Why Demographic Suicide? The Puzzles of European Fertility

a volume of essays on topics in demography honoring Paul demeny would be incomplete without asking why large parts of the european civilization that produced Paul, a gentleman and a scholar in the finest sense of both words, have decided, through the aggregate decisions of women and men, to commit gradual “demographic suicide.” one would think that potential mothers and fathers, facing the promise of peace and relative prosperity, would choose to have children. But, puzzlingly, many people across europe are choosing to have fewer children than will produce stable, much less growing, populations. demography is destiny. the consequences of shifts in fertility (even as moderated or even partially reversed in the future) will have substantial consequences on many aspects of life: aging, health care costs, marital and family relationships, labor markets, immigration, the fiscal sustainability of social insurance programs, and schooling. if anything like the current fertility trends persists, the outcome will have profound consequences for what it means to be a “nation” and what are acceptable social relationships within a nation-state. Current projections of the rate of natural increase imply either unsustainably large reductions in the working-age population or substantially higher levels of the influx of “non-nationals” (or a little of both). the fact that women and men are making choices that result in lifetime childlessness must be symptomatic of a revolution in human affairs. leaving a posterity has, for thousands of years of human history, been an integral part of the very definition of prosperity and happiness for the typical person. those who remained childless—priests and nuns, monks and eunuchs—were recognized as choosing radically different paths to human meaning and happiness or were regarded as unfortunate.