Italy's birth rate crisis is 'irreversible', say experts
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
It’s not a birth rate crisis, it’s a suboptimal economic system crisis, where people of reproductive age do not have the economic opportunity and means to have and support children. The fertility rate is simply a trailing economic sentiment indicator.
We could start slicing off more GDP for human care (healthcare, childcare, elder care, social care, taking care of people broadly speaking), paying people more, enforcing work conditions that are more favorable to fertility and parents, but the folks at the wheel are like “nah” while whining the whole way to the crash site. They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to squeeze to get all the juice without any of the cost.
https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/world-de...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(to note, some of the fertility rate decline is because of educated, empowered women having access to contraceptives and thereby reducing desired fertility in the aggregate; this component in total fertility rate decline is unavoidable versus the elastic economic component)
The simplest way to explain is that too few women will have 3 or more kids to offset the number of women that have 0 or 1 child.
Part of it is like that Seinfeld bit about 95% of the population being undate-able. If you have say, 20% of women who don’t pair up because the there is no match available better than them staying single, and another 20% of women who have at most 1 kid, that requires a lot of the remaining women to have 3 or more kids to balance out to 2.1.
And I rarely see someone with 3 or more kids, I didn’t even see it much when I was a kid 30 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two-Income_Trap
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
> An increasing share of adults under 50 say they're unlikely to have kids — and the major reason is, well, they just don't want them, according to a report from Pew Research Center out Thursday morning.
> 64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp...
> Majorities in both groups say not having kids has made it easier for them to afford the things they want, have time for hobbies and interests, and save for the future. In the younger group, about six-in-ten also say not having kids has made it easier for them to be successful in their job or career and to have an active social life.
(US specific context)
The only answer is to brainwash the hell out of women to focus on child rearing as the top priority. Patriarchal religion springs to mind.
IIRC, the age of mother at (first) childbirth [1] is a useful statistic for understanding causes: in 2023, ranged from 31.9 yrs in the Islands (Sicily + Sardinia) to average 32.5 to 32.9 years in central Italy.
[2] "The province defying Italy’s birth dearth: Thirty years of child-friendly policies" describes how Bolzano - South Tyrol's child-friendly policies and $ incentives have given it the highest birthrate of all of Italy since the 1990s.
Also, The Lancet [3] last week wrote "The Italian health data system is broken" "A major weakness of the health-care system in Italy is the fragmented health data infrastructure: there is no unified, centralised system for documenting and sharing electronic health records (EHRs), hospital data, and general practitioner records... The root cause is extensive regional autonomy, with 20 regions operating independently and implementing differing policies and technologies, creating regulatory fragmentation and inefficiencies... Such a fragmented system not only fails the Italian population but also imposes a considerable economic burden on the country."
Is Meloni's govt changing any of that?
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/18p6ivs/fertility_...
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/567957/mother-average-ag...
[2]: https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/the-province-defying-italys-b...
[3]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
The pyramid might collapse!
Historically people had kids when they were serfs, slaves maybe it's the cynical in me but it seems incredibly hard to believe situations are worse than that
It's obvious that future generations are a net gain as far as the advancement of knowledge or our material well-being go, but the immediate cost of having and raising a child is shouldered mostly by their family. Incredibly few people (both now and back then) have children for the greater benefit of society.
If the goal is helping people have babies, why not....help them?
They should try a stick instead.
> They should try a stick instead.
Assuming this isn't a joke, let's go back to the old ages of treating women like horses to be traded at marriage and then force them to pop babies.
As a budding politician, are you willing to accept the drop in GDP caused by a 50% drop in labor force participation rate? Are you willing to lose all the doctors, teachers, nurses in society that are disproportionately women? Are you willing to stand in front of the revolution it will cause to take away human freedoms?
Easy to force "others" to do things. Harder to accept responsibility of your own choices.
Or punitive taxes on childless men & women, tax-supported tertiary education only for those with children, etc.. there are many sticks, why do you think only women's rights are at issue? Especially since it takes two to make a child.
As for all those nice things you list that we would lose - we will lose them anyway if we do nothing, either because the economy collapses, overburdened by old people, or because the immigrants used to supplant population growth belong to cultures that keep fertility high in exactly those ways you dislike. What do you think happens to a country once become a majority?
And what about the people who can't have children due to fertility issues? Do they still get penalized?
And what about people who have to abandon their kids in dumpsters after birth? Do they still get penalized?
What do you think happens to a country where people are forced to have kids?
Yes, as they don't have to bear the financial and time burden of raising children, but still benefit from living in a country where retirees don't outnumber working people - much like, in most of the world, the healthy also have to pay the taxes that fund hospitals.
> And what about people who have to abandon their kids in dumpsters after birth? Do they still get penalized?
Why would they have to abandon kids in dumpsters, instead of aborting them early or giving them up for adoption? This is nothing but a cheap emotional appeal, trying to equate encouraging fertility with horrific practices, with zero evidence. But to answer your question - no, infanticide would not give you a tax break.
> What do you think happens to a country where people are forced to have kids?
Another cheap emotional appeal - child-favoring taxes and education system becomes "forced to have kids". This is as true as saying Americans are forced to eat corn and attend church, because taxation favors corn-growing and churches. But to answer the honest version of your question, "what happens to countries where having children is not disincentivized and neglected" - the same thing that happened to nearly every country (or rather, every nation) from the dawn of time, up until the mid 20th century - they continued to exist. Unlike what will happen to nations with prolonged sub-replacement fertility.
This is unfair. People should not be penalized for medical issues that are not a fault of their own.
I don't know about you but I cannot accept penalizing people for no fault of their own.
Can you name a single country with a higher birth rate in 2024 than in 2014?
Why can't the rich be made to pay for the duration or pregnancy and post partum?