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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25908 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.

I will solve the childlessness problem hypothetically (amounts and currencies can of course be adapted to a country):

  1. 65% (deductible) federal income tax for all income over $50,000 for anyone over 30 with fewer than one child. The tax drops by 15% per child for the first three children, with historic deductions so that people who still have 3 kids but do so late can claw back some of what they paid. Child deductions only available to couples married at (or within six months of) birth.

  2. Capital gains tax is doubled for those over 35 with fewer than two children, normal above. Normal rate only available to married or widowed people.

  3. Death/estate tax for childless people is 60% marginal on estates over $1m in net worth, falling by 20% and rising in threshold by $2m for each child until the fourth.

  4. 75% of roles on boards of directors must go to married parents of at least two children. 50% must go to married parents of at least three children. The same applies to Congressmen and women and to senior positions / positions of responsibility in all regulated industries, and to all cabinet positions in the executive. 90% of senior positions in the military, state department and justice department must be occupied by parents of at least two children.

  5. Divorce comes with a 10-year additional tax penalty except in cases of (convicted) domestic violence or other abuse (in which case all marital benefits can continue for the victim).

  6. To qualify for any tax credits, a movie or television production must show or imply that at least 65% of characters with more than 10 minutes of screen-time described or implied as over the age of 27 have children. The same, in real life, applies to cast members with the same screen time threshold.

  7. Entry to any selective schools (specialized high schools, gifted programs etc) requires a child to have at least one sibling. Priority is given to those with two or more siblings.

  8. For every child after and including the third under the age of 18, graduates of four-year college degrees can receive $8,000 per year in student debt forgiven. This stacks for married couples where both partners have student debt, and for graduates of medical schools or STEM programs at top-50 (US News) universities, it rises by an additional 50%, meaning that some PMC professional couples could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt completely wiped out, never paying anything, if they have three or more children. (Two doctors with 4 kids under 18 would see $48,000 per year of college debt wiped off).

  9. A 10% state levy on home sales by childless adults over 30 funds mortgage subsidies for married parents of three or more children on a variable basis depending on the money raised the previous year. Married parents of 2 or more children who have had a child within the last 48 months pay no capital tax on primary home sales.

  10. White House, senate and congressional internships, state-funded scholarships, Supreme Court clerkships and other prestigious positions for young people are limited to those with at least one sibling. A core part of pushing up birthrates is convincing parents of only children to have another, so it has to be stigmatized.

  11. For constitutional reasons, exemption from some policies is available for those “constitutionally incapable” of having children. These exemptions must be filed for with a $10,000 processing fee, do not apply to inability to bear children related to any decisions taken by the individual (eg. gender transition, voluntary castration) above the age of federal criminal responsibility (12), or to psychological or material conditions like ‘asexuality’ or just being ugly. All decisions have to be approved unanimously by a panel appointed 50% by congressional republicans and 50% by congressional democrats. The presumption is that in cases of genuine medical infertility that is likely from childhood (ie not discovered later in life) the state will know about it years before any exemption may be needed.

I think this would work, although it's of course it's impossible politically. It will be interesting to see if China actually goes for something similar.

No country has truly gone big on fertility. Critics have pointed out that small efforts to boost fertility have not worked so why try. My stance is that if small efforts don't work, much larger efforts are needed.

From a political perspective, we are of course doomed. The normie opinion is that if we want to boost the birth rate we need even more feminism. So instead of interventions that work, we'll get things that make the problem worse such as child care subsidies (which only encourage greater marginal female employment).

No country has truly gone big on fertility.

Ceaușescu's Romania doesn't count as "going big?" If not, then what does?

I guess Romania was doing something right. The results are actually pretty significant. Take a look at Romania vs. neighboring Bulgaria. Something changed in a big way in the 1966 and stayed that way until Ceaușescu was deposed.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=BGR~ROU

So what changed? Here's what Wikipedia says:

In 1966, in an attempt to boost the country's population, Ceaușescu made abortion illegal and introduced Decree 770 in order to reverse the Romanian population's low birth and fertility rates. Mothers of at least five children were entitled to receive significant benefits, while mothers of at least ten children were declared "heroine mothers" by the Romanian state.

The government targeted rising divorce rates and made divorce more difficult—it was decreed that marriages could only be dissolved in exceptional cases. By the late 1960s, the population began to swell. In turn, a new problem was created, child abandonment, which swelled the orphanage population (see Cighid). Many of the children in these orphanages suffered mental and physical deficiencies.[30]

Measures to encourage reproduction included financial motivations for families who bore children, guaranteed maternity leave, and childcare support for mothers who returned to work, work protection for women, and extensive access to medical control in all stages of pregnancy, as well as after it. Medical control was seen as one of the most productive effects of the law, since all women who became pregnant were under the care of a qualified medical practitioner, even in rural areas. In some cases, if a woman was unable to visit a medical office, a doctor would visit her home.[31]

I don't know if this counts as "going big". Rewards for mothers who have 5 children!? That's a pretty tough bar to clear.

My guess is that it worked mostly out of patriotism. Reversing the decline in unpatriotic Western democracies might be harder. The civil religion has faded to the point where people no longer think their society has any value in preserving.

My guess is that it worked mostly out of patriotism. Reversing the decline in unpatriotic Western democracies might be harder.

Stories out of Ceaușescu's Romania suggest a decent amount of it was out of fear. Patriotism does not generally lead to a bunch of mothers bearing babies, then abandoning them to unusually miserable orphanages. Also, after the first two years, that's quite the steep plunge. Maybe the first two years were patriotism, and the next several decades were fear?

How many children ended up in orphanages?

I don't trust Western institutions to report on this issue fairly, especially as it deals with the hot button topic of abortion. It is in the interest of Western academics to exaggerate the harms to the greatest degree possible.

I do find it bizarre to think that the state would say "have children or else" but also "once you have the children feel free to dump them in an orphanage, no problem". If it was only threats driving people's behavior, then couldn't the state simply mandate they raise children too? Then again, Communist regimes are not exactly known for good state management.

I think the correct posture here is one of epistemic humility. The birth rate went up. This was due to state policy. Everything else is mostly noise.

I don't trust Western institutions to report on this issue fairly

...Well I'm not going to find original Romanian records.

The main personal stories I've heard from Romania in that era were through Orthodox priests talking to other priests and more visible Christians who had lived there, and the enforcement of atheism sounded pretty brutal, so my baseline is "enforcement of preferred state outcomes was pretty brutal."

I think the correct posture here is one of epistemic humility. The birth rate went up. This was due to state policy. Everything else is mostly noise.

To the extent that you're simply observing a fact, and not making any policy proposals, I suppose. And the USSR did make it through WWII intact and modernize significantly under Stalin. No judgement. Everything else is mostly noise.

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