Concerns about falling birth rates are growing and are likely to continue to grow. There is no need to panic, but there is a problem that needs to be addressed. And it is quite a serious problem. Even if we accept that the Czech Republic will not have 10 million inhabitants in the future, but perhaps eight or nine million. Or six million.
First of all, we should admit that we do not understand the problem. We do not know how to encourage people to have children again. Birth rates are falling in all civilisations and value systems. They fall in religious and atheistic regions. It falls where people respect traditions and where they reject them. Social programmes help a little, but even they do not lead to a birth rate that would stop the population from falling.
In the Czech Republic, this has been compounded by a shock fall in living standards and the fact that many weak cohorts have reached childbearing age. Both of these factors will wear off in a few years, but our population will still continue to decline.
If we leave aside moralising, which is just a manifestation of intellectual resignation (I don’t understand something, so I declare that others are amoral), we are unable to identify the cause of the collapse in the birth rate. We know that as the standard of living (of society as a whole, not of individuals) rises and education improves, the birth rate falls. But we don’t know why.
In such cases it helps to turn the question around. Why do some people have children at all? Why isn’t everyone childless?
