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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25962 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 problem is that a job doesn't just provide money, it provides social status. Being a stay at home mom is just dull, repetitive drudgery but working in HR for $40k/yr is an exciting and challenging Career. Paying women to stay at home and have kids won't be enough if they'll be more respected for working a job. There needs to be a cultural change that makes having kids high status. I doubt there's a western government in existence that has the will and ability to make that happen though, maybe not a government anywhere given that Japan/China/Korea are doing even worse.

Another problem is that don't just want people to have kids, you want the right people to have kids. In the US we get a $2k/yr tax credit per child. That's a negligible amount of money if you're middle class and up so it really only incentivizes the poor. I'd prefer a deduction instead of a credit and make the amounts much, much higher so that a single income family with kids can have more or less the same lifestyle as a DINK family.

I can’t tell if sarcasm but people working in HR aren’t high status, doing anything interesting, or adding significant value.

Seems to me SAHM is boring because it is lonely, especially for wives in a higher economic bracket. There aren’t ten other women from the same social status that live nearby whom you can converse with while little Johnny and Jill play. That is, there is a collective action problem at work.

I was being snarky trying to portray the mindset of the type of people who put off kids to pursue mundane careers, but I should have been clearer. I don't think working in HR is better or more important than being a parent.

I can’t tell if sarcasm but people working in HR aren’t high status, doing anything interesting, or adding significant value.

They're subtracting significant value. But there's definitely status in being the ones who makes rules for and is feared by the productive people.

I guess. HR are looked down upon where I work.

It wasn’t as if the wife of a moderately successful professional man in 1910 was raising her own children or scrubbing kitchen floors the way modern “SAHMs” are expected to; she had maids to do that because wealth inequality was much higher back then and domestic staff much cheaper. Even a skilled artisan or low-level clerical worker would often have a maid in the house.

I'd also point out that college-educated rich women in 1910 were also doing basically non-profit work, they just weren't paid for it. There were many ideological varied movements being led by middle class and rich women of the time, no different from today. This idea there was a time when rich/UMC college-educated in urban areas were just sitting around, doing nothing but taking care of their kids has never really been true in like, the past probably 150-200 years, because of what you said.

In some ways, the 50's were the worst of both worlds, which is what led to feminism - technology has risen to where even middle class women didn't need to spend all day doing household work and because they were in atomized suburbs, there wasn't much to do but kvetch with your fellow other college-educated but at-home mothers about your life.

And they often needed that maid, because modern household appliances didn't exist yet.

Having kids is high status among the rich. I’m not sure how widespread this knowledge is but in wealthy social circles in NYC, London etc being able to afford 4 kids is probably the biggest status marker, since each additional child (including the first) is a few million in costs (once larger housing, 15 years of private school tuition, more rooms on vacation, flights, clubs, college etc are accounted for). If you see a 32 year old secular mom who has 4 kids in Manhattan, you’re looking at someone who has a lot of money.

The problem is that as you say, a DINK couple making $350,000 a year together would have to make like $1m a year or more to have the same lifestyle with 4 kids, assuming they intend to raise them in the manner normal for the upper-middle class.

being able to afford 4 kids is probably the biggest status marker

Because they've outsourced the child raising - a nanny is a must, and if you have more kids then maybe two nannies. An au pair. Some kind of domestic help. We're going back to the days of the parents only see their kids when they're brought down from the nursery to see Mama and Papa for a few minutes before dinner. To quote Belloc's satire on "The Nordic Man":

The Nordic Man has a nurse to look after him while he is a baby, and she has another domestic at her service. He has a night and a day nursery, and he is full of amusing little tricks which endear him to his parents as he grows through babyhood to childhood.

Towards the age of ten or eleven, the Nordic Man goes to a preparatory school, the headmaster of which is greatly trusted by the Nordic Man’s parents, especially by the Nordic Man’s mother. He early learns to Play the Game, and is also grounded in the elements of Good Form, possibly the Classics and even, exceptionally, some modern tongue. He plays football and cricket; usually, but not always, he is taught to swim.

Thence the Nordic Man proceeds to what is called a Public School, where he stays till he is about eighteen. He then goes either to Oxford or Cambridge, or into the Army. He does not stay long in the Army; while from the University he proceeds either to a profession (such as the Bar, or writing advertisements) or to residence upon his estate. This last he can only do if his father dies early.

The brutal truth is, if you want more babies, then ban abortion and contraception - see all the screaming** about forced pregnancy - and that didn't turn out too good for Romania either.

Economy is such that to be able to afford a house, or even renting, you need a dual-income couple. If Mom and Dad have Careers and not just jobs, it becomes more and more expensive to have kids. Cost of childcare* is high, but Mom needs childcare because she can't afford to stay at home looking after the kids herself. If you want your kids to do well in life, then increasingly they have to be "skilled knowledge workers" as someone in another thread said, and that means pouring resources into making sure they go to good schools and do the right extracurriculars to get into the good university for the degree that will open the door to the good jobs.

Being SAHM has been downgraded to the idea of being a drudge and indeed, hampering society - go out there and be Economically Productive in the Workforce! The same governments anxious about falling birth rates are also anxious about getting more women out to work.

*And it's high because it's not a simple matter of "put a bunch of babies in a room, give them the occasional bottle and nappy change".

**And I do mean screaming, see this breathless paper on the worst case scenarios where emergency care medical staff are now the equivalent of the French Resistance fighting the Nazi occupation because every single woman who can't get an abortion is now a medical emergency who will die from the nightmare event.

It's not the economy that makes owning a house unaffordable, it's the regulatory environment.

Sure you can build more homes. You just can't build a looming condo high-rise next to my house. Blotting out the sun, causing extreme traffic problems, causing enormously worse problems should a bus or light rail terminal be built by it, etc.

In fact the negatives of such a project are so certain and great in magnitude that my locality has strictly forbidden such a project. As have almost all localities across my entire continent. The local regulatory environment norms across a continent of hundreds of millions of people point in one clear direction: ban this thing.

And I wish they'd legalize it in a few special economic zones so new urbanists would go to them and stop trying to go against local sentiment in almost all places and trying to break the really nice thing we have going for us.

I agree - local places will ban such things. That's why you need state or federal preemption so politicians who aren't afraid of the 9 people who show up to every City Council meeting and complain about anything changing can actually write decent law.

I guarantee the home you live in was not wanted by somebody in the neighborhood when it was built.

I very much doubt that 9 or so motivated people in almost every locality all across the continent bent all zoning rules to their will.

Almost every local government independently decides to do this. It would be amazing if every locality had a small core of turbo NIMBYs forcing their will onto everyone else. All other people almost everywhere somehow helpless.

The fact that a very large number of independent elections converged on one policy makes me think the policy is popular among voters.

And I wish they'd legalize it in a few special economic zones so new urbanists would go to them and stop trying to go against local sentiment in almost all places and trying to break the really nice thing we have going for us.

Appeasement doesn't work. You can legalize it in special economic zones (e.g. in towns with a train station in NJ), and the New Urbanists will take that and demand more. They don't just love New Urban development (in fact, often they don't, or at least they don't make it economically viable and you get a New Urban ghost town) but also hate suburban development.

If you want your kids to do well in life, then increasingly they have to be "skilled knowledge workers" as someone in another thread said, and that means pouring resources into making sure they go to good schools and do the right extracurriculars to get into the good university for the degree that will open the door to the good jobs.

It really doesn't mean that at all, plenty of skilled knowledge workers have degrees from non-prestigious colleges. This is a myth that the PMC has bought into fully.

This is a myth that the PMC has bought into fully.

American PMC I would say -- there isn't really even such a thing as prestigious colleges in Canada/Europe. (I mean there kind of is, but nobody will hire you because you went to Queen's instead of UofA)

England is something of a special case in that the prestigious colleges are something of a class marker as well -- my impression is that this is mostly impactful only for certain types of job however.

American PMC I would say -- there isn't really even such a thing as prestigious colleges in Canada/Europe

McGill comes immediately to mind. They at least think they're prestigious.

Nobody cares that you went to McGill though -- maybe the odd lawyer who also went to McGill. It's the Harvard of Canada, but that doesn't make it Harvard.

Social engineering is not some impossible task, societies have been regularly, consciously selected for all kinds of things for the entire history of human civilization.

If you want smart people to have more children, all you need to do is make life without or with few children less pleasurable, fun and exciting than life with many children. That is a question of incentives, most of them financial. Incentives and disincentives work, they’re why drink-driving rates have fallen by huge amounts for example, because of a feedback loop between high punishments, social stigma and shame. That same loop can be transferred to childlessness.

It is possible to make PMC life with kids more immediately attractive than PMC DINK life. But it requires hefty, substantial redistribution and engineering of tax burdens (neither of these are remotely new to Western countries).

It is possible to make PMC life with kids more immediately attractive than PMC DINK life. But it requires hefty, substantial redistribution and engineering of tax burdens

How do you make family life more appealing to degenerate hedonists than a DINK life of hedonism and degeneracy?

I'd focus on incentives to go from 2 to 4 or more. It's less of a lifestyle change. My fear would be that in current year instead of children conceived and born naturally from heterosexual marriage, incentives would be available to 'married' homosexual men using surrogates.

As long as they’re using first-world eggs, turning third world surrogates into baby factories for affluent Western gay men is of no significant population-level concern.

Depends on how heritable (exclusive) homosexuality is, I would think. If it's not very heritable it works fine, otherwise you're just pushing the problem to the next generation.

Because that's not creepy and corrupt? These sorts tend to be down with the globohomo ideology. Encouraging it's spread is a concern.

If your goal is to make more people, then why worry about gay people making them with sperm donations or surrogates? We're getting far into "feature, not a bug" territory if a policy makes gay people fertile.

I don't want people that badly.

My experience has been that the homosexuals that do this are all in on the globohomo (the other homo) ideology.

That they may do this on their own is bad. That they may be supported via some sort of policy intervention that was to increase hetronormative families is too far for me.

This line of argument reminds me of the "to get people to ride public transit, you don’t have to fix the issues with public transit, you just have to make the experience of traveling by car much much worse" argument I see sometimes.

They’re both true. A lot of US cities have a problem wherein public transport is seen as only for poor people and homeless, and once something becomes a negative class marker it has a stink that’s hard to shake off. Forcing middle class people to use public transport increases cleanliness and safety (because they lobby for it; in NYC the effort to clean up the subway has big support, whereas in LA and SF nobody gives a fuck since only the poorest of the poor use it) and in the long term makes for better transport systems. Countries like Germany and Finland where middle class people use the bus sometimes have a much higher standard of public transport than places like the US where it’s only for poor people without a car / license.

Obviously cleaning up the smelly / scary / dangerous / drug addicted scum is highest priority, as is general cleanliness, but some pressure is probably necessary to provide the initial impetus for a switch.

Taking wealthier people class hostage to improve public transit doesn't work. People just resign themselves to subways with smelly and occasionally aggressive bums in them. And Stockholm Syndrome makes them turn on anyone who does anything about it privately.

And Stockholm Syndrome makes them turn on anyone who does anything about it privately...

Stockholm has a clean, crime-free metro.. Since mass immigration altered Swedish demographics, this requires significant spend on graffiti cleanup and Metro-contracted security staff who are willing to use the necessary force to keep it that way. This continues to happen despite Swedish politics being what it is, because voters are neither morons nor masochists.

For the avoidance of doubt, so does every other sufficiently large Continental European or first-world Asian city. The fact that America can't police public spaces without a level of lethal violence that normies won't tolerate doesn't mean that it is impossible, just that America sucks at policing. The absence of research interest in "Why can't Americans convert taxpayer dollars spent on policing into an absence of crime the way other first-world countries can?" is exhibit A in why criminology as a discipline is a waste of space.

If you want smart people to have more children, all you need to do is make life without or with few children less pleasurable, fun and exciting than life with many children.

How do you do that? It's time is the important thing here, see the complaints about "now my friends are married and have kids they can't come on nights out/trips with us anymore as everything has to be planned around the kids". Raising kids is a second job, and if you dump it all onto the mother, while Dad is the breadwinner - well, we've spent sixty years nuking the traditional family, good luck with getting that back.

If the prospect is "I have five kids and have to look after them" versus "I have one or no kids and pay more tax", some people will prefer to pay more tax and have the ability to "hey if I decide I want to hit the club tonight, I can do that!"

Think of the Parable of the Daycare Charge for Late Pickups.

It's possible to go from DINK to traditional family but you have to be realistic about the lifestyle differences especially with 4 or more children. We may have had 5 or 6 if we'd started earlier. The first 7 years of marriage we were busy being DINK with nights out/trips.

See, I absolutely think the major problem is that we've turned having children from something that naturally happens, 'well of course now you're married and having regular sex, pregnancy is going to occur', into something that needs to be planned like the D-Day Normandy landings. From the scaremongering around abortion (every child a wanted child, as unwanted children are going to be victims of abuse, so if you don't plan it out perfectly then you will be an unwilling parent who will physically and emotionally abuse the child you resent), to the idea that you must be ready so you need the education, the career-building, the having fun while you're young, then settle down to having the perfect kid at the perfect moment with the perfect trajectory for making them successful in life.

I'm not saying you shouldn't consider finances and time and the rest of it when having children, but fuck it. The best way to have more children is just to have more children. No planning. No erecting astrological charts to decide the optimum moment for conception and then forecasting the future. Just do it (to swipe a phrase).

EDIT: That's also part of my dubiousness around this enthusiasm for polygenic selection. We've already made having children, for the people who should be having more kids, so stressful and expensive and high-stakes, now we're going to throw another gallon of accelerant on the bonfire: what, Justin and Pippa, you mean you didn't undergo IVF to create a bunch of embryos that could then be selected for the optimum traits for a Better Baby? You just got pregnant like some Stone Age cavepersons? Ahahaha, surely you must be joking! You're setting up your unfortunate child to be a failure and loser in life with deleterious traits being freely expressed in their genome!

Yeah, that's going to encourage people that having three kids at a minimum is a feasible thing.

I agree absolutely. There's less expectation that children would/should follow naturally from marriage.

The difficulty for me was a working top decile spouse.

The best and brightest of the PMC ladies are indoctrinated very early with plans and pathways. Achievements and career milestones. It's challenging to move past the sunk cost even if continued career progression is unlikely to make you happy.

There was much less planning for 3 and 4 than for 1 and 2. Partly due to experience and mostly that my wife was already full time homemaker after 2.

No erecting astrological charts to decide the optimum moment for conception and then forecasting the future.

It used to be that the astrological charts were used by couples who wanted children and they weren't coming along.

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