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