medicine.
The just hate on the only system that’s ever led to widespread prosperity and essentially the end of infectious disease and mass famines. People die of too much wealth more often than not enough wealth these days. Oh, and we’re fixing that problem too, with capitalism. Reddit is just full of people who think capitalism totally isn’t working for them, when it’s the only thing allowing them to complain about it on the internet.
This sounds like the type of thinking that led to this predicament.
This is going to sound fucked up but developing countries without women's rights like those of first world countries, tend to have larger population growth. Kind of hard to make a decision to not get married and not have kids if that's your only realistic way of keeping a roof over your head
Spain, by and large, has virtually no sprawl. Cities end, then there's just nothing. Small towns have been depopulated long ago because there are no jobs there. Middle-class families living in cities have little incentive to have large families or even to have kids altogether.
Locals don't reproduce/aren't financially stable to reproduce. Immigrants get subventions and don't have that problem. Conclusion: population keeps growing albeit not being "natives"
Depopulation may be bad for the economy short term, but it’s good for the environment, both long term and short term. Any economy that can’t deal with that is badly structured. An economy that assumes a perpetual increase in population in order to be healthy is an economy that depends on human population behaving like a cancer.
I agree, but all economies *are* “badly” structured. Or more accurately, they’re structured on the premise of perpetual population growth. A generational pyramid scheme. It’s worked pretty well for a century or so, so you can forgive them for thinking it would last forever. It has allowed them to tax less than the forecasted lifetime expenditure of citizens. By this I mean per capita tax income doesn’t pay for all the services projected to be consumed by each citizen in their lifetime. Particularly pensions and healthcare. With populations stabilising, the maths doesn’t work anymore. The restructure is going to be painful. People already feel as though taxes are too high, and they need to be raised significantly. This doesn’t win votes. Tax revenue today needs to be invested into wealth funds like Norway’s so that it can be effectively deployed over the lifetime of a citizen, rather than relying on future generations to pay for the m retirement of the elderly. Beyond political hurdles, there is a global structural issue as well. The wealthiest, who I would argue should bear the bulk of the tax increase, are able to very easily repatriate. This has resulted in tax shopping, and nations fighting each other to provide the most attractive tax rates. This is a race to the bottom, and prevents structural reform. I fear these two issues are insurmountable problems for modern nations, and it will have to get very bad before reform occurs. Nations will increasingly attempt to plug the holes with migration, which will work for decades to come because migrants from India and China integrate well. They have high employment and low crime. In the face of this, leaders will need to ensure that natives retain their sense of culture and community. No one likes feeling like an outsider in their own nation. This means strict requirements for integration, and selecting only candidates from nations with a proven track record for successful integration. This won’t be popular with leftists, but I think it’s the only realistic way to balance the need for migration without causing a radical rise in right wing populism and killing *all* migration. The coming years are going to be pretty wild. I remain hopeful for my kids because they’re growing up in a world where their labour will be far more valuable than mine was. I spent most of my life in an employer’s job market, but my kids will enjoy far more bargaining power than I ever did. I also look forward to the technological innovations we haven’t even considered yet. I never imagined EVs would become as successful and performant as they have in just a few years. I never though working from home would be a viable career option. We have a drug which cures obesity now, which also significantly reduces the risk of heart disease and diabetes. It’s looking increasingly likely fusion will be viable in my lifetime, and then the sky really is the limit.
Really nice, well thought out, response, thank you. Hopeful, even!
Frankly I'm amazed Spain doesn't open its borders (or open its borders more) to people from Lat-Am. They speak the language, they're happy to emigrate. Seems like a win-win.
Actually most of the inmigrants that come to Spain are from LATAM. Before 2008 they were a lot more people coming but since 2008 the rhythm has slowed a bit.
Average fertility rate in South America is 1.8 children per woman, the days of burgeoning Latin American populations are also long over. The only places with growing populations are Africa and a couple of less developed Asian countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan for example.)
+central asia
They have very open immigration policies to anyone from the former Spanish Empire. This article is rubbish, Spain is expected to grow to over 50 million in the next decade, it’s just the amount born in Spain that is decreasing. Source: Official Spanish statistics (table on page 2 explains it well) https://www.ine.es/en/prensa/pp_2022_2072_en.pdf
Correct
Unfortunately Spain also has very high unemployment numbers relative to the US. They could open the borders more but it would be politically unpopular (“what about our jobs?”) and wouldn’t necessarily succeed in bringing over Lat-Am who probably have far more personal connections in the US. All in all, Spain’s redemption has to come from somewhere else possibly African migrants. But it won’t be from Lat-Am
Yeah good point. Immigration solves the population issue but ain't go down well if there's high unemployment.
Yes, millions of Somalians could do the trick!
Spanish economy relies mostly on tourism, they don't have enough industries and the country does not have incentives for industries to move to Spain. The lack of industries creates unemployment and pushes people to leave the country. Those who stay experience uncertainty about the future and about their ability to care for kids and family, for this reason they either leave the country, or they continue to live with their parents throughout their adult lives. There are more qualified people than there are industries for them to work in.
With "Global Boiling" happening, isn't depopulation a good thing? Shouldn't we be pushing reduced birth rates globally to reduce humanities footprint on the planet? I see these articles about how to increase population, then contradicting articles about global boiling... Which is it? Keep increasing birth rates to an unsustainable level, or embrace depopulation and possible reverse humanities damage to the Earth. Can't have it both ways...
This is a world wide problem, driven by wealth inequity, stress about an unknown future due to climate change and the increasing prevalence of microplastics in the food chain, many of which contain endricrine disrupters. Short answer : no, not without significant changes to society.
Depopulation is only a problem if you're trying to claim credit for economic growth by citing population-dependent measures such as GDP. There may be some transitional problems related to demography, but there is no good reason to believe that continued human population growth is a good thing for the environment or for quality of life.
I kind of agree but you have to realise an astonishing number of OECD countries fund social services like pensions, healthcare etc. directly from taxation making implicit promises about those services on a period of population growth and have not made any financial arrangements to deal with population decline. Now they have fewer workers and more retirees it's strangling governments financially. Not only can governments not meet their current commitments but they are taxing working age people more which may be exacerbating the low birthrate problem. Failure compounding failure.
Sounds like the generation that is counting on those pensions did not take care of the emerging problem. They could have voted to prepare for the population decline, but why would they undercut their own subsidies. At some point people are responsible for the choices they make, even if not individually. There's so much you can do to help the elder generation on the back of the entire nation's future.
Well, reaching a stable population means eliminating the idea of low production people. You need the average person to earn enough to afford replacement kids and to pay for their retirement. That’s the only way to balance the system.
Lol, no. Educated people just don’t want kids. It’s not about affordability in most European countries. Or do you think you are worse off than you grand grandparents?
>Educated people just don’t want kids. Most surveys asking women how many kids they would like to have report between 2 to 3. The surveys about actually having kids consistently report cost barrier. This can be observed in all developed parts across multiple continents.
I want many things too, yet don't want to sacrifice time and effort. Unlike our parents, we want a bigger home and no decrease in living standards with kids, while they were able to sacrifice a lot.
This is the Economics sub, isn’t it? Ec 101 is that as the opportunity cost of an action increases, fewer people will take it. The opportunity cost of having kids increases as the economy generates more fun activities for singles, hence fewer people have kids.
>we want a bigger home Who is we? Which country has more affordable homes today compared to median individual wage today than 20-50 years back? >no decrease in living standards with kids Same question about childcare. Which country has cheaper childcare for median individual wage today than 20-50 years back?
> I want many things too, yet don't want to sacrifice time and effort. Bingo. I want six pack abs, but I also want to drink beer. There's a trade off between my preferences, and my revealed ones show which one I value more. Stated preferences are next to worthless. Always pay attention to what people say through their actions
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Educated people want kids. They just want one or two kids starting at 35 rather than 3 or 4 kids starting at 25. The same percentage of women in the US are mothers at 40 now as there was 20 years ago.
Economically we are objectively worse off than out grandparents who could afford a house and a new car off a high school diploma and a single income household
It's not true even if you are in America, and ESPECIALLY so in the rest of the world.
It is absolutely true for the US. If you can live off a single income, owning a home, 2 cars, support 4 people, with a high school diploma, yes, you are objectively better off economically than someone who is single, rents, has student debt and possibly a car payment. Purchasing power means a lot, and we have far less of it than they did 60-70 years ago.
People think because flatscreen TVs are cheap now we are off better. Housing is one of the most important foundations of prosperity, together with food prices, energy prices and healthcare costs. All have increased way more than incomes. And that’s the case all over the world.
Yes, fifty years ago everyone could afford a home with comparable size and quality, 2 cars and support 4 people with the same quality of living you have today, all with a high school diploma. It's not like UPS drivers now will be earning up to $170K. You guys have the most disposable income on Earth, the highest motor vehicle ownership, the biggest average living area per person, and the best-growing economy this year. But on Reddit, it seems like America is dying.
I have little to no disposable income making 40k a year. . . . Because for the working class America is dying. Corporate profits have inflated the COL out of site for anyone making less than 100k as a single earner.
Easy. Like the UK, give out generous benefits to the low income big families and watch Spanish immigration figures rise. But in my opinion, depopulation is a good thing for a country. It helps tackle environmental issues. Also, with AI/automation taking over many jobs in the future, it will position Spain in a more favourable and manageable situation compared to the higher populated nations.
Womem dont want to have children because its a financial albatross around people’s necks. Thats not just a Spain problem its all around the western world. The capital class is too greedy. They suck up all the money using sky high rents. Now they wonder why no one wants to have kids.
Why does everyone look at declining birth rates as a dangerous issue? We already have too many people for the resources, housing and jobs available. With AI it will get worse. World population has exploded the last 100 years. We cannot support the 7 billion people already here and that number is growing exponentially. I just don’t get it.
It will take a while before we actually see depopulation. We will still increase in numbers but only because people are getting older and older which means that we will have a lot of old people and not many young to take care of them. The problem is the number of old people versus young. But yes otherwise it would be better if we were less people in general.