A good article that explains why Southern Europe's with low birth rates starts to be more serious than Northern Europe's.
It flips the stereotypes of "good Christian women stay at home and have children" on its head, now that Denmark has a higher fertility rate (1.78) than Malta (1.13).
And it shows why the natalist policies that the right likes so much (because they provide a more palable alternative to migration to their mostly racist electorate) don't work.
You don't encourage people to have more kids by giving them a one-off payment, nor a piece of land to harvest, nor a tax break.
You encourage them to have more kids by giving them a house and a stable job before their mid 30s, a way out of their parents' house, the guarantee that they won't lose their job or give up on their career plans if they have a kid, and by giving them affordable daycare, affordable nannies, family-friendly workplaces, and by designing child-friendly cities. And by having good migration policies to bridge the remaining gap between your ferility rate and 2.0.
The ideas that the governments of Italy, Poland and Hungary are proposing to encourage local births (and also the Economist's final paragraph in this article, "Fix, don't bribe") remind me a lot of the ius trium liberorum instead.
It was a piece of legislation signed by Augustus about two millennia ago.
The fertility problems afflicting ancient Rome weren't very different from those afflicting Europe today. As women became more educated and the population overall more urbanized, the upper classes started to have less and less kids.
Amid fears of seeing the Roman nobility and ruling class going extinct within a couple of generations, Augustus signed an act that gave families with at least three kids a wide range of priviliges - among those, the fathers weren't expected to serve in the army, and the mothers were allowed to benefit from shares of the inheritance that were otherwise reserved only to male children.
It didn't work.
Not only: it mostly became an act of legitimate bribery, as local governors would often grant the status to friends and clients, regardless of the size of their families.
In order to prevent abuses, the law was amended so that the emperor gave a generous reward (a half of the transgressor's wealth) to anyone who reported someone illicitly benefiting from the program.
That didn't fix it either. It only created a network of professional spies whose only job was to report alleged violations - a good way of getting very rich, very fast.
The problem got so serious that the emperor was eventually forced to slash the reward only to a quarter of the transgressor's wealth. And, guess what? That didn't fix it either. The law remained a sort of dead limb of the Roman legal apparatus, ineffective, used solely for clientelistic purposes, and impossible to revert (all senators loved it, of course), until Justinian finally repelled it in 534 AD.
Let's hope that it won't take our civilization 500 years to learn the same lessons.
https://links.fabiomanganiello.com/share/64d6be8e295207.07192136
