This article is a great illustration of a much larger phenomenon which probably comes into play in case of other countries as well. It is standard operating procedure for globalist NGOs, the Soros empire etc to:
1) recruit and fund activists in foreign countries who agree with their agenda
2) have them publish their radical opinions/POWs as unbiased, objective reporting in flagship Western papers like the NYT
3) have other activists back in the home country review these articles in local media as evidence of disapproval coming from an important and trustworthy place. If Orbán wasn’t evil, the NYT wouldn’t write that he is!
Of course this strategy can sway opinions both domestically (in Hungary) and abroad (like in the US).

Although it is never mentioned, one of the authors, Benjamin Novak is a former correspondent of 444.hu, a Soros-funded Hungarian leftist-globalist news portal. This article is his highly biased personal opinion, full of misrepresentations and obvious fabrications like Orbán’s threat to Weber which is totally out of character. 444.hu has since then wrote about this NYT article to its Hungarian audience and cites it as evidence of Western disapproval of Orbán.
In Hungary, this phenomenon is so well known that it even has its own name which could be anglicized as “belaweyering”. Bela Weyer was a journalist for left-wing journal HVG but he was also well-connected in Germany, where mainstream papers would publish his articles criticizing right-wing governments. Weyer’s colleageus in turn would review these for HVG in Hungarian as evidence that serious people in Germany are also disapprove of the government. They probably do this in every other smaller country where there is no serious English-language media to provide a more detailed coverage. In Hungary, pretty much the only people who bother to write in English about the politics of the country are Soros people trying to summon the CIA cavalry for a color revolution.

American readers, like everybody else, tend to suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia. They know the NYT is BS about the January 6 protests or BLM, but they often believe it about Taiwan, Ukraine or Hungary. (The NYT does publish correct and high-quality information). But foreign reporting in mainstream papers, especially when critical of a goverment and even if believable or written in dispassionate English, is very often just the personal opinion of a CIA/Soros activist posing as an unbiased expert.

This is why the ecological fallacy is a fallacy. Differences exist for different reasons depending on where we see them, there are even more obvious examples for this than IQ. For example, height differences between healthy adults living roughly in the same place and age mostly exist for genetic reasons, but height differences exist for different reasons between 3 and 10 year olds (maturation), men and women (sex and all the biochemistry that comes with it) or North and South Koreans or modern and 19th century Americans (various environmental effects), even if they have identical or nearly identical genes. The high heritability of traits mean that differences WITHIN STUDY SAMPLES exist for mostly genetic reasons, not that these traits are genetically fixed. I guess we could breed people for various traits pretty effectively so I’m not going to say that “environmental effects have a greater potential to cause differences than genetics”, but within reasonable or even observed conditions (e.g. over the past 100 years or across the total pool of modern countries) this is certainly the case.
We are constraining a lot of environmental variance by generally only including people living in the same place and age in genetic studies. We had strong hypotheses even about the remaining variance, for example that social class or childhood experiences which obviously differ even here matter a lot. These hypotheses are mostly bunk by now. But between-era and between-country differences in environment (culture, morals, nutrition, widespread habits, trends in education which affect everybody in the same place and age) probably do matter a lot for IQ (maybe even g), height, health and income. It is quite crazy how little people study these.

I’m not very convinced by the preprint’s conclusions. They show that during warmer weather, fewer patients who tested positive were admitted to the hospital or died. They correct effects for age and sex and say in the Discussion that hospital overwhelming and changes in treatment protocols are not likely to cause this, which is true. But of course because the epidemic started in the winter and now we are in the summer, ‘Temperature’ is basically just a proxy for ‘time since the start of the epidemic’. It went up automatically, but many important changed during this time, very importantly the extent of testing. Based on serological studies there are at least ten untested positives for each tested positive so there is a huge pool of asymptomatic or hardly symptomatic people to discover with more tests. More tests means a less severe disease course on average, and I think this is the only thing they are seeing here. They should include “time since January” or even better, “number of tests administered” as a covariate. That way we would see if people who were admitted on an unusually warm May week (independently from the fact that it was May already and more tests were administed) really had a better disease course. I think seasonality is still pretty much disproved by tropical outbreaks, which is of course great news because we shouldn’t expect a resurgence in temperate areas just because it’s autumn again.

Hungarian reader here. The government offers these benefits:
– CSOK: up to HUF 10M free for NEW property IF you have or agree to have 3 kids within 10 years. If you buy used property or have fewer kids it is still available but only about 1-2.5 M. There is a special version for depopulating villages where you do get 10M for a used house but you have to modernize it. No kids or divorce=you pay the money back with interest. 12< week old fetuses, adoptions and dead kids count though. There are limitations to get rid of dumb breeding and using the benefits for investments, because you also have to live in your property, you must have a work history of I believe 1+ years, no criminal record and both of you must be married, live in Hungary and be Hungarian citizens. Another limitation is that this much money won't buy you anything. If you don't have your own funds, you cannot use CSOK.
– CSOK loan: up to HUF 15M. This is a loan, only for properties but no interest. This is issued through banks and the banks do the usual background checks. If you wouldn't qualify for a normal 10M loan, you won't qualify for this. AFAIK no limits on number of kids or used/new property.
– Babaváró ("baby expecting") loan: this is the really sweet deal, I'm actually considering taking it out. This is a 10M loan FOR ANY USE – you can just buy bonds with it if you want. If you have just one kid, it is interest-free AND re-payment is frozen for 3 years. If you have a second kid, 30% of the remaining debt is cancelled and you can freeze payments for 3 more years. If you have a third kid, all the debt is cancelled. The debt is NOT a mortgage, you have 20+2×3 years to pay it back and monthly payments can never exceed HUF 50k which is not a lot. CSOK & CSOK loan limitations apply, so there is protection against dumb breeding. This offer is available until 2022.
– Tax returns: you can progressively deduct up to HUF 100k from your taxes if you have 1-3 kids. Considering that gross wages are ~350k at the moment, this is significant.
– Family benefits: very limited at 12k HUF (~40 dollars) per month per child. This is what you get if you have no income.

There are minor programs (e.g. car subsidies) also. The programs cost about 3 billion dollars (~2% of GDP) this year. Some benefits just rolled out so the annual cost is fractional, but you have to consider that lots of people who already had kids took the benefits as soon as they were available.

The Babaváró is very attractive because you don't have to choose in advance what you want. If you are expecting a child, it is basically risk-free. CSOK drove up property prices at attractive locations (Budapest, some rural areas) to the extent that Budapest is not affordable. With 10M CSOK+25M loans you can buy houses in rural areas or smaller towns or build your own in county capitals but not Budapest. There is a minimum size limit of 70 square meters for apartments which is considered big and usually only available in large new condo buildings.
I think the policies will not be dysgenic because underclass people cannot benefit much from them. I have doubts if they will have massive effects though because having your own property is still a huge risk. They are certainly the most generous family formation subsidies in the world right now so let's see.
Sham marriages are not an issue because a marriage only gets you 5k HUF/month for 2 years – not worth the hussle.

BTW the most impressive economic program in Hungary has not been this, but the Japanese-style re-structuring of state debt to private investors. Hungarian sovereign debt is down to ~70% of GDP from ~80 in 2010, but its re-structuring towards HUF-denominated bonds. In 2010, the country had about HUF 20k billion in debt, about half HUF-denominated and half in foreign currencies, less than 500 billion owned by private citizens. Now, the debt is about 29k billion (nominal increase was offset by GDP growth), from which only 5.5k billion is foreign currency but 9k billion is owned by private citizens for whom very attractive bonds are available. The Hungarian government now owes a third of its debt to citizens and this is expected to increase to a half by 2023. This is probably why the Babaváró grant is so generous – the government would be OK to have its debt re-financed by the money it gives you.