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And these days Germany has to support a continent. It’s the economic powerhouse that’s supposed to be rescuing the euro and preventing the five soidisant PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) from having the Big Bad Wolf of reality blow their house of straw to smithereens. But what happens when your engine room is rusting? “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development.

“Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear—Germany will become a weak economic power in the future.”²⁴

The EU committed (to borrow from Philip K. Dick) a kind of pre-crime: it mugged the next generation. For the moment, the victims are still walking around, mostly unaware of what they’re in for. For many of them, life is good. Take Marina Casagrande of Bergamo.²⁵ In Italy, a court ordered her father to pay Marina an allowance of 350 euros—approximately $525—every month. Signor Casagrande was then sixty. His daughter was thirty-two. She was supposed to have graduated with a degree in philosophy eight years earlier but, though her classes ended way back at the beginning of the century, she was still working on her thesis. So Signor Casagrande is obliged to pay up, either in perpetuity or until the completion of Marina’s thesis, whichever comes sooner. Her thesis is about the Holy Grail. Which Marina would have little use for, given that she’s already found a source of miracu-lous life-transforming powers in Papa’s checkbook.

Marina is what they call a “bambocciona,” which translates, roughly, as “big baby”—the term for the ever-growing number of Italian adults still living at home, in the same bedroom they’ve slept in since they were in diapers. There was, as usual, a momentary spasm of ineffectual outrage over the judge’s decision against Signor Casagrande, whose very name is mocked by this demographic trend: the casa would seem much more grande if only Junior would move out. But in Italy they rarely do: seven out of ten adults aged 18 to 39 live with their folks.²⁶ Sixtysomething Italians ordered to pay “child support” to thirtysomething kids might consider moving back in with their nonagenarian parents and suing for a monthly allowance backdated to the early Seventies.

Italy’s bamboccioni have their equivalents around the world. In Japan, they’re called parasaito shinguru—or “parasite singles,” after the horror film Parasite Eve, in which alien spawn grow in human bellies feeding off the host. In Germany, they’re Nesthockers with no plans to move out of “Hotel Mama.” In Britain, they’re KIPPERS (Kids In Parents’ Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings). In Canada, by 2006, 31 percent of men aged 25 to 29 were still sleeping in their childhood bedroom each night.²⁷

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 sired able-bodied 13-year-olds to do it for you. Today, most developed nations have managed to defer adulthood and thus to disincentivize parenthood—quite dramatically so, if the judgment against Signor Casagrande holds. Why blame his daughter? No matter how long you stay in school in Italy, there’s nothing waiting for you when you come out. Francesca Esposito was twenty-nine, spoke five languages, had two degrees, and could land no job other than an unpaid traineeship with a government agency facilitating millions of euros’ worth of false disability claims.²⁸ “I have every possible certificate,” she told the New York Times, which, in its poignant profile of Italy’s young, never seemed to consider whether such expensively acquired “certification” is necessary for a government job—or most others. Young(ish) Francesca had a law degree from Italy, a master’s from Germany, and had interned in Luxembourg at the European Court of Justice. A century ago, this leisurely, indulgent saunter through a tri-national varsity would have been the province of bored aristocratic scions with no interest in politics or soldiery, but somehow Europe got the idea to universalize it. Miss Esposito’s father is a fireman, her mother a high school teacher. She is the first in her family to learn a foreign language and graduate from college.