Hungary 1.4 to 1.6 to ?

I have mentioned many times how countries seeking to inspire people to have more children mostly fails. They offer too little to make a difference, their approaches are nowhere near bold enough. And too often they focus on short-term bonuses and benefits, rather than long-term. Free child-care is one of the best policies.

Hungary has already increased their fertility rate in recent times, but they are still nowhere near the magical figure of 2.1. So now they have put in the biggest effort of any country so far, costing an incredible 5% and 6% of Hungary’s GDP.

The measures include:

  • Tax breaks for mothers with 4+ children
  • Student loan forgiveness for families with 3+ children
  • Housing subsidies for newly wed couples
  • Car purchase subsidies for larger families

It will be interesting to see the results. My guess is that they’ll get to 1.8 at best. For most countries population decline is a losing battle, and definitely more so if you are not keen on immigration.

China Needs Some Shock and Awe

Incremental improvements to what China offers to their people to inspire them to have more children will never be enough. They need to think of what a decade’s worth of bribes will look like and put them all on the table, all at once, so people take notice and seriously consider it. Otherwise, it is like the proverbial frog getting boiled.

This is pathetic:

By 2026, China will aim to offer nationwide full reimbursement for all policy-covered medical expenses related to childbirth, including prenatal checkups, the administration said.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/no-out-of-pocket-expenses-childbirth-china-2026-2025-12-15/

How To Get More White Citizens

NOTE: I am a putting on my futurist hat, and making predictions based on current trends. I do not want these ideas to happen. GDP is evil and capitalism will fail…

There is a trending opinipon and totally due to the racism of Donald Trump: the only good immigrants are white.

Combine that with the requirement that capitalist societies need never-ending growth (as measured by the GDP), and we have western nations with low fertility rates relying on immigrants to boost the GDP…

And we get to a point, whether spoken out loud or barelun disguised, that western countries will start fighting over the available white immigrants. And that creates some crazy scenarios!

Bidding war – white migrants might be offered incentives to move to a particular country. As each country tries to outdo the others, we will find out what such an immigrant is “worth”. Especially if they have skills and/or a lot of money.

Not allowed to leave – if a population numbers emergency is declared, citizens might not be allowed to move to another country. Then we have the ackward scenrario where tourists might defect!

Rampant breeding – in poorer white countries, people might churn out babies, not just because of massive government incentives, but actually wishing that some of their kids will move to another country and send back the riches.

State breeding – if citizens are unwilling to make enough babies, the state might pay donors and surrogates, and create babies that will be state-owned and operated. And then placed in a foster care system.

The shortage of white people to welcome to your land will inevitably lead to decisions on what is the next best. Christianity is likely to be a key factor, and so people from strongly Christian countries could be welcome. Asians as well, especially the paler kind. Chinese quite possibly, if they are allowed to leave. If they do, they could become the consumers China needs, while also sending money home.

The winner, the last (western) survivor of capitalism, will be the country that inspires their population to have many more kids, goes hard early to import the very best migrants at any cost, and keeps their country a desirable place to live, by all measures. And they start ASAP!

721 Schools Close in Greece

Greece currently has a fertility rate of only 1.3, and the effects are already kicking in. This year more than 700 schools (out of 13,000 total) will close because they do not have 15 students to remain viable. To be fair, the minimum student requirement has been rising, meaning the huge numbers are a bit misleading. Even so:

…the student population is expected to be approximately 1.21 million for the 2025-2026 academic year, a drop of over 150,000 students since 2018-2019.

Although predictably the schools are mostly rural, some are even urban, and even in Athens.

Along with the low fertility rate, people are also emigrating for financial reasons, adding to the problem

Wars hasten population decline – who knew?

Russia’s population is decreasing quite rapidly. WSJ says:

At least 150,000 Russians are dead on the battlefield, according to Western estimates. Nearly a million fled the country after the war began. The number of births is at its lowest in more than two decades, with bigger-than-average drops in babies born in some regions closest to the fight. 

In 2024 Putin promised to spend a whopping $157B. over 6 years, to encourage more baby-making. As we have seen in many other countries, typically incentives are never sufficient to reverse the trend.

Even before the Ukraine war, roughly 300,000 people emigrated from Russia each year. I would not be surprised if Russia finds (unfair) ways to stem that.

And Russia has another issue that most countries don’t have – men drinking themselves to death. They are dying 10+ years younger than Western countries

Korean Government Encourages Blind Dates

As an experiment it was interesting, from 50 men and 50 women, just over 50% of them rated each other in the top 3 matches, for 27 couples who can now go on a date.

But just like UBI, it is a limited experiment. There will be no desire to expand it greatly. And if governments want to get people breeding again, half-hearted efforts will not achieve it.

The lucky couples get a $225 prize package of restaurant and cultural event vouchers.

Cuba down 18% in one year

Low fertility affects populations, but slowly, because people live for 80 years or so.

Cuba doesn’t have a fertility problem, it has a “I don’t want to live here any more” problem. There can be a snowball effect – the more of your relatives have fled to Florida, the more appealing it becomes to go yourself. Because normally family (and jobs and friends) is what keeps people from fleeing.

Sorry, it does also have a problem with the fertility rate being only 1.4. That could be due to fertile people being the most likely to leave. Over 65s are the only age category that is growing in numbers in Cuba.

Over 850,000 people have fled Cuba for the United States in the last 3 years, reports the Latin Times. For a country with only 11 million people, that is highly significant

Russia goes Authoritative / Next Level on Fertility

It has been clear over the last few years that incentives and positive reinforcement are not helping stem reduced fertility levels in countries globally. At best they are making the decline less bad, but not stopping it. For counties with an iron grip over their citizens, unimaginable responses might occur. Keep in mind China’s historical, rigid one-child policy (unless you were rich).

Now, Russia is starting to get aggressive. Lawmakers have proposed a ban on “propaganda of conscious refusal to bear children,” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-proposes-ban-child-free-lifestyle-rcna172616

When the parameters are ill-defined, and the punishments severe, expect the Russian populace to be very careful about any mention of choosing to not have children, anything gay, ideas on global over-population, and so on.

It won’t work, of course. Baby-making is such a serious part of life, people will still make their own conclusions and decisions.

Then what will follow will be punishment (not taxation) for those who go child-less. China will do the same and all other communist countries. Capitalist countries will rely on immigration, for now.

11 Million Empty Homes in Japan

Japan has millions of abandoned rural houses for sale.

The glut delights foreigners, who’ve been able to buy one for as little as US$23,000. But underlying the surplus are meaningful shifts in Japan’s culture. Demographic and economic patterns – including a shrinking population and migration from the countryside to cities – are combining to create a “ghost town” problem in Japan.

Japan’s 8.5 million abandoned rural homes, or akiya, have become a ‘cheap’ option for foreigner owners | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)

The Japanese word for the abandoned houses is akiya and the last official count (in 2018) was 8.5 million, so the 11 million estimate seems reasonable.

Population decline is of course part of the problem, but so is people moving to Tokyo where new housing is still being built.

Something kinda cool about Japan’s predicament is that they are giving us glimpse of what will happen in most countries, and happen soon. There will be abandoned housing, but it won’t be uniform across the nation. It will be clunky, with some towns reaching a tipping point where they become unviable, and end up as ghost towns. While ghost towns sound cool and feel like something to take advantage of, I think the 50% of Detroit’s empty houses, during a housing crisis, says it all.

Nobody Wants 9 Billion People

There are plenty of individuals and communities who want more babies, and more people. I am an example of that – my former wife and I only stopped at three children because we had to – otherwise we adore them and would have wanted at least one more. Churches of course like a larger flock and famously ban contraception, or the like. Entire countries are currently actively promoting having more kids, because of the demographic and financial nightmares they fill soon be facing.

But nobody, and I mean that literally, thinks that Planet Earth should collectively have more people.

More people would be a drain on resources of course, but even though technology has in recent decades more than countered that, making sure that people have food, clothes, plastic and fuel is only one consideration. Every single aspect of more people means a worse for all the animals and plants, their diversity and flourishing, on our planet. It is selfishness from the only species that knows how to be so selfish.

With the expectation that nobody is going to argue for more of us, then the serious question, and one rarely asked and never answered, is how few of thus there should be. Given our destructiveness, and green, and damage, one answer is that we should exit from the equation altogether.

I would argue that there is a place for us – even, at a stretch, a technological us – even potentially us on planets that can be grown instead of destroyed – and maybe all we need is some tough love to make the hard decisions.

That hard decision is to – collectively, in aggregate – have fewer children. Dramatically so, so that our numbers are decimated.

I say tough love because we have well proven it is too hard of an ask for us to voluntarily make, and the harm we are doings means any natural decline will be too slow. The dictates of capitalism, and its thirst for growth, suggests that degrowth is not something we will allow.

So all that leaves is for someone, for some people, to make that decision for us. Few people would condone actual slaughter or effective slaughter (concocted diseases for example), yet I am surprised no super-villian has emerged who is actively doing it. And no, Bill Gates is not that guy.

But persuasion is a tool we can use. And I am okay with taking that angle. Simple persuasion, as in advertising, is unlikely to be effective. But radical actions, forms of civil disobedience, and wanton destruction, of tearing apart the fabrics of all the negative sides of society and putting the spotlight on the harms of capitalism and overconsumption, might persuade enough people that bringing more kids into this world feels wrong.

Radical actions of the few, in arenas that are not expecting it, in fragile systems that are barely staying afloat anyway, is what I am talking about.