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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.
My state offers heavily subsidized childcare and healthcare for pregnancy and young children to middle income families and below, which is not that hard to actually use. I looked up the fertility rate, and it isn't great.
But also, I like this visual tracker of US births by state 2005 - 2021, where is shows births per 1,000 women (15 - 44) going down noticeably every single year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/fertility_rate/fertility_rates.htm
It looks like more than just "we can't go out when we want." Arizona went from 80 to 55.5 in 15 years. Utah went from 93 to 64. 15 years ago, women went to college and worked, people also moved away from their parents to work, liked going on trips together, missed going on date nights when they had young children, used contraception, and had access to abortion. The trend remained pretty steady through Covid and the years after.
I'm not sure why it's so stark, but even very expensive taxpayer funded childcare, food, tax breaks, and healthcare programs don't appear to be doing anything about it. Certainly not trivial things like cheap (or even free!) diapers and formula.
Free childcare is not actually an inducement to have children. It’s a subsidy for moms to work.
Moms have a strong revealed preference to work less and spend more time being a mom. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in a capitalist economy that results in some unfair-on-the-surface outcomes, and you can’t paper over them. It’s much easier to make mothers miserable so you can claim their career outcomes are where you want them.
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