 |  | | Feb. 19, 2015 |  | No. 159 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | It's been weeks since I tortured you with demographic talk, but a few days ago we got news from Italy that's chilling, yet not surprising.
Italy's birth rate is now the lowest it's been since the country started keeping records in 1861. The total number of Italian births dropped to 509,000 in 2014. The total number of deaths: 597,000. As minister of Health Beatrice Lorenzen put it, "That means we have become a dying country."
This news didn't come out of nowhere. Italy's fertility rate has been falling for more than a generation, and the country had been getting by on immigration and demographic momentum. (I talked about Italy at some length in What to Expect When No One's Expecting, if you want to take a really deep dive on the situation.) But the country has been below the replacement fertility rate (which is 2.1 children per woman) for long enough that its demographic momentum has petered out. And there's no obvious way out of the trap they now find themselves in.
Here's how bad the situation is in Italy: The average Italian woman now has just 1.39 children during her lifetime. The median age of a woman at childbirth is 31.5 years. And the number of Italian women who complete their childbearing years without having any children has increased by 40 percent in the last 10 years. All of which suggests that while it might look like the floor has dropped out on Italian fertility rates, they may not have touched bottom yet.
It gets worse: You may have heard the argument that it doesn't matter if a country's fertility rate is sub-replacement, because they can always make up the difference through immigration. That turns out to be harder than it sounds.
Italy has had an aggressive program of immigration. In a country of 60 million people, 5 million of its residents are non-nationals-meaning that more than 8 percent of the people living in Italy aren't Italian. Last year alone, 207,000 foreigners immigrated to Italy. (Since 65,000 Italians left, the net immigration was +142,000.) Think about it this way: Italy imported one new immigrant for every two babies born. And it was barely enough to keep total population stable.
In a welfare state, this mass of immigration causes all sorts of problems, of course: social, cultural, and economic. But even if you leave those complications aside and look at immigration as a pure good, the signs in Italy suggest that it isn't sustainable. Because when it comes to fertility, the leveling power of Western culture is so powerful that even the immigrants start behaving like Italians: Last year, the fertility rate of immigrants in Italy fell to 1.97, bringing them below the replacement rate, too.
Back in 2012 the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, gave a fair summation of what's really at stake:
Demography is the key factor. If you are not able to maintain yourself biologically, how do you expect to maintain yourself economically, politically, and militarily? It's impossible. The answer of letting people from other countries in . . . that could be an economic solution, but it's not a solution of your real sickness, that you are not able to maintain your own civilization.
Within our lifetimes, the country once known as Italy is likely to become little more than a museum of Italian culture with a staff of residents who keep it running for the tourists. Either that, or it will cease to become anything like what we now think of as Italian. Neither prospect is encouraging. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | "'Plagiarize,' as I once wrote. 'Let no one else's work evade your eyes. / Remember why the good Lord made your eyes, / so don't shade your eyes, / but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize ... / only be sure always to call it please, "research."'
"Sadly, these lines were borrowed from me back in 1959 by a comic singer named Tom Lehrer for a ballad, chiefly lyrical, about the enduring influence of the 19th-century Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. Do people still listen to Tom Lehrer? The composer of such uplifting odes as 'I Got It from Agnes,' 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,' and 'The Masochism Tango,' he somehow managed to be the man Groucho Marx would have been if Groucho Marx had been a Harvard mathematics instructor-which makes it all the stranger that he risked plagiarizing from me these lines about plagiarism.
"Of course, in its way, the theft merely proves my timeless originality. It's a compliment, really, that much of what I do is claimed by others. So influential are my thoughts and phrasings that a great number are actually pre-stolen-taken by other writers before I can even get around to thinking or saying them."
-Joseph Bottum, "To Borrow a Phrase" from our February 19, 2007, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. | | | | | | | | THE READING LIST | | | | | Kim Jong Un: so much crazier than you think.
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Tales of cypress wood recovery from a magazine called Garden & Gun. Don't miss this thing.
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Heather Wilhelm on the yoga pants panic of 2015. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "The hacks have a special love for Stewart because he's their id. They don't just think he's funny, they thrill to his every sarcastic quip. They wish they could get away with being so one-sided, snarky and dismissive.
"They wish they could skip over all the boring phone calls and the due diligence and the pretend fairness and just blurt out to their ideological enemies in Stewart style, 'What the f-k is wrong with you?'
"Most other journalists aren't allowed to swear or to slam powerful figures (lest they be denied chances to interview them in future). Their editors make them tone down their opinions and cloak them behind weasel words like 'critics say.' Journalists have to dress up in neutrality drag every day, and it's a bore.
"Yet Stewart uses his funnyman status as a license to dispense with even the most minimal journalistic standards. Get both sides of the story? Hey, I'm just a comedian, man. Try to be responsible about what the real issues are? Dude, that's too heavy, we just want to set up the next d-k joke."
-Kyle Smith on the departure of Jon Stewart, February 15, 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | There was so much good reading this week that I wanted to close out with an extended list of pieces that should be on your list.
First up is Graeme Wood's piece on ISIS in the Atlantic. It's a bracing depiction of the hermit kingdom: The Islamic State controls a territory larger than England. It has a governing arm that sets tax rates, runs courts, and issues currency and license plates. Wood's piece is a tour de force of reporting, but it might be most notable for how candid it is. He argues that you can't fight ISIS unless you know what the Islamic State is, and he says openly that it's not just "a religion," but a "distinctive variety of Islam."
"The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic," Wood concludes. "Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam."
If only someone-anyone-in the Obama administration could be so clear-eyed about this threat, then perhaps they might be better equipped to defeat it.
On a lighter note, the New Yorker has a long profile of Jony Ivey,Steve Jobs' Svengali and the man who handles industrial design for Apple. Like most everything Apple, you will love and hate him at the same time. It's filled with telling details, the sum total of which conveys that when Ivey splits, the rot will really set in at Cupertino. Also: There's an Easter egg in the piece about a former Apple designer who now runs a company making $5,000 single-serve coffeemakers. That's right.
You've heard the expression that lottery tickets are a tax on people who can't do math?Well Ethan Siegel has now done the math to show exactly how badly the Powerball game is rigged. Anyone with the fortitude to read the whole thing almost certainly doesn't play the lottery, but it's worth it anyway just for the yucks. And also some interesting asides. For instance: You should never pay the extra $1 for the Power Play. And there's an inflection point on the size of the jackpot at which the higher total makes it less valuable because it raises the probability of multiple winners. (Siegel shows the curve on number of tickets sold as the jackpot rises, which is pretty great.)
Finally there's a New York Times piece about Justine Sacco. You may remember her as the gal who Twitter mobbed for a not-actually-racist tweet just before she boarded a plane to South Africa. By the time her flight arrived eleven hours later, her professional life had been destroyed. This essay is as good a look at how-we-live-now as you'll find. And it's not encouraging.
I've been lamenting the perils of Twitter for a long while and I don't really want to saddle up on this again. But I will anyway. Twitter has an uncanny ability to bring out the worst in people. Even good people. For example, National Journal's Ron Fournier has always struck me as a pretty diligent professional, a grown-up who calls things like he sees them. Just a few weeks ago he wrote a column talking about how he didn't like what Twitter was doing to him: "I don't love what Twitter does to me," he wrote. "When I'm self-conscious enough to notice, what I see spewing from my timeline too often is bombastic, caustic, sarcastic, and simplistic. Did I mention self-promotional?" He went on to lay out a bunch of rules that he hoped would keep him from being a jerk on Twitter.
Six weeks later, he was apologizing for being a jerk on Twitter and noting that he had violated his own rules.
The thing is, I don't blame Fournier. I blame the medium. As the Times piece makes clear, Twitter is a machine designed to magnify the worst aspects of the internet and dilute-or neuter-its positive aspects.
And, by the by, it doesn't seem to help journalists who think they "have" to be on Twitter.
I take a great deal of solace in knowing that nothing is permanent on the Internet and that Twitter will be outmoded and passé soon enough. The only problem is that whatever comes next will probably be worse.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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