Dr. Michaela Muscat Spaak

⛵🏝️🕊️ Sociologist & Former Diplomat 🌞 Climate & Geopolitics 🐟 Mediterranean islander

[alex bronzini-vender @alexbronzini]

@Bubb4H34d The future of media: Claude writes the op-eds, and ChatGPT reads them.

[Lila Rose @LilaGraceRose]

Babies Samuel, Daniel, and Christopher were born via surrogacy as triplets, fighting for their lives in the NICU.

The buyer abandoned the children, leaving their surrogate mother to care for them.

She watched one of them tragically pass away.

Now, after Kyla Simpson, the surrogate mother, cared for the surviving children for two years, the buyer wants them back.

The children have been placed in foster care amid the legal dispute.

This is the cruelty of surrogacy: Children are treated as products to be commissioned, rejected, reclaimed, and fought over.

Children are human beings, not commodities.

Kids are not for sale.

[Élysée @Elysee]

Dilexit veritatem.
Il a chéri la vérité.

[Ishaan Tharoor @ishaantharoor]

Wow. @derspiegel has made millions of Nazi party membership cards searchable so Germans can look up their ancestors and get a glimpse of what they were doing under Hitler

[PsikoBilim @Psikobilim_]

Bir insan ne kadar zekiyse o kadar çok yardımsever olma eğilimindedir.
Çünkü zeki kişiler, iş birliğinin uzun vadeli toplumsal faydalarını daha iyi görebilirler.

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

Smartphones are not the explanation for the recent decline in fertility. Instead, they are an accelerator of deeper forces already at work.

Let’s start with the facts. Fertility is falling almost everywhere: in rich, middle-income, and poor countries; in secular and religious countries; and in countries with high and low levels of gender equality.

The decline accelerated around 2014. So, no country-specific explanation will work unless you are willing to believe that 200 distinct country-specific explanations arrived at roughly the same time.

Smartphones look like the obvious candidate: the first iPhone was released in 2007, and global adoption has been astonishingly fast.

Economists understand the first major decline in fertility in advanced economies, from 6 or 7 children per woman throughout most of human history to about 1.8, that occurred between the early 1800s and roughly 1970, well before smartphones. The main drivers were a sharp fall in child mortality (effective fertility was rarely above 3 and often close to 2) and the shift from a low-skill, rural agrarian economy to a high-skill, urban industrial one. We have quantitative models that fit these facts well.

Country-specific factors mattered too, of course. Proximity to low-fertility neighbors accelerated Hungary’s decline, while fragmented landowning structures accelerated France’s. But these were second-order mechanisms.

This is also why most economists long considered Paul Ehrlich’s doom scenarios implausible. We forecast that fertility in middle- and low-income economies would follow the same path as in the rich, probably faster, because reductions in child mortality reached India or Africa at lower income levels (medical technology is nearly universal, and most gains come from handwashing and cheap antibiotics, not Mayo Clinic-level care). Much of what we see in Africa or parts of Latin America today is still that old story.

But in the 1980s, a new pattern appeared. Japan and Italy fell below 1.8, the level we had thought was the new floor. By 1990, Japan was at 1.54 and Italy at 1.36.

This second fertility decline began in Japan and Italy earlier than elsewhere, driven by country-specific factors, but the underlying dynamics were widespread: secularization, an education arms race, expensive housing, the dissolution of old social networks, and the shift to a service economy in which women’s bargaining power within the household is higher. The U.S. lagged because secularization came later, suburban housing remained relatively cheap, and African American fertility was still high. U.S. demographic patterns are exceptional and skew how academics (most of whom are in the U.S.) and the New York Times see the world.

My best guess is that, without smartphones, Italy’s 2025 fertility rate would be about 1.24 rather than 1.14. I doubt anyone will document an effect larger than 0.1-0.2. Italy was at 1.19 in 1995, not far from today’s 1.14. The TFR is cyclical due to tempo effects, so I do not read too much into the rise between 1995 and 2007 or the decline from 1.27 in 2019 to 1.14 today. The direct effect of smartphones is not zero, but it is not, by itself, that large.

Where social media, in general, and smartphones, in particular, matter is in the diffusion of social norms. What would have taken 25 years now happens in 10. Social media are not the cause of fertility decline; modernity is. But they are a very fast accelerator.

That is why social media are a major part of the story behind Guatemala (yes, Guatemala) going from 3.8 children per woman in 2005 to 1.9 in 2025. Without them, Guatemala would also have reached 1.9, just 20 years later.

Modernity, in its current form, is incompatible with replacement-level fertility. By modernity, I do not mean capitalism: fertility fell earlier and faster in socialist economies than in market economies. Socialist Hungary fell below replacement in 1960, and socialist Czechoslovakia in 1966 (both experienced small, short-lived baby booms in the mid-1970s). By modernity, I mean a society organized around rational, large-scale systems and formalized knowledge.

Countries will not converge to the same fertility rate. East Asia is likely stuck near 1, possibly below, given its unbalanced gender norms and toxic education systems. Latin America faces the same gender problem plus weak growth prospects, so I expect something around 1.2. Northern Europe has more egalitarian family structures and might hold near 1.5. The very religious societies are probably the only ones that will sustain 1.8.

All of this could change with AI or changes in population composition. We will see. But on the current evidence, deep sub-replacement fertility is the “new new normal.” Unless we reorganize our societies, better learn to handle it as best we can.

[The Times and Sunday Times @thetimes]

Lord Skidelsky obituary: leading historian of Keynes https://t.co/NLxMP7jlNH

[Dr. Michaela Muscat Spaak @MicaMuscat]

@bamutxi @ShaykhSulaiman @grok is this fake or real ?

[juan @juanbuis]

france didn't spend €109 billion on AI to build chatbots. they went straight to what actually matters:

the crêpebot 3000

[John Simpson @JohnSimpsonNews]

Over the years I’ve been in many towns and cities when they were being bombed — in a few cases (Baghdad, Belgrade etc) by my own country. No matter what the justification, most of the victims have been entirely innocent. I’ve come to loathe the very thought of aerial bombardment.

[Sylvain Maillard @SylvainMaillard]

Cérémonie de dénomination de la nouvelle école Suzanne Spaak, rue d’Argenteuil, dans le 1er arrondissement de #Paris.

Une figure de résistante et Juste parmi les nations, qui transcende le passé pour inspirer les nouvelles générations.

#Paris1 #Circo7501

[Mairie de Paris Centre @MParisCentre]

L’école élémentaire publique de la rue d’Argenteuil s’appelle désormais l’école Suzanne Spaak (1905-1944).

Résistante, Juste parmi les Nations, Suzanne Spaak sauva des enfants de l’horreur de la Shoah.

[Mairie de Paris Centre @MParisCentre]

L’école Argenteuil (1er) portera bientôt le nom de Suzanne Spaak, en hommage à cette résistante et Juste parmi les Nations, qui a sauvé de nombreux enfants juifs de la déportation pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale.

[Dr. Michaela Muscat Spaak @MicaMuscat]

@British_Airways Frequent fliers who need to keep their medicine cool/ refrigerated should fly @emirates @etihad @airfrance @Eurostar @easyJet and @AirMalta. They’ve always been extremely helpful and their staff were kind.

[Dr. Michaela Muscat Spaak @MicaMuscat]

@British_Airways Sure, instead of choosing the best medicine for my needs, I���ll pick one that suits your policy. The alternative is clear, fly with a different airline. I’m informing my health insurance & doctors/hospitals; so that fliers in a similar situation can choose a different airline

[Rosa Luxemburg Foundation @rosaluxglobal]

Happy birthday, Antonio Gramsci! 🎉🥳

[António Guterres @antonioguterres]

I am sorry to see that despite years of talk, gender inequality is on full display at the #UNGA General Debate.

Less than 10% of speakers this week are women.

This is unacceptable – especially when we know gender equality delivers for peace, climate action and much more.

[Dr. Michaela Muscat Spaak @MicaMuscat]

“Behind every Al Fayed or Diddy, there is a small army of enablers: this column is dedicated to them”….

[Marina Hyde @MarinaHyde]

My column on Diddy, Fayed and the sex-case industrial complex – just think of the number of henchmen WHO KNEW

https://t.co/ptOzwPhrfm

[#WOMENSART @womensart1]

Georgia O'Keeffe,
Morning Sky, 1916
#WomensArt

[keerthik śaśidharan @KS1729]

[contd] covers I had never seen before | Balthazar
#durrell