Achtung baby
anxious Austrian, Emil Reich, predicted that Germany would have a population of 150m in 1980 and as many as 200m by the year 2000. It seemed plausible at the time. Germany had a high birth rate and a falling mortality rate. Reich’s prediction, in his book “Germany’s Swelled Head”, turned out to be completely wrong. By the early 1980s East and West Germany had a combined fertility rate lower than anywhere in the world except Denmark and the Channel Islands.
Another explanation is immigration. Germany has not only accepted a lot of people in the past decade—it has taken them from countries where large families are the norm. In 2017 Syrian women in Germany had 20,100 babies, up from just 2,300 three years earlier. Afghans and Iraqis had more than 5,000 each. Tomas Sobotka, a researcher at the Vienna Institute of Demography, estimates that about half the rise of Germany’s fertility rate in the past few years is explained by immigration.
The other explanation for the baby boomlet is that Germany has made it easier to raise children. What crushes birth rates, whether in Europe or East Asia, is opening higher education and attractive jobs to women while continuing to expect mothers to do the great majority of child care and housework. If a society forces women to choose between jobs and motherhood, many will keep working.
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