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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25964 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:

Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline

https://archive.is/T6thJ

Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.

After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.

But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.

Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.

The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.

One of the most disheartening things about reading more deeply about the public politics of the past is you come to realize that, as often as not, people don't really win arguments (which are often just rhetoric anyway) so much as manage to marginalize their opposition to where no one can hear their arguments anymore. Facts might well play a role in that, but they're certainly far from determinative.

A while ago, probably in some dissident right space, I saw someone sharing the old, original conservative arguments against social security and other government provided pension programs, the arguments that were being offered against them before those programs were implemented. And the main argument I saw was something like "There are natural, organic ties between and across generations in families (illegible ties, you might say) that are crucial to nurture for the health of broader society, and having the government intervene in PROMISING to support the elderly is likely to do grave damage to the longer term building of those ties". I remember being struck at the time that I'd never seen the argument, nor had I seen anyone refute the concern. Those holding those concerns just lost and were marginalized because giving destitute elderly people in the 30s free money was, in the immediate term, a huge relief of visible suffering and was thus understandably hugely popular, politically. Those old discussions keep coming to mind, for me, every time I read these stories about cratering birth rates.

I don't think there's data here, but I suspect that liberals who have stronger personal ties with their grandparents than average don't have noticeably more children.

the health of broader society

The textbook example of such societies are the Malthusian in nature. If having kids is the only way to ensure you survive in old age, then it is in everyone's interests to breed like rats. The outcome is an exponential grows which periodically gets mowed down by the horsemen Pestilence, War and Starvation.

You might call such societies 'healthy', I call them hellish.

The main problem with the pension system is that the working generation is paying the pensions for the previous generation, which works when the population is growing or stable. What we should do instead is make each generation pay into a fund which will eventually pay for their pensions. So even if the size of generations changes, the per capita funds will be stable.

Previous generations if nationalists worried a lot about having enough manpower to throw into the meat grinder of war. In the nuclear age, this is not much of a concern among superpowers any more.

Personally, I would predict a rebound of the TFR at some point, once space in the metropolitan areas becomes more affordable due to the shrinking population, people are likely to have more kids. But even if I am wrong, I would much rather that some robot nurse cared for me in old age than living in a society which puts undue pressure on people to have kids.

You might call such societies 'healthy', I call them hellish.

But they are societies. Ceteris paribus, they'll survive forever. With our 'continuously declining sub-replacement fertility' model it's either replacement or extinction.

Yes. People don’t seem to realize that the one thing all states with low birthrates have - from Sweden to Saudi Arabia - is a welfare state.

Welfare state is a bit hard to define, but if one checks the table of OECD countries by social spending, the second-lowest is the famously low-fertility South Korea.

All OECD countries have highly developed welfare states. It’s not a “the more welfare, the lower the birth rates” argument, it’s that the existence of any advanced welfare state makes economic bonds between a community less necessary.

Well, a welfare state kind of necessitates being a developed country, unless you have some sort of a different definition from the one I have.

It would also seem to be a vicious cycle.

Lower birth rates =

Smaller family networks =

More demand for government safety nets =

Less value to family support =

Lower birth rates

Haredim are satisfied customers of the welfare states they live in.

Haredim are cynically exploiting the welfare states they live in.

I don't see the distinction.

Sure, and there are other ultra-niche groups like French tradcaths (who avail themselves very effectively of the generous incentives for children), those in the Dutch Bible Belt and so on for whom the same is true. But that takes an extraordinarily high-pressure traditionalist religious subculture that has had a lot of filtering and leaving. Many, possibly most descendants of shtetl dwellers secularized. Most descendants of Swiss mennonites in 1800 secularized. So did most high-tfr Catholics. This evaporation left highly fertile populations that survived.

We might say that unless you have an ultra-strong core of religious devotion to a community such that it persists even after it is no longer economically necessary, it seems that the arrival of the welfare state typically coincides with declines in fertility rates as other communal organizations and institutions like the extended family suffer.

There are natural, organic ties between and across generations in families (illegible ties, you might say) that are crucial to nurture for the health of broader society, and having the government intervene in PROMISING to support the elderly is likely to do grave damage to the longer term building of those ties"

The problem is this was a failure and seen so at the times which is why Social Security was immediately popular - as seen when you compare endemic elderly poverty rates in comparison to other groups pre-Social Security and now.

Those holding those concerns just lost and were marginalized because giving destitute elderly people in the 30s free money was, in the immediate term, a huge relief of visible suffering and was thus understandably hugely popular, politically.

That huge relief of visible suffering was the 'disproof' of the anti-social security argument. That is normally the way these things work: A huge and public argument goes on for quite some time on a particular topic, most often without being settled explicitly by public debate but, instead, by events. While the relation of such 'events' to the previous debate can often be quite tenuous in fact, in the perception of the public it is ultimately all that matters. It has ever been thus. Many public debates in the distant past were settled by the winner of a battle, not because might makes right, but because victory proves the favor of God/the gods. The entire rejection of the small central state/market oriented model in the United States came down to the disaster of the Great Depression, regardless of whether 'free markets' """caused""" the Depression or not.

Good information is expensive.

Well it is interesting in that perhaps small central governments underperform when you have Great Depressions (though seemingly caused by a central bank and worsened by FDR’s policies) but perhaps do better in the long run? That is, perhaps voters liked the immediate benefits and didn’t realize the long term costs.

Somewhat similar to some of the anti suffragist arguments. They weren’t all cartoon misogynists. Some made credible arguments that seem to be proved out. It makes you wonder how many good ideas were discarded for political reasons.

Yeah, on this topic, I find myself repeatedly recommending people read Jane Jerome Camhi's Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880-1920 on this topic.

there used to be a very interesting article shared around on occasion about anti-suffragettes. Pointing out that a lot of suffragettes at the time used to assert ideas that expanding the vote would create World Peace because women would never vote for war and other now seemingly ridiculous claims. and that a lot of the actual convincing wasn't based around assuring people of the virtue of expansion so much as arguing the logical continuity of universal suffrage. A "might as well" convincement rather than a moral crusade. Or that there used to be a unique moral claim that women had when they did interefere because they were seen as apolitical. That the history of the movement as understand by the common man has been pretty much forgotten.

Of course I don't know whether it's true or not, but I've never been able to refind it. I'd love if anyone here still has a link to it.

Was it this one?

https://herandrews.com/2015/03/01/women-against-suffrage/

It was! Thank you so much! I'd thought it lost to me for good.

It's this article. https://kirkcenter.org/essays/a-cause-lost-and-forgotten/

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