Is Europe's fertility crisis is overstated?

It is, according to an article in the Economist, which pokes holes in some of the more alarmist reactions to Europe's declining fertility rates.

Received opinion holds, in the phrase of Auguste Comte, a 19th-century social scientist, that “demography is destiny” and that Europe is doomed by its death-spiral population numbers. American observers from Walter Laqueur, an academic, to Mark Steyn, a conservative polemicist, argue that Europe is fast becoming a barren, ageing, enfeebled place. Vast numbers of old people, they reckon, will be looked after, or neglected, by too few economically active adults, supplemented by restless crowds of migrants. The combination of low fertility, longer life and mass immigration will put intolerable pressure on public health, pensions and social services, leading (probably) to upheaval.

There are several possible objections to that gloomy forecast. One is that a growing population is not, of itself, necessarily a good thing, nor a falling one unambiguously bad. Another is that there is no short-term correlation between population change and wealth: Japan and South Korea have even lower fertility than Europe. But there is a simpler objection: the picture of relentless decline is wrong, or, to be accurate, half wrong. Europe is not in decline. Rather, as Jitka Rychtarikova of the Charles University in Prague argues, it no longer makes sense to talk about Europe as a single demographic unit at all. There are two Europes.

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