The Biggest Policy Blunder of All Times

As 2025 winds down, further evidence of drastic population policy changes are too big to hide, hence they are cobbled together in odd-reading press releases pushed by the Austrian state broadcaster ORF.

Europeans often compensate their political irrelevance vs. Americans by pointing to the latter’s lack of education, culture, and history, but there is so little context in the below piece, it boggles the mind.

Hence, for background, please see the below posting from what seems like the Jurassic period, in which we learned:

Fewer births and deaths in 2024, birth rate again negative: 76,873 children were born in Austria in 2024, 0.9% fewer than in 2023, according to preliminary results from Statistics Austria. In the same period, 87,407 people died, 2.6% fewer than in the previous year. The birth rate in 2024 was again negative at -10,534 (2023: -12,155). The average number of children per woman fell to a new all-time low of 1.31.

That came from the officials at Statistik Austria on 25 Feb. 2025 [source]:

At the same time, Austria alone took in a staggering 3.34m immigrants, which increased the country’s total population to 9.2m as of early 2025:

Why, oh epimetheus, do you place both declining birth rates and what the UN considers a viable policy option to combat these trends (plus ageing) known as ‘replacement migration’ together?

The quick and simple answer is today’s topic.

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

Births Decline Further

Via the Austrian Press Agency/ORF, 29 Dec. 2025 [source; archived]

Births in Austria have continued to decline. This is shown in the study ‘Familien in Zahlen’ [trans. Families in Figures’, the annual report for 2025 by the Austrian Institute for Family Studies at the U of Vienna; text in German only], published today by the Federal Chancellery. According to the study, there were only 77,238 births in 2024, which is about 370 fewer than the number in 2023 [which, as the top-linked piece from Feb. 2025 shows, had been the lowest number in decades]. By comparison, there were over 83,000 births in 2020 [a ± 7% reduction compared to then; gee, I wonder what happened in the past five years]. The historical low was in 2001 with 75,458 births.

Nevertheless, the trend has been downward in recent years. Accordingly, the fertility rates have also continued to fall. While it was 1.44 in 2023, it dropped to 1.31 last year. The rate for Austrian women, at 1.22, is significantly lower than that of mothers with foreign citizenship, at 1.58 [and in this briefest of all paragraphs, a bombshell admission™ lurks: remember that we were propagandised for decades that an ageing society must have mass immigration to stave off catastrophe—looks like, as per official gov’t data, this ain’t gonna happen].

Average Age of First-Time Mothers Giving Birth is 30.4 Years.

In contrast, the average age of mothers at the birth of their first child is at a historical high at 30.4 years. The lowest average age since records began was 22.8 years in 1973 [this factoid alone explains much of the lower birth rate; I suppose since we’re at this, we may as well point to the very ugly twin of increasing levels of loneliness, involuntary celibacy, single households, etc.]. The share of women who have their first child after age 40 remains relatively low, at 3.6 percent. However, at the beginning of the millennium, it was significantly lower at 0.8 per cent [I’m going for: I suppose we’ll very soon consider IVF and other assisted means of getting pregnant at that age in terms of what it means…]

The number of children born out of wedlock has recently decreased considerably, to 38.1 per cent [so, it’s apparently not sooper-dooper liberals and atheists who are having wild procreation parties, it seems to the contrary, which provides further clues about the snark in the preceding paragraph]. In 2020, it was still over 41 per cent. The number of marriages and registered partnerships, however, remained stable last year, totalling more than 47,700. The average age at first marriage was around 31.5 years for women and about 33.5 years for men [and this short notice points to one of the core underlying problems in terms of origins of this predicament: that’s about a decade later than in the early 1970s, if one would correlate (assume) the share of children born out of wedlock to have been lower 50 years ago: the reasons are simple to understand—economic uncertainty (mainly the oil shock of 1973) plus welfare state measures tied to last earnings before pregnancy plus discrimination against mothers in the workplace].

The Vast Majority of Single Parents are Women.

In Austria in 2024, there were a total of 696,100 couples with children under 15 living in their household. Of these, 55,100 were stepfamilies/blended families in which at least one child from a previous relationship was brought into the household.

Around 190,000 children and young people under 18 grew up with single parents. The proportion of children living with their mothers (just over 167,000) is noticeably higher [this is also a massive compounding factor as there’s no other single indicator of problems as a teen and, likely, later in life as fatherlessness].

Family Minister Claudia Plakolm (ÖVP) said that while policymakers can set the framework, it is ultimately the decision of each couple whether or not they want children. She added that it is a task for society as a whole to create a family-friendly environment in which people are happy to start a family [look beyond the boilerplate blabber: if it was, indeed, ‘a task for society as a whole’, that has failed miserably in the past half-century; I’m not claiming ill intentions (at first), but obviously generous welfare state spending—brought about by the socialists in power in the 1970s and continued by every single notionally right-wing/conservative gov’t since—is the chief culprit here].

A Bit From ‘Families in Figures

Here is a bit more from that publication, which I found most relevant:

Abstract

Families in Figures (FiZ), the statistical reference work, is updated for 2025. It shows the changes in selected key figures over the past ten years. It includes data on topics such as births and fertility, marriages/registrations of registered partnerships, divorces/dissolutions of registered partnerships, household and family typs, employment, child care, family and social benefits, and European comparative data. The 71 tables and 30 figures are provided with reading examples and a glossary explains terms used in family statistics.

Citation: Markus Kaindl & Rudolf Karl Schipfer, ‘Familien in Zahlen 2025 Statistische Informationen zu Familien in Österreich’.

As to more particulars, well, here we go, as in, table 4 showing births to Austrian and (vs.) immigrant parents (mothers to the left, fathers to the right):

Vienna, the country’s capital (and where I was born and raised) is the one federal state (Bundesland) where (drum roll) children born to Austrian parents are in a minority right now. Further particulars below:

While I will not discount the massive implications of these changes—just imagine running high-tech societies with populations of very diverse™ and far-away backgrounds (I suppose our countries will turn into shitholes well before we ever run out of potential candidates to train as engineers and the like)—the in my view most damning data is kinda buried on p. 27, and it relates to the total fertility rates according to the mother’s immigration status:

What demographers call ‘replacement fertility rate’ is 2.11 children per woman, and while the Austrians’ (Germans) rate stood at 2.09 children per woman in 1950 (p. 26), whoever in-migrated to Austria until the late 1990s had a slightly higher fertility rate (2.12 to 2.14).

By contrast—and this is the smoking gun evidence—whoever arrived after 2000, their fertility rate was already below replacement rates at 2.09 children per woman and, if these fragmentary data are any indication, falling even faster than that of the native-born population.

Let that sink in for a moment.

It took roughly from around 1950 to between 1980/85 for Austrian (German) birth rates to decline from 2.09 children per woman to 1.65/1.47, which corresponds to 30-35 years.

Immigrant populations achieved (sic) the same rapid collapse in 24 years.

Let’s consider another golden calf here, however briefly, before wrapping up, namely welfare state spending on family formations (marriages):

The highest number of marriages after WW2 occurred in 1987 (76,205). The reason being the abrogation of gov’t marriage subsidies [orig. Heiratsbeihilfe] as of 1988.

If you squeeze your Mk. I eyeballs, you can see that marriages were trending downwards since WW2, and that there was very little stopping or reversing that trend.

Having more gov’t subsidies made several thousand of couples determine to get some extra benefits but didn’t budge the trend. I suppose whatever natalist gov’t benefits, e.g., those espoused by Hungary most prominently (a permanent 25% reduction of a mother’s income taxes per child born) will merely ‘pull forward’ the decision of those couples who already determined they would love to have children.

While I personally doubt any of this will make more than a handful of childless people reconsider their stance, it’s also very likely to have few, if any, tangible benefits in the longer run (though I’m freely admitting that 30+ years of data as summarised in the above graph isn’t very much, demographically speaking).

Bottom Lines

Once one places birth and fertility rates (plus, of course, feminism), mass immigration, and welfare statism into the same analytical framework, there are but two conclusions to be drawn that, moreover, can no longer be considered tentative:

• whatever specific gov’t measures were taken from the early-to-mid 1970s —and let’s leave out the reasons as to why these were taken; I think this was the case—it is obviously the biggest policy failure in recorded human history (from the point of view of John & Jane Q. Public, that is, not from the powers-that-be and discounting whatever happened before Noah built the ark)
• I’m not arguing to totally check out and become apathetic, esp. if you have (grand)children, it is a clarion call to re-take the gov’t that rules you ostensibly in your name and make it work in the favour of the people

Let’s not forget that the majority of foreigners that came to Western countries is rapidly adapting to Western mores (of reproduction), which also calls into question ‘mass remigration’ as a viable policy position (while disregarding, for the time being, pertinent issues if this is logistically possible)—but note that this doesn’t mean that the worst of the worst shouldn’t be put behind bar ASAP (here’s looking at El Salvador).

Oh, lest I forget, please spend two hours and watch Stephen J Shaw’s tell-all documentary ‘Birthgap’ (2025), which I found very illuminating:

Source

Featured image source: https://www.facebook.com/son.hahong.7/photos/d41d8cd9/3225708467590645/

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