381–390 of 643 posts
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I'm pretty sure Korea has pretty shit work/life balance. And if you lose your job you're also SoL. There's still a substantial amount of instability and psychic stressors that could lead to someone not wanting kids, on top of constantly fearing war with NK
Yet it is still among the best places to live on earth.
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The only way your hypothesis is plausible (ignoring everything else that’s weird and troubling about it) is if everyone on the planet decides to go along with it. Not every society has this problem of low fertility, and those who own the future are the ones who show up.
That slogan has caught my eye too—the future belongs to those who show up. I’ve been thinking about these things in terms of generational investment. To pour time and resources etc into oneself is an investment in generation 0 with respect to the individual. If our societies don’t encourage investment in generations beyond 0 (ie in our children) then they effectively vote their genetics and those of their ancestors t…
Societies with more investment per child have less children. You are getting everything backwards.
As a European I can imagine what impact having high immigration from Africa mixed with all the property being unaffordable and owned by older white generations will have i.e. huge disparity in wealth between black and white, quick growth of black population and decline in white population, rise in racial tensions, rise of far right and claims of being assimilated.
I'm pretty ignorant about places like Korea and Japan though. Is there any hope they won't suffer the same difficulties?
Here's an article about predicted population changes: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jun/13/n...
I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but this does not surprise me in the least. The life in Korea is way too competitive and stressful. The hellscape begins in pre-school and primary school where parents make kids go to private school AFTER school, often till late evenings. This progressively gets worse and worse until university. In my father's generation, people could relax after getting into univers…
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Fertily reduction correlates strongly with increased prosperity worldwide. Policy making and cultural attitudes play a role too, but the correlation is uncontested and rather evident.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s a short term trade off. If you carve out of the effort budget that portion allotted for rearing the next generation and swap it out for or bias it strongly toward higher technology development, deeper universities, or whatever, then you cut yourself off the branch you sit on so to speak when the degree of that bias is so out of proportion. Maybe a generation can afford to delay the investme…
Also, if someone actively desires and seeks out the end of humanity maybe they have a reason for that and are fully aware of what they are doing rather than being ignorant about the wonders of poorly planned procreation.
I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but this does not surprise me in the least. The life in Korea is way too competitive and stressful. The hellscape begins in pre-school and primary school where parents make kids go to private school AFTER school, often till late evenings. This progressively gets worse and worse until university. In my father's generation, people could relax after getting into univers…
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What? Declining birth rates have nothing to do with oppressing women. Worker exploitation, poor social safety net, and wealth disparity are squarely to blame.
When all these things were worse, 100 years ago, people had more kids than they do today.
It’s eerie to think of how hard South Korea is going to crash in the future. These past years may have been it’s peak.
The closest thing we have to a crystal ball is Japan, which is a few decades ahead in demographics, and it's been much more prolonged slump than sudden crash there.
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Apologies for ranting but this topic resonates too much. Housing prices are 9x salary vs 4.5x salary in the 70s and it takes a while to save up. Personal data point: it took me winning an IPO lottery to start thinking about having kids for real. Having kids while earning minimal wage? Terrifying, especially in the US where getting yourself or your kid sick could bankrupt you in the blink of an eye - and if you want m…
But the people having kids are the ones with less money. The parents in my neighborhood are middle class (I mean like cops and admin assistants) and there’s three families with three kids just within 8 houses. Meanwhile among my law school friends, 0 kids is far more common than 2, and while I’m sure someone else besides me in my class (200 people, late 30s) has 3, I don’t know them. One thing I think gets really ove…
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> Declining birth rates have nothing to do with oppressing women. I think the point was the opposite: countries with limited respect and opportunities for women have higher birth rates because women have less control over whether they have children and if good careers aren’t an option anyway there’s less opportunity cost to staying home with a child.
You mean countries like France ? Just implement a repartition retirement system and small incentive per child which diminish after the third, boom, 2.1 fertility rate for most of the 21rst century. At least for now, the destruction of our retirement system and our current trend towards capitalization is already killing our fertility rate, and the idiots pushing this will once again realize this too late, because this…
This has nothing to do with the policies you mention. It has everything to do with the fact that the most popular name for newly born boys is now "Muhammed" (or some other spelling variant of it).