Of Roberto Pecchioli

Source: Heretically
If we ask a sample of averagely informed and well-educated citizens what the most serious problem in Italy is, we will get a remarkable variety of answers. Some will talk about immigration, many of unemployment, others of the loss of social rights, some of the decline of moral principles, of corruption and so on. Our thesis is different: the most relevant issue is the birth rate. A people who do not have children is destined to end up through biological consumption. It drags itself into selfishness, in the distrust of the future, in mental closure, in the very rejection of life. Because nature abhors a vacuum and elsewhere the demographic pressure is immense, someone, fatally, will replace us. The civilization in which we were born will disappear and Italy will become a concept of the past. They will study it in history books. This intervention has an objective: state that the empty cots are the nation's most serious and urgent problem and economic difficulties, financial and social issues in which we are struggling have aging and the consequent decrease in the population among the triggering causes. Maybe that's not entirely true, as Benito Mussolini thought, that number is power, but certainly, in a time that aspires to infinite growth, losing population is an element of profound weakness, the visible sign of decline. In the present, only arguments related to economics or interests can convince. For this reason we renounce the motion of feelings, to the appeal in favor of our civilization, to patriotism, to the need to save our nation from extinction. Our thesis is that the biological continuity of the Italian people is worthwhile, it is the best investment for the future, a big deal for each and every one.
Let's start with some figures. The decline in births began in the middle years 70 of the past century and continued with accelerated motion until the current demographic winter. The new born, since then, have decreased by 50 percent: it is a dramatic fact and every annual statistic certifies a new negative record. In a population, to reproduce without increasing, the fertility rate must not be less than 2,1 for each woman of childbearing age. The current average is 1,35. Within a few years, the population will decrease by as many as ten million. We think it's bad, an epochal event that must be remedied without resorting to the solution pursued by the ruling oligarchies, that is, the replacement of Italians with populations of other origins, culture, ethnicity. An irrefutable fact should make us reflect: the public debt curve began its surge when the birth rate began to decline. The only Italian provinces in which the number of births exceeds that of deaths are those of Trento and Bolzano. In Alto Adige there is an active family agency with funds and ideas, so much so that Istat admitted that if those policies were extended to the whole of Italy, we would be among the European states with the highest birth rate. There are therefore solutions, although inevitably long-term, beyond the immense anthropological and value changes of the last half century. The most interesting book on the subject is the recent The Empty Cradle of Civilization, co-written by a politician, the current minister for the family Lorenzo Fontana and an economist, banker and teacher of great prestige such as Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, leading exponent of Catholic culture, personal friend of Pope Benedict XVI. We were struck by the quote that serves as the incipit to the introduction of the precious essay. It is by Cesare Pavese, the tormented son of the peasant civilization of the Langhe: “who doesn't have children so as not to support them, it will maintain those of others. “It comes from the profession of living, the writer's existential diary, and it seems to us to be a merciless yet correct photograph of reality. It touches on an essential point, the selfishness of the many who do not want to share their life and goods with anyone. Their choice is short-sighted and counterproductive even from an individual perspective. Already today, percent Italians under fifteen years of age, they can be counted well 165 who have surpassed the 65. Taking social reality into account, of the mechanisms of work and the delay with which one enters the world of trades and professions, taking note of the presence of at least two and a half million carers, mostly foreigners, already today we support other people's children.
Within twenty years, un terzo della popolazione sarà in età avanzata, bisognoso di cure e di assistenza. L’incidenza sul sacro PIL delle spese relative è di circa 30 billion, l’1,9 del totale e schizzerà in breve al 3 percent. Il sistema pensionistico, al netto di aggiustamenti e rimodulazioni, costa già 220 billion per year, la spesa sanitaria supera i 112 e quella assistenziale i 70. Il picco della spesa previdenziale, tra circa vent’anni, raggiungerà il 16,3 per cento del PIL. Economisti senza paraocchi considerano l’invecchiamento della popolazione come un gigantesco freno all’economia. Gli anziani consumano meno delle altre fasce di età, e ciò “comporta una domanda che cresce di meno e una formazione di risparmio più consistente, per l’incertezza del futuro “(fonte Centro Studi Nomisma, that of Romano Prodi). Those savings will generally remain stagnant and will not go towards financing innovation and the new business, for obvious reasons. No political and financial choice can ignore the enormous expense linked to the management of a population entering old age, investments in education, the culture, professional training will decrease. In a country of pensioners, few work and the nation collapses. Progressive involution will entail new risks and problems never faced in this proportion by previous civilizations. The scenario looks stormy. The Federal Reserve has calculated that the effect of the birth rate decline on European GDP growth has been 1.25 per year since the 1980s. For us, at the current value it is around twenty billion per year. It is the amount of a heavy economic maneuver by the government. Bank of Italy's forecasts are disturbing. The decrease in population will lead to a halving of economic growth in the medium term and an increase in long-term structural unemployment, which will rise to at least 8 percent. It cannot be compensated for by increasing productivity, which will actually tend to go down. The collapse of the state budget will be inevitable, unless something drastic, further decrease in social spending and an unbearable increase in tax pressure.
We all know the fate of many small towns first hit by the emigration of young people, then by the aging of the residual population. The further step is the closure of local commercial activities, of post offices and health facilities. The last inhabitants are forced to flee, making the locations ghostly deserts. The fate of Italy will not be different. There is no doubt that governments' tolerance towards illegal immigration is widely agreed upon at the highest levels to stock up on manpower to employ and exploit.. In the abstract, if the choice is to maintain the pace of development and levels of wealth achieved, there is nothing else to do. It's not this one, Obviously, our thesis, but no one can deny that without a quick turnaround, a gigantic bet on the ability and will of our community to change the course of events, there are no alternatives. We are prisoners of two enormous lies. The first is that of those who consider man to be a cancer of nature, therefore it discourages births and, specularly, he despises the social role of the elderly. The spread of euthanasia is one element of these trends. Old people are useless, not very productive, bad consumers, they get sick often, better to convince them to die. It's a dirty money issue. Few children and contempt for old age are twin ideas, fruit of the same negative values, respect for the elderly and love for children die together, wrote Victor Hugo. The other is persistence, despite history's denials, dell’economia e della matematica, dei principi malthusiani. Thomas Malthus, economista inglese tra i massimi esponenti della scuola classica, sosteneva che la colpa della miseria di tanta parte della popolazione fosse dovuta all’istinto naturale di riproduzione. Per lui la vita non èaltro che una lotta per lo spazio e il cibo in cui la popolazione aumenta molto più velocemente delle risorse disponibili, progressione geometrica contro progressione aritmetica.
In questo schema regressivo, l’unica soluzione per generare crescita economica nonostante le culle vuote, in cui la società tende a non riprodurre se stessa, è spingere al massimo il consumismo. Result, growing environmental damage due to the senseless exploitation of creation and no possibility of dedicating resources to rebalancing the generational balance. Savings must in fact subsidize consumption, while taxes rise to cover welfare and social security spending, moving away from productive investments and research. Because consuming turns into a social obligation, income is not enough, forcing both spouses to work, which prevents the birth of children or makes it economically unsustainable, as well as a nuisance for mass hedonistic habits. To keep the level of consumption high with falling incomes and widespread social insecurity, production must be relocated where labor costs are lower. This destroys the productive fabric and the wisdom of local workers. The perception of purchasing power remains unchanged, ma, precisely, it's just a false impression, because the nation is impoverished, Social protections decrease and debt increases, private and public. In order to digest mass immigration, the belief is spread that the new arrivals will pay the pensions of the elderly as well as fill the void of the younger generations. Social contributions tend to decrease due to low wages and precarious contractual forms imposed on new hires. Because precariousness and humiliating incomes have become the normal condition of fellow national workers, even more so for immigrants, exploiting which is easier, especially since they are employed in "poor" sectors and very often illegally. So where will the billions needed to keep INPS afloat come from??
It becomes financially difficult to start a family, says Gotti Tedeschi, “exactly because thirty years ago we decided not to have children”. It is a tautology that needs to be explained: we convinced ourselves that we would be richer without children, but the opposite happened. The solution is to return to the family, to a balanced birth rate. Malthusian madness, moreover, clashes with the best known growth models, focused on workforce growth, that is, of the population, as well as productivity, of demand and investments. One of the great errors of the dominant theories is precisely the emphasis placed on supply, without interest in the question, which instead dominates the Keynesian model. The forecasters failed spectacularly, promising snow at the Equator. Lester Thurow, a venerated master who passed away in 2016, he theorized that the highest economic growth occurred without population growth. The facts have taken care of disproving it: in Brazil, China, India's population is increasing and they are accumulating new wealth, Europe follows the opposite path. The current demographic winter, which has become an advanced economic autumn, it is the ideology of Western elites since 1972, the year of the Club of Rome report known as The Limits to Development. Official UN data refutes the neo-Malthusian conclusions promoted as the Gospel of the West: in the 20th century the population grew four times, the available wealth of forty.
Alfred Sauvy's voice remained unheard, great demographer and brave economist, which linked well-being to a reasonable increase in population, remembering the inglorious end of the Roman Empire, which lost half of its inhabitants in less than two hundred years. The effect of the oligarchies' choices is before our eyes: fixed costs for progressive aging increase; fewer young people work, lower productivity, inventiveness and innovation, no one saves since it is the family that produces the propensity to save, while the loners consume. Production delocalisation, penultimate card to keep consumption high, it becomes a cause of unemployment and social dumping; all that remains is mass immigration and more debt. The same inventor of the concept of GDP, Colin Clarke, he opposed the oligarchic choices aimed at demographic decline with rigorous economic arguments. Forgotten, he ended his career in remote Australia. Illuminate is the American example. The USA, to support the politics of imperial power, they require very high growth rates. The American birth rate has dropped and has not been compensated in economic terms by immigration. There was nothing left but to drug the system with subprime mortgages. Almost a third of growth is generated by the explosion of private debt, which now amounts to almost 100 percent of US GDP. We know the outcome, just as it is known that aggregate debt (private plus public) of the West (Still) developed, who claimed to increase wealth without having children, increased by 50 percent in a few years. A long-term vision is needed, of which our time is incapable, which measures everything in terms of immediate effects. Surprise, but the historical analysis of some data explains many things: In the 1960 the GDP per capita of rich countries was 26 times higher than that of the poor, exploding a 57 times in 1995. Just five years later, the relationship took a turn for the worse 7 volte. In the first phase of the decline in birth rate, there was an increase in wealth, since the equilibrium was still sustainable, it subsequently collapsed for the opposite reason, combined with the irruption of China and India. They are well 65 countries with a population replacement rate insufficient to keep their numbers unchanged. These are predominantly Western nations or influenced by the dominant system of thought in our country. The collapse of social systems is approaching and will lead to socioeconomic and existential imbalances that are difficult to resolve.
We avoided it, in the treatment, to ask ourselves the basic questions, those relating to the value of human life, of the continuity of our culture and to reflect on the general validity of a system based on increasing economic income, to escape the conditioning of principles. There remains the need to question the extent of ethical changes, cultural, behavioral, civilians produced by the demographic winter in our small corner of the world and on concrete solutions. We conclude with Ettore Gotti Tedeschi's exhortation to fill Italian cradles: “to make the economy grow again and produce wealth to be redistributed in a balanced manner, necessary to invest in technology and produce progress in the use of scarce resources". Warming up the freezing Italian demographic winter is worth it. We quietly add, saves an ancient nation from irrelevance and extinction, allowing our civilization, to our people, to avoid a fate from a chapter in history books dedicated to the past.