In comments today at a demographics conference, Pope Francis lamented the dire lack of births in Italy (which is more or less the same throughout Europe and indeed the Western world). He had specially sharp remarks for a woman who he said recently requested a blessing for her “baby” only to reveal that it was a dog.
Now, we know that Pope Francis likes to employ colorful anecdotes that may include composites or at least embellishments. So maybe the woman wasn’t quite so brazen as this. But we have all seen the “dog mom” bumper stickers (even “dog grandma”—the poor ladies) and the general growing ridiculousness of pet-obsessive culture. And we can see how our culture’s vanity seems manifestly to be growing in indirect proportion to the falling birth rates.
So I thought the Holy Father was dead-on when he knocked young people’s replacement of marriage and having children with “mediocre substitutes” like careers, travel, leisure—and fur babies.
But I had to scratch my head at the way he framed it. He said that these young people are in fact “forced” into seeking these replacements, because the “savage” free market was making marriage and parenthood too expensive.
He didn’t elaborate further or connect the dots in these comments, which makes it hard to understand or critique his reasoning. But on the face of it, it seems counterfactual. Birth rates in Italy have declined by more than half in the last fifty years, but this decline has been accompanied by a tenfold increase in Italy’s per-capita GDP. The steady upward trend of Italians’ wealth during that time has been accompanied by improvements in health care and air quality, lower food prices, decreases in infant and maternal mortality, and the steady march of material progress that has left people better fed, more comfortable, more mobile and educated, physically safer, longer-lived, and with more disposable income than before.
Indeed, all this comfort forms the basis for the more-typical critique of capitalism that one often hears in Catholic circles: that it has led to consumerism. With so many choices, so many distractions, so much extra money, we’re prone to spiritual softness. Francis and modern popes before him have rightly called out the West on this serious problem.
But the idea that the market system that created the conditions for all this wealth-generation is to blame for economic disincentives to raising families? It just doesn’t seem to track. And I don’t think you have to be an unabashed cheerleader for capitalism, or to ignore its real flaws or pitfalls, to see this. That free markets tend to make things cheaper and more abundant is not an unalloyed good, but it’s a fact.
Besides, Italy’s regulatory state is pretty onerous compared with the U.S. or even the rest of Europe; its version of capitalism is more a tangle of rules, cronyism, and corruption than unfettered profit-seeking. And its social welfare system is especially comprehensive. Italy’s overall tax rate is more than twice that of the U.S., and it uses some of that revenue to fund pro-natal policies like long maternity leaves, heavily subsidized education, and “baby bonuses” in the form of direct payments to families with children. And like much of Europe, it has a national universal healthcare service. It seems like this generous and tightly regulated nation is a bad example of uncaring greed ruling the day.
So Italy is far richer than it has been in living memory, and politically it is far more committed to providing living necessities for its residents. Yet its birth rates have cratered.
Maybe, then, we should not speak of young people being “forced” by their conditions to raise dogs instead of babies or to choose cars or careers over families. Let’s focus instead on diagnosing and healing whatever spiritual disease has caused us collectively as a culture to value things over people, personal pleasures and freedoms over the experience of self-sacrificial love.