Old Italy
Low birth rates and an aging society are recurring subjects of
national debate in Italy. Pundits, politicians and religious
leaders regularly issue warnings about “empty cradles” and
demographic decline. Does Italy really have an aging problem?
By Gaia Baracetti, February 8, 2022
Italians have a special reverence for their Constitution. It was
written after the most traumatic time in our history as a unified
nation by those who had risen up against Nazi fascism and thus
redeemed their country. Putting aside their differences – not an
easy feat in a country as divided as Italy – they agreed on a
common set of principles and rules for the nascent democracy.
The first article of the Italian constitution states: Italy is a
democratic Republic founded on labour. As far as I know, this
emphasis on labour in the first article is unique among Western
democracies. It says something deep and meaningful about who we
want to be as a society and what we want to value. The irony is,
by looking at Italy now, you’d never guess it. Only about a third
of the Italian population is officially employed; among the
working-age population, Italy has one of the lowest employment
rates in Europe. An Italian sociologist, Luca Ricolfi, has devoted
a book to explaining the paradox of a country where everyone is
living large but no one seems to be working. As he points out, a
small cohort of workers (and many de facto slaves) is supporting a
large number not so much of children, as of spouses, older people,
and unemployed. Sometimes I wonder whether we should reformulate
our famous first article to read instead: Italy is a democratic
Republic founded on pensions.
Italy has one of the oldest populations in the world; almost a
quarter of its population is 65 or older. Our pension expenditure,
the second highest among OECD countries, amounts to around 15% of
total GDP and to about a third of all public expenditure (though
not all pensions are given for age-related reasons). We also have
a comparatively low actual retirement age; statistics here are
harder to provide because, in typical Italian fashion, what the
law prescribes and what happens in practice are very different
things. The Italian island of Sardinia is one of the world’s only
four “blue zones”, that is places where people are exceptionally long-living (you guessed it: Japan has another).
Is all of this good or bad?
Hard data can only tell you so much about the state of a country.
Being an extended family-based society means that a lot of the
work that in other Western countries people have gotten used to
paying for is often performed by parents, spouses or relatives.
Not all contributions to society come in the form of paid work.
And if the American “Great Resignation” is any indication of the
future, it’s possible that other societies might start following
our example rather than the other way round. Still, this is not
happening because salaries in Italy are so high that they make
it easy to support a family with one income alone. On the contrary,
a combination of nepotism and lack of recognition for merit, low
salaries and a general disillusionment means that many young people
are looking forwork abroad. What’s left behind are a lot of
pensioners and a crushing public debt. The question on everyone’s
mind is: with so few young people, who will pay for pensions?
Preoccupation about low birth rates, an aging society and the
depopulation of the uplands are almost a national obsession
(looking at a map, you’ll see that Italy is largely made up of
hills and mountains; these are much more forested and less
populated than they used to be). Every time a new report comes
out about Italy’s low fertility rate, any sensitive overpopulation
activist must switch off all media for a while to avoid being
bombarded with lamentations and ideas about how to “solve” the “problem”. Not to mention the Vatican.
There are a few, mostly common citizens, who dare point out that
Italy is too crowded already and that the very slow decline in
population we’ve begun experiencing in the last few years might
even be a good thing. You’ll never hear a journalist, academic,
let alone a politician, say anything of the sort.
My reading of the situation is that all of this is mostly the
fault of a very selfish generation or two – mostly the Boomers –
who do not want to give up their privileges and refuse to
understand that their children, the grandchildren they claim to
want and the environment itself are paying an extraordinary price
for it.
The main problem is that our pension scheme was designed when the
population was younger and life expectancy lower, the economy was
booming, and letting people retire handsomely in their 40s (really)
was seen by political parties as one good way to keep getting votes
(and achieving formal full employment). Even now that we’ve realised
we need to course correct, pension reform is one of our biggest
taboos and even the young don’t want it. I know a few young people
who cannot wait to retire, like the exploited worker dreaming of
becoming a millionaire because he cannot even imagine a less unequal
society. But if everyone either is a pensioner or wants to be a
pensioner, who will support them? Immigrants! The babies we must
absolutely convince young people to have!
But it will never be possible to solve the pension problem through
demographic growth; if anything, it will make matters worse.
As we’ve seen, a large number of those already here do not work
anyway. Since wages are low and pensions are high, many prefer to
stay home and be supported by their parents or grandparents
(inheritance taxes are low too, so even your elders’ deaths can
buy you a few years). This is not true for most migrants, who do
not have such support networks and will take whatever work is
available, thus contributing to keeping wages low. Also, hiring in
Italy is prohibitively expensive; many small business owners prefer overworking themselves than getting help. And why is hiring so
expensive? Mostly because taxes are high – those pensions need to
be paid for somehow – and there is an infinite number of costs and regulations that in many cases serve no purpose at all, except to
provide jobs to other people who are employed, but whose work brings
no actual benefit to society.
Should we magically manage to employ all existing residents and
then all those extra babies and extra immigrants many politicians
tell us we should have, what happens when they, too, reach retirement
age? We then have the same problem we were trying to solve, except
now it is even bigger. This is how Ponzi schemes work. And they
always crash.
All of this seems obvious to me, but apparently to no one else.
Everyone wants to keep the retirement age low so that young people
will enter the workforce. Literally everyone from the extreme right
to the extreme left is campaigning for the rights of pensioners,
and that includes labour unions – work has become so exploitative
and dangerous that the main right workers want is that of leaving
it as soon as possible. I’d even say that this refusal to negotiate
on the inalienable rights of the elderly is one of the reasons we
keep getting unelected prime ministers doing what the elected
cannot or will not do, such as raising the retirement age or
convincing the EU to let us take on even more debt.
Until we solve the pension problem, Italians will never accept a
shrinking population as the blessing it is. It's really disheartening
that all the benefits that come with an aging, demographically
contracting society – less violence and conflict, a healthier
environment, more wild or open spaces, lower house prices even –
are not widely recognised due to greed and lack of imagination.
I’m stressing the pension issue because, even though many countries
in the world are facing the same “problems” (or blessings perceived
as problems, such as low birth rates), the solutions should be
specific to each context. I believe that Italians are not worried
about aging per se. As I mentioned, family bonds are strong and
grandparents are valued. What people worry about is not having
children around, on the one hand, and not being supported in their
old age, on the other. They also worry about being “replaced” by foreigners, but this is beyond the scope of this discussion.
A society with few children might look “sad”, but that’s only
because we’re looking at it the wrong way. It needs to be pointed
out that children are an economic “burden” even more than the old
(you can work at 70, but not at 7, and Italians also tend to spend
an inordinate amount of time finishing their schooling). The
disproportionate number of older people also might be more of a
phase before a new equilibrium. At the moment the biggest age
cohort in Italy is made up of those in their late 40s and early 50s.
Some of those will die before old age; others will move up the
pyramid like a snake’s meal, then die, and our population might
settle into a more even distribution.
We are unlikely to go back in the foreseeable future to an actual pyramidal-looking population pyramid, but we should not aspire to
that, as it would mean we’d have a growing population, and/or not
many people surviving to old age. Yes, children are joyful, but
they also need to be taken care of properly. Smaller families tend
to endow children with better nutrition, healthcare, and parental
support. Moreover, children don’t stay children forever. If, when
they reach young adulthood, they are unable to find suitable
employment, they will either migrate en masse or turn violent
against each other as they compete for very limited resources,
including jobs. We see this happening from Central America to
Afghanistan to Nigeria to the Middle East, yet we don’t recognize
it for what it is.
It’s true that healthcare for the elderly is very expensive, but
modern, highly effective health care is expensive, and possibly
unsustainable, in general. There aren’t many ways around this.
We will need to work on prevention and make hard choices as a
society about how much we want to spend on what. Children also
require significant healthcare from pregnancy to the first
vaccinations; the fact that we’ve made the choice to save every
life means that children with rare and serious conditions will
require a lot of financial support to receive the care they need.
There are ways to find that money by reducing expenditure on other
things or tackling the extreme inequality of contemporary societies.
Or – I am just putting this out there – we could decide for once
that quality is more important than quantity, and that we do not
actually want to live 110 years having spent the last thirty of
those in a retirement home, or having deprived the young of their
time and income to prolong our life past the time it was still
enjoyable. One of the saddest results of Italy’s relative wealth
is that our elderly are cared for, mostly, by foreign women who
often aren’t raising their own families back home. There are
stories about children left behind in Eastern Europe who rarely
see their parents; they are in Western Europe, making our life
comfortable.
Yes, Japan is trying out robots to care for old people; is this
the future we want? A lot of research about healthcare and care
for the elderly focuses on quantifiable outcomes, but we need first
and foremost, as we come to terms with a reality of limited resources,
to have an honest discussion about our values and priorities in life,
and what we are willing to sacrifice for them.
At any rate, thanks to progress in healthcare, many pensioners are
healthier than they could have expected to be a few decades ago.
That is one more reason to ask people to retire later.
Among the many “solutions” proposed for the aging problem and a
supposedly shrinking workforce, many of them informed by Japan’s
experience, I personally do not believe in automation. In some
sectors it’s probably here to stay, but my informed guess is that
we have neither the energy nor the raw materials that would be
necessary to automate as many jobs as we project. For a country
such as ours, that is energy-poor but has a big artisanal tradition
as well as an inequality problem, it doesn’t seem like more
automation is the solution. Even in the car-making industry one of
our most famous brands, Ferrari, a few years ago was bragging about
not using many robots because humans, among other things, are more
flexible. Humans are irreplaceable in so many ways. We also need to
keep being able to make things with our hands instead of delegating
everything to machines.
Yet another irony, in fact, is that a lot of people who do make
their dream of retiring early come true are then bored, sad, or
restless. So they find ways to keep working anyway – once again
enjoying an unfair advantage over the working young who might then
have to compete against people doing stuff for free.
Boomers are finding themselves on the receiving end of a lot of
generational resentment. Some of it, unfortunately, is justified.
They’ve created a world to suit their reality and their expectations
of the future. Many seem unable to comprehend that times have changed
and that their projects were never sustainable to begin with. Aging,
both at an individual and at a collective level, often means an
acquired mental stiffness; an inability to look at things differently,
to re-imagine the world and take it into a new, better direction.
And this is the only true aging problem we have.
https://overpopulation-project.com/old-italy/
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)