The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - France Hits the Demographic Point of No Return || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

The Americans and Kiwis are the last of the developed countries still holding onto growing populations. France is the most recent victim to have fallen into demographic decline, so let's see what the future has in store.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4kazl19

Hey all, Peter Zine here, come to you from a snowy Colorado, got a fresh inch overnight. Today we're talking about demographics specifically in France. French statistics were released in the last couple of days, indicating that France is the latest country in the world to now have more deaths than births. France has long been the country in Europe with the highest birth rate with the most pronatalist policies, and now they have slipped into population decline as well. This means that every country in the first world with the exception of the United States and New Zealand are now in this position where they are in demographic decline. The Germans are among those that are furthest along.

They actually hit this point back in 1972 or 1973. So short version, this isn't the end for France, but it is the beginning of the end. Germany's a great example. They've been in this situation for about 50 years now, but from the point that you have more deaths than burst, you then have to wait for everybody to kind of leak through the system. That literally takes an entire human lifetime. In the case of Germany, what this means is for the last 30 years, they really haven't had many people under age 20. And so most of their economic growth comes from high productivity workforce and exports. You can only have a consumption-led economy if you have a lot

of people age 20 to 50. Those are the people who do most of the spending. France still has a lot of those. It'll be another 20 years before those numbers start to decline. So France, in whatever the world evolves into next still has at least two, three, four decades. But in the case of the Germans, this next 10-year period is when they simply run out of working-aged adults. They're going to have to invent a new economic model. For the United States, we're going to hit that point where France is today in about five years is the estimate. We've seen smaller and smaller generations for the last 30 years. And now with the Trump administration turning so gung-ho against migration, which is the one thing that can buy you time. We're looking at probably the United States being a net zero growth population last

calendar year. Full statistics aren't in yet, but we will hit that more deaths than births by natural causes by 2030. And then we will start that decline too. Now, as again, with the German example, that doesn't mean the end is nigh, but something to keep in mind is whereas the Germans aged out during a time that there was a lot of young people on a global basis and there was someone to export to, the United States and France will be aging out in a period where that is no longer true, because we already have a large number of developing countries ranging from Chile to Colombia to Thailand that have already crossed this Rubicon. And so you can't export to the world if the world is not young enough and rich enough to buy from you. So while we still do literally have decades left, it's going to be a more compressed experience than what happened in, say, Italy,

or Germany or Korea or Japan. One other note, China, officially, according to their own statistics, hit this point about five years ago. The statistics aren't very good. They probably hit it more like 15 years ago. Also, the Chinese birth rate, just this last calendar year, dropped by 17% in one year in a time where there wasn't an economic crisis. So just because you have more deaths than births doesn't mean that you're gone already, but it also means that countries age at different paces and the Chinese don't have nearly as much time. So we really are looking at an economic dissolution in the German situation within a decade because they've been moving this way for a half century.

And also from the Chinese system in this decade because they are aging so much more quickly. All right, that's it for this one. Talk to you guys later.