On the left-liberal side, they wait impatiently every month for the CSO to release the current population data, that is, the development of the number of deaths and births. Almost every time, this gives the politicians and journalists of the opposition a reason to say that the government's family policy is not working, since fewer children have been born than a year before.

And if the indicators of the given month are more favorable than the previous year, then the subject of criticism is why there were "only" as many more children as there were. Based on the numbers, one could often think that the criticisms are justified, except that the opinion makers of the left do not look at the good statistics when they pass judgment on Hungarian family policy.

But why does the absolute number of births lead us astray? It is a regrettable fact that the population in Hungary has been decreasing since the 1980s. Accordingly, the generation that is growing up, that is, going to school and then becoming parents, is also represented in smaller numbers than their predecessors.

A small side note: it is precisely for this reason that it is misleading to describe the decline in the number of applicants to university as a decline in education. This is not because proportionally fewer people want to study in higher education, but because there are fewer potential university applicants in the first place.

But back to our main idea! As the population continues to decline, so do the number of women entering childbearing age. Moreover, due to the downward trend, every year there are more people who leave the potential childbearing age than enter it.

From this point on, you don't need to be a doctor of mathematics to realize that fewer women of childbearing age will give birth to fewer children, even if, as the case may be, more children are born per individual than before.

The so-called "fertility rate" is meant to eliminate this statistical distortion. This shows how many children women of childbearing age have on average. A country's population can be on an upward trajectory if this number reaches 2.1, as this means that the affected mothers are giving birth to more than 2 children on average.

the entire Sunday article here.

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