5 ms·

France sees collapse in births to lowest since World War Two

26 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

hollasch 3y ago
“The most common reasons people gave for not having more children were concerns about the economic, social and climatic outlook, cited by 30% of those polled. Some 28% said raising children cost too much.” It occurs to me that this could be the fuel for a vicious cycle in countries where the government assumes high responsibility for social care: low birth rates create a population skewed older, which requires greater taxes on younger citizens, which places them under greater financial stress, which further suppresses the decision to have (or to have more) children.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Another instance of short term cost/benefit ratios not matching up with long term cost/benefit ratios (for the individual and the collective), and in this case the long term spans many decades.
- MasterYoda900 3y ago
  Why can’t seniors living in long term care simply take care of one another? These discussions about the tax burden of seniors are about two things in the end: health care and assisted living. Assisted living means: workers to cook meals for seniors, to help them dress, to remind them to take their pills, etc. In our advanced industrialized societies, we offload that burden to young workers in their prime. In more traditional societies like Japan, senior communities don’t need young workers because they rely on one another. Let seniors cook for one another, help one another get dressed, etc. And let young workers go start businesses or work on cancer cures or build software and help society get richer as a whole. https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-_-secrets-to-longevity-from-the-centenarians-of-okinawa-537851/amp https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-_-secre... There’s still the health care aspect to deal with (seniors can’t do heart surgery on one another), but we could decrease the tax burden of over 65s by switching to a Japanese model.
  - Arnt 3y ago
    Basically: The ones who are healthy enough to take care of others prefer to stay at home (where they often take care of a spouse).
    - wharvle 3y ago
      Yeah, US model is that we prefer independent living for seniors as long as possible, then living with family, and only then assisted living (not that it always goes that way, but that tends to be the ideal) at which point not enough seniors in assisted living are capable of helping others for the Japanese model to work. It’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem in the US—we try to keep seniors out of assisted living because it’s incredibly expensive and has a reputation for poor quality; those things are the case because they require lots of paid labor, but also don’t pay great, resulting in high costs but also often-not-great quality; so seniors who have other options tend not to enter assisted living, so capable seniors aren’t around to do any of the work that might reduce reliance of the system on paid labor…
      - zwieback 3y ago
        Not just US, saw that in Germany with my grandma and now my parents.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Japan's eldercare system has been held up recently as something Western nations should aspire to, but the reality is complicated: https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-care-of-older-people-in-japan-myths-and-realities-of-family-care https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-ca... Basically - having supportive family take care of you is great, when you have supportive family. Not everyone does. Even in Japan, with a long Confucian culture, they had problems with elder care being too much for younger family members; with elderly being neglected and left to fend for themselves; and even with elder abuse and homicide. Now try applying that to America, where the social fabric is frayed, the norm since WW2 has been for children to move away from their parents in adulthood, and many people don't even have functioning intergenerational relationships at all.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  France has many, many benefits for parents. I think people feel the pinch because growth has been at best very low for a long time while inflation has accelerated in the past few years. On the other hand, population has to stop growing at some point and, say, immigration has already been causing huge problems in France.
  - retinaros 3y ago
    no there is literally none if you earn more than the lower middle class. if you poor yes you have lot of benefits
    - mytailorisrich 3y ago
      The French do not usually realise how good they have it. Income tax depends on number of children. Nursery fees depend on income. I believe cost of school meals depend on income. Child benefits payments. I think this is now based on income but it used not to be. Cash payment at beginning of school year to help pay for school stuff, etc. though I think this is also depending on income. So sure lower earners benefit more but everyone gets something. Many countries would think this is very good. I am French and I moved to the UK a long time ago. My income tax actually went up. In the UK income tax depends on... income. Your children are irrelevant.
      - retinaros 3y ago
        so the only thing you get is 0,5 person tax deduction per children. everything else is for lower incomes. you are right its not nothing but knowing these children will pay for the current generation retirement this is a very small upside
        orwin 3y ago
        0.5 for the first and second child, 1 for the 3rd? Also you get "free" retirement semester per child (4 for giving birth for the mother, 4 for taking care of a child for at least 9 years, to be divided between both parents (biological or not). Free education is for everyone, as is free healthcare. Really cheap meals if whatever your income is, almost free to cheap music classes, almost free club participation (even if you have a QF of 10, 50% of the cost is still paid by the relevant state echelon, or the CAF). And let's be honest, if your QF is 8 or more in a big city with a single child, you aren't middle class: it mean your monthly revenue (pre income taxes, since those are influenced by your QF) is higher than 8k. A lot of benefits do disappear when your QF is higher than 6 to be fair with you, but still.
- supertrope 3y ago
  The French government just rammed through raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. Macron cited the long term demographic and knock on economic risks of not doing it. In an economically declining country that prioritizes social spending on pensions to the point of crowding out investment in the future, the young might just emigrate.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
epolanski 3y ago
Can't lie, it triggers me so much to read it's about money. It's not. Society has changed, values have changed, and arguably it's good for the planet if there's less of us. Only loser is the neverending idea of endless economic growth. We need different economic models. If we'll be poorer, so be it.
- lainga 3y ago
  In an Opinionway poll of 11,000 people for the association, two-thirds who did not have children said that they wanted to
  - epolanski 3y ago
    Yes, then they blame the economy while paying their 50k euro car lease and commenting on Facebook on their 1k phone about their 4k trip to Japan. I see so many people in Europe my age as I described blaming it on money yet spending like there's no tomorrow.
    - wharvle 3y ago
      I could have bought, say, a Tesla with cash for just what our three kids cost in medical expenses for their first five years of life. And ours weren’t that expensive. I could take a $4k trip to Japan every year for the next 20 years and not approach childcare costs before they were in school. Extra monthly housing costs for a good school district versus a more-conveniently-located and similarly-safe but worse-schools area nearby would cover the payment on a pretty damn good car. US perspective (if you couldn’t tell from the reference to high healthcare costs) but still. Kids are crazy-expensive.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - cassepipe 3y ago
      When people say they have no money they really mean they have no money to live according to the standard of living they think they deserve
rebhan 3y ago
[flagged]
sylware 3y ago
... but the population is still growing. And other EU countries have a significantly lower bith rate. This is a NOP news.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
A 20% drop since 2020 - yikes.
randomopining 3y ago
So basically natives don't reproduce, we import more immigrants who reproduce much faster, and those immigrants leaving their homeland allows more "growth space" for the existing people there. That's essentially a population replacement on the planet-scale, isn't it?
- xeornet 3y ago
  It sure is! And we act as if talking about it is absolutely prohibited.
  - randomopining 3y ago
    Yup it's a very straightforward concept (notice how my post contained nothing false, emotional, or bigoted), and yet it gets downvoted by a sect of people who simply cannot allow "this type" of free speech to exist.
    - standardUser 3y ago
      It would take a very simplistic understanding of human migration to think it is in any way "straightforward". I think the downvotes come form the extreme over-simplification present in comments like yours.
      - randomopining 3y ago
        What part of my proposition is unfleshed or unsupported by facts? It's not like some 100 page dissertation, it's a comment on HN. Of course you could spend weeks discussing anything in the detail it deserves.
      - xeornet 3y ago
        The causes may be complex, the outcome however is extremely simple. Worth noting that a few down votes have no reflection on the truth or accuracy of a particular comment, they are merely an expression of opinion and/or ignorance - in much the same way my comments are simply an opinion and/or ignorance.
retinaros 3y ago
spoiler birth rates kept decreasing for the past decade. one of the main reasons is our government shifted from helping families to helping retired people for electoral reasons. its pure evil and it happened in two way. 1. francois hollande and leftist ideals wanted more equity and decided it wasnt fair that “wealthy” people where getting government money when they had children (for them wealthy was anyone middle class or higher in france which whatever you think is way lower than usa in terms of income). they passed this law ten year ago and now only lower income families are incentivised to make children. pretty crazy and suicidal if you hear me. the wave of educated people saying not to make children for the environment due tompropaganda is alarming, at the end only people making children in france are immigrants so that they can get enough money from government to survive without a job (because the jobs dont exist we have 10% unemployment) 2. then macron presidencies just followed this wave. he got elected by boomers while the majority of the active working population voted for the oponent.the boomer generation will benefit from the retirement ponzi that is in place in france, getting back more than they paid to retirement funds during their carreers. the following generations are paying for this robbery. he then decided to reward them by raising pensions by 5% while advocating against raising salaries to tackle inflation. the major idea behind this is that families vote right rather than left , they want to pay less taxes and are not easy to control. the solution: remove the middle class from the genetic pool, import mass immigration from less developed countries that will forever be lower class and forever vote left to get enough money to survive in a country without industry and with very few blue collar or unqualified jobs.
- cassepipe 3y ago
  Wow, I didn't expect to read once in my life that François Holland was a leftist, except maybe in Valeurs Actuelles (MAGA-like in France) Are you sure the higher middle class is not having children because of the lack of state support ? Doesn't being higher middle class suggests that you own your house and have at least 3000 euros a month salary ? Isn't it enough for one child ? Why do you think people not wanting children because they are worried about the state of the planet for their children is because "propaganda" ? Are you saying climate change is propaganda ? Isn't every expert on the subject saying that we are not doing enough and that things are going to be worst even in the best scenarii ?
floxy 3y ago
Seems like France has one of the highest total fertility rates in the developed world. Nearly twice as high as South Korea. (1.7 vs 0.9 birth per woman, with 2.1 as the population replacement level). If any country is too far down the population implosion road, it would seem to be South Korea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
johnea 3y ago
I'm pretty sick of reading the ponzy scheme practitioners whine about population decreases. With 8 billion ape men on the planet, overrunning every natural support system, the human species needs a major reduction. If it hadn't reched this over-burdended level, then the reduction also wouldn't be so painful. But the real problem of "paying for it" must be held in the light of Bozo and Elon racing to see who can be the first trillionaire. There's plenty of money, it's just spent on stupid shit like Mars vacation planning instead of taking care of the population that is largely responsible for creating that wealth...
- pkaye 3y ago
  If you want to deal with luxury goods of the rich, go after Louis Vuitton. It has a market cap of $362B. The world doesn't need expensive handbags. Atleast SpaceX is lowering the cost of launching satellites into space.

26 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

“The most common reasons people gave for not having more children were concerns about the economic, social and climatic outlook, cited by 30% of those polled. Some 28% said raising children cost too much.” It occurs to me that this could be the fuel for a vicious cycle in countries where the government assumes high responsibility for social care: low birth rates create a population skewed older, which requires greater taxes on younger citizens, which places them under greater financial stress, which further suppresses the decision to have (or to have more) children.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
Another instance of short term cost/benefit ratios not matching up with long term cost/benefit ratios (for the individual and the collective), and in this case the long term spans many decades.
MasterYoda900 3y ago
Why can’t seniors living in long term care simply take care of one another? These discussions about the tax burden of seniors are about two things in the end: health care and assisted living. Assisted living means: workers to cook meals for seniors, to help them dress, to remind them to take their pills, etc. In our advanced industrialized societies, we offload that burden to young workers in their prime. In more traditional societies like Japan, senior communities don’t need young workers because they rely on one another. Let seniors cook for one another, help one another get dressed, etc. And let young workers go start businesses or work on cancer cures or build software and help society get richer as a whole. https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-_-secrets-to-longevity-from-the-centenarians-of-okinawa-537851/amp https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/lifestyle/news-_-secre... There’s still the health care aspect to deal with (seniors can’t do heart surgery on one another), but we could decrease the tax burden of over 65s by switching to a Japanese model.
- Arnt 3y ago
  Basically: The ones who are healthy enough to take care of others prefer to stay at home (where they often take care of a spouse).
  - wharvle 3y ago
    Yeah, US model is that we prefer independent living for seniors as long as possible, then living with family, and only then assisted living (not that it always goes that way, but that tends to be the ideal) at which point not enough seniors in assisted living are capable of helping others for the Japanese model to work. It’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem in the US—we try to keep seniors out of assisted living because it’s incredibly expensive and has a reputation for poor quality; those things are the case because they require lots of paid labor, but also don’t pay great, resulting in high costs but also often-not-great quality; so seniors who have other options tend not to enter assisted living, so capable seniors aren’t around to do any of the work that might reduce reliance of the system on paid labor…
    - zwieback 3y ago
      Not just US, saw that in Germany with my grandma and now my parents.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Japan's eldercare system has been held up recently as something Western nations should aspire to, but the reality is complicated: https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-care-of-older-people-in-japan-myths-and-realities-of-family-care https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-ca... Basically - having supportive family take care of you is great, when you have supportive family. Not everyone does. Even in Japan, with a long Confucian culture, they had problems with elder care being too much for younger family members; with elderly being neglected and left to fend for themselves; and even with elder abuse and homicide. Now try applying that to America, where the social fabric is frayed, the norm since WW2 has been for children to move away from their parents in adulthood, and many people don't even have functioning intergenerational relationships at all.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
France has many, many benefits for parents. I think people feel the pinch because growth has been at best very low for a long time while inflation has accelerated in the past few years. On the other hand, population has to stop growing at some point and, say, immigration has already been causing huge problems in France.
- retinaros 3y ago
  no there is literally none if you earn more than the lower middle class. if you poor yes you have lot of benefits
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    The French do not usually realise how good they have it. Income tax depends on number of children. Nursery fees depend on income. I believe cost of school meals depend on income. Child benefits payments. I think this is now based on income but it used not to be. Cash payment at beginning of school year to help pay for school stuff, etc. though I think this is also depending on income. So sure lower earners benefit more but everyone gets something. Many countries would think this is very good. I am French and I moved to the UK a long time ago. My income tax actually went up. In the UK income tax depends on... income. Your children are irrelevant.
    - retinaros 3y ago
      so the only thing you get is 0,5 person tax deduction per children. everything else is for lower incomes. you are right its not nothing but knowing these children will pay for the current generation retirement this is a very small upside
      - orwin 3y ago
        0.5 for the first and second child, 1 for the 3rd? Also you get "free" retirement semester per child (4 for giving birth for the mother, 4 for taking care of a child for at least 9 years, to be divided between both parents (biological or not). Free education is for everyone, as is free healthcare. Really cheap meals if whatever your income is, almost free to cheap music classes, almost free club participation (even if you have a QF of 10, 50% of the cost is still paid by the relevant state echelon, or the CAF). And let's be honest, if your QF is 8 or more in a big city with a single child, you aren't middle class: it mean your monthly revenue (pre income taxes, since those are influenced by your QF) is higher than 8k. A lot of benefits do disappear when your QF is higher than 6 to be fair with you, but still.
supertrope 3y ago
The French government just rammed through raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. Macron cited the long term demographic and knock on economic risks of not doing it. In an economically declining country that prioritizes social spending on pensions to the point of crowding out investment in the future, the young might just emigrate.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

epolanski 3y ago

Can't lie, it triggers me so much to read it's about money. It's not. Society has changed, values have changed, and arguably it's good for the planet if there's less of us. Only loser is the neverending idea of endless economic growth. We need different economic models. If we'll be poorer, so be it.

lainga 3y ago
In an Opinionway poll of 11,000 people for the association, two-thirds who did not have children said that they wanted to
- epolanski 3y ago
  Yes, then they blame the economy while paying their 50k euro car lease and commenting on Facebook on their 1k phone about their 4k trip to Japan. I see so many people in Europe my age as I described blaming it on money yet spending like there's no tomorrow.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    I could have bought, say, a Tesla with cash for just what our three kids cost in medical expenses for their first five years of life. And ours weren’t that expensive. I could take a $4k trip to Japan every year for the next 20 years and not approach childcare costs before they were in school. Extra monthly housing costs for a good school district versus a more-conveniently-located and similarly-safe but worse-schools area nearby would cover the payment on a pretty damn good car. US perspective (if you couldn’t tell from the reference to high healthcare costs) but still. Kids are crazy-expensive.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - cassepipe 3y ago
    When people say they have no money they really mean they have no money to live according to the standard of living they think they deserve

rebhan 3y ago

[flagged]

sylware 3y ago

... but the population is still growing. And other EU countries have a significantly lower bith rate. This is a NOP news.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

A 20% drop since 2020 - yikes.

randomopining 3y ago

So basically natives don't reproduce, we import more immigrants who reproduce much faster, and those immigrants leaving their homeland allows more "growth space" for the existing people there. That's essentially a population replacement on the planet-scale, isn't it?

xeornet 3y ago
It sure is! And we act as if talking about it is absolutely prohibited.
- randomopining 3y ago
  Yup it's a very straightforward concept (notice how my post contained nothing false, emotional, or bigoted), and yet it gets downvoted by a sect of people who simply cannot allow "this type" of free speech to exist.
  - standardUser 3y ago
    It would take a very simplistic understanding of human migration to think it is in any way "straightforward". I think the downvotes come form the extreme over-simplification present in comments like yours.
    - randomopining 3y ago
      What part of my proposition is unfleshed or unsupported by facts? It's not like some 100 page dissertation, it's a comment on HN. Of course you could spend weeks discussing anything in the detail it deserves.
    - xeornet 3y ago
      The causes may be complex, the outcome however is extremely simple. Worth noting that a few down votes have no reflection on the truth or accuracy of a particular comment, they are merely an expression of opinion and/or ignorance - in much the same way my comments are simply an opinion and/or ignorance.

retinaros 3y ago

spoiler birth rates kept decreasing for the past decade. one of the main reasons is our government shifted from helping families to helping retired people for electoral reasons. its pure evil and it happened in two way. 1. francois hollande and leftist ideals wanted more equity and decided it wasnt fair that “wealthy” people where getting government money when they had children (for them wealthy was anyone middle class or higher in france which whatever you think is way lower than usa in terms of income). they passed this law ten year ago and now only lower income families are incentivised to make children. pretty crazy and suicidal if you hear me. the wave of educated people saying not to make children for the environment due tompropaganda is alarming, at the end only people making children in france are immigrants so that they can get enough money from government to survive without a job (because the jobs dont exist we have 10% unemployment) 2. then macron presidencies just followed this wave. he got elected by boomers while the majority of the active working population voted for the oponent.the boomer generation will benefit from the retirement ponzi that is in place in france, getting back more than they paid to retirement funds during their carreers. the following generations are paying for this robbery. he then decided to reward them by raising pensions by 5% while advocating against raising salaries to tackle inflation. the major idea behind this is that families vote right rather than left , they want to pay less taxes and are not easy to control. the solution: remove the middle class from the genetic pool, import mass immigration from less developed countries that will forever be lower class and forever vote left to get enough money to survive in a country without industry and with very few blue collar or unqualified jobs.

cassepipe 3y ago
Wow, I didn't expect to read once in my life that François Holland was a leftist, except maybe in Valeurs Actuelles (MAGA-like in France) Are you sure the higher middle class is not having children because of the lack of state support ? Doesn't being higher middle class suggests that you own your house and have at least 3000 euros a month salary ? Isn't it enough for one child ? Why do you think people not wanting children because they are worried about the state of the planet for their children is because "propaganda" ? Are you saying climate change is propaganda ? Isn't every expert on the subject saying that we are not doing enough and that things are going to be worst even in the best scenarii ?

floxy 3y ago

Seems like France has one of the highest total fertility rates in the developed world. Nearly twice as high as South Korea. (1.7 vs 0.9 birth per woman, with 2.1 as the population replacement level). If any country is too far down the population implosion road, it would seem to be South Korea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

johnea 3y ago

I'm pretty sick of reading the ponzy scheme practitioners whine about population decreases. With 8 billion ape men on the planet, overrunning every natural support system, the human species needs a major reduction. If it hadn't reched this over-burdended level, then the reduction also wouldn't be so painful. But the real problem of "paying for it" must be held in the light of Bozo and Elon racing to see who can be the first trillionaire. There's plenty of money, it's just spent on stupid shit like Mars vacation planning instead of taking care of the population that is largely responsible for creating that wealth...

pkaye 3y ago
If you want to deal with luxury goods of the rich, go after Louis Vuitton. It has a market cap of $362B. The world doesn't need expensive handbags. Atleast SpaceX is lowering the cost of launching satellites into space.