The alarms are now recurring. Every time Istat data on the Italian population are published, it emerges that fewer and fewer children are born and how now in our country there are more deaths than births every year.
The result, net of immigration and even without taking into account the increase in mortality linked to the Covid emergency, is that the Italian population is progressively decreasing year after year.
A few seasons ago we exceeded the threshold of 60 million inhabitants and today we have fallen to just over 58 million . With these rates we could arrive in a few decades with a halved population , of just over 30 million individuals and in which the elderly will be three times the number of young people.
Are we Italians destined, therefore, to extinction? It is around this question that the very interesting essay by statistician Roberto Volpi “The last Italians” (Solferino, 2022, pp. 272, also e-book) develops. An essay that starts from the data and their analysis and then goes clearly first of all to the main reasons for the demographic crisis that Italy is experiencing. Reasons that Roberto Volpi summarizes us as follows:
“Do material issues, jobs, financial security, housing, and more count in the decision to have children? Of course they do. But not as much as we think they matter. If they were so decisive they would always have more children in the rich north, and instead they have always had more in the south. It is the feeling of the children that has changed. They were a 'before', now they are an 'after'. They opened a cycle - that of adulthood, of the full entry of the individual into society - today they close a cycle - that of self-affirmation. They represented a push to go further, to do better, to conquer new positions and goals; today they are the lid to put on what has already been achieved, the ultimate goal to be achieved. In addition, in Italy there have been a series of formidable transformations in a very short span of time, from the end of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s: the liberalization of the pill, divorce, the new family law with full equality between men. woman, the legalization of voluntary termination of pregnancy. It is as if we had not had time to get used to a new regime of freedom and secularism from which, from a procreative point of view, we let ourselves be overwhelmed, making fewer and fewer children ”.
What risks does this demographic decline entail for our country? Why is less Italians not a good thing?
“A population is not a photograph. You can reduce a photograph without changing anything: not the figures, the details, the relationships between the elements. Quite the opposite in a population. The population is like an organism: it must compensate for deaths with births, because if this does not happen, the population is reduced but by reducing everything changes because children and young people and more generally the young age classes are decreasing. the continuous increase of the average life, only make the inhabitants of the most advanced ages become more numerous. Result: the continuous aging of the population. Today in Italy there are 125 inhabitants aged 70-79 for every 100 inhabitants aged 0-9, that is, there are many more inhabitants in the eighth decade of life than the inhabitants in the first decade of life. As if death strikes the other way around, and instead of looking to the elderly and old, it looks for children. It is not so, of course, it is that we are born very , very little, whereas before we were born a lot. But it seems so. And in thirty years the inhabitants of 80-89 years will be more numerous than those of 0-9 years: more the real old people of children and young people. How can such a population hold up? "
Can't immigration help us?
“Look: the calculations are soon done. In the last six years, the Italian population has lost 1.5 million inhabitants. By 2070, that is, in less than fifty years we will be over 12 million fewer, about 47 million inhabitants. After that, even greater population losses are expected. And all this happens at the same time, in the same historical period in which we have had and still have substantial migratory flows from abroad to Italy. So, immigration, this is out of the question, does not save us . Of course, if there hadn't been immigration, today we would have lost not 1.5 but at least 8 million inhabitants, already today we would be around 50 million - from the almost 61 we were in 2014. So, immigration a hand there. 'has given it and will give it to us. But it will not be our lifeline ".
What should Sardinia expect in the near future from a demographic point of view?
“These are painful notes because Sardinia is perhaps the Italian region that is worse off from a demographic point of view. Sardinia will arrive in 2070 with 40 percent fewer inhabitants . In Sardinia, in 2070, an old age index of 500 elderly people over 65 for every 100 children and young people up to 14 years of age will be reached, a value much higher than that of 300 to 100, also enormous, in Italy and impossible even to imagine . The fact is that in Sardinia the birth rate is at a very low level, far below the Italian one, which in turn is the lowest in the world. In Sardinia there are just over 5 annual births per 1,000 inhabitants , a birth rate that literally entails the disappearance of the Sardinian population in just over a century. I am not saying that this will be the case, that Sardinia will only remain a desert. But if no action is taken, this is more or less the region's already written destiny ”.
Is it too late to reverse course? Can we do something concrete to avoid our "extinction"?
“Taking action to avoid the decline, the collapse, if not the extinction of the Italian population is anything but easy. I want to mention here only one line of action to be pursued with great determination, the most decisive: to build a labor market specifically aimed at young people , which favors them as much as possible, even in occupying stable and important positions as soon as possible. This is the precondition for establishing the largest number of couples with women not yet thirty or just over thirty who can easily look at the second child , also from the biological point of view, as well as from that of safety and stability. Only the second child, in fact, can save us, only if there are many couples and they have more than one child can we hope to save ourselves. In Italy currently two out of three women have a child or no child. Here, either we get out of here in a short time, very short, or we say goodbye to Italy ".