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Notes -
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
https://archive.is/T6thJ
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.
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.
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