Science on The Prosperitist

German Emigration

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 11:30:00 +0200

On 1 June 2026 the Federal Statistical Office published Germany’s migration figures for 2025. On its count more Germans left the country than came back, for the twenty-first year running, and the loss had grown from 81,000 to 97,000¹. The next morning the Neue Zürcher Zeitung supplied the reading that stuck. 288,579 Germans had moved abroad, it wrote, “So viele wie noch nie”, more than ever before. Three quarters of the emigrants had a university degree, and to put it drastically: “Deutschland verliert seine Leistungsträger”, Germany is losing the people who carry it². Nine days later Alice Weidel of the AfD told the government in the Bundestag that in its first year in office “so viele deutsche Staatsbürger ausgewandert wie nie zuvor”, more German citizens had emigrated than ever before³.

Weighed, Not Counted

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:30:00 +0200

In October 2017 the Entomological Society Krefeld, on the Lower Rhine, and a group of ecologists from Nijmegen published what the society’s insect traps had caught over 27 years. The answer was less and less: by 2016 the weight of flying insects in German protected areas was 76 per cent lower than in 1989¹. The German language gained a word for it: Insektensterben, the dying of the insects. It was almost absent from the newspapers before 2017 and at its most frequent in 2019². In that year 1.74 million Bavarians, 18.3 per cent of the electorate and more than had ever signed a petition for a referendum there, put their names to one called Rettet die Bienen (save the bees)³. The federal cabinet adopted an action programme with an extra €100m a year⁴, and in 2021 parliament passed a law⁵.

The Polar Bears Nobody Counted

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 08:30:00 +0200

The polar bear has a public relations problem in both directions. For two decades it has been the face of the melting Arctic, thin and stranded on a shrinking floe. For almost as long there has been a counter-claim: polar bear numbers have gone up, not down, four- or fivefold since the 1960s, while the ice retreated the whole time. If the ice is the bears’ habitat and the ice is going, how can there be more bears?