Society is a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn.
Edmund Burke
This paper is the result of the cultural action and researches of Andrej Kolarik executive manager of the Conservative Summit and related projects at the Ladislav Hanus Institute
This very partnership is put into question by the demographic winter, resulting in the shrinking of each successive generation. The demographic winter is therefore not primarily a problem of insufficient immigration or inadequate subsidies. It is the consequence of a deeper transformation in the economic, cultural and institutional conditions under which people form families. Modern societies have made children more expensive, parenthood later, families more geographically fragmented and the benefits of raising the next generation more widely shared. The result is a growing gap between the private cost of having children and the social value of producing the next generation.
It is not merely a future shortage of workers or a threat to the balance of a pension system, but it ultimately asks – do we want to continue as a society? For a long time, the famous response by Konrad Adenauer was: Leute werden aber immer Kinder haben—people will always have children. Except that they will not necessarily have enough of them. Across the developed world, societies are unable to reproduce themselves.
While a stagnation in economic growth provokes economic reforms and invitation of foreign direct investment, a demographic decline, whose effects are measured in much longer cycles, enjoys much less concern. Though there are some societies that cared. Some governments made elaborate family policies. But there is only so much a government policy can do.
When Government Policy Reaches Limits
Poland and Hungary have both attempted to reverse demographic decline through ambitious family policies. Poland introduced a monthly child benefit of 800 zlotys for every child, while Hungary built a much broader system of family tax benefits, housing subsidies, baby-expecting loans and income-tax exemptions for mothers of large families[1].Family policy can reduce the financial and practical costs of having children, and in some cases it can produce meaningful increases in fertility. What it appears unable to do on its own is restore the fertility rates of contemporary developed societies to replacement level for an extended period.
While well-designed family policies may temporarily increase the fertility rate by 0.2 per woman, their long-term effect remains questionable as neither as generous and thought out family policy as the Hungarian one have after over a decade in place stagnated at 1.3 children per woman.[2] The oft-cited Georgian example, where the Patriarch promised to personally baptised every third child in a family in 2007 had a slightly longer effect, with its impact ending in 2023.[3]
This should perhaps not surprise us. As societies moved from rural agricultural life towards urban service economies, they also moved, in broad life-history terms, from r-selection towards K-selection.Fertility rates also fell due to families not having to bet against epidemics – infant mortality fell as in became standard for almost all children to survive until adulthood.
In an agricultural society, children could eventually become an additional pair of hands on the farm. In a modern urban economy, they remain financially dependent for two decades while parents are expected to invest ever more in their education, health and development. From the perspective of homo oeconomicus, the child has ceased to be an investment and become a prolonged expense. Especially in cities, hopeful parents often face issues such as prohibitive housing costs, or unavailability of childcare, making it hard to earn a living while providing for a family.
As societies become richer, they tend to have fewer children. If generous family policy were sufficient to reverse this process, it would be difficult to explain why some of the world’s poorest societies have fertility rates several times higher than those of wealthy European countries. Money matters. But money alone cannot explain why one society has five children and another has one.
A modern state can make children more affordable by subsidies. It cannot subsidise the desire to have them.
When Demand for Large Families Shrinks
In early modern England, the wealthiest had almost twice the number of children as the poorest people – and this distinction cut across professions and social classes[4]. Pre-revolutionary France was an unusually early case of fertility decline, beginning among the upper classes well before the Revolution and spreading gradually to the rest of society. This decline can be linked to a changing culture of status, luxury, individual consumption and weakened religious and traditional norms, with wealthier Frenchmen increasingly preferring social advancement and display over large families[5].
Among the Protestants in south-central Slovakia a cultural one-child policy became the trend in early 19th century, with the primary motivation being to keep properties intact (the inheritance law divided property among all children), while those having more children were looked down upon in the village. In a few generations, this resulted in vast estates with little workforce.[6] The legacy in the region remains until the present, even when Protestants had been outnumbered by Catholics in most of the villages concerned – the area remains depopulated and economically stagnant.
The root cause could lie not in people not having enough money to afford children – but in the fact that the above-average wealthy people stopped having large families[7]. Not only would they themselves have more children, but by large families becoming status symbols, those just below them would attempt to appear wealthy, and try to have large families as well.
When Free Riders Dominate
Among the institutions most frequently blamed for declining fertility is the pay-as-you-go pension system. The evidence is at least suggestive: a number of African countries, including Mauritius, Seychelles, South Africa and Namibia, experienced substantial declines in fertility after introducing pension systems comparable to those found in Europe. In Gambia, the extension of pension coverage to the working population was likewise followed by a significant decline in the birth rate.[8]
While the African cases may also be attributed to correlation rather than causation, with infrastructure development and modernisation perhaps becoming an important factor rather than the introduction of pension systems, an analysis of the developments in Brazil aims to find the causality between declining birthrates and introduction of pension systems. As Brazil expanded the eligibility for old-age pensions also to rural workers,in 1991 “we find that the associated increase in pension wealth has a significant negative effect on fertility: The reform reduced the probability of childbirth by 8% in the short-run and completed fertility by about 1.3 within the first 20 years after the reform. [9] The authors of the study conclude that their findings lend micro evidence to the long established view that the intro-duction of pension systems in emerging and developing countries is associated with declining fertility rates at the macro level[10].
The problem with the pension system associated with Bismarck is that it dilutes individual responsibility across generations. The costs of raising children remain, grosso modo, private. Parents pay for housing, food, education and the countless years required to raise a child into an independent adult. The benefits of producing the next generation, however, are nationalised. Once those children enter the labour force, they will pay for everyone’s pensions—not only those of the people who raised them.
The result is a peculiar form of free-riding. A society needs children to sustain its pension system, yet the private costs of producing the next generation fall disproportionately on those who raise them, while much of the economic benefit is shared by society as a whole. The feedback loop takes decades to become visible, and there remains little direct connection between the number of children a person raises and the pension he or she eventually receives.
Michel Houellebecq appears to have understood the paradox. In his novel Soumission, the liquidation of the pay-as-you-go pension system is among the first measures introduced by the fictional new president of France.
While the pension system has solved the problem of how to grow old without becoming dependent on one´s children, it ultimately seems to have weakened a strong practical incentive for having them.
Not only that, but as the share of pensioners increases, so does the demand for policies that effectively transform the country´s democracy into a gerontocracy As a result transfer payments to the retirees gradually increase as they become the single largest electoral block[11] and any party seeking electoral success would need to cater to their demands. A dwindling economically active population, with increased retiree transfers to a more numerous retiree population is thus found under ever-stronger economic pressure, as a larger share of their income is being redistributed in the transfer system.
An Impossible Biography
Of course, modern society has another question to answer: when exactly are successful women supposed to have children?
The life strategy presented to an ambitious high-school graduate as responsible is remarkably straightforward: finish university, establish a career, become financially secure, get married and only then have children. Yet biology does not necessarily follow this timetable. Combining education, career and family, while expecting excellence in all three, asks women to succeed simultaneously in what were historically both the female and the male spheres.
For Malthusians worried about the dangers of population growth, extending women’s education has long been seen as one way of postponing marriage and motherhood, thereby reducing the number of children women have during their childbearing years[12]. The same sequence of life that modern society presents as the path to female success therefore happens to be a sequence that postpones motherhood.
The conservative answer cannot simply be Kinder, Küche, Kirche. Telling women to abandon education and professional ambition is neither possible nor desirable. But neither is it enough to tell a generation of women that they can have everything while leaving them to discover that the biological clock has not read the career plan.
The real task is to propose a viable biography for a young woman: one in which education, work, marriage and motherhood do not have to be completed one after another, but can overlap.Should children arrive earlier in life, they should not be relegated to the last place among life goals.
A Broken Geography
Another factor working against family formation is the broken geography of the extended family. Young couples follow universities and jobs towards cities and suburbs, while their parents and grandparents often remain in the towns and villages they left behind.
The result is a strange demographic paradox. Grandma is lonely. The young parents are exhausted. The grandchildren need care. And the three generations may live hundreds of kilometres apart.
For most of human history, raising children was not a project undertaken by two isolated adults. Grandparents, siblings and neighbours were part of the household’s wider ecosystem. By organising economic life around workplaces rather than households, we have often separated workers from the families who could otherwise help them raise children. While grandma has time, parents need help and children need grandparents, the sheer number of miles between them keeps them apart.
The Demographic Trilemma
Philip Pilkington and Paul Morland have described the concept of a demographic trilemma: a situation in which it is necessary to pick any two of the three possibilities. The demographic trilemma requires a choice of a two-combination among ethnic continuity, low fertility and economic growth[13]. With a sudden resurgence of birth rates being a rather unlikely option, developed countries have come to choose either mass migration (being the case of the United Kingdom) or old-age stagnation (as chosen by Japan).
The demographic winter is therefore about more than labour shortages, pension deficits or GDP growth. It is a question of whether the living still understand themselves as part of a chain extending backwards and forwards in time. Previous generations inherited a society they did not create; they improved it and passed it on. The demographic question asks whether the present generation intends to do the same.
The answer cannot simply be to import workers, increase subsidies or hope that people will eventually change their minds. A society cannot outsource the desire to reproduce itself. It must once again make room—for children, for parents, for grandparents and for the sacrifices that connect one generation to another.
Burke’s partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn is ultimately a reminder that a society is not only what exists today. It is also what we inherit and what we choose to leave behind.
[1] KONRADSHEIM, Matthäus, Family Policy, a Comparative Study, by New Direction, p. 19-22 (link)
[2] BAUCH Kaiser, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Population Collapse, on Substack (link)
[3] ACKERMANN, Proč Evropané vymírají? Hledání důvodu propadu porodnosti před 30 a 120 lety, (link)
[4] ACKERMANN, Proč Evropané vymírají? Hledání důvodu propadu porodnosti před 30 a 120 lety, (link)
[5] ACKERMANN, Proč Evropané vymírají? Hledání důvodu propadu porodnosti před 30 a 120 lety, (link)
[6] ALÁČ Ján interviewed by SUDOR Karol: Ako sa evanjelici na juhu stredného Slovenska takmer vyhubili, at DenníkN (link)
[7] ACKERMANN, Proč Evropané vymírají? Hledání důvodu propadu porodnosti před 30 a 120 lety, (link)
[8] ACKERMANN, Proč Evropané vymírají? Hledání důvodu propadu porodnosti před 30 a 120 lety, (link)
[9] DANZER, Alexander and ZYSKA Lennard: Pensions and Fertility: Micro-Economic Evidence, p. 39-40 (link)
[10] DANZER, Alexander and ZYSKA Lennard: Pensions and Fertility: Micro-Economic Evidence, p. 40 (link)
[11] MACARRÓN LARUMBE, Alejandro: Demographic Suicide? in The European Conservative Magazine, Spring 2025.
[12] KONRADSHEIM, Matthäus, Family Policy, a Comparative Study, by New Direction, p. 27 (link)
[13] PILKINGTON Philip and MORLAND Paul: Migration, Stagnation, or Procreation:
Quantifying the Demographic Trilemma, link