I am did a series of articles this week about the effects of low birth rates on Finland and Finns.
When I have gone through various estimates of, for example, the number of people of Finnish origin in the future, my mouth has dropped open – the effects of the decrease in the birth rate are so amazingly large!
I was already thinking about why economic pages don't write about the development of the birth rate as much as about inflation, and I wondered how often policy measures are correctly evaluated from the perspective of the birth rate.
Birth the decline is a global phenomenon, be it Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Hungary, Iran, the United States, China, most African countries or Japan. It has been going on since 2012. The interesting thing about the phenomenon is that no one knows what causes the decline in birth rates in different parts of the world.
There are plenty of explainers and explanations, but the problem is the sum of so many factors that almost no one has a picture of the situation, let alone an analysis.
On September 24, The New York Times published an extensive of the article about how two centuries of population growth seems to be turning to decline.
“If the birth rate in the world remained the same as it is in the United States now, the world's population would drop from a peak of 10 billion to less than two billion 300 years later, over ten generations,” the article wrote.
Nordic countries have long been considered as a kind of model countries for family policy. Even in Finland, the total fertility rate of women of childbearing age has still dropped to 1.25.
For the population to regenerate and stay the same size without immigration, that number would have to be 2.1.
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Polarization reduces opportunities for relationships.
With the current one in terms of birth rate, Finland is roughly among the ten weakest countries in the world.
The main one is South Korea. There, the statistical authorities said on Wednesday of last week that last year's birth rate fell to the lowest level in history, to 0.72. In the last quarter of the year, the figure in South Korea was already 0.68.
Birth the decline is influenced by many factors, from the rise in the standard of living to the improvement of contraception, from climate change to the most diverse cultural reasons and the development of technology.
On the one hand, the forces that push childbearing away seem to be getting stronger. At the same time, the forces that used to encourage childbearing – for example, the security of old age and cultural pressure – are weakening.
One an interesting side plot of the declining birth rate is related to the increasing use of smart devices and entertainment, social media and partly the resulting polarization.
Väestöliitto research professor Anna Rotkirch said in an interview that smart devices have been researched to undermine relationships. The attention is almost always elsewhere, on the cell phone or laptop screen.
While before the majority of young people's relationships ended in marriage or the birth of a child, now the majority end in divorce.
Research has also clearly shown that the increase in polarization and hate speech on social media and in society is taxing the birth rate.
They don't even want to meet the sectarians of the foreign bubble.
According to the US-based 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, which studies global trust, people who used to have a neutral attitude towards members of the opposite political camp now feel fear and hatred towards them.
Americans today are increasingly opposed to dating, marrying, or even living in close proximity to those with different political views. evaluate Ngaine Woods, Dean of the University of Oxford. In Turkey, almost eight people out of ten don't want their own daughter to marry someone who votes for a party they don't like.
Author Pontus Purokuru seal Wounded land– in his book the effects of the revolution in communication on human life succinctly like this: “People build a huge communication network in which they evaluate each other. They compete for popularity and argue about how to talk about something. Later, the system will come to be known as the 'misery machine'.”
The author is HS's financial reporter.
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