From: The Capsule, the new podcast from Calcalist

“Israel’s governments have been obsessively paying people to make children, from the birth grant to a long list of welfare payments and allowances, which made sense in the 1950s and 1960s, when population growth was a legitimate national target. These are distorted subsidies that advance an improper purpose from a public standpoint“ץ


This is the unpopular but sober opinion of Prof. Alon Tal, head of the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University and chairman of Tzafuf, the forum for the population, environment and society.
dvance an improper purpose from a public standpoint”.

For the past two years, Tal has been around the country preaching the idea that children are happy and blessed, but they can also cause serious trouble for the quality of life in Israel. So, simply, he calls on people to make fewer children. “People say to me, ‘You get into the bedroom,’ and I say, on the contrary, I want to get the government of Israel out of there, which tells you to do more children, we have to relax and understand that the country is crowded. As a state, can not and should not. “

In a fascinating and eye-opening interview in the first episode of “The Capsule,” the new podcast from Calcalist, Alon Tal explains why it is now necessary to reduce birthrate. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, he says, today Israel does not need a lot of citizens who will settle the land and establish facts on the ground. “When we are the most densely populated country in the Western world, this is irrelevant thinking, and the population in Israel has grown at a rate of 2% per year, which means that today there are 8.6 million people and we are on our way to 15 million people.”

“The listeners know exactly what that means, because they also sit in a traffic jam and say, ‘Oh, I will not get to the wedding today,’ their child is in a class with 41 children and will not get any more help from his teacher. “Where you do not look, you will see that we have undergone the infrastructure from a human perspective and the quality of life in Israel is deteriorating.”

Listen to the podcast