I think all these studies skirt very gingerly around a big problem. Stressful work culture, lack of support for families (includes high real-estate costs, long commute times, lack of sick leave, etc.) and most importantly a path for women (and men - but its mostly women) who drop out of the workforce and want to get back in once the children are older and more independent.
Child rearing takes a group of people not just a nuclear family where both parents work long hours. Cost of living and work culture is forcing people to work long hours and women don't find a good enough reason to give up their freedom, and keep in mind it's what childbirth is in most Asian cultures, a woman giving up what she wants to do until the child is independent. I see no reason why women would ever want children. What's society providing them that they need to make this sacrifice ?
All studies mention these, they just don't provide any concrete solutions. It's typically around creating some committee or forum that is looking to change this. Nothing will change, not until the corporations start running out of people to hire or the country runs out of soldiers for defense.
I hope we one day see a radical new form of raising children. Historically it was truly a village that raised a child. I never understood how my parents raised 5 children. But looking into it more, there was always a community of people that raised me. Community and mutual aid was huge in the small town in Ethiopia where my parents came from. Coming to Canada, that didn't change. Uncles, aunts, older cousins, long time family friends. Communes have a similar structure but usually get a bad rep. Good podcast episode on the topic
"We could be raising our children cooperatively in dwellings designed to enhance rather than inhibit social connection. We could be more sustainably sharing our resources and teaching our children to value collaboration over competition. We could be living in wider lateral networks of love, care, and support; fighting the scourges of loneliness, anxiety, precarity and the many stresses associated with modern life. Most of us are not.”
> I never understood how my parents raised 5 children.
My 2*(grand)mother raised 11 children. From what I've heard from other family members, the key to success is not giving enough emotional and material support to each child.
What I'm trying to say is: the expectations on children quality of life are also much higher vs 100 yrs ago.
And I think that is the key to dropping fertility: Once you experience relative wealth, you increasingly want to give the same to your kids.
It's not that we can't afford more children, but that we can't afford to give more children and ourselves the level of comfort we've come to expect.
I could afford to give quite a few children the standard of living we had when I was a kid, but while it was fine for it's time, it's not what I'd want to go back to for either myself or my kids.
It's also why I don't think this is a crisis in the long term on a global basis, though it may become one for individual countries:
Once wealth catches up to a level where we have sufficient buffer, I think we can balance things out.
The problem with those types of communities is that they often have a high level of social control. We see a pattern where most of the social development first happens in the cities (sexuality, culture, new ideas) and then slowly spreads to smaller communities. The constraints of small communities leads to many "escaping" to the cities to improve their lives.
Israel experimented with communally raising children within the Kibbutz system, but as far as I know the results weren't super encouraging and few places still do it
Kibbutz's failed because there's no incentive to do any work, same with every other form of communism that's been tried. Reworking daycare to be a more holistic experience than it currently is is a very different idea.
Communal childcare in kibbutzim is not related to economic success - I know people who grew up like that, they gave up on it because the results for the kids were seen as negative. Even in rich kibbutzim with plenty of resources they've phased out communal childcare and children live with their parents.
What about introverted subset of people who prefer to be left alone, to not participate in wider social networks, who want to have a family and a door that shuts?
>and most importantly a path for women (and men - but its mostly women) who drop out of the workforce and want to get back in once the children are older and more independent.
I don't think this is quite right, and your second paragraph is kind of alluding to the underlying issue. I think it's more that there isn't a pathway for women to drop out of the workforce permanently and revert to a single-income household. A lot of women in my wife's peer group want to do this, but can't make the finances work. Of course, they end up having to pay for child care anyway and maybe it comes out in the wash. Regardless, maybe some kind of UBI can be help here for women with children who simply don't want to go back to work.
Aside: you might be commenting specifically on Asian work culture, not sure, but the "give up freedom" thing I don't believe to be unique in that regard.
I agree. A large contingent of women want to be mothers without the stress and distraction of workplaces, but it is increasingly uneconomical to do so. So instead we resort to daycare, but with how expensive that is there is a natural cap on having more than 1-2 kids during your most fertile years. No surprise the fertility rate is less than 2.
Regarding benefits - I don't know about South Korea, but where I grew up in Hawaii some of my peers or their parents purposefully had kids out of wedlock to collect the additional welfare payments that single parents were eligible for, even though they otherwise were still partnered and even living together. However, with less practical need to maintain a family over the long run, parenting quality and outcomes suffered and atomization increased. A "Great Society" era benefit intended to help those caught in tragic edge cases ended up being a perverse incentive for those in the next generation who may have avoided that situation otherwise.
While doing payments for married mothers instead may have been a net-outcome better design in retrospect, there is an opposite possibility of perverse incentives for toxic families to stay intact. I don't know if marriage-agnostic UBI for parents is the best answer, though it would at least balance the currently misplaced incentives. In an ideal world it would be better to first resolve current inflated costs by making it easier and cheaper on the supply side to provide housing, healthcare, and education.
My sister is in that boat of not making finances work. Her job pays too well for her to leave the work force.
As a man, I’m looking for an independent woman with a good income, because I don’t want to get gutted in a divorce. I’d love to be a SAHD, but it’s difficult for me to find single women with comparable income.
> My sister is in that boat of not making finances work. Her job pays too well for her to leave the work force.
But her finances arent the problem here. Its how high expenses are. Her job could pay 150k/yr or 20k/yr but the situation is the same when she quits. Its good that she at least makes enough money that it justifies working if she wants to.
Yes, she could quit her job, move to Appalachia, her husband earn $20k/yr, and grow her own food. But that’s a huge lifestyle reduction. What does retirement and end-of-life healthcare look like if she and her husband make $20k/yr?
I think what’s more important is income vs local population income. In SF, she probably earns 3-4x everyone in SF or 10x nationally. In a low cost of area place, her husband’s income might only be 1.5x more, leaving less money for retirement and child care.
I make a bit over 100k after taxes and spend 30k a year. I've saved enough to quit, but the golden handcuffs feeling is real. I'd just be giving up so much money.
My wife dropped out of the workforce for our kids in the US and then wanted to go back to work once they were more independent. It's not that we couldn't make it work financially.
Anecdotally, I was against us having the second child. I wanted my wife to head back to work once my elder child was 3. There were a bunch of reasons she had dropped out but she had liked her job.
1. Gap between the two kids. We've generally observed that the best gap for siblings to bond is when they're within 4 yrs of each other. This isn't some great research but we just observed it in our friend circle.
2. We had excellent childcare close by, as in 5 minutes from home. I had flexible and remote work and would have been able to drop and pick my child up. I also had a provision where I could write the child care off my taxes.
She finally went back to work when my little one was 8. She did go back when the little one was 3 but had to drop out again because of a health issue with the little one.
Women being expected to stop their own careers and stay home as a housewife used to be quite normal and even expected in South Korea, but this has been changing quite quickly. Nowadays, many women return to work after giving birth - even quite quickly in many cases, and not by choice. Because the couples can't afford the kids otherwise.
Anecdotally: Most of my wife's circle of friends are in their early 30s to mid-30s with first children (and we're on the way to fitting this description as well) and back to work, while their mothers stopped working once they had children.
This is to say, the previous system was bad, but the new reality is in some sense worse: No, women bearing the brunt of child-bearing alone is not great, but now both parents work very hard in family-hostile work conditions to even make ends meet. Both parents working full-time is very difficult if neither employer is flexible enough not to handle "I have to pick my kid up today" or "my kid is sick".
Agreed completely, but I’ll add another point. About 50% of my friends are university+ educated women of different ethnicities, but all living in first world countries. We’re also all in our late 20s or 30s, so it’s becoming a “now or never” kind of dilemma for some of them.
We used to make “oh it’s expensive!” excuse until we started making decent money. Now that excuse doesn’t work, but there has been a significant precedence showing you can have a fulfilling life without having a child. You can have even a better one unless you have psychological attachment to it. I’ve heard my friends getting baby fever here and there, but then quick reality check of how much work it would be reminds them it’s not worth it.
And I completely agree, what’s the point? If you have some sort of spiritual or religious beliefs about life, maybe you can excuse it. But my circles don’t buy into those. We’ve also discussed global depopulation issues on different occasions, and consensus was “well, we didn’t cause this awful environment, so it’s not our problem”. Some sort of game theory problem where if you participate you’re more likely to be screwed unless majority participates. But if you don’t participate, you’re definitely on the winning side.
And another note, my friends in their late 30s/40s who always wanted to have a child have exactly one child for myriad of reasons. And obviously that’s not enough.
Sorry for the rant, but maybe the older generations were a bit more conscious rather than kicking the can down the road.
See, the thing is that I cannot entirely shake the feeling that part of this stance is a certain laziness/complacency, essentially a lack of interest in any challenging activities.
What I mean is: A lot of the people who come down against child-rearing for lifestyle reasons assign a lot of value to things they'd rather do instead because they provide "great experiences I'd miss out on because I won't have time or money anymore" like "traveling".
Which is of course true, having kids is a trade-of. But doesn't raising kids also provide a big set of exciting experiences you are trading-of against?
Sure, you can prefer one or the other at will, and it could absolutely be true that your pick is best for you. But I'll say that my friends who are into activities/experiences that provide challenge (e.g. sports, adventuring, what have you) also are often into having kids.
That makes me wonder if there's not something to cultivating the kind of experiences you seek to have.
Raising a child is a whole lifestyle change. It's a long term commitment and a whole shift in almost every priority in your life. Viewing child care as some challenge that only non-lazy people do is quite a stretch.
You have to see it in context: I'm wondering what leads specifically people who feel that generally speaking they could afford to have children and direction change if they wanted to, to prefer one set of priorities and experiences over another.
Keep in mind I'm responded to a comment that speculated on which choices lead to a "more fulfilling" life, which means it's a decision couched in a certain amount of safety and freedom. IMHO that set direction a bit and begged the question.
If you make it specifically about "more fulfilling", other branches of discussion (e.g. whether having children is a good idea for them or the planet) are at least partially taken off the table already. If you decide against children for one of those reasons, you don't even need to feel addressed.
You're right, framing the discussion around a "more fulfilling" life can limit other important aspects. People are highly complex. Ultimately I think the choice to raise a child comes down to an alignment with a huge set values and circumstances which are the result of countless factors.
> But doesn't raising kids also provide a big set of exciting experiences you are trading-of against?
Isn't this just FOMO? Some people will enjoy the experience of raising kids, some will not. Is it not better to regret not having kids than to have them and regret having them?
I don't doubt that, but speaking as someone building a non profit in stealth that covers the cost of permanent birth control for folks who can't get it completely covered by health insurance (or who have to rely on medical tourism to obtain it), I've spoken to many folks who adamantly don't want children and not because they are lazy or don't want a challenge.
Kids are a choice, not a mandatory checkbox. That is the thesis.
> Some people will enjoy the experience of raising kids, some will not.
Thats not why people have kids. Even people that have kids (and dont regret it) would like to spend their time on other things if they could. People dont choose to have kids based on how they like to spend their time.
> People dont choose to have kids based on how they like to spend their time.
I'm not sure I agree, at least universally. How do you decide for children without thinking about the changes it'll make to your daily life and whether that's something you want to be doing?
Of course there's plenty of people who have children because they feel it's expected of them, or economic necessity, or other external reasons.
Its called sacrifice. Enduring inconvenience or discomfort in favor of some greater cause.
That’s not to say everyone should have kids or feel this way. But it’s ridiculous to suggest some people just like video games, or traveling, and others like missing work deadlines to care for their sick child (or everything else that goes with raising kids).
Sacrifice is a choice in this scenario. I think, I agree with the OP above, that one chooses to not to make that sacrifice (e.g. lifestyle change). Just the value of the sacrifice has been getting lower and lower every year for younger people.
My point is people are choosing kids because of a deeper responsibility and meaning. Not because the experience of raising kids is more fun than hanging out with friends or other alternatives. The parent in this scenario is not maximizing their enjoyment or personal satisfaction in the way someone choosing their hobbies is. That distinction did not seem observed when comparing the choice to raise children with the choice to spend free time other ways.
I won't talk for my entire generation, but I (40 years old) have 2 kids for absolutely selfish reasons - I feel love for them and having my kids makes me deeply happy[0] in a way that nothing else really did (not my career nor my hobbies or friends). The only thing that comparably increased my happiness is having a long term romantic partner.
[0] even if there are plenty instances where they also annoy me
That's not the comparison I was originally making, though. I was specifically not talking about moment-to-moment sensations of pleasure.
What I meant to capture originally is that some people at least somewhat more habitually choose to spend their time in ways that involve sacrifice and delayed gratification, or are OK with activities that are e.g. (time-wise) 90% build-up for 10% release, or however you want to put it. For example, a long climb for a quick descent. Or a long march to see something first-hand.
Some people treat those activities as aspirational. And in my experience - which is of course anecdotal - that seems to correlate with whether they can get onboard with the idea of child-rearing. It's something about the effort-pleasure ratio and where your cut-off is, or your idea of how much hardship something special is worth, and perhaps whether you value cultivating an attitude about it.
People are not having kids because they have good alternatives now. International travel is affordable for more and more people, regularly going to fine dining establishments is something accessible to most American software engineers, and the people left having kids are the ones either too poor to afford those good things anyways, or people who are knowingly giving them up in exchange for expected joy from raising a child.
International travel and fine dining is absolutely not comparable to having kids in terms of the returns you get on these activities. I don't mean quantitatively, but qualitatively - you don't get the same kind of satisfaction from both.
The only thing I'd say is somewhat qualitatively comparable is being a in a loving relationship.
> International travel and fine dining is absolutely not comparable to having kids in terms of the returns you get on these activities.
The returns are guaranteed, whereas a child can end up having negative returns at an almost endless scale. The potential downsides to having a child are endless, the upside is limited and finite.
Also w/o children retiring early is doable for the financially responsible, whereas having even a single child makes that difficult.
Being financially independent at 40 or so allows for a lot of options for self fulfillment. An almost endless array of meaningful causes around the world are in dire need of help.
The tl;dr is that for a lot of people the choice comes down to "travel the world and have sex on beaches while eating fine food" or "unknown baby that might bring joy or potentially ruin your life."
Is it any wonder rational people are choosing the path that allows them to travel, eat well, be financially stable, and find meaningful hobbies and activities?
Again, I believe what it comes down to now is that people have a choice. It isn't "get married -> have kids" but rather "find partner, figure out what to do next".
Heck marriage rates are also plummeting (which IMHO is bad news for social stability).
The lack of social support certainly makes the choice of having kids harder, but my #1 ask isn't government funded daycare, it would be a world where having a large familial support structure is the norm.
Honestly the hardest part of having a kid is that without family nearby, there is no down time.
Government programs can't help that capitalism spread families to the winds.
I'm ok with people choosing not having children & it's good that there's a choice.
I'm just pointing out (from personal experience, an experience someone who doesn't have kids doesn't have) that it's not a float happiness with traveling the world adding +1.5f and a child +4.3f. It's not comparable, not in the colloquial sense that one is a much bigger value than the other but literally in the sense that it's not the same quality/feeling/satisfaction.
It's true that you don't know what you're going to get (e.g. children with disabilities are a lot more challenging that healthy kids) but I think the materialistic approach ("should I take 4 vacation or raise 1 child?") is not conductive to finding happiness in life.
I agree regarding the challenges in our current system & government/societal support.
The amount one must sacrifice is rising, regardless of the pay off. Everyone has their own threshold, yet the minimum needed to birth and raise kids is going up while buying power is decreasing.
I'd say plenty of people do things because they can envision it might be great, not because they feel FOMO. Do you never look forward to things without FOMO being the cause?
It also depends on how much of a reasonable idea you have about what you'd be getting yourself into, e.g. from participating in siblings raising children or other opportunities.
> But doesn't raising kids also provide a big set of exciting experiences you are trading-of against?
Maybe for you, but the value proposition isn’t there for me. There’s no indication that the world is willing to fix its global problems (climate change, housing problems and etc.), why would I also subscribe my child to this “fun”? It is weird to write that sentence, as I am generally a fairly optimistic person. But “let me sacrifice a ton, for a decent chance of misery of myself and my offspring” doesn’t sound right to me.
I was about to write a paragraph how my friends also like challenging activities, except having a child. But I couldn’t make my brain to compare “having a child” to a “challenging” activity. At the end, it’s one of the things, where you either want it or not. If you want people to want it, get the older generations to make a sacrifice for us and somehow fix the current socio-economic problems that’s discouraging the women.
>Maybe for you, but the value proposition isn’t there for me. There’s no indication that the world is willing to fix its global problems (climate change, housing problems and etc.), why would I also subscribe my child to this “fun”? It is weird to write that sentence, as I am generally a fairly optimistic person. But “let me sacrifice a ton, for a decent chance of misery of myself and my offspring” doesn’t sound right to me.
Let me offer a different perspective. Whenever I see your sentiment - that you are choosing to not have kids because the world sucks and you don't see us solving anything - my immediate reaction is that you deserve no voice whatsoever in how the rest of us decide to solve those problems. No voting, no representation, nothing. Having kids, in a sense, is a bet that we'll figure things out one way or another. You've made your bet, and are exiting the conversation because you don't have skin in the game (literally).
That might sound harsh, but it's essentially just the inverse of your sentiment justifying not having kids in the first place because of overwhelming pessimism about the future.
> Whenever I see your sentiment - that you are choosing to not have kids because the world sucks and you don't see us solving anything - my immediate reaction is that you deserve no voice whatsoever in how the rest of us decide to solve those problems. No voting, no representation, nothing. Having kids, in a sense, is a bet that we'll figure things out one way or another.
What an odd perspective. Are children the only way to have skin in the game when it comes to the future?
One consequence of doing something like this would be an almost complete removal of people who through no fault of their own cannot have children as well as some religious practitioners from public life.
Having just read the FDA announcement on artificial wombs, how would those fit into this?
>What an odd perspective. Are children the only way to have skin in the game when it comes to the future?
What, specifically, is odd about it? I think the stranger position is the one that allows people to inform policy that affects future generations when they themselves are intentionally not making themselves a part of that future. Put simply: why do you get a voice in what will affect my kids when you think the future is all for naught anyway?
Think of it like this: why do you think politicians always advertise the fact that they have a family when they're running for office (or hide the fact that they don't)? Because it, at a subconscious level, makes people feel comfortable. "This person's progeny have to live with these policies." It's a trust signal.
>One consequence...
I've stated twice now that intentionality matters. If you're referring to things like Monasteries, where people take vows of chastity (which would obviously preclude children), the idea of political participation is already complicated. I've known a Priest or two who don't believe Clergy should vote.
>Having just read...
I'm radically opposed to AWT for other not-unrelated reasons.
> What, specifically, is odd about it? I think the stranger position is the one that allows people to inform policy that affects future generations when they themselves are intentionally not making themselves a part of that future.
It's arbitrary and dogmatic to require having kids in order to have a say in the future, for starters?
> why do you think politicians always advertise the fact that they have a family when they're running for office (or hide the fact that they don't)?
That's not true in Western Europe and increasingly untrue in the US too.
> Because it, at a subconscious level, makes people feel comfortable. "This person's progeny have to live with these policies." It's a trust signal.
As an example I can think of many US politicians who had kids that supported the 2017 tax cuts and opposed measures to decarbonize the US economy. Kids or no kids, they don't care about the future.
Good for you. I’d even go further, force us to have kids. That’ll show us!
Glad that my attitude is in somewhat majority, otherwise we wouldn’t have potential depopulation problems. Don’t have to worry about these type of takes.
I'm not really trying to "show" you anything, in that sense.
I'm pointing out the absurdity of your position. Look, you can't have it both ways. You can't claim you care about the future and what happens to the planet and then intentionally make yourself not a part of it. I simply tune out and don't consider the opinions of folks who fall into that camp. Why would I?
I dunno, maybe you should, because unless our opinions are considered, the problems will only get worse?
It’s not like we’re some bunch of people who would never change our minds, but actions speak louder or something. If older people want us to take these bets, give us better odds.
Arguably many suffered and died young or lost young children. Some likely regretted having, or skipped having kids. It's completely legitimate to consider the societal costs and not only the benefits to birthing children.
Yeah and arguably, many survived to see the light on the other side of the tunnel.
It's completely legitimate in the same way as this argument is: "since there's a risk of me being hit by a car, or having an unpleasant day when I go outside, I better stay inside."
Overly focusing on the negative outcome to the point of inaction is often a thinly veiled excuse for some other often internal/personal reasons.
Doomerism doesn't have legitimacy because it's just a decaying idea. If ideas had an evolutionary tree, it is a recurring branch(leaf) that always died off while legitimately calling itself legitimate, every single time.
I have never seen this sort of extreme existential pessimism in real life (not online). Altering major life decisions like having children based on fears of a negative future. Im not sure if its just more commonly expressed online or if its more common in other place (Europe maybe?) or different age groups (teens or young adults?) but if I asserted this to people locally they would think im nuts.
Another possibility is this isn’t actually the difference between you wanting kids or not. Perhaps this is an oversimplified reason, but Im taking you at your word.
Not sure what to say, but do you have friends in their 20s? It’s not exact doomerism, but more of a “if I am struggling, why should I burden someone that I will love even more”.
And again, for a lot of people life can be more fulfilling without having a child as well. The general economy want these people to have children for its own benefit, not for the benefit of the parents.
As someone with kids I can tell that you I often wonder if it was the right thing to do. Have I brought them into a world which will deliver them misery? Are the opportunities that were available to me, and even more so my parents, gone now? The evidence is looking grim. The prognosis is not good. This world is going to shit and the billionaires in charge don’t give a single fuck.
I'm from Europe so maybe you're right about that part, but almost every girl in college had that opinion or at least partially agreed to it, age being around 18-25.
You shouldn't take OP at his word though. The glaring observation I had that was shared by many, many, is that this is a very age-group specific thing.
Even the most vocal ones of this existential pessimists stopped it at around 28-30 years old, when the question stopped being idealization but very personal.
Existential pessimism leading to life decisions are usually just an rationalized excuse for other, often more personal, situational and emotional, reasons.
"are humans rational or irrational? It's a trick question, humans are ratioanalizers. We make up our mind and then come up with a plausible reason and believe in it"
Existential dread is a catchy, relatable idea without any consequences.
Holding that idea when you're under 30 doesn't mean much because most people don't have any important life decision they can't postpone while holding it. As soon as the reality offers the consequence of said belief, people will actually have a serious thought about it.
Very few people I know that in the end decided to live child free at later age, claimed existential dread as the reason. Most people grew up enough to realize that it is ultimately a decision based on personal/ego reasons/preferences, a gut feeling, and trying to justify it with some limited scope "rationalization" is just kidding themselves
The "challenging activity" stuff comes from the fact that my brain just can't compute the "I'd rather have all these great experiences than having kids"-type statements and not seeing any potential for great experiences in child-rearing, especially when those experiences often seem to be a lot more copy-paste.
"Challenging" also maybe doesn't quite capture what I meant. Do you know how you sometimes have to bike somewhere two hours on a slow, heavy MTB that makes it a slog for a 15min downhill descent? It's more that kind of challenge.
> See, the thing is that I cannot entirely shake the feeling that part of this stance is a certain laziness/complacency, essentially a lack of interest in any challenging activities.
This mentality of "I'm a mom, what's your superpower?" really irritates me.
For what you know, I could be fitter, smarter, more interesting that you and embrace challenge every day of my life. But having a child would always put you a step above, because it's oh, so challenging.
Couples take on all sorts of challenging hobbies and endeavors on a regular basis, some requiring years to build up and master. The difference is that with most of those things, they're not walking a tightrope and putting the wellbeing of another person in the balance by doing so. Many couples would be putting themselves at much higher risk of financial ruin by having kids and making sure they're properly cared for.
I agree with this. There's sadly too many places where society & co don't help mitigate and minimize the risk, either, and I absolutely respect people who feel the risk to themselves or the children is undue.
Beehiveourall hacked to go against most basic instinct as proof of concept. Social engineering progress,but to offer no api for the hacker is selected for.
Those with api go into the catcentration camp. The final conflict emerges abstract organisms (companies) vs unhackable societys trying to dislodge lifeblood (workforce) from these societies whole contributing nothing back.
> I see no reason why women would ever want children. What's society providing them that they need to make this sacrifice?
What do you think your future holds? If we are entirely realistic, I think in 50-60 years, and perhaps much sooner, we'll almost certainly be dead. On our way out everyone and everything we've ever known will also be dying. Best friends we'd thought would last to the end will fade and disappear long before.
And that's just the start. Because well before the end our bodies will begin to fail, with our minds often enough not far behind. And, without family, a very likely scenario is that we simply end up alone. In Japan there are so many people dying completely alone, often unnoticed until a neighbor or service worker smells the rot, that they have a term for it: kodokushi - lonely deaths. [1] South Korea has followed suit with godoksa. By raising a family we not only get to fulfill our ultimate responsibility in the continuance of the species, but also you in many ways provide some continuance of ourselves. And as you age we will always have family, such that we will never truly be alone in this world.
It seems to me that the masses of people not having children today is vaguely familiar to the masses of people taking out 6 figure loans to pursue random degrees, unlikely to benefit their ability to provide a living for themselves. They certainly know what everybody is saying about such decisions, but somehow think it won't apply to them. And in any case the consequences are so far removed from the present that it can sometimes be difficult to take them seriously, but that doesn't mean those consequences don't exist.
That's basically my point. There's probably half of humanity today (the women) who can help with this. And no one is making life easier for them if they decide to go through with it. In fact the men most of the time make it harder.
Why should women help here? Why acquiesce to the needs of a society that doesn't care about their mental, physical and professional needs?
This really defines the problem. (1) we approach child rearing as an economic proposition, and (2) it doesn’t make sense to as an economic proposition.
But the more we fight the second proposition, the more we reinforce the first.
Trying to make kids less expensive still treats this as a financial calculation.
When you ask “why have kids?” there needs to be a real answer, and I don’t think “the economic public good” is going to convince people.
That's why religions tend to assign child rearing a extentential "Go straight to hell" punishment if you don't do it. It turns out it's a great way to keep your religion around.
Although many religions encourage the raising of families more than secular culture does, I have not really seen this "have kids or go to hell" thing you're describing.
They don't want you to sleep around, and in some religions they don't want you to use birth control, but there's not a lot actively saying you need to have kids.
Sometimes having children is strongly implied for those who follow the path of marriage (and may officially even be the purpose of that), but there are typically also paths where people are expected to remain celibate.
Arguably, say in the Catholic church, there is too much emphasis on the latter, what with celibate clergy and everything. In LDS I would say family is more of an ideal. This extends even into the theology. Catholics say "'til death do us part", but LDS say husband and wife go to heaven together and stay married there forever. Hinduism overall seems less obsessed with correct behavior (it has dharma, of course, but no simple hell thing), but it also provides both householder and ascetic paths.
I think religions sort of take it for granted that enough people will want to get married, and that if you get married you'll have kids. Instead they're worried about self control.
Little did they anticipate that the superego would maintain its iron grip without help, that the rationally-planning ego would have the means and motive to skip kids entirely, and that the id would get so distracted with hatred of other people that it wouldn't even try to bring them together, even in unwise or destructive ways. But that's where we are.
Well more concretely, it's that the people paying the cost do not directly reap the benefits of the investment.
A child has extremely high long-term ROI for the economy. But (for good reasons) you can't take out a loan in the name of a future child for a larger house now. Someone (aka) the government needs to be future-sighted enough to make the investment. Unfortunately, governments are run by people who will individually not reap political benefit for good outcomes 30+ years in the future.
> governments are run by people who will individually not reap political benefit for good outcomes 30+ years in the future.
Study proposal: Are there more family-friendly policies in hereditary monarchies (which have longer incentive horizon than democratically elected politicians do)? Are birthrates higher in kingdoms?
I don't agree that an incremental human is a big benefit for The Economy. In a steady state it should be mostly neutral in terms of the per capita GDP (of course there are non-linearities with things like scientific discoveries scaling to all of humanity). Even considering taxes an incremental average human should have no impact on the total welfare of society. In a changing demographic pyramid (inverting) I can agree to your point though because the child will be forced to pay an even higher amount towards the wealth distribution towards the care of (child-less) older people.
I think the incentives could be fixed in a simple (not easy) way, by not letting childless people benefit from the safety net spanned by children of other people.
> I think the incentives could be fixed in a simple (not easy) way, by not letting childless people benefit from the safety net spanned by children of other people.
Yeah this is the only serious fix, but once childless people become a large % of the electorate (aka it's a real problem), they can vote against assuming responsibility for the problem they created... and your country is basically in an inescapable doom loop.
That'd be an extremely complicated fix though. Are sterile people automatically excluded from old age benefits? What about someone who suffered from assault and finds reproduction traumatic? What about someone who simply finds reproduction repulsive? What about conscientious objectors who think that over population is a serious issue and refuse on moral grounds? What about people with disorders or genetic aberrations that they don't wish to pass on? What about women with physical defects that make pregnancy extremely dangerous? (some heart conditions for instance)
That road is extremely grey and has a lot of really difficult edge cases you'll need to sort out.
Also - if we just need a next generation in the workforce immigration is an excellent option for the time being.
First of all there is still adoption for many of the points you raise. Secondly, is it justified to risk societal collapse to right these naturally occurring wrongs/unjustnesses? It‘s a hard question especially because we don‘t/can‘t have a sound theory that predicts the future. I believe only society/country scale evolution can figure this out.
IMO thats btw. one of the downsides of the EU, eliminating the differences/competition between countries stalling this kind of evolutionary truth seeking process
yeah children used to be the best investment, nowadays in developed countries it seems a lot of young people think the opposite, and they have good reasons to.
it's going to be a sad, empty and quiet world in the west a few decades in the future.
This is perpetually self correcting. The societies which don't take joy in having children die out and are replaced by those that do. Surely this has been happening for millennia, and the reason that we see most societies as being pro-natal is survivorship bias.
This may be a bit of a depressing point but, for a long time in western society, a women's role was accepted to purely be a mother and caregiver. When you say "was seen" I think it's important to clarify that it was seen that way from the point of view of society - society certainly impressed this view on women raised within it but I don't think we can disentangle the taught behaviors from natural behaviors.
Some of these beliefs still stretch into the modern day in really toxic ways - my sister-in-law (a tenure track professor) got a lot of flack from tenured professors who had deferred having a family until the window had closed when she had to duck out of a semester for maternity leave.
Not sure where you are but it feels that this is exactly what it's like in America. I am not sure why nobody really cares and I suspect by the time people try to do something about it, it won't be too late, but it's going to take a Herculean effort to fix. Mindset and structural support.
It is. The only difference is that the US (and Canada) are way more welcoming of immigrants than South Korea or Japan. That's basically what's keeping them competitive. I'm also pretty sure that high birth rate from illegal south american immigrants keeps US population going. The legal immigrants have children but at a subsistence level, generally <= 2.
TFR for the United States is 1.84, while South American countries rage from 1.75 (Uruguay) to 2.26 (Bolivia)[1]. It's tricky to find data on how the US TFR breaks out demographically. It would be very interesting, to your point, to see if immigrant TFR just echos the origin country or if there's a debuff applied for living in the United States. Anecdotally, this feels true to me less more Traditional Catholic immigrant families from Mexico or El Salvador but I've no idea if the data backs it up.
My understanding is that Japan requires dual Japan/US citizens to choose one citizenship when they turn 18. If Japan allowed dual citizenship, they could see dual citizens return and raise families. These dual citizens would enable Japan to maintain more homogeneity via immigration while also increasing population growth.
Singapore solved most of those problems decades ago. Essentially:
1. Force children to take care their aged parents.
2. Entice children to buy housing close to their parents.
3. Ensure priority of children living within close of a school to get into that school.
4. Massive subsidies for childcare. Bigger subsidies for working parents and little for those stay home mum dad. This is to avoid situation in the west where you get free money the more unemployed and children you have.
5. Baby bonus tied to the more children you have. Bonus is locked in a special account with very special and limited use for children needs (hospitals, childcare, school fees). Unlike the western countries baby bonus which parents can redirect to buy TV for themselves.
6. Build clusters of community close to each others with facilities to promote society integration.
7. Allowing low cost domestic helpers from neighboring countries with low wages or unemployed. Unlike western countries asking for equal living minimum wages to wrongly think on citizen would rather be domestic helpers or laborer. Use market force to ensure workers able to change jobs as they like to force employers to increase salary to retain workers.
8. Improve low cost healthcare access (though Korean doing this better).
9. Tightly control property market which dont contribute to national productivity. Ensuring everyone has a home and not hoarding homes to bid up prices (one of the downfall of Japan in 80s because allowing overinflated property....Korean and China seems to following Japanese route which can tie up monthly child support money for servicing debts).
10. Superb public transport and highly subsidies transports to ensure the poor can be as mobile as those rich within country.
11. Encouraging more willing to give-birth-foreigners as citizens to damp down arrogant locals of just want to enjoy being singles.
12. Actively tie subsidies with willingness to start family and having more babies throughout every facet of available subsidies. For example subsidies depends on number of households in a home rather than per individual citizen.
This is largely governance issue and not corporate. Korean officials largely undereducated and lack integrity as those in Singapore where they sack officials if even involved in marital affairs NATIONALLY.
South Korea was among the poorest countries in the world - poorer than many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa as recently as the 1960s. Withing a single lifetime they transformed themselves into one of the most advanced developed economies on the planet with a madman (mad men) on their doorstep.
It’s natural that that kind of change will have some massive societal implications, many of which they are still sorting out.
Their birth rate is something that will require immense attention and work to begin to correct, but it’s worth noting what they’ve accomplished in getting to a place where they can afford to worry about that as one of their primary concerns.
> it’s worth noting what they’ve accomplished in getting to a place where they can afford to worry about that as one of their primary concerns
It's probably also worth noting the long history of military dictatorships, murderous suppression of worker rights, massive ongoing corruption (including a literal cult controlling the government until 2016) and the highest suicide rate in the world. Reducing the story to just economies is truly narrow minded.
You can say the same things, or even worse, about many countries in the same time frame — China, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Chile. South Korea both achieved economy miracle, and transformed itself into a solid democracy, better than any of the others
It's easy to illustrate the impact of fertility rates by model, and it's far more rapid/severe than I think most realize. A fertility rate of "N" means that the next younger generation will be N/2 times as large. So, a fertility rate of 2 means no change, while a fertility rate of 4 would result in an exponential doubling. How about 0.7? We can create a population distribution of this easily enough because we know how big each generation will be relative to the one after it. Assume each generation is 20 years (if its longer - things look even worse). We end up with, for instance:
===
1000 eighty year olds, 350 sixty year olds, 122 forty year olds, 42 twenty year olds, 15 newborns.
===
So you have a working age population of ~300 people working to support a population of 1529. You have a median age of 80, and an average age of 70. Think about the pressure on hospital, healthcare, and any sort of pension or other programs. Those 300 people need to not only man all of these jobs, but also somehow keep the entire economy from collapsing. I mean it's just not going to work.
And then of course your population will be declining catastrophically quickly. The ~20 years during which those 1000 eighty year olds die will result in a population decline of 65%. Yet that's no salvation because the ratio of age distributions won't change at all, unless fertility rates do. You'll end up in the exact same position, continuing to lose 65% of your population each 20 years to come.
Even worse, it's N/2.1 rather than N/2 due to pre-child-bearing-age mortality.
OTOH, obviously 1000 people aren't going to be alive at the age of 80. In Korea life expectancy is 83, but if it was 80 then we'd have 500 people alive at the age of 80, not 1000.
It'd be interesting to redo your numbers with an actuarial table.
That's true. I ran a simple model a few years back. I expected my population to last for a few centuries at reproduction rate like 1.5, but they all died super quickly after an initial bulge.
Next 30 years are going to be a huge surprise for the population of all developed countries that they has successfully shrugged off till now.
I see little emphasis in this article on real estate or rents. Sure, the issues they raise are contributors, but housing issues are foundational for many of the other problems they spend a lot of time on in the article. SK is more land-constrained than Japan. We're seeing family formation being negatively impacted in many areas of the world now due to high real estate prices. It's particularly acute in SK:
The textbook life you're supposed to lead in South Korea (and while South Korea is a very dynamic country that is always changing fast, for the moment, the expectation to adhere to norms and aspire to what your folks did is still a bit higher than you're perhaps used to) is to get married, move into a marriage home you bought - more on this in a moment - a couple of months to weeks before the ceremony to start co-habitation, and get busy having children.
"Buying a home" in South Korea means either outright buying, or very commonly, living rent-free for the duration of a one- or multi-year contract after putting down a deposit that is usually 75% or more of the property value. This system is considered good and desirable, called Jeonse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeonse
For numerous reasons, the Jeonse system is slowly getting dismantled. Monthly rent schemes are slowly becoming more and more prevalent. This is causing a big squeeze/run on the now-fewer good Jeonse apartments available, and giving many South Koreans the feeling that it's harder than ever to find a home to have, which is so intrinsically linked to this life milestone that for some, it puts getting married out of question.
In addition to the above issue, which is meant as perceptual, it's also actually become economically more difficult to afford good housing. Some of this is very real and beyond the control of individuals, others is peer pressure to allocate money to e.g. luxury goods. Overall it's become tough on couples to afford housing and kids without both parents working very hard, which in turns makes child-rearing difficult to pull off; Korean employers and co-workers are still very hostile to workers with children (don't bring private issues to work, etc.).
(I'm not Korean, but I've lived there for some years, can communicate in the language and read the news, and am married to a South Korean citizen with a child on the way; the latter is one of the reasons we moved away.)
> Another economic factor in the falling birthrate is the rising price of real estate and a resulting increase in unmarried or late-marrying people. The tradition in Korea is for men to prepare a family home before marrying, and the rising cost of housing in recent years has thereby triggered a decline in marriage rates. The Bank of Korea recently enacted emergency interest rate hikes that brought down the price of condominiums, but the interest rate on mortgages has risen, keeping home ownership a distant dream for many.
Ok, there's a bit of a mention there, but they don't seem to consider it the foundational issue. They mention education costs for several paragraphs - education costs would likely not be so high if real estate costs weren't so high.
Fewer desireable/high paying jobs gets several paragraphs, but again, this would be less of a problem if rents weren't so high - people would be able to live on the incomes available. High real estate prices are sucking the oxygen out of the rest of the economy.
> Another economic factor in the falling birthrate is the rising price of real estate and a resulting increase in unmarried or late-marrying people. The tradition in Korea is for men to prepare a family home before marrying, and the rising cost of housing in recent years has thereby triggered a decline in marriage rates.
"Another economic factor in the falling birthrate is the rising price of real estate and a resulting increase in unmarried or late-marrying people. The tradition in Korea is for men to prepare a family home before marrying, and the rising cost of housing in recent years has thereby triggered a decline in marriage rates."
Not only the marriage rates. A much bigger property is needed for three children than for one, so even if poor old husband manages to scrape together enough for a one-bedroom apartment, there is a strong disincentive incentive to have two more children...
There are two modes of renting in Korea, one of them involves you paying Full market value to renter as a deposit! In theory you will get all of your money back at the end of lease. Renter invests this money into something, hopefully not another rental property seeing as they just had a mini real-estate crash. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-south-koreas-housing...
South Korea is hostile for new families. Unless you were born to rich parents, have a decent education with a good job (that's with a Multi-national or a Chaebol), own property in Seoul, find a partner, and survive the probability of divorce, having a child is impossible--let alone having two to meet the population replacement rate.
To add some color: South Korea is somewhere between the size of Kentucky and Indiana (the 37th and 38th largest states), yet has over 51 million people, almost 15 million more than California, the most populous state. It has very few natural resources to speak of, and is roughly two-thirds mountainous, meaning most of the population is condensed in the few flat areas. In some ways, it's natural that the fertility rate would be so low, purely out of density, if nothing else.
It's honestly miraculous how far it's come. Within one lifetime, it went from a primarily agricultural economy to one of the world's largest and most industrialized. It builds (at times) half of the world's ships in tonnage, and its engineers and contractors are responsible for many of the world's tallest buildings.
As impressive as it sounds to say South Korea developed successfully on its own, did it? Did the US play any hand in its development? I mean obviously South Korea would not exist had it not been for the US' help in the war. But even afterwards, is there an sort of advantage South Korea had by having the US (the leading super power at the time) help?
The US provided a lot of support, which South Korea used well. But, several other countries got similar levels of support and achieved nothing...the corrupt leaders sold the country on the cheap.
South Korea could have very well been used as the US's beachhead especially during a time when China and Japan were becoming growing empires. Several businesses also benefited from the prosperity of neighboring countries. The Korean news to this day reports on export trends because of it being an exports-based economy.
A period of rapid easy growth has put Won into the pockets of Seoulites who merely became rich from just owning property. Unfortunately, this wealth did not propagate evenly throughout and the younger demographics are suffering today as a result.
It's arguable that Japan helped South Korea industrialize by offloading industries it could no longer afford due to rising wages.
This article is about analyzing the comparison raised between South Korea and Ukraine, but it is largely about analyzing how South Korea industrialized from Japan's assistance.
I didn't mean to imply that South Korea developed all on its own. (A good example of a country that tried to do that, with closed borders, is its northern neighbor.) Certainly, having the foremost superpower in its corner helped tremendously, much like the Marshall Plan did for post-WW2 Western Europe. It's a fascinating history that I can in no way do justice in a HN comment, save to say that one can't simply throw money at a country and come out with a result like South Korea. :-)
Sure, but the US also tried to help other countries such as the Philippines and Iraq which haven't done nearly as well. US aid doesn't seem to be the decisive factor.
It seems like post war japan and south korea saw a lot of investment into their manufacturing. Why didn’t the philippines see a similar level of investment at the time considering it was also destroyed and in need for rebuilding? Not destroyed enough relative to the firebombings of the japan home islands perhaps?
The Philippines saw a massive amount of American investment after WWII. I don’t have exact figures but it is comparable to South Korea. There are lots of differences. One Marcos was the most corrupt politician in history (in terms of total money looted). Two, Korea benefited from cultural and geographic proximity to Japan. As a former colony it was able to sell low cost products on the Japanese market and secure manufacturing contracts from Japanese firms. Three you might also make a point about the influence of Confucianism and Protestantism on Korea. To this day Korea is a very Christian country by East Asian standards (~30%) and the Chaebols are more Protestant than the overall population. Contrast with the Catholic Philippines and you can make a classic Weberian case of work ethic.
Japan colonized, invaded, and stole Korea for about 35 years under the guise of imperialism. Japan's colonial policy was the most tyrannical, unauthorized, and vicious in that it aimed not only at socio-economic theft but also at ethnic extermination. The Japanese did not hesitate to revise the mental culture through history, suppress the use of the Korean language, and destroy national cultural heritage. The anti-Japanese independence struggle was so stubborn and steadfast that it became a model for minority peoples around the world and led to liberation. The detrimental effects of Japanese power on Korean history were so severe that they led to the division of Korea into North and South Korea.
This isn't enough of an explanation. South Korea is denser than India, but only by ~20%, and India's fertility rate is more than double South Korea's. Taiwan is denser than South Korea, but its fertility rate is more than 50% higher. South Korea really is an outlier.
You might also compare the United States to its peers in Europe--fertility isn't that much higher in the US (and is lower compared to a few European countries that are much denser).
Indeed. Infinite growth as demanded by capitalism is not physically possible. If they wouldn't hit "the wall" now, they would hit it anyway in the near future.
Maybe South Korea's situation should give all ageing rich developed nations something to reflect on and start making preparations for the upcoming demographic plateau/collapse and reform stuff like welfare/pension systems, instead of blindly kicking the can down the road thinking growth is never ending.
True. However bullwhip effects are real as well. An undamped population explosion/collapse cycle is natural and stable, however it is far from ideal.
A 0.7 fertility rate is tiny. Keep in mind that fertility rate is measured per-female. So the per-capita rate is .35. If this holds, it means that the next generation will be 65% smaller than the current. This will inevitably lead to an overcorrection followed by a period of unsustainable population growth again.
To my knowledge there's no historic precedent for what's happening. Times of regrowth in the past after catastrophic decline (such as major war) was generally already in the context of extremely high fertility rates. What we do have is increasing evidence, across multiple nations such as Iran and China, that it's relatively easy to lower fertility rates and extremely difficult to bring them back up.
So I don't think there's any reason to expect a bullwhip type effect. It could simply be that we've created a system which does remarkably well up front, and then catastrophically collapses in the tail-end. If one wants to be especially fatalistic, we could even be looking at the Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox, but I think that's improbable - there still remain many high fertility cultures and they will simply inherit the world as low fertility cultures die off.
It’s only possible to happen now due to birth control, so it is the first time. In the past after great deaths the mostly young population had a bunch of kids.
That’s impossible now, because the people left behind after the collapse are mostly old.
In John Calhoun's mouse utopia universe 25 experiments, overpopulation inevitably leads to implosion characterized by asocial, juvenile behavior and inability to bond, and there was never any rebound.
You seem to be conflating economic growth with population growth. Also the concern is not that Korea's population is failing to grow, it's that it's failing to stabilize and will soon shrink significantly.
In my search to provide find examples of economic and population growth correlations, I came across two papers[1][2] which find no correlation. Thank you for changing my mind.
"The wall" is already manifesting in Europe as well, in terms of CoL and real estate prices[1] where even skilled workers can't afford a decent home anymore or build any wealth after paying the inflated rents from their stagnating wages. You either inherit something from your parents or are screwed if you don't get a top FAANG/F500 job out of university. Working for small or average companies doesn't cut it anymore.
It feels like the society collectively decided "no more new building" to make housing scarce and inflate up property prices of existing owners at the expense of the newcomers.
Seems like a common theme among the developed world from the Americas all the way to AU-NZ.
> It feels like the society collectively decided "no more new building"
This, more than anything else, seems to be the problem in the developed West, at least when it comes to real estate prices and related cost of living issues. At least in the US, there's a pretty strong correlation between land-use freedom[0] (that is, the ability for landowners to develop that land into more productive use, including higher-density housing) and median home/rent prices.
In the EU in particular, there's the nZEB standard, which became a requirement for new buildings. This makes the initial costs higher, but the ongoing ones lower.
There are only three options possible. Growth, stability, and shrinking. The fertility numbers are in the shrinking range.
And the worst part is that when shrinking, economies contract and things get worse. If they can't afford to have children now, then people in South Korea in 20 years will certainly not have it any better. It's an extinction death spiral.
Yes and what people don't realise is that exponential effects start to take place as a smaller population is than having fewer children and is this continues, the Korean people will effectively disappear in 100 years or so. Those fewer people must also support an aging population. It's a death spiral both for the people and the economy. If North Korea keeps fertility rate at its current level, they will exist into the future and the South will disappear.
There is a huge leap from "Infinite growth is not possible" to we're about to hit a wall.
And I don't know how capitalism demands more growth, it just provides more growth which is why capitalism is successful at things like reducing poverty.
> It's honestly miraculous how far it's come. Within one lifetime, it went from a primarily agricultural economy to one of the world's largest and most industrialized.
Is it miraculous if it's not sustainable, as we are clearly seeing? They had a massive, far-beyond-replacement-rate boom of the population, based on the 1970s and 1980s levels of fossil fuel consumption, fueled also by rapid globalization.
If the trends for energy and globalization are reversed, what are they going to do with a massively aged population around 2040-2050?
It seems like their demographic crisis is going to be one of the worst in the world, perhaps worse even than Japan's ?
One issue is that there are many who are not willing to live normal lives and there's this constant battle of trying to outdo one another. People are trying to please even mere strangers standing next to them at the crosswalk. Living mediocre is bad and there's a negative stigma associated to being middle to lower class.
If your apartment isn't a Prugio or Lotte Castle and live in Bangbae;
If your car isn't a AMG, BMW M, or at least a Genesis;
If your bag isn't a Hermes or a LV;
If your morning routine doesn't include an Ah-Ah (Ice Americano);
If your baby stroller isn't a Yoyo;
If your watch isn't an Apple Watch or Omega;
If your shoes aren't won through a Nike Raffle and have high resale;
If your road bike riding through Hangang isn't a Pinarello;
You'll be forever mediocre.
My solution? Spread the population apart such that people will stop comparing themselves with one another. There are plenty of places outside of Seoul where there's fiber internet, good schools that are empty (better teacher to student ratio), and cheap land. People should be more willing to embrace the countryside (shigol) and stop thinking it's bad or without opportunity. I hope there will be more remote jobs that pay well to incentivise new families to go outward. Seoul needs some rest!
> My solution? Spread the population apart such that people will stop comparing themselves with one another.
Small villages where everyone knows each other can be just as bad regarding bullying and talking behind one's backs, although I do agree - especially as some here in Western countries keep advocating for megacities and accelerating rural flight because of resource usage efficiency - that too dense populations are a hotbed of all kinds of social issues.
Having spent some time recently in Seoul, the amount of materialism and status oneupsmanship was striking compared to the USA. One hypothesis I have is that it's because of the genetic homogeneity of everyone there, meaning the main way to differentiate between others is through your things.
Interesting idea. You see this sort of thing throughout the westernized world, perhaps not as extreme as SK, but I've never been so I can't compare.
This is a completely busted system of values though... Almost everything you mention is the luxury version of things that all have functionally very similar alternatives at a much lower cost. The main value is signaling and maybe satisfying some mimetic desire. As signaling, it's a zero sum game, and is mostly just consuming all excess resources.
The question is why do people feel that this is the best use of their resources? Do they not have any purpose for their lives beyond consumption? Why are people being judged largely based on the consumer products they can afford instead of whether they're a kind person or whether they have a a lot of friends or whether they're proud of their children or any number of other positive things they could be doing?
> Do they not have any purpose for their lives beyond consumption?
A lot of people have no purpose in their life beyond consumption. Truly, this is it.
If people put the tiniest fraction of work into their fitness, their personality, their intelligence or any other character-building activity or experience instead of working away to buy trinkets and tokens of vapid displays of wealth, we may actually get somewhere as a species.
Exercising is hard, as is resisting junk food, as is reading a book compared to watching TV, or throwing yourself into a new situation. It's so much easier to not do that stuff, sit in an office and collect a paycheck and redirect that money towards things we think make us better than each other.
Personally, I'm way more impressed with the people I know who run 100km+ a week, workout hard and study hard, than people who walk around wearing designer clothes or showing off the things they've bought. The latter sounds sort of pathetic.
This is an old thread, but I just saw your response. I think fitness is a fine goal instrumentally, and way better than just buying crap you don't need, but ultimately your six pack abs are still another trinket or token. The question is what your purpose is. For some people, their main purpose is bringing up the next generation. Others try to build big things. Others try to discover something new. Others want to help create or perpetuate useful organizations. Others want to glorify God.
Now all of that said, if you want your six pack abs so that you can attract a wife so that you can start a family, great. If you want to be fit so that you'll live longer and with more energy so that you can accomplish other things, also great.
My general feeling though is that due to a bunch of changes in the modern world, people have lost outlets for a sense of purpose in their lives, and this is leading to major psychological problems.
> My solution? Spread the population apart such that people will stop comparing themselves with one another.
That would fix the problem, but it's not a solution, because there's no practical way to implement it. It's hard to imagine that even five people would willingly move out of Seoul.
Not really, the degree of flaunting just changes. People with a little bit of money have Nikes, people with a bit more have designer clothing, people with a lot more have lavish houses and yachts, and the people with the most have "foundations".
The real rich, the capital owners, are not the ones flaunting wealth for status...that's the upper class people with high-paying jobs; rich but not wealthy.
Guessing ... because of appreciating real estate and concentration of jobs, living in certain cities/areas became culturally synonymous with "being a winner" while staying in rural/industrial towns meant "being a loser". So the big cities became the bottle neck through which all young people need to funnel before they deem each other worthy of starting families. And that's a bottle neck on population growth.
The same mechanism exists elsewhere but the contrasts between "stagnant vs vital" would be more pronounced in SK, probably because of the rate and scale of the economy over the last 40-50 years. Maybe?
The government needs to stop fuelling the bubble. Instead, raise mortgage rates (so that "time in market" stops being a factor) and force industry to spread out offices and jobs (of all ranks) evenly throughout the country.
Lot's of sticks. No real estate / wealth transfers unless to couples with 2 kids. New nuclear families either have potential windfall of 4x estates/wealth/housing from multiple older generations or they have to work the uphill childless grind. Combine with subsidies for home ownership in desirable areas for those with kids. BAN PET OWNERSHIP for those without kids. IMO This one huge. Increasing trend of emotional surrogate pets filling emotional void in east asia. Need to drive down cost of people settling for medicore relationships.
It's not enough to make economics of having kids easier, you have to make not having kids harder.
As someone who's lived in both areas, California still had opportunities for advancement during my career if one was willing to work hard. In SK, you can work hard all your life but as opportunities are limited, you'll get stuck in toil.
When tourists look at S. Korea and say, "Hey, it's real nice here!" They don't see the hundreds of low-paid workers who are working behinds the scenes. There are plenty of low paying jobs but nothing that can help one build generational wealth.
It's exactly the same in western Europe. American tourists visit here on vacation and think "wow it's really nice here, it's walkable and full of culture" but they don't see there's no opportunities for building generational wealth, as all of it has already been captured by the previous generations so the new generation is stuck in serfdom.
The vast majority of Americans aren’t building generational wealth anyway.
Plus is wealth really all that valuable when you don’t have to worry about crime, funding your child’s education, losing your job, or having a major health scare? When living in a walkable area full of culture is an option everywhere, rather than a select few areas?
As someone that lived there with a kid a while back, I agree, and it's only gotten tougher since I left.
> What's the solution?
Let's start by identifying the problem. The problem is that everyone wants to live in Seoul, or even in particular parts of Seoul. Is there a solution to that? Hard to see what it might be.
The solution is fewer people - which is the direction they are headed.
S.Korea has twice the population density of Germany for instance. So cutting in to half the current number seems about right.
Honest question: who benefits from population growth besides developers?
> Honest question: who benefits from population growth besides developers?
Honest answer: next generation of retirees / older people. They need young people in multiple ways - 1. to sustain welfare (which is pay-as-you-go universally), 2. production of food / entertainment / stuff, 3. services
If you think automation is going to solve that, just look at who were "essential service workers"[1] in Covid where governments had to make exceptions even in the early days of pandemic when things were at their scariest. All those are essential functions for the society. Who is going to handle all of that when each next generation is only 35% of the previous generation's size (with a TFR of 0.7)?
Question was - "who benefits from population growth"
You know that immigrants don't grow on trees or in labs, right? They are also part of "population growth", just somewhere else. And bringing too many of them en mass is already destabilizing infertile societies (see: European ones).
everyone. more humans = more geniuses = more technology = more everything. The modern world would not have existed with a global population capped at 100k humans or something
Rapid changes are always problematic, no matter the direction. Society and environments can accommodate slow changes much easier than they can accommodate quick ones.
Well, we probably can’t support the semiconductor supply chain with half the workers due to the statistics involved of the percentage of humans interested/capable in stem.
Have the Gov subsidized the young with generous programs, perhaps a monthly fee for each child where at some level (2-3 children), one parent could stay home to raise them and collect a modest salary. Otherwise most young folks can't afford it.
The government is already subsidizing families with children. 700,000 won ($528) per month up to age of one, and 350,000 won ($264) per month up to the age of two. It's certainly a nice to have but not enough.
Agree, it sounds like peanuts. Probably still better than nothing on net but substantially raising this subsidy is the first thing to do if making a serious attempt to improve things for families.
This seems to be the problem with all the developing countries. Economic growth requires, men and women both prioritising jobs over marriage and family stability. Divorces happen because there is immense incentive for women to look for better partners even after 1, or many marriages. The incentives are life long, premium monthly pensions with annual raises and child support payments. All you have to do is marry some one, and divorce them. They now owe you life long monthly pensions.
There is not a job on earth where you can work two years, and then be entitled to life long pensions. Not even in the extreme politics of communism was this even imagined, to the scale marriage has been reduced to now.
Given all, marriage and even having kids is heavily disincentivised. You have to be an idiot beyond belief to walk into something like this.
Apart from this, even with a perfect marriage. Most men have to deal with never ending disappointed feelings from women for working to death and still coming short of their expectations. Given all this I don't think there is a easy solution for this birth rate problem.
Social engineering on the scale of countries is needed. The overall social and cultural trend world wide are no where near whats needed to bring about these birth rate increases.
There's a good note about the vast disparity between tiers of employers in South Korea (and will likely ring true in other countries too)
>> There is also a large wage gap between the primary labor market of major companies, like Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor Company, and the secondary labor market of small to medium-sized enterprises. This labor market polarization is progressing, and there is an even greater disparity in labor conditions than in Japan. [...] Employees of larger companies are much better off, with relatively higher salaries, better working conditions, and labor union protections. Those in SMEs, though, earn low wages, work under harsher conditions, and have no unions to protect their rights in negotiations with management, making these companies far less attractive to job seekers.
I'd pair that with a François Mitterrand-era (i.e. ~1980-95) French position that 'Progress means nothing unless it is shared by all.'
Chaebols are antithetical to democracy, as ultimately people will always act in their own best interests, and centralized individual economic power will rapidly corrupt democratic restraints placed on it.
The only antidote is decentralization of economic power (aka ensuring gains are widely accessible by most of the population).
Some historical context that might be of use to one or two lonely grad students reading this comment :) As a US peace corps volunteer working in a very rural health center in South Korea (one paved road in a large county, many villages still without electricity), it was impossible not to notice the huge push the Park Chung Hee government was making into birth control. Pres. Park was convinced that Korea's very high birth rate was an anchor around his plans for economic development and so devoted substantial government resources toward reducing it. Many families had 5-8 children, especially in the first four were daughters, as at the time there was an overwhelming preference for sons. This preference generally changed to daughters sometime in the 1990s.
In practice Park's birth control program meant that every township (면, about 10,000 in population) outside the cities had a special nurse devoted to birth control (가족계획요원) operating out of the local township center. My job involved tuberculosis control out in the villages, so I came to know these nurses well. In practice they provided information on birth control to all married women and were tasked with keeping track of the menstrual cycles of all married women, a fact I found extraordinary at the time and still do in memory. Additionally, the government encouraged vasectomies financially (esp. for government employees) and there were often long lines of anxious-looking men outside our health center awaiting the procedure. There are many reasons for the low birth rate in contemporary South Korea, but the inflection point came in the 1970s and the now long-forgotten family planning nurses were at the forefront of this change.
My wife and I have opted not to have children for reasons* and it's really sad how the conversation with the in-laws has moved from "you should have children because children" to "you need to have children because korea needs you to have children", and it's not just a passing comment here and there, the campaign to get us to single handedly re-populate SK is intense and sustained. I wonder if other couples are experiencing this.
*We can't afford to have children, Climate change, We can't afford to have children
I'm not arguing your decision to not have children. I've made the same decision myself, but the 'can't afford to have children' has always confused me.
Even after the point where contraception became readily available, people were having children with far fewer resources than anyone alive today. What I hear when people say 'We can't afford to have children' is an additional '...and maintain our current standard of living'.
It seems there's a lot of expectations that we heap on parents. My kids must have their own room. Must go to a prestigous private school. Must participate in expensive sports. Must travel. Must attend a top university, on and on.
Kids don't have to have any of that (ok, own room is pretty important after a certain age). The truth is parents need to chill out of this evolutionary arms race to make sure little timmy has every possible advantage even if they run themselves ragged getting there.
It might be fair to assume that you are relatively upperclass tech worker; I think your perceptions of what people can do is colored by your social circle. For many people they aren't worried about kids going to a private school, it's whether they can afford to feed someone else.
I'm surprised none of your expectations include basic child care - food, shelter, care. If you are just scraping by on two incomes how do you expect someone to feed another human on one income? For many young adults that still live with their own parents, they aren't worried about their kids having their own room, they are worried about having their own place to stay.
It's very pompous to assume that most people aren't having kids because they won't be able to afford to send them to Phillips Exeter when a record number of single people in South Korea live with their parents because they can't afford homes.
Sure, the people in your social circle may be eschewing having kids because they can't afford to give their kids the same lifestyle they grew up with, in private schools or don't want to give up traveling, but people who can afford those luxuries in the first place aren't representative of the broader population.
It might be fair to assume op is as well. Beyond that, people have 'afforded' kids since there have been people, and this includes the worst deprivations at the beginning of the industrial age. Birth rates are actually inversely correlated with income, and this cuts across industrial and agrarian societies.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. As income rises and your children are unable (or disallowed) to start working for themselves, the calculus on child rearing changes. It's different when your 8 year old can start collecting eggs. I don't buy that as income rises people would rather go to Italy than have children. OP mentions they can't afford it - the people who I've met who say that really can't afford it. The ones that are DINK, are proudly DINK.
My broader point is that globally, these issues are less about couples wanting maintain their summer vacations to Italy, and more that people who want to have children are unable to responsibly do so. Telling people, in the US at least, that they should have kids because of the government safety net would be considered irresponsible advice.
As a new-ish parent in a HCOL area, this actually makes sense to me. Before children, we needed two incomes just to afford a relatively modest but comfortable lifestyle (both STEM related jobs, but not anywhere near FAANG salaries). But childcare is expensive and there are not a lot of affordable resources to lean on when things go haywire, for example when the child is sick and needs to stay home from daycare (a week of short notice babysitting can cost as much as an entire month of daycare). It has been extremely stressful and everyone around us that seems to be making it work either makes a lot more money than us (and can pay for a lot more help) or have a lot more help from relatives (or both).
In LCOL areas, single income households are more realistic. And retired grandparents and relatives are more likely to be able to afford the area and help out with childcare. So it is not really about "affording" the kids, it is really more about how much help you can get. Certainly food and diapers cost money, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to child care.
EDIT: Also, in terms of number of kids, there are some subtle influences there as well. A couple on FAANG salaries can easily afford 4-5 kids in a HCOL area. But modern car seats are massive and to shuttle that many kids around you would need a large SUV. But driving one of those around in an urban-ish area is a nightmare. It is little things like this that push down the fertility rates in these areas. Big rural open settings are great places for popping out kids. Expensive, high cost, high density environments are not.
> For many people they aren't worried about kids going to a private school, it's whether they can afford to feed someone else.
In a developed country? Even the US (hardly a socialist paradise) has extensive programs to keep children fed. I think that issue is pretty well covered.
Speaking of the US alone, which already has an incredibly stigma on relying on handouts, those programs can be tricky to qualify for. A couple with one child can only qualify for WIC with an household income under 45k in California.
But stepping back, I think you are missing the forest for the trees here. I don't think people are actively abstaining from having children like the OP is, but I don't think you are treating people as capable of making responsible, informed decisions. How do you arrive at the calculus that, in the US, someone would desperately desire children so much that they would opt to go on government assistance? Who is that person to you?
I don't understand, is your reasoning that South Korea should become a poor country?
Yes poor people have more babies, but those poor people are becoming a smaller set in South Korea. You now need to analyze why, specifically, SK's (and many other country's) middle class aren't having children.
umm no, im saying your argument that the reason people dont have kids is because they cant afford them is exactly wrong. The number of children people have is perfectly inversely correlated by how wealthy they are, and many of the countries with the best socialized child care and other government programs to help poor people (northern europe) have some of the lowest birth rates in the world.
Back then children were viewed as a source of cheap labor that could contribute to the household. Developed countries have changed their expectations as you have noted. You can't produce a farm hand that can contribute cheap labor directly to the household at an early age. Now we have to produce skilled workers that can contribute to the society. Skilled workers that may not even do their own laundry before 18.
As a result, the household just sees children as a large expense, where the benefits go to the society. There's a significant incentive to defect from this arrangement.
Not to say the experience of raising a child isn't intrinsically valuable. But, the value of that experience is only enough to incentivize some people to have 1-2 children, and as we are learning now, not enough of an incentive to keep birth rates above replacement in advanced economies.
We probably don't need to make children a net economic positive again, as the intrinsic rewards of the experience are enough of an incentive, it could be net neutral or slightly net negative and still get us above replacement. But, advanced economies will need to change the math if they want to fix this.
Yes, but at the same time you also don't want to rob a child of their childhood and adolescence. Who cares if by age 20 they aren't a virtuoso in violin and who cares if they haven't already won 5 random bogus academic awards?
Well, kids can technically be raised on almost nothing but that doesn’t mean they should be, because there are consequences for doing that which will stay with the adults those children become for the rest of their lives. Probably, the ideal point is somewhere in the middle, as it is with most things.
Even so, kids are a large sustained expense that can’t be opted out of once they exist and are one of the most common strains on relationships both financially and emotionally — even just one kid can take a couple from thriving to struggling depending on their circumstances. In short, kids are risky, and it’s easy to see why many couples don’t particularly care to take that risk.
Following that, if governments want more people having kids, they should be throwing all they have into de-risking raising a family.
children went from around an 8 year burden on resources and then immediate source of labor to approximately 18-24 year drain on resources. what you're describing is the result of getting 1 bet instead of 7. It's unsurprising many in the (downwardly mobile) middle class or upwardly mobile lower class have fewer children in those conditions.
> I'm not arguing your decision to not have children. I've made the same decision myself, but the 'can't afford to have children' has always confused me.
To add to your list of reasons, for me, I feel like I am bringing a child only to feed the capitalist system - saddled with debt, and living with less freedoms than me. I feel like my dearest loved one will not be able to thrive in this world. They could, sure, but the chances of thriving are low.
I wouldn't worry to much about climate change, humanity overcame bigger problems. And if your in-laws want children so much, just tell them your concerns, they might be willing to chip in financially.
> Did your parents know the answer to that? Did your grandparents?
No. But it's not really relevant to me.
My grandparents' generation was largely motivated by religious faith (and lack of birth control) to have a bunch of kids.
My parents' generation mostly lost the religious motivation, but inherited the inertia without questioning it. It's not to say they didn't want their kids, but having kids was just "what you did".
Do you think any parents have ever known that answer? Before climate change was the Cold War and threat of nuclear annihilation, before that was two major world wars, before that was a string of wars and plagues going back to the beginning of humanity.
If you think climate change is a good reason to not have children you need to stop and reexamine how the media/doomscrolling have affected your thought process.
I see this reason given time and time again and I just don't understand it. We're currently living in what's probably the best time ever to be a human. We get to live in air conditioned houses, many medical issues have been all but eradicated, we have (for the first time ever) too much food, etc.
Otherwise if it's just an excuse - you don't need one to not have children. If you just want to maintain your current lifestyle that's up to you.
> reexamine how the media/doomscrolling have affected your thought process.
No need. Except for Hacker News and local news, I don't read the news. I don't use other social networks except for a few small non-news subreddits and Github.
But my local environment is changing year over year, and it's concerning.
> We get to live in air conditioned houses
It's funny that you mention that. Air conditioners were almost unheard of where I live. But now we're regularly hitting 40C+ in the summer for long stretches and people locally are installing them. It wasn't like that 15 years ago.
To flip your advice on its head, maybe turn off the air conditioning and experience the change firsthand.
I guarantee my 2 year old daughter will be just fine in regards to global warming. Some areas of the world might have issues, but if you're in a rich country like America you don't really need to worry about it on a personally-affecting-me-level.
You're underestimating how connected the world economies and supply chains are. You seem to be huffing some serious copium if you're sure your daughter will be fine.
Bubonic plague, supereruptions, ice ages, malaria, smallpox, ozone deterioration - lots of these seem small now but that’s only because we’ve already overcome them
That’s the whole point that is being made… we’re talking about humanity - Yeah lots of individuals will die due to climate change, particularly in 3rd world countries but humanity will be just fine overall, just as it was with all those disasters.
I think you are seriously underestimating the impacts that worldwide crop failures in the next 20 years are going to have as far as global human catastrophes go.
Significant crop failures will cause prices to rise, which will enable the wider use of refrigerated storage, fertilizer, new crop varietals, desalinated water, greenhouses, etc. This will bring supply and demand back into balance at a higher price.
The higher price for food will cause millions of deaths, an impact comparable to COVID or to the Ukraine and Ethiopian wars combined. It will pale in comparison to the impact of WW2, the black plague or the Chinese cultural revolution.
it's difficult to articulate the (IMO correct) position that climate change is horrible but still totally solvable. somehow people hear "we can solve this" as " there's no reason to be concerned"
I agree with the gist of your argument, but I wouldn't phrase it as "totally solvable". Limiting it to 2 degrees is possible, limiting it to 3 is likely. Both are bad, both are locally catastrophic but neither are globally catastrophic.
I like my phrasing "millions will die". That works on numerate people, but most people can't really conceptualize the difference between a million and a billion. Any other suggestions?
There's a certain group of people that take the absolute worst predictions of climate science and just runs with it. Granted, there's a far larger group of people that think we'll be ok with business as usual. Neither is true.
I'm using BAU loosely here. I'm not referring to RCP 8.5. I have my own issues with the IPCC's estimates relying to much on direct air capture, but I don't think 5-6c is likely unless there's an unforseen feedback loop we haven't factored in.
I'd almost bet money on the eventual use of stratospheric sulfide injection to cool the planet. It's cheap enough that even a third world country could conceivably pay for it. We have no idea what the side effects will be, but it may well be worth the risk to avoid 3-4c of warming.
I work with climatologists in the development of AI models that improve over the climatology.
The amount of arable land that will be lost in the tropics is going to dramatically impact all countries around the Equator. Some areas simply will not support human life without air conditioning with a 2 degree increase in wet bulb temperature and +3C increase in extreme weather events.
Crop failures are linked to many historically extreme events. A 15%-30% in staple foods has _massive_ impacts in the poorest 20% of the population. In poor democracies it leads to people voting for demagogues and autocrats; in other places it's much worse.
The cascade of these events with ever increasing temperature is exponential.
The soil quality there is very low. Also, large parts of canada are covered by the 'canadian shield' which is basically where glaciers have scraped down to bare granite bedrock. If we had thousands of years to adjust, I'm sure we could manage but you're not planting huge fields of wheat, corn or soybean in that soil.
Those area are limited by the number of hours of sunlight and the number of growing seasons. Reductions in 20-30% are expected, but this doesn't really capture the increase in extreme weather events that can lead to total crop loss.
I dunno about SK but in the USA the road to kids was: partner up, get a stable income, find a home, start a family. The second and third links in that chain are broken for most people. The older generation wants to work into their 70s and own a bunch of rental properties so… no grandkids.
And your kids stand a chance to be poorer than you if you can’t support their education and devote time to care for them. If you can’t afford a home that’s the path you are on. It’s pathetic how people want folks to sacrifice themselves to create more workerbees for society while they demand their housing “investment(s)” continue to blast upward and vote for less housing.
Real wages are largely flat for the past 50 years (in the US) as in equality increases. I think thats a big part of the U shaped birth to income graph.
I'm not in SK but in the US. I decided long ago to not have children (I'm a man) along with my wife. Maybe we'll change our mind one day, but more than likely it won't.
I honestly just don't think its my responsibility to contribute to some "greater good" of continuing to populate the earth. Humans survived just fine when the population of the Earth was half the size of now.
This is extremely selfish and probably not seen in a good light, but since I don't have children nor do I plan to, I honestly don't really care that much what happens after I pass when it comes to the population, etc. Not to be mistaken though, while I live I won't try to actively make things worse for anybody.
Just as long as you recognize that if the worker/retiree ratio gets significantly out of whack, the demand for services needed by retirees is going to massively outstrip supply supply so inflation is going to kill any retirement savings you're planning on.
If you're directly or indirectly working on that problem somehow, you're probably doing far more good for future humans than you would just by having kids.
Rich countries will just keep importing labor. The large aged population will throw out any government that threatens their quality of life in retirement.
Middle income and poor countries with low birth rates may suffer greatly from having their working aged populations poached.
This only works so long.... We are running into the issue where almost no rich countries are producing excess population. Couple that with the countries we think of as excess population producers have massively reduced their own birth rates, then one day those rich countries will start having to pay very large amounts for imports, hence threatening the quality of life by increase costs.
This is an article about Korea, a country which is not doing so, and is quite likely incapable of doing so in the quantities needed to offset a 0.7 TFR.
I really don’t see why you should have a moral obligation to continue the unsustainable overpopulation of the planet. Every single scrap of science tells us that we have overshot the planet’s carrying capacity along every dimension we care to measure. And yeah, one more person may contribute a tiny bit to a GDP and SP500 number, but those numbers will be irrelevant when the soil no longer yields food.
My outlook is that the world certainly isn't getting better any time soon. It'll get a lot worse first. And who knows how long that will take. And I want to be young enough to enjoy time with my kids when they're adults. The complications and difficulties are worth it, I figure.
I say this as an American glossing through this comment thread though, so I don't know your circumstances.
Is there an fertility rates published by income/wealth levels? Does the U-shaped fertility graph show up in SK? As in, poorest people have more kids, middle class have fewest kids, and richest have more kids.
In Spain there's no institutional pressure, but peer pressure. I'm expected to have children and pay +1/2 of my income in rent, have little savings, etc.
I'm pretty much an average spaniard in financial terms.
Climate change frightens me too.
I mean, If I had children I would have fear for their future and I would be completely ruined financially.
But it seems this is completely incomprehensible to older generations that wonder why youngster complain about getting hands in their pocket trough rent, pensions, debt, etc.
Older generations want you to have kids because in their mind they or their parents had kids through even worse things. Wars, famine, and crippling global economic decline are the cultural memory of our older generation. Existential things like affordability or an impending climate crisis pale in comparison to the village being bombed and seeing the affects of famine in front of you. The fact you are able to have an expensive apartment for yourself at all and be safe in it for the last several decades is a historical anomaly for most people especially on the european continent.
Excellent comment. The desire to have children being generationally transmitted has inertia that doesn't account for a landscape that has changed much more rapidly.
How exactly does that expectation work? What happens if you only pay 30% of your income to rent? Will you get passed over for a promotion if your boss sees you live slightly below what he is paying you, or something?
You write that you have "opted" and then that you can't afford having children. That sounds more like childlessness was forced upon you - unless you've explicitly decided to be poor (such as for example monks do).
Many cultures value independence, so when people are forced to things, they tend to twist it around by saying it was their decision. That's why important issues get swept under the rug.
If you really want to have children but are worried about climate change and cost - may I suggest you look moving to norhern europe. The region will survive most predicted outcomes and childcare is heavily state subsidized. That is if you would love to have a family but can’t for the stated reasons. It’s totally fine not to want children as personal choice without any rationalization as well!
It's slightly more than I explained. My wife worked her way up from a rural farming town here in Korea, basically taught herself English (and 18th century English), went to the states and got her PhD in American History (something she worked 2 jobs to do + we have debt) and became one of the few Korean born American History professors in the country. We'd both really like to stay in Korea, and we'd like to have kids, but these things seem at odds in SK these days, maybe things will change for us, maybe we'll move one day, we'll see. As it stands today, caring for aging parents on both sides, giving our kids a better life than ours, seems... challenging. (Thanks for the positive and helpful comment, btw :)
It would be better to move to the midwestern US honestly. Housing and childcare is super affordable out there and wages will probably still work out better than in europe. I expect when shit hits the fan you’d rather be in wisconson with american citizenship than on the proverbial maginot line. Civilians don’t often fare well in european continental conflicts.
Yes: US will continue being an economic powerhouse, and a very rare geopolitical entity that can source all of it’s inputs and can grow it’s own food. I would definitely think about really hard moving my family to US if our kids were 10 years younger mainly because I’ve realised how it geopolitically speaking outclasses anyplace else on earth.
No: Please do better research. Civilian population in North Europe will do quite well compared to planetary alternatives.
Yes: But safety wise US still wins if one is worried of foreign invasion.
No: As an immigrant you may run into safety issues from the current residents that live in the midwest. Add potential government instability and loss of democratic freedoms, and it starts swinging the balance back over to northern Europe.
I wonder why your in-laws won't provide you with means to have children if they want you to have children.
In Russia it is customary to provide children with some kind of housing ("granny's flat") either for living or for renting out, even without any expectations.
I don't think shaming young people into having children will work (for SK or any other country). Eventually they will have to adjust their culture and immigration policies to be more welcoming to outsiders.
Maybe you’d change your mind about affordability if you actually had to pay the externalities of your childlessness and didn’t hope to be subsidised by others
To add another source, the Atlantic had a piece on birthrates in South Korea last March: https://archive.li/Fm93M
Quoting from the article:
> There are a lot of reasons people decide not to have a baby. Young Koreans cite as obstacles the high cost of housing in greater Seoul (home to roughly half the country’s 52 million citizens), the expense of raising a child in a hypercompetitive academic culture, and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care. But these explanations miss a more basic dynamic: the deterioration in relations between women and men—what the Korean media call a “gender war.”
Unfortunately, there seems to be little commonality in how men and women see the issue. Hard to imagine any solution at all.
This sounds like a study made from afar by just reading numbers without even talking to Koreans.
When I talk to Korean parents, the vast majority of them tell me that raising even one kid is exhausting.
They usually try as much as possible to satisfy every requests of their baby: carrying the toddlers for hours until they fall sleep, letting their kids sleep in the parents bed until they're 6, spoon-feeding them until they are 6, and so on... A Korean pediatrician friend told me that Korean kids score the lowest in the world in terms of autonomy.
So, parents of one kid are already exhausted and think it would be too hard to have a second one.
That's entirely to be expected when your plan hinges around having one kid. They're called little emperors for a reason. If you have more than one kid, Korean or not, you treat them less preciously.
Perhaps we need a cultural change in parenting, a more relaxed parenting style or more of a village experience where parents can trust teachers, neighbors, bus drivers etc. to reinforce values, expectations, etc. so it isn't all on the parents (or parent).
Could you please not post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait? Your account has already been doing it repeatedly. We're trying for something else here!
"Calhoun had been running similar experiments with rodents for decades but had always had to end them prematurely, ironically because of laboratory space constraints, says Edmund Ramsden, a science historian at Queen Mary University of London. This iteration, dubbed Universe 25, was the first crowding experiment he ran to completion.
As he had anticipated, the utopia became hellish nearly a year in when the population density began to peak, and then population growth abruptly and dramatically slowed. Animals became increasingly violent, developed abnormal sexual behaviors, and began neglecting or even attacking their own pups. Calhoun termed this breakdown of social order a “behavioral sink.”
Eventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to [Calhoun],” says Ramsden."
Are we sure that there's nothing else going on with fertility rates? It seems odd to me that one of the primary drives of humanity has fallen off of a cliff so quickly. Sure, it mostly manifests as a drive to have sex and we can get around that with birth control, but that's not the only thing it does to us. There's a reason the concept of the "biological clock ticking" is a thing.
We know testosterone levels are dropping: "After controlling for confounders—including year of study, age, race, BMI, comorbidity status, alcohol and smoking use, and level of physical activity—total testosterone was lower among men in the later (2011-2016) versus earlier (1999-2000) cycles (P < 0.001). Mean total testosterone decreased from 1999-2000 (605.39 ng/dL), 2003-2004 (567.44 ng/dL), 2011-2012 (424.96 ng/dL), 2013-2014 (431.76 ng/dL), and 2015-2016 (451.22 ng/dL; all P < .0001)."
Setting aside that semen quality is also affected... Maybe testosterone, or other hormones that might be affected by the same thing, also affect the drive to have children? It seems the more urban a civilization, the lower the birth rate.
When I just tried to look up if anyone has looked into that I couldn't find anything, but here's a nice overview of different theories on fertility rates dropping as a whole: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8977063/
Weird to be wondering if men are to blame here when women are typically the ones who have the final say as to when and with whom they decide to settle down and have kids with. Personally I think it is a combination of couples not wanting to have kids for a variety of reasons (not wanting to sacrifice their quality of life, lack of economic security, anxieties about the future), women delaying childbirth for longer to focus on education and career (and possibly waiting too long and not being able to have children by the time they are ready), women becoming pickier with who they choose to date and marry with the reality of hypergamy (women with higher educational and career attainment typically want to date men who are at least as successful as they are, and women are increasingly outperforming men in education and career these days). I'm sure men have some blame in this too, but most single men I know would prefer to not be single, but can't seem to find anyone interested.
I didn't say it was men. Unfortunately I haven't seen any studies looking at if women have also had a decrease in testosterone levels. Like I said though, it could be another hormone.
Sure, we can find plenty of excuses...but to say that people don't want to have children anymore is like saying they don't want to have sex anymore - which seems to be happening more and more as well. Teenagers are having less sex than ever, in a time where knowledge about sex and birth control is at an all time high. I think something is screwy.
While South Korea has the largest fertility rate fall it's important that they are just the most extreme of many countries. East Asian countries in general like China and Japan have been having a big fall, and many European countries are as well. France has the highest birthrate of any European country at 1.84 but even that is below replacement rate.
Central Africa is pretty much the only remaining region with fertility>3. Even in pretty poor countries like Bangladesh, which I learned in school had unsustainability high birth rates are already near or below replacement rate fertility. And if you look at time series trends, is't negative in the vast majority of countries: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN
It's a simplistic thought, but I often have this optimistic impulse that dealing with stabilizing the birth rate is easier than escaping the Malthusian trap would be, especially with energy use/person generally trending up.
Longterm, it probably is. The problem is the transitional period. The reality of having a population with more elders and fewer working age adults will be absolutely brutal.
Having read the article and somewhat followed the SK troubles, the only sensible conclusion I can draw is that the culture itself has become poor and unable to prosper, and is on a downward trajectory. A small % of people will obviously succeed but this doesn’t really make a culture. You having children today doesn’t guarantee the circumstances for your children, no matter how much of a financial or otherwise buffer you put in place - because your neighbours are in the same situation and nobody wants to take action to divert from the current course. This is another society that’s on track for extinction.
You just can’t play along and hope for the best. It doesn’t work that way and it never did. Forcing your kids to stay up until 4 am to study while you get yourself into debt is not a recipe for success no matter what the rest of the country is doing. It’s just terrible from a societal perspective.
Aside from SK specific issues in TFA, are their wealthy countries that have successfully countered declining birth rates with something other than immigration?
But there are places where it isn't nearly as stark as SK or HK (the two big ones under 1.0, let alone replacement of ~2.1).
Most of Western Europe is under 1.5, which is still way under replacement rate. Sweden, France, and Iceland are at like 1.8, which is still under replacement rate but not incredibly low.
Unless you count tiny places like the Faroe Islands maybe.
One thing I don't see mentioned is that a larger portion of the population spends a lot more time in full-time school, and in part-time school + working which easily delays having children.
Is it truly necessary for so many of us to spend that much time in school? Can school programs be shortened? Can we admit in some areas additional schooling doesn't provide more value than on the job training / experience?
I think in the West we would benefit if the default position was that it's shameful and selfish to not have kids. The way our welfare state is set up currently is such that we don't pay for our own retirement, but need the generations below us (hopefully a larger generation) to fund our retirement as we did for the generations before us.
When we don't have kids the welfare system which we seem to value simply doesn't work anymore and puts increasing pressures on younger generations. And this compounds the low birthrate issue because we now have to raise taxes on younger generations and take out more debt (both public and private) to afford the welfare spending. This high level of taxation and indebtedness increases wealth inequality and makes it harder for young couple to have children.
I think we'll work this out the hard way at some point... The West is trying to offset the inevitable with ever increasing levels of immigration but that will only work for so long. Eventually the welfare system will collapse and people will have to have kids if they want to be cared for in their older age. I hope we don't get to that point, but it seems to me people are too nice to shame people for not having kids and are unwillingly cut welfare spending / fund their own retirements.
Not sure what the situation is in South Korea. If people care for their own elderly family / neighbours instead of expecting the state to do it then perhaps a low birth rate is less of an issue. Sure, GDP might not grow, but that's not the end of the world.
Gotta have kids in the first place to raise kids that know to respect and care for the elderly. Otherwise this sentiment sounds like "I hope other people raise kids that know to respect and care for elders" because it's not like people are financially rewarded for most kinds of elder care, at least in the US, and that labor has to come from somewhere.
The nuclear family has the side effect of needing to put elders in a care facility rather than them living at home with the rest of the family. It's also compounded by the amount of medical care people receive in old age and many families aren't capable of safely caring for certain levels of dementia, for example.
It's kind of an application of Ghandi's "be the change you want to see in the world" - knowing that at the very least YOUR kids have been taught to respect and care for elders.
If there is any genetic component to wanting children, this will hopefully work itself out over a few generations as the bloodlines of people that don't want children die off.
The part of Israel that has a high birthrate is militantly not modern. To the point of not working in order to study religion all day, and blurring out women in photographs.
I’m no expert, but I was under the impression that the fertility rate there is relatively high, pretty much across the board, compared to most other developed countries. Is it only high in the most orthodox communities?
Chinese people are seeing the same decline of birth and marriage.
Part of that contributes to better life but I'd say the majority is because of Capitalism. This form of Capitalism is initiated by the government so there is not much to check its power.
Essentially, if you look at housing, cost of education and cost of medical services, you will understand why middle class in China does not want to give birth to children.
I'll note that this isn't intended to start a political argument, but I'm confused when people blame capitalism, even in countries that are themselves communist. What does this even mean? Are we blaming the global market economy? What would the solution be then, severely limit trade between countries?
I really think it's a mistake to say quality of life is lower in China right now than at any point in the past. Yes, housing is expensive, but 60 years ago literally tens of millions of people starved to death. Housing in rural china is still cheap, but no one wants to live there. It's capitalism that allowed people to escape rural subsistence farming that realistically meant starvation level quality of life. I do think people work more, but that's largely because the alternative is being a subsistence farmer on the verge of starvation like they would've been before capitalism.
Decades of vicious persecution and propaganda don’t just vanish.
Even in America, there was a massive effort to convince people to have fewer kids, and prominent people still blindly recite the talking points - with zero correction by fact-checkers.
It's okay. You can complain to your union (which is run by your company) or work for a competitor (which is also owned by the same conglomerate as your company).
At least your leader is no longer brainwashed by a shaman who channels her dead father while taking bribes from those conglomerates [1]. That father who was also your former military dictator who followed the great tradition of torturing and murdering socialists and worker leaders with the CIAs help.
I would imagine integrating North Koreans into the South would be far more difficult than the reunification of Germany. The technological and health gap alone is huge and even their language has started to drift apart.
I've read about the sad state of escaped North Koreans. They are provided a "life starting" package from the South Korean government, but sometimes to get out of North Korea they have to promise to give some of that money to the people smuggling them out. There are also a lot of scams that North Koreans don't know to be wary of, and there was even a report of someone going back to North Korea after being scammed and becoming a propagandist on their national television to tell everyone about how South Korea is full of scams and liars, and North Korea is way better.
Is that what you mean, or do you mean that building a society where both parents need to work in order to survive has distracted us from important parts of life that result in a healthier society?
Perhaps one parent working and one at home with plenty of time for both parents to relax and spend time with their family is the key, but that doesn't mean that the man should work and the woman should stay home (or that both parents need to be different genders).
This is a contributing factor, for sure, but even in European countries with strong social safety nets and pro natalist policies (going so far as to pay cash for kids you have), the fertility rate declines. Why? Empowered, educated women delay having children, have less overall, or have none. When they have access to contraceptives and opportunity, the fertility rate falls below replacement rate. It also happens when your economy is unfavorable of course (China, South Korea, Japan, etc).
Sometimes they are beyond a couple's means, sometimes they are an opportunity cost. Sometimes, they are simply not wanted.
To some degree I think it may be subconsciously capitalist factors as well. Wealthy European countries have expensive housing. And most people aspire to a nursery room for a baby and later a separate room for the child, but then you have to upgrade your living situation to include another room at great expense.
Think about the last time you saw a tv show set in the current time where children are in a bunk bed in a single room. I can’t really think of any.
Do you have any data to support this? I always thought the issue was a mix of multiple things including social support, immigration policies, and various other complicated factors.
His basic premise is incorrect. Markets aren’t a significant part of all economic systems. Historically tribes didn’t operate under some universal system but webs of reciprocal gift giving was common. The best modern example might be Amish barn raising where members in good standing can receive a great deal of labor without direct compensation but to stay in good standing means providing the community with labor.
As to the decline in fertility that’s got many causes from access to birth control to pollution such as micro plastics directly reducing fertility. Negative impacts from capitalism play a role, but it isn’t so simple.
My impression was that in the US the housing crisis was caused by regulatory burden, zoning laws and nimbyism. Is there clear evidence of US housing problems stemming from capitalism?
Whoops, I misread before my coffee and thought they were talking about capitalism generally.
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One critique of capitalism for housing, is that private housing doesn't get built in a bust cycle, or generally when it's no longer profitable to do so. The recent boom can be traced back largely to supply not recovering to pre-2007 levels, and the market being unable to make up for lost time. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
I am not aware of a housing market that is nearly all private that has built its way to affordability, short of massive economic collapse (e.g. '90s Japan) or some other catastrophic event.
Yes there are restrictions on supply but you need to look at why for the things you mention. Zoning doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's implemented by politicians. Why? What forces are pushing for that? Is it the NIMBYs? Maybe. But money talks in politics. So what political interests are pushing for restrictive zoning? Why?
The real problem here is that housing became financialized (like every aspect of our lives). People see their $300k house go up in value to $600k and think they've made money. But have they? You still need a place to live. If every house that cost $300k now costs $600k, you still only have one house unit of wealth. So what have you really gained?
One extension of this is you decide you need to own multiple properties. You need to become a landlord. For many, this is their retirement. But what is being a landlord? It's withholding a basic human need (ie shelter) for profit. it's choosing to let people die on the streets if it makes you money.
So this system only really benefits the truly wealthy to accumulate wealth by extracting wealth through rent at the threat of violence. Eviction is violence. Witholding shelter is violence.
Now this might be fine if the government provided a baseline for shelter through what is most commonly referred to as "social housing". Americans, in particular, who hear this think "projects" or "ghettoes" (ie Section 8 Housing) but look at a city like Vienna where ~60% (IIRC) of the housing is owned by the government [1].
But we don't have such a aystem in the US because it would reduce profits. It would reduce the extraction of wealth from workers. This is capitalism.
Cool, so why is the solution simply not getting money out of politics and allowing people to build as much and as affordable housing as they want? Why is the solution to have the government distribute living accommodations, as opposed to making those dwellings cost pennies like anything else you can buy on Amazon, and let the markets figure this out the way they have with TVs and pencils?
And ah yes that global bastion of unfettered capitalism: China.
All your "in the US" examples aren't capitalism, they're barely even free markets (and several aren't at all). High regulations, high barriers to entry, massive government subsidies for established players and massive government regulation preventing new players from entering the market.
Capitalism has its downsides for sure, but pointing out education and health care is not the brilliant argument you think it is.
> And ah yes that global bastion of unfettered capitalism: China.
Yes, China is a capitalist country. Putting "Communist" between "China" and "Party" (ie CCP) doesn't make it communist anymore than D standing for "Democratic" makes the DPRK (North Korea) a bastion of Democracy (or, for that matter, the German Democratic Republic aka GDR aka East Germany).
China has private companies, private property and an effective if not actual ban on labor organization (ie unions). It is in every way a capitalist country.
> All your "in the US" examples aren't capitalism, they're barely even free markets
"Free markets" are both a myth and orthogonal to capitalism. You mention both "free markets" and "too much regulation". That's neoliberalism (and, for the record, right wing).
Markets only function when there's a strong government to enforce them. Deregulation is merely a way to transfer wealth to the already wealthy, placing the costs for that on the government and the populace at large (eg any number of chemical spills, disasters, poisononing of water sources and so on).
The tendency to produce monopolies and pseudomonopolies IS, but that is a very well known market failure, that was once addressed quite well in democratic societies while maintaining (classically) liberal economic policies.
The problem we have now isn't capitalism... It's plutocracy.
I didn't think I was. There are plenty of markets in the US that are pretty capitalist[ic?]. But education, health care, those examples are all so far from that.
Not capitalism but the unfettered capitalism without protection for workers. In a system where humans are treated as "input" for the big machine without income security, said humans will not produce more burden unto themselves.
If having a kid increases the risk of destitution, the rational human will choose to not have them (or at least not have more than 1).
I would like to sympathize with that opinion, but as a matter of fact also countries with strong worker protections and a pretty decent social security system are suffering from birth rates below replacement.
To be precise the issue is that capitalism will always optimize for "most profit" and little else, simply due to the design of the capitalist "machine". Koreans are simply very very good at capitalism, and the result is a society where most will barely scrape by, constantly working, while those at the top reap massive profits. If you've been paying attention, you can see the same exact thing here in America, with a little more wiggle room due to the wide range of cost of living throughout the country.
The other thing is that Japan and Korea have heavily state sponsored capitalism; bank capital and other resources are overwhelmingly allocated to large conglomerates as an industrial policy, which strangles small and medium size businesses that actually employ most people and thus reduces wages across the economy.
Samsung Group is 20.3% of South Korean GDP, and that’s just one of the chaebol.
The situations aren't really comparable. Yes, there has been a noticeable uptick of intra-gender conflict and discourse in South Korea for the last 5 years. But I'd rank it as a minor factor in the general marriage and childcare apathy or inability. As for the conflicts themselves, the starting conditions and challenges for both gender roles are very different from the West, and Korea's feminism is also not the West's feminism.
(I'm not Korean, but I've lived there for some years, can communicate in the language and read the news, and am married to a South Korean citizen with a child on the way; the latter is one of the reasons we moved away.)
Care to explain precisely what you mean in this context? Because it's hard not to see this as a dog-whistle for "why can't women just be happy with the caretaker role?" but perhaps you mean something more benign.
This sounds like Korean men who can’t get a date. Given they’re blaming “Western-style feminism,” I see why.
Marriage rates in Korea are declining, as they are everywhere. But there is no evidence of increases in single men, other than in the uneducated and low-income group [1].
I am by no means an expert but I would classify this as misogyny that is rampant in a lot of asian countries. Especially for a number of the developing countries, including Korea, women are still very much seen as property.
I did mention that a conflictual approach to relationships-- as opposed to a collaborative one -- created problems for both men and women in this age group to find partnerships.
I wouldn't necessarily call it "fueled by western style feminist politics", when it is fueled as much (or even moreso) by "western style incel politics". Furthermore, while it most certainly is an issue over there, it's not so widespread it contributes meaningfully to this particular statistic.
The article has curiously little about what koreans actually want, vs what the author thinks is stopping them (despite their burning desire) to have kids. After all, as the article says the birthrate went way down a long time ago thus it's likely that people would know by now what is stopping them from having more kids
No. I want kids but I don't want them until I can afford stable housing. And if that's hard for me as an overpaid tech worker, then I understand why most people are delaying kids or not having them at all. If most young people are still living with parents or roommates well into their 30's, then it's not a mystery why my generation isn't having kids. Nothing to do with 'life is so good kids aren't desirable anymore'.
Then why does the birth rate steadily go down as you move up the income curve? My experience is that my wealthy adult peer group just has almost no interest in having children while my high school friends, many struggling badly financially, all already have families.
Higher standards. The person you are replying to wants stable housing on some of the most desirable land in the world. The conditions for upper middle class people to have kids are exceedingly high by any standard.
I don't think it is an absurd or even high standard to want reasonably priced (30% of income) shelter (whether owned or rented) within a reasonable commuting distance (30 mins one-way) of a job.
You're solving for this with the constraint being your job. If you tried to solve this problem with family being the constraint and the job and financial situation being more variable, all of a sudden your options open up. Your constraints show your priorities.
You don't want just a job. You probably want an elite and interesting job, which for a dev to be paying out a large percentage of their salary is probably in San Francisco or Seattle or New York.
You could take a boring remote job with more average pay out in Kansas if family were a priority and pay off a house in a year or two.
Yea, pretty much this. I'm half of a two person couple well into the upper middle class - we live in a one bedroom condo that costs more than half a million dollars... kids are not a realistic financial decision.
You and I are probably in similar situations (I rent a 1-bedroom apartment in an upscale-ish area) and you probably earn more than me but I live very comfortably.
I've personally never had any interest in having kids. Whatever it is that makes kids appealing, I've never had it.
But I think I agree with you and I don't understand why I think I agree with you.
Kids do seem like a crazy financial decision today. But if we wanted to, we could for sure have a kid and get by. Plenty of people have plenty of kids on a lot less money.
Is it that we want to maintain our standard of living more than people did in the past? Plenty of poor people have plenty of kids in 1 bedroom apartments. Do we just demand more comfort today? Are we just more picky? Are kids just not worth what they used to be?
I don't think any of these answers are bad. I just think it's interesting.
> Is it that we want to maintain our standard of living more than people did in the past? Plenty of poor people have plenty of kids in 1 bedroom apartments. Do we just demand more comfort today? Are we just more picky? Are kids just not worth what they used to be?
I find it interesting that this is almost the only post in the entire thread that arrives at the need to do a little introspection.
Apparently, the ability to do that is much rarer these days than I thought.
It's not ability it's just willingness. Go to the recent Scrum threads or any discussion of remote work. It's all just these incredibly strongly held opinions that people feel the need to share over and over.
I think this is a big part of it. As much social pressure as there is to have kids today, it seems reduced from how it was even a single generation ago.
Raising kids is expensive[1], time consuming, and in general a pain-in-the-ass. With reduced social (and even legal) pressure to stay married, and increased expectations of a career for women (without any accompanying reduced expectations for men), it's entirely unsurprising to myself that many opt-out of it.
Indeed, most of my daughter's friends in early elementary school lived with their parent in a 1BR, studio, or a rented bedroom. One of them had 3 siblings, making 5 people in a 1BR apartment.
I guess maybe parents had fewer expenses when I was a kid (I was born in 1983)? No cable bill, no cell phones, fewer video games, no streaming services?
IIRC, housing, child-care (especially if you include after-school activities), and health-care (If you are un- or under-insured with your job) dominate the increased expenses. Housing is a strange one because a lot of parents will try to move to a better school district, so parents may end up paying more for otherwise similar housing than non-parents.
FWIW, the things you give as examples are rounding-errors in our budget (though only two of our kids have cell phones so far); we don't have cable, pay $22/mo for streaming services, buy used video games, and pay an average of $60/mo for our phone bill. We spend over $300/mo on groceries for comparison.
No but I replied to your comment before it was updated I think. It only said 'life is maybe too good for kids anymore' when I saw it but now I see more text.
As you can see clearly from the sibling comments to mine, the problem is not that people don't have the means to have and support children. The problem is that they have a very specific vision for what it's supposed to look like, and that specific vision is extremely unaffordable right now. Various demographic, technological, and financial phenomenon have forced us to a point where the big suburban house, yard, fence, dog, etc. is simply not financially feasible for the bottom 80% of the population.
Instead of realizing you can do more with less, many of these people are delaying or rejecting the family phase of life. There's a certain echo chamber that makes this seem like an inevitable outcome in the developed world, which is of course clearly proven wrong by the fact that people in third world countries are having families and prospering on fractions of the income that these "first world victims" are struggling with.
It's more of an "expectations problem" than any hard and fast financial barrier. People in developed countries simply can't afford to have the life they were expecting to have. Meanwhile, the other half of the world continues putting one foot in front of the other because they never expected it any other way.
In countries without proper health care, the lives of everyone lower than upper-middle class are unbelievably precarious. In the US at least, although there was a lot less healthcare 100 years ago, there were no procedures that cost you 10 years salary.
Just giving birth in the US costs about $20K. It takes a day, and can be done at home by professionals that don't even need to be trained as nurses at 99% of the safety level. It can be done by a woman alone, with no help, at 80% of the safety level. If you can wring $20K out of something that generally happens by itself without a hitch, your system is fucked up.
Life is precarious here, although often luxurious. Exchange that luxury for security, and you'll see a lot more people confident enough in the future to have a baby responsibly. It's not a question of having a suburban yard, it's a question of having something that won't be pulled out from under you quickly. The suburban yard is just a buffer, just like close family that live nearby is. But capitalism atomizes the family, and encourages them to move to find work on a dime. Capitalism is a direct competitor to the family: family is where capitalism isn't. The larger families are, the less capitalism exists.
SK is a US vassal state, so I can't imagine that their health care system is much more humane.
Expensive societies with the always concomitant class stratification will always run into reproduction issues.
In short, unsubsidized poor and even middle class people begin to rationalize that, even if they could somehow manage the financial stress of reproduction, their lives are too miserable to justify damning their kids to the same fate.
That said: climate doomerism, as an excuse for not having kids, is for intellectual children.
Climate arguments aside, such views ironically ignore that man is subsumed under nature. If and when the climate is actually a problem in regard to reproduction, the human population will decline directly due to climate pressure. Then the climate and else will recover, and the population will again recover. In other words, the climate's ecosystem with humans is self limiting and correcting if it is an issue at all. Refusing to have kids due to climate is the exact same as saying that someone else deserves children more than you do. And that's it.
Your last paragraph tries to use population arguments to prove that individual decisions are illogical. That doesn't look great after calling people who hold a certain position "intellectual children".
The only thing they left out in the article is what the effect of pollutants like BPA have on the birthrate. Currently, BPA, an artificial estrogen, is nearly everywhere from food, receipts, and now even clothing. PFAS, BPS, and a host of other pollutants are almost as widespread in many countries that experienced any decent amount of industrialization
Is there some evidence that these chemicals are more present in countries with lower birthrates?
Plastic, plastic byproducts, etc. are some of the cheapest and most readily available materials in the world, including in developing countries. The much stronger predictor here seems to be HDI and industrial maturity.
Nearly country in the world is now affected by low birthrates. Most developing countries aren’t spared by lower trending birthrates. The exceptions lie in Central Africa. The prevalence of these hormone disrupters aren’t limited to developed countries.
> Most developing countries aren’t spared by lower trending birthrates
Most developing countries are developing. The countries that are developing more slowly (or are somewhat stagnant) are the ones that have the highest birthrates[1].
Yes, but even their birthrates are trending lower because they likely have the same pollutants if not more of them being exposed to their respective populaces. You have to look at trends and not just the current rates. It makes sense that they’re also affected, since developing countries do a large portion of manufacturing for developed countries
The age depopulation bomb is affecting everyone but Central Africa.
This explanation may make sense if people were complaining about an inability to have kids despite wanting them. But physical infertility is not alleged here.
True, but most developed nations have easy access to IVF and/or other conception medical services.
Another question might be...what % of couples can get pregnant without artificial means? And how is that changing over time?
For perspective there are estimates out there that IVF will be involved in 10% of pregnancies in the near future. Some of that is it getting better, cheaper, and more accessible obviously...but we are talking about something (pregnancy) that's technically "free".
I agree that it's a frustrating counter argument since it is so vague and poorly understood but we really don't know a lot about how hormones effect decision making outside of a few very crude ones.
It is a mostly non-existent argument but it's still something that's important to consider.
If you must have a child hormones will have little to do with it. Reproduction can be made into a very routine robotic like activity, like going to the gym.
I'm not certain where this is really coming from. There are certainly ways to ignore people's consent and physically force pregnancy but this article is focused on whether people are choosing to have children or not. Would you mind clarifying your statement? It's very difficult to read what you're getting at.
Also, just technically speaking, we know there are hormones that absolutely can prevent you from being able to get pregnant - that's what the pill is.
Correct. South Korea's low birth rate is primarily out of personal choices, although likely impacted by high cost of living and weirdly kid-unfriendly cultural norms.
Child rearing takes a group of people not just a nuclear family where both parents work long hours. Cost of living and work culture is forcing people to work long hours and women don't find a good enough reason to give up their freedom, and keep in mind it's what childbirth is in most Asian cultures, a woman giving up what she wants to do until the child is independent. I see no reason why women would ever want children. What's society providing them that they need to make this sacrifice ?
All studies mention these, they just don't provide any concrete solutions. It's typically around creating some committee or forum that is looking to change this. Nothing will change, not until the corporations start running out of people to hire or the country runs out of soldiers for defense.