Japan leads world in childless middle-aged women
asia.nikkei.com
asia.nikkei.com
And when I say pay them, I don't mean a small token amount. I mean literally a starter salaryman income for 1 child, and each additional child is a promotion with the attendant income boost.
It's not even a problem. That money will be used to buy goods and services in the economy. Unemployment will go down because more men will be needed to meet this increased demand.
Single motherhood shouldn't be a goal of government, considering how destructive it is to society.
If it helps, like all professions, you can certainly require that people take certification courses to maintain their designation.
Single motherhood is not destructive to society. What is destructive to society is single mothers who live in POVERTY. I have a friend who is a single mother, she lives in poverty in a dump and can't break free because she can't get a job that will pay enough for daycare/afterschool. Where we live, the govt set the rules that if you get a part time job they will claw back the income you earn, which means you work and still get to stay in poverty.
> Single motherhood is not destructive to society.
>It appears that one major hurdle to marriage is finding a suitable partner with adequate financial resources.
To me, it looks like a problem of women having unrealistic standards, and keeping them until they're past their prime and marriage becomes hard.
A woman who marries in Japan generally winds up taking care of both sets of (generally long lived) parents as well as the household and the children.
That's a ferocious amount of work with very little social support.
Countries keep complaining about women not having children but do absolutely nothing to make having children not suck.
However for women, the later years life satisfaction never catches up to men. Caring for both kids, parents, and eventually your own husband are huge factors here.
As people live longer, and children manage to remain under the partial care of their parents longer, the miserable middle age gets longer and more miserable.
I was remarking to my wife how, due to the wide age range of my siblings, my parents were dealing with children in the home & mothers in declining health for a total of 32 years! For 10 of those years they were dealing with BOTH kids at home & 1-2 mothers in declining health. With children & mothers spread across up to 5 states.
Suddenly at age 60 they found themselves empty nested & without parents to care for either. They are clearly much happier than they'd been in a long long time.
Right now they are in good health, but statistically it's the men whose health fails first, which would put my mom back in the caregiver stage for 1..2..10 more years, who knows.
In poorer countries women have children because they can't afford not to. In rich countries women have no children because they can't "afford to." Be that opportunity cost, e.g. working part time to take care of / deprioritizing your career for your child, or actual cost as in paying for childcare.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?most_...
I don't think any rich countries have figured out a good solution to the modern problem that boils down to "having kids used to be a EV positive, and is now EV negative" due to a confluence of factors of - needing 2 income households, paying off your own student debt, high housing costs, high childcare costs, and then high college costs for those kids.
People used to have a lot of kids to help in the home/farm/etc and to offset high childhood mortality rates to ensure they had some surviving descendants. Even after people moved off the farms, say WW1~WW2 era, kids were at least seen as sort of EV neutral, grandma watched them during the day and then they were out of the house and off the balance sheet by 18.
Now even people who truly want children are calculating how many they can afford and if that number is 1 or 2. I think a lot of people thinking "I'll just have 1 so at least there will be someone to look after me" will be disappointed with the % that end up too estranged/distant to truly be helpful in that manner later.
This problem is even more troubling because I think we almost put too much expectation on middle/upper class parents to do all these things to support their children well into their mid-20s, to the point that birth rates in US are inversely correlated with income & social class. That is - the people least able to care for their own kids, in need of the most state aid, are the ones having more of the kids.
Meanwhile the middle/upper class construct more and more levels of cost & time requirements on themselves for child rearing.
Fancy wedding, fancy car, their own house(not rented), etc.
In Japan, it's a common belief held by men that if a woman is over 30, she's done as a potential mate and wife.
Birthrate in Poland is still declining
That said, birth date decline is not uniform around the world. And countries like Japan have bad immigration policies. With Japanese people living longer and longer, the ratio of younger to older is severely skewed. This is not a good situation to be in.
Interesting times ahead
It is when your social security framework depends on an ever-growing population.
Hey, I guess that makes it a pyramid scheme, doesn't it. Interesting.
It is a pyramid scheme, but so is the rest of our debt fueled societies.
Bad in the sense that they can have a shrinking population without ceding their country to foreigners, without sacrificing their nationhood on the altar of economy?
As you say, we are at 8 billion already, how many more can the planet support? Well, think globally, act locally: how many can Japan support? Reducing population one country at a time is much easier than the global coordination problem of reducing it for the entire world.
How can you at once be aware that the global population is already too large, yet demand each country have perpetual population growth, either through birthrate or immigration?
And Immigration won't fix all their population issues either. It is just one of the ways to handle the population crisis.
You're just suggesting they do it slowly. Salami slicing to the same conclusion.
Maybe it would be different if you didn't have large cultural groups who could form them? But then again, there aren't any Polish parallel societies in Germany (and ~2% immigrated or have an ancestor that came from Poland), and after a generation, you can only tell them apart from the rest of the population by their last name.
My long term bet is that Japan is ultimately in a better spot with a declining population and restrictive immigration, rather than Western societies who are poaching from the third world to account for their own shortfalls. I predict the end result from the latter case will be a lot of unhappiness for all parties involved.
Declining is not bad. Declining too fast seems to be bad, because then society will go through a dire strait with too much people becoming elderly simultaneously, without enough young people around for proper support.
Yes, a shrinking society is bad.
Fertility rate in: Sweden 1.8, Norway 1.7, Denmark 1.8, United Kingdom 1.7
In these societies, its important to have lots of kids to be able to live(more workers = more income)
Also a family is way more valued in the east than the west, where it seems to be popular to leave your family for any inconvenience(Oh your father insulated you once when he was angry? Go no contact immediately, how dare he!).
An example of this is how many Europeans and most of north americans have bad relationships with their parents, compared to someone like an Egyptian or an Iraqi, even though Westerns had arguably better upbringing.
You should still do it, because obviously, but if you expect more children to be the outcome, you'll be in for a surprise.
I wouldn't go that far. Just that you can't blame low fertility on poor treatment of women, and that "I will protest society by having fewer children" is a convenient fantasy, not a stance held by a significant number of women.
I would wager the true cause of low fertility is something merely correlated to women's rights, because e.g. the UAE have a fertility rate of 1.3, while in Israel it's at 3.0.
Source for all the numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
If a woman has children she is expected to stay home and take care of them. It's the death of her career. So, to delay when to have children seems just a practical decision to being able to keep a job that she may find rewarding.
If part-time work had more prestige and men also took part of the responsibility and joy of rising children that motivation will disappear.
Housing in Japanese cities is still crazy high so there will still be problems to solve as couples delaying when they have children has many motivations.