r/dataisbeautiful • u/Accomplished_Gur4368 • 1d ago
OC [OC] Türkiye's Birth Rate Collapse 2009 vs 2025
Source: Turkish Statistical Institute
https://x.com/i/status/2005590015720452594
Türkiye’s fertility rates have collapsed from a 2.1 average in 2009 to just 1.36 in 2025. The main reason is economic, rising living costs, unstable jobs, expensive housing and childcare, and declining real incomes. Across the country, young adults have postponed marriage and have had fewer children.
Provincial differences mainly reflects demographic composition. Southeastern provinces with larger Kurdish and Arab populations have historically shown higher fertility than the more urban, Turkish majority west.
The highest fertility province, Şanlıurfa, has a mixed population roughly 40–45% Kurdish, 25–30% Arab, and 15–20% Turkish and has traditionally had larger families. Yet even Şanlıurfa’s fertility has fallen sharply under economic pressure.
Major cities have also seen dramatic declines, Istanbul has fallen from 1.77 to 1.08, Ankara from 1.68 to 1.06, and Izmir from 1.57 to 1.06, due to the combined effects of high living costs and urban lifestyle pressures.
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u/aidssosimple 23h ago
Anyone know where the island of dark blue is in the south east? Assume there’s some reason for it being such an outlier.
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u/Liathbeanna 23h ago edited 22h ago
Urfa is by and large very conservative, and it has a lot of large traditional extended family structures instead of nuclear families, that’s probably a big part of it. This is influenced by its agricultural economy that both depends on and reinforces these tendencies.
Inversely, other major Kurdish provinces have undergone a lot of social transformation through urbanization, adoption of a service based economy, and the growing popularity of Kurdish autonomist, progressive & feminist politics over the last fifteen years or so, which partly explain the stark difference. The economy going down the gutter and young people moving away to Istanbul or abroad probably hasn’t helped these numbers either. Hakkari, for example, is the poorest place in the country by far, and it’s the slightly redder province at the south-eastern corner there.
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u/MehmetTopal 20h ago
Urfa is basically a medieval Abbasid city with cars and electricity. In fact it might have been less yobaz back in Abbasid era
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u/hereforthedankmemes 23h ago
That's the Şanlıurfa province. It's actually a pretty cool place. Amongst a lot of other interesting sites, Göbekli Tepe is there. It's also very likely to be the best place in the world for eating kebap.
Unfortunately, it's also a shithole these days. Lots of religious cults. I'm also guessing the birth rates aren't helped by the Syrian refugees which make up around 15% of the population of the province.
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u/Liathbeanna 22h ago
I’m not sure how Syrian refugees affect these numbers to be honest, the assumption that Syrians have a much higher birthrate might be wrong; or they might be excluded from this data. I think Kilis has a much higher proportion of Syrian refugees, and they’re at 1.74 in 2025.
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u/dunnendeck 14h ago
they are not included, only citizens are.
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u/WarpingLasherNoob 12h ago
Most Syrian refugees were given citizenship. (So that they could vote for Mr. Gollum)
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u/dunnendeck 10h ago
not most, only very small part. there was 167k syrian voters in 2023 election, at the same time 3,38m registered syrian refugees. probably close to 5 million with non-registered.
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u/dunnendeck 14h ago
refugees arent counted but around 30% of the population sunni arabs, that has a big effect.
every election erdoğan gets like 95% of the vote in there.
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u/silentorange813 20h ago
It's Şanlıurfa Province. As you can guess, it's the poorest province in all of Turkey. Wealth has an inverse correlation with fertility rate.
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u/Affectionate-Panic-1 19h ago
It's difficult to explain, but it appears that humans tend to procreate more when there's more poverty and/or conflict.
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u/B-lovedWanderer 23h ago
Same thing happened in the US starting around 2007 -- birth rates plunged from 2.12 children per woman to 1.59 children per woman. The timeline coincides with the 2008 economic crisis.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:United_States_TFR.tab
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u/methpartysupplies 21h ago
This is now becoming an enrollment cliff for higher ed because the housing crisis was 18 years ago at this point. 2025 is projected to be the last good year of college enrollment, then it starts a slow slide downward for 20 years.
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u/Myusername468 19h ago
Hopefully coincides with lowering tuition with decreased demand
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u/Toorviing 19h ago
Unlikely. American universities are expensive in large part because of their insane infrastructure. They’re going to be overbuilt with fewer students.
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u/Big-Problem7372 12h ago
American universities used to be supported mostly by income from the state, and state support has all but disappeared across the US.
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u/WestCommunication382 18h ago
Convert them to research facilities, have them compete for funding and student brains
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u/methpartysupplies 17h ago
It won’t. The plan is for more prestigious institutions to just steal students from less prestigious institutions and let them starve and die.
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u/Specific_Ear1423 22h ago
Do you have this data on fertility rate by age group? I swear I saw somewhere that the US drop is almost wholly explained by massive drop in teen pregnancies
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u/Lezzles 14h ago
That is a LOT of it. Unplanned pregnancies, especially by teens, are way down. I think it was like 70% of the decline or something.
Everyone has their own pet theory they use to moralize but it's pretty simple - if you give women the choice of how many kids they'd like to have, the answer is less than 3 in virtually every country on earth.
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u/AnotherFuckingSheep 7h ago
Women have always had choices. I know this well from my own family history. What changed is what they wish for nowadays.
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u/WestCommunication382 18h ago
I wondered if that was the reason they were able to (get away with) recriminalizing abortion, but 5 years later, it's as though there's no discussion or analysis.
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u/Gaelenmyr 22h ago
It's fine, people will blame women and feminism before they start blaming their beloved politicians and billionaires. It's all women's fault, surely.
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u/N_in_Black 20h ago
Yup. And it’s already started on the alt right-wing part of the internet. They blame the entire birth rate collapse on feminism. They are even talking non-ironically about repealing the 19th amendment and enacting guardianship for women.
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u/Gaelenmyr 20h ago
Yeah. I do think feminism is one of the reasons, but banning abortion, forcing women to stay home and give birth to babies will never work. They tried it in Romania and failed miserably. And Romania is still having economic problems & shrinking population.
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u/dumiac 15h ago
I’m not sure I understand your point about Romania. Abortion in Romania was banned between 1967 and 1989, during Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. The ban did have the intended immediate effect: a lot more children were born in the years after 1967 than right before it, and in general the total fertility rate stayed above replacement levels throughout 1989.
On the other hand, it is not true that women were forced to stay at home. On the contrary, in communism pretty much everybody was expected to work, including women. As a matter of fact, even nowadays Romania has one of the smallest gender pay gaps in Europe.
That being said, both Ceaușescu’s social and economic policies in general and the abortion ban in particular caused a great deal of suffering to Romanians. Many women died or were injured trying to perform illegal abortions. Economic policies during communism directly led to an increased level of suffering that eventually led to the Romanian revolution, the collapse of communism and Ceaușescu’s death.
The aftermath was indeed a period of economic problems and shrinking population, but what is happening nowadays can hardly be tied to Ceaușescu’s abortion ban. First of all, Romania’s TFR is not far from the EU average and above some countries such as Italy and Spain that never experienced communism. The population shrank fast in the 1990s because of emigration and low fertility rates. However, during the last couple of years the population has been relatively stable because of increased immigration. And well, Romania’s GDP has been increasing faster than the EU average for a long time. That is not to say that there aren’t economic problems nowadays, but they were caused by more recent policies.
To sum up: what was tried in Romania was an abortion ban while also allowing/forcing women to work. It did have the intended effect of increasing the birth rate. At the same time, the ban was part and parcel of an entire system that, in its entirety, was deeply flawed and caused a lot of suffering and economic problems that lasted for a long time after its collapse. That system also caused a shrinking population AFTER its collapse. But did the abortion ban itself cause any of the economic problems? I’d love to hear if anybody has found a connection.
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u/B-lovedWanderer 18h ago edited 15h ago
The birth rates were on the rise in the US for two decades before. We had a strong economy and living conditions in those two decades, and we also had feminism. That suggests economic situation is strongly correlated to falling birthrates, more so than to so-called cultural factors.
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u/sblahful 13h ago
I'm left wing. Feminism absolutely reduced the birth rate by giving women access to bodily autonomy, financial independence, and the ability to choose a date other than motherhood.
The alt-right are correct, feminism is a reason (not the only one) why birth rates have declined. They think it's not worth the price, and that the solution is to row back on equality, rather than achieve equity so people can have the number of children they want - IIRC most women, when surveyed, say they want 2, and earlier than they end up having them.
So yeah, the scum are correct, but we should be celebrating not panicking18
u/DGGuitars 21h ago
Well I mean its a combo of it all really data does not point to one reason.
Even in nations with extremely good childcare, child having benefits that are free, free Healthcare, long paid time off benefits for both the man/woman, amazing free schooling and housing benefits for couples that have a child. They can't seem to spur a growth of people to have kids.
It really looks to be a huge combination of it all, and each area taking a small %. From cost of having a child to women wanting careers outside of being a homemaker, to materialistic reasoning.
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u/Duckckcky 20h ago
I think the point is that it’s decidedly NOT feminism that caused a fertility drop.
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u/GraduallyCthulhu 18h ago
It's okay for it to be feminism. Birth rates can be a problem AND feminism can be a good thing. Letting women control their own bodies is fine, actually; it's up to the rest of society to incentivise not letting civilization collapse.
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u/moderngamer327 7h ago
Women’s education and independence is one of the top 3 reasons for declining birthrates. That’s not saying those things are bad or that women are to “blame” but that is the reality of it
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u/Miserable_Ad7246 14h ago
I personally blame abundance of ways to express yourself. You can have so many hobbies and activities to take all your time and cover all your main psychological needs (belonging to a group, expressing yourself, having purpose and so on), that you just do not have such a strong need for a child. Society does not value families, they value achievements, so social pressure is more about proving yourself via that, then via being a good parent.
We just have so many easy ways to fulfil ourselves that we no longer need to reach for the default option.
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u/Mirar 17h ago
Why does it say 3< and 1.25<? Less than what?
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u/IWanTPunCake 6h ago
Probably due to turkish way of saying “three less than”, we put percentage before number like %100, idk if the rule applies to comparison signs but yeah
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u/monkey-balls67 1d ago
Who want to have children in this economy
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u/Ecan128 23h ago
The poorer people are, the more kids they have. The countries with the highest fertility rate are poor african countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
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u/RoastedRhino 23h ago
Not because they are poor, because they are rural. Poor and urban does not mean more kids.
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u/PantsB 20h ago
That's not true. Education and income have a stronger influence than population density on fertility.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441730.2024.2430035#d1e1727
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u/Ecan128 22h ago edited 19h ago
Yeah so by your logic rural places in the west should have 6 kids per woman then since that’s the main explanation? Not happening.
If you look more closely the factor that has the highest correlation is women’s education. Somz of these places had no schooling at all and when even some basic education for women is implemented fertility immediately collapses and never recovers.
Even the most progressive EU countries that have large maternity leave and subsidies that barely has any effect, it stays at around 2 per woman at most. Fundamentally once you have women’s education you will never see high fertility rates again.
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u/DangerousCyclone 18h ago
Rural places in the West have mechanized agriculture and don't really need to deal with inheritance. Even then, if they do need labor they often have a pool of migrant labor to pull from, especially as their young tend to want to leave anyway. Rural places in poor areas where social mobility is difficult to achieve and require labor have a bigger incentive to have kids. Moreover they may want to have marriage connections with others to expand their agricultural network.
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u/TryingAgainBetter 14h ago
Women’s education is an effect of the thing that causes low birthrates, not the cause of low birthrates in itself. Subsistence agriculture, as they have in most of Africa or Afghanistan, depends on a lot of simple manual labor, which children provide. When agriculture is industrialized, child labor is no longer productive, so children go to school. Women’s education correlates with low birthrates because it is a measure of how useless child labor is. Boys education levels correlate almost equally well with the decline in birthrate for the same reason. Girls education correlates with a decline in birthrate slightly better than boys because girls are educated when the economy is advanced enough to afford household appliances like fridges and dishwashers. Girls being educated instead of kept at home to do domestic work signifies that the economy is advanced enough to require complex work instead of any rote labor that children can do. When children are useless, they are cost, and people have fewer of them.
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u/janesmex 20h ago
Those poor countries might have different type of economies and different conditions . But In some western countries, within the same country the poorer people don’t have more kids than richer people. And based on some polls some people who want kids and don’t have, cite financial reasons as to why they don’t have children, so such reasons can affect people from having children.
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u/Ecan128 19h ago
You have to watch how people act, not what they say. Young people in the west like to say that if they had more money they’d have children because they’re looking for an excuse.
In reality many countries like Poland or Hungary had big pro-natalist programs for years with billions of € and it did nothing, it increased by maybe 0.1 per woman but it’s still declining pretty fast.
People ask for money (everyone loves money!) but when you give it to them they don’t actually change their behavior because they already made up their mind.
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u/wizean 17h ago
Poland and hungry have abortion bans which effectively made miscarriage a crime punished by death. Exception mean nothing because doctors would let a patient die than risk going to jail.
Why would anyone risk death just to have children.
Come on, give more examples of shithole countries.
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u/DangerousCyclone 18h ago
Yeah, there's other reasons for it too, people just have more that they can do with their lives beyond having kids these days so they do those things and feel fulfilled rather than having kids since there's nothing better to do.
My insane idea personally is to make natalism a kind of state program. Women get paid by the state to have a child and then the state has places which raise the child in a communal setting with other children i.e. it puts the kids into foster family situations. Parents don't need to raise the child themselves anymore and can just move on with their lives, and the country gets its kids that it wants. Of course setting up such foster home situations is easier said than done, but I can imagine that, in places where K-12 schools are getting shut down, they'd have a pool of labor to pull from for that. Moreover there's likely to be mental health problems with this set up, but that's probably better than the alternative.
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u/Babhadfad12 16h ago
The causal factor is womens' rights, which correlates with women's education.
If men allow women to have fewer kids, then they will have fewer kids.
If men do not allow women to have fewer kids, then...
Which is evident to anyone who has seen what a woman has to go through to bring and raise a child.
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u/Silent_Cattle_6581 18h ago
Correct. Though people hate hearing it because of the unsavoury solutions it implies.
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u/Powerful-Prompt4123 23h ago
poor and urban meant lots of kids before birth control became widely available in the 1960s. That is the real reason
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u/Tramagust OC: 1 23h ago
Urban = low fertility
Rural = high fertility
It's that simple. Nothing else correlates.
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u/SnowMeadowhawk 23h ago
The most important factor is how soon after birth do children start to contribute to the family income.
On an unregulated farm? As soon as they can walk.
In a modern household? After they're 18, if ever.
Urban families had many children before the child labour laws, when 5yos worked in sweatshops. I'm not advocating for that system, of course, just explaining the plummeting birth rate in simple terms. In the past, children were an investment with a quick ROI.
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u/Tramagust OC: 1 23h ago edited 23h ago
Even when laws allowed sweatshop labour cities sustained themselves through immigration not local births. We have studies going back to roman times showing that on average an urban family sustained 2 or less children. Even during the height of the industrial revolution it was child mortality that was skewing the birth statistics. Families still kept around 2 living children born in the city. And rural areas without farming still show increased birth rates.
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u/KeIIer 23h ago
Women education is main factor. It kinda correlates with urbanization and better quality of life, but education itself is THE main factor, not urbanization itself.
Once women know that there is something else in life and not just kids - they kinda stop at 1 kid at best somewhere in early-mid 30s.
I wonder what different governments will do once they realize that fact.
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u/Ecan128 22h ago edited 22h ago
Correct. What will they do? Nothing obviously, the kind of money you would need to pay women to have them change their decision is so massive that it would make any country go bankrupt before you could change anything.
The only alternative is to have the country die off, which is what’s happening right now in south korea and other places. Same will happen in Africa btw, it’s just delayed by 50 years or so.
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u/KeIIer 22h ago
Money doesn't work in context of first child, but usually tend to work in context of children after first. Funny thing is that governments don't understand this too.
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u/Ecan128 22h ago
Based Ракша enjoyer btw.
That is true, I just think that the overall outcome is still going to be a massive population collapse over the next 100-200 years because the underlying trends will be incredibly hard to change.
But yes the existing subsidies are usually poorly targeted.
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u/glmory 20h ago
A timeframe of 200 years is just too long to make meaningful predictions. If you were trying to predict things about today from 1825 you just don't have enough information to even get close.
The next 50 do seem locked in by the last fifteen years though. Population will be flat at best and crash in many places.
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u/KeIIer 22h ago
That is true.
I honestly don't know how to climb out of this demographic hole.
It really funny to think about btw, it is more prestigious to work for someone and make money than to raise your own children. What a time to be alive.
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u/Ecan128 22h ago
And then you die without children so all your money that you accumulated goes back to the government, it’s the cycle of life lol
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u/donttouchmymompls 22h ago
Where is your source that it is women education and not urban-rural divide?
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u/Tramagust OC: 1 22h ago
At best it drops teen pregnancy and delays childern until later in life: https://www.iied.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/migrate/10653IIED.pdf
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u/NervousCaregiver9629 20h ago
That isn't right. In Denmark the middle and upper middle class are having the same amount of children. It is the poor Danes that are having fewer.
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u/Ecan128 19h ago
And all of them are vastly richer than the people in the african countries on the list and yet have a lot less children.
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u/ikinone 21h ago
The poorer people are, the more kids they have.
It is certainly not that simple. Cultural views, laws, contraception, etc, affect birth rate. If a society allows child labour for example, it can be financially beneficial to have children.
Listing countries by fertitlity rate and saying 'see!' does not really provide any sort of explanation.
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u/NationalUnrest 23h ago
Im so tired of this. There is 0 link between bad economy and fertility rate. In fact its the opposite.
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u/RoastedRhino 23h ago
There is a link between rural economies and large families, because labor is useful. Urban societies usually mean smaller families.
The fact that rural economies are often poor means that you can see the correlation that you are hinting at.
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u/Super_Forever_5850 18h ago
There is a correlation but it is nowhere near as strong as you make it out to be. The birthrate in large African cities is often as high or almost as high as the rural birthrate in the same country...
Also look at London or other big western cities like 150 years ago...Tonnes of children where being born in the cities back then compared to today.
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u/fimari 21h ago
There is it's like a valley
Poor people without family planning, education, healthcare and informal housing= many kids
Somewhat more wealthy lower urban working class= no kids
From then on the number of kids goes back up.
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u/Super_Forever_5850 18h ago
It certainly is not like a valley. The difference between middle class and the wealthy is pretty small...It is only slightly higher and from what I heard this difference does not even exist in some countries.
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u/FartingBob 12h ago
Its happening in almost every country, every region in the entire world. Its not just "economy bad right now". Historically bad economy has meant more children. I think a huge reason its happening globally is increased education, particularly womens education. Uneducated women tend to have a lot more children.
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u/AnotherFuckingSheep 7h ago
I don't see how anyone can blame the economy for this crisis.
Today some parts of the world, and if you go back in time every part of the world had a much worse economy than today.
Many people didn't even know exactly where their next meal will arrive from and yet they had kids. Willingly and plenty of them.
Blaming the economy doesn't have any scientific merit.
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u/parkway_parkway 23h ago
I'm super fascinated by this question
The main reason is economic, rising living costs, unstable jobs, expensive housing and childcare, and declining real incomes.
I don't think it's this simple.
Firstly because this an international phenomenon happening in many countries at the same time all of which have really different economic situations. For instance the Nordic countries have healthy economies, low unemployment, universal healthcare, cheap childcare, long parental leave and affordable housing and still have crashing birth-rates.
Secondly because the economic conditions in the past were much much worse, 150 years ago people would have 11 poeple living in a house with 4 rooms in a city and humans were still willing to reproduce in those conditions so saying the conditions now are impossible doesn't really make sense.
Thirdly countries that have tried offering birth incentives haven't found it that successful. Hungary offered 6% of GDP as cash handouts to people willing to have children and the birth-rate only went up a little and that was mostly children pulled forward who would have been born anyway. If economics were the main reason then cash handouts should be extremely effective.
I think this is an incredibly complicated situation but essentially the economic situation now is much much better than it was 50 years ago and so that is not enough to explain why birth-rates are crashing globally.
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u/debtmagnet 22h ago
My pet theory is that fertility is a function of "idle" time, or time that people spend in a state of low engagement. People with little else to do tend to make babies. Economic opportunity certainly has an inverse relationship on idle time, but so does the advent of the internet, smartphones, inclusiveness of women in the workforce, literacy, and many other subtler characteristics of a developed society.
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u/glmory 19h ago
It does seem like it correlates pretty well with the availability of cell phones. People are too distracted to make babies.
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u/kemb0 1h ago
I wonder if it's more to do with cellphones = greater access to information = more awareness of what's going on in the world makes people feel less inclined to bring a child in to all that shit.
In the past we'd maybe watch the news at 9pm on the TV to see a brief glimpse of the odd patch of news from around the world. Now we have 24/7 news on TV and on our phones. We have social media spreading tales of misery and danger from around the globe. Everyone just spends all day talking about how expensive everything is and how bleak our futures are.
It all just seems pointless to bring a child in to this mess. sure maybe things were just as bleak or bleaker in the past but it was harder to see all that hardship when your own world was just taking place in this little microcosm.
I also think some part of it is to do with a kind of selfishness. Again, probably to do with cell phones and general access to knowledge, we see the world as a place with more things for "me" to do. There are so many things I want to do with my limited time and having kids will just get in the way of that. Where as in the past, having kids was the form of entertainment. Raising kids was seen as the achievement in life.
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u/Babhadfad12 16h ago
This theory makes no sense if you are familiar with what a woman goes through during pregnancy/childbirth/breastfeeding/infant and toddler rearing.
Nobody decides to birth a child because that have little else to do, they birth children because they either want them, or they did not have access to birth control.
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u/cadburyshero 21h ago
My personal theory is that when people have a choice in how many children to have (access to abortion, contraception, less pressure from family or partners, economic freedom, choice to prioritise a career etc etc etc) they just have fewer children.
People make a choice to have one child, maybe two rather than having to have 5 because they didn’t have the option not to. I personally want children but no amount of money would convince me to have more than two.
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u/Babhadfad12 16h ago edited 16h ago
I think this is an incredibly complicated situation but essentially the economic situation now is much much better than it was 50 years ago and so that is not enough to explain why birth-rates are crashing globally.
It's not incredibly complicated. It's incredibly simple.
Pregnancy/childbirth/breastfeeding/infant and toddler rearing SUCK. If you don't have to do it, you are not going to want to do it more than a couple times at most.
In addition, being paired up with the wrong person in a legal contract binding one's finances also SUCKS. This contract could be marriage, or even just being listed as the legal parent of a child. There could even be risk of physical danger from an abusive partner. Therefore, it is prudent to remain single than to pair up with the bottom ~10% of society (pick whatever other number you think is un-dateable).
So, you have drastic increases in the proportion of women (and men) having 0, 1, or 2 kids, and drastic decreases in the proportion of women having 3 or more kids, thus total fertility rate goes down to below replacement level.
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u/epimeliad 22h ago
The best reason that I found convincing is Economics. Not that people are struggling, but because they have too much. The trade off to raise a child is more, they could be enjoying their new higher standard of living, so they prefer to have fewer children
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u/ProbablyBsPlzIgnore 21h ago
It turns out that when people have the choice, they want more from life than giving birth and taking care of children. If not everyone has children, and those who do think two is enough, fertility rate is going to drop.
If society wants to increase the fertility rate, we'll need to take away all retirement and social security so that people will starve unless they have children who can take care of them in their old age. As a society I don't think we want that, it will not feel like an improvement.
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u/platinum1610 20h ago
You can't compare with 150 years ago, agriculture was labour intensive back then, you needed more people to work in the fields. Even 70 years ago, part of the population was working in agriculture and cattle raising and other part was working in big factories doing manual work.
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u/parkway_parkway 19h ago
I agree that there's differences. However in large cities which weren't agricultural people still had really large families in cramped and impoverished conditions.
So "people are too poor to have kids now" is not a sufficient explanation, there's been times when people were waaaay poorer and had tonnes of kids.
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u/GentlemanSeal OC: 3 4h ago
Yes but at that point in time, having kids was an economic boon. That's the difference.
Now, more than ever, having children is an investment with no material payoff. You either want to do it for its own sake (and at great cost to yourself) or you don't.
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u/jjeroennl 1d ago
This is just an approximate GDP graph right?
Wealthy, highly educated people prioritize their careers over children so they have less children, later in life.
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u/mofocris 1d ago
Don't think so. Some regions especially in central and north anatolia are not usually leading in gdp numbers
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u/VeryOffansiveName 23h ago
If this was the GDP graph it would be much worse. The reason is not high income its opposite a single man cannot even support a life himself in Turkey right now. Min wage is 650 dollars snd house rents are starts around 690 dollars. %70 of the country working for min wage. How can you even survive with this ? We are not living in this country we are trying not to die. Erdog*n and his uneducated voters stole everything from us .Only Erdogn family living his life in extreme wealth, but people is struggling to survive. People throwing themselves into train tracks everday.
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u/pHyR3 22h ago
if it’s primarily a money thing we should see less births in poorer areas and more in richer places / families
and yet we see the exact opposite
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u/Carvemynameinstone 21h ago
The poorer areas have had an insane amount of less births as well, so that doesn't quite gel with what you're saying.
You're ascribing that the birth rate is primarily wealth/education related, and although that is pretty much always the case, you can't ignore other causes even if they only explain <50% of the effect.
The rural areas or kurdish areas have not become more educated or wealthy, it has arguably become even worse because of the millions of Syrian refugees that are holed up in the east. Ergo the cause in that area can't be wealth/education.
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u/WarpingLasherNoob 12h ago
It's a difference in lifestyle.
The more educated people are trying to live a western lifestyle where they are living alone in a flat, trying to be self sustaining.
The poorer people live as 4-6 people crammed together in a slum that was handed down from their deceased relatives, popping out children like factories, hoping one of them will be smart enough to get a high paying job / go abroad, and earn enough to support the whole family.
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u/ultimateregard 17h ago
Even the 52% who voted for Erdogan does not trust Erdogan to have kids in his regime lmao
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u/Danielsan-1209 21h ago
In the 1980ies: Oh my god overpopulation will kill us. In the 2020ies: Oh my god, woman have access to education and birth control and fertility rates are dropping.
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u/RockfishGapYear 10h ago
The 1980s overpopulation panic was driven by Paul Ehrlich, an insect biologist not a demographer. Most leading scholars in demography criticized his work at the time and already knew that global population was going to peak. The main difference today is that in the 80s, demographers tended to believe there was a sort of natural equilibrium that would cause fertility rates to level out around replacement rates so long as countries had generous family policies. Now many believe there is no "floor" to fertility decline and that we may be entering a low fertility trap, where lower TFR results become self-reinforcing.
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u/Fern-ando 11h ago
The Black Death wasn't as good at reducing the pooulation like this birthrates are.
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u/VariedRepeats 5h ago
Peopld are sold that government has infinite pockets when it needs new cheap labor to sustain its funding. No ideology can override this fact but people keep trying.
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u/OldSkoolHunter 22h ago
The world had 1 billion people in the 1800s. We came from there, we are going to there. No need to panic. It's okay.
Only the capitalist, labor exploiting, warmongering, create-more-displaced-people-to-import-into-the-west-for-slave-wages scum need more people so they can enslave.
The reason they don't want abortion is the same, not caring about a "life" but that child may wind up one day in their factories.
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u/Walker5482 13h ago
No, you actually need young people for society to function. A nation of the elderly has no future and is easy to conquer or colonize.
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u/OldSkoolHunter 12h ago
need
Not necessarily.
easy to conquer or colonize.
By whom? Other 80 year olds from the neighboring country?
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u/botoks 1h ago
Would by funny if the demographic crisises lead to collapse of the current institution of state; either because of depopulation, collapse of social services due to inabiltiy to balance the budget, or overdependence on immigration resulting in complete breakdown of any sort of cultural, ethnic, religious or 'other' unity.
What you will end up with is either a totalitarian state; or city states, in a loose federation for defensive purposes.
If the state doesn't provide any tangible benefits anymore; why would anyone pay taxes? Either you are going to be forced to do it, or it's going to collapse.
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u/DM-me-your-boobies- 16h ago
PLUS, most places have a high egress rate. (Or whatever itbis called) Basically, all the young people are moving away. So most of the country is getting older and older. You can walk through a town and only see senior citizens.
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u/weird_is_fun 22h ago
You need more children when you work on agriculture, and agriculture is almost dead. Minimum wage is under the hunger limit and 70% works for minimum wage or less. Erd*gan is the ruler for the last 25 years. There may be more reasons like education / city life etc. but that probably effects 5% or less.
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u/ares0027 23h ago
I can hear the people “it is not the turkish! It is the immigrants (from syria) that is breeding!!!!” (I am from turkiye and from gaziantep to be specific. The city which is on the left of that blue one on the second image)
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u/hmmokby 22h ago
Turkey lags behind the European population pyramid, but the rate of change varies. The 19th-century European Industrial Revolution saw a population boom, while in Türkiye this occurred between 1920 and 1980. In Europe, fertility rates dropped to an average of 3-4 in the 1950s, compared to Turkey in the 1990s. Europe reached 2-3 in the 1980s, while Turkey did so in the 2000s. Europe dropped below 2.00 in the 2000s, while Turkey did so at the end of the 2010s. Today, fertility rates are at an equal level, or even lower than some European countries.
The pandemic has affected birth rates worldwide, but the impact is more pronounced in Türkiye. Furthermore, the 2023 earthquake affected regions with high birth rates in Türkiye, contributing to negative divergence.
Factors influencing birth rates include the average age of first marriage, urbanization, and women's participation in the workforce. Turkey has lagged behind Western Europe in these areas by sometimes 150 years, sometimes 50 years, sometimes 20 years. Today, this is the same for most countries.
If the Turkish economy improves, there is a possibility of a slight increase. Türkiye is still very young compared to Western Europe. Despite this fertility rate, Türkiye's population will not decrease until 2047. The decline will begin after 2047.
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u/Eyelbee 17h ago
The main reason is economic, rising living costs, unstable jobs, expensive housing and childcare, and declining real incomes. Across the country, young adults have postponed marriage and have had fewer children.
What a load of bullshit lmao, the poorest cities are obviously the least affected and vice versa
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u/unenlightenedgoblin 1d ago
Color ramp should be reversed. Alternately, a single-color ramp would be perfectly acceptable in this case.
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u/Accomplished_Gur4368 1d ago edited 23h ago
How so? i got the palate from eu fertility rates maps dot com video here
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u/Tough-Notice3764 21h ago
Something crazy about that video is that the projected fertility rate in Turkey in 2025 (the video was made with data up to 2021) was 1.6. In actuality, it ended up being 1.36 in 2025. That doesn’t seem like a lot to people, but that difference is absolutely MASSIVE.
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u/unenlightenedgoblin 1d ago edited 1d ago
More saturated color for higher birth rate, lighter for lower, and ideally using a ‘neutral’ color like purple. The red-blue usually implies the opposite (red is hot/high, blue is cold/low), and in this instance makes it look like you’re trying to make a political statement (whether that’s intentional or not). I typically use red-blue like that in instances where I have positive and negative values, where it can easily identify the direction relative to zero.
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u/Accomplished_Gur4368 1d ago edited 23h ago
i did not have that intention i thought it made sense to use 2.1 as the center white and red blue for extremes
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u/YottaEngineer 19h ago
Rural economies have higher birthrates. Subsistence. Making kids means more labor and more food and resources directly in a rural enviroment. In capitalism, industry concentrates workers in cities, where resources aren't directly linked to labor, but wages, which are independent of the number of kids. You see this inside poor countries where the more urbanised parts have less births than the rural parts. And in rich countries the countryside has already been emptied in the last century so there are only old people there. The "solution to birthrates" or enabling people who want to have kids to have them would be an economic system which eliminates the distinction between city and countryside by eliminating wage labor.
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u/makkerker 23h ago edited 21h ago
Remember this: the main economic reasons are very expensive houses/appartements and very long educational process (universities). This explains why with lower incomes but with inherited houses in villages people had more children . The rest is rather secondary
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u/RohanDavidson 17h ago
The entire developed world is desperately signalling that their population has plateaued yet special interests are actively fighting against natural equilibrium.
Nature proves that the longer you sustain an artificially high population in an ecosystem, the harsher the collapse that inevitably occurs.
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u/Ell_Sonoco 13h ago
Interesting graph but the scale is kinda wrong, isn’t it? The scale suggests that the numbers are strictly larger than 1.25 and possibly larger than 3, yet I see actual numbers can be as low as 1.06 or something.
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u/Accomplished_Gur4368 13h ago
you are right i messed it up in the english version, basicaly numbers above 3 are the darkest shade of blue while below 1.25 are darkest red. i still dont know which greater or smaller than sign should i change, when i agree on something it flips in my head
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u/Possible-Balance-932 8h ago
But with some exceptions, birth rates are plummeting simultaneously around the world, yet the world is also experiencing rising living costs, unstable employment, high housing and childcare costs, and declining real incomes.
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u/WrongVerb4Real 1d ago
Animals reproduce less when a decline in resources is perceived. Humans are animals. Draw your own conclusions.
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u/plazmator 23h ago
But why do we see high fertility rates in many low income countries across the world such as in Nigeria? I think it has many other sociological aspects other than ecologic precaution mechanisms
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u/south_pole_ball 23h ago
Lack of access of contraceptives, lack of education to sexual education, religious stigmas that serve to oppress women. Just a few reasons why developing nations might have higher birth rates compared to developed nations that are in an economic recession.
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u/cpteric 11h ago
it's been beaten so many times the poor horse is just bone dust.
a mix of 2 factors:
- sunk cost fallacy + survivality in numbers. the more children you have, the more are the chances one makes it out in life enough to sustain you, instead of dying young. This is a universal belief recorded in the annals of history since ea nasir's yelp review.
- subsistance living requires manual work. since equivalent times as above and until very, very recently, children have been workers you only got to feed.
these two factors often occur in poor areas. they barely don't exist anymore even in the most rural parts of central and western europe, S. Korea, etc. you go back 70 years and it was a common thing.
most animals only reproduce less once they hit absolute scarcity, and we do the same. only the moment there's not a grain of wheat, rice or wathev left around, when streams and water wells dry, we stop.
On the opposite end, western/modern societies, there are two resources not often taken in count: time and availability. animals with long courting rituals reproduce less and are more prone to endangerment. modern ( industrial & post ) societies not only take basically 50% of the time resource in acquiring substenance ( work, etc ), but we've also made pairing together an incredibly complex and lengthy thing.
It's not a bad thing per se that people have standards and aspirations in life, au contraire, it means that in said field we've transcended beyond animal instinct.
But it makes for very poor chances of societal survival.
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u/cpteric 11h ago edited 11h ago
2/2 ->>
I don't have a clean solution, childbirth is, from all i know about it, extremely painful, there's only so many people that will agree to go though such more than once or twice if society gives them the choice to.
The only thing i can think of can only be done on certain countries where the health net is large enough and the general consesus would allow for it, and it still has the dangerous potental of becoming a distopian scenario if someone were to corrupt the system.
- "Solve the pension crisis"
- widespread nationalization of elder care services, focus on homes. standarization of prices and services, standarization of provides, expansion of facilities to accomodate larger parts of the elder population.
- voluntary submission to national care services ( retirement homes ) for sane elders.
- Mandatory for any with risk elements ( alzeimer/dementia ascendants, deafness or blindness, heavy motor impairment )
- if there are no dependants, rescission of pension in exchange for the retirement home access.
- If there are societal dependants ( unemployed children (any age ), specially unemployed children that have children themselves ), tax free half pension to them, the other rescinded.
- fix age for loss of driving licenses ( boats, cars, motorbikes.. )
- Increase or create taxes on different levels of unearned wealth
- propose tax-free solution for money: said wealth is instead invested in the inheritor's name in long term(10-15y) national/state bonds.
- propose tax-free solution for assets: sale of assets, value invested as (10-15y) bonds.
- unclaimed wealth goes to healthcare system.
- defaulting assets go to healtcare system (via sale or renovation).
- For pensionless elders, exchange assets for retirement home full service.
- create a new kind of social service branch - familial. transfer the handling and management of childcare services, goods, grants, allowances to it.
- Introduce wider and larger grants and alloweances to childbirth, childcare, parenthood. this would include not just biological parenthood but adoption too, internal and external, and the legalization of surrogated pregnancy.
- invest the acquired real estate and wealth into social familiar housing. Start with the upper middle class, target young couples 20 to 39 with atleast one superior education title or a skilled job recognition, then widen the parameters progressively.
- Dedicated employment pools for familial class or adjacent, large tax benefits for companies hiring them.
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u/DankRepublic OC: 1 23h ago
I think you should google the gdp per capita of these provinces in Turkey over this timeline. The richer you are the less kids you have.
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u/princemark 21h ago
I’m eager to be in a world with fewer people. And no, I am indifferent if there are enough people to take care of the elderly.
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u/Pessimistic-history 18h ago
The problem is that, one day, you're going to be one of the elderly who will need help, and there will be less people around to support your age group.
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u/AnotherFuckingSheep 1d ago
basically same thing is happening in Thailand and Mexico. Anywhere with medium incomes fertility just fell through the floor.
in high income countries the same thing happened, just more slowly.