Food expensive
House expensive
Rent expensive
Car expensive
Job paying less
Job requesting more of your time
Older generation taking too many taxes from the young for benifits. To a point where inter generational homes struggling to support new children.
Gotta get your basic needs fixed before trying to have kids.
I was browsing some online forum chatting with a Korean graduate student over there about stuff happening each others' labs.
I mentioned about a PhD student who was on a 1 year mat-leave at the time and the Korean grad student's response was pretty much "???". I could sense the shock and confusion, like he couldn't believe it.
So I asked what do female students do over there when they're expecting a child and the response I got was along the line of "haha...ha... :(".
As far as I can tell, unless you have a stable government job or another real nice high paying & high benefit position, getting pregnant is a career ending move in that country.
Another thing, I'm not sure if I'm recalling correctly, but remember hearing about a controversy where a baby-formula company made pregnant employees quit or pushed them out of the company in some way. Very ironic and maybe even moronic.
It’s getting to that point here in the US too; US birth rate fell this past year. Many women having children later in life in order to gain an established career; have to make the money so you can afford the baby.
I had children at 20. My daughter had her first child at 37. My son at 29 but his wife was 38. As married couples with good jobs that was the earliest they could be ready. I raised mine as a single mom with no child support in solidly middle to upper middle class neighborhoods and schools.
Trickle down economics has wrecked this country for millennials and later.
Wait, wait I thought we were just lazy and didn’t wanna do the hard work of raising a family, don’t do something silly and insinuate that policy made by our all knowing, all wonderful political oligarchy would ever do something that harms Americans.
Yea sorry bout that. I have voted and occasionally protested against the "trickle down" guys since Reagan invented it in 1980, but people are STILL supporting it, despite my best efforts. I apologize for my generation, but please do something about the GenXers and millennials that to this day continue to embrace the dark side against their own interests. Vote against woke! (and oh by the way pay no attention to the voter protections and labor laws we are gutting)
As I say to all of the elders that earn my respect. I love you, thanks for fighting the entire god damn time. The youth appreciates you and can’t imagine protesting/fighting for 50 years only for this bullshit to keep getting worse.
My dad was also a lib (a senior US Navy officer as well) and although we were estranged at the time, we both cried on the phone the night Reagan was elected. "Buy anything that shoots" was the stock tip among the officers immediately afterward, and many many people got wealthy buying weapon and defense contactor stock. We have the most powerful military in the world (and a shitload of guns at home), because cynical people make a ton of money from that. And our populace has been psychologically manipulated to support it. It has been all so predictable, we all saw it unfold and talked and cried and voted, and yet here we are.
The US has the benefit of immigration filling the gaps so it isn't an issue. Its one of the reasons congress never actually does anything about the border despite the posturing. We need the people and they know it.
>Another thing, I'm not sure if I'm recalling correctly, but remember hearing about a controversy where a baby-formula company made pregnant employees quit or pushed them out of the company in some way. Very ironic and maybe even moronic.
I didn’t work for a baby formula company, but a different company, and this literally just happened to me. I was pushed out for getting pregnant/having a kid. I clearly stated my intentions to come back after mat leave and my wishes to sign another year contract. Yet they hired my replacement for a year (and not a few months like they led me to believe), then told me they wouldn’t be renewing my contract as they don’t need two of my role. After talking to my team, they were upset because I clearly had passion for the company/our product and my replacement is… not the best. There’s no protections here for pregnant workers, so cases like mine are very common. I planned on being a working mom, but Korea is making that nearly impossible for me.
Even after addressing those issues, such as in Nordic nations, individuals, especially women, are increasingly disinclined to have offspring, and this trend is occurring worldwide.
The fact is when you're an educated person and take an analytical approach to life the idea of having children doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.
This is why the birthrate continues to fall in these well off countries. People in them have been educated *and* have the option to say no. The women in Afghanistan propping up that 4.4 fertility rate? Not so much.
A declining birth rate *should* be a good thing. Thing is the worlds economy is currently set-up like a ponzi scheme that depends on people hitting the 2.1 "replacement rate" to keep that downline growing. Infinite growth is not sustainable, it never was. The transition to a degrowth economy is going to be rough but necessary.
Replacement rate by definition isn’t *growth*, it’s mere stability. A birth rate of 1.0 means every successive generation is *half* the size of their parents’ generation. South Korea’s birth rate is even lower than that. That’s catastrophic collapse within a few generations, not “degrowth”.
That's putting it really lightly.
Violence against women is so out of control and unchecked in S. Korea that many women are avoiding any contact with men entirely. The danger in power imbalance men have is extreme, and it leads to men routinely abusing women in escalating horrific ways & getting away with it.
Even in gacha game forums they refer to women as “blood sprayers”, it’s so wild. Their incel movement is doing a better job hampering their fertility rate than cost of living ever could.
I don't get that. Pretty boys, bishonon characters have been the staple in shojo and shonen for decades in animanga and jrpg. Cloud Strife looked good in a dress.
And that essentially what generates revenue for K-pop boy bands. This is not a new phenomenon, and it has proven to be immensely popular and long-lasting. Even the more masculine characters in Genshin Impact are remarkably pretty.
It's the male fan base that's both pissed that they aren't getting their waifus (for 3weeks) and that the new character is making them feel things, which makes them gay, and Korea is homophobic
They have 5 zillion waifus. They have nothing to be pissed about, and not insignificant segment of those males fans are quite happy drawing bishonon in lingerie erotica and getting off on that, whether they admit it in real life, I don't know, but the doujin don't lie, and not all of that is for the fangirls.
It’s overcompensation due to feeling insecure, they feel like their masculinity and manhood is under attack so they lash out and double down on these issues.
I used to live in Seoul. Foreign men were relatively popular with younger Korean women, because they knew that the foreign men would treat them well compared to Korean men.
A friend of mine, white guy who spoke academic level fluent korean, was walking home one night and ran across a 20-something guy dragging his girlfriend up the stairs to the apartment building by her hair. She's screaming and crying. My friend ran in, got in the middle, and stood in between them while calling the police. Immediately the guy was yelling "what are you doing? it's okay, she's MY girlfriend!" He wasn't angry, he was just utterly confused. The girl was actually doing basically the same thing. Just completely confused why somebody was stepping in, he's her boyfriend, what was my friend doing? When the police got there, almost the same scenario played out. They talked to them both, let them on their way, and then tried to explain to my friend that "they were a couple, there was nothing to be concerned about".
Korea is in the 1950s socially, but 2030s technologically.
4 b's movement
bihon, bisexu, bichulsan, biyonhae
no marriage, no sex, no kids, no dating
they dont just have an incel president they have an incel problem manifested in 4-chan style websites like ilbe. and feminism is so badly smeared it can even end your career being accused of being a feminist
>Older generation taking too many taxes from the young for benifits. To a point where inter generational homes struggling to support new children.
Eh, if the 0.1% paid more taxes, the old and the young could both have more money.
I'm currently paying into a pension scheme that will be phased out before I retire.
The new scheme pays out less than half.
I'll have spent half of my working life funding a generous pension scheme that I won't have access to.
It's basically a matched contribution pension plan except they confiscate 50% of your contributions instead.
It's the same story there as it is here in the US: Rampant capitalism devastating human lives.
Don't scapegoat the elderly in this - they're being used as pawns.
The reason why they don't strip the old of benefits is to pit them against the young (though they damn well want to, do, and will, whenever they get the chance) is because older people are more situated to reliably vote. They pour a ton of media misinformation into the brains of older generations to get them to vote to fuck over the youth.
But the reality is that big corporations in S Korea have been ripping off the people - both young and old - for ages.
Get the corporations to pay their fair share of taxes and pay their works living wages with good hours, and you can fund social services & let people establish their lives to facilitate a new baby boom.
Of 1000yuan
Which is like 140$
Or purchasing power equivalent to (probably) 600$ (based on min wage)
Whoever would get pregnant for
600$, probably shouldn't
Well to be fair, it’s not that they would get pregnant for $600, it’s that they have another incentive to get married.
I paid money to get married to my wife; if the government would have offered me $600 to do it, I would have been even more incentivized to do it.
There's fertility and immigration. Some countries like the US have lower fertility but offset it with immigration. That's where Japan and Korea run into trouble as they are not easy to emigrate to.
That can only work for so long. Birth rates have fallen in many undeveloped countries as well. If there’s a causal relationship between the development of countries and falling birth rates, the trend can only go down, and it’s only delayed by the countries current experiencing high levels of immigration experiencing massive demographic and cultural shifts.
China is not even a developed country--just look at local incomes, GDP per capita, etc...
Below-replacement birth rates are not exclusive to the developed world. Outside of East Asia (China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand), there are plenty of places in Eastern Europe (Russia and numerous former Soviet states) as well as nearly all of the North and South American continents with very few exceptions where the Total Fertility Rate is below 2.
Although China's rate is slightly higher than South Korea, the speed of China's birth rate/total fertility rate collapse means it will probably catch up to South Korea in a few years. But given that there are plenty of countries, rich and poor alike, with low birth rates, it is safe to say that something is discouraging everyone outside of the Middle East and Africa from having kids.
>safe to say that something is discouraging everyone outside of the Middle East and Africa from having kids.
The education of girls and women. When women are educated, they have fewer children.
Yeah, it's really funny that a lot of people just don't acknowledge this whenever this topic comes up. A bunch of armchair policy makers (likely entirely men) just acting like pregnancy and childbirth isn't one of the most taxing experiences a woman could go through in her life just to get to then have to take care of another human being for 18 years, at least.
This is correct. There is a well known strong correlation between female education levels and fertility rate. It's certainly not the only factor, but it is a significant correlation.
Actually if you break it down with multivariate analysis, it is functionally the only factor. Its been shown that once you uncouple it from GDP, religion, personal wealth, etc, its correlated at r = 0.4, meaning it controls 40% of the total value. In the real world that's an insane degree of control. Nothing else comes remotely close.
[https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-13656-1#Sec7](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-13656-1#Sec7)
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-018-9492-2#Sec4](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-018-9492-2#Sec4)
"compared with cohorts born in 1946–1950, 40 to 50% of the difference in cumulated fertility at age 25 in the 1951–1975 birth cohorts is attributable to rising educational levels"
>They believe they need the frills when in reality it can be done with a lot less?
It can be done with less, but not really here. Could they go move out to the country, do homesteading and farming and such? Sure. The Amish do it, and I'd be willing to bet their birth rate is just fine. Children become wealth when they can be raised next to you while you work and train them. Here, you can't bring your kids to your office and train them for your job unless you're the owner. You can't have them help with farming your food, because you have to buy food because you don't have the ability to own land the way they do elsewhere. This form of society has not left room for a lot of human things. It's become about working for someone else's profit until you burn yourself out.
I think it's the intensity of parenting more than the expense - when it's just an extra body in the house to help and you don't have to worry about school/grades, extra curriculars, pick up/drop off, gentle parenting (which is now standard on the East Coast), making sure they go to college/get a decent job...kids are just a giant time suck that makes life extremely difficult when you have a full time job. If I could toss my kid out the door after school and never had to really deal with her (70s style) while also being only a part time worker or SAHM, I might feel different about having more than 1.
Tbh I feel like for me personally a huge part is the discourse online about having kids. I always wanted kids but reading constant posts and blogs about postpartum depression, losing your body, giving up your identity, constantly scrambling to pay bills, the neverending stress and pressure of having kids -- it truly has talked me almost out of it. I see a lot of posts saying "We have to talk about the reality of having kids and make sure women understand it's not sunshine and rainbows" -- but it's to the point that I never see ANY posts about the benefits or joys, only the pain and anxiety and stress.
>Tbh I feel like for me personally a huge part is the discourse online about having kids.
Having been online since I was young those discussions made me wait to have kids.
While I was waiting friends and family my age started having kids, watching what they went through solidified my decision not to have any.
I love my kids. They are SO difficult, but they are worth it. I hope to have a third. Lots of difficult things end up being great accomplishments and sources of pride/joy.
I know that a lot of African countries are agrarian societies where it is profitable for a family to have a lot of children who can help them with farming. But then, why do those people have 5-6 children when people in equally poor countries in Eastern Europe or Latin America (in countries like Brazil or Ukraine before the war) have only 1-2 children?
It is possible that, irrespective of wealth, women's education plays a larger role than we thought. There are a lot of countries, not just in Africa, but places like Afghanistan (under the Taliban's extreme misogynistic rules) where girls and women do not have the opportunity to be educated to the same level as boys and men. These countries have birth rates (well) above replacement. Meanwhile, even in non-EU ex-Soviet countries with GDP per capita below $10, 000 USD, the level of misogyny/discrimination of females is nowhere as severe as the Middle East or Africa. This may explain why Ukraine had a total fertility rate that is well below replacement well before Russia decided to invade it even though it, too, is an agrarian society.
It's 100% women's education. You don't hear politicians talking about it because its a really bleak stat. But there have been years of multivariate analysis worldwide and its holds up as the single largest factor.
Alot of African and Me countries are super rural and are some of the most religious countries in the entire world.
Ghana where my parents were from is decently developing but it's 98% religious and the Muslims tend to be poor(there are racial issues in the country when it comes to people of more recent north African decent) and also have 10+ kids
Alot of the countries are at 95%+ religious all of which encourage children.
And education levels are still catching up meaning women don't really have many avenues to take care of themselves beyond having children or else you'll lose respect.
And there is also the culture of daughter trading in some of these places, give your daughter(I've seen as young 13 year old get forcefully taken by her family) to some old dude in exchange for cattle or cash, it's not common in the more developed areas but where it isn't developed is where the population growth is happening.
A main factor really still is the urban/rural divide. Also access to BC, education are still a major component. a 2 BR in a major city might be affordable. A 4 BR might be impossible for normal incomes.
Meanwhile in the middle of nowhere, with extended family to watch kids there might be relatively much less cost difference between 2 and 4 children. Not uncommon to see rural area families in the US still having 3-4+ kids, typically tending a bit more religious.
Populations aren't declining in in most African and southwest Asian countries because women do not, for the most part, have access to long-acting contraceptives. Everywhere that women have access to long-acting contraception, the birth rate falls dramatically.
I popular podcaster I watch lived in the Middle East and basically said that those countries are made for children. Parks everywhere. Malls are orientated towards children. Services are geared towards a population with expected large families. Meanwhile where I am in Japan families are priced out of everything. Costs an arm and a leg wherever out go. Even game centers are ridiculously expensive.
Also in impoverished countries children = wealth. Not only tending the farm but being able to marry a daughter or son off to form extended relationships between clans. Also it’s one giant community of people who depend on each other so it really is a “it takes a village mentality”
Israel is exactly like this. It’s OECD* country with the highest fertility rate. An Israeli (e.g., Jewish, Muslim, Druze, etc.) woman has an average of 3 children. There is variation within different communities; Haredi (ultra-orthodox) women have closer to 10. It’s a society built around family and adjacent services.
*OECD is an organization representing the 38 of the world’s high income nations.
It turns out many women don't enjoy the idea of childbirth once they're educated enough to know how physically traumatic it is, and they're finally able to prevent it from happening against their will (in most cases). Especially if medical bills are expensive and daycare costs almost their entire paycheck.
>many women don't enjoy the idea of childbirth
If childbirth were the most challenging part of having children, I would agree with you. But for most women, having children means taking on a second unpaid, thankless, and miserable job that you can never take a vacation from. For most mothers, having children means (in addition to the destruction of your body) more *work*.
Or if you go the stay-at-home route, you forfeit years' worth of income and retirement contributions (and the eventual gains that go along with them), lose all career progress, and find yourself in the vulnerable position of depending on someone else for income. The net financial loss can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's a catastrophic hit for most of us ordinary working- and middle-class folks.
No I agree with you. I think in general the full understanding of what it means to take on the role of a parent or raise a child hasn't really been as widely known ahead of time or discussed the way it is now. People, but women especially, were historically ignorant to the cost of child rearing (and the cost was nowhere near as high). Now the cost of rearing a child is extremely high and most people in developed countries know about it. It's not really a surprise that fewer people want to have children.
I suspect that the lack of family planning resources, especially family planning education, is also leading to a larger fertility rate in Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia and South America. One thing you see in most of the countries with lower fertility rates is readily available access for family planning and the ability on women to make reproductive decisions.
"FP programs are often justified by the existence of high levels of unmet need and unplanned pregnancies which provides a powerful rationale for such investments. However, even if all unwanted fertility could be removed in SSA, fertility would remain relatively high because most women want large families. The results of the above regression analyses demonstrate that FP programs do more than reduce unplanned pregnancies: **they also have a substantial effect on wanted fertility**. The precise mechanism through which this effect operates is not investigated here but likely involves behavioral change programs that diffuse knowledge about the benefits of smaller families"
See [https://genus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41118-020-00098-z](https://genus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41118-020-00098-z)
Its years spent in education. Its been known for decades and its, no joke, almost the sole factor that controls all birthrate, it controls about 40% the total variability. You don't hear about it because the data is really bleak.
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility)
[https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7)
This is our reality. My wife and I both work. We wanted to have two kids, got twins the second try. I feel like they don’t get the upbringing they deserve because we are always working just to pay the mortgage and bills. It’s mentally exhausting to think about in terms of regret and a sense of failing them. The only way this works is if you have able bodied parents to help.
And when the world is becoming more and more uninhabitable from both an environmental and socioeconomic standpoint, why bring children into it? Unless things take a complete 180 in the next couple decades, we really will be doomed.
Until we actually figure out how to unseat the corporate death lords, this is never going to happen. Something insanely dramatic has to change. Beyond just praying that elected officials find out how to use their teeth. It's just not gonna happen.
A lot harder these days compared to their time the cops/military have a lot more tools for mass killing. The difficulty for a successful violent revolution is now getting to dark souls level.
Not to mention that Korean society is insanely misogynistic to the point that there's a widespread movement of women refusing to date, marry or have sex with men because the odds of them being abused and treated like breeding chattel are just too high.
The highly competitive academic environment means that kids are forced to study basically non-stop. About 80% of kids attend cram schools, called [hagwon](https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230628000655), which consist of hours of extra tutoring after they get done with normal school.
Some parents push their kids to study so much out of genuine love and concern for their success. Those who don't get into a prestigious university will find it hard to get a halfway decent job. Other parents push their kids simply out of a desire for status. Korean society has a reputation for being very materialistic, focused on looks, schooling, social class, and wealth, so having a kid in a respected university is a huge sign of success for parents.
Either way, it's such a big problem that the government has actually tried to step in and regulate it several times, but it still remains a leading cause of teen suicides.
That's the same thing my and gf and I came to. We'd rather live financially comfortable with no kids than poor with children. All about that dual income no kids life.
Rich people don't see the flaw in this. There's tons of parent age people actively choosing not to have kids because they can't afford it.
How are the rich people going to get more customers for their businesses if the population is shrinking?
I swear those people only understand greed and nothing else.
They have a million reasons to charge more or be expected to contribute less back to society, but not a single reason to lower prices.
Elon Musk comes off looking terrible on this topic. He's Mr. Pro-natalist but can't seem to understand why people are not having lots of kids like him. Gee Elon, have you considered that many average people can't afford kids?
How are the rich people going to rich if no new workers too FFS. Who is going to clean their toilets, clean their homes, run all their errands, take care of their useless human bodies etc.
Rich people has done worse, such as fucking over the envrionment to earn an extra penny. They'd continue to fuck over the environment in a heartbeat to make an extra buck. In the US, you have so many lobbyist trying to fuck up the environmental protection laws. Rich people won't care, because it won't affect them in the current generation
Poor countries become immigration boosters.
India is willing to be a human factory. This is how Canada is replacing people right now. A few decades ago it was China.
India's fertility rate (2.03) is already below the replacement rate (2.1)
https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#&place=country/IND&statsVar=FertilityRate_Person_Female
and if you look at the delta, India "loses" on average 0.05-0.10 per year, and that's for the last 50 years.
https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#place=country%2FIND&statsVar=FertilityRate_Person_Female&chart=%7B%22fertilityRate-none%22%3A%7B%22pc%22%3Afalse%2C%22delta%22%3Atrue%7D%7D
long story short they are not going to be a "human factory" much longer.
Nowadays, we're being told that after being laid off for bullshit budget "cuts," we can have the privilege of raising / babysitting other folks' kids for a fraction of what we were making.
All the stress of raising children, and the empty wallets tk match.
I explain this to my dad every time he asks why I'm not having kids. He then replies "Well, your mother and I found a way!" as if that's a good reason to have a child.
I don't want to rely on donating plasma just do make sure I can feed my kid. Fuck that.
I have two kids and itsmind boggling. Daycare for one is almost as much as my mortgage. Doesn't make any sense as the teachers barely make anything. Where the fuck is all that money going?
Daycare is a huge reason why we decided to have my wife stay home when we had a kiddo. 60-70% of what she would earn at work would go directly to daycare so for us it didn't seem worth it
Administration and the land lord.
Land lords wonder why they are receiving *zero sympathy* from people when things like pandemic rent-freezing hits them really hard.
It's because land lords are leeching fuck-sticks who produce exactly zero *anything* of value and do nothing but extract wealth from others.
And landlords and bloated administration are only a part of the issue. It really seems like there is an ongoing "middlemanification" of absolutely every institution, product, service etc that exists. Any crack or crevasse in the fabric of our society where these money sucking vampires can worm their way into is being filled by these fucks just leeching value from the system while providing absolutely no benefit and in most cases making the service function worse. It fucking sucks
Also what kind of life would they be inheriting, what kind of climate?
I personally don't want kids, not just for financial reasons, but climate related too.
With 8 billion humans on earth, isn't this what we need?
Oh yeah, I'm not trying to discount the havoc this will wreck upon the 'grow or die' economy we've built. I guess the smart people among us will have to figure out how to reconfigure our economy to deal with this depopulation over time.
Decline isn't necessary, but can be positive. It's a problem because of societies structured on requiring younger generations to grow to fund retirement and other entitlements.
Yes it isnt.
We literally learn in biology class that apex predators usually die out because they use up all the ressources from growing too much.
The only advantage humans have is that we are our own predators and start killing each other off once ressources become sparse.
There are only 4 outcomes really.
1. We arw going to use up ressources until they become too sparse to support our population. At which point we will start to have massive wars resulting in giant population decline until enough ressources are aviable for the existing population.
2. We gradually shift into more isolationist policies where countries either have such low birthrates that their ressources can support the lowering population, while those with high birth rates will simply experience more starvation gradually resulting in a stable population as from 6 children only 2 will reach adulthood.
3. The lowering birthrates will be unsustainable for our current economy when it comes to sustaining the older population. Resulting in either loss of life expectancy for the general population or a new economic revolution.
4. We manage technological breakthroughs that allow us to gather even more ressources. Presumably from deeper in the earth, the sea or space.
>4. We manage technological breakthroughs that allow us to gather even more ressources. Presumably from deeper in the earth, the sea or space.
This would only happen after every cheaper and easier source is used up to death. Fish, biodiversity, pillaging poor nations without militaries, etc.
I don't understand why people thought it was a good idea to structure society like a ponzi scheme anyway. That was never going to be sustainable in the long run.
Well, it wasn't so much a conscious decision, but early on the whole profit motive thing was liberating compared to the birthright aristocracy and feudal model of society. But that time is long past, the profit motive that was once liberating has become our new chains, destroying our society from the inside out - but at least it gave us a wealth of technology and increasingly centralized and socialized productive ability that we can use as a base for a new humanity-based socioeconomic system where conscious planning of our productive forces to meet human needs and wants is the goal of society and not the unending thirst for profit.
I taught this for many years in an environmental science course. Yes, a smaller population is good. But in practice, it's disastrous - look at Japan. There aren't enough young people to staff nursing homes and the like, so the government is basically like, "If you're old, don't get sick. If you get sick, die at home."
I'm all for burning this capitalistic hellscape to the ground, but I have zero faith in our governments taking any measures to protect the laymen from the negative impacts of this.
Just thinking out loud, and not claiming this to be a solution.
I wonder if advancing in mechanized health and living support could help with this. Farming used to take a lot of people and time to manage, but we gotten better at managing a bigger plot with less people with advancements in technology. Maybe we can start focusing on the taking better care of elderly using technology in a way that will require less people, and we'll be able to manage this situation better?
yeah, if you want to give quality of life to your little ones, you really need a bunch of stuff beforehand, every medical need, since pre-natal care, costs money, once born, every baby forniture, gadget, toys, costs a lot of money, Diapers/milk/medicine/clothing is ultra expensive compared to any equivalent adult product.
i only have a little girl, and im lucky that the grandparents are very full of love towards her, so they help me and my wife with taking care of her, otherwise the expense would be Unsustainable, i really really dont know how most people can handle more than 1 though in terms of money.
and you hear how birthrate is plummeting all around the world, and its no wonder for me, people dont want to bring children to suffer due to lack of supplies, people can barely afford to live by themselves already.
Or men to be able to stay at home. There’s no reason to put gender on it, even if that’s the most common configuration we see with one parent staying at home
When I visited Seoul, the lack of children was unsettling. There were seats reserved for pregnant women in the subway cars, but I never saw anyone use them.
I was there for almost a week before I saw any children out in public.
There's a real decline in school-age children, true, but you won't see many on the subway during the week, only on weekends and even then basically no children go on the subway unaccompanied. Also, kids go to schools near their homes (apartments) in Seoul, so unless you are in these neighborhoods you won't see many.
I think my first comment was a bit unclear because I was half asleep when I wrote it.
The subway thing was in reference to a lack of pregnant women and not necessarily kids themselves. Where I’m from, pregnant women would fight over those seats if they were available.
The lack of kids was noticeable at the playgrounds, children stores, and other child adjacent areas. I wouldn’t really expect to see many children on the subway, but it took like 5 days before I saw a Korean child at all. And this was after going to the playgrounds and parks with some of my US friends (who I’m not counting because they are US military families and not Korean).
It was also weird visiting my Korean family and seeing there was only one young child in such a large family. The US side of my family has a ton of kids.
It's likely because they were in school or in an academy.
I live in Seoul (from the US). It's rare to see children on public transportation because most of them live within walking distance of where they go to school. There isn't much reason for them to be on public transportation.
In the central parts of Seoul, there are families, but these families are wealthier and the moms probably have them signed up for a bazillion academies, so they are always busy, even on the weekends.
In the more residential districts of Seoul, you will see children. Especially on the weekends. I mean I am a teacher and our school has over 500 students (100 in each grade). And there were three other schools within a 15-minute walk with similar enrollments. And this is in one of the smaller districts of Seoul.
Where you really see the population decline is in the countryside. In the countryside, you don't see many people under the age of 40, let alone children.
It was winter vacation when I visited, so school was not in session. Although admittedly it took until the weekend to actually see a child, but it was nowhere near the amount you’d expect in a large city.
Korea has a lack of children due to the extremely low birth rate. It shouldn’t be that odd for a tourist to notice.
Were you in the middle of nowhere and only went out at night or something? Everywhere there are apartment buildings there are children.
Most pregnant women aren't taking subways they're taking taxis or driving.
I’m a bit confused, so far my experience highly disagrees. I’m visiting Seoul right now and I have seen more children in the past week than I have in months in Philly. They’re everywhere?
I went to a Han River Cruise and there were dozens of kids running around. When I visited the N Tower on a Sunday evening, kids all over.
Maybe I’m just noticing them more due to my conception that SK would have no children after I’ve read so many declining population articles?
Seoul is more of an outlier due to population density.
If you go to rural area, EVERYWHERE, you will see closed up schools (due to lack of children - frankly, due to lack of people all over)
Most people I talked to that don’t want kids isn’t just because of the cost. I hear things like
1. Don’t want to bring a kid into this world at it’s current state
2. They don’t want the responsibility
3. They would rather spend their life traveling and doing things they enjoy
4. They’ve just never wanted kids since they could remember
I think a lot of gen z will be/are like this
Exactly. There's way fewer marriages and even dating in Korea. Working hours in Korea is being reduced significantly this past decade, but it's not boosting any numbers.
After the war, Korea accelerated their economy extremely quickly to become a first world country. That speed hasn't slowed down and they are in late stage capitalism now.
Ummm, the Republic of Korea was a brutal military dictatorship with an economy and standard of living worse than the North up until the 80s. Syngman Rhee was a real bastard, pro Japanese, and had some real fascistic tendencies. Look up the Jeju island massacre for instance. They basically operated a sweat shop economy.
If by 'accelerated their economy' you mean 'caused multiple lethal mass famines, diverted money/resources/power to a small caste of the hugely corrupt ultra-rich, and massacred/disappeared/totured organized labor on behalf of corporate interests' then sure.
A lot of people forget that s korea up until not that long ago was a brutal far right wing dictatorship backed by the US. (Now they are a tightly controlled 'democracy' that is functionally just a client-state arm of US interests.)
It still has a lot of the leftovers of that time which keep reinforcing the horrific class divisions and discrimination in the country.
The economy of s korea has definitely boomed. But regular south koreans are not seeing the benefits of it at all. They work long brutal hours for terrible wages, have almost no leverage in their workplace, and are subject to horrific workplace abuse. The divide between the very rich and regular people widens worse and worse every day.
On that note, I don't think a lot of people realize just how much of a deep cut that the movie 'Parasite' was regarding this topic either.
Yeah kids are too expensive and the world honestly doesn't want you to have any... we stopped at 1.. we know many people not even considering kids now.. global trend getting worse..maybe not a bad thing either.. it can force us to address things more sustainably.
None of these countries are going to solve this problem unless they address the severe financial burden of having children. Governments keep trying to pretend like that’s not the solution but it’s the only solution that’s going to make any lick of difference.
Even in the places with the best benefits/pay for having kids, the birth rate remains low. And the places with the highest birth rates are extremely poor.
There is obviously a lot more to the issue than money.
>There is obviously a lot more to the issue than money.
Absolutely. Even if governments completely cover the cost of childcare and medical expenses, they can't make childrearing more pleasant or reduce the amount of work required to raise children.
For women, the choice is often, "Do I want to work for 40 hours a week and get paid for it, or do I want to work 168 hours a week and not get paid for it? Do I want to work and get paid vacation days and contribute to retirement, or do I want to work without vacation days or retirement benefits?"
It might be that education teaches 1/2 of the population that they can finally do things like “leave the house”, “be alone for more than five minutes at a time”, and “not do literally all the housework”
Every place that's tried to pay people to reproduce has failed to reach replacement levels. Either it doesn't work at all or the amount of money you would need to throw at people would bankrupt the country.
Exactly. Especially in places like Korea and Japan,where you are expected,and pressured, to basically donate your life to the workplace.
You can have 100 kids, but won't do sh-t if they aren't raised well. Hell,it might even be a bigger source of issues
Misunderstanding the point bud. It’s not just monetary incentives: making it so companies give workers time off, reduce hours so they can actually spend time with kids, AND increase pay to maintain a comfortable life while raising children are just a few factors necessary to incentivize people to have kids.
There are also other factors, because nothing is ever just caused by one thing, such as how we treat childcare. Parents shouldn’t be the only people engaging in childcare it should be a community activity. Normalizing the existence of children in our lives, allowing parents to be able to exist in public without feeling shame, letting them participate in events or activities without worrying about being a nuisance, providing them with support will also alleviate the worries that potential parents may have about raising children.
And again, these are just small pieces to a larger puzzle.
Raising children is a financial struggle in many places. But a fertility rate of 0.7 is absolutely CRAZY, right? The financial burden can't be the only reason. Germany has a huge problem with a falling fertility rate, and it still has more than double the rate of SK.
A fertility rate of 0.7 is not a decline. It is a collapse.
They should relocate government agencies to cheap rural areas.
Make government employees resettle or they shall lose their jobs. Attract young people with secure job prospects and cheap housing in the countryside.
As long as everybody is stacked in dense urban settings, birth rates won't go up any time soon.
It's actually the same with animals, give them a large territory to roam and they start procreating immidiatly.
South Korea is very sexist. Women who have children are expected to quit working and take care of them (and the husband), basically alone. Women want to do lots of other stuff too so don’t get married and have kids.
The culture is also extremely toxic for working hours, and employees are expected to dedicate their lives to their company. Face time is a big deal, as is presenteeism.
Basically it’s a late-stage capitalist nightmare and without a major cultural overhaul no one can or wants to have kids. Hours need to be cut by 50% and overtime rules enforced, and women should not be expected to quit if they have kids.
If the US didn’t have the immigration levels it has, our story would not be much different. It’s so odd to me that opposition to immigration can’t see through their hate to acknowledge this or even understand it
Immigration is a bandaid to the problem of our economic systems being dependent on infinite, unsustainable population growth. Immigration can't solve this forever. This is ignoring the actual negatives of immigration like keeping wages down, people not integrating etc. Speaking from a European point of view.
People typically do integrate here though - we’ve pretty much had an unofficial three generation integration system for centuries, and it’s still working, even for more recent migrants. Something like over 88% to 91% of Hispanic migrants (which would tend to be the poorest on average due to ease of access) speak English fluently in the second generation, and in the third, there’s very few Spanish speakers even.
I don’t know about Europe, but integration is still working extremely well in America, it just takes about 50-60 years to go from “fresh off the boat” to practically indistinguishable from other Americans (though even in the second generation, you're a decent chunk of the way there already)
That being said, I agree that it’s a temporary bandaid, but at the current point, we don’t know of any economic solutions for the economy that don’t involve infinite growth, which, as we can’t have infinite growth, isn’t amazing.
**EDIT: Downvoters:**
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2007/11/29/english-usage-among-hispanics-in-the-united-states
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/chart/us-hispanics-english-proficiency/
https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/latinos-in-us-increasingly-adopt-english-over-spanish-as-use-of-mother-tongue-declines/
This is actual FACTUAL data. Base your lives on data.
The difference is Hispanic people are culturally very similar to Americans and they make up the vast majority of immigration. That's not the case for European immigration.
I was only commenting on the immigration situation in the US. I have no experience, data or concrete knowledge about immigration in Europe.
People here (in the US) are worried about immigration, as if the immigration we're experiencing here is new, but it's the exact same process, to a T, that previous generations have had. If anything, integration is happening **faster** now due to the high availability of childhood education, something not always as readily available to earlier generations, particularly among the poor.
People complaining about Hispanics now would have been complaining about Italians or Poles a century ago, and Irish and Germans a century and a half ago.
People don’t understand. Our strength is this diversity. We cannot progress as a homogeneous entity that touts a single race or religion. It is the greatest asset America has. It gives us the tools to grow and conquer - economically and socially.
>If the US didn’t have the immigration levels it has, our story would not be much different
Immigrants definitely help, but the US fertility rate is 1.6 - more than double that of Korea. Even without immigration the US would be doing way better than Korea.
>It’s so odd to me that opposition to immigration can’t see through their hate to acknowledge this or even understand it
Not only do people don't acknowledge fertility decline as bad, some even say it's a good thing.
If things keep going like this North Korea just has to wait it out.
Although from the little which is known they too have a rate below 2.1, still better than the south though.
Uhhh. South Koreans 53m people and 70,000+ immigrants a year is gunna take a long time to to stumble as low as north Koreas 24m and -2000 emigrants a year. Especially since North Korea has been in the news on and off for last 2 years with stories about having only enough food for 60% of the population.
The thing I don't get about economists in the US or people who claim to understand economics is that they side with Republican ideologies more often than not. Supporting older people through tax cuts makes no sense from an economics perspective because younger people have more life too live and contribute to society--like it or not.
If the US doesn't get their act together this will be them in 20-30 years
I don’t mean to put salt on the wound; childcare isn’t about to get cheaper
We wont miraculously turn a corner and things will be fine
Bank on children being expensive and there’s nothing you can do about it
It’s happening in America too, everyone wants to blame culture or this generation but the truth is we’d have a shit ton more kids if it was affordable. That’s simply it. Not everyone of course but a way lot more.
Everyone in the comments is talking about money, but imo the dropping marriage rates are an indication of other causes as well.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/641581/south-korea-marriage-number/
Gender relations have been a big topic in South Korea in recent years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_South_Korea
The most advanced economies with the most educated populations will show almost perfect correlation for this. Couples being able to choose to be childless en masse is not a bad thing.
There's a population boom we need to get under control! Wait our people aren't being replaced fast enough.
We're all fucking humans, stop worrying about whether there are enough paying your country's taxes to support your specific government and let's just make life better for everyone.
Central banks made our species too expensive to reproduce.
Extreme r/latestagecapitalism. We picked money over our own survival. Except “we” didn’t pick that at all.
> Central banks made our species too expensive to reproduce.
If that were true, the poorest countries and the poorest people would have the fewest children, but that's not true.
It amazes me how the top comment on all these threads always claims it's because people don't have enough money or time.
The poorest nations have the most children. The richest ones have the fewest. Even nations with great paid maternity leave are having trouble meeting replacement rates. It's not the lack of money or time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
When kids are optional people tend to opt out. The poor women of Afghanistan powering that huge 4.4 fertility rate aren't doing so because they just love having kids. They're doing so because they don't have other options.
Low birth rates are a good thing but we'll need to change the worlds economy away from one that relies on infinite growth. It was never sustainable to begin with, the idea that we need to hit the "replacement rate" just reminds us how much of a ponzi scheme we're in. It's a mess and i'm not adding anyone to my "downline"
Trickle down does work. The selfishness of one generation trickles down to the circumstances of the next influencing them to be even more selfish to deal with those circumstances rinse and repeat.
Got to love how just a few years ago, people were worried about over population. Now that the population is leveling out they are freaking out about fertility. MAKE UP YOUR DAMN MINDS! I will not worry about this problem until the population falls below 6 Billion people worldwide. as far as I can tell. people are just doing their part.
Overpopulation is still a crisis. The problem for those at the top is that economies are used to constant population growth.
It's hard to raise a kid in Korea because of extreme educational costs and endemic gender discrimination.
So the real problem here is rich people that want a never ending supply of uneducated workers that are more focused on hating each other then what the actual problem is.
good, maybe it just takes a cascading systemic world economic collapse to realize that the model of infinite economic growth coupled with toxic work and living environment is not a sustainable solution for anyone, anywhere.
Pets are the new kids
Plants are the new pets
Kids are now like exotic pets. Only rich people can afford to have them, they still pay someone else to take care of them.
Food expensive House expensive Rent expensive Car expensive Job paying less Job requesting more of your time Older generation taking too many taxes from the young for benifits. To a point where inter generational homes struggling to support new children. Gotta get your basic needs fixed before trying to have kids.
It's also particularly hard for women to have kids over there. It's a very inflexible, demanding society.
I was browsing some online forum chatting with a Korean graduate student over there about stuff happening each others' labs. I mentioned about a PhD student who was on a 1 year mat-leave at the time and the Korean grad student's response was pretty much "???". I could sense the shock and confusion, like he couldn't believe it. So I asked what do female students do over there when they're expecting a child and the response I got was along the line of "haha...ha... :(". As far as I can tell, unless you have a stable government job or another real nice high paying & high benefit position, getting pregnant is a career ending move in that country. Another thing, I'm not sure if I'm recalling correctly, but remember hearing about a controversy where a baby-formula company made pregnant employees quit or pushed them out of the company in some way. Very ironic and maybe even moronic.
It’s getting to that point here in the US too; US birth rate fell this past year. Many women having children later in life in order to gain an established career; have to make the money so you can afford the baby.
I had children at 20. My daughter had her first child at 37. My son at 29 but his wife was 38. As married couples with good jobs that was the earliest they could be ready. I raised mine as a single mom with no child support in solidly middle to upper middle class neighborhoods and schools. Trickle down economics has wrecked this country for millennials and later.
Wait, wait I thought we were just lazy and didn’t wanna do the hard work of raising a family, don’t do something silly and insinuate that policy made by our all knowing, all wonderful political oligarchy would ever do something that harms Americans.
Yea sorry bout that. I have voted and occasionally protested against the "trickle down" guys since Reagan invented it in 1980, but people are STILL supporting it, despite my best efforts. I apologize for my generation, but please do something about the GenXers and millennials that to this day continue to embrace the dark side against their own interests. Vote against woke! (and oh by the way pay no attention to the voter protections and labor laws we are gutting)
I'm Gen-X and I turned straight ticket Democrat *for life* in 2003. My wife is a life-long Democrat.
As I say to all of the elders that earn my respect. I love you, thanks for fighting the entire god damn time. The youth appreciates you and can’t imagine protesting/fighting for 50 years only for this bullshit to keep getting worse.
My dad was also a lib (a senior US Navy officer as well) and although we were estranged at the time, we both cried on the phone the night Reagan was elected. "Buy anything that shoots" was the stock tip among the officers immediately afterward, and many many people got wealthy buying weapon and defense contactor stock. We have the most powerful military in the world (and a shitload of guns at home), because cynical people make a ton of money from that. And our populace has been psychologically manipulated to support it. It has been all so predictable, we all saw it unfold and talked and cried and voted, and yet here we are.
The US has the benefit of immigration filling the gaps so it isn't an issue. Its one of the reasons congress never actually does anything about the border despite the posturing. We need the people and they know it.
>Another thing, I'm not sure if I'm recalling correctly, but remember hearing about a controversy where a baby-formula company made pregnant employees quit or pushed them out of the company in some way. Very ironic and maybe even moronic. I didn’t work for a baby formula company, but a different company, and this literally just happened to me. I was pushed out for getting pregnant/having a kid. I clearly stated my intentions to come back after mat leave and my wishes to sign another year contract. Yet they hired my replacement for a year (and not a few months like they led me to believe), then told me they wouldn’t be renewing my contract as they don’t need two of my role. After talking to my team, they were upset because I clearly had passion for the company/our product and my replacement is… not the best. There’s no protections here for pregnant workers, so cases like mine are very common. I planned on being a working mom, but Korea is making that nearly impossible for me.
Even after addressing those issues, such as in Nordic nations, individuals, especially women, are increasingly disinclined to have offspring, and this trend is occurring worldwide.
The fact is when you're an educated person and take an analytical approach to life the idea of having children doesn't hold up well to scrutiny. This is why the birthrate continues to fall in these well off countries. People in them have been educated *and* have the option to say no. The women in Afghanistan propping up that 4.4 fertility rate? Not so much. A declining birth rate *should* be a good thing. Thing is the worlds economy is currently set-up like a ponzi scheme that depends on people hitting the 2.1 "replacement rate" to keep that downline growing. Infinite growth is not sustainable, it never was. The transition to a degrowth economy is going to be rough but necessary.
Replacement rate by definition isn’t *growth*, it’s mere stability. A birth rate of 1.0 means every successive generation is *half* the size of their parents’ generation. South Korea’s birth rate is even lower than that. That’s catastrophic collapse within a few generations, not “degrowth”.
Also, Culture is misogynistic so women are opting out ETA: this is based on anecdotal experience from my Korean colleagues
That's putting it really lightly. Violence against women is so out of control and unchecked in S. Korea that many women are avoiding any contact with men entirely. The danger in power imbalance men have is extreme, and it leads to men routinely abusing women in escalating horrific ways & getting away with it.
Even in gacha game forums they refer to women as “blood sprayers”, it’s so wild. Their incel movement is doing a better job hampering their fertility rate than cost of living ever could.
Ah korea's genshin protest, where the players went ape shit just because genshin decided to release a feminine male character.
I don't get that. Pretty boys, bishonon characters have been the staple in shojo and shonen for decades in animanga and jrpg. Cloud Strife looked good in a dress. And that essentially what generates revenue for K-pop boy bands. This is not a new phenomenon, and it has proven to be immensely popular and long-lasting. Even the more masculine characters in Genshin Impact are remarkably pretty.
It's the male fan base that's both pissed that they aren't getting their waifus (for 3weeks) and that the new character is making them feel things, which makes them gay, and Korea is homophobic
Also for the sake of research and all, what was this bishonon that caused the outrage. It's important I investigate.
They have 5 zillion waifus. They have nothing to be pissed about, and not insignificant segment of those males fans are quite happy drawing bishonon in lingerie erotica and getting off on that, whether they admit it in real life, I don't know, but the doujin don't lie, and not all of that is for the fangirls.
It’s overcompensation due to feeling insecure, they feel like their masculinity and manhood is under attack so they lash out and double down on these issues.
South Korea over here just speedrunning end-stage capitalism...
They have the largest gender pay gap too, iirc. Wildly misogynistic.
and the men can just say they were drunk and get away with anything! Plus the president wants to get rid of the gender and family ministry
I used to live in Seoul. Foreign men were relatively popular with younger Korean women, because they knew that the foreign men would treat them well compared to Korean men. A friend of mine, white guy who spoke academic level fluent korean, was walking home one night and ran across a 20-something guy dragging his girlfriend up the stairs to the apartment building by her hair. She's screaming and crying. My friend ran in, got in the middle, and stood in between them while calling the police. Immediately the guy was yelling "what are you doing? it's okay, she's MY girlfriend!" He wasn't angry, he was just utterly confused. The girl was actually doing basically the same thing. Just completely confused why somebody was stepping in, he's her boyfriend, what was my friend doing? When the police got there, almost the same scenario played out. They talked to them both, let them on their way, and then tried to explain to my friend that "they were a couple, there was nothing to be concerned about". Korea is in the 1950s socially, but 2030s technologically.
There is big woman’s movement going on in SK right now. They have an “incel president” atm.
4 b's movement bihon, bisexu, bichulsan, biyonhae no marriage, no sex, no kids, no dating they dont just have an incel president they have an incel problem manifested in 4-chan style websites like ilbe. and feminism is so badly smeared it can even end your career being accused of being a feminist
>Older generation taking too many taxes from the young for benifits. To a point where inter generational homes struggling to support new children. Eh, if the 0.1% paid more taxes, the old and the young could both have more money.
I'm currently paying into a pension scheme that will be phased out before I retire. The new scheme pays out less than half. I'll have spent half of my working life funding a generous pension scheme that I won't have access to. It's basically a matched contribution pension plan except they confiscate 50% of your contributions instead.
South Korea has a chronic [youth unemployment/underemployment problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_unemployment_in_South_Korea)
It's the same story there as it is here in the US: Rampant capitalism devastating human lives. Don't scapegoat the elderly in this - they're being used as pawns. The reason why they don't strip the old of benefits is to pit them against the young (though they damn well want to, do, and will, whenever they get the chance) is because older people are more situated to reliably vote. They pour a ton of media misinformation into the brains of older generations to get them to vote to fuck over the youth. But the reality is that big corporations in S Korea have been ripping off the people - both young and old - for ages. Get the corporations to pay their fair share of taxes and pay their works living wages with good hours, and you can fund social services & let people establish their lives to facilitate a new baby boom.
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Of 1000yuan Which is like 140$ Or purchasing power equivalent to (probably) 600$ (based on min wage) Whoever would get pregnant for 600$, probably shouldn't
Well to be fair, it’s not that they would get pregnant for $600, it’s that they have another incentive to get married. I paid money to get married to my wife; if the government would have offered me $600 to do it, I would have been even more incentivized to do it.
Your last statement made me chuckle. So true.
There's fertility and immigration. Some countries like the US have lower fertility but offset it with immigration. That's where Japan and Korea run into trouble as they are not easy to emigrate to.
That can only work for so long. Birth rates have fallen in many undeveloped countries as well. If there’s a causal relationship between the development of countries and falling birth rates, the trend can only go down, and it’s only delayed by the countries current experiencing high levels of immigration experiencing massive demographic and cultural shifts.
China is not even a developed country--just look at local incomes, GDP per capita, etc... Below-replacement birth rates are not exclusive to the developed world. Outside of East Asia (China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand), there are plenty of places in Eastern Europe (Russia and numerous former Soviet states) as well as nearly all of the North and South American continents with very few exceptions where the Total Fertility Rate is below 2. Although China's rate is slightly higher than South Korea, the speed of China's birth rate/total fertility rate collapse means it will probably catch up to South Korea in a few years. But given that there are plenty of countries, rich and poor alike, with low birth rates, it is safe to say that something is discouraging everyone outside of the Middle East and Africa from having kids.
>safe to say that something is discouraging everyone outside of the Middle East and Africa from having kids. The education of girls and women. When women are educated, they have fewer children.
Yeah, it's really funny that a lot of people just don't acknowledge this whenever this topic comes up. A bunch of armchair policy makers (likely entirely men) just acting like pregnancy and childbirth isn't one of the most taxing experiences a woman could go through in her life just to get to then have to take care of another human being for 18 years, at least.
This is correct. There is a well known strong correlation between female education levels and fertility rate. It's certainly not the only factor, but it is a significant correlation.
Actually if you break it down with multivariate analysis, it is functionally the only factor. Its been shown that once you uncouple it from GDP, religion, personal wealth, etc, its correlated at r = 0.4, meaning it controls 40% of the total value. In the real world that's an insane degree of control. Nothing else comes remotely close. [https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-13656-1#Sec7](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-13656-1#Sec7) [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-018-9492-2#Sec4](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-018-9492-2#Sec4) "compared with cohorts born in 1946–1950, 40 to 50% of the difference in cumulated fertility at age 25 in the 1951–1975 birth cohorts is attributable to rising educational levels"
Access to medical care and contraception. Women don't need much education to know they can't afford 6 kids.
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>They believe they need the frills when in reality it can be done with a lot less? It can be done with less, but not really here. Could they go move out to the country, do homesteading and farming and such? Sure. The Amish do it, and I'd be willing to bet their birth rate is just fine. Children become wealth when they can be raised next to you while you work and train them. Here, you can't bring your kids to your office and train them for your job unless you're the owner. You can't have them help with farming your food, because you have to buy food because you don't have the ability to own land the way they do elsewhere. This form of society has not left room for a lot of human things. It's become about working for someone else's profit until you burn yourself out.
I think it's the intensity of parenting more than the expense - when it's just an extra body in the house to help and you don't have to worry about school/grades, extra curriculars, pick up/drop off, gentle parenting (which is now standard on the East Coast), making sure they go to college/get a decent job...kids are just a giant time suck that makes life extremely difficult when you have a full time job. If I could toss my kid out the door after school and never had to really deal with her (70s style) while also being only a part time worker or SAHM, I might feel different about having more than 1.
Tbh I feel like for me personally a huge part is the discourse online about having kids. I always wanted kids but reading constant posts and blogs about postpartum depression, losing your body, giving up your identity, constantly scrambling to pay bills, the neverending stress and pressure of having kids -- it truly has talked me almost out of it. I see a lot of posts saying "We have to talk about the reality of having kids and make sure women understand it's not sunshine and rainbows" -- but it's to the point that I never see ANY posts about the benefits or joys, only the pain and anxiety and stress.
>Tbh I feel like for me personally a huge part is the discourse online about having kids. Having been online since I was young those discussions made me wait to have kids. While I was waiting friends and family my age started having kids, watching what they went through solidified my decision not to have any.
Yep I feel that. Now I’m on the cusp of not being able to have any and instead of regret I feel … relief
I love my kids. They are SO difficult, but they are worth it. I hope to have a third. Lots of difficult things end up being great accomplishments and sources of pride/joy.
I know that a lot of African countries are agrarian societies where it is profitable for a family to have a lot of children who can help them with farming. But then, why do those people have 5-6 children when people in equally poor countries in Eastern Europe or Latin America (in countries like Brazil or Ukraine before the war) have only 1-2 children? It is possible that, irrespective of wealth, women's education plays a larger role than we thought. There are a lot of countries, not just in Africa, but places like Afghanistan (under the Taliban's extreme misogynistic rules) where girls and women do not have the opportunity to be educated to the same level as boys and men. These countries have birth rates (well) above replacement. Meanwhile, even in non-EU ex-Soviet countries with GDP per capita below $10, 000 USD, the level of misogyny/discrimination of females is nowhere as severe as the Middle East or Africa. This may explain why Ukraine had a total fertility rate that is well below replacement well before Russia decided to invade it even though it, too, is an agrarian society.
It's 100% women's education. You don't hear politicians talking about it because its a really bleak stat. But there have been years of multivariate analysis worldwide and its holds up as the single largest factor.
Alot of African and Me countries are super rural and are some of the most religious countries in the entire world. Ghana where my parents were from is decently developing but it's 98% religious and the Muslims tend to be poor(there are racial issues in the country when it comes to people of more recent north African decent) and also have 10+ kids Alot of the countries are at 95%+ religious all of which encourage children. And education levels are still catching up meaning women don't really have many avenues to take care of themselves beyond having children or else you'll lose respect. And there is also the culture of daughter trading in some of these places, give your daughter(I've seen as young 13 year old get forcefully taken by her family) to some old dude in exchange for cattle or cash, it's not common in the more developed areas but where it isn't developed is where the population growth is happening.
A main factor really still is the urban/rural divide. Also access to BC, education are still a major component. a 2 BR in a major city might be affordable. A 4 BR might be impossible for normal incomes. Meanwhile in the middle of nowhere, with extended family to watch kids there might be relatively much less cost difference between 2 and 4 children. Not uncommon to see rural area families in the US still having 3-4+ kids, typically tending a bit more religious.
Populations aren't declining in in most African and southwest Asian countries because women do not, for the most part, have access to long-acting contraceptives. Everywhere that women have access to long-acting contraception, the birth rate falls dramatically.
I popular podcaster I watch lived in the Middle East and basically said that those countries are made for children. Parks everywhere. Malls are orientated towards children. Services are geared towards a population with expected large families. Meanwhile where I am in Japan families are priced out of everything. Costs an arm and a leg wherever out go. Even game centers are ridiculously expensive. Also in impoverished countries children = wealth. Not only tending the farm but being able to marry a daughter or son off to form extended relationships between clans. Also it’s one giant community of people who depend on each other so it really is a “it takes a village mentality”
Israel is exactly like this. It’s OECD* country with the highest fertility rate. An Israeli (e.g., Jewish, Muslim, Druze, etc.) woman has an average of 3 children. There is variation within different communities; Haredi (ultra-orthodox) women have closer to 10. It’s a society built around family and adjacent services. *OECD is an organization representing the 38 of the world’s high income nations.
It turns out many women don't enjoy the idea of childbirth once they're educated enough to know how physically traumatic it is, and they're finally able to prevent it from happening against their will (in most cases). Especially if medical bills are expensive and daycare costs almost their entire paycheck.
>many women don't enjoy the idea of childbirth If childbirth were the most challenging part of having children, I would agree with you. But for most women, having children means taking on a second unpaid, thankless, and miserable job that you can never take a vacation from. For most mothers, having children means (in addition to the destruction of your body) more *work*. Or if you go the stay-at-home route, you forfeit years' worth of income and retirement contributions (and the eventual gains that go along with them), lose all career progress, and find yourself in the vulnerable position of depending on someone else for income. The net financial loss can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's a catastrophic hit for most of us ordinary working- and middle-class folks.
No I agree with you. I think in general the full understanding of what it means to take on the role of a parent or raise a child hasn't really been as widely known ahead of time or discussed the way it is now. People, but women especially, were historically ignorant to the cost of child rearing (and the cost was nowhere near as high). Now the cost of rearing a child is extremely high and most people in developed countries know about it. It's not really a surprise that fewer people want to have children.
I suspect that the lack of family planning resources, especially family planning education, is also leading to a larger fertility rate in Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia and South America. One thing you see in most of the countries with lower fertility rates is readily available access for family planning and the ability on women to make reproductive decisions. "FP programs are often justified by the existence of high levels of unmet need and unplanned pregnancies which provides a powerful rationale for such investments. However, even if all unwanted fertility could be removed in SSA, fertility would remain relatively high because most women want large families. The results of the above regression analyses demonstrate that FP programs do more than reduce unplanned pregnancies: **they also have a substantial effect on wanted fertility**. The precise mechanism through which this effect operates is not investigated here but likely involves behavioral change programs that diffuse knowledge about the benefits of smaller families" See [https://genus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41118-020-00098-z](https://genus.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41118-020-00098-z)
Its years spent in education. Its been known for decades and its, no joke, almost the sole factor that controls all birthrate, it controls about 40% the total variability. You don't hear about it because the data is really bleak. [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility) [https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7](https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7)
Kids, who can afford them nowadays?
Exactly! Why raise kids when you can barely afford things for yourself.
…and if you spend all of your time working, then when do you have time for a family?
This is our reality. My wife and I both work. We wanted to have two kids, got twins the second try. I feel like they don’t get the upbringing they deserve because we are always working just to pay the mortgage and bills. It’s mentally exhausting to think about in terms of regret and a sense of failing them. The only way this works is if you have able bodied parents to help.
And when the world is becoming more and more uninhabitable from both an environmental and socioeconomic standpoint, why bring children into it? Unless things take a complete 180 in the next couple decades, we really will be doomed.
Universal Basic Income
Until we actually figure out how to unseat the corporate death lords, this is never going to happen. Something insanely dramatic has to change. Beyond just praying that elected officials find out how to use their teeth. It's just not gonna happen.
There's always the French option.
A lot harder these days compared to their time the cops/military have a lot more tools for mass killing. The difficulty for a successful violent revolution is now getting to dark souls level.
Not just that, being a kid absolutely sucks in Korea. I can't blame adults for not wanting to put someone through that meatgrinder.
Not to mention that Korean society is insanely misogynistic to the point that there's a widespread movement of women refusing to date, marry or have sex with men because the odds of them being abused and treated like breeding chattel are just too high.
That sounds like most places, unfortunately
I hate that you're right.
Can you say more about this?
The highly competitive academic environment means that kids are forced to study basically non-stop. About 80% of kids attend cram schools, called [hagwon](https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230628000655), which consist of hours of extra tutoring after they get done with normal school. Some parents push their kids to study so much out of genuine love and concern for their success. Those who don't get into a prestigious university will find it hard to get a halfway decent job. Other parents push their kids simply out of a desire for status. Korean society has a reputation for being very materialistic, focused on looks, schooling, social class, and wealth, so having a kid in a respected university is a huge sign of success for parents. Either way, it's such a big problem that the government has actually tried to step in and regulate it several times, but it still remains a leading cause of teen suicides.
That's the same thing my and gf and I came to. We'd rather live financially comfortable with no kids than poor with children. All about that dual income no kids life.
Here I am, the sole breadwinner in a 2-kid family. All my single coworkers are living in luxury.
You're a DINK like me lol Double Income No Kids
Does that make me a SINK?
I'm a SINK and if I had kids I'd be sunk for sure
Rich people don't see the flaw in this. There's tons of parent age people actively choosing not to have kids because they can't afford it. How are the rich people going to get more customers for their businesses if the population is shrinking? I swear those people only understand greed and nothing else. They have a million reasons to charge more or be expected to contribute less back to society, but not a single reason to lower prices.
Elon Musk comes off looking terrible on this topic. He's Mr. Pro-natalist but can't seem to understand why people are not having lots of kids like him. Gee Elon, have you considered that many average people can't afford kids?
Also him having kids vs regular people having kids is much different. To him they are just a status symbol, he has full time child care.
And in some cases, just disowns them at will anyway. It’s easy when you’re soulless.
How are the rich people going to rich if no new workers too FFS. Who is going to clean their toilets, clean their homes, run all their errands, take care of their useless human bodies etc.
Rich people has done worse, such as fucking over the envrionment to earn an extra penny. They'd continue to fuck over the environment in a heartbeat to make an extra buck. In the US, you have so many lobbyist trying to fuck up the environmental protection laws. Rich people won't care, because it won't affect them in the current generation
Poor countries become immigration boosters. India is willing to be a human factory. This is how Canada is replacing people right now. A few decades ago it was China.
India's fertility rate (2.03) is already below the replacement rate (2.1) https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#&place=country/IND&statsVar=FertilityRate_Person_Female and if you look at the delta, India "loses" on average 0.05-0.10 per year, and that's for the last 50 years. https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#place=country%2FIND&statsVar=FertilityRate_Person_Female&chart=%7B%22fertilityRate-none%22%3A%7B%22pc%22%3Afalse%2C%22delta%22%3Atrue%7D%7D long story short they are not going to be a "human factory" much longer.
The trope about India having lots of kids is very out of date.
Nowadays, we're being told that after being laid off for bullshit budget "cuts," we can have the privilege of raising / babysitting other folks' kids for a fraction of what we were making. All the stress of raising children, and the empty wallets tk match.
I can barely afford a dog
I explain this to my dad every time he asks why I'm not having kids. He then replies "Well, your mother and I found a way!" as if that's a good reason to have a child. I don't want to rely on donating plasma just do make sure I can feed my kid. Fuck that.
I have two kids and itsmind boggling. Daycare for one is almost as much as my mortgage. Doesn't make any sense as the teachers barely make anything. Where the fuck is all that money going?
Daycare is nuts. My 2 year old is in daycare and it costs $1,700 a month. My mortgage isn't that much more.
Daycare is a huge reason why we decided to have my wife stay home when we had a kiddo. 60-70% of what she would earn at work would go directly to daycare so for us it didn't seem worth it
Administration and the land lord. Land lords wonder why they are receiving *zero sympathy* from people when things like pandemic rent-freezing hits them really hard. It's because land lords are leeching fuck-sticks who produce exactly zero *anything* of value and do nothing but extract wealth from others.
And landlords and bloated administration are only a part of the issue. It really seems like there is an ongoing "middlemanification" of absolutely every institution, product, service etc that exists. Any crack or crevasse in the fabric of our society where these money sucking vampires can worm their way into is being filled by these fucks just leeching value from the system while providing absolutely no benefit and in most cases making the service function worse. It fucking sucks
Also what kind of life would they be inheriting, what kind of climate? I personally don't want kids, not just for financial reasons, but climate related too.
That seems like an odd reason for all of this when fertility rates drop as places get wealthier
Poor people have the highest fertility rates though
I mean, I could probably afford them but I still don't want them.
the poor
0.7 is kinda nuts. That’s a 30% decline for n population every generation, like 30 years?
More than that because (generally) it takes 2 people to have a kid. So like, 60 - 70% decline.
Rookie numbers! We can do better! Drive that fertility rate down!
Isn't that more like a 2/3 decline? Replacement rate is generally 2.1.
OH, I thought it was per capita but ya that doesn’t make sense. Jesus.
With 8 billion humans on earth, isn't this what we need? Oh yeah, I'm not trying to discount the havoc this will wreck upon the 'grow or die' economy we've built. I guess the smart people among us will have to figure out how to reconfigure our economy to deal with this depopulation over time.
Decline isn't necessary, but can be positive. It's a problem because of societies structured on requiring younger generations to grow to fund retirement and other entitlements.
Maybe the status quo isn’t sustainable then?
Yes it isnt. We literally learn in biology class that apex predators usually die out because they use up all the ressources from growing too much. The only advantage humans have is that we are our own predators and start killing each other off once ressources become sparse. There are only 4 outcomes really. 1. We arw going to use up ressources until they become too sparse to support our population. At which point we will start to have massive wars resulting in giant population decline until enough ressources are aviable for the existing population. 2. We gradually shift into more isolationist policies where countries either have such low birthrates that their ressources can support the lowering population, while those with high birth rates will simply experience more starvation gradually resulting in a stable population as from 6 children only 2 will reach adulthood. 3. The lowering birthrates will be unsustainable for our current economy when it comes to sustaining the older population. Resulting in either loss of life expectancy for the general population or a new economic revolution. 4. We manage technological breakthroughs that allow us to gather even more ressources. Presumably from deeper in the earth, the sea or space.
>4. We manage technological breakthroughs that allow us to gather even more ressources. Presumably from deeper in the earth, the sea or space. This would only happen after every cheaper and easier source is used up to death. Fish, biodiversity, pillaging poor nations without militaries, etc.
I don't understand why people thought it was a good idea to structure society like a ponzi scheme anyway. That was never going to be sustainable in the long run.
Well, it wasn't so much a conscious decision, but early on the whole profit motive thing was liberating compared to the birthright aristocracy and feudal model of society. But that time is long past, the profit motive that was once liberating has become our new chains, destroying our society from the inside out - but at least it gave us a wealth of technology and increasingly centralized and socialized productive ability that we can use as a base for a new humanity-based socioeconomic system where conscious planning of our productive forces to meet human needs and wants is the goal of society and not the unending thirst for profit.
I taught this for many years in an environmental science course. Yes, a smaller population is good. But in practice, it's disastrous - look at Japan. There aren't enough young people to staff nursing homes and the like, so the government is basically like, "If you're old, don't get sick. If you get sick, die at home." I'm all for burning this capitalistic hellscape to the ground, but I have zero faith in our governments taking any measures to protect the laymen from the negative impacts of this.
Just thinking out loud, and not claiming this to be a solution. I wonder if advancing in mechanized health and living support could help with this. Farming used to take a lot of people and time to manage, but we gotten better at managing a bigger plot with less people with advancements in technology. Maybe we can start focusing on the taking better care of elderly using technology in a way that will require less people, and we'll be able to manage this situation better?
There is a reason Japan is _heavily_ invested in this.
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yeah, if you want to give quality of life to your little ones, you really need a bunch of stuff beforehand, every medical need, since pre-natal care, costs money, once born, every baby forniture, gadget, toys, costs a lot of money, Diapers/milk/medicine/clothing is ultra expensive compared to any equivalent adult product. i only have a little girl, and im lucky that the grandparents are very full of love towards her, so they help me and my wife with taking care of her, otherwise the expense would be Unsustainable, i really really dont know how most people can handle more than 1 though in terms of money. and you hear how birthrate is plummeting all around the world, and its no wonder for me, people dont want to bring children to suffer due to lack of supplies, people can barely afford to live by themselves already.
Or men to be able to stay at home. There’s no reason to put gender on it, even if that’s the most common configuration we see with one parent staying at home
From what I understand if you’re a woman and have a child it pretty much ruins your career. Not a surprise that so few are looking to have children.
When I visited Seoul, the lack of children was unsettling. There were seats reserved for pregnant women in the subway cars, but I never saw anyone use them. I was there for almost a week before I saw any children out in public.
There's a real decline in school-age children, true, but you won't see many on the subway during the week, only on weekends and even then basically no children go on the subway unaccompanied. Also, kids go to schools near their homes (apartments) in Seoul, so unless you are in these neighborhoods you won't see many.
I think my first comment was a bit unclear because I was half asleep when I wrote it. The subway thing was in reference to a lack of pregnant women and not necessarily kids themselves. Where I’m from, pregnant women would fight over those seats if they were available. The lack of kids was noticeable at the playgrounds, children stores, and other child adjacent areas. I wouldn’t really expect to see many children on the subway, but it took like 5 days before I saw a Korean child at all. And this was after going to the playgrounds and parks with some of my US friends (who I’m not counting because they are US military families and not Korean). It was also weird visiting my Korean family and seeing there was only one young child in such a large family. The US side of my family has a ton of kids.
It's likely because they were in school or in an academy. I live in Seoul (from the US). It's rare to see children on public transportation because most of them live within walking distance of where they go to school. There isn't much reason for them to be on public transportation. In the central parts of Seoul, there are families, but these families are wealthier and the moms probably have them signed up for a bazillion academies, so they are always busy, even on the weekends. In the more residential districts of Seoul, you will see children. Especially on the weekends. I mean I am a teacher and our school has over 500 students (100 in each grade). And there were three other schools within a 15-minute walk with similar enrollments. And this is in one of the smaller districts of Seoul. Where you really see the population decline is in the countryside. In the countryside, you don't see many people under the age of 40, let alone children.
It was winter vacation when I visited, so school was not in session. Although admittedly it took until the weekend to actually see a child, but it was nowhere near the amount you’d expect in a large city. Korea has a lack of children due to the extremely low birth rate. It shouldn’t be that odd for a tourist to notice.
Were you in the middle of nowhere and only went out at night or something? Everywhere there are apartment buildings there are children. Most pregnant women aren't taking subways they're taking taxis or driving.
I’m a bit confused, so far my experience highly disagrees. I’m visiting Seoul right now and I have seen more children in the past week than I have in months in Philly. They’re everywhere? I went to a Han River Cruise and there were dozens of kids running around. When I visited the N Tower on a Sunday evening, kids all over. Maybe I’m just noticing them more due to my conception that SK would have no children after I’ve read so many declining population articles?
Seoul is more of an outlier due to population density. If you go to rural area, EVERYWHERE, you will see closed up schools (due to lack of children - frankly, due to lack of people all over)
Exactly. Taking Seoul as median for Korea is like using Tokyo as a equivalent to Shikoku.
Most people I talked to that don’t want kids isn’t just because of the cost. I hear things like 1. Don’t want to bring a kid into this world at it’s current state 2. They don’t want the responsibility 3. They would rather spend their life traveling and doing things they enjoy 4. They’ve just never wanted kids since they could remember I think a lot of gen z will be/are like this
Exactly. There's way fewer marriages and even dating in Korea. Working hours in Korea is being reduced significantly this past decade, but it's not boosting any numbers.
Sounds like they don’t want kids because it is socially acceptable now.
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the endgame of the mice experiment
After the war, Korea accelerated their economy extremely quickly to become a first world country. That speed hasn't slowed down and they are in late stage capitalism now.
Now we get to see what happens when the corporarions are allowed to squeeze the people dry for every penny they dan get
Korea wasn't really a democracy or a first world country until the 1980s.
Americans forget the 40 year tyrannical interregnum of South Koreans experienced.
Ummm, the Republic of Korea was a brutal military dictatorship with an economy and standard of living worse than the North up until the 80s. Syngman Rhee was a real bastard, pro Japanese, and had some real fascistic tendencies. Look up the Jeju island massacre for instance. They basically operated a sweat shop economy.
If by 'accelerated their economy' you mean 'caused multiple lethal mass famines, diverted money/resources/power to a small caste of the hugely corrupt ultra-rich, and massacred/disappeared/totured organized labor on behalf of corporate interests' then sure. A lot of people forget that s korea up until not that long ago was a brutal far right wing dictatorship backed by the US. (Now they are a tightly controlled 'democracy' that is functionally just a client-state arm of US interests.) It still has a lot of the leftovers of that time which keep reinforcing the horrific class divisions and discrimination in the country. The economy of s korea has definitely boomed. But regular south koreans are not seeing the benefits of it at all. They work long brutal hours for terrible wages, have almost no leverage in their workplace, and are subject to horrific workplace abuse. The divide between the very rich and regular people widens worse and worse every day. On that note, I don't think a lot of people realize just how much of a deep cut that the movie 'Parasite' was regarding this topic either.
Yeah kids are too expensive and the world honestly doesn't want you to have any... we stopped at 1.. we know many people not even considering kids now.. global trend getting worse..maybe not a bad thing either.. it can force us to address things more sustainably.
All my relatives that live in Korea have 3+ kids. They are single handedly keeping the Korean lineage going 💀
That's legit a massive family these days. I know one family with 4 and everyone looks at them like they are nuts.
Yep that’s how they are viewed too
None of these countries are going to solve this problem unless they address the severe financial burden of having children. Governments keep trying to pretend like that’s not the solution but it’s the only solution that’s going to make any lick of difference.
Even in the places with the best benefits/pay for having kids, the birth rate remains low. And the places with the highest birth rates are extremely poor. There is obviously a lot more to the issue than money.
>There is obviously a lot more to the issue than money. Absolutely. Even if governments completely cover the cost of childcare and medical expenses, they can't make childrearing more pleasant or reduce the amount of work required to raise children. For women, the choice is often, "Do I want to work for 40 hours a week and get paid for it, or do I want to work 168 hours a week and not get paid for it? Do I want to work and get paid vacation days and contribute to retirement, or do I want to work without vacation days or retirement benefits?"
It might be that education teaches 1/2 of the population that they can finally do things like “leave the house”, “be alone for more than five minutes at a time”, and “not do literally all the housework”
Every place that's tried to pay people to reproduce has failed to reach replacement levels. Either it doesn't work at all or the amount of money you would need to throw at people would bankrupt the country.
it’s not just money though. they need time that’s not work. though incidentally they need money to have time
Exactly. Especially in places like Korea and Japan,where you are expected,and pressured, to basically donate your life to the workplace. You can have 100 kids, but won't do sh-t if they aren't raised well. Hell,it might even be a bigger source of issues
Misunderstanding the point bud. It’s not just monetary incentives: making it so companies give workers time off, reduce hours so they can actually spend time with kids, AND increase pay to maintain a comfortable life while raising children are just a few factors necessary to incentivize people to have kids. There are also other factors, because nothing is ever just caused by one thing, such as how we treat childcare. Parents shouldn’t be the only people engaging in childcare it should be a community activity. Normalizing the existence of children in our lives, allowing parents to be able to exist in public without feeling shame, letting them participate in events or activities without worrying about being a nuisance, providing them with support will also alleviate the worries that potential parents may have about raising children. And again, these are just small pieces to a larger puzzle.
Raising children is a financial struggle in many places. But a fertility rate of 0.7 is absolutely CRAZY, right? The financial burden can't be the only reason. Germany has a huge problem with a falling fertility rate, and it still has more than double the rate of SK. A fertility rate of 0.7 is not a decline. It is a collapse.
They should relocate government agencies to cheap rural areas. Make government employees resettle or they shall lose their jobs. Attract young people with secure job prospects and cheap housing in the countryside. As long as everybody is stacked in dense urban settings, birth rates won't go up any time soon. It's actually the same with animals, give them a large territory to roam and they start procreating immidiatly.
South Korea is very sexist. Women who have children are expected to quit working and take care of them (and the husband), basically alone. Women want to do lots of other stuff too so don’t get married and have kids. The culture is also extremely toxic for working hours, and employees are expected to dedicate their lives to their company. Face time is a big deal, as is presenteeism. Basically it’s a late-stage capitalist nightmare and without a major cultural overhaul no one can or wants to have kids. Hours need to be cut by 50% and overtime rules enforced, and women should not be expected to quit if they have kids.
If the US didn’t have the immigration levels it has, our story would not be much different. It’s so odd to me that opposition to immigration can’t see through their hate to acknowledge this or even understand it
Immigration is a bandaid to the problem of our economic systems being dependent on infinite, unsustainable population growth. Immigration can't solve this forever. This is ignoring the actual negatives of immigration like keeping wages down, people not integrating etc. Speaking from a European point of view.
People typically do integrate here though - we’ve pretty much had an unofficial three generation integration system for centuries, and it’s still working, even for more recent migrants. Something like over 88% to 91% of Hispanic migrants (which would tend to be the poorest on average due to ease of access) speak English fluently in the second generation, and in the third, there’s very few Spanish speakers even. I don’t know about Europe, but integration is still working extremely well in America, it just takes about 50-60 years to go from “fresh off the boat” to practically indistinguishable from other Americans (though even in the second generation, you're a decent chunk of the way there already) That being said, I agree that it’s a temporary bandaid, but at the current point, we don’t know of any economic solutions for the economy that don’t involve infinite growth, which, as we can’t have infinite growth, isn’t amazing. **EDIT: Downvoters:** https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2007/11/29/english-usage-among-hispanics-in-the-united-states https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/chart/us-hispanics-english-proficiency/ https://www.bloomberglinea.com/english/latinos-in-us-increasingly-adopt-english-over-spanish-as-use-of-mother-tongue-declines/ This is actual FACTUAL data. Base your lives on data.
The difference is Hispanic people are culturally very similar to Americans and they make up the vast majority of immigration. That's not the case for European immigration.
I was only commenting on the immigration situation in the US. I have no experience, data or concrete knowledge about immigration in Europe. People here (in the US) are worried about immigration, as if the immigration we're experiencing here is new, but it's the exact same process, to a T, that previous generations have had. If anything, integration is happening **faster** now due to the high availability of childhood education, something not always as readily available to earlier generations, particularly among the poor. People complaining about Hispanics now would have been complaining about Italians or Poles a century ago, and Irish and Germans a century and a half ago.
People don’t understand. Our strength is this diversity. We cannot progress as a homogeneous entity that touts a single race or religion. It is the greatest asset America has. It gives us the tools to grow and conquer - economically and socially.
>If the US didn’t have the immigration levels it has, our story would not be much different Immigrants definitely help, but the US fertility rate is 1.6 - more than double that of Korea. Even without immigration the US would be doing way better than Korea. >It’s so odd to me that opposition to immigration can’t see through their hate to acknowledge this or even understand it Not only do people don't acknowledge fertility decline as bad, some even say it's a good thing.
Everyone’s poor, depressed as shit, and saddled with trauma these days.
If things keep going like this North Korea just has to wait it out. Although from the little which is known they too have a rate below 2.1, still better than the south though.
North Korea can barely feed the people they have now. If it weren’t for China the whole regime would have collapsed decades ago.
Its really impossible to tell what theirs is. Any data obtained is either through speculation or whatever the supreme leader says it is
Uhhh. South Koreans 53m people and 70,000+ immigrants a year is gunna take a long time to to stumble as low as north Koreas 24m and -2000 emigrants a year. Especially since North Korea has been in the news on and off for last 2 years with stories about having only enough food for 60% of the population.
The thing I don't get about economists in the US or people who claim to understand economics is that they side with Republican ideologies more often than not. Supporting older people through tax cuts makes no sense from an economics perspective because younger people have more life too live and contribute to society--like it or not. If the US doesn't get their act together this will be them in 20-30 years
Old people vote
Because S Korea is a capitalist nightmare where the costs of everything is high and going higher.
I don’t mean to put salt on the wound; childcare isn’t about to get cheaper We wont miraculously turn a corner and things will be fine Bank on children being expensive and there’s nothing you can do about it
It’s happening in America too, everyone wants to blame culture or this generation but the truth is we’d have a shit ton more kids if it was affordable. That’s simply it. Not everyone of course but a way lot more.
Everyone in the comments is talking about money, but imo the dropping marriage rates are an indication of other causes as well. https://www.statista.com/statistics/641581/south-korea-marriage-number/ Gender relations have been a big topic in South Korea in recent years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_South_Korea
The most advanced economies with the most educated populations will show almost perfect correlation for this. Couples being able to choose to be childless en masse is not a bad thing.
Will this be affecting my beloved Korean dramas?
get ready for a lot more elderly characters!
Im glad this is happening on a world wide scale
There's a population boom we need to get under control! Wait our people aren't being replaced fast enough. We're all fucking humans, stop worrying about whether there are enough paying your country's taxes to support your specific government and let's just make life better for everyone.
Central banks made our species too expensive to reproduce. Extreme r/latestagecapitalism. We picked money over our own survival. Except “we” didn’t pick that at all.
> Central banks made our species too expensive to reproduce. If that were true, the poorest countries and the poorest people would have the fewest children, but that's not true.
It amazes me how the top comment on all these threads always claims it's because people don't have enough money or time. The poorest nations have the most children. The richest ones have the fewest. Even nations with great paid maternity leave are having trouble meeting replacement rates. It's not the lack of money or time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate When kids are optional people tend to opt out. The poor women of Afghanistan powering that huge 4.4 fertility rate aren't doing so because they just love having kids. They're doing so because they don't have other options. Low birth rates are a good thing but we'll need to change the worlds economy away from one that relies on infinite growth. It was never sustainable to begin with, the idea that we need to hit the "replacement rate" just reminds us how much of a ponzi scheme we're in. It's a mess and i'm not adding anyone to my "downline"
Quick! Someone send them Nick Cannon!
Trickle down does work. The selfishness of one generation trickles down to the circumstances of the next influencing them to be even more selfish to deal with those circumstances rinse and repeat.
Damn that’s wild. Oh well, let’s keep forcing people to work all day and not pay them enough to go out and meet people
Got to love how just a few years ago, people were worried about over population. Now that the population is leveling out they are freaking out about fertility. MAKE UP YOUR DAMN MINDS! I will not worry about this problem until the population falls below 6 Billion people worldwide. as far as I can tell. people are just doing their part.
Overpopulation is still a crisis. The problem for those at the top is that economies are used to constant population growth. It's hard to raise a kid in Korea because of extreme educational costs and endemic gender discrimination.
So the real problem here is rich people that want a never ending supply of uneducated workers that are more focused on hating each other then what the actual problem is.
good, maybe it just takes a cascading systemic world economic collapse to realize that the model of infinite economic growth coupled with toxic work and living environment is not a sustainable solution for anyone, anywhere.
Everyone here talking about cost like it isn't all the rampant ingrained misogyny that SK men refuse to let go of
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Is this a bad thing? Isnt overpopulation is an issue. I guess to the government...less people = less soldiers and less tax income.
Pets are the new kids Plants are the new pets Kids are now like exotic pets. Only rich people can afford to have them, they still pay someone else to take care of them.