The Nordic countries have the best social safety nets in the world and their native birthrate is still dismal. What short of significant financial incentives would you do? The correlation is women's right to control their reproductive timing and access to the highest levels of the workforce. In almost every country where women aren't second class citizens, birth rate plummets.
Because no western country has tried lowering housing costs yet. And I mean actually lowering housing costs, not just talking about it on TV, posturing, political promises or making stupid mistakes like rent-freezes and such.
But blaming the poor young people priced out of their own country for not breeding, and just bringing third world immigrants with no living standards, is much easier than improving the living standards of your own population.
As long as you treat housing like a speculative investment that is squeezing the young to get a much larger return for the older owners, instead of treating it like shelter and a basic necessity for any family, why are you surprised young people don't breed anymore? The precarious job market isn't doing them any favors either.
Mass migration that puts more pressure on affordable housing and on the low-end jobs market is not the solution here. That breeds long term instability, segregation, distrust, and leads to political extremism. The solution is fixing housing, which nobody actually wants to do, because "housing prices must go UP", and the ruling asset owning class is making a killing from it.
Its not just lowering housing costs. Raising a child does not just include housing cost, it also includes a ton of other costs, and since families have become nuclear and both parents work, it is hard to birth more children since cost/time that you need to spend on child rearing will be more. What is the solution to this? No idea
Yeah, take it further. Allow single-income households to prosper and be able to afford homes & children. Watch one-parent from each household start flocking to stay at home, maintaining a well-functioning household that's not dependent on external "services", and then having a bunch more than 1.5 kids is a possibility and probably a very appealing thought versus what it is now.
I think the housing crises has caused a lot of it. I am trying to have kids in my mid 30s, in large part because it took that long until I was financially stable. I can't even imagine what it must be like for a non software engineer.
Maybe a lower population -> lower housing prices -> easier to start a family will cause some sort of equilibrium.
That's not how real estate pricing works in the real world capitalism. Germany's population has been on decline for ~30 years due to demographics, yet housing has been getting more and more expensive, far outpacing wage growth in the last few decades, especially after the QE bull run from ~2013, so much so that owning your home is impossible for the average German.
Why is that you wonder? That's not how free market economy should work right? If now there is less demand for a good due to population shrinkage, then prices should come down right?
Well, that's because housing is not a good, it's a speculative investment asset, so as soon as people die and are not replaced, their free houses don't magically end up in the hands of those who would need them the most to buy at a discount, but end up on the "free market" being bough by existing rich home owners, investors, speculators and publicly listed real-estate conglomerates, using their existing assets and capital as leverage to buy even more houses for their investment portfolio. And governments and banks have ensure the policies to make sure this asset keeps going up, up, up.
When housing is an investment vehicle, then it can never be affordable, regardless of the population decline.
Like a commenter above said, which explains why home prices are not coming down despite population shrinkage: "people are not competing for houses, piles of money are. The bigger piles are winning."
> Germany's population has been on decline for ~30 years due to demographics
The thing is – within that time frame it hasn't, actually. There have been some years with slight decreases, but those have been balanced by other years with increases, and compared to 1990 population is actually definitively slightly up (83.2 millions last year vs. 79.8 millions). Combined with a decreasing average household size (2.27 in 1991 vs 1.99 in 2019) and internal migration those things by themselves will probably generate enough pressure on the housing markets in and around the prospering parts of the country, even without any added financial shenanigans on top.
As you rightly say real estate is treated more as an investment, so those who have bought in will never sell for a price lesser than what they bought in for. Hence real estate prices will never crash, unless something disastrous or apocalyptic happens to that country/area.
Then implement a bunch if them. Pornography is know to decrease drive. There are tax benefits that can make things happen as well. The desire to get it done just needs to emerge.
Europeans aren't having kids because they aren't having sex drive. They are having sex, just with protection, as they don't want kids, because the job and housing markets are too fucked to support a family without massive stress and anxiety for the parents.
Fix those first so we can have a stable income and affordable housing from a young age, and then we'll take off the condoms.
