The German team had a fantastic start in this World Cup with four wonderful goals against Australia. The German daily BILD proclaimed “Ihr habt uns vierzaubert”, the country was happy and forgot their floundering coalition government for a while. The German football team is not only the youngest since 1934, it is also the most diverse with more players having a non-German background than ever before, reflecting the growing diversity of the population.

But there is another aspect to demographic changes in Germany, and that is the shrinking population. The Guardian highlighted something recently that has been an issue for four decades in Germany: the low fertility rate. This rate reflects the number of children that a woman of child-bearing age is likely to have. Accounting for infant mortality and the fact that fewer girls are born than boys, a fertility rate of 2.1 (the replacement rate) is normally required for the population of a developed country to replace itself.

Although in Germany the fertility rate has been below the replacement rate since the early 70s, German politicians and the good old people themselves have only woken up to this since 2003 when the then Social Democratic Minister for Families, Old People, Women and Young People (so basically everyone who is not a middle-aged male) Renate Schmidt launched a report on “sustainable family policy” where the two authors (one an older, childless man, the other a woman who just had her first baby) recommended a radical overhaul of benefits payable to parents and mothers, in particular after they had a baby. Instead of paying a flat-rate of €300 to every mother or father for 24 months, the payments should be income-related. A parent who stays at home to look after the children receives two-thirds of their net salary (capped at a generous €1.800 per month), for a maximum of 12 months. This can be split between both parents and rises to 14 months if the father takes at least two of them. These benefits were only announced in 2006 and came into effect in January 2007 under the then Conservative Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen. In the beginning it seemed to have worked, as numbers went up: more children were born and (many) more fathers were taking parental leave. While the second effect is still prevalent, the first is not. The fertility rate is still (or again) around 1.37.

Being one of the two authors mentioned above I am obviously frustrated that my recommendations didn’t have a better effect, although I am pleased to see that so many more fathers are taking time off work to look after their children. At least half of our intended consequences came to pass.

But I do wonder where we got it wrong with the other half. Or did we? Can we blame the low birth rate on the recession? What did we miss when we came up with this “revolutionary” policy recommendation (introduced in traditional Germany amidst an outcry of “forcing men to the crib”)?

The recession hit in 2007 and that certainly had an effect. Economic and other insecurities don’t help when one wants to have children. This was drastically shown in East Germany when the fertility rate dropped dramatically to under 0.8 (!) in 1992, as nobody knew what national unification would bring. Also, studying times are long which gives qualified women a much shorter window of opportunity to start a family if they want to work for a couple of years before starting a family (by which time they can easily be already 35 which might already be too late for some). However, the last time I checked you needed two people to start a family and there is evidence that men in Germany seem to grow up later and don’t feel old enough to start a family even if they hit 40. I wonder how much longer do they want to wait?

Admittedly, it will take a while for the Germans to disappear off the map: a quick calculation based on the 12th population forecast by the German National Office of Statistics shows that somewhere around the year 2314 the Germans will have died out. Might this be the year, the English will win the World Cup again?