cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/53484820
If you scroll to the bottom of the article, they post their sources, including studies published in peer reviewed journals. I’m sure most of us see this headline and go, “Duh,” but here we have hard data. Every time our billionaire and political overlords wring their hands about birthrates, the collective response from all of us should be, “fuck you, pay me, or kick rocks.”
It’s nice to see an actually study confirming what I have been saying for years now.
The only surprise for me is that this is happening in places like Germany which have higher salaries rather than only places like my native Portugal which for Europe has shit salaries.
I have a Finance Industry background and lived in Britain for a decade before I came back to my home country, and Britain was about 5 - 10 years ahead in their realestate bubble, so it was painfully obvious to me when I arrive in Portugal that high house prices (in a country with shit salaries in European terms) was causing the country to have one of the most aged populations in the World:
So because of high housing costs relative to incomes and insecure employment (for certain early in one’s career, for some for a lot longer), people massivelly delay just starting a family until they can earn enough to actually be able to afford their own home, then delay the having their first child until they can actually afford the time off work for one member of a couple or having climbed enough the career path that they have an actual secure job were they get paid time off AND until they can afford the costs of raising a child AND can afford to move to a house with a room for the child (or at least have a prospect of being able to do so in a few years before the child reachers their teenage years).
So all this so that in their mid to late 30s they can have just 1 child.
Then for the second child it’s yet more “climb the career until you can afford to raise more children” AND “earn enough to upsize your home to have one more room” and at this point people start worring about the risks for the mother and the baby of “having a child in your 40s”, plus people are getting a bit fed up with the decades of nothing but fighting (extra nasty in Portugal which has a “working long hours” culture) just to be able to get another kid
So most people give up on having a 2nd child - the overwhelming majority of couples I know here only have 1 child.
Remember, 2 children per person is still below the 2.4 average need to merely maintain population size.
(Oh, and on the “funny” side, all this shit then leads to government choosing to import immigrants “because working-age population is falling” which then leads to other problems due to the higher rate of cultural misunderstanding and collisions when people with different cultures arrive in large numbers without enough time to integrate, all of which boosts the anti-immigration Far-Right)
The solution, IMHO is two fold: