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Germany will soon crash into the consequences of a fertility crisis made much worse by the mismanagement of the boomer generation. The demographic collapse tearing up the generational contract may soon destroy one of Germany's greatest achievements: Its welfare state. Millennials, GenZ and younger are left with a huge mess they somehow need to sort, while they're outvoted by the grey block making the decisions for them.
What happened? Population Collapse Germany was among the first countries to industrialize and so its fertility rates dropped early in the 20th century. But for 55 years, they have been below replacement, at 1.4 children per woman in 2025. Compared to South Korea this sounds almost amazing but it still means population collapse. If fertility stays at 1.4 then 100 Germans will have 70kids. When those grow up, they will have 49 kids, who will then have 34 kids, who will have 24.
A 76% drop within four generations. Many people think there are too many humans anyways, so what is the big deal? Well at the same time people started living much, much longer. So we have a fatal mix of way more grannies and way fewer babies. The real crisis German Millennials, Gen-Z and younger will have to live through is the massive shift in population composition and the transition period. In 2026 Germany is already one of the oldest countries in the world with a median age of over 45. Almost two in five Germans are over 50, almost one in four is older than 65. Only one in 8 is a child under 14. Despite its industrial production declining, suffocating bureaucracy and little economic
growth, Germany's system is still chugging along and it remains one of the richest countries. The country still has a big population and a big workforce, along with generous social benefits and pension payouts. But soon the reality of demographics and boomer mismanagement will hit Germany like a freight train. Population crash means that a society and culture loses more than just people. The systems and countries we have built can't just be downscaled, things stop working. Young Germans Are Screwed. Old Ones too.
By 2036, 13 million German Baby boomers will retire - this big bulge here. But because they didn't have nearly enough kids way fewer younger people will replace them - in 2030 alone there might be millions of jobs that will be impossible to fill. Fewer people working means fewer taxes and resources for the state. Also services will decline, waiting times will increase for everything from your bags at the airport to doctor's appointments. But the much more urgent issue is retirees. Germany has a "pay as you go" pension system, which means that about 20% of today's salaries is directly paid out to pensioners.
This sort of worked in the 1960s when there were five working Germans for every retiree. But in 2024 this ratio is down to about 2.5. In the 2030s it will get closer to 2 workers for one pensioner. And about ten years after retirement people tend to get really sick and cause the vast majority of health care costs. The math ain't mathing and it actually never really did. Already in the 1970s governments began to subsidize the pension funds with tax revenue - pushing the problem into the future. As has more or less every single government since then.
Well… The Future is Today In 2025, the German federal government spent roughly a quarter of its annual tax revenues to fix holes in the pension system - on top of the working population's payments. Let's say that again: One in four German tax euros is used to pay out pensions today. More than on education, research, infrastructure and defense combined! The wealth of the nation is redistributed from the young and the working to the old and retired. And as the boomers retire this will only get worse.
It's money that could be spent on things that help the young and the working part of the population. Like incentives to start a family, lower taxes, free childcare, cheap loans to buy homes, investments in education, infrastructure or clean energy. There are so many things that would help young Germans. But will Millennials and Gen-Z get to enjoy similar pensions at least? Well, it's not very likely. The current system only works for boomers because their parents had more children and died younger, and because Germany was booming and the problem escalated slowly.
Young people today don't have all of that. Ok that is depressing, but at least the young can take care of their own retirement and save money, right? Well many sure would like to but taxes and contributions are about 40% of salaries for the average worker and almost 50% in the highest tax brackets. One of the highest in the world. Together with the rising cost of living and sluggish wage growth, this makes it especially hard for young and middle aged Germans to generate savings for their own retirements.
One of the best investments, wealth generators and places of comfort and security is owning your own place. But due to a mix of NIMBYS preventing new development, increasing mountains of new regulations making building more expensive, and millions of people immigrating to Germany in the last few decades, the housing supply is deeply behind demand. Renting and buying real estate in metropolitan areas, where young people actually want to live, is so expensive today, that even couples with a dual income and good jobs have a really hard time affording it. The generational contract in Germany is broken. And yet, some media voices continue to frame all this as a failure of young people's financial habits.
The reality is complicated, and misleading narratives permeate the media landscape. Thankfully, there is a solution. Our partner Ground News is a website and app built to help you think critically about the information you consume - a mission we fully support. They curate news articles from across the globe, adding context on political bias, reliability, ownership, and summaries that highlight what each side is leaving out. You can even compare headlines to see how bias shapes the narrative. Take this story about a report on Germany's economic decline: some present it as a straightforward warning, while others highlight it as a serious threat to living standards.
Ground News also reveals "blind spots" - stories that only one side is covering, showing you what your usual news feed is hiding. As information bubbles are becoming the norm, thinking critically about the news is no longer optional. And Ground News makes it easier to do just that. Try it at ground.news/nutshell, or scan the QR code on the screen. Using this link gives you 40% off an unlimited access subscription, and directly supports our channel. And now back to the video. Young Germans are condemned to pay off a huge loan on the future that the older generations have generously granted themselves. And they don't have the power to change this by voting - because German parties just have no incentive to help young people.
Demographic decline in a democracy is a feedback loop: when seniors are the largest group of voters, politicians make politics for them. This leaves young Germans facing a hard time building wealth or getting their own homes, which makes them even less willing to start families and have children, even if they want to. All of which is making the demographic crash worse. Germany has become a society that works for the old and relies on the young, making it really hard to create new young people.
Baby boomers' lives are affected, too. With unsustainable pension funds, inevitably, millions of older Germans will have to work much longer than they thought. A retirement age of 70 or higher is already being discussed. Today about 20% of German pensioners live in poverty and that rate is all but guaranteed to increase significantly in the 2030s. Still, seniors and boomers, in total, own the vast majority of Germany's wealth. Germans are even arguing about to what extent the costs of social systems have gotten out of hand.
Even in a high tax country like Germany there is plenty of wealth disparity and opportunities to tax the rich and take pressure off workers - alltough of course the details are fiercely debated so we'll not get into this right now. But the scale of the gap between what workers pay and what is needed to cover boomers' pensions is so enormous that even raising taxes would only buy a bit of time. And beyond pensions, the welfare and healthcare systems Germans rely upon may become unaffordable in the 2030s. The vast majority of health care costs occur during the last quarter of your life. So just as the healthcare workforce is shrinking due to demographics, the numbers of patients will explode.
The waiting time for a specialist doctor is already months in the state health care system. Ok, but what about immigration? Whatever your opinion on immigration is, pro or against, please put it in a box and ignore it for a moment, we only want to look at it from one perspective: Can it solve the population crash? Let's look at the population again. If a country's pyramid looks like this and you want to stabilize it at the bottom, immigration will not do that. For one, it doesn't actually make your country that much younger.
In Germany the birthrate of most of its immigrants isn't higher than the locals'. And if new immigrants have more children, they tend to adjust to the rest of the population within two generations. Sure, immigration over the last few decades has delayed the coming crash and in the transition period we'll run into serious worker shortfalls, especially in health care and nursing. So zero immigration doesn't seem wise or feasible. But there's a problem: If birthrates stay as low as they are or go down even more, then the German population will continue to shrink. And to keep it stable it would constantly need to be replenished by new immigrants.
Until they age and themselves need new immigrants, to pay for their retirement. No matter if you think this is a good idea or not - it is not actually possible - birth rates are crashing everywhere - eventually immigration around the world will slow down massively - the world is running out of young people. So immigration can delay the issue a bit and ease the consequences, but that is it. Germany either has to solve its demographic crash - or its welfare state and pension systems will break. Conclusion and Opinion Part - So How Over is Germany?
The demographic crisis is the greatest danger to German living standards, and social cohesion. And the same crisis is unfolding in all western countries. Things are about to escalate in Germany, Italy, France and Poland - but the same issues are also on the horizon in the US, Argentina or Canada. The reality nobody wants to talk about is that solving the demographic crisis will be very painful. It will require sacrifices from everyone and politicians seem incapable of addressing it honestly.
But to solve the demographic crisis for real, something no nation has done successfully so far, might mean doing things that are intensely unpopular with older voters. Instead of spending 25% of Germany's entire budget on the elderly, especially the wealthiest among them, we could invest more of it in families - paying for housing and childcare and making it an amazing deal to have a big family. More than anything, our attitude to kids and families needs to change. Demographics move slowly but then unstoppably. The next few decades will be rough - but our societies can decide just how rough - and what kind of societies will emerge on the other side.
Making this video was hell. We wrote the first draft in the winter of 2023! We killed this script again and again only to be annoyed and start fresh. This topic is complex and people angrily disagree about it, so presenting the information in a way that was nuanced but also not so much that it lost all bite was incredibly hard. Especially as Germans it was a real challenge stepping outside the narratives we grew up with. We had countless discussions inside our team and with our experts, arguing passionately over individual sentences, facts to delete or add in.
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