Europe’s Future: Lots of old people, no babies

September 3, 2006 · Filed Under Uncategorized · View Comments 

by Eric Garland

I talk about aging populations incessantly. Most of the popular discussion of the future tends to downplay how big this will be. I suspect this is because Baby Boomers are more comfortable talking about how “peppy” they are going to be in retirement (which is true) rather than consider the real dynamic of a vastly grey society. It could be problematic to have lots of old folks with few young people to work and support society. Plus, I think it will be weird when shuffleboard surpasses soccer as the world’s favorite sport.

But Europe has it really bad off. America’s got lots of Latino immigrants boosting the population, but Europeans like Italy, Greece, and Spain have had incredibly low birth rates — less than 1.3 babies per couple. There’s a huge question of who’s going to run Italy when everybody is old, and the kids have left to work in Milan, Rome, Dublin, and London.

This is a big, big, big trend.

The International Herald Tribune chimes in on this with “Europe, East and West, wrestles with falling birthrates.” Evidently, Czech Republic, Latvia, and Slovenia are even worse off than their Western neighbors — 1.2 babies per couple! The lack of social services and stagnant economic options makes it difficult to afford kids, and so…they aren’t.

Who’s going to be European?

I’d like to juxtapose this with the recent racial tension in France and elsewhere. There are plenty of people who’d like to live in Europe — people in miserable situations rotting in the kleptocracies of West Africa, just for starters. But Europe has had a terrible time integrating people who come to live permanently — the riots in France last November were a good sign of that. But when your own people only produce 1.3 babies per couple, over time, I think you should expect Europe to start looking a lot like, say, the French World Cup squad:

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