The decline in the number of births should be seen in connection with the ‘gender divergence’ between increasingly progressive young women and increasingly conservative young men, observes economist Pauline Grosjean in her column.
The number of births has continued to decline in France in 2025. The fertility rate, at 1.56 children per woman, reached its lowest level since 1918. It is true that most of France’s neighbors are faring even worse, and France still holds its – rather relative – status as a champion of birth rates. This decline is a universal and long-term phenomenon, with explanations that have shifted over time.
The initial phase, which has been the most studied, is that of the demographic transition, marked by the shift from a regime of high mortality and fertility to one of low mortality and fertility. France was already an exception, having started its demographic transition in the 18th century, before other countries. Without this early transition, some economists estimate, France’s population would today stand at 250 million.
The demographic reality will hit hard, then all those western countries will compete to attract immigrants, to wipe their old asses and contribute to pension funds. Those who accept immigrants today will rule the world tomorrow.
It is already hitting hard and not just Western countries. The fertility rate is below replacement on every continent besides Africa already. Countries like China and Thailand have shrinking populations today. The global fertility rate was at 2.3 in 2023 according to the UN.
Something to keep in mind while talking about birth rate in France, is that we have a retirement system that is centered around growth. We do not have individual retirement plans, we pay each month for the currently retired people, and the workers will pay for ours when we retire. This creates a problem when the population of retired ppl is in augmentation and the active population ( working and paying taxes) is declining.
For a long time there was way more active pop than retired so we have a safety net, but it will slowly erode. And currently the political “solution” being pushed is not growing the active population (immigration for instance), but shifting the system towards a capitalisation (ie. Simililar to 401k)
The logical thing to do is to raise the retirement age, especially eith increasing life expectancy. But even suggesting something like this has half of France up in arms…
Maybe the logical thing to do wouldn’t be to bake fucking pyramid schemes into your society. I’m looking at you social security
“Most of France’s neighbors are farting even worse…”
It’s the sauerkraut.
They’ve been pulling the long con, exporting ze stinky cheezes
Outjerked
I’m sure their rulers are having no trouble reproducing.
The middle class is being bred out of the gene pool.
the ruling class is often inbred.
I’m really confused about what you’re trying to say, because it kind of sounds like replacement theory
No that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying the wealthy are trying to kill the rest of us off, or at least thin the herd. Though be it on purpose or just through incompetence is the question. It’s not a crazy Theory really.
Why wasn’t the lower class included in the statement? If it’s because they’re breeding like rabbits then “it kind of sounds like replacement theory”. I don’t know why that group was omitted but it leaves that interpretation open
Because the poor tend to be less educated in ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies. So we see rich people having as many kids as they want, and poor people having a lot of kids, often accidentally, and only the middle class moderating themselves.
I dont know whats the situation in france but in finland highly educated (middle class) people have more children than working class people.
I failed to find much data for France but it looks like for the US there is a slight downward trend with wage so no rich having lots of babies and no middle class not having babies:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/
In the US there are people who you would think we’re literally unfuckable, looks, hygiene and filthy poor and yet they find someone and have 7 kids.
I’ve seen women and men alike that almost make you want to throw up by looking at them but somehow have a fuckn kid crawling on them.
Oh for sure feels like that in Finland too but apparently statistically speaking for every one of those families there’s a bunch of people who never reproduce whereas middle class educated people have 2-3 children pretty consistently.
I don’t think they are, because labour and consumption, which brings them money, all go through us and require us. In this case (because God knows evil people have conspired since the dawn of mankind and we all know the character of our leaders, so ofc it wouldn’t be that crazy of an idea), it’s just incompetence, I think, or it’s simply seen as unimportant for globalist capitalists because labour can be outsourced or imported.
Well that’s certainly a large part of it. It’s also certainly true that a lot of the wealthy are actually really stupid, don’t think things through, and are easily fooled.
But I’m not so certain it’s just incompetence, though I’m sure that does play a big part. It’s just hard not to think maybe a little bit of it isn’t planned. When you learn about how project 2025 theorizes that the US population ideally should be 100 million it makes all the cutting health care and cutting food Aid and getting rid of vaccines take on a more Sinister light. And that was planned by the Heritage Foundation who write policy for not only the United States but large portions of the rest of the world too.
And then you start learning about these AI rationalists. Those whack jobs who think that we’re going to create an AI God who will solve all the world’s problems. And anything standing in the way of the creation of the AI God is inherently evil and any sacrifice to get to that point is worthwhile. There’s a shocking number of techboro billionaires who are of that mindset. Who truly believe that we can get rid of Labor and replace it with robots and AI and they want to do it now. And don’t look now but Peter Thiel is in France right now giving a speech about anybody who wants to regulate AI must be the Antichrist. Could a bunch of tech bro billionaires convince a lot of lazy capitalists that letting a lot of rest of us die is a good idea? Doesn’t seem far-fetched to me.
When you learn about how project 2025 theorizes that the US population ideally should be 100 million
Where does it say that? (Scroll down to see the downloads)
https://archive.org/details/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL/page/n4/mode/1up
Admittedly, I’ve only skimmed the document but I don’t recall seeing that mentioned, and I haven’t heard people say it about project 2025 before
I could find no reference to it. Would be a wild thing for them to include
Wouldn’t be surprised if that was part of a Stephen Miller-esque plan, but I would be shocked if it was publicly published. Especially in such a foundational document
So, it’s just something some people think might be true, like a bogeyman, or there’s some evidence for a statement by an author in the document somewhere?
Agreed, Miller is mighty messed up but that statement, for now, seems to be coming from nowhere
Okay, first of all thank you for all the info you just dropped on me, what a thoughtful, thorough post.
And yes, perhaps there is something like that in the Western world, specifically America. I didn’t know about the project and the numbers they wanted to reach. Scary. Because they’re not even facetious anymore, they just tell it all, it might just be actioned (and the UK, where I currently reside, often follows America’s example so there’s that…). But the future is uncertain so let’s hope the humanity of the American people will lead them somewhere else, perhaps with some balkanization involved because some ideologies are very geographically entrenched. 🙏
Okay, I read it and re read it and, unless I’m mistaken, I think he meant “rich people have money for kids, whilst the middle class doesn’t”. Which I don’t necessarily agree with (ofc rich people have money and we have less and less, I agree and it sucks, but is it behind the birth rates, really?), that’s much better than just another racist take. 😅
The article up to the paywall is just “blame women”
Y u no want to fuck with stupid fucks?
The vibe I got was blame men for not being appealing enough
And in the end, it all boils down to:
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”
If the system makes raising children expensive, pushes for individualism, career, productivity and consumption while making high paying jobs located in child unfriendly cities, you get this as an outcome. And of course systemic changes are immediately wiped off the table because a small number at the top profit from the system as it is.
also COL areas
Exactly this
Okay, I spent all of my late teenage years to early adulthood in France so I feel I can chime in: French people, like most Westerners I’ve met, don’t know what they should do with their lives and the burden of responsibility of having children is simply not that appealing compared to having fun, either partying and doing coke or collecting figurines and dakimakuras. Even romance and love is fucked because marriage is seen as outdated and so serious so life long monogamy, for many, is just meh or scary. People don’t date for any objective, they just get together cause they’re lonely or sexually starved. And if they do understand what they should be doing, they’ll be old and weary, and either the psychological scars will stop them from fully commiting to something or biology will have done its thing and now you’re 42 trying to have your first kid, of course it’s gonna be difficult.
Now, whilst I have my value judgement on it, I’m not making any right now, I’m just describing what I’m seeing. Hedonism, consumerism, and an ideological vacuum, means that people won’t be making big commitments like having children. Of course the Muslims will, that makes sense, no surprise over there.
PS: and no, it’s not a financial thing. The immigrants with no support or family money that goes back several generations, working shitty min wage jobs, have and want to have children. It’s an ideological difference.
PS2: oh yeah and the current wave of redpill and casual misogyny on one side and “sexual liberation” and casual pornography on the other isn’t helping either. It just makes both sexes less interested and more cautious, even when there’s always good people in the bunch. That’s gonna have to be addressed as well.
and no, it’s not a financial thing
Over here in Estonia, we have observed that it is a financial thing. Research has shown that parental pay (the state pays X% of your previous salary for up to 475 days of being on parental leave - and as a sidenote I think the measure is wrong, because it means the rich and poor get different sums) encouraged people who already had children to have a second or third child.
But the measure had limits. It did not measurably encourage people to have their first child, and the birth rate continues to decline despite the measure.
I don’t know the details because I’m not a parent. On personal notes, if suddenly, I discovered myself in a stable relationship and a hypothetical partner asked me if I want a child, I would reply “do I look like a big wheel? I can’t afford that”.
Hypothesis: today’s young people know a bit more about finances than previous generations. They know that one should not have a child before one has stopped renting and bought a place to live in. This being impossible early on, decisions are delayed and the suitable time passes. Grandparents who could potentially help with child care start needing care themselves. Also, people increasingly live at distance from their parents, so grandparents’ chances of helping with child care are reduced even if they aren’t elderly yet.
As for relationships, research indicates that they break more often. Arguably the reason is that people don’t want to remain in a badly functioning relationship, and haven’t got the skills to keep it from breaking. (I don’t even want to get started about dating sites - it’s not profitable for dating sites if people find compatible partners. It’s their customer disappearing and stopping to pay.)
Skills could be taught in school. Dating sites could be told to redesign themselves, accounting for sociological knowledge. Social security for parents should be effective enough to support a single parent who is renting their place of living, and should last long enough for a child to reach shool age. Such a policy should have constitutional guarantees (not changeable with 1 parliament). If this was done, population decline would slow over here. Not sure about France.
Finances play a part, sure, but it cannot be the main one because, again, truly poor, barely off the boat immigrants keep the French birthrate from falling dramatically. It cannot just be that, it can be a factor but not the main one. People in Gaza have children and they’re occupied, have nothing, and are murdered on a regular basis…
And why can’t you have kids whilst renting? Like I said, most of the people I know who have kids are fully employed but make little money and are renters. And that’s okay, they have their children in a nice, safe environment and that’s what matters. “Money will come, we’ll reach some economic stability, it’ll be fine, God has our back” is what these poor immigrants are thinking, and it might be the reason for the difference in attitudes even though they’re considerably poorer and with less of a helpful network in their new countries.
Another hypothesis: people who recently immigrated more typically live in settings where an older family member can help with child care. Could it be true?
As for Gaza, it’s not suitable comparison material due to high mortality. What is being sought is a solution that works for low-mortality societies where care for the elderly is a considerable job and budget line.
I think that providing people with total economic certainty of being able to raise a child without risk of poverty, early in their life (before their parents start needing care) might hit a nail. Not sure if it’s the only nail, though.
It’s not the only nail, and how big that nail is depends a lot on your cultural background. The immigrants have basically nothing, man, they escaped their countries to rebuild because of war, famine or simply economic uncertainty, whilst the locals have or should have strong family ties and more financial ease, and these are the ones not reproducing, usually. I’d say that, for those who want kids, this is certainly an impediment, a deterrent, but for those who don’t this doesn’t matter and many simply don’t. They don’t consider it an extremely rewarding, valuable and developmentally necessary part of life, so they don’t think about it, and sometimes they do when it’s already kinda late too.
What a terrible take. Having children doesn’t mean someone has their life figured out and has an objective in life. Lots of people have kids just because they think it’s something you should do. I keep reading articles about how more and more kids go to school without even most basic skills like climbing stairs. Parents just give them phones and ignore them. What objective did they have when they decided to have kids? At the same time people without kids don’t just have fun and do coke. Like, WTF? People pursue their interests, study, travel, volunteer… They don’t wake up when their 40 with psychological scars realizing they wasted their lives.
Some people have an idea about what to do with their lives and some don’t. Having kids has nothing to do with it.
At the same time people without kids don’t just have fun and do coke
Right?? We can’t afford coke
I’ve read recently that coke is really cheap now. €15,000/kg.
We seem to have very different notions of “cheap.” Then again, I have absolutely no idea how many noses that are. I’d guess over a thousand, which would still put it at 15€/nose or evening. Not what I’d consider cheap.
It’s cheapest it has ever been. And you don’t have to snort it all. Stash it and sell when the price goes up again.
You mean coke futures?
I’d guess you have to when buying by acreage
Well, if they don’t take parenthood seriously and just have kids because they’re not cautious or think “it’s the right time”, that’s not good, of course, but that doesn’t invalidate what I’m saying. Parenthood is the decision to make your entire life revolve around your lifelong project, a product of love. Where, even more so than with a partner, you discover the beauty and sweetness of giving, of selflessness, which is virtuous. For me, if you make the conscious decision not to have kids (biological, adopted, or even being the primary caretaker of a nephew for instance), you will never be a fully developed human being, because you never experienced what adulthood is really about: responsibility, and the pleasure of taking it. And of course if you’re a categorically bad parent, which kinda makes you a bad person altogether, you are this way because you’re not taking this responsibility seriously, and you’re also an incomplete human being.
And again, if this was the current Western mentality, these headlines wouldn’t be a thing. Now, whether you feel like every population, or even just the European one, should at least be healthily above replacement, or not, that’s something else. Personally, idc (perhaps I should but I haven’t thought about it much, ngl), but what I do know is that not prioritising childrearing, and not seeing it as a fundamental developmental milestone for every adult, are behind these falling birthrates.
You need to have kids to be a fully developed adult.
No, you shouldn’t have kids until after you’re a fully developed adult…
If the your most impressive achievement is have kids to ride the coattails of, you probably didn’t do anything that important with your life.
This is the second example ITT of what I was talking about, lol. Again, you’re free to have your value judgment on parenthood, just like me. What’s undeniable, at least to me, is that the failing birthrates in “developed countries” have this, amongst other perhaps less relevant but still existing characteristics, at its core.
I read different takes on having kids before but this is just… wow. What you’re describing is some extremely idealized idea or parenthood that applies to maybe 1% of parents in the world. Most people have kids because they help with work and support you when your old. In developed countries most people have kids because culturally it’s just something you do, because it’s a status symbol, because they can’t afford birth control or simply because they are bored. For many parents it’s a completely selfish act, they just want something they can control and use to realize their unfulfilled dreams. At the same time every normal adult has to be responsible all the time, be it at work, with their friends, their partner. Thinking that taking care of a kid is the only way someone is truly responsible is just silly.
I don’t know what type of bubble you grew up in but real world doesn’t look the way you think it does. Different people have different ideas for life and having kids does not define anyone. Looking at everyone through the prism of parenthood is some really weird obsession.
1% ? Both my mom and my MIL are obsessed with me and my wife, respectively. Same with my brother, her brother. Like, that’s not true, that’s not what I’ve seen. My friends with kids are obsessed with them, some to the point of losing their minds on a regular basis in worry, lol. Idk man, I think you’re letting your bad, very geographically localized (like you said, “developed countries”) experience blind you to a wider, very different reality. And yes, for many, maybe the world’s majority, that’s how it goes. It doesn’t mean they won’t have their own psychological pathologies and forgo virtue at times, we’re talking about people here, but trust me that for them, having children is their dream come true, the main one, and they would literally rather die than lose them or anything too tragic come to them.
Yeah, if we’re talking Korea, Japan, France, Germany, etc, things are different, but that’s due to a mixture of trauma and an ideology that rejects responsibility and doesn’t value parenthood as much as it values the way less stressful “fun” (which in this case, is sweet labour, but whatever), and you’re talking from that perspective so of course we disagree on the value of parenthood, but you cannot disagree (or haven’t yet, at least) that those very beliefs are what’s at the core of the failing birthrates… which is all I was trying to talk about here, tbh, I wasn’t expecting this long of an exchange regarding virtue, parenthood and Western values. 😅 It was nice but I just came from a long shift, lol.
I will explicitly disagree with you here
What you’re pointing to as the cause - changing perceptions of children, and them no longer being seen as a milestone - is simply a symptom of the root cause: Children are no longer a boon. They’re now a burden
This what the poster above you was saying. Children used to be valuable as a source of labor, and to provide for you when you can no longer work
I don’t think this is the only cause, but I do think it’s the primary reason for the shift in mentality
Are you telling me that children were only/mostly seen as valuable in the West/developed countries because of the labour they provide? And now that work has changed they simply don’t wanna have them and that’s at the core of this ? Even I don’t wanna believe that about this society.
I’m not going to debate you on your moral stance, nor on your conclusions.
But your own experience is a pretty narrow sample size and your generalization is pretty substantial. I don’t think you do justice to the diversity of people out there.
My personal experience with people in France is different, for example, I won’t tell you your argument is invalid over that, but it’s a sample size as big as your own, so it should be weighed.
That’s a very polite way to engage, I appreciate it. Why do you think french people aren’t having kids, friend?
In my perspective there are two aspects: social security and secularisation.
People that are uncertain about their being able to support themselves and afford a house are less likely to procreate.
There’s less influence of the Catholic church, whose message was to procreate.
Both lead to a more solitary life style and lessen faith in the general direction of society.
Mmm, a very reasonable answer. Secularisation definitely plays a part in the larger ideological differences between this population and others. There’s certainly been a very real and drastic economic decline in France since the 70s or something, and my friends’ parents have made it very clear several times, lol. But again, the fact that immigrants, which are arguably the poorest group, are perhaps the most fertile of the bunch points toward yet another ideological/psychological difference (maybe not having as much makes them panic more than others that simply think “God will provide”? Idk) that is deeper and more impactful than financials, IMO.
Perhaps the native thinks of their own childhood as the baseline, and feels like they would be unable to provide, while the immigrant came from comparable economic conditions they have now, or even worse, so they don’t see issues with it.
There’s also the fact that the immigrant is often religious and believes he must have children.
Maybe you’re right, but that’s a mistaken view by the locals, as seen by the immigrants having kids and not just starving on the streets but surviving and even thriving, perhaps not super comfortably, but still doing so. And yes, belief, ideology, they’re at the core of this situation, I agree with you there. 👍
Hedonism, consumerism, and an ideological vacuum
If that’s causing the declining birthrate, why is the birthrate in North Korea dropping so rapidly?
Probably other reasons related to the fact it’s a hermit kingdom isolated from the world, maybe.
