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How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

nippon.com

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Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#81

Post by aidenn0 »

paulcole wrote: post #62
munk-a wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#82

Post by m_fayer »

WanderPanda wrote: post #56
orochimaaru wrote: post #46

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 ju…

How did we end up at a point where creating life (literally) is a „not good enough reason“?

How did we end up at a point where creating life turns midlife into a grueling thankless slog?

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#83

Post by orochimaaru »

remarkEon wrote: post #61
orochimaaru wrote: post #46

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 ju…

>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…

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.

She was lucky but not everyone is.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#84

Post by globalise83 »

davidktr wrote: post #43
UncleOxidant wrote: post #24

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: https://ww…

ctrl+f "real estate" "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...

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#85

Post by em500 »

South Korea is just the most extreme example of the global trend of below replacement rate and still decreasing fertility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#/media/Fi...

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

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#86

Post by justrealist »

ilkke wrote: post #76
munk-a wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've allowed everything in life to be assigned a monetary value and it turns out that kids have a very low RoI

Only in the short-term, which is exactly the problem. Squeeze more now and don't worry about the long-term consequences. "Après nous, le déluge"

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.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#87

Post by locopati »

WanderPanda wrote: post #56
orochimaaru wrote: post #46

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 ju…

How did we end up at a point where creating life (literally) is a „not good enough reason“?

maybe when easy to use birth control gave women the power to choose whether they wanted to bear more (or any) children?

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#88

Post by woodruffw »

chaostheory wrote: post #65
woodruffw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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].

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-vs-hum...

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#89

Post by speakfreely »

seydor wrote: post #25

Life may be too good for kids anymore 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

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.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#90

Post by kredd »

orochimaaru wrote: post #46

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 ju…

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.

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