This article is published in cooperation with the ideaForum of the Batory Foundation.
By Paweł Marczewski
The recently published results of the 2021 Polish national census suggest that the future is already here. In the decade since the last census, Poland’s population has declined by 332,000 people, or 0.9%.
This might not seem much, but demographic forecasts, including Eurostat’s EUROPOP2019, show that within three decades Poland’s population will shrink by almost 3.9 million people, over 10%. The census results show that this process is already happening.
But it is not just the dwindling population that is a challenge for Poland’s development; changes in the age structure are also significant, with the results of the census making it clear that Poland’s population is not decreasing in all age groups, but among the youngest one as well as people of working age.
In 2021, the post-working age population (60+ for women and 65+ for men) was 1.8 million higher than a decade earlier. Its proportion among the entire population rose from 16.9% to 21.8% over that period. By contrast, the working age population fell by 1.9 million over the same period, from 64.4% to 60% of the population. There were also more than 245,000 fewer Poles aged 0–17.
Demographic forecasts show that these changes in the size of age groups will increase further still. EUROPOP2019 predicts that by 2050 almost a third of Polish society will be senior citizens.
In the report Generations: Solidarity in Development, published jointly by the GAP Foundation and Batory Foundation a few months before the preliminary census results, we treat these transformations as a starting point for describing a future Polish society based on intergenerational solidarity (more on how such a society might operate and what changes are needed to create it in a moment).
For now, the government’s response to these challenges is to take steps to curb or reverse the trends of ageing of society. This is why politicians from the ruling camp talk so much about “promoting fertility”.
We can expect that the two separate institutions they have set up to deal with demography – the Generations Institute established by a decree of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and the Polish Family and Demography Institute pushed by the MP Bartłomiej Wróblewski – will concentrate on working to increase the birth rate.
The problem is that the government’s actions in this field have so far been ineffective in the long term, based as they are on traditional ideas about the family rather than scientific knowledge about the factors conducive to fertility and a solid diagnosis of the demographic situation.
Regardless of whether the government tries to boost fertility with further family allowances or by promising to cut pensions to those without children, these solutions will not result in an increased number of births.
As demographer and economist Irena E. Kotowska notes, the key to fertility is the number of women of reproductive age (15–49), which will shrink by 30% in Poland by 2050. The number of births will therefore fall, whatever solutions the government adopts.
Investment required to boost fertility
A good pro-family policy can make this fall less dramatic – “good” meaning responding to the actual needs of parents and those who would like to be parents, and not one that tailors help to fit a top-down, ideology-based model.
As further education has grown more widespread, it has become increasingly important to reconcile parental care with professional self-realisation.
Contrary to damaging stereotypical ideas that it is women with low education and lacking work experience who want to have babies so they can “live off benefits”, more often those expressing a desire to have children are professionally active women. In a 2017 CBOS study, 67% of working women in Poland declared such a desire, compared to just 35% of those not in work.
Moreover, also contrary to stereotypes, fertility is growing in Poland not in less wealthy, rural areas, but especially in cities of more than 100,000 residents. In 2019, the fertility rate for Poland was 1.42, in large cities it was 1.45, and in eight of them (including Gdańsk, Kraków, Poznań and Warsaw) it was 1.5.
A critical factor was the relative ease with which professional active women in these cities could reconcile working with childcare thanks to better access to institutions such as nurseries, preschools, and day-care centres.
Investing in institutions and solutions helping people to balance work with childcare is therefore essential for stopping the fall in fertility. Without this, it will be impossible to keep the number of births at a level even close to the current one, and thus the ratio of seniors to young people and those of working age will be even more unfavourable than demographic forecasts suggest.
Investments in easily accessible nursery and preschool care or promotion of more equal division of care responsibilities between women and men are crucial, but even this will not mean a sudden increase in women of reproductive age.
Regardless of how much the state’s pro-family policy is adapted to parents’ actual needs, in the next three decades Poland will become a country with an increasing number of seniors in comparison to those in other age groups. And we must prepare for this if we do not want the country to become an arena of major generational conflicts.
Growing challenges
In January 2022, the Polish Economic Institute (PIE) published the results of an experimental study to observe the phenomenon of age discrimination on the labour market. Fictitious candidates aged 28 and 52 applied for jobs not requiring experience as well as for positions demanding specialist skills acquired working in a similar post.
In the first case, the young people were contacted in more than 17% of cases, and those aged over 50 only half that figure. For positions where experience was needed, the younger people were contacted in 27% of cases and the older ones 15% of the time. In Warsaw, however, the disproportions were much larger – the older applicants received a response four times less often than their younger counterparts.
The PIE experiment demonstrates emphatically the alarming phenomenon of ageism on the labour market, but is also a warning bell for the future. With older people making up a growing proportion of society, age discrimination will become a particularly acute waste of human knowledge and experience.
The labour market is not the only area where a changing age structure will bring profound transformations. The healthcare system, which even today is unable to meet the population’s needs, will come under particular pressure.
This is not just about the number of doctors per thousand people or of hospital beds, but also about providing the kind of care that will allow an increasing number of older people to stay healthy and active – professionally and otherwise – as long as possible.
The last round of the international research project SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), conducted in 2017, shows that more than half of people aged 65+ declare that the help they receive meets their needs only “sometimes, very rarely or not at all”.
The same study reveals that one third of people aged 50–54 struggle with health problems making it harder for them to function day to day, while half of those aged 60–64 face such difficulties.
In the age groups above 65, there are more people with such problems in Poland than in all the other countries covered by the research. To date, insufficient institutional support has meant that the burden of helping older people in everyday life has fallen largely on families.
As signalled by a large percentage of seniors declaring that the assistance they receive is inadequate, work and childcare duties as well as insufficient professional help meant that these families were often unable to cope with this task.
The changes in Poland’s age structure mean that these challenges will be even greater. Today, for every 100 people aged 15–64 in Poland there are 30 aged over 65; in three decades’ time, this ratio will be 100/60.
If the state and society do not develop better ways of supporting seniors, they face a serious care crisis which will affect various spheres of life. Families burdened with care responsibilities will have less time for work and leisure, and seniors’ quality of life will worsen dramatically.
The democratic system will also come under pressure. Polish respondents asked about the most important axes of difference today tend to name left and right, views on the pandemic and economic divisions. The problem is that many of these divides have their source in completely different life conditions, and consequently also generations having differing perceptions of the political reality.
Young Poles decidedly favour the left (young women) or libertarianism (young men), not just because of their age, but because as young people they have a different perspective on the problems of the country and society.
The same applies to older voters. International comparative studies conducted by the Centre for the Future of Democracy at the University of Cambridge show that young people today are more critical of how democracy works than their parents and grandparents at the same age.
Added to the fact that this age group will be getting smaller, and therefore its political preferences will have less and less bearing at the ballot box, this means that legitimisation of the democratic system is under serious threat. There is a growing generation of people who collectively see democracy as the best possible system, and are therefore more disillusioned than their parents or grandparents by the fact that this political system is increasingly not meeting its promises.
Intergenerational solidarity
From polling stations, via jobs, to homes, in which many seniors are struggling to cope with health problems and a lack of adequate care – almost all the areas of social life in Poland require solutions encouraging formation of intergenerational solidarity.
We showed proposals for such solutions in the aforementioned report Generations – Solidarity in Development. The changes we called for concerned very concrete issues such as professional activation programmes, which should be addressed not only to separate age groups, but to entire companies, sectors or regions, taking into account experiences and competences of workers of various ages.
We also call for the creation of support mechanisms making it possible to reconcile paid work with care for older family members requiring help – this would include carer’s leave, higher benefits, and also local assistance networks in which families could be supported in the care by regional authority organisations and local public institutions.
Furthermore, we propose that a more significant role should be played in the processes of democratic decision making by deliberative and participatory mechanisms, so that the forms of civic engagement undertaken by young people will be more significant than previously, and not limited to consultations.
Building genuine intergenerational solidarity is a great civilisational challenge that demands decisive actions in perhaps all areas of operation of the state. The results of the 2021 census show that this challenge must be embraced now.
If not, in the coming decades we will live in a society that is not only older, but also increasingly atomised, more economically unequal and poorer. Intergenerational solidarity is not just a question of social solidarity, but also an important demand of future economic growth.
The original Polish version of this article can be found here. Translated by Ben Koschalka.
Main image credit: Jakub Orzechowski / Agencja Gazeta
