Why South Korean women aren't having babies

Sub-replacement fertility is not some inevitability, where we must choose between having running water and a stable population.

Men are totally on-board with having more children and tend to report a happiness increase afterwards. Women are not because it will reduce their self-reported happiness. Before in the past getting married and having kids would give women access to financial security and social acceptance. Now you’ll likely end up poorer than single women and there’s no social benefit, and contraception also exists. The constraint here is mothers.

I hear lower birthrate blamed vague on “economic development” or “wealth” but the main factor is really just the utilization of both genders for salary labour combined with the increased dependence and non-productivity of the young. An increasing focus on and the suicidal subsidization of education only makes this more extreme, given we’re directly economcially incentivizing to now have kids when they’re most reproductively fit. I honestly think education is lowering the IQ by causing increasing amounts of birth defects among the kids who are getting born due to advanced maternal age, while education has simultaneously become more and more performative signalling. We’ve had a reverse Flynn effect for decades, epigenetics are a huge part of why.

I hear a ton of comments from feminists is the problem is men don’t contribute their fair share to childrearing. I absolutely agree, women DO (on average) work harder, the men who ARE having kids are frequently either phoning it in or being total deadbeats, but having dealt with a deadbeat dad before, liberal society cannot effectively force them to contribute. If men equally contributed it honestly might be enough alone to spike the birthrate like 0.5 or something absurd like that but even if you instituted a social credit system I don’t know how you could actually accomplish this. It is simply evolutionarily incentivized for women to invest more parental effort than men. Maybe just tax all men (not just fathers) harder for the sake of ease of tax collection.

Governments should give financial incentives for women to have kids, although emigration is a concern for many countries, the US should at least be able to do this. I’m not talking about subsidizing the childrearing - which I think misses the issue - I’m talking about giving women money they could spend on themselves OR their children. I’m saying the incentive should exist even if the kids get adopted.

It's like telling Americans, "Bill Gates has less operations than poor people, and countries with the best healthcare in the world, their people also have less operations, so no, medical operations in America are not too expensive". You've wildly mixed up cause and effect, and are comparing non-like things.

The people in America who want to have children are routinely priced out of having children, "kids are too expensive" is absolutely true. The existence of rich people in America who do not want children despite their wealth, in no way disproves this.