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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.
Here is my policy suggestion
Inculcate in young girls’ a desire to have children. You do this with positive, aspirational media and experiences involving motherhood. Echoing RandomRanger’s insight downthread, require girls in the first three years of schooling to bring their dolls to school and engage in doll-oriented activity. The highlights of female education in the first 6 years of schooling should be: motherhood, cultivating the nurturing instinct, and homemaking skills. In high school, two years of required internships in which female students “babysit”, nanny, and helping out new mothers — which doubles as a cost-free program for new mothers.
Ban women from high stress professions. (Women in STEM is grossly dysgenic due to low birth rates. Instead, reserve the least stressful STEM-adjacent positions for the highest IQ women. This is highly eugenic.) Reserve society’s least stressed jobs for women.
Government grants to media which extol motherhood.
Raising girls as identical to boys has obviously failed. In history, the primary “skill” a girl learned was how to be a mother/wife. That’s because it’s an important, difficult, stressful 6-18 years of a woman’s fertile years. Feminism failed, we can move on. Another to note is that there is a lot of research showing that stressed mothers and mothers who cannot breastfeed or love their children properly have a much higher chance of having children who are mentally ill or autistic etc, or even have childhood obesity. So the thought that we would lose “money” with our MAMA agenda (Make American-women Mothers Again) is not necessarily correct. Tons of resources are spent on psychiatric and physical disability which is ameliorated through MAMA policy.
It’s kind of hilarious that we consciously destroyed the mothering instinct in girls who naturally gravitate to dolls and tea parties and so on, and then we look at ourselves shocked like that retarded Spider-Man meme when we realize women now don’t want children, want money and safety more than children, and are stressed at the prospect of children.
I don't have numbers, but my anecdotal observations are that this is culturally dependent. The Chinese and Indian women I work with take full advantage of the generous FAANG benefits to help produce and take care of children. Some white American women do, but not nearly as much. Family events put on by the company are full of mostly south and east Asian children. There are probably as many mixed white and east Asian kids as there are white kids.
A great deal of this is driven by family pressure to have kids. Maybe that's where policy would be most effective. Make white parents nag their children to have kids so that they can get access to some government benefit. Maybe offer full social security retirement benefits at an earlier age, or boost the benefit for each grandchild produced.
This is basically my plan on what I'd like me and my future wife to do once I get married and we have children. Basically I coach her (if she needs coaching, I can't imagine I would ever marry a woman who doesn't have it in her to get hired at a FAANG if pushed, even if she's a doctor or something) to get a decent job at one of these big companies (finance jobs don't work here, your ability to take from the company if you're not putting in is much more limited, you have to have a big institution where the system is not set up to deal with such a mindset and can't change easily to suck at the teat of), then she gets pregnant and has a child and we keep drawing her full salary plus large maternity benefits for us and then soon after she returns to work she gets pregnant again and we repeat the process. Rinse and repeat until our family is at the desired size. Getting paid FAANG money to raise kids is about as excellent a lifestyle as most women can hope for, plus all those years on maternity technically count as "experience" so if she does want to work once our kids are old enough she has a decent CV still present.
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