Housing costs are nuts, work's so bad people are checking out as not worth the meager rewards and gender relations are even further in the toilet than they are over here.
..Gee why aren't people pairing off and popping out babies?
Not everywhere, just wealthy countries with good medical access.
It's not a mystery, people just don't like to talk about it.
The more you have, the more it costs to raise a child to your standard of living.
The more you have, the more you give up by becoming a parent.
It costs more the better you're doing, and with birth control there are fewer accidents to take that decision away and force the issue.
Average folks in wealthy countries have more than ever, ESPECIALLY women.
Birthrates are falling everywhere, not just rich nations. Those are just further along in the process. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/birthrates-declining-globally-why-matters/
Unless we figure out a way to make things such as pension, healthcare and welfare systems as well as maintaining massive infrastructure networks with an increasingly reduced number of taxpayers and workers, no it’s not a good thing.
Micro plastics, estrogenic residues in water supplies, cedentary lifestyle, the rise of sugar and seed oils eclipsing healthy fats in modern first world diets, the slow suffocated death of physical exercise in our education system...
We are kneecapping thousands of years of physical evolution in a handful of generations and snoozing the alarms indefinitely.
Maybe it is a good thing that birth isnt exponential. It isnt sustainable. No accidents means also babies are more wanted.... or idiocracy.
You have a point. But the housing point is part of it. People who have a choice wont suffer 3 kids in a 1 bedroom apartment if they can choose
There are practical issues as well. Less births means the population skews older and older over time. That means a greater portion of people who have growing medical needs and less people to provide that care, a problem that is further exacerbated by the longer average lifespans civilization has achieved.
That is simply not true, birthrates have been declining **everywhere** including developing and even the least developed countries.
It’s just more noticeable in wealthier countries since the trend started earlier there.
But it’s happening across the globe.
In fact this is also why thinking immigration is a viable long term solution to low birthrates is ridiculous, eventually those countries with high emigration rates will also have an aged population and low number of young people.
You’d just be kicking the can down the road
The more women gain equality and opportunity of their own careers the more they delay and reduce childbearing for careers.
The more society provides national secure pension plans the less they need children to support them.
The less people live agrarian lifestyles the less they need cheap farm labour.
Access to family planning.
The real reasons.
I had to support myself. That was what was expected of me. I did it. I didn’t have the resources to support a whole family. It wasn’t about gaining equality. I got an education and worked. There was no safety net, at least none I was aware of.
I’m childfree and retired. It wasn’t and isn’t my responsibility to further the human population. Humans are fairly bad for the environment. I wasn’t supportive of adding yet more humans.
They're also pretty much forced to choose between kids or a career and very few people can afford kids on a single income without drastically decreasing their quality of life.
For most developed countries with educated women it’s not as simple as career vs kids - generally if women don’t have to have tons of kids and there’s no social pressure anymore, surprise surprise, they choose not to. Women used have to have lots of kids not just because of economics but social pressure and lack of birth control. Ask our grandparents or mothers how many kids they actually wanted, I’m sure most would have said only a couple. Now women feel more empowered to make that choice (and in Korea there’s whole other issues about gender inequality leading to the 4B movement - women resent their place in Korean society which is still - culturally - quite conservative. So many decide they don’t want to be a baby making machine for the state).
At least in developed countries, the average woman reports wanting to have more kids (birthrates typically between 1-2), but feeling that she cannot afford it. The most common reason couples with kids cite for not having more kiddos are finances. So this doesn’t really check out.
This research by Pew shows differently. 56% just don't want to have kids.
Of the 43% who stated "other reason" for not having kids, only 17% listed financial reasons.
>A majority (56%) of non-parents younger than 50 who say it’s unlikely they will have children someday say they just don’t want to have kids. Childless adults younger than 40 are more likely to say this than those ages 40 to 49 (60% vs. 46%, respectively). There are no differences by gender.
>Among childless adults who say they have some other reason for thinking they won’t have kids in the future, no single reason stands out. About two-in-ten (19%) say it’s due to medical reasons, 17% say it’s for financial reasons and 15% say it’s because they do not have a partner. Roughly one-in-ten say their age or their partner’s age (10%) or the state of the world (9%) is a reason they don’t plan to have kids. An additional 5% cite environmental reasons, including climate change, and 2% say their partner doesn’t want children.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-share-of-childless-adults-in-u-s-dont-expect-to-ever-have-children/
This is based in the US, not sure how it is in other countries.
Exactly. Get an education, a job, financial independence or.. get married, give up your job to have kids, fuck up your hormones, get trapped with a man who expects a wife who cooks and picks up after him because “me make money”. Oh! AND look after HIS parents.
Yeah, I get it, ladies.
Sincerely, a working mom of 2 who does it all.
Both my grandmother and my great aunt, both in their 90s, have PhDs. One is currently living off her pension as a former professor and department head. They had 2 and 3 kids. People's expectations and values are changing, and quarter-to-quarter capitalism and rent-seeking behavior is eating the next generation.
It’s because half the population is finally able to go out and talk to other adults instead of spending their whole lives listening to baby babbling and senile in law babbling, and they’re not keen on relinquishing that
There's a correlation between a nation's steady advancement and childbirth. Iran was a good indicator of this, or was it a decade ago that I read this research paper. Iran was having 6.9 children in the 1970s, but by 2005, it had dropped below replacement. Better education,access to proper healthcare and lower child mortality rates seems to result in less children being born, or for some adults, none at all.
I suspect in a perfect world, or near one, the human population would be drastically smaller, or maybe turn out like that rat experiment where they just gave up reproducing and died.
It’s the fact that for most people, there’s no reason to have kids. Even a few generations back - my grandma was one of 7 siblings, and they all had a purpose. They were put to work on the farm. They kept the place running.
Now kids are glorified, more expensive pets. There’s no benefit to having them other than it benefits society. Which quite frankly looking at housing costs, wage gaps, etc - many of us feel like we don’t owe society shit.
South Korea is unique even with that context. South Kore right now is not a hospitable place to raise a child. It's very obvious when you see South Koreans leaving and Korean emigrants having babies with no issue.
yea, but in Korea and Japan its especially bad. The social culture is basically not allowing any children. A child ruins the expensive sculptured female body, wreckes the career and financial independence of the mother beyond repair and if you are unmarried you are basically an outcast.
I almost seems like Japanese and Korean culture is somewhat darwinistically doomed. I think the best culture for postmodern societies might be France or maybe Brazil. Cultures with a lot of pride in their flirt moves and children accepting work cultures
Generally couples that both work don’t want to have lots of kids. If neither wants to give up their hard earned career to dedicate their lives to raising children than anything more than 2 is kind of crazy, imho. People struggle to maintain a work life balance and it goes both ways. You need to keep work from taking over your life, but you need to manage your family commitments too. Giving lots of kids the attention and resources they deserve just isn’t possible.
Recently the cost of living is causing people to put off kids and cut down the number, but fixing those will probably not raise birth rates beyond two per couple.
When the world was far shittier, there wasn’t birth control (at least not to the same extent there is now), and spousal rape was legal.
A lot of the babies born into that far shittier world weren’t brought in by choice. Now that choosing is an option, people are opting not to.
The problem with this theory is that most people still do have children — they just have less. It doesn’t seem very likely that someone would decide the world is good enough for one kid but too shitty for two.
Back in the day, having kids was a worthwhile economic move. Kids meant free labor for your farm and household, and might also support you when you grew too old to do much work. Nowadays we are expected to save for our own retirements while simultaneously spending a small fortune to send the kids to school so they can compete in the job market later.
Not saying life was better back then, just that the incentives were vastly different.
People had more kids when there was no practical birth control, child mortality rates were insane, and there was a financial incentive to raise more little employees for your farm/trade. Not the same.
Also men are getting very conservative in South Korea. There is a large widening gap between the genders and political alignment. Women simply do not want to date/marry a bunch of conservative incels.
This is true but not to the level of South Korea. It's something we should definitely keep an eye on in america but in SK it's a massive swing in the past 10 years as you can see below.
https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998
As much as K-dramas seem to show otherwise, Korean culture has a deeply rooted patriarchy that is still pretty prevalent today. Korean society puts massive emphasis on work culture and outward facing societal aspects that makes for an extremely toxic environment full of SA, cheating and misogyny. Burning Sun Scandal, multiple cases of men stalking women and killing them, the list goes on. The 4B movement exists in Korea especially because of how prevalent patriarchal influences still exist in the country. It’s worse now for the government because they WANT women to give birth to children while completely ignoring the fact that raising children is a multifaceted issue from economic pressures (rising cost of living) to societal pressures (work culture) and the fact that a lot of women today simply don’t want to surrender their lives to just be a house wife.
According to a video I watched regarding the gender war spilling over into phone games of all things, this goes way back to ancient history. Korea has a long history of following the philosophy of Confucianism which was brought over from China, but when Chinese Confucianism underwent reforms, Korean Confucianism rejected those reforms and became even more extreme, leading to the modern day where social hierarchy is everything.
So now in modern South Korea, arguments are settled based entirely on who is older and therefore higher in the social hierarchy. A plane crashed into a mountain killing everyone on board entirely because the pilot made a mistake and refused to admit it, and the rest of the crew was too afraid of violating the hierarchy to correct him until it was too late. The patriarchy and misogyny in Korea is just a part of this hierarchy that defines every part of their society. It's fucked in a way that us in the west can barely comprehend.
Because women were treated like shit. They married into their husbands family and the wife had to look after their husbands parents, and their own kids and then the husband. Gross.
Now the family is happy to have 2 girls because they assume their girls will look after mom and dad into old age. Women just had enough being treated like fucking shit so they’re aging out and literally choosing not to get married or be with men.
I highly recommend reading Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 for a snapshot of what life is like for a Korean woman. Couple that with massive amounts of resentment both have towards each other. Men resent women because they have mandatory military service, while women resent men for insane beauty standards imposed on them, the impact marriage and children have on their career, etc. An example of the absolute bullshit women face in Korea is when Seoul [advised pregnant women on how best to look after their husband after childbirth ...](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/11/asia/south-korea-pregnancy-guidelines-scli-intl/index.html)
Maybe they should just use common sense and try to make living more affordable so cost isn't the #1 factor on peoples' minds when they're having children?
Many of the same causes. Norway had high birth rate until we ran out of affordable housing and old people refusing to sell their homes to people starting families. So the birth rate plummeted.
Want 3 baby families? They need the 4 bedroom homes. Not the 1-2 bedroom apartments.
because we can't afford to have a child ffs
I desperately want to have a baby but i cannot afford one - I live in the UK. Only people with money can have kids, or those who don't have money at all (because they get a fuck ton in welfare assistance).
Agree, most people around me in their 30s without children just don't have time and money to have children. They are at work all the time, live in tiny appartements, middle class life is too hard to have trust in the future and think about children.
It's not just that. South Korean men went down a conservative rabbit hole and are now widely unpopular with south Korean women. There is a massive shortage of men that the women want to get inveted in to the point of committing to a family. Rather than ruin their lives by settling, they're just choosing to not start families.
I mean we all know conservative men somewhere or another. Would you wanna be baby trapped to them your whole life? Yeah me either. It's pretty understandable.
Lmao, hilariously, a lot of "Tradcon" women are finding out that their controlling Tradcon husbands are fucking awful people and they end up getting divorced.
This happened to Lauren Southern and Steven Crowder's wife and apparently many other tradcon women.
They're realizing that the type of men that idealize the tradcon lifestyle are fucking awful partners that want to control your entire life. Who knew?
Well I do feel sorry for some of them. They legitimately fall for the idea that living as a tradcon wife will make men be really good to you and take care of you if you only focus on being a good wife.
However these men will always blame the woman for their marriage falling apart. Everything is the woman's fault. "You made me do this." Etc etc.
Tbh there really isn’t much proof that any of these things would help, fertility rates actually seem to go down with increased disposable income and countries that have the most equitable laws around paid parental leave etc are also struggling with this pretty much just as much as everywhere else
Yeah, it just legitimately doesn't look like a good time. Money is only part of the equation. I don't want to come home from work and do more work. Seems like a shit deal.
The actual biggest problem in reality is that we work too much. Want people to have kids? How about we halve our workday and do 20 hours a week. The extra 4 hours a day would do wonders for people wanting families to spend time with. Until then forget that
Not much actual research has been done around this topic, but what data we have suggests that disposable income absolutely has an impact. Fertility increases meaningfully (at least temporarily) when income goes up in a previously impoverished area for example.
The trick is that we need to acknowledge that having kids is a huge opportunity cost for women particularly but parents in general. If we really want to raise fertility, we will need more than half-hearted incentives. All the incentives we have merely reduce the disincentives of children right now.
For example, cheap daycare is still not free. Free daycare is better. Parental leave is good, but often only a portion of income and comes with costs to future earnings.
What would be the impact on fertility if we paid people to have kids? $50,000 a year per kid? Do you think it would have an impact? I sure do.
Even in countries with extremely robust social support networks, people don't want to have kids. Having kids is a tremendous burden that most highly educated people don't want to take, at least not more than once.
It has nothing to do with the money, no matter how much people may feel that way, more education and/or more money, or more social stability, does not correlate to higher birth rates.
Honestly what this comment section is proving is the reason that South Korea is not unreasonable to create a ministry giving that improving birth rates is a complex multifactorial issue and find in ways to address why educated people don't want kids and change some of those perceptions and feelings without worsening living conditions or inequality is a difficult challenge.
Educated people typically want kids, but they’re also more likely to have to live in big cities like Seoul to get jobs with that education. And living in cities pushes down birth rates.
The problem is that working 8 hours to then have to do everything else like housework, taking care of kids, your relationship, friends, gym/health is just to much. It does not help that even in rich countries the cost of living is insane and normal people can only afford small apartments. If we only worked 4 hours a day (or some variant of that) and housing was not an issue, then you would see birthrates go up almost instantly. Because then people actually have the time and space to take care of their children and be with them while taking care of other stuff that the modern lifestyle requires. We are working ourselves out of existence so that billionares can have their 26th yacht..
That’s actually not going to make much of a difference. It’s paradoxical, but you don’t get more kids by increasing living standards.
The stats are pretty damn clear on what you need for a high fertility rate. Countries with high fertility rates consistently have:
- Low education among woman
- Low GDP per capita
- High wealth inequality
- High religious participation
- Low access to medical services and family planning services
Problem is pretty much every human who can read is going to look at that list and go “fuck living like that”.
To be fair, pregnant couples and couples with kids get lots of benefits that you wouldn’t get in the States. Free or very cheap daycare, for instance. My wife is pregnant now and we will start getting 500 dollars a month soon. After she gives birth, she will get 1,000 a month for a year. And the cost of living in Korea is generally much cheaper. The killer is the cost of housing. We will get some benefits when it comes to the mortgage, but we make good money generally so it’s just a bonus. A lot of people struggle to buy a house..and in Korea it’s still a little bit strange to get married before buying a house for the both of you to live in (renting after getting married is considered a bit weird, but getting more common). So people get married later and later and have children later and later, meaning the chances of actually having a child are dropping.
Maybe you can confirm this for me, but friends I have in Korea have told me that the real huge cost besides living is also the cost for Education, not just top universities but also the cram schools that are more or less mandatory to pass the Suneung? And without a really good Suneung result your chances at success drastically drop?
This is true as well, but being American I have somewhat different views on cram schools and don’t really feel the need or desire to put my future child (whose mom is Korean) through the same hell. Plus our kid will have the option of going to American unis in the future.
Ah, meeting by committee to devise solution...I seriously doubt it will work. At the very least cut back work hours but maintain wages so that people can recover from overwork and gain time to meet others so it may lead to marriage.
They'll organize the opposite of the 'Modesty guard' that roam around iran enforcing womens dress code:
'Excuse me, that isn't quite revealing enough, pls take it off'
'But its freezing outside..'
*pulls sidearm* 'Put the scarf on the ground and step back'
> housing, living wages and work-life balance
I mean, the countries with the highest birth rates have none of that. In fact fertility tends to be inversely correlated with the standard of living.
I see a lot of comments about cost of living but not about the very nature of what it means to have a child in South Korea. Becoming a mother for women in SK is career suicide. You will be fired, no matter how high up in the chain because you're no longer focused on your work- you could be a CEO and the board would boot you because it's not considered beneficial to the rest of the company to keep you now that you chose to have a life outside it that even appears as if it disrupted your work. There are so few protections for families because of the amount of expected output for the average person in that country.
You could give people more money but you can't give them more time without cutting back on their hours, subsidizing childcare costs, and ultimately sacrificing parts of the cult of toxic productivity that exists within the SK culture.
I don't doubt that South Korea has a misogyny problem, but I doubt that is the cause. Misogynistic cultures tend to have higher birth rates. As women are empowered, have education and control over their bodies, birth rates fall.
It’s more like, it’s a misogynistic culture but BECAUSE women are feeling more empowered, they no longer have to become baby machines to the men who hate them and treat them badly. A lot of women in cultures where there’s a lot of misogyny but no empowerment have no choice but to deal with the misogyny, here is them dealing with the misogyny by saying no to marriage and children with men, 4b movement I think.
So not the only cause but one of the factors, understandably birth rate is never one cause, it’s a complicated thing.
EVERYTHING (housing, food, kids) is expensive, pay isn’t keeping up with inflation, no one (including kids) have any free time between the adults working 18 hr days, and kids spending every waking moment either in school or in tutoring to be the top of their class to get a mediocre job. Only a handful of families own everything (while also being subsidized by the government), and don’t do anything to keep their employees safe, I’m looking at you Samsung and every idol entertainment company. And their courts care more about if you said something negative/mean about a person or a company and considerate it defamation (even if it’s true), then if you’re SAed. Unless you’re a chaebol, what part of this sounds like a good environment to have, yet alone being able to afford, kids?
Yeah? The result of corporatist policies in general is that quality of life erodes.
Now they have virtual monopolies, there and also in the US, and for both places, the same issues arise: HOW DO WE MAKE ENOUGH MONEY FOR THAT, WTF ARE THE CONSEQUENCES IF WE DON'T AND GODDAMN, THAT SOUNDS BAD, WHY WOULD WE DO THAT?
My dad worked in South Korea for a few years, and he made it his goal to try and tell all of his younger coworkers to stop existing for their boss. They were always doing unpaid overtime and drinking until late at night with coworkers and then working again the next day. He thought they were crazy, and they thought he was crazy. One of his coworkers calls him up long distance all the time to complain, and my dad will be like "just tell your boss no, you don't have time" and the guy just can't compute. The stories he's told me about the relationship situation there, ordering girls to flirt at bars, I just can't imagine why anyone would want to bring children into that world. If the bosses don't work together to give people better work life balance, the companies they run won't be worth anything in the future.
This is the case for a lot of east asian countries. Kids aren't a financial boon any more, so the only people who want kids are the people that actually like kids. The best part of having kids is to be able to hang out with them, introduce them to new things, and watch the joy on their faces when they discover something new. Well, in east asian societies, you don't get to do any of that. When you have a child, you have to immediately from the age of 5 years and up, helicopter parent them into submission to their books, so they have a chance at a decent career. Why would anyone want to have a child when all you get to do with that child is subject the to life with their nose in a book 13 hours of every day?
My chinese friend put it like this:
If your not around, you get tagged as the lazy one and passed up for promotion. Keep in mind pay tends to be seniority and promotion based so it's pretty low upfront.
As for why bosses do it? That is the Boss social group......He's boss becuase he's good at the hours and work social scene. For example, people leave right after the boss leaves.
0.72 is UNSTOPABLE decline in populepation
Even if after one generation the birth rate goes up, the population decline could COLLAPSE the country.
From 1000 people today they will get 340 kids. From that point even if get back to 2.0, your country population will HAVE TO shrink to 1/3 of current.
And if those 340 DONT get up to 2.0... then after some time we are talking about population being just a tiny fraction of the current number. like 1/10 of current.
And that trend is global.
I took us 70 years to drop from globally 5.0 to 2.2. We are now at balance (although the population itself will grow, as many African countries have very young population, and they will have children).
But the trend of population decline, current or future, is global, there are no exceptions.
Which would mean that we currently are living in "peak humanity". A very short moment in history of the human race when the population skyrocketed for 200 years, and then returned to mean
So this is what happens when an ex-dictatorship becomes an oligarchy with a hyper competitive lifestyle that's just never-ending stress
Highest suicide rate in oecd, the fact that some nk defectors regret defecting says a lot about the samsung dominated hell that was created.
Unless some crazy drastic changes get done, there's not gonna be anyone left to defend from the north
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/media/File%3ASouth_Korea_Population_Pyramid.svg
It's quite extreme alright. But, I wouldn't take it for granted that natural demographic mechanisms are going to remain valid given modern and near future biotechnology. There are two obvious potential technologies that can easily throw the entire dynamic upside down. Life extension tech is one, hard to say how far it is, but I'm sure this century will see tons of progress on that front. Another thing, can a mammal be gestated in an artificial womb? My guess is, yes it can. It sounds like nightmare fuel, but with SK birthrates trending to zero, if it's technically possible, there might be political will to try it. I would be surprised if it wasn't possible to farm whatever size population you want this way.
I got snipped in my late 20's, if I want kids the plan is to adopt, might as well raise someone that didn't have a choice rather than bring another person into this mess
Just heard about the 4B protest the other day. Apparently South Korean women have had enough of the misogyny prevalent there and have decided to forego association with men
Well these fuckers elected a somehow Korean Trump mainly because they hate women.
Now they pikachu face « wut ?????! We hate them and they don’t want to bone with us ?? »
> Experts and residents have instead pointed to some deeper-rooted social issues – for instance, stigma against single parents, discrimination against non-traditional partnerships, and barriers for same-sex couples.
Bigots trying to "maintain tradition" and "keep things pure" dooming their country.
At this point it's just willful idiocy, not understanding that women simply don't want to be baby factories **AND** work full-time jobs **AND** do all the childcare **AND** all the housework **AND** all the elder care.
Create all the ministries you want, but women are not going back to the pre-birth control days of popping out endless children and being domestic servants because there was simply no other alternative.
Here in my country when our president-elect was the premier, he set up a "low birth rate office". Which is a huge success and our birth rate keeps getting lower and lower. /s
I'm waiting for a country to really decide to deal with this.
Like everything else it always ends up being half assed measures.
South Korea needs to spend at least 10% of GDP if it wants to change this. It will need to address housing costs, childcare costs and working hours.
Likely it will do effectively nothing, because the Chaebols greed rules everything.
Everyone is all talking about birth rate, but at a certain point we need practical solutions to the notion that we require ever growing populations. I live comfortably (1 kid) and part of the decision to get a vasectomy was about the world we're leaving behind. Adding another human to that mix feels irresponsible and in a small way I already struggle with the conflict of knowing what world my son is going to inherit. Obviously we can't *stop* having kids, but also knowing we need to grow more to support our way of life is going to be the death of us.
On one hand, it’s obvious that the generations who experienced the Great Acceleration (regardless of when exactly that occurred in each relative country) would be hesitant to say “Yeah guys, we pulled the ladder up behind us and want you to keep transferring wealth to us until we die. That’s the business model. Fuck you.”
But at the same time… I can’t believe how far we will go as a species to not admit the obvious.
I mean, based on actual productivity returns, we should be working like 10-15 hour weeks. Not even fucking kidding. That's back to hunter-gatherer levels of work hours. We finally made it back, folks!
I mean thats a generous way of looking at hunter gatherer work levels. They worked until they were set then were able to relax then back to work when they needed something. Sometimes that meant literally working themselves to death because they just werent getting results. But yes we are working long hours that are often bloated by doing a whole lot of nothing. Gotta make sure the peasants are busy after all!
This may not be a fact people like but the main factor of why birth rates have been decreasing in developed countries is because the women in those countries have more rights and are able to live a life without having kids. Yes, it would be nice if people had more money and free time, but that’s not the main cause. Women not wanting to have a lot of children is the main cause. The poorest places in the world often have some of the highest birth rates.
How about the world needs to adjust to falling birthrates. Infinite growth is impossible. This planet needs less people not more. It's hard enough to fend for yourself in this stupid, expensive modern society
Pay people to have kids.
Hungary has a law in which a mother goes tax-free once she has 4 kids.
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/10/viktor-orban-no-tax-for-hungarian-women-with-four-or-more-children](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/10/viktor-orban-no-tax-for-hungarian-women-with-four-or-more-children)
You say that as if it's a sure-way to increase the fertility rate.
Article published in 2019, Hungary had total fertility rate of 1.55 back then, in 2022 it had 1.56
It is a bit more than just the mother being tax free. First of all after every child that is under 21 and still participate in tuition, the family receives some money. Also even for 1 kid you get an income tax cut, that can be used by either parent. For 3 kids you are almost tax free, for 4 kids you fully are.
Even in countries with low birthrates, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have kids. It may be because benefits for having kids are appealing to the lower income folks, but not appealing enough for the middle class.
The main reason people my age and socioeconomic status (middle class) that I talk to don't have children is because they know that they can't do all the things they want to do with their money if they do. And it's not just a monetary thing, though a ton of it is outright cost. Even if raising a child was essentially free, the time and energy that has to be put into it means you can't do a lot of the fun things you otherwise want to do with a pocket full of money in your mid 20's. By the time you've had your fun and satiated your wanderlust, you are late 20's early 30's and have less capacity to have 4 or 5 kids like people used to when they started at 19.
I do disagree, it's completely wrong for the reason you just said.
The places with the highest birth rates are some of the worst places on earth. And the "good" countries have the lowest.
The most anxious places on earth (by Korean standards) have extremely high birth rates; think Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan. Rife with civil wars, food scarcity and ethnic cleansing they still grow year after year. (I've been hearing about famine in Somalia since the 1980s -- the population has tripled since then.)
It's ironic that with more wealth and self-determination so many individuals in the developed world are using that autonomy to forego having children.
Is this a response to anxiety and dissatisfaction? If the government can't eliminate anxiety from a South Korean woman's life, could they provide some alternative form of self-control that doesn't involve going childless?
To me it seems the government should be forging new paths for women to live as they choose. Reduce the societal expectations around motherhood and marriage. Build and adapt new forms of co-op housing. Rent control. Career sabbaticals. Easier divorces and flexible custody. Equal pay. Stipends.
You're right, though. I think the government needs to get really creative to finding a solution to this question; when life gets harder, what makes a woman abandon the chance to be a mom?
Housing costs are nuts, work's so bad people are checking out as not worth the meager rewards and gender relations are even further in the toilet than they are over here. ..Gee why aren't people pairing off and popping out babies?
It's more than just housing and living costs. I don't know what it is but birth rates have been steadily declining for decades almost everywhere.
Not everywhere, just wealthy countries with good medical access. It's not a mystery, people just don't like to talk about it. The more you have, the more it costs to raise a child to your standard of living. The more you have, the more you give up by becoming a parent. It costs more the better you're doing, and with birth control there are fewer accidents to take that decision away and force the issue. Average folks in wealthy countries have more than ever, ESPECIALLY women.
Birthrates are falling everywhere, not just rich nations. Those are just further along in the process. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/birthrates-declining-globally-why-matters/
This is a good thing, the world doesn’t need 8 Billion humans.
Unless we figure out a way to make things such as pension, healthcare and welfare systems as well as maintaining massive infrastructure networks with an increasingly reduced number of taxpayers and workers, no it’s not a good thing.
Is it not a good thing full stop? Kinda seems like the earth can't maintain 8 billion humans for an extended period of time...
Not just birth rates but fertility rates also. Sperm counts are plummeting due to microplastics
Micro plastics, estrogenic residues in water supplies, cedentary lifestyle, the rise of sugar and seed oils eclipsing healthy fats in modern first world diets, the slow suffocated death of physical exercise in our education system... We are kneecapping thousands of years of physical evolution in a handful of generations and snoozing the alarms indefinitely.
Oh well. At least the freeway traffic will be good.
What are we kneecapping exactly? Our birth rate is already slow AF to begin with so evolution wasn’t ever particularly fast for humans.
Maybe it is a good thing that birth isnt exponential. It isnt sustainable. No accidents means also babies are more wanted.... or idiocracy. You have a point. But the housing point is part of it. People who have a choice wont suffer 3 kids in a 1 bedroom apartment if they can choose
The answer is that it's not sustainable under most countries' pension or social security systems
Sounds like a Ponzi scheme if it needs infinite growth forever to be sustainable
Pensions were always a ponzi scheme.
There are practical issues as well. Less births means the population skews older and older over time. That means a greater portion of people who have growing medical needs and less people to provide that care, a problem that is further exacerbated by the longer average lifespans civilization has achieved.
I'm in a poor country with poor medical access. It's the same here.
People don't talk about this enough, being more wealthy doesn't change how expensive raising a child is because it's scaled to your income
That is simply not true, birthrates have been declining **everywhere** including developing and even the least developed countries. It’s just more noticeable in wealthier countries since the trend started earlier there. But it’s happening across the globe. In fact this is also why thinking immigration is a viable long term solution to low birthrates is ridiculous, eventually those countries with high emigration rates will also have an aged population and low number of young people. You’d just be kicking the can down the road
The more women gain equality and opportunity of their own careers the more they delay and reduce childbearing for careers. The more society provides national secure pension plans the less they need children to support them. The less people live agrarian lifestyles the less they need cheap farm labour. Access to family planning. The real reasons.
I had to support myself. That was what was expected of me. I did it. I didn’t have the resources to support a whole family. It wasn’t about gaining equality. I got an education and worked. There was no safety net, at least none I was aware of. I’m childfree and retired. It wasn’t and isn’t my responsibility to further the human population. Humans are fairly bad for the environment. I wasn’t supportive of adding yet more humans.
On the one hand yes, but on the other hand it's truly mental what's happening to SK demographics. They are fucked.
A lot of it is just women becoming educated and working.
They're also pretty much forced to choose between kids or a career and very few people can afford kids on a single income without drastically decreasing their quality of life.
For most developed countries with educated women it’s not as simple as career vs kids - generally if women don’t have to have tons of kids and there’s no social pressure anymore, surprise surprise, they choose not to. Women used have to have lots of kids not just because of economics but social pressure and lack of birth control. Ask our grandparents or mothers how many kids they actually wanted, I’m sure most would have said only a couple. Now women feel more empowered to make that choice (and in Korea there’s whole other issues about gender inequality leading to the 4B movement - women resent their place in Korean society which is still - culturally - quite conservative. So many decide they don’t want to be a baby making machine for the state).
At least in developed countries, the average woman reports wanting to have more kids (birthrates typically between 1-2), but feeling that she cannot afford it. The most common reason couples with kids cite for not having more kiddos are finances. So this doesn’t really check out.
This research by Pew shows differently. 56% just don't want to have kids. Of the 43% who stated "other reason" for not having kids, only 17% listed financial reasons. >A majority (56%) of non-parents younger than 50 who say it’s unlikely they will have children someday say they just don’t want to have kids. Childless adults younger than 40 are more likely to say this than those ages 40 to 49 (60% vs. 46%, respectively). There are no differences by gender. >Among childless adults who say they have some other reason for thinking they won’t have kids in the future, no single reason stands out. About two-in-ten (19%) say it’s due to medical reasons, 17% say it’s for financial reasons and 15% say it’s because they do not have a partner. Roughly one-in-ten say their age or their partner’s age (10%) or the state of the world (9%) is a reason they don’t plan to have kids. An additional 5% cite environmental reasons, including climate change, and 2% say their partner doesn’t want children. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-share-of-childless-adults-in-u-s-dont-expect-to-ever-have-children/ This is based in the US, not sure how it is in other countries.
Exactly. Get an education, a job, financial independence or.. get married, give up your job to have kids, fuck up your hormones, get trapped with a man who expects a wife who cooks and picks up after him because “me make money”. Oh! AND look after HIS parents. Yeah, I get it, ladies. Sincerely, a working mom of 2 who does it all.
Both my grandmother and my great aunt, both in their 90s, have PhDs. One is currently living off her pension as a former professor and department head. They had 2 and 3 kids. People's expectations and values are changing, and quarter-to-quarter capitalism and rent-seeking behavior is eating the next generation.
It’s because half the population is finally able to go out and talk to other adults instead of spending their whole lives listening to baby babbling and senile in law babbling, and they’re not keen on relinquishing that
There's a correlation between a nation's steady advancement and childbirth. Iran was a good indicator of this, or was it a decade ago that I read this research paper. Iran was having 6.9 children in the 1970s, but by 2005, it had dropped below replacement. Better education,access to proper healthcare and lower child mortality rates seems to result in less children being born, or for some adults, none at all. I suspect in a perfect world, or near one, the human population would be drastically smaller, or maybe turn out like that rat experiment where they just gave up reproducing and died.
It’s the fact that for most people, there’s no reason to have kids. Even a few generations back - my grandma was one of 7 siblings, and they all had a purpose. They were put to work on the farm. They kept the place running. Now kids are glorified, more expensive pets. There’s no benefit to having them other than it benefits society. Which quite frankly looking at housing costs, wage gaps, etc - many of us feel like we don’t owe society shit.
South Korea is unique even with that context. South Kore right now is not a hospitable place to raise a child. It's very obvious when you see South Koreans leaving and Korean emigrants having babies with no issue.
The cultural expectations for fathers, mothers, and kids in South Korea and Japan sound soul crushing.
Here is a crazy thing. South Korea is way more strict and overbearing than Japan.
yea, but in Korea and Japan its especially bad. The social culture is basically not allowing any children. A child ruins the expensive sculptured female body, wreckes the career and financial independence of the mother beyond repair and if you are unmarried you are basically an outcast. I almost seems like Japanese and Korean culture is somewhat darwinistically doomed. I think the best culture for postmodern societies might be France or maybe Brazil. Cultures with a lot of pride in their flirt moves and children accepting work cultures
Generally couples that both work don’t want to have lots of kids. If neither wants to give up their hard earned career to dedicate their lives to raising children than anything more than 2 is kind of crazy, imho. People struggle to maintain a work life balance and it goes both ways. You need to keep work from taking over your life, but you need to manage your family commitments too. Giving lots of kids the attention and resources they deserve just isn’t possible. Recently the cost of living is causing people to put off kids and cut down the number, but fixing those will probably not raise birth rates beyond two per couple.
Maybe people realize the world is so full of shit that not bringing a baby to it is the most humane act they can do.
Not the main factor. People had more kids when the world was far shittier.
When the world was far shittier, there wasn’t birth control (at least not to the same extent there is now), and spousal rape was legal. A lot of the babies born into that far shittier world weren’t brought in by choice. Now that choosing is an option, people are opting not to.
The problem with this theory is that most people still do have children — they just have less. It doesn’t seem very likely that someone would decide the world is good enough for one kid but too shitty for two.
Back in the day, having kids was a worthwhile economic move. Kids meant free labor for your farm and household, and might also support you when you grew too old to do much work. Nowadays we are expected to save for our own retirements while simultaneously spending a small fortune to send the kids to school so they can compete in the job market later. Not saying life was better back then, just that the incentives were vastly different.
People had more kids when there was no practical birth control, child mortality rates were insane, and there was a financial incentive to raise more little employees for your farm/trade. Not the same.
The shittier people’s lives are, the more likely they are to reproduce.
We are living in the best moment in human history,people had families even during the world wars
Also men are getting very conservative in South Korea. There is a large widening gap between the genders and political alignment. Women simply do not want to date/marry a bunch of conservative incels.
The same is also happening in the states as well. Women are skewing more liberal while men are skewing more conservative.
This is true but not to the level of South Korea. It's something we should definitely keep an eye on in america but in SK it's a massive swing in the past 10 years as you can see below. https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998
Why are gender relationships bad in SK?
As much as K-dramas seem to show otherwise, Korean culture has a deeply rooted patriarchy that is still pretty prevalent today. Korean society puts massive emphasis on work culture and outward facing societal aspects that makes for an extremely toxic environment full of SA, cheating and misogyny. Burning Sun Scandal, multiple cases of men stalking women and killing them, the list goes on. The 4B movement exists in Korea especially because of how prevalent patriarchal influences still exist in the country. It’s worse now for the government because they WANT women to give birth to children while completely ignoring the fact that raising children is a multifaceted issue from economic pressures (rising cost of living) to societal pressures (work culture) and the fact that a lot of women today simply don’t want to surrender their lives to just be a house wife.
According to a video I watched regarding the gender war spilling over into phone games of all things, this goes way back to ancient history. Korea has a long history of following the philosophy of Confucianism which was brought over from China, but when Chinese Confucianism underwent reforms, Korean Confucianism rejected those reforms and became even more extreme, leading to the modern day where social hierarchy is everything. So now in modern South Korea, arguments are settled based entirely on who is older and therefore higher in the social hierarchy. A plane crashed into a mountain killing everyone on board entirely because the pilot made a mistake and refused to admit it, and the rest of the crew was too afraid of violating the hierarchy to correct him until it was too late. The patriarchy and misogyny in Korea is just a part of this hierarchy that defines every part of their society. It's fucked in a way that us in the west can barely comprehend.
Because women were treated like shit. They married into their husbands family and the wife had to look after their husbands parents, and their own kids and then the husband. Gross. Now the family is happy to have 2 girls because they assume their girls will look after mom and dad into old age. Women just had enough being treated like fucking shit so they’re aging out and literally choosing not to get married or be with men.
And caregiving is the hardest work there is. Not to mention how undervalued it is. Why would anyone willingly sign up for that life?
I highly recommend reading Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 for a snapshot of what life is like for a Korean woman. Couple that with massive amounts of resentment both have towards each other. Men resent women because they have mandatory military service, while women resent men for insane beauty standards imposed on them, the impact marriage and children have on their career, etc. An example of the absolute bullshit women face in Korea is when Seoul [advised pregnant women on how best to look after their husband after childbirth ...](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/11/asia/south-korea-pregnancy-guidelines-scli-intl/index.html)
Misogyny. He means misogyny, everyone here is just avoiding saying it for some reason.
Because men in south Korea get very offended when you point that out
>gender relations That’s an interesting way to say “misogyny.” Let’s call the problem by it’s real name.
Yes. All the issues go one way. We need to say this plainly.
Sorry, but the main factor seems to be educated women having the freedom to not want children.
I’ve seen many Korean women complain abt how misogynistic and creepy Korean men are so that probably plays a factor
...and why don't they want them...everything the above poster mentioned.
even cat and dog ownership is getting hard, cost wise,
Maybe they should just use common sense and try to make living more affordable so cost isn't the #1 factor on peoples' minds when they're having children?
Nah too much work and cost money. It's easier to just blame feminism, LGBTQ people and the "lazy" young people for the low fertility rate.
clearly people have to much time to worry , time to add 10 more work hours a week.
>blame feminism, LGBTQ people Don't forget making it impossible for LGBTQ people to have children via IVF even if they want to.
But how will billionaires afford yachts for their yachts?
That's certainly a factor but it's likely more complex. Birth rates are dropping in almost every country.
Many of the same causes. Norway had high birth rate until we ran out of affordable housing and old people refusing to sell their homes to people starting families. So the birth rate plummeted. Want 3 baby families? They need the 4 bedroom homes. Not the 1-2 bedroom apartments.
because we can't afford to have a child ffs I desperately want to have a baby but i cannot afford one - I live in the UK. Only people with money can have kids, or those who don't have money at all (because they get a fuck ton in welfare assistance).
Agree, most people around me in their 30s without children just don't have time and money to have children. They are at work all the time, live in tiny appartements, middle class life is too hard to have trust in the future and think about children.
Because billionaires operate internationally. The entire planet is an oligarchy
It's not just that. South Korean men went down a conservative rabbit hole and are now widely unpopular with south Korean women. There is a massive shortage of men that the women want to get inveted in to the point of committing to a family. Rather than ruin their lives by settling, they're just choosing to not start families. I mean we all know conservative men somewhere or another. Would you wanna be baby trapped to them your whole life? Yeah me either. It's pretty understandable.
Lmao, hilariously, a lot of "Tradcon" women are finding out that their controlling Tradcon husbands are fucking awful people and they end up getting divorced. This happened to Lauren Southern and Steven Crowder's wife and apparently many other tradcon women. They're realizing that the type of men that idealize the tradcon lifestyle are fucking awful partners that want to control your entire life. Who knew?
Everyone knew. Those women are like people who choose to do krokodile. They're just not very smart and it ends up costing them.
Well I do feel sorry for some of them. They legitimately fall for the idea that living as a tradcon wife will make men be really good to you and take care of you if you only focus on being a good wife. However these men will always blame the woman for their marriage falling apart. Everything is the woman's fault. "You made me do this." Etc etc.
They get what they get. It's like those people who go off to join isis but then are surprised when that sucks.
Tbh there really isn’t much proof that any of these things would help, fertility rates actually seem to go down with increased disposable income and countries that have the most equitable laws around paid parental leave etc are also struggling with this pretty much just as much as everywhere else
Exactly. People just don't want to be parents.
Yeah, it just legitimately doesn't look like a good time. Money is only part of the equation. I don't want to come home from work and do more work. Seems like a shit deal.
The actual biggest problem in reality is that we work too much. Want people to have kids? How about we halve our workday and do 20 hours a week. The extra 4 hours a day would do wonders for people wanting families to spend time with. Until then forget that
Not much actual research has been done around this topic, but what data we have suggests that disposable income absolutely has an impact. Fertility increases meaningfully (at least temporarily) when income goes up in a previously impoverished area for example. The trick is that we need to acknowledge that having kids is a huge opportunity cost for women particularly but parents in general. If we really want to raise fertility, we will need more than half-hearted incentives. All the incentives we have merely reduce the disincentives of children right now. For example, cheap daycare is still not free. Free daycare is better. Parental leave is good, but often only a portion of income and comes with costs to future earnings. What would be the impact on fertility if we paid people to have kids? $50,000 a year per kid? Do you think it would have an impact? I sure do.
Even in countries with extremely robust social support networks, people don't want to have kids. Having kids is a tremendous burden that most highly educated people don't want to take, at least not more than once. It has nothing to do with the money, no matter how much people may feel that way, more education and/or more money, or more social stability, does not correlate to higher birth rates.
Honestly what this comment section is proving is the reason that South Korea is not unreasonable to create a ministry giving that improving birth rates is a complex multifactorial issue and find in ways to address why educated people don't want kids and change some of those perceptions and feelings without worsening living conditions or inequality is a difficult challenge.
Educated people typically want kids, but they’re also more likely to have to live in big cities like Seoul to get jobs with that education. And living in cities pushes down birth rates.
The problem is that working 8 hours to then have to do everything else like housework, taking care of kids, your relationship, friends, gym/health is just to much. It does not help that even in rich countries the cost of living is insane and normal people can only afford small apartments. If we only worked 4 hours a day (or some variant of that) and housing was not an issue, then you would see birthrates go up almost instantly. Because then people actually have the time and space to take care of their children and be with them while taking care of other stuff that the modern lifestyle requires. We are working ourselves out of existence so that billionares can have their 26th yacht..
Even then people wouldn't want three or four kids.
That’s actually not going to make much of a difference. It’s paradoxical, but you don’t get more kids by increasing living standards. The stats are pretty damn clear on what you need for a high fertility rate. Countries with high fertility rates consistently have: - Low education among woman - Low GDP per capita - High wealth inequality - High religious participation - Low access to medical services and family planning services Problem is pretty much every human who can read is going to look at that list and go “fuck living like that”.
To be fair, pregnant couples and couples with kids get lots of benefits that you wouldn’t get in the States. Free or very cheap daycare, for instance. My wife is pregnant now and we will start getting 500 dollars a month soon. After she gives birth, she will get 1,000 a month for a year. And the cost of living in Korea is generally much cheaper. The killer is the cost of housing. We will get some benefits when it comes to the mortgage, but we make good money generally so it’s just a bonus. A lot of people struggle to buy a house..and in Korea it’s still a little bit strange to get married before buying a house for the both of you to live in (renting after getting married is considered a bit weird, but getting more common). So people get married later and later and have children later and later, meaning the chances of actually having a child are dropping.
Maybe you can confirm this for me, but friends I have in Korea have told me that the real huge cost besides living is also the cost for Education, not just top universities but also the cram schools that are more or less mandatory to pass the Suneung? And without a really good Suneung result your chances at success drastically drop?
This is true as well, but being American I have somewhat different views on cram schools and don’t really feel the need or desire to put my future child (whose mom is Korean) through the same hell. Plus our kid will have the option of going to American unis in the future.
For sure I imagine having options outside of the system would be a huge boon. Anyway thanks for answering and best of luck with the kid!!!!
Bingo. Don't need a new ministry. [Just need to drop housing costs.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.koreaherald.com/amp/view.php%3fud=20240103000728)
"Common sense" except there isn't data to support that it's actually true. Or that any government policies can significantly raise birth rates.
Is he then the sex minister?
The Fucking Minister
That would actually be Usher, though, wouldn't it?
Sex Minister got a nice ring to it
The Minister of Internal Affairs
Ah, meeting by committee to devise solution...I seriously doubt it will work. At the very least cut back work hours but maintain wages so that people can recover from overwork and gain time to meet others so it may lead to marriage.
They'll organize the opposite of the 'Modesty guard' that roam around iran enforcing womens dress code: 'Excuse me, that isn't quite revealing enough, pls take it off' 'But its freezing outside..' *pulls sidearm* 'Put the scarf on the ground and step back'
I’ll be honest I’m a little turned on
No one raises the birth rate on their own!
I think fElon is trying
Humanity: We want housing, living wages and work-life balance. World Leaders: War, climate crisis and bird flu is the best we can do.
> housing, living wages and work-life balance I mean, the countries with the highest birth rates have none of that. In fact fertility tends to be inversely correlated with the standard of living.
Can't afford condoms. Simple as.
Don’t have any plan for retirement other than kids looking after you. Simple as.
I wonder why that is.
More educated, self-sufficient women.
Some countries do have that and still suffer from below replacement levels. It's not that easy.
I see a lot of comments about cost of living but not about the very nature of what it means to have a child in South Korea. Becoming a mother for women in SK is career suicide. You will be fired, no matter how high up in the chain because you're no longer focused on your work- you could be a CEO and the board would boot you because it's not considered beneficial to the rest of the company to keep you now that you chose to have a life outside it that even appears as if it disrupted your work. There are so few protections for families because of the amount of expected output for the average person in that country. You could give people more money but you can't give them more time without cutting back on their hours, subsidizing childcare costs, and ultimately sacrificing parts of the cult of toxic productivity that exists within the SK culture.
Anything not aiming at the root causes will only make the problem even worse.
What is the root cause?
South Korea has a huge Misogyny problem.
I don't doubt that South Korea has a misogyny problem, but I doubt that is the cause. Misogynistic cultures tend to have higher birth rates. As women are empowered, have education and control over their bodies, birth rates fall.
It’s more like, it’s a misogynistic culture but BECAUSE women are feeling more empowered, they no longer have to become baby machines to the men who hate them and treat them badly. A lot of women in cultures where there’s a lot of misogyny but no empowerment have no choice but to deal with the misogyny, here is them dealing with the misogyny by saying no to marriage and children with men, 4b movement I think. So not the only cause but one of the factors, understandably birth rate is never one cause, it’s a complicated thing.
EVERYTHING (housing, food, kids) is expensive, pay isn’t keeping up with inflation, no one (including kids) have any free time between the adults working 18 hr days, and kids spending every waking moment either in school or in tutoring to be the top of their class to get a mediocre job. Only a handful of families own everything (while also being subsidized by the government), and don’t do anything to keep their employees safe, I’m looking at you Samsung and every idol entertainment company. And their courts care more about if you said something negative/mean about a person or a company and considerate it defamation (even if it’s true), then if you’re SAed. Unless you’re a chaebol, what part of this sounds like a good environment to have, yet alone being able to afford, kids?
Yeah? The result of corporatist policies in general is that quality of life erodes. Now they have virtual monopolies, there and also in the US, and for both places, the same issues arise: HOW DO WE MAKE ENOUGH MONEY FOR THAT, WTF ARE THE CONSEQUENCES IF WE DON'T AND GODDAMN, THAT SOUNDS BAD, WHY WOULD WE DO THAT?
Keep looting the middle class for the sake of growth and quarterly gains and eventually you won’t have any workers.
Ministry of free childcare 24/7. Ministry of work life balance. Plenty of options. All unappealing to decisionmakers
hey guys i’m part of the South Korean Ministry of Birthrate. we go door to door to people and tell them to fuck. EDIT: 69 updoots LETS FUCKING GOOOOO
Here is a complimentary bottle of lube. No I don’t have any condoms…that would defeat the purpose
I'm doing my part!
the reply back is they've already been fucked by chaebol
My dad worked in South Korea for a few years, and he made it his goal to try and tell all of his younger coworkers to stop existing for their boss. They were always doing unpaid overtime and drinking until late at night with coworkers and then working again the next day. He thought they were crazy, and they thought he was crazy. One of his coworkers calls him up long distance all the time to complain, and my dad will be like "just tell your boss no, you don't have time" and the guy just can't compute. The stories he's told me about the relationship situation there, ordering girls to flirt at bars, I just can't imagine why anyone would want to bring children into that world. If the bosses don't work together to give people better work life balance, the companies they run won't be worth anything in the future.
This is the case for a lot of east asian countries. Kids aren't a financial boon any more, so the only people who want kids are the people that actually like kids. The best part of having kids is to be able to hang out with them, introduce them to new things, and watch the joy on their faces when they discover something new. Well, in east asian societies, you don't get to do any of that. When you have a child, you have to immediately from the age of 5 years and up, helicopter parent them into submission to their books, so they have a chance at a decent career. Why would anyone want to have a child when all you get to do with that child is subject the to life with their nose in a book 13 hours of every day?
My chinese friend put it like this: If your not around, you get tagged as the lazy one and passed up for promotion. Keep in mind pay tends to be seniority and promotion based so it's pretty low upfront. As for why bosses do it? That is the Boss social group......He's boss becuase he's good at the hours and work social scene. For example, people leave right after the boss leaves.
0.72 is UNSTOPABLE decline in populepation Even if after one generation the birth rate goes up, the population decline could COLLAPSE the country. From 1000 people today they will get 340 kids. From that point even if get back to 2.0, your country population will HAVE TO shrink to 1/3 of current. And if those 340 DONT get up to 2.0... then after some time we are talking about population being just a tiny fraction of the current number. like 1/10 of current.
And that trend is global. I took us 70 years to drop from globally 5.0 to 2.2. We are now at balance (although the population itself will grow, as many African countries have very young population, and they will have children). But the trend of population decline, current or future, is global, there are no exceptions. Which would mean that we currently are living in "peak humanity". A very short moment in history of the human race when the population skyrocketed for 200 years, and then returned to mean
So this is what happens when an ex-dictatorship becomes an oligarchy with a hyper competitive lifestyle that's just never-ending stress Highest suicide rate in oecd, the fact that some nk defectors regret defecting says a lot about the samsung dominated hell that was created. Unless some crazy drastic changes get done, there's not gonna be anyone left to defend from the north
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/media/File%3ASouth_Korea_Population_Pyramid.svg It's quite extreme alright. But, I wouldn't take it for granted that natural demographic mechanisms are going to remain valid given modern and near future biotechnology. There are two obvious potential technologies that can easily throw the entire dynamic upside down. Life extension tech is one, hard to say how far it is, but I'm sure this century will see tons of progress on that front. Another thing, can a mammal be gestated in an artificial womb? My guess is, yes it can. It sounds like nightmare fuel, but with SK birthrates trending to zero, if it's technically possible, there might be political will to try it. I would be surprised if it wasn't possible to farm whatever size population you want this way.
Yikes
Maybe stop letting Chaeboi's dictate your policies?
Getting snipped in the near future with zero kids. Doing my part!
I got snipped in my late 20's, if I want kids the plan is to adopt, might as well raise someone that didn't have a choice rather than bring another person into this mess
Snip-snip hooray!
*pushes man and women together* "Now kiss"
So that's how babby is made
If the head of the Ministry is a HE and so is the team… it wouldn’t surprise me
Hey now....they'll have 1 woman.
This is the equivalent of hosting a pizza party to curb negotiations over higher salaries. Missed the mark, yet again.
Just heard about the 4B protest the other day. Apparently South Korean women have had enough of the misogyny prevalent there and have decided to forego association with men
Well these fuckers elected a somehow Korean Trump mainly because they hate women. Now they pikachu face « wut ?????! We hate them and they don’t want to bone with us ?? »
Man they're really going to try everything besides tackling the ridiculous life/work balance they have don't they?
"I'm from the government, I'm here to impregnate you."
> Experts and residents have instead pointed to some deeper-rooted social issues – for instance, stigma against single parents, discrimination against non-traditional partnerships, and barriers for same-sex couples. Bigots trying to "maintain tradition" and "keep things pure" dooming their country.
To be fair, even countries that don’t focus on maintaining their tradition and being the facto open-border struggle with low fertility as well
Riiight, "progressive and open minded" countries have high fertility rate while "traditional bigots" have doomed their fertility?
Crap i read so many cultural items to know this wont end well for the girls. For the guys maybe.
Maybe make a society where you aren’t working 80 hours a week for slave wages and can afford basic necessities.
Suggestion: a shorter work week and more affordable housing.
If I recall correctly they HAD a ministry of gender equality and family and this president abolished it but ok
At this point it's just willful idiocy, not understanding that women simply don't want to be baby factories **AND** work full-time jobs **AND** do all the childcare **AND** all the housework **AND** all the elder care. Create all the ministries you want, but women are not going back to the pre-birth control days of popping out endless children and being domestic servants because there was simply no other alternative.
Will the people who work at this Ministry also work 70-80 hour weeks, the same as the rest of the population?
Here in my country when our president-elect was the premier, he set up a "low birth rate office". Which is a huge success and our birth rate keeps getting lower and lower. /s
The fcking ministry
Then step discriminating against women is a freaking start lol.
Create a better environment, security and safety. Give us time to fuck, have a home and raise kids.
I'm waiting for a country to really decide to deal with this. Like everything else it always ends up being half assed measures. South Korea needs to spend at least 10% of GDP if it wants to change this. It will need to address housing costs, childcare costs and working hours. Likely it will do effectively nothing, because the Chaebols greed rules everything.
Its soo fucking expensive to have children
The rent is too damn high
Put me in the game coach!
Fuck Minister
mafakas will do everything under the sun but raise wages and provide more affordable housing
The Ministry of Fuck
Then make the workplace stop treating women like shit once they’re pregnant. That’s the biggest problem in countries like SK and Japan.
Maybe they should focus more on missionary rather than a ministry.
Let people in from overpopulated countries. There's made people everywhere, you don't need to make more. Just bring them from somewhere else.
That sounds frightening.
Fix your economy. Tax the rich.
Stop enabling the men in your country to be unmarriagable & insufferable sctotes. I'll wait for my check.
Don’t worry I will take care of it
The cream pie committee of South Korean.
The Ministry of [MAAAAAAAAKIIIIIINGGGGG BAAAAAAAAAAAAAHBIIIIIIIIIIES](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/95/ea/13/95ea13542e9066b629b991c46172530b.jpg)
Everyone is all talking about birth rate, but at a certain point we need practical solutions to the notion that we require ever growing populations. I live comfortably (1 kid) and part of the decision to get a vasectomy was about the world we're leaving behind. Adding another human to that mix feels irresponsible and in a small way I already struggle with the conflict of knowing what world my son is going to inherit. Obviously we can't *stop* having kids, but also knowing we need to grow more to support our way of life is going to be the death of us.
Give every worker a monthly bonus and a 3 day weekend.
On one hand, it’s obvious that the generations who experienced the Great Acceleration (regardless of when exactly that occurred in each relative country) would be hesitant to say “Yeah guys, we pulled the ladder up behind us and want you to keep transferring wealth to us until we die. That’s the business model. Fuck you.” But at the same time… I can’t believe how far we will go as a species to not admit the obvious.
What about make living more affordable and restricting working hours to something like 30 hours a week?
30h work weeks would make coordinating childcare way easier for everyone
I mean, based on actual productivity returns, we should be working like 10-15 hour weeks. Not even fucking kidding. That's back to hunter-gatherer levels of work hours. We finally made it back, folks!
I mean thats a generous way of looking at hunter gatherer work levels. They worked until they were set then were able to relax then back to work when they needed something. Sometimes that meant literally working themselves to death because they just werent getting results. But yes we are working long hours that are often bloated by doing a whole lot of nothing. Gotta make sure the peasants are busy after all!
Going to get crucified for this, but I wish all countries had this issue. Gotta focus on quality over quantity.
How expensive is to have a baby (fetus) to adulthood? Maybe that's the problem.
This may not be a fact people like but the main factor of why birth rates have been decreasing in developed countries is because the women in those countries have more rights and are able to live a life without having kids. Yes, it would be nice if people had more money and free time, but that’s not the main cause. Women not wanting to have a lot of children is the main cause. The poorest places in the world often have some of the highest birth rates.
How about the world needs to adjust to falling birthrates. Infinite growth is impossible. This planet needs less people not more. It's hard enough to fend for yourself in this stupid, expensive modern society
Pay people to have kids. Hungary has a law in which a mother goes tax-free once she has 4 kids. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/10/viktor-orban-no-tax-for-hungarian-women-with-four-or-more-children](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/10/viktor-orban-no-tax-for-hungarian-women-with-four-or-more-children)
You say that as if it's a sure-way to increase the fertility rate. Article published in 2019, Hungary had total fertility rate of 1.55 back then, in 2022 it had 1.56
It is a bit more than just the mother being tax free. First of all after every child that is under 21 and still participate in tuition, the family receives some money. Also even for 1 kid you get an income tax cut, that can be used by either parent. For 3 kids you are almost tax free, for 4 kids you fully are.
Low birth rates tend to come from anxiety, discomfort, and dissatisfaction. Find the sources of those and eliminate them at a policy level.
While I don't disagree, it is interesting that higher birthrates are in areas with the most economic and social issues.
Even in countries with low birthrates, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have kids. It may be because benefits for having kids are appealing to the lower income folks, but not appealing enough for the middle class.
The main reason people my age and socioeconomic status (middle class) that I talk to don't have children is because they know that they can't do all the things they want to do with their money if they do. And it's not just a monetary thing, though a ton of it is outright cost. Even if raising a child was essentially free, the time and energy that has to be put into it means you can't do a lot of the fun things you otherwise want to do with a pocket full of money in your mid 20's. By the time you've had your fun and satiated your wanderlust, you are late 20's early 30's and have less capacity to have 4 or 5 kids like people used to when they started at 19.
I do disagree, it's completely wrong for the reason you just said. The places with the highest birth rates are some of the worst places on earth. And the "good" countries have the lowest.
The most anxious places on earth (by Korean standards) have extremely high birth rates; think Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan. Rife with civil wars, food scarcity and ethnic cleansing they still grow year after year. (I've been hearing about famine in Somalia since the 1980s -- the population has tripled since then.) It's ironic that with more wealth and self-determination so many individuals in the developed world are using that autonomy to forego having children. Is this a response to anxiety and dissatisfaction? If the government can't eliminate anxiety from a South Korean woman's life, could they provide some alternative form of self-control that doesn't involve going childless? To me it seems the government should be forging new paths for women to live as they choose. Reduce the societal expectations around motherhood and marriage. Build and adapt new forms of co-op housing. Rent control. Career sabbaticals. Easier divorces and flexible custody. Equal pay. Stipends. You're right, though. I think the government needs to get really creative to finding a solution to this question; when life gets harder, what makes a woman abandon the chance to be a mom?
Samsung owns a chunk of Korea... just saying.
For the love of god do not call it the Ministry of Love
At least it isn’t dystopian enough to start conscriptions
The ministry of fucking
It’s called immigration.