Greek Demographic Decline

As Peter Zeihan has said of all industrial societies.

I mostly ignore U.S. news, these are the international outlet that immediately come to mind.

• al Jazeera

• BBC

• CNA (Singapore)

• Deutsche Welle

• euronews

• France24

Demographics are a periodic issue covered by all four of the European outlets. I can’t recall seeing a piece on it in al Jazeera or CNA. Here we see Greece, which is recording two deaths for every birth, and has a fertility rate of just 1.43, which is two thirds of what’s needed for a stable population.

Greece needs immigrants, young people who want to live and work there, to buy a home and have children. The neo-Nazi anti-immigrant Golden Dawn party rose to prominence after the 2009 financial crisis, but by 2019 no longer had any seats in parliament. Even so, the most plentiful source of young people would be Syrian refugees, and Islam is a touchy issue in the country due to the history between Greece and Turkey.

Like every other country that industrialized in the 20th century, Greece has two choices - become a melting pot, or stagger towards a crash in which every young person has to support two or three retirees.