Chile has a fertility rate at 0.88 children per woman in 2024, that will result in a 82% decline of the population in just two generations time. So Chile will go from having a population at 17m to as low as 4-5m within our lifetime, even WITH immigration!
Argentina is at 1.16, Uruguay is at 1.2, Colombia is at 1.05, Puerto Rico is at 0.88, Cuba is at 1.3, Costa Rica is at 1.12.
All in all, the population of LATAM will decline very fast in this century. Low birth rates combined with high emigration rates is a recipe for disaster. The problem is not population decline itself, but the reversal of society’s age. LATAM will have an average age at 55-60, it will be one big nursing home devoid of vitality and energy with no children or youth.
Even the US now has a higher fertility rate than Mexico, for the first time in history. The US fertility rate is 1.6 children per woman, the Non-Hispanic White fertility rate is 1.56, and Mexico’s fertility rate is 1.45. So if White America was a country it would actually have among the 3rd highest fertility rate in the America’s! Which is funny considering how they think they are being replaced when they are actually the ones growing the fastest now!
My source is each country’s respective Wikipedia demographics site. Which uses the country’s own gov’t data as its source. So for Argentina e.g it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Argentina#Vital_statistics
Which uses
https://www.argentina.gob.ar/sites/default/files/informe_serie_seguridad_social_en_perspectiva.pdf
As its source.
Comments
I also think it is kinda sad that in the future, the battle for skilled labour among countries will be one big ponzi scheme. European countries like Spain depend on countries like Argentina for skilled immigrants, but Argentina now has a lower birth rate than Spain itself. So Argentina will be forced to scour countries like Venezuela for labour to make up for low birth rates + high emigration rates, but Venezuela already has a below replacement fertility rate itself and will also be forced to look for labour elsewhere.
The same thing applies to Germany, who imports labour from Thailand, but Thailand has a much lower birthrate than Germany, so Thailand actually imports labour from countries like Myanmar, but Myanmar now also has to import labour from somewhere.
I’m not surprised at all, given how living in LATAM is becoming more expensive while our purchasing power is simply not going up at all.
Add up low wages, violence, climate change, gentrification, displacement, lack of affordable housing and you get a pretty messed up cocktail to ruin any country.
Where do you get the source for Colombia? Our fertility is low, but it’s certainly not that low.
You can’t blame young couples for not having children. The future is bleak and the cost of living is higher than ever before. Change begings from above. If politicians want people to have kids, they need to provide incentives.
People are having less children and raise a child is expensive, like in any other place in the world. Also there is a generational shift on attitute on family and what people want
My grandpa had 5 children, he barelly finished Elementary School, he worked as a mechanic, He was able to afford two houses , two cars and have a comfortable life.
My parents had 3 children, both parents have a technical degree, mom is a nurse and my dad a mechanic, they were able to afford an appartment.
I have 2 college degrees, I can barely afford a down payment for an unfinished flat in the outer suburbs, I am overworked, and barely can afford basic needs.
So, despite all, everything is getting more difficult despite being more educated, more exposed to the world, getting a job is hard, having a decent life is a dream now. So if you can barely support yourself let alone bringing a child
I want to be a dad, but I don’t feel like it’s right to bring a child into the world until I’m financially ready to do so, and one of the main prerequisites for this is homeownership. You fix that and I’ll have a kid within a year
good
For México at least, the decline has been ongoing since the 2008 aprox.
At least in the big three cities (DF, GDL, MTY), people is having less children or none at all, while the countryside remains active and the migration towards said cities is rising more and more.
The people arriving to those cities try to keep the family mindset until they realize the expensive it is to have family there and most of the times they just have 1 children.
There’s a lot to consider. The first is that the birth rate may look quite low as a lot of young women and girls are just not having babies as teens/early 20s. They may be delaying childbirth due to greater access to information, birth control/abortion, societal values moving away from being a mom (due in part to social media), more demanding careers, and more economic power making them less reliant on men (and even their own families who can exert demand/expectations for children as well*) at a young age
That aside, we have to grapple with a rapidly aging population while being a middle income country. Not all hope is lost, but it may mean being stingy with our future elderly and increasing productivity per worker.
I also think the future of young women/girls offers a glimmer of hope for Mexico. First in that more may enter the workforce more educated (hence why they aren’t having children nor are they working). Further, more careful family planning may increase the productive value of children compared to their unwanted analogs of the past.
*Side note: I think this is why even well educated, “rich” women of decades past still had quite a few children by modern standards compared to women who are now less educated and rich than them. These “rich” women were not rich in their own right. They were dependent on their families and/or husbands which pigeonholed them into a mother role in spite of their high socioeconomic status.
Not surprising. Life is hard enough by ourselves, we don’t want to have kids to make it worse.
I am certainly not bringing children into this world to be wage slaves like I am.
I’m 30+ wirh 2 degrees and couldn’t afford a home in Brazil. I live in a different country now as my husband is not Brazilian, and while we have a better quality of life, we still cant fathom the idea of kids when rent is €2k a month.
I feel terrible for the kids that are being born today, if it’s a shitshow for my generation, I can’t even imagine how it’s gonna be for them.
Bad and has dark implications for the future. The birth rate must be kept at replacement level to sustain the elder population.
There is no democratic solution for this and societies will have to take drastic measures to stop demographic collapse.
I think this is part of a global trend. Reduction of population is not bad, provided it is not sudden and drastic and governments have time to adjust.
Simple, inflation. I don’t understand why people sound the alarm with this topic, I don’t think birth rates were ever meant to be consistent throughout history anyways. Even in the worse case scenario, we only need a few thousand people to repopulate a whole country.
Meh, as long as we have immigration our head is above water. And we should be looking regardless into having an economic system that doesn’t depend on eternal growth.
Good not worth to bring children into this world
Another rent hike and an article about AI replacing us out to fix it.
Al carajo con los índices de fertilidad. Después de que en los últimos 300 años las élites no se callaban con el slogan: “no tengan hijos a los que no puedan proveer.” Ahora, se quejan de que la gente no quiere procrear.
I don’t understand what is your point with this. It is obvious that if people can’t afford a home for themselves and see no perspectives for the future, they won’t have kids. It’s good that we are FINALLY thinking of children as independent autonomous thinking beings who will live on beyond us, not as free elderly care. Not having children in this day and age is, in my opinion, an act of kindness.
And as others mentioned, just like you, we exist in our countries, we don’t exist to entertain. If you or our governments want our “youthful energy” to remain, then they better change things. It’s that simple.
This is wonderful! We don’t need more people here. Countries with fewer people are easier to manage. It’s also good for the environment
Jesus Christ, why does foreigners come here every week to ask about fertility rates?
The Latin America population decline might accelerate more than Europe’s because of the migration patterns.
We’re rich enough to afford contraceptives and too poor to afford children
We are fucked, unless AI and robots comes to save us, which is highly likely imo
And it will keep falling as long as the graph for housing cost keeps growing further apart from the graph for wages.
Landowners’ and landlords’ ambition for fast, limitless “capital gain” will render them the only ones allowed to afford to make a living.
We’ll just get immigrants from places with higher birth rates. Problem solved.
I really don’t care to be honest. I’m not bringing children to this fuck fest of a world
It’s called “losing hope for the future”
I’m Brazilian, and I’m going to be a father this year.
My wife and I made a deal 8 years ago that we would have kids only if we lived in a less violent country. So we lived in the Netherlands for three years, and then we decided to have a baby. Of course, nothing prevents us from going back to Brazil if needed.
So, violence and economic factors play a significant role in this.
The world move to a city living from rural living is partially to blame, previous generations have no problem with space and society demands as everyone was working the fields and the few with higher intellectual curiosity would go to the city to study and become a professional. Today mostly everyone is trap in apartments or small homes. there are high expectations to provide each kid a better life with expensive after school activities that leaves room to at most 1 child otherwise income would not last.
It’s quite normal. Children in the rural past were a capital good, an investment in future labor. The more children you had, the more hands Tom work your field. Nowadays they are luxury goods, like a Lamborghini. You don’t get any return and they are expensive to maintain.
So it’s completely understandable why richer countries will be able to afford more children than poor ones.
In any case, it’s not so bleak, emmigration is becoming less and less of an issue as the gap between LATAM and the developed world grows smaller and there’s always groups of people that have more children. The ones that don’t procreate will die off and the ones that do will push the numbers up.
Edit: I’ll add another economic reason why population will not fall off a cliff perpetually. There’s something called marginal value of labor and capital. The more labor relative to the amount of capital the smaller the returns. That return is called the salary. So if population falls dramatically, there’s less labor for the same (or more if there’s been growth and investment) capital. That will mean a higher average salary which will attract immigration and make it easier to have kids.
We are going Extintic, much like the Indegenous ancestors that inhabited this land hundreads of years ago 😔
Life cost, salaries are similar to 20-30 years ago , housing prices are skyrocketing. Unless you live in the middle of nowhere you won’t afford to buy a house, with a regular salary.
In the year 2000 with 1 million Mexican pesos (US$100k dollars from 2000) you could buy a nice 4 bedroom house in a nice neighborhood in the middle of Mexico City for example Del Valle. Today with 2 million pesos (US$100k today) you would buy a suite of 20m2 in the same neighborhood…the house would probably cost 15-20million pesos (US$750k-1million) nowadays
We’re screwed. I’m yet to hear about a country that developed itself AFTER the fertility rates went this down.
Nah. Those numbers don’t seem right.
World Bank fertility rates
Best country in Chile
We have all the disadvantages of advanced economies without any of the benefits. Low fertility rates without being developed economies lmao
Greater sexual education and legal abortion was inevitably going to make people less prone to forming families.
I can think of very few things that would be better for the planet than a massive reduction in human population.
IF you manage to get to a financially stable position (very few people do), by the time you get there, you’re too old to have kids.
That is what they say, but here in Ecuador every young woman seems to have small children in tow, whether they be babes in slings, handheld toddlers, or pushing miniature supermarket carts. Can these Wikipedia figures really be correct? I suppose local hospitals and Health services must have accurate statistics on the number of births.
It’s not bad, it’s terrible. Our economic models work with export and consumption lead economies. If you’re the first one, the price of labor basically skyrockets and you are outcompeted really easily, see germany, japan. And if you happen to be the second one, that one is even worse bc it tends to mean a drastic reduction in your gdp, while the economic burden of aging people increases. We have no economic model for this. This is literally a disaster waiting to happen.
In my experience it surprises me tbh, my friends do want to have children, my older cousins have each 2 children. Mind you I am privileged but even my friends from other contexts think the same
The 20th century has brought shitty governments from left,right,center, conservative you name it,the cost of living has been increasing.That along with the globaist agenda of anti-marriage,anti-family “ideology” has created this scenario.
It has become very expensivento support a family in latinamerica, people are still going for it in many cases though.
Just a heads up the demographics may be off bc most ppl of Mexican or Latino descent are considered white per USA reference. Even though, in the USA Mexican-Americans and other Latinos are not socially treated as White. Since in America whiteness is associated with ppl of Anglo-saxon descent. Ppl forget while Black Americans were the primary targets of racial discrimination and segregation in the Jim Crow South. In the West Coast and Southwest Mexicans and indigenous communities faced similar discrimination. Stores had signs that said, “No Mexicans, No n-word, No dogs” and Mexicans also faced lynching and students of Mexican descent where often told not to speak Spanish and faced physical punishment for speaking Spanish in public schools. Interestingly, the Mendez vs. Westminster case to desegregate schools in California to allow Mexican-American students schools attend schools with White students and it would later help set precedent for Brown vs. the Board of Education which would officially desegregate schools in the USA a major win the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s and shows a connection between chicano and black liberation struggles.
The history that can be found here:
“The Mexican government itself protested the category, because the entire Southwest used to be part of Mexico, and when it was taken over by the United States, they promised Mexico that the Mexican residents there would be treated as full citizens. Well, at the time, you had to be white to be a citizen. So that’s where the whole issue came about of Mexicans, specifically, identifying as legally white but socially not-white.
It worked against them in some ways, because they claimed segregation and discrimination, the parties being accused of discrimination could say, Well, no, you’re white. So this history of claiming whiteness has been a strategy that Mexican Americans and other Latino groups have used to try to lobby for acceptance — claiming Americanness, claiming whiteness.”
On The Census, Who Checks ‘Hispanic,’ Who Checks ‘White,’ And Why
I’m a woman and while I’d love to have a beautiful child, I haven’t yet because I am terrified of being pregnant and most especially, giving birth. And then of course… everything that comes after that. Would it be right to bring a child to this world with how increasingly expensive and hostile it’s becoming? And with access to the internet and all of the information about what childbirth and pregnancy can do to my body, I am really really having to think twice about it. I feel like women were kept uneducated about the horrible side effects and traumatic childbirths in the past because otherwise they would not want to go through that. I know it’s not everyone, but enough. There’s so many things about pregnancy and birth that women are very ignorant about and only learn about it once they go through it. It’s like taboo to talk about the trauma of giving birth and everything that comes later. I also don’t depend on a man to provide for me and therefore don’t feel obligated to be a housewife and mother, like my ancestors were.
According to wikipedia, the fertility rate is 2.2. Don’t know if that’s okay or not, but we’re a small country with a disproportionally huge population, so a population decline doesn’t seem like a problem imo.
There is a lack of houses, so people can’t start a family.
More time away from work (without lost wages). Housing. Stable access to commodities. Equitable sharing of care work.
You solve most (not even all, but ideally all) of these, I believe you’ll see an upswing. Not to pre-demographic transition levels, but possibly replacement
rookie numbers
Esto terminará en una de dos maneras. O la élite global se mueve para impedir el acceso a la contracepción o se desploma la población y eso resulta en un nuevo equilibrio de poder en las relaciones laborales. La plaga bubónica mató a una tercera parte de la población obrera de Europa. Los supervivientes obtuvieron ingresos más altos, algunos dejaron de ser siervos de los señores feudales y fundaron pueblos y eso sirvió para impulsar el cambio del feudalismo hacia el capitalismo.
It makes sense. Latin America is the most urbanized region in the world with more than 80% of people living in urban regions. It is notably expensive to raise children in cities. What did you expect?
Hardly surprising. Wages and purchasing power are stagnant while everything continues to get more expensive. It’s difficult enough to survive by yourself these days, bringing a kid into it is a massive padded expense that most people just can’t afford.
The east Asian countries, specifically Korea, are likely going to be the first ones to fall to fertility collapse. Hopefully other countries will be looking, taking notes, and taking steps to avoid it before they fall into the death spiral that S. Korea is now in. Which will mean a major restructuring of the economic models we have developed in the last 50-100 years or so. Specially around housing.
Either that or we go towards authoritarianism and people are “heavily encouraged” to have kids. People are not having kids because they care too much about their living standards and those of their kids, either you improve material conditions so they feel comfortable having kids or you actively make them have kids regardless of material conditions.
Damn, it feels like just yesterday people were warning us about an overpopulation problem. I remember someone telling me that the US is classifying Hispanics as white now so it wouldn’t appear that White Americans are becoming the minority. I remember asking because I got a DUI a couple of years ago, and in my paperwork they had me labeled as white under race, and I’m light-skinned, but I’ve never considered myself white, and I know Hispanic isn’t a race, but they’ve always used it as such on paperwork.