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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27082 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.

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.

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.

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