30 ms·

Italy's birth rate crisis is 'irreversible', say experts

10 points by geox 2y ago

toomuchtodo 2y ago
> They say they cannot afford to have children in Italy 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-depopulation-prospects-and-implications/ https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/world-de... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=fertility%20rate&sort=byDate&type=story 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)
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  I don’t think any economic/parental leave/policy changes can bring a nation’s TFR to replacement rate if women are able to stay single and/or cannot be coerced into having more kids than they want (i.e. have physical security and ability to earn income). 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.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Certainly, we could argue that this is solely a result of women empowerment and choice and ignore the folks who say “it’s the economy.” At that point, switch to planned decline if no effort will be made to help those actually interested in reproducing socially and economically. I take issue with the disingenuous and performance art of the messaging, “the purpose of the system is what it does.” Admit defeat and plan for it, it’s not a matter of “if” but simply steepness of downward trajectory.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      There very well could be an economic component, but the important part is can TFR be raised to above replacement rate, which is what I am seeing zero evidence of based on global data from all different countries with different policies.
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      I'm interested in it. This contrivance of consent (society protecting and empowering women is pure contrived luxury) is a evolutionary dead end. That's why nature never saw fit to program it in. Women need to be desperate for security (financial and physical) or they simply will not have enough children. Anyway. Build the replicators before it all stops. We are a stepping stone to whatever is next. 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.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      Aren’t the two - empowerment and economy - related? We went from having someone at home to take care of kids, which makes it easier to have them, to having no one at home and double the supply of workers, which of course reduces wages compared to the alternative world.
      - toomuchtodo 2y ago
- bamboozled 2y ago
  It's also funny to me that the billionaires and soon to be trillionaires are also the most concerned about it :) The pyramid might collapse!
- smcin 2y ago
  Right. But the graph of 2023(?) data [0] varies hugely by region, from a TFR of 1.65 in Bolzano in the far north, to <= 1.0 in Sardinia and the central regions. That correlates somewhat with GDP but there are clearly other factors. Also this doesn't show internal migration or external immigration (of adults + children) or the effect of cost of housing - is there any compound graph showing all of that? 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_rate_in_italy_live_births_per_woman/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/18p6ivs/fertility_... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/567957/mother-average-age-at-childbirth-in-italy-by-macro-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/567957/mother-average-ag... [2]: https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/the-province-defying-italys-birth https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/the-province-defying-italys-b... [3]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(24)00375-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    The policies needed are the policies you refer to in the region showing the outlier.
    - smcin 2y ago
      a) Not necessarily: b) Those are provincial policies of South Tyrol, not the Italian government c) South Tyrols started its policies 40 years ago. They also included creating a govt-supported childminder day-care system ('Casa Bimbo'). d) Each province would have to first get political and economic consensus on what is a desirable birthrate for a particular province, or at least agree that pro-child policies should be implemented with taxpayer money (which in general in European politics is taboo for even discussing). e) The policies that would be needed in other provinces/regions would presumably be different and more expensive to Bolzano which has very a low cost of living. e) South Tyrol's provincial govt is led by the South Tyrolean People's Party (SVP), a Christian-democratic political party for the German-speaking minority. Presumably this is considered allowable identitarianism by Italians (or at least South Tyroleans), unlike elsewhere in Italy, or Europe (compare to Hungary or Poland).
- nradov 2y ago
  Some of those changes sound like good ideas but how do "we" pay people more? Relative to peer countries, Italian workers on average are already over paid and not very productive. Also note that due to recent Russian aggression, the "peace dividend" has been cancelled so Italy and other NATO members are going to have to start spending something like 3% of GDP on defense instead of depending on the USA to protect them.
gunian 2y ago
This and the SSA crisis are magnificent pieces of social engineering if you believe in stuff like that 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
- mjh2539 2y ago
  Most people are stupid and incredibly short-sighted, most of the time. If pre-modern serfs and slaves had access to a fairly reliable, inexpensive means of avoiding contraception, none of us would exist and the human race would be caught between Malthus on the one hand and demographic collapse on other. 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.
- mkmk 2y ago
  Not a lot of effective contraception available for serfs, right?
  - gunian 2y ago
    Could you say more about this I feel like I don't get it
nine_zeros 2y ago
Idk, have you considered passing laws that make it easier for people to stay at home, have sex, get pregnant, have the baby, keep the baby - all the while not losing their jobs? If the goal is helping people have babies, why not....help them?
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  The goal isn’t just having babies, the goal is children raised in a manner in which they will grow up to be a net positive to society. That’s a much harder thing to incentivize with official policy, if not impossible.
- polski-g 2y ago
  Because carrots don't work. Carrots haven't worked in any country in the planet. Carrots haven't worked in Asian cultures, in Anglo cultures, in Scandinavian cultures. They should try a stick instead.
  - kccoder 2y ago
    What would be examples of sticks in this scenario? Forced pregnancy and birth?
    - polski-g 2y ago
      No voting rights until X. Higher sales tax until X. Marriage lottery at age Y if no X.
  - nine_zeros 2y ago
    > Because carrots don't work. Carrots haven't worked in any country in the planet. Carrots haven't worked in Asian cultures, in Anglo cultures, in Scandinavian cultures. > 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.

10 points by geox 2y ago

> They say they cannot afford to have children in Italy 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-depopulation-prospects-and-implications/ https://www.aei.org/research-products/working-paper/world-de... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=fertility%20rate&sort=byDate&type=story 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)

lotsofpulp 2y ago
I don’t think any economic/parental leave/policy changes can bring a nation’s TFR to replacement rate if women are able to stay single and/or cannot be coerced into having more kids than they want (i.e. have physical security and ability to earn income). 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.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Certainly, we could argue that this is solely a result of women empowerment and choice and ignore the folks who say “it’s the economy.” At that point, switch to planned decline if no effort will be made to help those actually interested in reproducing socially and economically. I take issue with the disingenuous and performance art of the messaging, “the purpose of the system is what it does.” Admit defeat and plan for it, it’s not a matter of “if” but simply steepness of downward trajectory.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    There very well could be an economic component, but the important part is can TFR be raised to above replacement rate, which is what I am seeing zero evidence of based on global data from all different countries with different policies.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    I'm interested in it. This contrivance of consent (society protecting and empowering women is pure contrived luxury) is a evolutionary dead end. That's why nature never saw fit to program it in. Women need to be desperate for security (financial and physical) or they simply will not have enough children. Anyway. Build the replicators before it all stops. We are a stepping stone to whatever is next. 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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    Aren’t the two - empowerment and economy - related? We went from having someone at home to take care of kids, which makes it easier to have them, to having no one at home and double the supply of workers, which of course reduces wages compared to the alternative world.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
bamboozled 2y ago
It's also funny to me that the billionaires and soon to be trillionaires are also the most concerned about it :) The pyramid might collapse!
smcin 2y ago
Right. But the graph of 2023(?) data [0] varies hugely by region, from a TFR of 1.65 in Bolzano in the far north, to <= 1.0 in Sardinia and the central regions. That correlates somewhat with GDP but there are clearly other factors. Also this doesn't show internal migration or external immigration (of adults + children) or the effect of cost of housing - is there any compound graph showing all of that? 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_rate_in_italy_live_births_per_woman/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/18p6ivs/fertility_... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/567957/mother-average-age-at-childbirth-in-italy-by-macro-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/567957/mother-average-ag... [2]: https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/the-province-defying-italys-birth https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/the-province-defying-italys-b... [3]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(24)00375-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  The policies needed are the policies you refer to in the region showing the outlier.
  - smcin 2y ago
    a) Not necessarily: b) Those are provincial policies of South Tyrol, not the Italian government c) South Tyrols started its policies 40 years ago. They also included creating a govt-supported childminder day-care system ('Casa Bimbo'). d) Each province would have to first get political and economic consensus on what is a desirable birthrate for a particular province, or at least agree that pro-child policies should be implemented with taxpayer money (which in general in European politics is taboo for even discussing). e) The policies that would be needed in other provinces/regions would presumably be different and more expensive to Bolzano which has very a low cost of living. e) South Tyrol's provincial govt is led by the South Tyrolean People's Party (SVP), a Christian-democratic political party for the German-speaking minority. Presumably this is considered allowable identitarianism by Italians (or at least South Tyroleans), unlike elsewhere in Italy, or Europe (compare to Hungary or Poland).
nradov 2y ago
Some of those changes sound like good ideas but how do "we" pay people more? Relative to peer countries, Italian workers on average are already over paid and not very productive. Also note that due to recent Russian aggression, the "peace dividend" has been cancelled so Italy and other NATO members are going to have to start spending something like 3% of GDP on defense instead of depending on the USA to protect them.

gunian 2y ago

This and the SSA crisis are magnificent pieces of social engineering if you believe in stuff like that 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

mjh2539 2y ago
Most people are stupid and incredibly short-sighted, most of the time. If pre-modern serfs and slaves had access to a fairly reliable, inexpensive means of avoiding contraception, none of us would exist and the human race would be caught between Malthus on the one hand and demographic collapse on other. 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.
mkmk 2y ago
Not a lot of effective contraception available for serfs, right?
- gunian 2y ago
  Could you say more about this I feel like I don't get it

nine_zeros 2y ago

Idk, have you considered passing laws that make it easier for people to stay at home, have sex, get pregnant, have the baby, keep the baby - all the while not losing their jobs? If the goal is helping people have babies, why not....help them?

lotsofpulp 2y ago
The goal isn’t just having babies, the goal is children raised in a manner in which they will grow up to be a net positive to society. That’s a much harder thing to incentivize with official policy, if not impossible.
polski-g 2y ago
Because carrots don't work. Carrots haven't worked in any country in the planet. Carrots haven't worked in Asian cultures, in Anglo cultures, in Scandinavian cultures. They should try a stick instead.
- kccoder 2y ago
  What would be examples of sticks in this scenario? Forced pregnancy and birth?
  - polski-g 2y ago
    No voting rights until X. Higher sales tax until X. Marriage lottery at age Y if no X.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  > Because carrots don't work. Carrots haven't worked in any country in the planet. Carrots haven't worked in Asian cultures, in Anglo cultures, in Scandinavian cultures. > 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.