Today, Explained - Authoritarianism, baby!

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán traveled to Texas for CPAC this week. Back home, he’s trying to fight population decline by paying some citizens to have more kids. But a real solution involves one weird trick Hungary — and US conservatives — hates. This episode was reported and produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Amanda Lewellyn and Hady Mawajdeh, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC, returns to Texas this week. All the usual suspects are in attendance. I want to ask, how many from Texas? Local politicians. How many of you from somewhere else who want to be from Texas? Who loves pizza? Papa John. Yeah, who loves freedom?

If it wasn't for freedom, there wouldn't be no pizza. There wouldn't be no Papa John, that's for sure. And the Prime Minister of Hungary? My country is the lone star state of Europe. Viktor Orban was in the House, which is kind of weird because a lot of people point out that he's like a xenophobic authoritarian. For proof, check out his ideas on how to get Hungarians to make more babies. The last 10 years, the number of marriages has doubled and the number of abortions has halved in Hungary. It's not a bad start. That's ahead on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

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I'm here with producer reporter Miles Bryan, who really wants to tell me about his favorite meme. Okay, you know that meme from ClickHole? The one with the bald guy gazing at you with the caption that says, heartbreaking, the worst person you know just made a great point. I think I know of this meme because you so love this meme and turned me on to it. Well, that's kind of how I'm thinking about the reporting that I want to bring to you.

Are you the worst person? No, just stay with me here. The worst person in the scenario I'm setting up here in that half of the meme is Hungary's Prime Minister, Viktor Orban. So listeners might remember our three-part series back in May on how Orban is pioneering a sort of soft authoritarianism that has piqued the interest of conservatives in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Yeah. More recently, Orban said he didn't think Europeans should be mixing with brown people from elsewhere. Yikes! Don't tell my wife. He expresses a kind of Christian nationalism that has very powerful resonance, obviously, in America. They see that Hungary, small though it is, and cut off though it is,

and in Europe though it is, has actually managed to do many of the things that the nationalist right in America is aiming to do. Post-Noel King and I went to Hungary to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference held there, or at least try to attend. Listeners will remember that she got kicked out. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King, and I got kicked out of CPAC Hungary. We talked to a lot of people in Budapest, which is the most progressive place in the country,

and plenty of them had critical things to say about Orban. You know, they thought his anti-LGBT policies were repugnant, and the wall he had built on Hungary's southern border was cruel. But there was one set of policies that got uniformly rave reviews from people across the political spectrum. Tell me more. In case you haven't guessed yet, this is the great point part of the meme. And in this case, the great point, according to the people we talked to anyway, is Hungary's policies to incentivize having babies.

So what is the great point? What are the policies? Okay, so for some context, Hungary's population has been declining for a long time. A shrinking and aging population presents all sorts of problems. So to counter that, Hungary's government has come up with these policies to make having a been declining for a long time. A shrinking and aging population presents all sorts of problems. So to counter that, Hungary's government has come up with these policies to make having a big family more enticing. I think the easiest way to get into the details is to introduce you to some families I met in Budapest a couple of months back. Okay. First, I want to tell you about Zoltan and Haiti. They live in a suburb of the city, and I went to meet them with our Hungarian fixer, Mate. Zoltan, Heidi, Mate. Miles, nice to meet you.

Hi, I'm Heidi. Nice to meet you. See you, Mate. What a beautiful home you have. No, it's not finished yet, unfortunately. They're planning a home renovation, which the Hungarian government will pay for a big chunk of just because they have kids. Well, that's a sweet deal.

Yeah, and there's more. Just wait. So Heidi and Zoltan met in college. They have two kids now and are trying for another. Heidi says that was always her plan. I always want three children. So even my mom has said that from whenever I could speak, I have always said that I want three children. I don't know why.

Zoltan was not so sure. In my past thinking, I would like to have two kids, not three. Now, if this was America, we can imagine what Zoltan would say in that family planning conversation, right? Can't afford daycare. What about saving for college? You know, the whole laundry list of stuff that makes it really hard to have a kid. But this is Hungary. But this is Hungary, baby.

So I want to tell you about some of the government support that this family is entitled to. Because to my American sensibility, it is astonishing. Huh. So in addition to that home renovation grant, they get a subsidy to buy a big car available to parents of three or more kids. Wow. They get a subsidy to spend on a babysitter. They get a grant to buy a big car available to parents of three or more kids. Wow. They get a subsidy to spend on a babysitter. They get a grant to pay down their mortgage. Wow.

They get help with student loans. They get money from the government to start a savings account for their kids. Holy smokes. Oh, and if they have a fourth child, Haiti no longer has to pay income tax. That's like the red carpet treatment. What kind of car did they buy? Well, they don't have the three kids yet, so they haven't upgraded to the car. But OK, the talk that Zoltan and Haiti ended up having about baby number three, it was sort of like the inverse of how it often goes over here. If we want to build a house and you would like

only two children, you don't really get too much support from the government. But with three children, you get much more. So even when you want to start your life, you have to decide how much you would like from the start. And you can say that I would like just two, but between two and three children, economically, it's a really, really big difference what gives the government. Not just the reason why we choose this for you. Not just the money, but it helps. But it helps. It helps, yeah.

It's hard to make that decision. What happens when you have five kids, Miles? Does someone like, do you get a personal masseuse? Sadly, all the benefits cut off before five. I guess they got it cut off somewhere. Did you talk to any other families or was it just Zoltan and Haiti? I did. I talked to one other. I met Kinga and Miklos at their Budapest apartment. They had four kids. I asked them if they got to that number to take advantage of Hungary's, you know, generous subsidies,

and they were like, definitely not. We often joke about living in a bit of a Catholic bubble. So because of that, I think it's quite normal among many of the people we know to have three kids. Yeah, four is pushing it. But then again, to be honest, the fourth was, I don't know how you should say it in English, but a kind of surprise or present child. They just love to get down, Miles.

So Kinga and Miklos, you know, they had the number of kids that they had for personal reasons, but they did say these benefits are such a thing in Hungarian culture that jokes about like having kids for the government perks are just like part of the culture. You know, I'm wondering how bad is the baby situation in Hungary that the government's willing to roll out this level of social welfare? Yeah, well, let me give you some backstory here. Play a little plinky music here.

In 1970, Hungary's population was about 10.3 million. In 2020, it had fallen to 9.7 million. By comparison, the U.S. population in that time went way up from like 205 million people in 1970 to 330 million people 50 years later. Now, to be fair to Hungary, that country's population decline was pretty common in Eastern European countries. A lot of them lost population after the fall of communism in 1990, when people who could leave the country

did for better prospects elsewhere. But they also saw big declines in their birth rates. In 1970, women in Hungary had two kids on average. By 2010, it was about 1.2. The birth rate needs to be 2.1 for populations not to decline. Huh. But with all these programs, are those numbers turning around? I mean, the boosters say, yeah. The nation of Hungary, led by the one and only Viktor Orban,

is experiencing nothing less than a nationalist populist marriage and baby boom. They point out that since Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was elected in 2010, the country's birth rate has shot up to about 1.6 babies per woman. They also like to point out that the number of marriages has nearly doubled in that time. Hungary is leading the way to cultural revitalization of Western civilization for the whole of the European continent. This is interesting, but Myles, I imagine we could have gone to any country and looked at how they're trying to encourage people to have kids. What makes Hungary an outlier, if anything?

I mean, first, Hungary's policies stand out for just their sheer number and the amount of money and support the state is putting behind them. I think Hungary spends 5% of its GDP on families and boosting family formation. I mean, that's just a huge amount of money. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has made this a centerpiece of his government. But there are other ways that Hungary stand out that are maybe less rosy. Say more. Well, as popular as Orban's policies are with a lot of Hungarians, they're also deeply unfriendly to a lot of people. And they're unfriendly in ways that are in line with Orban's style of governing. You know, he calls himself an illiberal Democrat, and he prioritizes

Christianity and conservative cultural values at the expense of basically everything else. Gay people in Hungary are not allowed to get married. And Orban's party actually led the charge to rewrite Hungary's constitution a few years ago to effectively ban gay people from adopting, which means they don't have easy access to these family subsidies. Another group that's often shut out is the very poor. Huh. Yeah, the Roma are the largest minority group in Hungary. And the Roma often live in brutal poverty. Since their ancestors arrived in Europe from India some 600 years ago, Roma people have been enslaved, expelled, and ethnically cleansed. Hundreds of thousands were slaughtered during World War II. Many don't

have a good connection with a bank. And that's a problem because these subsidies we've been talking about, they're usually run through banks. Agnes Szabo-Morvai is a researcher at the Center for Economic and Regional Studies in Budapest. I do my research in various topics related to how the Hungarian family policies affect fertility rates. She says it's sort of ironic because the Roma in general have twice as many kids as the non-Roma in Hungary.

So they're often shut out of benefits that could be a huge help for them. It reflects, I think, the preferences of a right-wing governing party, right? It's not publicly said, but I would infer that they wanted to increase the fertility of the higher income, wealthier people. I should note here that the Hungarian government says the percentages of Roma people unemployed and living in deep poverty has fallen a lot in the last decade. OK, so what I'm getting from you is that Hungary has these incredibly generous social benefits for future parents, but only the future parents that Victor Orban prefers. I know from our previous episodes that we were talking about American conservatives trying to cop Victor Orban's style in various ways. Are they paying attention to these benefits as well? Oh, they're paying attention and they are loving them. These

policies have infatuated a certain type of U.S. conservative. You know, the J.D. Vance's and Tucker Carlson's who are super anti-immigrant and are down for government spending to promote the right kind of children and families. Victor Orban, who is, of course, the bugaboo of nearly every liberal in the mainstream American media, has implemented a couple of policies that I think are really interesting. One of which is that in his country, they offer loans to new married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples eventually stay together and have children. Why can't we do that here? Why can't we actually promote family formation here in our country? Was that J.D. Vance? It was. But he didn't mention anything about them not extending benefits to the gays or to the Roma.

You know, I think that's probably part of the attraction. So for all the conservatives in the United States and elsewhere who take a look at what Viktor Orban's doing and want to perhaps emulate it, I got to ask, is it viable to encourage your own population to make more babies while sort of shunning the Roma, the gays? You know, I talked to a bunch of people about that question, and the answer seems to be probably not. No. You know, the birth rate is definitely up in Hungary. But, you know, I talked to a demographer who points out that the birth rates of other nearby countries like the Czech Republic and Romania have also gone up during that time. And Agnes, the researcher I interviewed for this story, says it's not really clear how much more Hungarian policies can move the needle past where it is now.

Usually the research finds that you cannot buy everything for money in terms of fertility. So what you're saying is it's trickier than it might seem to buy your way out of a demographic crisis? That was my conclusion. But you know, population decline is not just Hungary's problem, right? It's a problem that China now faces. It's a problem that Japan faces. It's a problem that Germany faces.

It's a problem that Sweden faces. And it's a problem that the United States is likely to face soon. It's this looming challenge for the whole world, right? But the crazy part about it is there is a solution to population decline and population aging. There's an answer that we know works. It's just not something that conservatives or a lot of people, frankly, are very excited to support. Let the people in. Immigration, exactly. And I'm not talking about immigration on a small scale. To really deal with these problems, I'm talking about massive amounts of immigration rebalancing the entire planet, not along national lines, but along ones of young and old.

Today Explained, back in a minute. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to Thank you. from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame

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deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Our show is called Today Explained, and sometimes in the middle, someone sings, Today, today explained, it's today explained. Would you mind singing that in Hungarian? Ma, ma meg lesz magyarázva, magyarázva, magyarázva. Ma meg lesz magyarázva, magyarázva, magyarázva. Brian Walsh is an editor at Vox's Future Perfect. He works on stories about policies and technologies that can make the planet a better place. So we went to him with our questions about population decline.

Birth rates have been dropping around much of the world for quite a while. I mean, here in the United States, they're below replacement level. That's 2.1, but that's also the case in most of Europe. Last year, Italy's birth rate hit its lowest level since 1861. In most of East Asia, for instance. Now, the number of children in Japan is at its lowest since 1950. Really the only places where you're seeing population growing at a pretty fast rate is parts of Africa, sub-Saharan Africa especially, South Asia, countries like India,

the Philippines. But they're really the exceptions in a world where population growth is really slowing down. And we're talking about this as a problem. I'm doing air quotes here. But, you know, I'm sure a lot of people are thinking, well, you know, the planet's getting hotter. We're running out of resources left and right. Why is the population slowing down such a bad thing? We do not have infinite resources to keep growing forever. I mean, look, I took the subway into Manhattan today, so I can totally get up on the side of having fewer people just around you. But it is a problem in a couple of senses. One is that from an economic growth perspective, as population growth slows down, you don't just get fewer

people, fewer workers, fewer consumers as well. You also get an older population, older populations, people tend to work less, that's less productive, less innovative. And also the fact is, you know, with fewer younger workers, you have fewer people to support that much larger, older population. So put all that together, it really is both an unprecedented situation, we've never really faced this before in the history of our entire species. So we don't know what this is going to be like. It's going to be something that's going to be really difficult to deal with. And that's why I think you see a lot of governments trying various methods to boost that fertility rate. Okay. So if you accept that this is a problem that needs solving, which I'm sure not everyone out there will, but if you do, what do you do

about it? We heard all about Hungary's generous benefits that we also noted weren't extended to everyone in the country. Income tax breaks, credits for home renovation, subsidizing mortgages, hooking you up with a car. What else is out there? The coupon policy of helping people to get more kids to actually pay them off for that, that seems to have some effect. You might see a little bit of a boom. You saw that, I think, in Hungary and some other countries that have tried that. It doesn't seem to solve the problem. Some of the biggest things you can do simply is provide more state-sponsored child care. That's a huge issue here in the U.S., but in a lot of other countries as well.

To boost the birth rate, the French state has a family allowance system backed by tax incentives. Then you look at a place like France, which has a very well-subsidized, very well-established public child care system. Families with three kids or more achieve the golden status of a famille nombreuse, a big family that gives you more perks like discounts on transportation. They have higher rates of birth than a lot of their neighbors in other parts of Europe. It's a generous system that costs the state tens of billions of euros each year, a high cost that's worth it if you ask French parents. You want a situation where you can just make it easier to have families. If you want to have the families, you can do it. The government will support you in that way. It doesn't have to be about paying you off. It just has to be about making that, especially those first few years when you're trying to maybe balance work and having

kids, make that a little easier. Even if you don't have more kids, you have a situation where families are just generally supported more generally. That helps people work more. It just helps across the board. Unfortunately, we haven't really seen that in the US. I mean, no one's found a silver bullet but for immigration, right? Immigration, I think, is the closest thing

you can get to a silver bullet when it comes to directly affecting population growth because you can bring in often younger people. People are often coming when they're immigrants. They're not coming at 50, 60, they're coming at 20, 25, 30. They can bring in, they can have families, they can be productive, they can be innovative. A lot of, of course, really innovative companies in the United States have been started by immigrants. And it just allows you to really offset that aging you would otherwise have. And, you know, for the United States, which for a long time, that was a huge source of population growth. It slowed down a lot, really significantly since the

Trump administration, but it hasn't really even picked up under Biden as well. And if the U.S., if that is a priority to avoid a situation where we're facing towards an older and eventually shrinking future, that's got to come from immigration. That is really the only source. And that's not an option a lot of other countries have. You know, Japan, which has been shrinking already, has a hard time accepting immigrants. You know, China, same thing. Has a hard time accepting immigrants as in they just don't want to. Yes. I mean, like culturally, it's not been a place where immigrants tend to come. It's not an easy place for immigrants to really join the culture.

It's somewhat more exclusionary. And just traditionally, that path hasn't been available. We are living in times when there are fewer and fewer children born in Europe. For the West, the answer to that challenge is immigration. For every missing child, there should be one coming in, and then the numbers will be fine. But we do not need numbers. We need Hungarian children.

But what we're really talking about here is a kind of xenophobia, a kind of aversion to a multicultural country, right? I mean, because we're not just talking about letting in some immigrants. We're talking about countries fixing their population decline problems by letting in a ton of brown people. You have basically two choices, I think, if you're in charge of a country right now. You can either go the exclusionary xenophobic route, in which case you're almost certainly locking yourself into long-term decline in population and in other ways, I'd say, or you can open up to a much more multicultural culture and actually have a future which will have growth, which will have dynamism, which will have innovation. It's going to look different than the country you're used to, but that really is the only choice forward. If we just had, you know, a bunch of pegs on a board representing population across the planet and tried to balance it out so that no country on Earth

had a declining population anymore, how much different would the planet look? I think it would look really different. You're talking about hundreds of millions in population growth happening in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia. If you want to smooth that out, that would be a very different world. You see a lot of those people going to Europe, for instance,

which is going to be declining and shrinking a lot faster than North America. People going to North America, people even going to South America. It would be a whole shift of the world. How likely that is, I don't know, because simultaneously the situation where I think migration is more important than ever to solving this and other problems, and you're seeing waves of population, you're seeing resistance in a lot of countries. And to me, that's going to be one of the big stories of the future of the 21st century. What we do about the situation about migration, what we do about the situation of population decline, population slowdown, this is the only way to really handle it. And either we will or we face

a world that is just going to be, I think, taller walls. A lot of people stuck in areas where, you know, they can't maximize what they could do with their lives. Countries on the other side of those walls shrinking, decaying. I think a future where people can move much more freely is going to be a better future, but it's a tough political ask, it seems, both here in the U.S. and in a lot of parts of the world. That was Brian Walsh. He's an editor at Vox's Future Perfect. Read up on some of the solutions to the world's biggest problems at vox.com slash future perfect. Our show today was produced and reported by Miles Bryan. He was edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed and mastered by Afim Shapiro.

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