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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25911 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.

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.

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.

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.

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