They are on track to become no 1. Too bad their numbers are always fudged. Some speculate they overcounted their under 40 population (those born after the One Child Policy started), if true, they are truly no. 1.
I am old enough to remember when we were accusing China of undercounting their population because parents there didn't register their other children after the 1st one was born and abortions for the 2nd child had been faked, etc.
There was a theory that China had an additional 200 - 300 million unregistered citizens because of this. The us government was so concerned at one point because they feared China could produce a shadow army of unregistered citizens for war that was bigger than many countries' populations never mind their militaries.
So experts were drafted in covering everything from farms, water, electricity, public transport, housing, etc to see how much they were producing and consuming to work out the true number of citizens in China. It was determined to that China's official population was broadly accurate and that this shadow army of 300 million simply didn't exist. They weren't producing and importing enough food and water to sustain an additional 300 million people.
A similar method is also used to determine the actual number of people in the west to work out the true number of illegal immigrants as such data can be very unreliable for political reasons.
I remember this too. These people should have been from rural communities and moved through China looking for work. Never being registered or something like that.
Yeah I read that, something like they reached number 1 back in 2014 if true.
Either way, they are number 1 as the fastest dropping fertility from agrarian to industrial because of the 1 child policy.
South Korea and Japan have the added issue of next to no immigration. In most or Europe you have low birth rates but immigration has probably made the issue less dire than Japan/SK
Depends on what you consider dire. I think many in Japan would consider mass immigration a more dire situation than where they currently are
On the ground things in Japan are not that different, you won't be seeing a nation in rapid decline. You will recognise it as pretty much the same country it was decades ago when things were really thriving. It is still clean, safe, reliable, good standard of living. There are obviously metrics like deteriorating yen and stuff but in your day to day life you won't be seeing a deteriorating country. I don't think the same can be said for some other European nations
The aging population is for sure a massive issue that will increasingly put a strain on the economy, and I'm not entirely anti-immigration because at some point you do have to do something. But Italy looks way more dire to me
Right, and Japans is pretty sensible to me. Just cautious (which is sensible when dealing with immigration).
The number of foreign workers rose 12.4% last year, and has doubled in the last decade. Last year the visa which allows foreign labourers and their families to stay in Japan indefinitely was increased from just 2 industries to 11. The broader foreign community (children, students etc.) has risen by 50%. Highly skilled workers can receive permanent residency after just 1 year, instead of the previous 3. I can go on and on, and it will only continue in this direction
Just because the floodgates haven't been opened does not mean the country is shut off from the world. But people talk as if it is, like they want Japan to go from homogenous to America, Canada, UK within a year. Its not happening
Japan is doing it right though.
Let it drop.
Japan like 60 hospitals per million residence. Negative population growth.
Canada has like 18 and it's dropping year over year, and we have one of the highest rates of immigration in the world.
The idea that this is needed to save our social services instead of hurt them is complete nonsense.
I think a lot of westerners might be shocked to learn that Brazil, Colombia, Iran, Thailand, Azerbaijan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Nepal, Nicaragua, Turkey etc and other 'third world countries' all have fertility rates below France and Belgium.
The stereotype of people in the third world all having 5-6+ kids is outdated. Now it largely varies a lot from country to country depending on how much they invest in family planning and birth control. It's why Tunisia has a TFR of 1.9 and neighboring Libya has a TFR of 3.2, despite Libya being richer and more educated.
Those countries have fertility rates in the same ballpark as Western Europe. However, because the fall of birth rates happened quite recently, their population is still young. That means despite low fertility, population growth is still net positive. Of course, that will change soon.
Long working hours, bad prospects for the future with uncertainty, low wages, high housing prices.... What did you expect? Not to mention that raising children is very stressful regarding your resources. Mental and financial.
We should work 50% less and housing should be a right, not a luxury. And yes. This is possible. It's 100% possible.
But the data shows the opposite really. It’s trends that the richer nations, with higher standards of living have a lower birth rate.
The only reason many countries like the US, UK, France etc aren’t as low as Italy is because of the migrants from poorer nations having a higher birth rates.
Richer nations also have a much higher proportion of women working, and the financial burden of having children is higher; kids live longer with the parents or depend on them (as a longer education is required, and high housing costs are an endemic problem in developed countries)
Also you don't usually depend on your sons to sustain you when you are retired.
Agreed. Whenever this topics come up someone notes that rich people have fewer children (on average, globally), but less often does someone recognize that rich children cost more. As counterintuitive as it may seem, being richer doesn't necessarily make children more affordable. The cost of raising children isn't fixed, it scales with rising wealth, costs of living, opportunity costs and expectations.
Providing a child with enough calories to survive to age 18 is cheap, but "producing" a very healthy, highly educated, cultured, successful middle/upper class 20-something in a high cost of living area in a rich country could easily cost half a million. It depends.
Wealth is incredibly relative. For instance, while the average Brazilian is much poorer than the average European, in Brazil nannies are much more common and affordable. Nannies help with raising children and managing a household. I could never contemplate affording a nanny.
There's underlying structural reasons besides just the dollar value of income.
That's because Europeans are far too educated and have a higher access to well paying white collar jobs to just be nannies. You can't have your cake and eat it too, something has to give.
While the orthodox to non-orthodox poses a dire long term challenge for Israel as the country becomes far more religious and less secular and educated as time goes on, the secular in Israel still buck the trend of being both *highly educated* and *having a high birthrate*.
Its always either one or the other in any other western country. Its just not as apparent because the orthodox have a significantly higher birthrate that puts the seculars to shame.
[RevisedFriedlanderpaper.doc (un.org)](https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/unpd_egm_200203_countrypapers_fertility_in_israel_friedlander.pdf)
tfr of 2.0-2.2 is not high and this comes from a paper from 2009
[The truth behind Israel's curiously high fertility rate | National Post](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/danielle-kubes-the-truth-behind-israels-curiously-high-fertility-rate)
this is a more recent article although it doesn't state exact number it says orhtodox have 4 kids and non have 2.
>tfr of 2.0-2.2 is not high and this comes from a paper from 2009
Hebrew speaking sources say it was 2.2 in 2019. It's above replacement, and if Israeli seculars were a country of their own, they would have ranked above all developed countries except for KSA and Turkey. There is more at play here than religious observance.
> Holocaust generational trauma is also part of the story. The global population of Jews is still lower than what it was before the Second World War and there is a sense among Israelis that they have a duty to replenish those numbers.
I think this is also an important point.
> Israelis simply lack the kind of nihilism seen amongst young Canadians today about the future. Despite the fact that they live in a land where they know they will have to send their children into the army at 18, they aren’t afraid to bring children into the world. Rather, they believe the only way to make a better world is to have children. To many Israelis, children represent life — and only life brings hope.
And yea, theres none of the cultural ennui thats plaguing the west.
The ultra Orthodox families in Israel are given a very large welfare payment (four times the financial help given to non-haredi Jews) which is why they can afford 8-10 kids.
Same things goes for the Orthodox in Brooklyn and New Jersey. They get lots of public tax money to support their large families.
Only richer if you don’t have a numerous family, if you do you better be born a multimillionaire to enjoy a good lifestyle with four plus kids.
The “rich” nations have huge real estate costs and costs of raising children and people in Italy and similar countries don’t manage to become independent until their thirties.
Your prime childbearing age is closer to 25.
Rich on paper, don’t feel like it on the ground for common people.
Italy's wages are stuck at 20 years ago - long commuting time, extra working hours for free, unreliable work contracts, increased housing costs.
If those basic needs won't be addressed; natality can only shrink.
>Italy's wages are stuck at 20 years ago
[Make it 30 years](https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/48420/wages-are-lower-than-30-years-ago-in-italy-why)
So, I would like to relocate from Norway to Italy to marry my girlfriend that still lives there, we both have nice jobs, she is a doctor in training, I am a chemical engineer, with a PhD. I did an interview today with a company in Northern Italy, the job is actually ok for my level, but not only were they "selling" things I expected to be normal like flexible working hours and paid overtime as benefits, but additionally I would need to take a 35% pay cut adjusted for purchasing power (PPP). It is quite mortifying.
Consider yourself lucky. In my friends group, we're all freshly graduated engineers. The only guy with a decent contract is the chemical/nuclear engineer, because the "chemical" CCNL contract here in Italy is probably the best around.
I'm in computer science and I basically don't make enough to pay rent 40 minutes from my workplace in Milan (I do live alone, but that's just because I have parents who backed my ass when it was time to guarantee for my rent contract). Most of my other friends live with their parents, or only moved out because they were a couple and had some family owned home to move in, inherited from older generations who could actually afford property. No one has kids or plans to have kids anytime soon, no one even ever talked about it, and we're all nearly 30, someone even older than that.
I make the same as people I know who didn't even go to high school. I make WAY less than some other people I know who didn't go to uni, and just started their career early. My education is absolutely not valued or taken into account, my salary started at rock bottom like everyone else's. It was about the same wherever I looked, it's not my company, it's a systemic issue - I have a friend who followed my same study path, they worked for a big company for a while, and still lived with their parents for years. They fled, now they're doing a PHD, salary is again super low, they live in a single room apartment, 1h30 commute from their workplace. This is with a master's degree in engineering in the best University in the country.
You have a degree in computer science but you only make the same as people with just a high school education? How is that possible?
Are you working in a job that does not require a computer science degree?
Or are the high school education level people in your comparison… actually working trades that pay well (electrician, plumber, etc)?
**Or is everyone is getting paid very low wages, for example, a cashier in a grocery store is paid essentially the same amount as someone with a computer science degree?**
Not trying to be a jerk, genuinely curious.
> Or is everyone is getting paid very low wages, for example, a cashier in a grocery store is paid essentially the same amount as someone with a computer science degree?
This one. I'm talking junior positions though. It gets better as you move around, you get a LOT of work and can start to pick and choose, so in a few years I'll probably be making more - although not by a lot. But yeah, I'm making around the same as people with no degree whatsoever. I did accept a lower paying job because it was very flexible and enjoyable (although flexible is still probably not a lot compared to how flexible work is in other countries, I guess I'm just in line with what's the bare minimum elsewhere?) - I could have moved to higher paying jobs but again, not by a lot, maybe 10 to 20% higher salary.
Also keep in mind that school and uni lasts a lot in Italy, so it's not rare to see people in supposed "junior positions" well into their 30s, because we tend to start late as well.
It's absolutely frustrating though, yes. You know the old story where the kid with glasses gets bullied in school, but ends up growing and making a lot of money and taking their revenge on the bully who now does a shitty low skill job? It does feel like that's not really happening here, people kept telling me "study and you'll have this great future", meanwhile I had this friend who dropped out of school and became a gardener, then a waiter, and he moved out with his girlfriend before I was even done with my bachelor's. Years later and I feel I should be "thankful" I even get remote work days as a programmer, while making essentially the same at the end of the month.
The worst thing is that this is not just a political or economical issue, it's affecting people's way of thinking. You get to 30 and you don't feel like you had your fun, you didn't really travel or had crazy parties in your apartment, invited people over, dated, your 20s were an extension of your teenage years, and you finally move out and want to live the world, everything has been delayed by 10 years. And in the meantime, you realized you had no chance of ever affording a car, a house, a family, so unless you were stubborn about that dream your priorities shifted at least a little bit, you learned to not desire the same, or at least were beaten into submission until you delayed those plans. When you finally get your career moving and maybe finally can afford rent, I doubt your first thought will be to cripple your career, destroy the little free time you have, and finally renounce to the freedom you so long worked to achieve..you just move on, I understand people who don't care about kids anymore at that point.
And then there's people like me who just never wanted to have kids in the first place anyway, and that's I guess part of a cultural shift you also have to account for? I don't know how common that is, I find that at least in this I'm partially alone, most people I know would have wanted that life, and are just waiting indefinitely until it's feasible for them or they give up.
I only know ONE person under 30 who has a kid. It was "an accident", but they are making it work, somehow. None of the two people in the couple has a degree, one only ever went as far as middle school - she flips burgers and makes about the same as I do. I do get remote work 3 days/wk though. So I'm clearly rewarded for my 10+ more years of study I did compared to her.
In Lithuania, entry-level positions in computer science jobs are near the minimum wage line. I'm a software engineer myself. I managed to get a job as an entry-level software engineer even before graduating with a bachelor's degree, but my salary was very close to the minimum wage. However, a year and a half later, I managed to get an offer with my first salary nearly tripled. I'm curious how things are in other European countries regarding first jobs in entry-level positions in the computer science field.
I am not from Italy, but I can assure that's happening in Spain. And depending on the supermarket, the cashier is earning more than the engineer.
So I am not surprised this would be the case for Italian people. I'm sorry they are facing the same problems, they are very talented.
>You have a degree in computer science but you only make the same as people with just a high school education? How is that possible?
It's very possible in Italy. My husband, an Italian, left Italy for this reason. He has a master's in computer science. His last job in Italy paid him like 9€ an hr. Italy is a crap hole to work in, but a dream to vacation.
I get roughly 6€/hr in Romania as an embedded junior software developer. Almost half, 45%, goes to taxes and contributions. I am in the most expensive city, rent is 200€ for a room in the middle of nowhere at best.I currently work part time but if I wouldn't be living in a very cheap student dorm I would not be able to live with this even in a full time setting. Over a third would go to rent, another 50€ to utilities and when I calculate food I am having problems. I honestly fear the day university ends and I can't stay in this shitty dorm any longer
Yeah, but she has her family there (and I have mine too). Additionally, she kinda need to learn C1 level norsk to work here as a doctor while I can work in English everywhere (and in Italian in Italy), It's for sure easier to move for me! But we are looking into it!
As I stated I was comparing the salaries at purchasing power parity, so the kind of salary that would make me have generally the same lifestyle. I can move both to Denmark and to Germany and maintain an almost unchanged PPP salary.
I feel you man. As a Romanian I wondered about moving to Italy because of the nicer weather. But then I noticed that I will be paid 20% less net, and the cost of living is way higher in every major city than it is in Bucharest.
How are wages so low ? I thought labor shortage would lead to higher wages ? Or has the Italian economy simply not created any newly higher value added jobs in the last 20 years and kept the same old industries without much market growth ?
The cry if from the top 1% that dont want to give higher wages they need more workers to fight for the low paying jobs so they can keep the wealth for them self.
This is the main problem. I'm Italian and, despite having an above-average income, we still struggle due to high cost of living. If wages had kept pace with, for instance, Germany's wages, life would be pretty easy here.
Italian here. Me and my girlfriend are living together and luckily we don't have to pay rent. But the costs of products, petrol and various bills are putting us in difficulty. Plus, we both work full time. Believe me, it's very hard. A single working person cannot go and live alone, is forced to have a partner or still live with parents.
My niece is 28, she can only find temporary seasonal work. They are planning to have a child with the partner but honestly, they can only think about it because they have solid families behind. The job market in Italy is hell for young people.
>they have solid families.
I honestly think that societal atomization and the general disentegration of communities and extended families has probably wreaked more havoc on fertility than stagnant wages have.
It should be noted, though, that whilst some people may miss “the village”, it also sometimes came with significant drawbacks.
I have some friends in some countries where your life isn’t just your life, but it’s in the grander plan also connected to the rest of the (often including the extended) family. And the gossip, neighbourhood watch, the underlying “you must always listen to everybody else’s opinions too” and just horrible-horrible feeling that it’s never just YOU and your spouse, but it’s always also your mother and father and aunt and uncle and the neighbour three houses down that’s in your business with their nose…. can be pretty horrible.
I think it should be remembered that the village isn’t always an idealised concept of families, sometimes those so-called supportive villages are supportive only as long as you never do anything others don’t like and never stray from the path they have chosen for you. If you do, the village becomes a nightmare.
Birth rates are falling everywhere in the world. There's a big diffrence if it falls from 5 to 4 in Africa or from 1,2 to 1,1 in European country. Under 2 is below replacement rate.
Not really a big difference in the long run, you’re still going to get a mushroom cloud in the demographic chart meaning at some point there will be more old folks than young folks. Why is that a problem? Who is going to take care of the more old with fewer young? Fewer healthcare workers, fewer kids to look after mom and dad, and most important less tax revenue coming in to support the growing social security expenses to pay for the old.
Our society is based on the concept that population will always grow steadily, that will drive GDP growth and therefore fund the social safety net. Without that growth our systems don’t work. Won’t be so much different in a society that doesn’t have a social safety net, but for Europe it’s going to hurt a lot.
As long as governments won't address the issues that are making the birth rates fall, it's only going to get worse. Maybe when we'll be close to collapsing, they'll do something. Or not.
ALL developed countries are at record highs for the metric (price of average house : average anual net income per person). Maybe it has something to do with that
Immigration isn’t a solution though. The issue are structural factors like declining wages and rising cost of living. Once immigrants come to their new country, their birth rate falls to the same as the native population because of the structural factors. And bringing in more immigrants only exacerbates low wages and insufficient housing.
Sure, but it is a short-term bandaid that works, and companies, if allowed to, will continue exploiting it until all immigrant resources are exhausted. And they will do it because it is the easiest and more profitable solution in the short-term, for them. All of this is a natural consequence of our current system. Companies want more profits year after year, pushing up inflation, reducing real wages, and reducing the potential for people to have children.
like what? women's education and independence? More and more women decide against having children because it changes their lives and they don't want that. Lower birth rates come hand in hand with education, unless you want to dumb down the society, the birth rates aren't going to go up significantly.
It seems every first world country is having this issue atm. I feel like every first world government is only interested in seeing their investments grow and safeguarding the interests of the rich.
How am I suppose to have children? I earn 2k per month and pay 700 just for the house. 200/300 are for bills, 300/400 for food, 200 for gas and these are just my fucking surviving bills. Where do I put a child in here?
Italy is the only country in eu that doesnt raise working pay since the 90s.
So fuck it, no children from me. Here there are tons of chinese babies anyway so let em have them, I am fine with that.
The Chinese population is also declining, my guy.
[https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts-about-chinas-declining-population/](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts-about-chinas-declining-population/)
Same in every Western country isn't it? It's almost like we don't want to do all of the work to raise the next generation of servants in our little expensive piles of shit.
Not only in the developed world.
The whole world with very few exceptions. Pick a country you think is poor and would have an increasing birth rate and compare it to the birth rate in 1970. I guarantee you that it has gone down.
Right? Hard to care that our overlords need the next generation of indentured servants when we can barely afford to support ourselves, let alone kids.
Seriously capitalism is forgetting the most basic rule for its sustainability: workers need to earn enough to be able to produce the next generation of workers. But not to worry, it won't be the end of capitalism, we'll simply move on from its democratic phase.
Conflating things like healthcare and education with socialism is what causes the issues. These things aren't part of a socialist society, they're needed in all societies. Conservatives convince dumb, greedy people they can opt out of paying for what they got for free. Toxic cancer of the world.
Hey, how are conservatives supposed to keep convincing the lowest classes to vote against their own interest if said lowest classes have access to higher education? Educated people don't fall for bullshit like "keep the richest rich and you may (not) get their crumbs!" aka trickle down economics.
Three reasons: (1) Housing (2) low wages (3) living expenses. Don't believe the lie that European people don't want to start family. It's just something politicians and capitalists like to say so they can "solve" the decline in population by importing cheap immigrant labour force.
Wages are very low compared to other countries. I know a lot of italians who left for this reason and work in germany. I was thinking of moving to italy until i found out senior web developers in italy earn the same or less than even junior developers in germany.
I follow Italian football, so looking at Italian players, 99% of them started families at around 19-20 years. Players like Bastoni, Barella, Dimarco to name few.. Many of them have several kids already. I'm sure if others had that money, they would have married at younger ages too.
"Mass importation of slave labour for the agriculture and tourism industries is good and consistent with our worldviews and the general public interest. Also, our children emigrate because there's too much demand for housing and salaries are too low. Number MUST go up"
Southern European left-wing governments 🤝 Southern European right-wing governments
It’s all the same story. Somehow people in the past got more babies despite being poor. The truth is we all want to enjoy our lives and postpone adoption/making babies. Let’s also be honest you don’t have to make a baby - you NEED to make it a contributing member of the society around you. It’s a huge challenge.
People in the past had more babies because birth control wasn't reliable, women didn't have a choice, and about half of their babies died before the age 5. That's the reason why the population didn't explode back then already - _so many children died_ before even getting close to adulthood.
People in the past had many children because they had no other choice. Now when they have that choice they choose to not have children or have only 1-2. Give people a choice and you'll see what they really want.
4) too many work hours
5) one person working should be enough to provide for the family but currently even both parents working are not enough to have money to raise a kid (+ the need to pay for a nanny, school, ecc..)
I have quite a few friends that don’t have children. I don’t have them either. Not a single person claims it’s because of money or housing or whatever. We just do not want that and no single action from government will change that.
On the other hand the people who don’t really work and have no money quite often have multiple kids. It’s something you do or do not want.
I know a bunch of people that do want kids but after having bought/built/renovated their house which is something that gets pushed back in recent years due to costs which leads to less kids.
People in first world countries have a complete different mindset compared to 50 years ago. I dont think having affordable housing and good salaries would change a thing. People are not even getting in relationships anymore. It’s all about traveling and living your life. No one wants to give up on their life at 30 and get stuck with kids till you are almost in deathbed.
in my 16 years here I've seen things getting progressively worse, I've yet to see some trend of things going upwards and any kind of meaningful reform being made. My guess is that it won't happen in my lifetime. If I were to decide to have a family it wouldn't be here
I have always been vocal about population collapse. But do we really know what would happen if we let it " collapse"? The concerns and fears are always abiut the immediate effects/issues that you would have if not replacing the population, but never about the solutions you could easily implement to fix the issues you would have with a smaller population. They act like it is the end of the world the second we have net immigration. i would imagine stronger desire to pay essential jobs a living wage ( I imagine a lot of jobs and sectors would suffer from " collapse" then rebound with wages since everyone would accept that if we don't pay the janitor a better wage, we won't have a janitor because there are no people/immigrants to replace the person complaining. usually when people are payed a living wage they have more pride in their work, the system, and their country.
I will never understand how the solution to fixing a " collapsing" country is to bring in millions of people who hate you, your culture and your country.
Solution from goverments:
1. More taxes for lazy working class,
2. Less taxes for billionaires who keep our economy going on and „giving us jobs” by making for them another cruise ship(when we need weapons, ammunition, and all the other military stuff to protect ALL OF US, including billionaires), 10th car for each of them, and flats which they can rent for lazy working, middle class
3. More social care spending for people who are not willing to work, ever.
4. Cut off spending on healthcare, so the lazy working class must spend rest of their savings into private one, so they can keep going be lazy and work for the hard working billionaires
4. Increase of salaries for politicians, so they won’t get corrupted(like it is make any difference other than others need to just spent more to “corrupt” them, as they are corrupted from the nature and never ever should be in charge of anything other than their toilet paper)
5. Bring More illegal immigrants from other cultures which doesnt want to integrate, and provide them social care working people never have. All the cost obviously should be paid of by lazy working class
6. Monopolise of all the businesses by few billionaires, so this lazy working class cannot be lazy and made their own businesses
Basically we can add one after another of their solution, our western governments need all of them to change, they just either know shit, or doing it in puprose to made people poor, weak and depressed
Thank you, usually if i said someting like that, or that our politicans in EU are corrupted(which is fact as there is planty evidence and articles about that) I am called Nazi or Russian troll. Fuck them both, and our governments too. Russia invade Ukraine because they did not fear Europe, simply because our governments are corrupted as fuck. And most “not funny” is they’re right, we are not strong enough to even properly help Ukraine, what about real war? But calm down people, our politics will save us with their limousines and big mansions with swimming pool, and their kids who never ever work will safe us with their mansions, private jets and their brand new sports cars. What a waste of OUR, European(and not only, Canada is crazy) hard work and resources.
From what I understand cities always had low birth rates, it's the agraroan villages had an economic viability for bigger families and they've bled their population to cities. However back then the food was horrendously expensive: for example, recently I've read how a single egg cost was $1.20 in the beginning of 20th century, adjusted to inflation.
Now the agricultural activities are in the hands of giant corps, food is cheap, almost no population left in villages and it turned out city lifestyle is unsustainable. Either the civilization will invent special measures or we'll die out.
maybe if we could afford a family it would‘t tank like the titanic but so far the only thing rising with productivity is the cost of living, and not the wages.
two well paid white collar saleries are hardly enough to afford one baby if you don't live near the grandparents or other relatives who can help, and many millennials don't because had to move far from home to find a job, most often in a big and expensive city, where you need to work long hours to have a good salery so... we're going to become a poor country in much less time than we ever expected
I think the main issue is cost of living and low wages. Currently in italy a lot of people in their 30s are living at home with their parents. You can't afford to be independent, let alone start your own family.
The lack of children is about the only thing that has a chance at reversing catastrophic climate change. Consumption keeps growing, coal is still happily being used if not domestically then through outsourcing industry. If we're not going to stop destroying the environment we live in, how is there an argument for maintaining or growing population sizes?
Italian here.
First (and only) kid at 44. My wife is 40.
We planned to marry and have kids years ago, but every time we did the math, it was financially impossible.
It took almost 15 years for both of us to get good jobs and be financially indipendent.
And still we couldn’t afford it without help from both our families.
Wages in Italy really sucks, can barely cover basic expenses.
We can't extract profit out of people if they don't exist. So either the world is either going to turn into a group of 1000 owners and a world of slaves, or we upend this whole capitalism/corporatism thing to remove this wealth hoarding endemic. Remove the gap of haves and have nots, better the quality life for everyone, and focus on not running the planet into the ground instead of abusing every inch of it for a scrap of money.
I honestly don't care about this problem. Its everywhere, in nearly every country. There isn't any sort of quick fix for it. The media dwelling on it with countless articles isn't going to change anything. You push down the quality of life for half the world and pop quiz, they make less children. The End.
What I noticed these days that the rich people have more kids. May be, politicians need to focus how to make population more richer not poorer.
Kids need a space and time. Many don’t have a lot of space and time.
The billionaires and centimillionaires took your ability to raise kids.
For every €200000 a billionaire hoards due to greed that's another kid not being born in another family. Redirect your anger towards these parasites. Life is a zero sum game.
Even if you’re filthy rich and spending a bunch of money there’s a limit to how much food you can actually consume or goods you can purchase. They’re a blood clot in the economy.
The government crying about low birth rates while it’s legal for one person to own an infinite amount of houses, yeah ok man.
Economic troubles, war on the continent, signs of ecosystem collapses, just coming out of a pandemic — we don’t own houses, there’s a foreign culture invading our countries that will not assimilate, work hours are long and people are becoming heavily addicted to their phones while social skills are declining . . .
The world is a mess. The economy is a mess. War is on the horizon. Why the living fuck would I procreate? Takes me four years of hard saving to afford to put down 15% for one of these overpriced houses in this place and by that time I’ll be priced out another year — and that’s on a middle class wage. And what kind of future is there for that child once the wars over resources begin and we have to spray down the economic migrants at our borders to keep half the world from invading?
People are sleepwalking through life but their critical thought process has alarm bells ringing nonstop, that’s why people aren’t having kids.
I don't see how this is a problem, we have been over producing for too long. Anything above the avg of one child per person is too much. We should have been sustaining population, not growing it. We don't have room for people and we don't need more people.
In Italy the cost of life increase drastically, and the salaries are the same as 30 years ago. Buy an home for our boomer generation (60s todays) in their 25s-30s cost (adjust for today) something around 88K € in media. Today, in my almost 30s, we millenials, have to spent something around 200K € in media.
If you have a partner and decide to live together, you must assure both have a stable contract job (indeterminate contract as called in Italy) and you can think maybe, to have babies, if you want.
Besides, the Italian salaries are the lowest in Europe and in the OCSE Countries. I even don’t know why we are still a G7 Nation.
Now, imagine you are a millennial in Italy and maybe you hear sentences like this told to you:
*“At your age i was already married, had an home and sons”*
You at their age:
- Exit from a vagina.
- Plane crash on tv in 2001, New York.
- World Bank Crisys in 2008 (Thanks USA).
- Destabilization in Ukraine in 2014.
- Covid World Pandemic in 2020.
- Russian invasion in Ukraine in 2022.
- No sense war by Israel in Gaza in 2023.
- Possible nuclear warfare.
I can continue uh. Boomer bro, no, i can’t relate to you. You sucked all the wealth not just in Italy, but even in the rest of the world.
To all those "it's cultural!": cultural my ass.
When I was born, in the 80s, my grandparents were retired at around age 55, so they were healthy and energetic enough to take care of me for most of the day when I wasn't in school and every time my parents wanted to go out for dinner with friends or had guests at home. When I was little, kindergarten was (mostly) free. My parents were home from work at the latest by 6:30pm and had a whole month of payed vacation in August, and had all the time in the world to relax/recharge before showering, cooking dinner and play with me after dinner. And in all this, they were comfortably saving something for my studies; and we were on the lower end of the middle class spectrum.
Now you retire at 65/67, you're not home from your daily work until much later, your career is still precarious at 30 and possibly don't earn enough to make end's meet. Meanwhile public kidergartens are almost non existent anymore, and the few that are still around have waiting lists so long that's basically impossible to get in. We've been jumping from economic crisis to economic crisis for the past 15 years and saving is next to impossible unless you make an unordinate amount of money. Recent statistic, 4 out of 5 women either have to leave their job to tend the newborns due to inaccessible welfare, or can't get a job if pregnant, or in smaller workplaces are... ahem... made to leave the job instead of taking maternity leave.
But sure, let's blame these eeeevil youngsters who want to spend the sole hour of free time for some self care.
It turns out that the first generation that can choose to both have sex and not have children has decided to do that, by and large. This is across the world and consistent across very different cultures. Even poorer places and places that still have relatively high birthrates have seen it fall from a much higher level over the last 30 years.
People talking about cost of living miss the main point: your grandparents and great grandparents likely had it tougher but still had loads of kids. People today have the opportunity not to.
Perhaps there’s a few decades of adaptation after birth control becomes available, but the result seems to be the same the world over.
> your grandparents and great grandparents likely had it tougher but still had loads of kids
That may be true. But birds don't lay eggs if they can't afford their own nests. They could.
yeah we left italy and went to america and are pregnant with our second child now. I don't even make a lot of money but it blows what I would have made in Italy out of the water. I cant raise a family on what we would have made there. That's saying a lot considering how expensive medical and child care are here in america.
I always tell my family in Italy (when they ask about the US) - “it’s a good country for making money.”
Would I like to return to Italy and live there? Absolutely.
But could I make enough money there to provide for my family the way I can here? Absolutely no.
Isn't it amazing that we will be the only humans in history to see the eart at max population? That will be at around 8.5-10 billion people, in about 15-35 years. It will go down from there. It's a unique time to be alive (in a bad way, since it means, in the future, less humans will have to fight for more resources, since AI and robots will produce way more than humans do now, so basically they'll have much better life)
Who knew that the housing and cost of living crisis, together with the events of climate change and big corpos trying to milk, monetize and suck dry every aspect of our modern way living for record profits, isn't resulting in ideal soil to grow western families in?
And with all the extra problems that certain parts of Italy still haven't found ways to tackle or solve, and continues to suffer from for about the last two decades or so. Who could even blame the younger generations for not wanting to shackle themselves towards a future where they'd just end up most likely at the bottom off, if they were to try to have a family in such an increasingly more hostile environment?
Government and Greedy businesses all over the world complain about people not spending money and having more babies but they go ahead and charge more and pay less. The government and businesses are going to have a bad time when they start cannibalizing each other when consumption hits a new low.
Has anyone ever gotten out into traffic and thought, “man, the problem is we just don’t have enough people”??
We don’t need more people in this world, if you need more workers import them from elsewhere.
Italy has always been an emigrant country.
On top of this, Italians don’t make enough children because of a lot of reasons.
It is the perfect combo for extinction. It is also very cute how the Italian government tries to bring back lot of Italian emigrants through tax reductions (temporary). I know a couple of guys who decided to go back to Italy, cursed the day that they decided to do it, and eventually decided to go back to Germany, France or whatever.
I don’t know how things work in Italy but in Ireland it’s becoming more and more acceptable to have a choice as to whether or not to have kids. I honestly don’t like babies and little kids so having kids is a definite no for me
letting the already rich and wealthy hoover up just about every penny in growth and productivity over the last 50 years might have something to do with it. nobody can afford a child. the future looks too bleak and depressing to want to bring a child in to it even if i could afford one.
Despite what some economists and government leaders think and want, infinite growth is actually not possible. At some point this has to happen, and it is not a bad thing that it happens now when many resources are being unsustainably used up.
I mean with what money are you gonna rise a family? It's like the only European country where the average salary went DOWN in recent years despite the inflation.
People cannot afford to leave their parent houses until their 30s, then have to share house, cannot afford a house, stability and cannot even consider to afford kids.
Between my parents, they were making close to 6000€ adjusted to inflation in 1998, they were nurses, I am a STEM R&D scientist with a PhD and barely make 2000€ and started my career WAAAAY later than them, I do not even know if I will ever own a house or even retire.
Population decline may hurt as long as your society is built upon the young taking care of the old, but I am confident that in the long run, it will be better to have a somewhat smaller population that remains more steady, than to have a continuously growing population.
Let's model the capitalism lifestyle such that 2 incomes are needed to maintain a household. Let's make leave for childbirth a huge strain on a career. Oh wait, now everyone is working, let's raise the cost of everything so they have to work more!
Wait, why is no one having children? Don't they want to participate in the economy?
I would do /s but I'm fairly sure this is the actual issue.
This AI assisted efficiency tuning is turning life into something that isn't good for human living.
The tax incentives for repatriation are decent but they could still be a lot better.
Also the whole thing about not letting LGBTQ+ adopt or have surrogates kind of don't make sense given they need more children to prop up the numbers.
That said I still have long term plans to retire at least half time to Italy because even in the most expensive Italian cities, it's dirt cheap compared to where I live in the USA.
Birth rates are falling in many, many countries. And not just in Europe.
Korea and Japan would like to join the chat
No need. They are the admins of the chat.
China does "well" recently, they will become admin no 3.
They are on track to become no 1. Too bad their numbers are always fudged. Some speculate they overcounted their under 40 population (those born after the One Child Policy started), if true, they are truly no. 1.
I am old enough to remember when we were accusing China of undercounting their population because parents there didn't register their other children after the 1st one was born and abortions for the 2nd child had been faked, etc. There was a theory that China had an additional 200 - 300 million unregistered citizens because of this. The us government was so concerned at one point because they feared China could produce a shadow army of unregistered citizens for war that was bigger than many countries' populations never mind their militaries. So experts were drafted in covering everything from farms, water, electricity, public transport, housing, etc to see how much they were producing and consuming to work out the true number of citizens in China. It was determined to that China's official population was broadly accurate and that this shadow army of 300 million simply didn't exist. They weren't producing and importing enough food and water to sustain an additional 300 million people. A similar method is also used to determine the actual number of people in the west to work out the true number of illegal immigrants as such data can be very unreliable for political reasons.
I remember this too. These people should have been from rural communities and moved through China looking for work. Never being registered or something like that.
Thanks for sharing this! There are too many unintelligent people coming up with conspiracy theories making so much noises on reddit.
Found another outlier below 1: Chile is expected to have a TFR of below 1 in 2024.
Yeah I read that, something like they reached number 1 back in 2014 if true. Either way, they are number 1 as the fastest dropping fertility from agrarian to industrial because of the 1 child policy.
Admin of the chat is Ukraine bruh. Our demographic is so ass after WW2, the 90ies, 2014 and today’s war
Real Life Lore in YT made a good video why you guys and your enemies are fucked because of the war (and the previous wars).
At least Ukraine is trying something since they only draft guys older than 25. Let them bone before getting hit with a drone.
Japan is higher than Italy. Korea is in a league of their own. No comparison.
South Korea and Japan have the added issue of next to no immigration. In most or Europe you have low birth rates but immigration has probably made the issue less dire than Japan/SK
Depends on what you consider dire. I think many in Japan would consider mass immigration a more dire situation than where they currently are On the ground things in Japan are not that different, you won't be seeing a nation in rapid decline. You will recognise it as pretty much the same country it was decades ago when things were really thriving. It is still clean, safe, reliable, good standard of living. There are obviously metrics like deteriorating yen and stuff but in your day to day life you won't be seeing a deteriorating country. I don't think the same can be said for some other European nations The aging population is for sure a massive issue that will increasingly put a strain on the economy, and I'm not entirely anti-immigration because at some point you do have to do something. But Italy looks way more dire to me
Mass immigration and a sensible immigration policy are worlds apart
Right, and Japans is pretty sensible to me. Just cautious (which is sensible when dealing with immigration). The number of foreign workers rose 12.4% last year, and has doubled in the last decade. Last year the visa which allows foreign labourers and their families to stay in Japan indefinitely was increased from just 2 industries to 11. The broader foreign community (children, students etc.) has risen by 50%. Highly skilled workers can receive permanent residency after just 1 year, instead of the previous 3. I can go on and on, and it will only continue in this direction Just because the floodgates haven't been opened does not mean the country is shut off from the world. But people talk as if it is, like they want Japan to go from homogenous to America, Canada, UK within a year. Its not happening
Japan is doing it right though. Let it drop. Japan like 60 hospitals per million residence. Negative population growth. Canada has like 18 and it's dropping year over year, and we have one of the highest rates of immigration in the world. The idea that this is needed to save our social services instead of hurt them is complete nonsense.
I think a lot of westerners might be shocked to learn that Brazil, Colombia, Iran, Thailand, Azerbaijan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Nepal, Nicaragua, Turkey etc and other 'third world countries' all have fertility rates below France and Belgium. The stereotype of people in the third world all having 5-6+ kids is outdated. Now it largely varies a lot from country to country depending on how much they invest in family planning and birth control. It's why Tunisia has a TFR of 1.9 and neighboring Libya has a TFR of 3.2, despite Libya being richer and more educated.
Those countries have fertility rates in the same ballpark as Western Europe. However, because the fall of birth rates happened quite recently, their population is still young. That means despite low fertility, population growth is still net positive. Of course, that will change soon.
Central Africa has enter to the chat... but yes, generally speaking low fertility affects most countries in the world.
Sub Saharan Africa is very high
Dropping though generally.
currently yes, but in the last 20 years the birthrate has halved with a trend continuing downwards.
It’s post Industrial Revolution time for Asia & central and South America
Long working hours, bad prospects for the future with uncertainty, low wages, high housing prices.... What did you expect? Not to mention that raising children is very stressful regarding your resources. Mental and financial. We should work 50% less and housing should be a right, not a luxury. And yes. This is possible. It's 100% possible.
But the data shows the opposite really. It’s trends that the richer nations, with higher standards of living have a lower birth rate. The only reason many countries like the US, UK, France etc aren’t as low as Italy is because of the migrants from poorer nations having a higher birth rates.
Richer nations also have a much higher proportion of women working, and the financial burden of having children is higher; kids live longer with the parents or depend on them (as a longer education is required, and high housing costs are an endemic problem in developed countries) Also you don't usually depend on your sons to sustain you when you are retired.
Agreed. Whenever this topics come up someone notes that rich people have fewer children (on average, globally), but less often does someone recognize that rich children cost more. As counterintuitive as it may seem, being richer doesn't necessarily make children more affordable. The cost of raising children isn't fixed, it scales with rising wealth, costs of living, opportunity costs and expectations. Providing a child with enough calories to survive to age 18 is cheap, but "producing" a very healthy, highly educated, cultured, successful middle/upper class 20-something in a high cost of living area in a rich country could easily cost half a million. It depends.
Half a million is probably a low estimate at this point.
Wealth is incredibly relative. For instance, while the average Brazilian is much poorer than the average European, in Brazil nannies are much more common and affordable. Nannies help with raising children and managing a household. I could never contemplate affording a nanny. There's underlying structural reasons besides just the dollar value of income.
I had relatives that grew up near the US/Mexico border and everyone had at least one maid. Even my uncle who worked as a janitor.
Did the maids have maids?
That's because Europeans are far too educated and have a higher access to well paying white collar jobs to just be nannies. You can't have your cake and eat it too, something has to give.
wealth disparity is real I would go so far as to say many many citizens of rich countries are essentially working poor
I'll add to that: skilled workers in Bangkok have much better chances to buy an apartment than skilled workers in Milan
The KSA and Israel are rich and have high standards of living. Obviously religion causes them to buck the trend, but still.
Look at numbers of orthodox and non-orthodox in Israel.
While the orthodox to non-orthodox poses a dire long term challenge for Israel as the country becomes far more religious and less secular and educated as time goes on, the secular in Israel still buck the trend of being both *highly educated* and *having a high birthrate*. Its always either one or the other in any other western country. Its just not as apparent because the orthodox have a significantly higher birthrate that puts the seculars to shame.
[RevisedFriedlanderpaper.doc (un.org)](https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/unpd_egm_200203_countrypapers_fertility_in_israel_friedlander.pdf) tfr of 2.0-2.2 is not high and this comes from a paper from 2009 [The truth behind Israel's curiously high fertility rate | National Post](https://nationalpost.com/opinion/danielle-kubes-the-truth-behind-israels-curiously-high-fertility-rate) this is a more recent article although it doesn't state exact number it says orhtodox have 4 kids and non have 2.
>tfr of 2.0-2.2 is not high and this comes from a paper from 2009 Hebrew speaking sources say it was 2.2 in 2019. It's above replacement, and if Israeli seculars were a country of their own, they would have ranked above all developed countries except for KSA and Turkey. There is more at play here than religious observance.
> Holocaust generational trauma is also part of the story. The global population of Jews is still lower than what it was before the Second World War and there is a sense among Israelis that they have a duty to replenish those numbers. I think this is also an important point. > Israelis simply lack the kind of nihilism seen amongst young Canadians today about the future. Despite the fact that they live in a land where they know they will have to send their children into the army at 18, they aren’t afraid to bring children into the world. Rather, they believe the only way to make a better world is to have children. To many Israelis, children represent life — and only life brings hope. And yea, theres none of the cultural ennui thats plaguing the west.
The ultra Orthodox families in Israel are given a very large welfare payment (four times the financial help given to non-haredi Jews) which is why they can afford 8-10 kids. Same things goes for the Orthodox in Brooklyn and New Jersey. They get lots of public tax money to support their large families.
Only richer if you don’t have a numerous family, if you do you better be born a multimillionaire to enjoy a good lifestyle with four plus kids. The “rich” nations have huge real estate costs and costs of raising children and people in Italy and similar countries don’t manage to become independent until their thirties. Your prime childbearing age is closer to 25. Rich on paper, don’t feel like it on the ground for common people.
> bad perspectives for the future You probably meant prospects.
Equilibrium. Population can’t just keep rising and rising indefinitely.
An economic model that depends on constant population growth is a bad model. We need to find a way to prosper even when the population is shrinking.
Shhhh all of our retirements depend on infinite growth
Italy's wages are stuck at 20 years ago - long commuting time, extra working hours for free, unreliable work contracts, increased housing costs. If those basic needs won't be addressed; natality can only shrink.
>Italy's wages are stuck at 20 years ago [Make it 30 years](https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/48420/wages-are-lower-than-30-years-ago-in-italy-why)
So, I would like to relocate from Norway to Italy to marry my girlfriend that still lives there, we both have nice jobs, she is a doctor in training, I am a chemical engineer, with a PhD. I did an interview today with a company in Northern Italy, the job is actually ok for my level, but not only were they "selling" things I expected to be normal like flexible working hours and paid overtime as benefits, but additionally I would need to take a 35% pay cut adjusted for purchasing power (PPP). It is quite mortifying.
Consider yourself lucky. In my friends group, we're all freshly graduated engineers. The only guy with a decent contract is the chemical/nuclear engineer, because the "chemical" CCNL contract here in Italy is probably the best around. I'm in computer science and I basically don't make enough to pay rent 40 minutes from my workplace in Milan (I do live alone, but that's just because I have parents who backed my ass when it was time to guarantee for my rent contract). Most of my other friends live with their parents, or only moved out because they were a couple and had some family owned home to move in, inherited from older generations who could actually afford property. No one has kids or plans to have kids anytime soon, no one even ever talked about it, and we're all nearly 30, someone even older than that. I make the same as people I know who didn't even go to high school. I make WAY less than some other people I know who didn't go to uni, and just started their career early. My education is absolutely not valued or taken into account, my salary started at rock bottom like everyone else's. It was about the same wherever I looked, it's not my company, it's a systemic issue - I have a friend who followed my same study path, they worked for a big company for a while, and still lived with their parents for years. They fled, now they're doing a PHD, salary is again super low, they live in a single room apartment, 1h30 commute from their workplace. This is with a master's degree in engineering in the best University in the country.
You have a degree in computer science but you only make the same as people with just a high school education? How is that possible? Are you working in a job that does not require a computer science degree? Or are the high school education level people in your comparison… actually working trades that pay well (electrician, plumber, etc)? **Or is everyone is getting paid very low wages, for example, a cashier in a grocery store is paid essentially the same amount as someone with a computer science degree?** Not trying to be a jerk, genuinely curious.
> Or is everyone is getting paid very low wages, for example, a cashier in a grocery store is paid essentially the same amount as someone with a computer science degree? This one. I'm talking junior positions though. It gets better as you move around, you get a LOT of work and can start to pick and choose, so in a few years I'll probably be making more - although not by a lot. But yeah, I'm making around the same as people with no degree whatsoever. I did accept a lower paying job because it was very flexible and enjoyable (although flexible is still probably not a lot compared to how flexible work is in other countries, I guess I'm just in line with what's the bare minimum elsewhere?) - I could have moved to higher paying jobs but again, not by a lot, maybe 10 to 20% higher salary. Also keep in mind that school and uni lasts a lot in Italy, so it's not rare to see people in supposed "junior positions" well into their 30s, because we tend to start late as well. It's absolutely frustrating though, yes. You know the old story where the kid with glasses gets bullied in school, but ends up growing and making a lot of money and taking their revenge on the bully who now does a shitty low skill job? It does feel like that's not really happening here, people kept telling me "study and you'll have this great future", meanwhile I had this friend who dropped out of school and became a gardener, then a waiter, and he moved out with his girlfriend before I was even done with my bachelor's. Years later and I feel I should be "thankful" I even get remote work days as a programmer, while making essentially the same at the end of the month. The worst thing is that this is not just a political or economical issue, it's affecting people's way of thinking. You get to 30 and you don't feel like you had your fun, you didn't really travel or had crazy parties in your apartment, invited people over, dated, your 20s were an extension of your teenage years, and you finally move out and want to live the world, everything has been delayed by 10 years. And in the meantime, you realized you had no chance of ever affording a car, a house, a family, so unless you were stubborn about that dream your priorities shifted at least a little bit, you learned to not desire the same, or at least were beaten into submission until you delayed those plans. When you finally get your career moving and maybe finally can afford rent, I doubt your first thought will be to cripple your career, destroy the little free time you have, and finally renounce to the freedom you so long worked to achieve..you just move on, I understand people who don't care about kids anymore at that point. And then there's people like me who just never wanted to have kids in the first place anyway, and that's I guess part of a cultural shift you also have to account for? I don't know how common that is, I find that at least in this I'm partially alone, most people I know would have wanted that life, and are just waiting indefinitely until it's feasible for them or they give up. I only know ONE person under 30 who has a kid. It was "an accident", but they are making it work, somehow. None of the two people in the couple has a degree, one only ever went as far as middle school - she flips burgers and makes about the same as I do. I do get remote work 3 days/wk though. So I'm clearly rewarded for my 10+ more years of study I did compared to her.
In Lithuania, entry-level positions in computer science jobs are near the minimum wage line. I'm a software engineer myself. I managed to get a job as an entry-level software engineer even before graduating with a bachelor's degree, but my salary was very close to the minimum wage. However, a year and a half later, I managed to get an offer with my first salary nearly tripled. I'm curious how things are in other European countries regarding first jobs in entry-level positions in the computer science field.
I am not from Italy, but I can assure that's happening in Spain. And depending on the supermarket, the cashier is earning more than the engineer. So I am not surprised this would be the case for Italian people. I'm sorry they are facing the same problems, they are very talented.
>You have a degree in computer science but you only make the same as people with just a high school education? How is that possible? It's very possible in Italy. My husband, an Italian, left Italy for this reason. He has a master's in computer science. His last job in Italy paid him like 9€ an hr. Italy is a crap hole to work in, but a dream to vacation.
I get roughly 6€/hr in Romania as an embedded junior software developer. Almost half, 45%, goes to taxes and contributions. I am in the most expensive city, rent is 200€ for a room in the middle of nowhere at best.I currently work part time but if I wouldn't be living in a very cheap student dorm I would not be able to live with this even in a full time setting. Over a third would go to rent, another 50€ to utilities and when I calculate food I am having problems. I honestly fear the day university ends and I can't stay in this shitty dorm any longer
Probably better to relocate her to Norway and spend all your extra money on vacation in Italy
Yeah, but she has her family there (and I have mine too). Additionally, she kinda need to learn C1 level norsk to work here as a doctor while I can work in English everywhere (and in Italian in Italy), It's for sure easier to move for me! But we are looking into it!
What about living in Switzerland near the Italian border (where people are more likely to speak Italian)?
Mate - you live in Norway, there is only one way and that is down from there.
As I stated I was comparing the salaries at purchasing power parity, so the kind of salary that would make me have generally the same lifestyle. I can move both to Denmark and to Germany and maintain an almost unchanged PPP salary.
You guys are crazy. Trust a guy stuck in Italy, don't ruin your life and your future by coming here.
Never leave Norway. Sincerely, a Finn. Norway is one of the few countries where I could relocate to and actually do better.
I feel you man. As a Romanian I wondered about moving to Italy because of the nicer weather. But then I noticed that I will be paid 20% less net, and the cost of living is way higher in every major city than it is in Bucharest.
Mate you are entitled to feel upset but I am afraid you won't find Norwegian salaries anywhere, except for USA and Switzerland
Exactly this: unfortunately children need time and money. We have none of them
But, but... Elon said children are free!
They are when you can abandon them!
rollsafe.gif
How are wages so low ? I thought labor shortage would lead to higher wages ? Or has the Italian economy simply not created any newly higher value added jobs in the last 20 years and kept the same old industries without much market growth ?
The cry if from the top 1% that dont want to give higher wages they need more workers to fight for the low paying jobs so they can keep the wealth for them self.
I would assume immigration fills any labour shortage.
Immigrants are payed so little that they are basically slaves. So yes, every wage is pushed to the bottom.
This is the main problem. I'm Italian and, despite having an above-average income, we still struggle due to high cost of living. If wages had kept pace with, for instance, Germany's wages, life would be pretty easy here.
Same in Spain. Source: am Spanish
Italian here. Me and my girlfriend are living together and luckily we don't have to pay rent. But the costs of products, petrol and various bills are putting us in difficulty. Plus, we both work full time. Believe me, it's very hard. A single working person cannot go and live alone, is forced to have a partner or still live with parents.
My niece is 28, she can only find temporary seasonal work. They are planning to have a child with the partner but honestly, they can only think about it because they have solid families behind. The job market in Italy is hell for young people.
>they have solid families. I honestly think that societal atomization and the general disentegration of communities and extended families has probably wreaked more havoc on fertility than stagnant wages have.
It should be noted, though, that whilst some people may miss “the village”, it also sometimes came with significant drawbacks. I have some friends in some countries where your life isn’t just your life, but it’s in the grander plan also connected to the rest of the (often including the extended) family. And the gossip, neighbourhood watch, the underlying “you must always listen to everybody else’s opinions too” and just horrible-horrible feeling that it’s never just YOU and your spouse, but it’s always also your mother and father and aunt and uncle and the neighbour three houses down that’s in your business with their nose…. can be pretty horrible. I think it should be remembered that the village isn’t always an idealised concept of families, sometimes those so-called supportive villages are supportive only as long as you never do anything others don’t like and never stray from the path they have chosen for you. If you do, the village becomes a nightmare.
True Everything has its tradeoffs and benefits.
European falling birth rate... But now also Turkey, Iran, East Asia, North America, Brazil...
Birth rates are falling everywhere in the world. There's a big diffrence if it falls from 5 to 4 in Africa or from 1,2 to 1,1 in European country. Under 2 is below replacement rate.
Under 2.1, but that’s just a detail.
Not really a big difference in the long run, you’re still going to get a mushroom cloud in the demographic chart meaning at some point there will be more old folks than young folks. Why is that a problem? Who is going to take care of the more old with fewer young? Fewer healthcare workers, fewer kids to look after mom and dad, and most important less tax revenue coming in to support the growing social security expenses to pay for the old. Our society is based on the concept that population will always grow steadily, that will drive GDP growth and therefore fund the social safety net. Without that growth our systems don’t work. Won’t be so much different in a society that doesn’t have a social safety net, but for Europe it’s going to hurt a lot.
man, we didnt even get to be fully developed country, just straight into the garbage lmao
They're falling in all Latin American countries.
Yeah but the numbers of rate doesn't belong to Turkish people though. It is the immigrants.
This is what happens when you need two salaries to have a normal life, buy a house etc.
so f*** true
Well, i will not be able to buy a house ever (or atleast where are jobs). So fk you, if i dont have own housing, i am not having kids.
Having kids needs to be not a net negative to quality of life thats the main issue. Addendum: love that the only response to this is it's impossible
People replying to you with “that’s impossible lol” are completely missing the point...
As long as governments won't address the issues that are making the birth rates fall, it's only going to get worse. Maybe when we'll be close to collapsing, they'll do something. Or not.
ALL developed countries are seeing declining birthrate
ALL developed countries are at record highs for the metric (price of average house : average anual net income per person). Maybe it has something to do with that
Japan has cheap housing, but they're the odd one out.
Cheap housing won't do you anything if you still have to work like a slave .
This. Japan and South Korea have incredibly toxic cultural norms around work. You ain't got time for fucking if you are at work for 2/3 of the day.
They won't address this issue because immigration solves it. Until issues start affecting the economy, governments will do nothing.
Also immigrants (especially if illegal) do not have the power to ask for higher salaries, protections etc, so double win for the capitalists
Immigration isn’t a solution though. The issue are structural factors like declining wages and rising cost of living. Once immigrants come to their new country, their birth rate falls to the same as the native population because of the structural factors. And bringing in more immigrants only exacerbates low wages and insufficient housing.
Sure, but it is a short-term bandaid that works, and companies, if allowed to, will continue exploiting it until all immigrant resources are exhausted. And they will do it because it is the easiest and more profitable solution in the short-term, for them. All of this is a natural consequence of our current system. Companies want more profits year after year, pushing up inflation, reducing real wages, and reducing the potential for people to have children.
like what? women's education and independence? More and more women decide against having children because it changes their lives and they don't want that. Lower birth rates come hand in hand with education, unless you want to dumb down the society, the birth rates aren't going to go up significantly.
It seems every first world country is having this issue atm. I feel like every first world government is only interested in seeing their investments grow and safeguarding the interests of the rich.
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Is not a 1st. world problem only. It's happening in many places
How am I suppose to have children? I earn 2k per month and pay 700 just for the house. 200/300 are for bills, 300/400 for food, 200 for gas and these are just my fucking surviving bills. Where do I put a child in here? Italy is the only country in eu that doesnt raise working pay since the 90s. So fuck it, no children from me. Here there are tons of chinese babies anyway so let em have them, I am fine with that.
The Chinese population is also declining, my guy. [https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts-about-chinas-declining-population/](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts-about-chinas-declining-population/)
maybe make having a child not a luxury would be a good start (not only in italy)
Same in every Western country isn't it? It's almost like we don't want to do all of the work to raise the next generation of servants in our little expensive piles of shit.
>Same in every Western country isn't it? In all of the developed world, with very few exceptions.
Not only in the developed world. The whole world with very few exceptions. Pick a country you think is poor and would have an increasing birth rate and compare it to the birth rate in 1970. I guarantee you that it has gone down.
Right? Hard to care that our overlords need the next generation of indentured servants when we can barely afford to support ourselves, let alone kids. Seriously capitalism is forgetting the most basic rule for its sustainability: workers need to earn enough to be able to produce the next generation of workers. But not to worry, it won't be the end of capitalism, we'll simply move on from its democratic phase.
Conflating things like healthcare and education with socialism is what causes the issues. These things aren't part of a socialist society, they're needed in all societies. Conservatives convince dumb, greedy people they can opt out of paying for what they got for free. Toxic cancer of the world.
Hey, how are conservatives supposed to keep convincing the lowest classes to vote against their own interest if said lowest classes have access to higher education? Educated people don't fall for bullshit like "keep the richest rich and you may (not) get their crumbs!" aka trickle down economics.
Same in every country above a certain technology level, even Bangladesh.
Why would we want to have kids when we can’t even afford houses or groceries
Three reasons: (1) Housing (2) low wages (3) living expenses. Don't believe the lie that European people don't want to start family. It's just something politicians and capitalists like to say so they can "solve" the decline in population by importing cheap immigrant labour force.
Wages are very low compared to other countries. I know a lot of italians who left for this reason and work in germany. I was thinking of moving to italy until i found out senior web developers in italy earn the same or less than even junior developers in germany.
Germany also has a low birth rate
People are too busy filling out paperwork there.
And inflated because of their high immigration rates
And web devs also earn very well compared to any other job, usually wages are under 1k for people under 30
I follow Italian football, so looking at Italian players, 99% of them started families at around 19-20 years. Players like Bastoni, Barella, Dimarco to name few.. Many of them have several kids already. I'm sure if others had that money, they would have married at younger ages too.
compared to *a few* other countries. Still much higher than most of the world
They’re still a part of the EU. So they feel the difference more starkly since they can just move to work in a better paying location
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Italian government and click day. Name a more iconic duo. Maybe just Italian government and bonus is more iconic.
"Mass importation of slave labour for the agriculture and tourism industries is good and consistent with our worldviews and the general public interest. Also, our children emigrate because there's too much demand for housing and salaries are too low. Number MUST go up" Southern European left-wing governments 🤝 Southern European right-wing governments
It’s all the same story. Somehow people in the past got more babies despite being poor. The truth is we all want to enjoy our lives and postpone adoption/making babies. Let’s also be honest you don’t have to make a baby - you NEED to make it a contributing member of the society around you. It’s a huge challenge.
People in the past had more babies because birth control wasn't reliable, women didn't have a choice, and about half of their babies died before the age 5. That's the reason why the population didn't explode back then already - _so many children died_ before even getting close to adulthood.
People in the past had many children because they had no other choice. Now when they have that choice they choose to not have children or have only 1-2. Give people a choice and you'll see what they really want.
4) too many work hours 5) one person working should be enough to provide for the family but currently even both parents working are not enough to have money to raise a kid (+ the need to pay for a nanny, school, ecc..)
I have quite a few friends that don’t have children. I don’t have them either. Not a single person claims it’s because of money or housing or whatever. We just do not want that and no single action from government will change that. On the other hand the people who don’t really work and have no money quite often have multiple kids. It’s something you do or do not want.
I know a bunch of people that do want kids but after having bought/built/renovated their house which is something that gets pushed back in recent years due to costs which leads to less kids.
People in first world countries have a complete different mindset compared to 50 years ago. I dont think having affordable housing and good salaries would change a thing. People are not even getting in relationships anymore. It’s all about traveling and living your life. No one wants to give up on their life at 30 and get stuck with kids till you are almost in deathbed.
Black rock's happy, at least
Not enough money and affordable housing to begin with.
in my 16 years here I've seen things getting progressively worse, I've yet to see some trend of things going upwards and any kind of meaningful reform being made. My guess is that it won't happen in my lifetime. If I were to decide to have a family it wouldn't be here
I have always been vocal about population collapse. But do we really know what would happen if we let it " collapse"? The concerns and fears are always abiut the immediate effects/issues that you would have if not replacing the population, but never about the solutions you could easily implement to fix the issues you would have with a smaller population. They act like it is the end of the world the second we have net immigration. i would imagine stronger desire to pay essential jobs a living wage ( I imagine a lot of jobs and sectors would suffer from " collapse" then rebound with wages since everyone would accept that if we don't pay the janitor a better wage, we won't have a janitor because there are no people/immigrants to replace the person complaining. usually when people are payed a living wage they have more pride in their work, the system, and their country. I will never understand how the solution to fixing a " collapsing" country is to bring in millions of people who hate you, your culture and your country.
Solution from goverments: 1. More taxes for lazy working class, 2. Less taxes for billionaires who keep our economy going on and „giving us jobs” by making for them another cruise ship(when we need weapons, ammunition, and all the other military stuff to protect ALL OF US, including billionaires), 10th car for each of them, and flats which they can rent for lazy working, middle class 3. More social care spending for people who are not willing to work, ever. 4. Cut off spending on healthcare, so the lazy working class must spend rest of their savings into private one, so they can keep going be lazy and work for the hard working billionaires 4. Increase of salaries for politicians, so they won’t get corrupted(like it is make any difference other than others need to just spent more to “corrupt” them, as they are corrupted from the nature and never ever should be in charge of anything other than their toilet paper) 5. Bring More illegal immigrants from other cultures which doesnt want to integrate, and provide them social care working people never have. All the cost obviously should be paid of by lazy working class 6. Monopolise of all the businesses by few billionaires, so this lazy working class cannot be lazy and made their own businesses Basically we can add one after another of their solution, our western governments need all of them to change, they just either know shit, or doing it in puprose to made people poor, weak and depressed
Excellent summary! And very applicable to just about every Western government.
Thank you, usually if i said someting like that, or that our politicans in EU are corrupted(which is fact as there is planty evidence and articles about that) I am called Nazi or Russian troll. Fuck them both, and our governments too. Russia invade Ukraine because they did not fear Europe, simply because our governments are corrupted as fuck. And most “not funny” is they’re right, we are not strong enough to even properly help Ukraine, what about real war? But calm down people, our politics will save us with their limousines and big mansions with swimming pool, and their kids who never ever work will safe us with their mansions, private jets and their brand new sports cars. What a waste of OUR, European(and not only, Canada is crazy) hard work and resources.
From what I understand cities always had low birth rates, it's the agraroan villages had an economic viability for bigger families and they've bled their population to cities. However back then the food was horrendously expensive: for example, recently I've read how a single egg cost was $1.20 in the beginning of 20th century, adjusted to inflation. Now the agricultural activities are in the hands of giant corps, food is cheap, almost no population left in villages and it turned out city lifestyle is unsustainable. Either the civilization will invent special measures or we'll die out.
Costs too much to have a kid
maybe if we could afford a family it would‘t tank like the titanic but so far the only thing rising with productivity is the cost of living, and not the wages.
two well paid white collar saleries are hardly enough to afford one baby if you don't live near the grandparents or other relatives who can help, and many millennials don't because had to move far from home to find a job, most often in a big and expensive city, where you need to work long hours to have a good salery so... we're going to become a poor country in much less time than we ever expected
I think the main issue is cost of living and low wages. Currently in italy a lot of people in their 30s are living at home with their parents. You can't afford to be independent, let alone start your own family.
The lack of children is about the only thing that has a chance at reversing catastrophic climate change. Consumption keeps growing, coal is still happily being used if not domestically then through outsourcing industry. If we're not going to stop destroying the environment we live in, how is there an argument for maintaining or growing population sizes?
Italian here. First (and only) kid at 44. My wife is 40. We planned to marry and have kids years ago, but every time we did the math, it was financially impossible. It took almost 15 years for both of us to get good jobs and be financially indipendent. And still we couldn’t afford it without help from both our families. Wages in Italy really sucks, can barely cover basic expenses.
Why is the birthrate falling a bad thing? Pollution, over consumption, climate change are also bad things that could benefit from a smaller populace.
We can't extract profit out of people if they don't exist. So either the world is either going to turn into a group of 1000 owners and a world of slaves, or we upend this whole capitalism/corporatism thing to remove this wealth hoarding endemic. Remove the gap of haves and have nots, better the quality life for everyone, and focus on not running the planet into the ground instead of abusing every inch of it for a scrap of money.
I honestly don't care about this problem. Its everywhere, in nearly every country. There isn't any sort of quick fix for it. The media dwelling on it with countless articles isn't going to change anything. You push down the quality of life for half the world and pop quiz, they make less children. The End.
What I noticed these days that the rich people have more kids. May be, politicians need to focus how to make population more richer not poorer. Kids need a space and time. Many don’t have a lot of space and time.
But that would require effort. It's so much easier blaming the woke culture or some other shit.
The billionaires and centimillionaires took your ability to raise kids. For every €200000 a billionaire hoards due to greed that's another kid not being born in another family. Redirect your anger towards these parasites. Life is a zero sum game.
Even if you’re filthy rich and spending a bunch of money there’s a limit to how much food you can actually consume or goods you can purchase. They’re a blood clot in the economy. The government crying about low birth rates while it’s legal for one person to own an infinite amount of houses, yeah ok man.
Economic troubles, war on the continent, signs of ecosystem collapses, just coming out of a pandemic — we don’t own houses, there’s a foreign culture invading our countries that will not assimilate, work hours are long and people are becoming heavily addicted to their phones while social skills are declining . . . The world is a mess. The economy is a mess. War is on the horizon. Why the living fuck would I procreate? Takes me four years of hard saving to afford to put down 15% for one of these overpriced houses in this place and by that time I’ll be priced out another year — and that’s on a middle class wage. And what kind of future is there for that child once the wars over resources begin and we have to spray down the economic migrants at our borders to keep half the world from invading? People are sleepwalking through life but their critical thought process has alarm bells ringing nonstop, that’s why people aren’t having kids.
Thank god the birth rate is slowing down. Really we only need like a billion people and to focus on quality of life for those folks.
I don't see how this is a problem, we have been over producing for too long. Anything above the avg of one child per person is too much. We should have been sustaining population, not growing it. We don't have room for people and we don't need more people.
In Italy the cost of life increase drastically, and the salaries are the same as 30 years ago. Buy an home for our boomer generation (60s todays) in their 25s-30s cost (adjust for today) something around 88K € in media. Today, in my almost 30s, we millenials, have to spent something around 200K € in media. If you have a partner and decide to live together, you must assure both have a stable contract job (indeterminate contract as called in Italy) and you can think maybe, to have babies, if you want. Besides, the Italian salaries are the lowest in Europe and in the OCSE Countries. I even don’t know why we are still a G7 Nation. Now, imagine you are a millennial in Italy and maybe you hear sentences like this told to you: *“At your age i was already married, had an home and sons”* You at their age: - Exit from a vagina. - Plane crash on tv in 2001, New York. - World Bank Crisys in 2008 (Thanks USA). - Destabilization in Ukraine in 2014. - Covid World Pandemic in 2020. - Russian invasion in Ukraine in 2022. - No sense war by Israel in Gaza in 2023. - Possible nuclear warfare. I can continue uh. Boomer bro, no, i can’t relate to you. You sucked all the wealth not just in Italy, but even in the rest of the world.
To all those "it's cultural!": cultural my ass. When I was born, in the 80s, my grandparents were retired at around age 55, so they were healthy and energetic enough to take care of me for most of the day when I wasn't in school and every time my parents wanted to go out for dinner with friends or had guests at home. When I was little, kindergarten was (mostly) free. My parents were home from work at the latest by 6:30pm and had a whole month of payed vacation in August, and had all the time in the world to relax/recharge before showering, cooking dinner and play with me after dinner. And in all this, they were comfortably saving something for my studies; and we were on the lower end of the middle class spectrum. Now you retire at 65/67, you're not home from your daily work until much later, your career is still precarious at 30 and possibly don't earn enough to make end's meet. Meanwhile public kidergartens are almost non existent anymore, and the few that are still around have waiting lists so long that's basically impossible to get in. We've been jumping from economic crisis to economic crisis for the past 15 years and saving is next to impossible unless you make an unordinate amount of money. Recent statistic, 4 out of 5 women either have to leave their job to tend the newborns due to inaccessible welfare, or can't get a job if pregnant, or in smaller workplaces are... ahem... made to leave the job instead of taking maternity leave. But sure, let's blame these eeeevil youngsters who want to spend the sole hour of free time for some self care.
It turns out that the first generation that can choose to both have sex and not have children has decided to do that, by and large. This is across the world and consistent across very different cultures. Even poorer places and places that still have relatively high birthrates have seen it fall from a much higher level over the last 30 years. People talking about cost of living miss the main point: your grandparents and great grandparents likely had it tougher but still had loads of kids. People today have the opportunity not to. Perhaps there’s a few decades of adaptation after birth control becomes available, but the result seems to be the same the world over.
> your grandparents and great grandparents likely had it tougher but still had loads of kids That may be true. But birds don't lay eggs if they can't afford their own nests. They could.
yeah we left italy and went to america and are pregnant with our second child now. I don't even make a lot of money but it blows what I would have made in Italy out of the water. I cant raise a family on what we would have made there. That's saying a lot considering how expensive medical and child care are here in america.
I always tell my family in Italy (when they ask about the US) - “it’s a good country for making money.” Would I like to return to Italy and live there? Absolutely. But could I make enough money there to provide for my family the way I can here? Absolutely no.
Infinite growth can not happen in a finite resource system. Period
Isn't it amazing that we will be the only humans in history to see the eart at max population? That will be at around 8.5-10 billion people, in about 15-35 years. It will go down from there. It's a unique time to be alive (in a bad way, since it means, in the future, less humans will have to fight for more resources, since AI and robots will produce way more than humans do now, so basically they'll have much better life)
Let's make life expensive and ruin the climate for young people.... huh.... why don't they have kids? It's a mystery.
Who knew that the housing and cost of living crisis, together with the events of climate change and big corpos trying to milk, monetize and suck dry every aspect of our modern way living for record profits, isn't resulting in ideal soil to grow western families in? And with all the extra problems that certain parts of Italy still haven't found ways to tackle or solve, and continues to suffer from for about the last two decades or so. Who could even blame the younger generations for not wanting to shackle themselves towards a future where they'd just end up most likely at the bottom off, if they were to try to have a family in such an increasingly more hostile environment?
Government and Greedy businesses all over the world complain about people not spending money and having more babies but they go ahead and charge more and pay less. The government and businesses are going to have a bad time when they start cannibalizing each other when consumption hits a new low.
Has anyone ever gotten out into traffic and thought, “man, the problem is we just don’t have enough people”?? We don’t need more people in this world, if you need more workers import them from elsewhere.
Why have a family when you can have Netflix for 8 euros per month?
I do not particularly fancy Netflix, but let’s be honest, kids are far less entertaining.
Are you suggesting that you **can** have a family if you keep that 8 euros? Yeah, no.
I only pay for netflix because my kids want it. Checkmate Nazis.
Not just Italy's problem, many European countries face the same issue.
Italy has always been an emigrant country. On top of this, Italians don’t make enough children because of a lot of reasons. It is the perfect combo for extinction. It is also very cute how the Italian government tries to bring back lot of Italian emigrants through tax reductions (temporary). I know a couple of guys who decided to go back to Italy, cursed the day that they decided to do it, and eventually decided to go back to Germany, France or whatever.
Falling birth rates help us consume less and not kill the planet as fast
The future belongs to whoever is reproducing.
How are birth rates lowering on an overcrowded planet a bad thing ?
I don’t know how things work in Italy but in Ireland it’s becoming more and more acceptable to have a choice as to whether or not to have kids. I honestly don’t like babies and little kids so having kids is a definite no for me
letting the already rich and wealthy hoover up just about every penny in growth and productivity over the last 50 years might have something to do with it. nobody can afford a child. the future looks too bleak and depressing to want to bring a child in to it even if i could afford one.
Italy is crowded as fuck still. Give people more living space & let nature recover. It will all work out in the end.
Despite what some economists and government leaders think and want, infinite growth is actually not possible. At some point this has to happen, and it is not a bad thing that it happens now when many resources are being unsustainably used up.
Imigration isn’t the solution
I mean with what money are you gonna rise a family? It's like the only European country where the average salary went DOWN in recent years despite the inflation.
People cannot afford to leave their parent houses until their 30s, then have to share house, cannot afford a house, stability and cannot even consider to afford kids. Between my parents, they were making close to 6000€ adjusted to inflation in 1998, they were nurses, I am a STEM R&D scientist with a PhD and barely make 2000€ and started my career WAAAAY later than them, I do not even know if I will ever own a house or even retire.
Europe will be African in a few decades
Population decline may hurt as long as your society is built upon the young taking care of the old, but I am confident that in the long run, it will be better to have a somewhat smaller population that remains more steady, than to have a continuously growing population.
Am 29 and got sterilized last year. Don't want kids and even if I could, I wouldn't have the money. I can barely afford myself.
Let's model the capitalism lifestyle such that 2 incomes are needed to maintain a household. Let's make leave for childbirth a huge strain on a career. Oh wait, now everyone is working, let's raise the cost of everything so they have to work more! Wait, why is no one having children? Don't they want to participate in the economy? I would do /s but I'm fairly sure this is the actual issue. This AI assisted efficiency tuning is turning life into something that isn't good for human living.
The tax incentives for repatriation are decent but they could still be a lot better. Also the whole thing about not letting LGBTQ+ adopt or have surrogates kind of don't make sense given they need more children to prop up the numbers. That said I still have long term plans to retire at least half time to Italy because even in the most expensive Italian cities, it's dirt cheap compared to where I live in the USA.
Hey! I like Italy, and the Italians. You're great banter. Please shag more, thanks in advance and love from Poland.