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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25902 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.

The carrots are not working, so there should be sticks implemented. Not sure how, but we should make childlessness painful.

The carrots are not working

The carrots are a big part of the problem.

I feel like we had an AAQC not too long ago about this, but I can't remember the details now. The gist was something like "the opportunity costs of childbearing and childraising are just insanely high and keep getting higher because there are so many other things to do that generate more immediate rewards." In particular, allowing women into the workforce came up, possibly alongside Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap book.

The value of raising children has become the inverse of the "privatize gains, publicize losses" business strategy. People who raise children bear the actual costs of perpetuating civilization, while everyone reaps the reward. We don't valorize motherhood, but perhaps more importantly, we don't punish childlessness.

so there should be sticks implemented

The comment I'm thinking of referenced someone's argument that "I would never do this of course but likely the most effective way, and maybe the only truly effective way, to increase birthrates is to just ban women from the workforce."

EDIT: Oh, hahah, it was my post actually. Here's the quote from the article I linked:

He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.

I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.

Seems pretty counterproductive to me: marriage rates would plummet, reducing birth rates.

The trouble is that ban women working outside the home nowadays, and you'll restrict motherhood to the latest arm candy of Elon Musk's or whomever - women in arrangements (be that marriage or cohabitation) where the man earns a ton of money and can support a family on one wage.

I'm referencing another discussion elsewhere here where someone said that the middle-class assembly line worker who could afford the lifestyle on one wage are the jobs being hollowed out, and that's the truth of it. If you want women to have four kids as a family, which wasn't a crazy notion even thirty years ago, then you have to make it livable. The family where they have four kids and are in squalor are not going to be the solution, because they will be lost in petty crime and all the other problems we have today, even if they start off with middle-middle class parents/grandparents. If they're living six people to three rooms and can't afford dentist or doctor visits, then they're sliding down the class ladder and are not the replacement fertility children you want. The very rich may have status marker big families, but they're never going to be producing numbers enough to stem the decline. You need the vast bulk of the middle to be having more kids, and if they can't afford them already, then cutting down on family income isn't going to fix the problem.

Arguably if women left the workforce en masse it would lead to an increase in men's wages due to lower job competition. You'd have to put in some protectionist regulations to keep companies from just outsourcing for cheaper labor, but part (and definitely only part) of the reason it's so difficult to raise a family on a single income is precisely because women entered into the workforce en masse to begin with.

Women's rights are not a suicide pact, but feminism and leftism generally seem deadset on making them such.

But would it lead to a corresponding increase in cost for everything?

It'd be complicated, since women not having disposable income independent of their husbands would lower demand on the consumer side.

Sure, but the answer there is that if there is a labour squeeze because no women in the workforce, then you will get the push for bringing in migrants for cheaper labour, plus increasing automation, plus demands for productivity increases - if there are two jobs and John is doing one, now John has to ramp up his productivity to cover the second, vacant job. That won't necessarily mean higher wages, either, unless you're in the kind of job where there's the expectation of good pay and conditions baked in.

And now because John is working longer hours and over the weekend, Jane is doing all the child-raising, and now there is dissatisfaction and unhappiness at home about "you don't do your fair share, the kids never see you" "well it's not my fault, I have to be the breadwinner, don't you think I'd love to be around more but it's not possible".

We're reaping what we sowed. The panic in the past was over "too many people! the earth can't support them all!" and that encouraged the decline in fertility, backed up by Malthusian fears. Now we're finding out that in fact, you need babies to replenish your population of working age adults, and Malthus was a false prophet to follow.

On the one hand, I'm laughing here because Paul VI has been vindicated. But I can't laugh too much, as the Zeitgeist has also corrupted Catholics who go along with the "sex is for fun and pleasure, you don't need to be married, don't get tied down with babies, use contraception to plan your family for when it is convenient for you" social messaging.

if there are two jobs and John is doing one, now John has to ramp up his productivity to cover the second, vacant job.

That's a very simplified view of thing. For that to work, you have to assume that all jobs are fungible and their income perfectly matches their net production to the economy. The reality is uh... more complex.

Roko had a funny tweet about this on twitter: the net change from most women to GDP is negative

Look at the jobs most women get. Very, very few of them are doing something like hard labor or the skilled trades. Rosie the Riveter was a switchboard operator who the artist painted much larger than she really was, and with a fake rivet gun.

More often they work in very human-focused jobs, like teachers, waitresses, nurses, haircutters, and secretaries. A lot of that is just getting paid to do the same shit they would have done anyway as a homemaker, except now they're doing it for strangers instead of their living family. (prostitution comes to mind as a similar model...) You can teach your kids, make meals for them, cut their hair, and take care of them when they're sick, it's not rocket science. But of course it looks good for the economy to have it be paid instead of free, so more money moves around.

More perniciously, they also work in office jobs where they directly compete with men. And then the entire office has to adapt and change culture to accommodate them. No more dirty jokes with the lads. Not too much overtime. Someone will have to cover for her when she's sick or just too stressed out to deal. Everyone must reach "consensus" so not too much angry arguing. Power structures based on hidden cliques rather than clear, explicit rules and hierarchies. And we must promote women at equal rates to men, so we can't use any evaluation metrics that would make them look bad, and we must hire women into HR roles specifically focused on hiring other women.

I increasingly just see the world as a power struggle betweeen men and women. In the past men had more power, because of their earnings. And they used that power to get what they wanted, which was sex, which incidentally led to babies. No women have more power, and they use it to get baubles and attention without having to put out.

Banning women from the workforce makes such wages possible, because it more than doubles the labor bargaining power of men in middle-class and white-collar lower class jobs.

yeah, I thought this too back when I was fifteen. But why did companies go along with it, then? Because labour is the greatest cost for any business, and you want to keep your costs down as much as possible. If there's a shortage of workers, you may have to pay higher wages to attract them - if you can't wait them out, or replace them with cheaper labour, or automate the job away.

Look at the breaking of the power of the unions, when they got too cushy about jobs and pay and conditions. Governments backed this up. If it becomes too expensive to pay the men in middle-class and white-collar lower class jobs, then there will be a solution found to the problem.

How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?

How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?

I'm not sure, but now that I've found the article I was thinking of, Nowrasteh definitely has a lot more to say about the aforementioned "carrots." Economic opportunities are a part of that picture, but so are things like Netflix and video games and international travel. His argument, ultimately, was that deregulation is the answer, which seems a bit optimistic to me. But also moot, because there's basically no political will for deregulation at this point, at least not in America. Which is in turn partly because it's easier to fight a culture war if you're authoritarian about it, so American politics has become increasingly authoritarian as it has become increasingly factional.

This is probably related to what you're talking about here.

Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.

Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.

That is certainly true. But porn, at least, is also directly related to the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, which was in turn substantially a product of feminism. In many ways I think we are still stuck playing out the consequences of the cultural upheaval of post-WWII America. Feminism and race relations and homosexuality and other left-of-center issues really became politically salient around that time, without significant historical precedent. America itself wasn't even particularly "multicultural" circa 1960, when the population was 85% white and 11% black.

I don't know where it ends, or how. I don't know how to resolve the problems we've inherited. If I look at history for guidance, problems don't appear to generally get solved so much as subsumed into whatever problems come next. Usually that seems to mean war, within or without. These days I suppose something approaching a technological singularity could also suffice. It's not clear to me that I want to still be alive when whatever happens next finally gets around to happening, except for the part where I'm curious to see how it plays out.

In many ways I think we are still stuck playing out the consequences of the cultural upheaval of post-WWII America.

That is undeniably true. Hell, it's such a cliche I think we all kind of accept it without even really thinking about how strange this situation is.

The more I read and think about history, the more I see is as being on the far right side of an exponential growth chart. Almost none of the stuff that dominates our lives has ever existed before. That's trivially true for recent inventions like social media and video games, but you can go back further and say that about anything. Like you said, the sexual revolution and civil rights era wasn't that long ago, it's within living memory, I've talked to my parents about it. Cars, TV, and telephones also only became common at that time.

Or go back further. The human population didn't used to grow so fast, until like 1850 when the developed nations solved child mortality and suddenly tripled in size in the span of a few generations. Then that spread to every other country on earth, until we all suddenly stopped having kids for some reason.

Or ocean travel. That didn't used to be a thing! Sailors would stay close to shore so they wouldn't get lost at sea. It was only a few centuries ago that humans learned to sail across the ocean, leading to the "age of discovery" when they could finally explore the world. Even then, it was normal for ships to crash and sink. Magellan and most of his sailors died on his expedition.

Before that, you have the bronze age and the metal age, when humans finally learned how to make metal. And it was a huge ordeal, requiring tons of skilled labor and maybe some slaves dying in the mines. That was still just a few thousand years ago, practically a blip in the human timescale, compared to the first humans from 2.8 million years ago. So for most of our history I guess we just used rocks and sticks, living in small tribes, leading a very violent dangerous life, and that's what we've evolved for. It's going to take some time to figure out how to live in in this modern world of technological miracles.

Oh, I don't know either. My girlfriend and I had a chat the other day where we were lamenting that people weren't involved in their communities, voluntary associations are dying out, people are lonely, everyone seems to hate each other. And then we just sat there in shocked silence as we pondered how we had no idea how to fix this. I think we both consider ourselves lucky to at least have each other.

Sometimes I feel like a sane man in an insane world (and other times an insane man in a differently-insane world, I guess that's how it goes). But there's something massively wrong with everything, and the internet seems to be making it meaningfully worse, filled with negativity (even deserved negativity!) and brutal comparisions. I'm certainly part of the problem. I've been on a death-spiral as of late that's consisted of hate-reading people's discussions on modern dating, and the only thing I've gained is unnecessary insecurity about what is really a very happy relationship with someone I love. Maybe that's what's going on -- there are real problems, things could be better, but everything people are engaging with is so harshly negative that it colors their perception of the world in ways that make the real problems seem worse, and even actually positive things that exist seem unstable. And since the problems are deeply connected to social trust and confidence, this acts as a self-fulfilling prophesy that makes the problems actually worse and the positive things that exist actually unstable. Nobody seems to be living in the real world, I'm no exception. I wish I could live in the real world. But how do I go about doing that? Am I so far gone, so deep into the rabbit hole that there isn't any way out? What is the real world? What is real? How do you define real? What is "online"? Do our minds make it real? A Roman official once said to a man he was about to execute, two thousand years ago yesterday: "What is truth?"

Marry your girlfriend and have children. Join a church and raise your children according to its teachings.

Are you and your girlfriend involved in a community? Do you have a community you know you could join, but haven't gotten around to it?

I have a basically functional community I could join, but due to some discontinuity, am having trouble joining again with very young children.

Time to unplug for a bit. Sounds like it is really getting to you. Go to real places and talk to real people. Most get along just fine.

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