No society can make this math add up. The economics of demographics used to be relatively simple: in a traditional agricultural society, by the time you got too worn and stooped for clearing and plowing, you hoped to have enough able-bodied 13-year-olds to do it for you. Today, most developed nations have managed to defer adulthood and thus to disincentive parenthood—quite dramatically so, if the judgment against Signor Casagrande holds. It’s no coincidence that the countries most prone to bamboccioni and parasite singles are the world’s oldest and fastest aging, with the lowest fertility rate: Japan, Germany and Italy are already in net population decline. Remember the ’80s? Japan was buying up every American icon from Rockefeller Center to Columbia Pictures and TV viewers were bombarded with commercials warning that they’d soon be speaking Japanese down at the shopping mall. So what happened? Well, the yellow peril got wrinkly—and thus a lot less perilous. Over half of Japanese women are still unmarried by the time they’re 30. Japanese maternity wards are going out of business. Japanese toy makers such as Tomy, recognizing that children’s toys is a deadsville market in a land without children, are diversifying into talking dolls with 1,200 preprogrammed phrases that can serve as companions for the elderly: they’re the grandchildren you’ll never have.
In Italy, the problem of the bamboccioni is often attributed to a lack of “affordable housing,” which certainly has something to do with the postponement of adulthood. Acre for acre, America is the cheapest developed country in which to buy a four-bedroom home on a nice-sized lot with plenty of space for plenty of kids. If you’re wondering why Canada’s fertility rate qualifies it for honorary membership of the European Union and why 75 per cent of the Dominion’s population growth comes from immigrants, look at how we live: yes, in part because of climate but largely because of Trudeaupian social engineering and immigration trends, Canada’s population is more concentrated than America’s. As Americans have decamped to suburbs, exurbs and beyond, Canada has become more urbanized. If you were seriously interested in tackling the country’s structural deformations, you’d want to provide some way of encouraging still fecund young couples to move from their cramped accommodations in Toronto and Vancouver to the dying hinterland.
But it’s hard to look at the Western world’s young middle-aged and think it’s purely a phenomenon of the property market. Marina Casagrande is an especially sublime embodiment of Western demography. Free citizens of advanced democracies are increasingly the world’s wrinkliest teenagers—a development Hilaire Belloc predicted quite explicitly in his book The Servile State way back in 1912, before teenagers had even been invented. If you’re a 30-year-old Japanese gal or 38-year-old Italian guy, why move out of the house? You’ve got all the benefits of adulthood (shagging, boozing, your own TV) with none of the responsibilities (cooking, laundry, property tax bills). We’ve created a world in which a 37-year-old Italian male can stroll into a singles bar, tell the chicks he lives at his mum and dad’s place in the same bedroom he’s slept in since he was in grade school—and he can still walk out with a hot-looking babe. This guy would have been a laughingstock at any other point in human history.
And every progressive politician says we need more of it. Barack Obama wants everybody to go to college. Why?
Well, why not? Most would-be employers already regard a U.S. high-school diploma as utterly worthless, so why not do the same to a bachelor’s degree?
It isn’t very difficult. In most Western countries, there aren’t enough working people engaged in genuine wealth creation to pay for a society organized on the human right to endlessly deferred adulthood—and, as Signor Casagrande discovered, eventually someone has to. But, more to the point, a society in which it becomes the norm for 40-year-olds to climb the stairs every night to their childhood bedroom, the same one that once had the teddy-bear wallpaper and the Thomas the Tank Engine coverlet, will not merely be a land that fails to produce the innovators necessary to create such wealth, it will be a world that does not make men, or women, in any meaningful sense of those terms. There used to be an English expression, “kippers and curtains.” In Europe today, it’s KIPPERS—and curtains.
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