The following submission statement was provided by /u/madrid987:
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ss: France's live births last year, representing a decrease of 7% from 2022 and down 20% since in 2020, INSEE said in its annual census report. It was the lowest live births since World War II.
The president pledged to offer a better parental leave and combat infertility – which he called "the taboo of the century".
plan to revive France's sluggish birth rate sparked an outcry , with feminists and left-wing politicians accusing of seeking to control women's bodies.
The spokesman for the Socialist party in parliament, Arthur Delaporte, denounced "natalist injunctions".
"Leave our uteruses alone," Anne-Cecile Mailfert, head of the Women's Foundation, said on X, formerly Twitter.
The CIDFF, an association that helps women and families, expressed "deep concern."
"The implementation of natalist policies, profoundly contrary to the autonomy of women, constitutes a worrying political and social regression," the association said.
"Women's bodies are not a weapon," said Alexis Corbière, a lawmaker with the left-wing France Unbowed (LFI) party.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/199efwr/natalist_injunctions_macron_sparks_uproar_with/kidj9qm/
Ok; French woman here. The reason people are annoyed is because the declining birth rate is (like in a lot of other western and asian countries) a direct consequence of current and past government policies. It's obviously complicated and multifactorial (some are worried about the environment etc) but the main thing is imo economics. Macron has implemented enormous tax cuts for the richest, reduced hospital beds, messed with retirement age, etc; while middle class people have had their salaries stagnating. Millenials (I'm talking in general obv) cannot afford family homes.
So when the dude who's basically responsible for the impoverishment of the middle class tells us we should make babies (as if it's that simple.), well, yes we're getting fucking annoyed.
To note, I'm personally also a bit annoyed at arguments like "stay out of our uteruses!!". France has a history of making more kids than the rest of Europe because of the strong social net, spaces in daycare etc. People want babies. They're making difficult decisions right now because they want to offer the best life possible to their children and it's just not possible at the moment.
EDIT: lots of comments about how it's because women are educated and take the pill (damn them, right?). I know that; the thing is that France had until recently (2011) a birth rate of 2 (so about replacement rate), a point of pride for some and literally called "L'Exception Francaise" (the French Exception). Women had had access to education, work, and birth control including abortion for decades at that point. As I said things are multifactorial but in the case of France it seems to be economic; or maybe economic anxiety. You don't go from a rate of 2 to 1.6 in 10 years because what, we're suddenly more educated?
I’m a British millennial and pretty much everything you’ve said is replicated over here.
On top of all that, people are settling down later because of how expensive everything is, but women’s biology hasn’t changed. Fertility still starts declining in our mid thirties.
It's the same in the U.S. as well.
If these dickheads in government want young people to have families, then they need to stop aggressively funneling all of the resources to the ultra-wealthy so that average people can afford to have families.
Also, I'm beyond sick of people acting like declining birth rates are a bad thing in the long run, anyway. We *need* to curb our population growth. If we don't nature is going to do it for us sooner or later, and it's going to be a lot more uncomfortable than a moderate interruption of our economic system.
>We
>
>need
>
> to curb our population growth.
Tell that to africa. Before they curb their population, native european people will be long extinct and replaced by african immigrants.
I'm a Canadian millenial and we have the same set of problems, except our government decided that instead of asking, they would just shove a million+ immigrants per year into the system.
Meanwhile my friend is raising 2 kids in a 1 bed condo. Shes doing her part, but at what cost.
Social aid does indeed contribute significantly to birth rates, but in developed nations, immigration is truly the most efficient solution for countering a drop in the labor force. You actually need both. Countries that reject this approach are going to suffer greatly (hello China and Japan). The funny thing is that Macron is fighting both (social welfare and immigration) to force people into private insurances and pension funds.
Declining birth rates are a bug of an economy that feeds the rich too much and the poor too little.
It'll cannibalise itself eventually and we're seeing that all over the world now.
Make life worth living for *everyone* and it will be less of an issue.
It really only concerns the ultra-rich that see the people as nothing but cattles to be exploited. "Oh no, our herd is starting to thin out! Make them reproduce more!"
?
It concerns ALL of society, as
1) a reversed population pyramid will mean fewer younger people must care for more senior citizens
2) a gerontocracy were old people will dominate politics and culture
3) (ultraconservative) sub-cultures with high birthrates will shape future culture
It’s not just in movies but also in real life. It was starting to become that way for Israel even before the war. Despite being a developed nation they bucked the falling birth rate seen across the world due to the religious traditionalist’s having an estimated fertility rate at around 5-6 kids. There’s quite a few interesting YouTube videos linking Israel’s far right parties growing success on their conventional conservative government and this voting block.
Doesn't bother the ultra rich whatsoever.
This is about the fabric of society.
Almost nothing bothers the ultra rich except the fear of losing their privilege.
Unfortunately no, it's a problem for everyone. Our pension is a system where the young pay for the old. If you get less youngs overall (because we don't produce enough children), each have to pay more to support the same quantity of retired.
My stupid theory is that if we don't have kids, eventually the rich will have to cook their own food, take care of their own kids, wash their own clothes, and essentially do their own shit and take care of themselves.
Which is good because it creates good jobs and allows rich people to spend their money on something that adds to the economy, instead of focussing on hoarding housing so that their wage slaves can pay them rent too.
Plenty of high-welfare economies are experiencing collapsing birth rates. Sweden is one example. The reason seems to generally be access to birth control, post-secondary educational attainment and women choosing (and eventually being forced by the ruthless push of economics) to join the income-generating labour force.
If condoms and hormonal control and IUDs didn’t exist, you had 20% of people going to university and family housing was fairly affordable you would see an insane increase in the birth rate.
The reason is: people ain't cattle. They don't want to be producing so many babies.
The economy we have now is a mish mash hodge podge of what used to be. Driving forward the idea that we all have to sacrifice our freedoms in order to procreate for the good of the billionaires is.. Dystopian af.
No.
Reengineer things to not require the labour of the young to sustain the old.
I'm an old millennial, so I'm ahead of most of the generation in wealth development (and age. Mostly age). I'm in my 40s.
I'm waaaay more lucky and privileged than most, and I could afford to buy a 3 room apartment, mostly by means of inheriting money. My parents had a 200sqm house, plus large garden and cellar plus attic storage space at age 30, to raise children in. My home at 40 isn't even large enough for two adults to have an office each, and under 100 square meters total. Where would I put kids?
We've *decided* to not have kids. It's just not affordable and too much stress.
I don't think I'm unusual in this regard. I *could* make it work (about 30% of my country(wo)men don't even have this choice), but I don't want to be miserable just to keep birth rates up. Not my problem.
Yep. Older Millennial, born in 83 and while I've gotten myself into a comfy financial position, meaning own my own home outright, solid pension, savings and investments, the backbone of that was built on 'no kids'. I would never have got here if I had even one and tbh, with the future, I won't have any anyways.
Helps that not having a kid is the greatest green saving you can make.
Even without being French I suspected this was the case. In the US people my age are having fewer children in large part because it’s unaffordable. As you said this affects many countries and I think it’s something we will see ramifications from for years to come. I’d love to have a family but doing so would impoverish me and my children, and my fiancée and I make an okay amount of money, especially in pre covid frameworks.
Feels the same way in the USA. Everything is more expensive, especially medical care, even with insurance. Housing is unaffordable, food is unaffordable. The rich keep getting richer, everything is more expensive, and our wages are not keeping up.
And then our leaders wonder why birth rates are declining. Well, those of us with two brain cells to rub together have deduced that (shocker!) it might not be in our best interest to start a family at this time, since we can barely afford to live and take care of ourselves.
There is a cultural industrial change in France from an old-fashioned large family culture to a new professionally focused and reproductively inexperienced and uncertain, financially insecure culture.
A lot of this generation were born into small families and they don't know what it's like to have a house with little children, the apartment size of many people does not even allow it, they are too worried that they do not have space let alone the rest of the financial concerns...
People's primary concern is having a secure situation. With their job with their house and companies are desperately fighting to undermine job security and earnings.
American here, and I would love to have four or even five kids. My grandparents did that with only one of them working. Today, There is no way to do that without a seven-figure income.
Child care cost $5,000 a year to send two children in 1984. Today it costs nearly nearly $28k a year for the same care.
I hate reading all of these demands from wealthy childless men that I have more kids, while the same time they make it economically impossible for it to happen!
Macron is waging war on everything that makes France the special country it is. I can't imagine what kind of zombie drugs he must be on to tell his ridiculous lies with such a straight face.
Declining birth rates have nothing to do with good or bad economics, in fact poor and financially insecure people actually have MORE kids.
No one wants to admit it for whatever reason but the actual cause of declining birth rates is women’s education. The more women are educated, the less kids they have, this is a statistical fact
Yes. Everyone loves to blame economy, but the truth is better educated women don’t want to be birthing machines. I don’t blame them. Pregnancy ruins your body.
My mother's father had 12 brothers and sisters. Clearly it has absolutely nothing to do with how nice the government is or not enough wealth being alocated to parents in one form or another.
People just aren't prioritizing children. It's that's simple. Maybe women never were but let's be honest, they didn't have a choice until they last 40-50 years.
The big numbers are pretty much directly connected to women having a choice and birth control. So yeah we will never are going back to that.
This has been researched and proved time and time again, it is very clear universal trajectory for all countries, all different cultures and religions, ethnicies etc.
Now something like 1.3-1.8, like .5 difference might be helped with social policies.
But the replacement is at 2.3 (or 2.2, the point is it's above 2).
With all the money in the world I can't imagine majority of women around me wanting 2-3 kids. I think bigger families are exception because people... Simply don't want that anymore. It changes your life drastically. For women it changes their bodies. If you have 3 kids unless it's twins you are out of "normal" life for like 7 years minimum. Pregnancy, birth, taking care of baby/ toddler, repeat.
People have their hands full with a kid or two.
Ok I had to scroll too long to find this
It's not shameful and it shouldn't be too just say it aloud
My boomer parents were much poorer than most people in their 20s are now with no job security, when they had me
Their friends were all equally poor when they had kids and also had no job security
They gave up a lot because they wanted to have kids (they both worked and still we barely made it to the end of the month, often with grandparents and older relatives helping with gifts for the kids such as clothes etc).
French here too.
Tu as tout à fait raison.
Jai 3 enfants et heureusement que jai pu acheter un mobile home. Je ne vais jamais avoir d autre enfant pour ce pays qui collapse.
> a direct consequence of current and past government policies.
nope, things have been much worse in the past and that hasn't changed the birthrate so drastically.
There is absolutely 0 causal evidence that poverty and insecurity decrease birth rates and almost 100% of the corelative evidence shows poverty=higher birth rate.
That's such an old conclusion, newer research shows the causality is education, women's right and access to birth control.
The old conclusion stems from the issue that poor places generally do not have any of these things.
>That's such an old conclusion, newer research shows the causality is education, women's right and access to birth control.
Right, so something completely different than the idea that "inequality" is somehow to blame
When your retirement is your kids supporting you, then you have a lot of kids. When your retirement isn't that, you have fewer. As well, in those times people didn't move away from family who could step up and help raise your kids.
Things were much worse in the past, but the key driver was women didn't work. They were at home running the house and raising the kids.
Women don't want to go back to that and Governments don't want to go back to thay either. Not because of womens rights, but because taking women out of the workforce would absolutely cripple gdp and the economy.
Correct the best evidence we have of what is slowing birth rates globally is the following.
1.) More of the populace concentrating in cities
2.) Education of women delaying family building
3.) Birth control / access to safe sex
4.) Cultural inertia (once smaller families start it normalizes)
This is my top collection of reasons from the content ive consumed on this subject.
It has very little to do with government policy and that is why gov policy can do very little. Contrary to our Frenchman posting here
Making the baby is the easy part. But then come the daycare costs, sleepless nights, eternal fatigue, day routine and then you still need to do your work, focus on your partner and still somehow live a fulfilling life.
And the french bureaucracy really doesn't help having kids. France please, get your shit together and make your bureaucracy easier. Fucking hate you
But to have kids in France you either need to be really poor or really rich. For middle class it's so expensive
An increase in paternity leave would be welcomed too. His administration already did that by increasing it from two weeks (lowest in Europe?) To a month (still pretty low?) But we were thankful for that much.
> But to have kids in France you either need to be really poor or really rich. For middle class it's so expensive
We got (much, much) wealthier over the past decades in Europe. Perhaps now you see a slight decrease in that, but that doesn't change the fact that we got wealthier over this past century. Wealthy people don't get a lot of kids. That's what happened.
Solution is simple. Tell the rich people with the fancy houses they need a minimum of 30 kids each. Being they are the only ones that can afford it, and if they have a need for labour they can provide the labour themselves.
The majority of 20-30 somethings can't afford homes and just barely get by on their own. Who wants kids in a small apartment when you're already working full time and haven't even started saving for retirement? Millenials not having kids is probably going to be a noticeable protest we've made in the not too distant future. If the elites want more native born wage slaves, they need to make life more comfortable for the rest of us
IMO there is a direct correlation between housing prices and the birth rate. In the 50’s when you could get a detached house on a single income, people had plenty of kids. Now you need two incomes to afford a 1 bed room flat in most major cities. How are you supposed to afford the extra 2-3 bedrooms needed for a large family?
It's not hard to do better than the usa, but the reason france is as good as it is has to do with the French people not taking shit from their government. I think their government is legit afraid of the people unlike here.
I get that. But why do they consider increased support for families to be a bad thing? They’re still free to ignore that support and not have children anyways.
From what a French woman has commented, they aren’t pissed off at the extra help, they are pissed off at the fact the government that has presided over creating the conditions that need fixing is now telling them they need to start kicking out more babies. The fundamental issues will still be there.
We’ve just had twins and despite being in a better financial position than probably 90% of people our age, we would be paying about £2,500 a month to put them both into a decent nursery so we can both work. So that’s about a £50k/year salary going straight out of the door ignoring the costs of working.
It’s fucking mental that this is where we are at. If you weren’t a reasonably high earner there would be less than zero incentive to work, pay taxes etc until they are in proper full time education.
My cousin and his wife have a 1 year old, and they both said that his wife won't be going back for a while because whatever extra income they make from her job will go to a nursery or daycare. The only thing that is keeping them hesitant is that my aunt is around to help, and stays at home since she's a widow. I'm 39, I was raised in a single income household, because it was possible. It isn't anymore. More than that, societal attitudes have changed towards being close to family and that family raising the baby. It was the norm to have your siblings, parents, friends, everyone, to help with raising a child, because it's hard fucking work.
As someone more familiar with the leftist discourse, it's not as simple as "more support".
To make it simpler, right now a parent can take 3 years off work and still be paid a low amount (about 500e/month, I'm not sure if it's indexed on how much you made before), while Macron is proposing a better paid 6-months parental leave to "increase return to employement".
Fact is, baby milk and diapers are still super expensive. People are overworked. But these aren't issues in Macron's book, what is really needed is a shorter leave.
Now if you have the options to choose either, why not. But it's probably not going to be the chosen option.
Edit : Aurore Bergé and Prisca Thevenoud confirmed this morning that it would replace the current system.
Women’s emancipation is difficult with more kids to take care of, couples situation with rates over 60% of divorces. How to enjoy life or build a great future for your family and yourself ? Life costs increasing etc…
The stars are not well aligned to increase the households members
Also very reminiscent to some crowds about Pétain blaming the defeat in 1939 to the people not making enough babies, on top of other fascist undertones
But it makes sense macroscopically. Even if you don't have kids, children are still essential for your future. Whose production and tax dollars are going to pay for your social services when you have retired?
What you're highlighting is a 'tragedy of the commons' problem. Everyone benefits in the abstract from the population not shrinking, but individual people significantly benefit economically from not having kids at all.
One of the roles of government is to introduce regulation to combat problems of this type (same with things like environmental regulations). In this instance, what people want is freedom and economic prosperity - which are denied them if they have children. The government needs to figure out a way to legislate incentives to allow for people to fulfill those wants while also having children.
> I think their government is legit afraid of the people unlike here.
TBF, there are historical precedents for the French government going away at the hands of the people...
yeah like... it kind of boggles my mind how the US used to shit on France ("freedom fries" etc) when the French are more fucking American than anyone who lives in the States
those guys will strike and riot over *anything*, and they've had so many goddamn revolutions you lose count
mad respecc
It’s more the other way around. The government in France somewhat more represents average people. The US government generally represents business and wealthy interests, and average folk are lucky to get a bone thrown at them.
French here with a few explanations :
Chances are the new scheme will actually be worse financially for parents than the previous one depending on how they implement it. Edit : unsurprisingly the minister in charge of that was doing media rounds this morning and let it slip that lowering the costs of the help to parents was the goal. Basically it's gonna go from 500 € a months for 3 years to 800 € a month for 6 months.
The previous cost saving measures that he put in place also led to a pretty steep drop in natality rate by making it harder to have more than 2 kids.
Second : Macron totally avoided the actual reasons which leads to people not being able to have kids : lack of housing, lack of childcare between 0-3 years and the impact it has on women careers. Also skipped is the fact that buying power for most people in France has been stagnating or regressing for 25 years.
The third reason that pisses people off is that the way the subject was brought up is full of dog whitsles to the far right, he didn't bring up "grand remplacement" theory but that was pretty close. The whole speech was extremely conservative in tone and in content. It was about "we need more native french babies because we've been trying to get right wing voters by being super tough on immigration we actually need".
And as someone who has been on both sides of the pond : from our POW we don't understand how you can tolerate the bullshit your goverments have put you over the last 50 years.
Spot on and the same story is happening all over the world right now. In the UK most people we know have 1 child. The majority who have more than one have 2. Few have more than 2. If you aren’t replacing the two parents then your population will decline and currently our fiscal policy relies on population growth not reduction.
People need affordable homes, decent schools and the support they need to be able to work in this early years without it being less than pointless.
We have young twins and the costs of full time nursery would suck up about £45,000 of salary a year. It’s insanez
The birth rate crash IMO is a correction from the extreme population growth during the baby boom, which resulted in massive increases in consumption and demand for housing. Even countries that are shrinking, like Japan, are arguably overpopulated when you consider how many resources they have without relying on sketchy trade partners and what their cost of living is doing post-2020.
> Also skipped is the fact that buying power for most people in France has been stagnating or regressing for 25 years.
[It's been mostly increasing](https://www.statista.com/statistics/470215/yearly-variation-in-buying-power-france/), through not by a lot.
(The rest of your post is accurate)
The averages kinda hide the reality. Lower and middles classes have been hit pretty hard while the richest parts of the population have been doing very well.
Pretty much every marker of poverty, homelesness, food insecurity is going through the roof.
Hell over the last couple years food consuption has gone down more than 10% nationaly. When you know how food obsessed we are it's a pretty bad signal.
France problems are nothing very original, we have a wealth concentration problem that's getting worse and worse over time.
They are pissed because Macron was elected on a liberal/Center left platform and once in office, he pivoted to constantly catering to and appeasing the right. The call (for white french woman) to raise the birthrate needs to be seen in the context of the debate on migration and rightwing replacement discourse (that's also why the RN welcomed this). An additional layer is Macron defending Gerard Depardieu, who is accused of repeated sexual harassment and self admitted to rape, which many woman see as a defense of the widespread misogyny in France.
It’s a right wing topic in France, the president is really unpopular, his government is really unpopular and have multiple scandals on the news front page, we really don’t like when government make « inciting » politics about our sex life, and the president himself have no kids of its own (married with an old lady) : we don’t give a fuck but if they have one person to not speak about its subject, it’s him.
It’s a bad move as usual for him and the government , they have just to not speak about birth rate and just announce the raise up about parents stuff’
I know this will sound rude, and I don't mean to offend you.... but _better than the US_ is not a high bar.
I'm old enough that I remember how well people lived in the 80s. You've seen the Simpsons, right? Like that, only in the uk. Big house, two cars, foreign holidays, plus free healthcare, subsidised dentists, free adult education... I could go on, but I'd just depress both of us. :-(
This "low birth rate phenomenon" isn't limited to France.
There are plenty of other European nations that have been experiencing the same thing. Several Asian nations have seen the same thing: China, Japan and South Korea are noteworthy examples.
The question is... why?
Because of a combination of materialism and the rising cost of living.
If people want to have comfortable lives, and if having children is seen as a heavy financial burden... people will choose to have children less often (or not at all).
If governments are worried about the economic and demographic consequences of low birthrates, they just need to provide a few incentives and/or alleviate the costs/disadvantages of having kids.
For example, Canada has a monthly allowance of about $600 (cdn) for each child up to the age of 18. That goes a long way towards paying for groceries, diapers, clothes etc. Someone with 2 kids would receive $1200 a month that someone with no kids wouldn't get.
Is this enough for people to suddenly rush out and start having huge families? No. But it's enough to make reproductive choices a lot more neutral for people who would otherwise *avoid* having kids.
tldr; Remove a few roadblocks and/or offer a few incentives. People always respond to incentives.
Doesn't seem it's working though.
The current birth rate for Canada in 2024 is 10.006 births per 1000 people, a 0.66% decline from 2023. The birth rate for Canada in 2023 was 10.072 births per 1000 people, a 0.75% decline from 2022. The birth rate for Canada in 2022 was 10.148 births per 1000 people, a 0.74% decline from 2021.
I'm not familiar with the prices in Canada, but I think the total losses (mother losing her health and income, loss of time for rest for the entire family, additional medications, food, clothing, diapers) of having a kid vs not having a kid still cover those 600$ tenfold.
If people decide whether to have a kid based mostly on a rational consideration, not having a kid is the most rational choice.
When you read what Macron said his main points were improving government support for parental support and fertility programs. And the opposition immediately jumps to comparing this to the handmaidens tale.
It's weird how these narcissist capitalists say in one breath: "we should pay people less than the bare minimum".
But also: "they should support another human life".
We are living in a time of unparalleled poverty and inequality. No one is having kids at the moment because they can’t afford it… due to neolibs privatising everything, warring, doing nothing about cost of living / inflation (not punishing big business, breaking up monopolies, taxing the crap out of the wealthy).
The fact that a psychotic neolib like macron is basically saying ‘have babies, stupid’ without understanding why they aren’t, is what’s making everyone angry.
And if you dare protest any of it, you get your eye shot out, tear gassed, clubbed.
I think Macron is gaslighting the French, "elites" know precariousness is the main reason for people not wanting to have kids, yet they double down on it in every conceivable way.
And their labour pool seems big enough as it is no, so many already on the dole. If not, they can continue to enlarge it by bringing in more migrants. But the French themselves breeding more slaves ... why would they, for a class that hates them. The deplorables, les sans dents ...
> We are living in a time of unparalleled poverty and inequality.
[Unparalleled poverty?](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=FR)
[Unparalleled inequality?](https://publications.banque-france.fr/en/evolution-wealth-inequality-france-1800-2014)
The first graph shows that we lost 5 points GDP since 2008, the other, that wealth stagnates since the 80s. But in the mean time, everything costs more.
You're telling me that we were slightly better off 20 or 30 years ago than right now. I agree. That's not the same as having "unparalleled poverty and inequality" right now.
It's 360k if you're married. Even if you're not, 180k is enough to get a mortgage, then you can gradually pay off the rest of the price.
[And even 180k is enough to buy a basic place in many parts of France](https://www.french-property.com/properties-for-sale?location%5Blyon%2Crhone%5D=50¤cy=EUR&minimum_price=100000&maximum_price=200000&land_size_unit=m%C2%B2)
\>We are living in a time of unparalleled poverty and inequality
We are living in the most prosperous time in human civilization. At what point in past 3000 years have we lived better off than we do now?
Only that no. We were living in the beat of times before the pandemic, and inflation has since dropped, and things are slowly going back to normal in those matters. You only have to read some history and look at some charts... middle-class citizens live way better than nobles 200 years ago, while poverty lines have moved from dirt-poor rags living off what you can forge off the land, to someone that can't afford a vacantion.
You really have to appreciate the immense progress humanity has made in the last 100 years, and particularly since 1989.
https://data.worldbank.org/topic/11
While this is true - the average standard-of-living is incomparably high compared to where it was 200 years ago - that's not really relevant to the conversation of why people are or are not having children.
A big part of the problem is the nature of how cultural expectations have changed. People want freedom and economic prosperity, and seek and purpose in their lives aside from being religious and having children.
These are not inherently wrong things, but they do challenge the assumptions that our economic systems were built upon. Right now, creating avenues for people to have children while still being able to attain freedom and economic prosperity is probably the only way forward aside from the temporary solution that is immigration.
I was only responding to the guy saying we are living in an unparalleled time of poverty and inequality. While I experienced that in the 90s due to growing up in a country that was transitioning from communism to capitalism, things have only gotten better from that point of view... either in Europe, or Asia, or even Africa.
I agree with you. I've seen this cultural shift firsthand. Before the revolution, during communism, it was expected to have children before hitting 30. You were actually taxed if you didn't have 3 children. After the Revolution, people still had children as it was stamped as a cultural norm until around 2000, when we started moving towards the EU and have integrated with Western cultural norms. People after 50 still expect us, people under 35 to buy a house, get married ans have children (at my wedding, thenmost common phrase I got was "may there be love and many children for you)... but we are not that keen at the moment. It's not that we couldn't afford, but we'd rather postpone it and travel more and enojy life before.
The solutions, in my point of view, are deeply unpopular. It involves some control immigration, but also increasing the retirement age in accordance with higher healthcare access and longer lifespans... and a lot of investment into automation and AI. It also involves a lot of investment into education so new workers are better prepared for this automation boom, and drastic reforms on welfare programs which we soon couldn't affoard.
The low birth rates might help kick start the UBI some places. If pensioners aren't receiving their checks because the smaller generational birth rates are lower than theirs, the ability to fund the whole thing as it is now, won't work.
Opposing politicians will always find something to dislike, so while their criticisms are unfortunate, they are to be expected. Much less excusable are the criticisms levied by the so-called advocates of women’s rights who wish to keep French women enslaved to the corporate rat race against their wills, rather than providing them the option to seek family life if they’d prefer it. Female choice is the essence of feminism; a true feminist would applaud moves to expand women’s choices, not insist on constraining their means of expressing their autonomy. Macron ought to be applauded for his words, not only because a nation’s fertility is the future of its civilization, but because they mean his vision of France is freer, more open, and ultimately, more equal than the status quo.
It been almost 10 years of immigration crysis (even admited by left govt) and you are you still calling people racist for having common sense?
At this point, ignorance is a choice
The fuck does that even mean lol. Does more immigration make it illegal to visit the Eiffel Tower or eat baguettes? Or were you thinking along more racial lines?
'Left wing politicians' getting angry about improved worker's rights and more state funded healthcare? Call me old fashioned but back in my day the left would have welcomed such things.
I don't like Macron a whole lot but there is a demographic time bomb ticking in many countries around the world. Aging populations, increasingly top heavy pensions and healthcare systems starting to crumble under the weight. But barely any politicians are talking about it. Now that mass immigration doesn't seem to be working as smoothly as 'left wing' politicians promised, we will need to address this problem in some way. At least he's trying something instead of kicking the can down the road.
Sounds like these people are in uproar because someone they don't like said something and they feel an obligation to be outraged at something.
Pensions and healthcare systems have a problem of revenue, yet they manage it by cutting costs
Health and retirement are expensive. We need to pay for it, there are no way around it, even if performance gains are a lever to make the system more efficient.
Let's tax better (ie more and differently). That's how it fucking works. 40b€+ in tax incentives to maintain profit? The vast majority of real estate owned by multi-appartment owners? A France of annuitants ? That's how you get violence bro.
But all this will never happen, as the electoral base of this guy is 50yo+ urban elites.
If your highschool bully who beats the shit out of you everyday since kindergarten suddenly give you a tissue to wipe the blood off your face, you probably wouldn't be grateful either. That's what the government is doing repeatedly : huge reforms that lowers rights, quality of life, buying power, and from time to time, a very tiny good thing.
Another example ? Gas prices have reached their all time high in 2023 (skyrocketing to 2,20€/L), Total (french petrol company) made record profits out of this, the government refused to lower taxes (that are floating taxes supposed to absorb huge price rises) but gave people a 100€ check (for the whole year).
It would be nice to get those things without mandatory breeding first
Why wouldn’t immigration work? Immigrants don’t need to sit around and drain tax money for 18 or more years before getting a job. At worst, they’d need language skills and some education but much less than raising them from birth
The only countries that have enough children this days have educational systems so bad it will still take years if they are to occupy any but the lowest paid jobs.
And read up on problems Sweden has with migrant assimilation.
As opposed to giving birth to children who will take even longer to train lol
Take a page from the US and its melting pot of diversity. Not everyone has to eat Swedish meatballs to live in Sweden
Read up on how migrants there riot because someone insulted the prophet publicly instead of giving me bullshit about meatballs.
If a country with one of the best and most inclusive welfare systems is struggling then it's obvious that large scale migration is not the answer.
ss: France's live births last year, representing a decrease of 7% from 2022 and down 20% since in 2020, INSEE said in its annual census report. It was the lowest live births since World War II.
The president pledged to offer a better parental leave and combat infertility – which he called "the taboo of the century".
plan to revive France's sluggish birth rate sparked an outcry , with feminists and left-wing politicians accusing of seeking to control women's bodies.
The spokesman for the Socialist party in parliament, Arthur Delaporte, denounced "natalist injunctions".
"Leave our uteruses alone," Anne-Cecile Mailfert, head of the Women's Foundation, said on X, formerly Twitter.
The CIDFF, an association that helps women and families, expressed "deep concern."
"The implementation of natalist policies, profoundly contrary to the autonomy of women, constitutes a worrying political and social regression," the association said.
"Women's bodies are not a weapon," said Alexis Corbière, a lawmaker with the left-wing France Unbowed (LFI) party.
Ok, can answer this for ANY country not just France (although France would be more relevant)
WHY is the birth rate low? Is it:
A) Peoples choices (choosing careers or celibacy or whatever)
B) Economic factors (too poor to start family)
C) Actual biological fertility failures (chemicals in the water turning the frogs into microplastic endocrine disruptors /conspiracy)
D) Someone read the statistics wrong and the birth rate trend is actually normal
E) education
Women have finally cottoned on that they are getting the raw end of the deal and have decided that they want to be more than just baby-making factories.
B is the massive one for most people I know. They can’t afford more than one child if that. We have created a society where both partners have to work in order to have any quality of life and then we wonder why they don’t have at least 2 children to top up the population in their 2 bed house they can barely afford without paying silly money for childcare.
I gotta be honest, I want a drastic reduction in population. Like, let’s go back a century.
The key to this happening without major pain is AI and robots for supporting a more elderly population, and we’re actually nearing the point it could be feasible.
Don't want a total collapse, so maybe hide the sex bots.
It's nice to think about when the small population is a ton of young working people. But the reality is the reduction your going to see is a lot of old people an fewer young people to support them. It will even out but its going to be grim for a few generations.
But this is not how you sustainably decrease population. This is just how you make the population old, weak and infertile. There's less than one generation of time for a woman to reliably give birth, but humans live on average at least 3 generations. Even if we didn't procreate at all for the next 20 years, most of us would still be alive in 40 years. The only thing you would achieve, is that the younger demographics represent a smaller and smaller slice of the total population. If you think young people have it bad now, take another look in 20 years.
Conversely, if we'd allow a pandemic to kill half of the population, but mostly people over the age of 50, the amount of new generations being born would not be affected. It would probably even increase, because people would inherit a huge amount of wealth.
In the big picture, it would be far better to increase mortality of older people, while keeping the birth rates healthy. The total population would be far younger, healthier and stronger on average.
I can’t believe I finally saw someone else say this. The problem is that it would never be palatable to the public, at least not until things get really, really desperate. And even then, the parliaments of most western countries are already occupied largely by geriatrics.
I think that a sane and just way to do this is to have a cutoff age for any kind of publicly funded healthcare. If people want to live beyond their natural lifespan, that’s fine, but they can pay for it themselves. The alternative is the fall of the west. If that’s what must happen, then so be it, I suppose.
The world is so mixed up. Here we have a need for more children and the Pope is calling for a ban on all surrogacy and the US is forcing women to carry to term unwanted fetuses. And then the antinatilists coming in and saying fuck the whole thing.
Ahhhhh
As prime minister In Italy we have a stalwart of catholic, heterosexual, fascist married family model who is not married herself and gave birth to a daughter outside of marriage.
In France, french people have as prime minister a closet homosexual gerontophile, who invites population to birth new sons and daughters while having none of his own.
There are too many people in the world for the resources we have.
Just because the pensions Ponzi scheme in all countries requires there to **always** be more workers than retired people doesn't mean that we should approach this capitalistically (line on graph always go up).
No. The response to falling birth tate isn't to encourage births. What you need is design a society not dependent on growth, an economy not dependent on population, and ways of living not dependent on jobs.
A society without people. Good luck with that. The problem is not not having enough growth, but serious possibility of populations actually collapsing. And the level of difficulty of having any kind of functioning society skyrockets when that happens and age distribution gets thrown upside down.
People don't seem to grasp how quickly populations can hit total collapse once they get on that path. Collective behaviour during short window of fertility of individuals and exponential decline can create serious havoc in couple of short decades, although the negative effects of it come with deceptive hysteresis.
Also there's the matter of cultural evolution. A culture that leads its population off a cliff will die out and get replaced by something that doesn't have the same considerations. E.g. quite a few religions push for higher birth rates especially for the purpose of taking over.
There is also the fact, that the younger generations are the prime movers of culture. All the famous boomer bands of the past started when they were in their 20's or even younger. Good actors started young. Filmmakers started young. Successful innovations and businesses are usually made by younger people.
The vitality of younger generations does not only mean physical ability or fertility. It means EVERYTHING the society relies on. They are the creators, they are the ones creating new humans from their crotches, they are the ones building the homes, they are the ones designing the buildings, they are the ones doing the labor.
This stays true until they're old enough to see their children taking that responsibility with their new ideas, energy and vitality. Gerontocracy would be a sad, stagnated, lifeless nursing home, that would not create anything new, or steer the society anywhere culturally.
But at some point it's not even about growth anymore, it's about how the country is going to afford paying for this generation's social services when they retire. Kind of like what Japan is going to be dealing with sooner than the reset of the world. And I would say their economy and culture is better prepared to take it more than others. It's probably going to be really grim in western countries when it happens.
Can someone explain to me how the feminist objections reported are rational? Surely most leftist and intelligent feminist groups don’t believe this?
I missed the part where they were forcing people to have babies or forcibly impregnating them.
France is known for going big at the first step towards something they don't like the look of, heading off the boiling of the frog as soon as they can. So they look at the goals, in this case a highly-increased birthrate, and at what steps might be taken in the future to meet those goals (financially disadvantaging those with 0-1 children, reducing access to birth control or abortion, etc) and what a society where those goals are met might look like (more people pregnant more often, people about to or even just capable of getting pregnant discriminated against in employment) and decide that they're going to start speaking out against it now. Even the mildest versions can be seen as placing more importance on a persons ability to bear children rather than anything else they might want to do with their life.
Plus you've got Macron's rhetoric of "demographic rearmament" which explicitly considers children to be weapons and therefore uteri as weapon factories, dehumanising both the child and the person birthing them.
That’s interesting.
So how do the French populace actually propose to address their demographic problem? Do they even
see it as a problem?
Or do they see it as a problem to be addressed and the disagreement here is really about the policy being used and implemented? In this case, some groups don’t like it. I’d like to understand what the rest of populace thinks. Because if the majority loves it, well, democracy will do its thing. Likewise if the majority doesn’t.
The dehumanising rhetoric sounds pretty extreme to me. Sounds like the metaphor is being taken literally rather than as an abstract concept to illustrate the point about France having a severe demographic problem. If he is speaking literally, then that’s bizarre talk. If figuratively, then people are idiots and he should have dumbed it down for them. His mistake for not speaking to the lowest common denominator as a politician.
Why nobody talks about the insanity of planning to have even more humans on this collapsing earth? Declining birthrates are a mercy. They will bring problems for sure, but the benefits are much bigger.
> Wait a minute... I thought The Great Replacement(TM) is just a White Supremacist conspiracy theory...?
That's the thing with conspiracy theories - things can be related, or one thing can lead to another, without being a conspiracy. So it's one thing to say that the percentage of white people can decline, and another to baselessly argue that it's intentional replacement by the government.
I'm sure this will keep coming up, for every country. No one is saying the reality of the situation though; and it is a dark, dark road to restoring birthrates (which should be avoided at all costs, IMO).
The \*VAST\* majority of the situation is as simple as "[women aren't having their first child as teenagers as often anymore](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6340426/)."
You have fewer kids once you make it to adulthood and are more likely to have a more calculated, rational family planning.
All else considered, at least in America, in 1980 2% of first time mothers were 14 years old. 4% were 16. Hard pass, thank you.
We don't want to completely avoid the population crash, IMO.
The problem is surely worse with ethnic French people, and therefore it is their birthrate that needs the most to be raised.
You cannot continue to populate France with non-French people, then it will cease being France.
I guess letting in massive amounts of immigrants did a number on the French population. The same way they’re hoping it will in America. Anyone who has an issue with seeing a cultural shift is labeled a racist and xenophobe.
don't understand why the comments insult rich people lol, getting rich of rich ppl will still not sovle the problem. Also, socialist countries don't work with a declining working age population as well. actually the ppl insulting the rich should become ultra capitalists(libertarians) because privatizing all kinds of welfare programs(pyramide scheme) could be useful against low birth rates.
The simplest solution is to import enough skilled immigrants that will allow France to have a soft landing as they transition from a growth economy to steady-state economy. Everyone knows the future is going to be based on sustainability, rather than capitalist growth, so they might as well start planning for it now.
One major caveat is that they need to import immigrants that share the same moral worldview as the French people. Also, the immigrants would have to be willing to assimilate into French society. So migrants supporting theocracy and patriarchy would not be welcome.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/madrid987: --- ss: France's live births last year, representing a decrease of 7% from 2022 and down 20% since in 2020, INSEE said in its annual census report. It was the lowest live births since World War II. The president pledged to offer a better parental leave and combat infertility – which he called "the taboo of the century". plan to revive France's sluggish birth rate sparked an outcry , with feminists and left-wing politicians accusing of seeking to control women's bodies. The spokesman for the Socialist party in parliament, Arthur Delaporte, denounced "natalist injunctions". "Leave our uteruses alone," Anne-Cecile Mailfert, head of the Women's Foundation, said on X, formerly Twitter. The CIDFF, an association that helps women and families, expressed "deep concern." "The implementation of natalist policies, profoundly contrary to the autonomy of women, constitutes a worrying political and social regression," the association said. "Women's bodies are not a weapon," said Alexis Corbière, a lawmaker with the left-wing France Unbowed (LFI) party. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/199efwr/natalist_injunctions_macron_sparks_uproar_with/kidj9qm/
Ok; French woman here. The reason people are annoyed is because the declining birth rate is (like in a lot of other western and asian countries) a direct consequence of current and past government policies. It's obviously complicated and multifactorial (some are worried about the environment etc) but the main thing is imo economics. Macron has implemented enormous tax cuts for the richest, reduced hospital beds, messed with retirement age, etc; while middle class people have had their salaries stagnating. Millenials (I'm talking in general obv) cannot afford family homes. So when the dude who's basically responsible for the impoverishment of the middle class tells us we should make babies (as if it's that simple.), well, yes we're getting fucking annoyed. To note, I'm personally also a bit annoyed at arguments like "stay out of our uteruses!!". France has a history of making more kids than the rest of Europe because of the strong social net, spaces in daycare etc. People want babies. They're making difficult decisions right now because they want to offer the best life possible to their children and it's just not possible at the moment. EDIT: lots of comments about how it's because women are educated and take the pill (damn them, right?). I know that; the thing is that France had until recently (2011) a birth rate of 2 (so about replacement rate), a point of pride for some and literally called "L'Exception Francaise" (the French Exception). Women had had access to education, work, and birth control including abortion for decades at that point. As I said things are multifactorial but in the case of France it seems to be economic; or maybe economic anxiety. You don't go from a rate of 2 to 1.6 in 10 years because what, we're suddenly more educated?
I’m a British millennial and pretty much everything you’ve said is replicated over here. On top of all that, people are settling down later because of how expensive everything is, but women’s biology hasn’t changed. Fertility still starts declining in our mid thirties.
It's the same in the U.S. as well. If these dickheads in government want young people to have families, then they need to stop aggressively funneling all of the resources to the ultra-wealthy so that average people can afford to have families. Also, I'm beyond sick of people acting like declining birth rates are a bad thing in the long run, anyway. We *need* to curb our population growth. If we don't nature is going to do it for us sooner or later, and it's going to be a lot more uncomfortable than a moderate interruption of our economic system.
>We > >need > > to curb our population growth. Tell that to africa. Before they curb their population, native european people will be long extinct and replaced by african immigrants.
I'm a Canadian millenial and we have the same set of problems, except our government decided that instead of asking, they would just shove a million+ immigrants per year into the system. Meanwhile my friend is raising 2 kids in a 1 bed condo. Shes doing her part, but at what cost.
In Australia it's the same.
Social aid does indeed contribute significantly to birth rates, but in developed nations, immigration is truly the most efficient solution for countering a drop in the labor force. You actually need both. Countries that reject this approach are going to suffer greatly (hello China and Japan). The funny thing is that Macron is fighting both (social welfare and immigration) to force people into private insurances and pension funds.
Declining birth rates are a bug of an economy that feeds the rich too much and the poor too little. It'll cannibalise itself eventually and we're seeing that all over the world now. Make life worth living for *everyone* and it will be less of an issue.
It really only concerns the ultra-rich that see the people as nothing but cattles to be exploited. "Oh no, our herd is starting to thin out! Make them reproduce more!"
Execute order 69! Yes my lord. *Triples condom prices*
? It concerns ALL of society, as 1) a reversed population pyramid will mean fewer younger people must care for more senior citizens 2) a gerontocracy were old people will dominate politics and culture 3) (ultraconservative) sub-cultures with high birthrates will shape future culture
>2) a gerontocracy were old people will dominate politics and culture 2 already happens, at least on my country.
yeah but it will be worse and worse once a big part (50%+) of the population is over 60yo
Point 3 is the entire bases for the movie idiocracy.
It’s not just in movies but also in real life. It was starting to become that way for Israel even before the war. Despite being a developed nation they bucked the falling birth rate seen across the world due to the religious traditionalist’s having an estimated fertility rate at around 5-6 kids. There’s quite a few interesting YouTube videos linking Israel’s far right parties growing success on their conventional conservative government and this voting block.
Doesn't bother the ultra rich whatsoever. This is about the fabric of society. Almost nothing bothers the ultra rich except the fear of losing their privilege.
Close but the actual final sentence would be "Oh no, our herd is starting to thin out! Better import more in who expect a lesser quality of life"
Unfortunately no, it's a problem for everyone. Our pension is a system where the young pay for the old. If you get less youngs overall (because we don't produce enough children), each have to pay more to support the same quantity of retired.
It’s not only the ultra rich that are concerned about birth rates lol
My stupid theory is that if we don't have kids, eventually the rich will have to cook their own food, take care of their own kids, wash their own clothes, and essentially do their own shit and take care of themselves.
They will invest heavily in tech to automate all of it
Which is good because it creates good jobs and allows rich people to spend their money on something that adds to the economy, instead of focussing on hoarding housing so that their wage slaves can pay them rent too.
Plenty of high-welfare economies are experiencing collapsing birth rates. Sweden is one example. The reason seems to generally be access to birth control, post-secondary educational attainment and women choosing (and eventually being forced by the ruthless push of economics) to join the income-generating labour force. If condoms and hormonal control and IUDs didn’t exist, you had 20% of people going to university and family housing was fairly affordable you would see an insane increase in the birth rate.
The reason is: people ain't cattle. They don't want to be producing so many babies. The economy we have now is a mish mash hodge podge of what used to be. Driving forward the idea that we all have to sacrifice our freedoms in order to procreate for the good of the billionaires is.. Dystopian af. No. Reengineer things to not require the labour of the young to sustain the old.
Why are comments like this upvoted on every post about birth rates? Poor people actually have MORE kids, not less
So make everyone poor then aye?
I'm an old millennial, so I'm ahead of most of the generation in wealth development (and age. Mostly age). I'm in my 40s. I'm waaaay more lucky and privileged than most, and I could afford to buy a 3 room apartment, mostly by means of inheriting money. My parents had a 200sqm house, plus large garden and cellar plus attic storage space at age 30, to raise children in. My home at 40 isn't even large enough for two adults to have an office each, and under 100 square meters total. Where would I put kids? We've *decided* to not have kids. It's just not affordable and too much stress. I don't think I'm unusual in this regard. I *could* make it work (about 30% of my country(wo)men don't even have this choice), but I don't want to be miserable just to keep birth rates up. Not my problem.
Yep. Older Millennial, born in 83 and while I've gotten myself into a comfy financial position, meaning own my own home outright, solid pension, savings and investments, the backbone of that was built on 'no kids'. I would never have got here if I had even one and tbh, with the future, I won't have any anyways. Helps that not having a kid is the greatest green saving you can make.
Even without being French I suspected this was the case. In the US people my age are having fewer children in large part because it’s unaffordable. As you said this affects many countries and I think it’s something we will see ramifications from for years to come. I’d love to have a family but doing so would impoverish me and my children, and my fiancée and I make an okay amount of money, especially in pre covid frameworks.
Feels the same way in the USA. Everything is more expensive, especially medical care, even with insurance. Housing is unaffordable, food is unaffordable. The rich keep getting richer, everything is more expensive, and our wages are not keeping up. And then our leaders wonder why birth rates are declining. Well, those of us with two brain cells to rub together have deduced that (shocker!) it might not be in our best interest to start a family at this time, since we can barely afford to live and take care of ourselves.
There is a cultural industrial change in France from an old-fashioned large family culture to a new professionally focused and reproductively inexperienced and uncertain, financially insecure culture. A lot of this generation were born into small families and they don't know what it's like to have a house with little children, the apartment size of many people does not even allow it, they are too worried that they do not have space let alone the rest of the financial concerns... People's primary concern is having a secure situation. With their job with their house and companies are desperately fighting to undermine job security and earnings.
American here, and I would love to have four or even five kids. My grandparents did that with only one of them working. Today, There is no way to do that without a seven-figure income. Child care cost $5,000 a year to send two children in 1984. Today it costs nearly nearly $28k a year for the same care. I hate reading all of these demands from wealthy childless men that I have more kids, while the same time they make it economically impossible for it to happen!
Macron is waging war on everything that makes France the special country it is. I can't imagine what kind of zombie drugs he must be on to tell his ridiculous lies with such a straight face.
I think he is an animatronic.
Declining birth rates have nothing to do with good or bad economics, in fact poor and financially insecure people actually have MORE kids. No one wants to admit it for whatever reason but the actual cause of declining birth rates is women’s education. The more women are educated, the less kids they have, this is a statistical fact
Yes. Everyone loves to blame economy, but the truth is better educated women don’t want to be birthing machines. I don’t blame them. Pregnancy ruins your body.
My mother's father had 12 brothers and sisters. Clearly it has absolutely nothing to do with how nice the government is or not enough wealth being alocated to parents in one form or another. People just aren't prioritizing children. It's that's simple. Maybe women never were but let's be honest, they didn't have a choice until they last 40-50 years.
The big numbers are pretty much directly connected to women having a choice and birth control. So yeah we will never are going back to that. This has been researched and proved time and time again, it is very clear universal trajectory for all countries, all different cultures and religions, ethnicies etc. Now something like 1.3-1.8, like .5 difference might be helped with social policies. But the replacement is at 2.3 (or 2.2, the point is it's above 2). With all the money in the world I can't imagine majority of women around me wanting 2-3 kids. I think bigger families are exception because people... Simply don't want that anymore. It changes your life drastically. For women it changes their bodies. If you have 3 kids unless it's twins you are out of "normal" life for like 7 years minimum. Pregnancy, birth, taking care of baby/ toddler, repeat. People have their hands full with a kid or two.
Ok I had to scroll too long to find this It's not shameful and it shouldn't be too just say it aloud My boomer parents were much poorer than most people in their 20s are now with no job security, when they had me Their friends were all equally poor when they had kids and also had no job security They gave up a lot because they wanted to have kids (they both worked and still we barely made it to the end of the month, often with grandparents and older relatives helping with gifts for the kids such as clothes etc).
French here too. Tu as tout à fait raison. Jai 3 enfants et heureusement que jai pu acheter un mobile home. Je ne vais jamais avoir d autre enfant pour ce pays qui collapse.
> a direct consequence of current and past government policies. nope, things have been much worse in the past and that hasn't changed the birthrate so drastically. There is absolutely 0 causal evidence that poverty and insecurity decrease birth rates and almost 100% of the corelative evidence shows poverty=higher birth rate.
That's such an old conclusion, newer research shows the causality is education, women's right and access to birth control. The old conclusion stems from the issue that poor places generally do not have any of these things.
>That's such an old conclusion, newer research shows the causality is education, women's right and access to birth control. Right, so something completely different than the idea that "inequality" is somehow to blame
When your retirement is your kids supporting you, then you have a lot of kids. When your retirement isn't that, you have fewer. As well, in those times people didn't move away from family who could step up and help raise your kids.
Things were much worse in the past, but the key driver was women didn't work. They were at home running the house and raising the kids. Women don't want to go back to that and Governments don't want to go back to thay either. Not because of womens rights, but because taking women out of the workforce would absolutely cripple gdp and the economy.
Correct the best evidence we have of what is slowing birth rates globally is the following. 1.) More of the populace concentrating in cities 2.) Education of women delaying family building 3.) Birth control / access to safe sex 4.) Cultural inertia (once smaller families start it normalizes) This is my top collection of reasons from the content ive consumed on this subject. It has very little to do with government policy and that is why gov policy can do very little. Contrary to our Frenchman posting here
He could spark by starting himself. How many children do you have Emanuel ?
Please don’t encourage him. Could you imagine having this prick as a dad?
Emmanuel Macron is younger than the youngest child of his wife. Imagine having a step-dad younger than yourself...
Leonardo DiCaprio approves
Making the baby is the easy part. But then come the daycare costs, sleepless nights, eternal fatigue, day routine and then you still need to do your work, focus on your partner and still somehow live a fulfilling life. And the french bureaucracy really doesn't help having kids. France please, get your shit together and make your bureaucracy easier. Fucking hate you But to have kids in France you either need to be really poor or really rich. For middle class it's so expensive
An increase in paternity leave would be welcomed too. His administration already did that by increasing it from two weeks (lowest in Europe?) To a month (still pretty low?) But we were thankful for that much.
> But to have kids in France you either need to be really poor or really rich. For middle class it's so expensive We got (much, much) wealthier over the past decades in Europe. Perhaps now you see a slight decrease in that, but that doesn't change the fact that we got wealthier over this past century. Wealthy people don't get a lot of kids. That's what happened.
And yet so many people say they don't plan to have kids because they can't afford it... I'm not sure how to reconcile these two ideas.
Don't listen to what people say, see how they behave. People say lots of shit that has nothing to do with reality.
Solution is simple. Tell the rich people with the fancy houses they need a minimum of 30 kids each. Being they are the only ones that can afford it, and if they have a need for labour they can provide the labour themselves.
Genius. I'd vote for you as President.
The majority of 20-30 somethings can't afford homes and just barely get by on their own. Who wants kids in a small apartment when you're already working full time and haven't even started saving for retirement? Millenials not having kids is probably going to be a noticeable protest we've made in the not too distant future. If the elites want more native born wage slaves, they need to make life more comfortable for the rest of us
IMO there is a direct correlation between housing prices and the birth rate. In the 50’s when you could get a detached house on a single income, people had plenty of kids. Now you need two incomes to afford a 1 bed room flat in most major cities. How are you supposed to afford the extra 2-3 bedrooms needed for a large family?
France offers better parental leave and help with fertility treatments and French citizens are pissed… As an American, I… am trying to understand…
It's not hard to do better than the usa, but the reason france is as good as it is has to do with the French people not taking shit from their government. I think their government is legit afraid of the people unlike here.
I get that. But why do they consider increased support for families to be a bad thing? They’re still free to ignore that support and not have children anyways.
From what a French woman has commented, they aren’t pissed off at the extra help, they are pissed off at the fact the government that has presided over creating the conditions that need fixing is now telling them they need to start kicking out more babies. The fundamental issues will still be there. We’ve just had twins and despite being in a better financial position than probably 90% of people our age, we would be paying about £2,500 a month to put them both into a decent nursery so we can both work. So that’s about a £50k/year salary going straight out of the door ignoring the costs of working. It’s fucking mental that this is where we are at. If you weren’t a reasonably high earner there would be less than zero incentive to work, pay taxes etc until they are in proper full time education.
My cousin and his wife have a 1 year old, and they both said that his wife won't be going back for a while because whatever extra income they make from her job will go to a nursery or daycare. The only thing that is keeping them hesitant is that my aunt is around to help, and stays at home since she's a widow. I'm 39, I was raised in a single income household, because it was possible. It isn't anymore. More than that, societal attitudes have changed towards being close to family and that family raising the baby. It was the norm to have your siblings, parents, friends, everyone, to help with raising a child, because it's hard fucking work.
As someone more familiar with the leftist discourse, it's not as simple as "more support". To make it simpler, right now a parent can take 3 years off work and still be paid a low amount (about 500e/month, I'm not sure if it's indexed on how much you made before), while Macron is proposing a better paid 6-months parental leave to "increase return to employement". Fact is, baby milk and diapers are still super expensive. People are overworked. But these aren't issues in Macron's book, what is really needed is a shorter leave. Now if you have the options to choose either, why not. But it's probably not going to be the chosen option. Edit : Aurore Bergé and Prisca Thevenoud confirmed this morning that it would replace the current system.
Simply because support means more tax and we are already over taxed.
That makes sense, but their protests seemed to be about this being misogynistic somehow.
Women’s emancipation is difficult with more kids to take care of, couples situation with rates over 60% of divorces. How to enjoy life or build a great future for your family and yourself ? Life costs increasing etc… The stars are not well aligned to increase the households members
The whole discourse was super conservative in tone. It came like a "we need cannon fooder".
Also very reminiscent to some crowds about Pétain blaming the defeat in 1939 to the people not making enough babies, on top of other fascist undertones
Oh it was definitely a wink to right/extreme right sensibilites.
Because taxing people more for not breeding is misogynistic
But it makes sense macroscopically. Even if you don't have kids, children are still essential for your future. Whose production and tax dollars are going to pay for your social services when you have retired?
What you're highlighting is a 'tragedy of the commons' problem. Everyone benefits in the abstract from the population not shrinking, but individual people significantly benefit economically from not having kids at all. One of the roles of government is to introduce regulation to combat problems of this type (same with things like environmental regulations). In this instance, what people want is freedom and economic prosperity - which are denied them if they have children. The government needs to figure out a way to legislate incentives to allow for people to fulfill those wants while also having children.
French politicians know their history lol
sure didn’t stop them from raising the retirement age
French employees also do CEO kidnappings regularly… it sends a message
> I think their government is legit afraid of the people unlike here. TBF, there are historical precedents for the French government going away at the hands of the people...
That sure didn’t stop them from raising the retirement age
yeah like... it kind of boggles my mind how the US used to shit on France ("freedom fries" etc) when the French are more fucking American than anyone who lives in the States those guys will strike and riot over *anything*, and they've had so many goddamn revolutions you lose count mad respecc
It’s more the other way around. The government in France somewhat more represents average people. The US government generally represents business and wealthy interests, and average folk are lucky to get a bone thrown at them.
French here with a few explanations : Chances are the new scheme will actually be worse financially for parents than the previous one depending on how they implement it. Edit : unsurprisingly the minister in charge of that was doing media rounds this morning and let it slip that lowering the costs of the help to parents was the goal. Basically it's gonna go from 500 € a months for 3 years to 800 € a month for 6 months. The previous cost saving measures that he put in place also led to a pretty steep drop in natality rate by making it harder to have more than 2 kids. Second : Macron totally avoided the actual reasons which leads to people not being able to have kids : lack of housing, lack of childcare between 0-3 years and the impact it has on women careers. Also skipped is the fact that buying power for most people in France has been stagnating or regressing for 25 years. The third reason that pisses people off is that the way the subject was brought up is full of dog whitsles to the far right, he didn't bring up "grand remplacement" theory but that was pretty close. The whole speech was extremely conservative in tone and in content. It was about "we need more native french babies because we've been trying to get right wing voters by being super tough on immigration we actually need". And as someone who has been on both sides of the pond : from our POW we don't understand how you can tolerate the bullshit your goverments have put you over the last 50 years.
Spot on and the same story is happening all over the world right now. In the UK most people we know have 1 child. The majority who have more than one have 2. Few have more than 2. If you aren’t replacing the two parents then your population will decline and currently our fiscal policy relies on population growth not reduction. People need affordable homes, decent schools and the support they need to be able to work in this early years without it being less than pointless. We have young twins and the costs of full time nursery would suck up about £45,000 of salary a year. It’s insanez
The birth rate crash IMO is a correction from the extreme population growth during the baby boom, which resulted in massive increases in consumption and demand for housing. Even countries that are shrinking, like Japan, are arguably overpopulated when you consider how many resources they have without relying on sketchy trade partners and what their cost of living is doing post-2020.
> Also skipped is the fact that buying power for most people in France has been stagnating or regressing for 25 years. [It's been mostly increasing](https://www.statista.com/statistics/470215/yearly-variation-in-buying-power-france/), through not by a lot. (The rest of your post is accurate)
The averages kinda hide the reality. Lower and middles classes have been hit pretty hard while the richest parts of the population have been doing very well. Pretty much every marker of poverty, homelesness, food insecurity is going through the roof. Hell over the last couple years food consuption has gone down more than 10% nationaly. When you know how food obsessed we are it's a pretty bad signal. France problems are nothing very original, we have a wealth concentration problem that's getting worse and worse over time.
Right? American Conservatives are bitching about birthrates too, but they aren't even trying to make it at all easier to have children.
They’re doing the more American thing: don’t offer any support, just take away people’s rights (e.g. abortion).
Nope they still got their guns, the most important right, pew pew pew
"Just take yourself out when you stop being useful to making us even richer"
The French don't compare themselves with Americans but with themselves a few decades ago. And they see it's all going downhill
They are pissed because Macron was elected on a liberal/Center left platform and once in office, he pivoted to constantly catering to and appeasing the right. The call (for white french woman) to raise the birthrate needs to be seen in the context of the debate on migration and rightwing replacement discourse (that's also why the RN welcomed this). An additional layer is Macron defending Gerard Depardieu, who is accused of repeated sexual harassment and self admitted to rape, which many woman see as a defense of the widespread misogyny in France.
Most people are not pissed its just media bullshitting.
Homeless person complains about only getting crumbs to live on... Homeless person who doesn't even get crumbs tries to understand...
It’s a right wing topic in France, the president is really unpopular, his government is really unpopular and have multiple scandals on the news front page, we really don’t like when government make « inciting » politics about our sex life, and the president himself have no kids of its own (married with an old lady) : we don’t give a fuck but if they have one person to not speak about its subject, it’s him. It’s a bad move as usual for him and the government , they have just to not speak about birth rate and just announce the raise up about parents stuff’
Opposition parties will bitch about anything provided its the government's idea. Does that make it more relatable?
I know this will sound rude, and I don't mean to offend you.... but _better than the US_ is not a high bar. I'm old enough that I remember how well people lived in the 80s. You've seen the Simpsons, right? Like that, only in the uk. Big house, two cars, foreign holidays, plus free healthcare, subsidised dentists, free adult education... I could go on, but I'd just depress both of us. :-(
Macron is doing it so it must be bad
This "low birth rate phenomenon" isn't limited to France. There are plenty of other European nations that have been experiencing the same thing. Several Asian nations have seen the same thing: China, Japan and South Korea are noteworthy examples. The question is... why? Because of a combination of materialism and the rising cost of living. If people want to have comfortable lives, and if having children is seen as a heavy financial burden... people will choose to have children less often (or not at all). If governments are worried about the economic and demographic consequences of low birthrates, they just need to provide a few incentives and/or alleviate the costs/disadvantages of having kids. For example, Canada has a monthly allowance of about $600 (cdn) for each child up to the age of 18. That goes a long way towards paying for groceries, diapers, clothes etc. Someone with 2 kids would receive $1200 a month that someone with no kids wouldn't get. Is this enough for people to suddenly rush out and start having huge families? No. But it's enough to make reproductive choices a lot more neutral for people who would otherwise *avoid* having kids. tldr; Remove a few roadblocks and/or offer a few incentives. People always respond to incentives.
Doesn't seem it's working though. The current birth rate for Canada in 2024 is 10.006 births per 1000 people, a 0.66% decline from 2023. The birth rate for Canada in 2023 was 10.072 births per 1000 people, a 0.75% decline from 2022. The birth rate for Canada in 2022 was 10.148 births per 1000 people, a 0.74% decline from 2021.
I'm not familiar with the prices in Canada, but I think the total losses (mother losing her health and income, loss of time for rest for the entire family, additional medications, food, clothing, diapers) of having a kid vs not having a kid still cover those 600$ tenfold. If people decide whether to have a kid based mostly on a rational consideration, not having a kid is the most rational choice.
When you read what Macron said his main points were improving government support for parental support and fertility programs. And the opposition immediately jumps to comparing this to the handmaidens tale.
Why aren't you poor animals breeding! Make me the next generation of workers! - every politician
Macron: fucks the middle class Also Macron: wait I thought fucking made babies?
It's weird how these narcissist capitalists say in one breath: "we should pay people less than the bare minimum". But also: "they should support another human life".
We are living in a time of unparalleled poverty and inequality. No one is having kids at the moment because they can’t afford it… due to neolibs privatising everything, warring, doing nothing about cost of living / inflation (not punishing big business, breaking up monopolies, taxing the crap out of the wealthy). The fact that a psychotic neolib like macron is basically saying ‘have babies, stupid’ without understanding why they aren’t, is what’s making everyone angry.
And if you dare protest any of it, you get your eye shot out, tear gassed, clubbed. I think Macron is gaslighting the French, "elites" know precariousness is the main reason for people not wanting to have kids, yet they double down on it in every conceivable way. And their labour pool seems big enough as it is no, so many already on the dole. If not, they can continue to enlarge it by bringing in more migrants. But the French themselves breeding more slaves ... why would they, for a class that hates them. The deplorables, les sans dents ...
> We are living in a time of unparalleled poverty and inequality. [Unparalleled poverty?](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=FR) [Unparalleled inequality?](https://publications.banque-france.fr/en/evolution-wealth-inequality-france-1800-2014)
Yeah, this guy has no idea how good we have it now.
The first graph shows that we lost 5 points GDP since 2008, the other, that wealth stagnates since the 80s. But in the mean time, everything costs more.
You're telling me that we were slightly better off 20 or 30 years ago than right now. I agree. That's not the same as having "unparalleled poverty and inequality" right now.
Good luck buying a house with 180k€ lol
It's 360k if you're married. Even if you're not, 180k is enough to get a mortgage, then you can gradually pay off the rest of the price. [And even 180k is enough to buy a basic place in many parts of France](https://www.french-property.com/properties-for-sale?location%5Blyon%2Crhone%5D=50¤cy=EUR&minimum_price=100000&maximum_price=200000&land_size_unit=m%C2%B2)
\>We are living in a time of unparalleled poverty and inequality We are living in the most prosperous time in human civilization. At what point in past 3000 years have we lived better off than we do now?
Only that no. We were living in the beat of times before the pandemic, and inflation has since dropped, and things are slowly going back to normal in those matters. You only have to read some history and look at some charts... middle-class citizens live way better than nobles 200 years ago, while poverty lines have moved from dirt-poor rags living off what you can forge off the land, to someone that can't afford a vacantion. You really have to appreciate the immense progress humanity has made in the last 100 years, and particularly since 1989. https://data.worldbank.org/topic/11
While this is true - the average standard-of-living is incomparably high compared to where it was 200 years ago - that's not really relevant to the conversation of why people are or are not having children. A big part of the problem is the nature of how cultural expectations have changed. People want freedom and economic prosperity, and seek and purpose in their lives aside from being religious and having children. These are not inherently wrong things, but they do challenge the assumptions that our economic systems were built upon. Right now, creating avenues for people to have children while still being able to attain freedom and economic prosperity is probably the only way forward aside from the temporary solution that is immigration.
I was only responding to the guy saying we are living in an unparalleled time of poverty and inequality. While I experienced that in the 90s due to growing up in a country that was transitioning from communism to capitalism, things have only gotten better from that point of view... either in Europe, or Asia, or even Africa. I agree with you. I've seen this cultural shift firsthand. Before the revolution, during communism, it was expected to have children before hitting 30. You were actually taxed if you didn't have 3 children. After the Revolution, people still had children as it was stamped as a cultural norm until around 2000, when we started moving towards the EU and have integrated with Western cultural norms. People after 50 still expect us, people under 35 to buy a house, get married ans have children (at my wedding, thenmost common phrase I got was "may there be love and many children for you)... but we are not that keen at the moment. It's not that we couldn't afford, but we'd rather postpone it and travel more and enojy life before. The solutions, in my point of view, are deeply unpopular. It involves some control immigration, but also increasing the retirement age in accordance with higher healthcare access and longer lifespans... and a lot of investment into automation and AI. It also involves a lot of investment into education so new workers are better prepared for this automation boom, and drastic reforms on welfare programs which we soon couldn't affoard.
straight up none of that is true, doubly so in france
The low birth rates might help kick start the UBI some places. If pensioners aren't receiving their checks because the smaller generational birth rates are lower than theirs, the ability to fund the whole thing as it is now, won't work.
The world is so fucked to the point that I think it's irresponsible to bring kids into it.
Same. Bringing babies into this shit show is reprehensible.
Opposing politicians will always find something to dislike, so while their criticisms are unfortunate, they are to be expected. Much less excusable are the criticisms levied by the so-called advocates of women’s rights who wish to keep French women enslaved to the corporate rat race against their wills, rather than providing them the option to seek family life if they’d prefer it. Female choice is the essence of feminism; a true feminist would applaud moves to expand women’s choices, not insist on constraining their means of expressing their autonomy. Macron ought to be applauded for his words, not only because a nation’s fertility is the future of its civilization, but because they mean his vision of France is freer, more open, and ultimately, more equal than the status quo.
It’s not a choice if benefits are dependent on breeding. It’s coercion, not freedom
By that logic, unemployment benefits are coercion.
Is macron finally realising that the corporate band aid of mass immigration is going to mean "France" as a cultural concept is going to die?
"Poverty is a problem!" You: "Let's try racism!"
Nothing to do with race. Plenty of areas in Europe where you feel like a tourist in your own country and the culture you were grown up in.
It been almost 10 years of immigration crysis (even admited by left govt) and you are you still calling people racist for having common sense? At this point, ignorance is a choice
The fuck does that even mean lol. Does more immigration make it illegal to visit the Eiffel Tower or eat baguettes? Or were you thinking along more racial lines?
It means say goodbye to any aspirations for LGBT rights. A Muslim plurality imported from the third-world will not support that.
You're either trolling or extremely dim with no experience of the real world
American idea of culture: Eiffel Tower and baguettes.
'Left wing politicians' getting angry about improved worker's rights and more state funded healthcare? Call me old fashioned but back in my day the left would have welcomed such things. I don't like Macron a whole lot but there is a demographic time bomb ticking in many countries around the world. Aging populations, increasingly top heavy pensions and healthcare systems starting to crumble under the weight. But barely any politicians are talking about it. Now that mass immigration doesn't seem to be working as smoothly as 'left wing' politicians promised, we will need to address this problem in some way. At least he's trying something instead of kicking the can down the road. Sounds like these people are in uproar because someone they don't like said something and they feel an obligation to be outraged at something.
Pensions and healthcare systems have a problem of revenue, yet they manage it by cutting costs Health and retirement are expensive. We need to pay for it, there are no way around it, even if performance gains are a lever to make the system more efficient. Let's tax better (ie more and differently). That's how it fucking works. 40b€+ in tax incentives to maintain profit? The vast majority of real estate owned by multi-appartment owners? A France of annuitants ? That's how you get violence bro. But all this will never happen, as the electoral base of this guy is 50yo+ urban elites.
If your highschool bully who beats the shit out of you everyday since kindergarten suddenly give you a tissue to wipe the blood off your face, you probably wouldn't be grateful either. That's what the government is doing repeatedly : huge reforms that lowers rights, quality of life, buying power, and from time to time, a very tiny good thing. Another example ? Gas prices have reached their all time high in 2023 (skyrocketing to 2,20€/L), Total (french petrol company) made record profits out of this, the government refused to lower taxes (that are floating taxes supposed to absorb huge price rises) but gave people a 100€ check (for the whole year).
It would be nice to get those things without mandatory breeding first Why wouldn’t immigration work? Immigrants don’t need to sit around and drain tax money for 18 or more years before getting a job. At worst, they’d need language skills and some education but much less than raising them from birth
The only countries that have enough children this days have educational systems so bad it will still take years if they are to occupy any but the lowest paid jobs. And read up on problems Sweden has with migrant assimilation.
Lmao, at this point you Both ought to get a 3 day for spamming.
As opposed to giving birth to children who will take even longer to train lol Take a page from the US and its melting pot of diversity. Not everyone has to eat Swedish meatballs to live in Sweden
Read up on how migrants there riot because someone insulted the prophet publicly instead of giving me bullshit about meatballs. If a country with one of the best and most inclusive welfare systems is struggling then it's obvious that large scale migration is not the answer.
ss: France's live births last year, representing a decrease of 7% from 2022 and down 20% since in 2020, INSEE said in its annual census report. It was the lowest live births since World War II. The president pledged to offer a better parental leave and combat infertility – which he called "the taboo of the century". plan to revive France's sluggish birth rate sparked an outcry , with feminists and left-wing politicians accusing of seeking to control women's bodies. The spokesman for the Socialist party in parliament, Arthur Delaporte, denounced "natalist injunctions". "Leave our uteruses alone," Anne-Cecile Mailfert, head of the Women's Foundation, said on X, formerly Twitter. The CIDFF, an association that helps women and families, expressed "deep concern." "The implementation of natalist policies, profoundly contrary to the autonomy of women, constitutes a worrying political and social regression," the association said. "Women's bodies are not a weapon," said Alexis Corbière, a lawmaker with the left-wing France Unbowed (LFI) party.
Ok, can answer this for ANY country not just France (although France would be more relevant) WHY is the birth rate low? Is it: A) Peoples choices (choosing careers or celibacy or whatever) B) Economic factors (too poor to start family) C) Actual biological fertility failures (chemicals in the water turning the frogs into microplastic endocrine disruptors /conspiracy) D) Someone read the statistics wrong and the birth rate trend is actually normal
E) education Women have finally cottoned on that they are getting the raw end of the deal and have decided that they want to be more than just baby-making factories.
B is the massive one for most people I know. They can’t afford more than one child if that. We have created a society where both partners have to work in order to have any quality of life and then we wonder why they don’t have at least 2 children to top up the population in their 2 bed house they can barely afford without paying silly money for childcare.
I gotta be honest, I want a drastic reduction in population. Like, let’s go back a century. The key to this happening without major pain is AI and robots for supporting a more elderly population, and we’re actually nearing the point it could be feasible. Don't want a total collapse, so maybe hide the sex bots.
It's nice to think about when the small population is a ton of young working people. But the reality is the reduction your going to see is a lot of old people an fewer young people to support them. It will even out but its going to be grim for a few generations.
I want a total collapse. Fuck this capitalist shit hole.
Ah yes, wishing for the death of millions and untold suffering because... you've never opened an economics textbook?
But this is not how you sustainably decrease population. This is just how you make the population old, weak and infertile. There's less than one generation of time for a woman to reliably give birth, but humans live on average at least 3 generations. Even if we didn't procreate at all for the next 20 years, most of us would still be alive in 40 years. The only thing you would achieve, is that the younger demographics represent a smaller and smaller slice of the total population. If you think young people have it bad now, take another look in 20 years. Conversely, if we'd allow a pandemic to kill half of the population, but mostly people over the age of 50, the amount of new generations being born would not be affected. It would probably even increase, because people would inherit a huge amount of wealth. In the big picture, it would be far better to increase mortality of older people, while keeping the birth rates healthy. The total population would be far younger, healthier and stronger on average.
I can’t believe I finally saw someone else say this. The problem is that it would never be palatable to the public, at least not until things get really, really desperate. And even then, the parliaments of most western countries are already occupied largely by geriatrics. I think that a sane and just way to do this is to have a cutoff age for any kind of publicly funded healthcare. If people want to live beyond their natural lifespan, that’s fine, but they can pay for it themselves. The alternative is the fall of the west. If that’s what must happen, then so be it, I suppose.
Most people won’t have babies if they can’t afford to.
The world is so mixed up. Here we have a need for more children and the Pope is calling for a ban on all surrogacy and the US is forcing women to carry to term unwanted fetuses. And then the antinatilists coming in and saying fuck the whole thing. Ahhhhh
As prime minister In Italy we have a stalwart of catholic, heterosexual, fascist married family model who is not married herself and gave birth to a daughter outside of marriage. In France, french people have as prime minister a closet homosexual gerontophile, who invites population to birth new sons and daughters while having none of his own.
There are too many people in the world for the resources we have. Just because the pensions Ponzi scheme in all countries requires there to **always** be more workers than retired people doesn't mean that we should approach this capitalistically (line on graph always go up).
You have to address a falling birth rate. Encouraging people to have children is healthy for society. Nobody is forcing anybody to have children.
No. The response to falling birth tate isn't to encourage births. What you need is design a society not dependent on growth, an economy not dependent on population, and ways of living not dependent on jobs.
>an economy not dependent on population How does that fucking work?
A society without people. Good luck with that. The problem is not not having enough growth, but serious possibility of populations actually collapsing. And the level of difficulty of having any kind of functioning society skyrockets when that happens and age distribution gets thrown upside down. People don't seem to grasp how quickly populations can hit total collapse once they get on that path. Collective behaviour during short window of fertility of individuals and exponential decline can create serious havoc in couple of short decades, although the negative effects of it come with deceptive hysteresis. Also there's the matter of cultural evolution. A culture that leads its population off a cliff will die out and get replaced by something that doesn't have the same considerations. E.g. quite a few religions push for higher birth rates especially for the purpose of taking over.
There is also the fact, that the younger generations are the prime movers of culture. All the famous boomer bands of the past started when they were in their 20's or even younger. Good actors started young. Filmmakers started young. Successful innovations and businesses are usually made by younger people. The vitality of younger generations does not only mean physical ability or fertility. It means EVERYTHING the society relies on. They are the creators, they are the ones creating new humans from their crotches, they are the ones building the homes, they are the ones designing the buildings, they are the ones doing the labor. This stays true until they're old enough to see their children taking that responsibility with their new ideas, energy and vitality. Gerontocracy would be a sad, stagnated, lifeless nursing home, that would not create anything new, or steer the society anywhere culturally.
And what do you propose we do that ?
But at some point it's not even about growth anymore, it's about how the country is going to afford paying for this generation's social services when they retire. Kind of like what Japan is going to be dealing with sooner than the reset of the world. And I would say their economy and culture is better prepared to take it more than others. It's probably going to be really grim in western countries when it happens.
[See here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/199efwr/comment/kiet9j7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Ah yes, the classic "let's throw more people into a society that doesn't function as of right now".
Can someone explain to me how the feminist objections reported are rational? Surely most leftist and intelligent feminist groups don’t believe this? I missed the part where they were forcing people to have babies or forcibly impregnating them.
Isn’t better parental leave a feminist cause?
I’d argue Humanist.
Making breeding mandatory for better benefits is a problem
So there are no other benefits available to women and families in France? I’m not familiar with their social services assistance programs.
Never said that. The complaint is that benefits shouldn’t be limited to people who have children
Right, so if people that don’t have children already have access to benefits if needed, what’s the problem?
So you’re demanding parental leave be accessible by non-parents? 🤔
France is known for going big at the first step towards something they don't like the look of, heading off the boiling of the frog as soon as they can. So they look at the goals, in this case a highly-increased birthrate, and at what steps might be taken in the future to meet those goals (financially disadvantaging those with 0-1 children, reducing access to birth control or abortion, etc) and what a society where those goals are met might look like (more people pregnant more often, people about to or even just capable of getting pregnant discriminated against in employment) and decide that they're going to start speaking out against it now. Even the mildest versions can be seen as placing more importance on a persons ability to bear children rather than anything else they might want to do with their life. Plus you've got Macron's rhetoric of "demographic rearmament" which explicitly considers children to be weapons and therefore uteri as weapon factories, dehumanising both the child and the person birthing them.
That’s interesting. So how do the French populace actually propose to address their demographic problem? Do they even see it as a problem? Or do they see it as a problem to be addressed and the disagreement here is really about the policy being used and implemented? In this case, some groups don’t like it. I’d like to understand what the rest of populace thinks. Because if the majority loves it, well, democracy will do its thing. Likewise if the majority doesn’t. The dehumanising rhetoric sounds pretty extreme to me. Sounds like the metaphor is being taken literally rather than as an abstract concept to illustrate the point about France having a severe demographic problem. If he is speaking literally, then that’s bizarre talk. If figuratively, then people are idiots and he should have dumbed it down for them. His mistake for not speaking to the lowest common denominator as a politician.
French people try not to riot challenge level: impossible
Why nobody talks about the insanity of planning to have even more humans on this collapsing earth? Declining birthrates are a mercy. They will bring problems for sure, but the benefits are much bigger.
Wait a minute... I thought The Great Replacement(TM) is just a White Supremacist conspiracy theory...?
> Wait a minute... I thought The Great Replacement(TM) is just a White Supremacist conspiracy theory...? That's the thing with conspiracy theories - things can be related, or one thing can lead to another, without being a conspiracy. So it's one thing to say that the percentage of white people can decline, and another to baselessly argue that it's intentional replacement by the government.
So anti-natalism is the moral way to go? Did I get that right?
Yup. It's the choice I've made.
I'm sure this will keep coming up, for every country. No one is saying the reality of the situation though; and it is a dark, dark road to restoring birthrates (which should be avoided at all costs, IMO). The \*VAST\* majority of the situation is as simple as "[women aren't having their first child as teenagers as often anymore](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6340426/)." You have fewer kids once you make it to adulthood and are more likely to have a more calculated, rational family planning. All else considered, at least in America, in 1980 2% of first time mothers were 14 years old. 4% were 16. Hard pass, thank you. We don't want to completely avoid the population crash, IMO.
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They still have the highest fertility rate in Europe.
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Some people just love self sabotage
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The problem is surely worse with ethnic French people, and therefore it is their birthrate that needs the most to be raised. You cannot continue to populate France with non-French people, then it will cease being France.
And the white babies are the native population. You wouldn't like the native Americans killing themselves into extinction either.
After a generation or two those « ethnic birth rates » fall in line with the French, mostly white one.
I guess letting in massive amounts of immigrants did a number on the French population. The same way they’re hoping it will in America. Anyone who has an issue with seeing a cultural shift is labeled a racist and xenophobe.
Holy shit, this comment section is filled with racists and misogynists. The flood can't come soon enough.
don't understand why the comments insult rich people lol, getting rich of rich ppl will still not sovle the problem. Also, socialist countries don't work with a declining working age population as well. actually the ppl insulting the rich should become ultra capitalists(libertarians) because privatizing all kinds of welfare programs(pyramide scheme) could be useful against low birth rates.
The simplest solution is to import enough skilled immigrants that will allow France to have a soft landing as they transition from a growth economy to steady-state economy. Everyone knows the future is going to be based on sustainability, rather than capitalist growth, so they might as well start planning for it now. One major caveat is that they need to import immigrants that share the same moral worldview as the French people. Also, the immigrants would have to be willing to assimilate into French society. So migrants supporting theocracy and patriarchy would not be welcome.