Poor Spain looks like it’s gangrened. Strangely, there’s complete silence in Spain on this crime against reproductive rights. No manifestations, no protests. Only a quiet dying off on the altar of freedom and choice.
These are simply numbers and colors but think about the human tragedies behind them.
Palestine, a post WWI British Mandate terminated in 1948 by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. Arab & Muslim countries must validate the Israeli victory over the British which forced them to return their mandate back to the UN in 1947 after Begin’s Irgun blew of the British military headquarters located in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
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Clarissa, do you have any idea why the Med in general and Spain in particular has such falling birth rates? I would expect that more in the North..
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The EU was particularly brutal to Southern Europe. Spain joined the EU emotionally, seeing it as sign that they were finally accepted as real Europeans. This emotional, rah-rah approach led to the wiping out of the Spanish economy.
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“The EU was particularly brutal to Southern Europe”
More specifically, among other things, the EU’s dogged insistence on introducing and keeping the Euro (despite no real reason for it to exist anymore), the lack of transfers (necessary for any currency spread over very different economic areas), the lack of a common fiscal policy and German economic dominance (until recently a thing) mean that industrial economies are prioritized and service economies (in the south) are screwed unless they manage to industrialize which would lead to a whole bunch of other problems.
Countries that could integrate into the German supply chain (like Poland and Romania) have been growing a lot in recent years, but nascent German industrial collapse (due to a symphony of terrible German policies that they are still obsessively pursuing) will put and end to that.
It’s also not just Europe, fertility has already collapse in places as seemingly unrelated as Iran and South Korea (lowest fertility in the world).
Infertility is baked into neoliberalism and until something replaces it as a dominant socio-economic paradigm things won’t get appreciably better.
Also, finally, fertility swings are not that unusual for populations but neoliberal policy of trying to counteract declining fertility with immigration just makes things worse.
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Exactly, and it’s also the neoliberal narratives that are very inhospitable to child-bearing.
Those hysterical women in the Spanish Parliament who wail over imaginary Palestinian children because it’s easier than to notice their own childlessness is a glaring example.
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Exactly, and it’s also the neoliberal narratives that are very inhospitable to child-bearing.
Those hysterical women in the Spanish Parliament who wail over imaginary Palestinian children because it’s easier than to notice their own childlessness is a glaring example.
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my father’s family is from Spain and he acts like it’s some kind of paradise because in the town he has a home many people own an apt in town and another at the beach. He says someone who works at the equivalent of Target can afford to buy a home. I’ve gotten into pointless discussions/ arguments with him because I have said unemployment is high and many people aren’t starting families. And I’ve said his town doesn’t represent a universal Spanish lifestyle. How would you explain what the low birth rate means about Spain being a successful country or now.
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It’s not just me who’s saying this. The entire Spanish cultural scene – writers, intellectuals, philosophers, even travel bloggers – are saying that Spain is dying. I’m here at the conference to talk about this. A whole country, a former leader of the Western civilization is fading out of existence. I can give a lot of statistics if people want. Before the age of 45, you are unlikely to find a permanent, full-time job. You’ll live on a patchwork of temp gigs and welfare. After 45, you are more likely than not to finally find a stable job but it’s too late to start a family. It’s a national tragedy, is what it is. And again, this isn’t my opinion. This is what everybody in Spain itself is actively discussing.
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“the people he knows all got where there are before joining the EU”
Early EU was very good to Spain, it was the final triumph of austerity (beginning in 2008 and still ongoing) that really screwed it.
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Yeah, it was good in exchange for Spain destroying every Mediterranean aspect of its economy, wiping out the agriculture to give room to Germans and the French. The depopulated countryside is the result of that.
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“every Mediterranean aspect of its economy”
The first time I was in Spain most people just had part time hustles that they juggled. Go to one “job” in the morning, go home for three hour lunch and then go to the second “job”. So the lack of full-time 9-5 employment in the northern European sense isn’t really new.
And most of the worst results were the choices of Spanish people themselves…
Things pre-2008 were far from perfect (this is Spain after all) but it was the triumph of Merkel’s austerity that locked the country into inescapable stagnation.
There’s a lot of shiny, new, pretty housing in Spain, and it often stands completely empty while 35-year-olds still live with their parents because of the housing crisis. It’s such an insane situation.
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I’m from the UK and there’s been a lot of commentary that the recent Budget (political finance bill) is taking us in the direction of Spain etc in terms of higher taxes for individuals, additional job taxes and higher minimum wages. Together these mean youth unemployment will rise and so people who are supporting themselves will choose not to bring new life into the world.
This means many (most?) births coming from older parents or those who are dependent on the state. There’s been a big shift in the number of babies born to non-British mothers (sorry, to people born outside the UK) though its not yet a majority.
Hilary White was commenting on this too, but with a second fascinating chart next to it: Italy’s fertility rate from 1850 to the present:
https://substack.com/@hilarywhite/note/c-77564073
I’d love to see that same chart for Spain, and other countries in Europe. It’s perplexing because we all want to blame contraceptives… but there seems to be a bit more to it than that.
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–Spain’s fertility rate has been declining since 1865, at least.
So… maybe the bigger question is, what happened in the 19th century to kick that off? Yes, they were still above replacement rate in 1975 (advent of hormonal birth control), and then it really plummets hard. But… that was just the tail end of the decline. Something happened, or started, waaaay before that. What was it?
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Spain was underpopulated even back in the 16th century because of the colonial expansion. But going back in history lets off the hook today’s politician. Things can change today if reasonable policy is adopted. But the socialists in the Spanish Parliament are wailing all day about Palestinian children instead of concentrating on the terrible absence of their own.
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“Underpopulated?” Sure.
Assuming that, it was only colonial expansion and had nothing to do with expelling a bunch of people in 1492. Or plagues: eg: The Great Plague of Seville. Or syphilis from the New World.
Didn’t you say the Spanish were a bit more morbid culturally than their European brethren?
As for today, I’m sure the rank inaffordability of family life doesn’t help. Along with an overreaction to air cooties, a severely anti erotic disease. As opposed to all the venereal antibiotic resistant ones.
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I’m not suggesting modern politicos should be let off, but I also think it’s multifactoral, and it’d help to try and ferret out *all* the big contributors and address them.
In more recent times, yes absolutely we could do a lot better with, say, the cost of housing. I think that’s a huge consideration: just that it’s very hard for most people to buy a house, however small, these days, *and* in many (most?) places, more kids = mandated must rent a larger house. We, for example, with three kids, could (if we could afford it) BUY a 2-bedroom house. But we could not rent one because safety regulations do not allow it. And for each additional 2 kids, we would have to rent a house with 1 additional bedroom. Right now, we can’t rent anything smaller than 3 bedrooms. If we had five kids we’d be totally screwed because where could you even *find* a 4br rental? Much less afford one? Rent goes up with number of bedrooms.
But that wasn’t an issue in 1870, and the decline was already going by then. And I’m not totally sure you can blame anything that people were *doing* for it, whatever it was. It seems to happen in the declining years of every empire. I think there’s at least a plausble argument for the agricultural revolution having a role in it. 19th century was the advent of superphosphate, the steel plow, and other ag implement improvements that led to greater yields (with some obvious disruptions such as the Irish potato famine and the American civil war). But… increased yields are often a two-edged sword: you deplete the soil more rapidly, and adding NPK doesn’t replace all the soil minerals you harvested and shipped away to the grain elevator. The more you grow, the more you deplete, and I reckon fertility has a non-trivial relationship to food quality. We already know that fresh produce now has only a fraction of the nutritional value it once had. Soil depletion and modern agricultural innovations are a big part of that. Every little thing does its part: glyphosate binds up copper in the soil and makes it inaccessible. Fast-growing cultivars simply don’t have as much time to absorb things from the soil. Intensive tillage and chemicals kill topsoil. Right now, we are really good at producing calories per acre, and terrible at producing nutritious food.
What’s your hypotheses as to when the greatest concordance between highest live birth rate and the greatest actual population increase occurred?
Food quantity and access can be also correlated (weakly) to median male heights. But that’s neither here nor there.
There’s a real lack of multigenerational housing in the US – places where grandma and toddlers, teens and young adults can live together in the same space comfortably.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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