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Italy's health minister has outlined plans to double child benefit to combat what she described as an "apocalyptic" decline in the country's birth rate. Just 488,00 babies were born in Italy in 2015, fewer than in any year since the modern state was founded in 1861. "If we carry on as we are and fail to reverse the trend, there will be fewer than 350,000 births a year in 10 years' time, 40% less than in 2010 - an apocalypse."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36297177
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Italy Wants to Double Child Benefit to Combat Low Birth Rate
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(Score: 2) by Squidious on Monday May 16 2016, @12:46PM
Does Italy receive so few immigrants that the low native birth rate is not offset? Is it tough to immigrate, or are immigrants made to feel unwelcome? Italy seems like an attractive place to move to for the history, food, climate, women, etc. The language is relatively easy if you have already learned another latin-based language. Is Italy an unattractive country to move to right now because of the downed economy and/or corruption? And by immigrants I mean the ones you might want to immigrate, not the destitute refugees who have made the news so much of late.
The terrorists have won, game, set, match. They've scared the people into electing authoritarian regimes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday May 16 2016, @02:02PM
And by immigrants I mean the ones you might want to immigrate, not the destitute refugees who have made the news so much of late.
Unfortunately the numbers are so incredibly low that just means demographic replacement.
As a thought experiment lets say the nicest Canadians in the world basically replaced the Italians, essentially genociding the Italian culture and replacing it with a colony named "East Vancouver". It would be a very nice place to live, its just that it wouldn't be Italy anymore, it would be "East Vancouver". Either way the Italians are wiped off the face of the planet.
If the economy were better, more immigrants could get jobs and make a life, but if the economy were better the native Italians would likely have more kids. There's no certainty which way the ratio would go. Possibly a better economy would mean less immigrants as a percentage even if the total numbers for both went up a lot.
There's a creepy ghoulish factor to immigration in that I could "improve Italy" by moving there (why am I considered automagically better than the natives?) but I can live better in my own culture with my vast extended family here, so the best way to make me move is something ghoulish like nuke LA, I live downwind (well, really really far downwind) so I might be motivated to move if my food started glowing. So the ghoulish part of "immigration is teh greatest" is that on a very small scale with very small numbers of people in a narrow view, if I immigrate to Italy then its win win for the natives and me, but from the point of view of the totality of the human race and the environment and Gaia or WTF, the actual cost of my immigration to Italy would have to include the death by nuke of everyone living in LA and the economic and environmental vaporization of a major city, so suddenly my immigration would be very expensive and the planet would be a hell of a lot better off with LA un-nuked and me staying home. Or a historical analogy Irish immigration in the 1850s was a super win scenario for all sides in New York City. Oh other than that whole "Irish potatoe famine millions starving and dying in the streets" thing. So on a global scale immigration always sucks ass and is to be avoided by engineered political policy at all costs. Sure onesie twosie its nice in certain small areas, but on a large scale across the world its always in total sum a net negative to the world and should be strongly discouraged when possible.
Another interesting thing to think about is babies mostly come from 20-something women, mostly, and they're a tiny fraction of the population. If I move to italy and women start squirting out babies because of me, my wife who hasn't been 20-something in ... some time, is going to be pretty pissed off about what I'm doing with the local girls. Maybe I could provide legit employment maybe a software consultancy that hires breeding age natives but thats a side effect and frankly most immigrants would just be taking jobs from breeding age natives anyway.
Increased supply always drops prices assuming demand is flat or declining, which is realistic. So increasing population 1% will just suppress birth rates 1% lower assuming similar cultures.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 17 2016, @07:41AM
Last I checked, people don't usually make babies in order to sell them. Therefore market principles clearly don't apply here.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 17 2016, @12:56PM
There's the hidden assumption (wrong, in some cultures) of responsible parenting.
So when I was a starving student working at the food store for $4.25/hr I had no interest in having kids. Once I got a "real job" the wife and I had more interest in kids.
Obviously, much as handing out degrees doesn't magically create jobs, dumping people off a turnip truck doesn't magically make them jobs either. So assuming similar culture, increasing immigration will lower birth rates by lowering incomes.
Also obviously that only applies to cultures that value being personally financially responsible for kids. There are plenty that laugh at that and ask for the .gov handout, or see the whole topic in religious obligation terms.
(Score: 2, Informative) by r1348 on Tuesday May 17 2016, @12:16PM
Italy has a quite high immigration, and that is what kept demographics positive until now. Yes, most of those immigrants are just passing by, and consider Italy just a gateway for Central and Northern Europe. However many decide (or are forced to) stay. There's still a problem when you analyze the details of immigration in Italy: most emigrants tend to be young natives with high education, most immigrants tend to be young males from Africa and Middle East with little education (admittedly, the biggest immigrant community here is the Romanian one, with over a million individuals). Immigrant co-existence in Italy has always been mostly peaceful. There are, of course, political parties that feed on xenophobia with Trump-like rhetorics, but a fact is that we never had large scale immigrant riots unlike in other European countries. This is because Italy is mostly organized in small towns, so immigrant communities never reach a critical mass to create a ghetto-like effect. Also in bigger cities, immigration does not usually distribute by ethnicity but by economical power, so immigrants and natives mix up quite a lot.
Italy is not the most attractive country of Europe for immigrants, but it's the one they'll have to cross for purely geographical reasons. It's still rich enough for some of them to decide to stay.