Why has fertility plummeted across East Asia?
ggd.world
ggd.world
But Korea, via its new digital nomad and culture visas seems to be opening up. If current trends presist we're headed towards a future where people from high population growth countries end up immigrating.
I actually don't see this as a problem. The world is full of willing workers. They might just need a visa
Pay a country's people more so that they have more time/resources to dedicate to making a family. Even better, incentivize families. Or is that too expensive for bankers?
For that to happen, resources need to be reallocated from somewhere else towards this. For that to happen, people would need to express this via voting.
> Why does everyone support wall streets "increase GDP at all costs" immigration platform?
Those resources don't come out of nowhere, so there is a need for immigration as well to get work done.
Efficiency gains in a process certainly create extra "resources" whatever they might be. But I do applaud you for not saying "we need immigration because we need ethnic food" like most people say nowadays.
Sure, and most of the world has much better lives already because of that then their parents.
This is excluding US which had a unique position after ww2 which has eroded to some extent but is still much better then the rest of the world..
> But I do applaud you for not saying "we need immigration because we need ethnic food" like most people say nowadays.
I would guess that is dismissive on purpose, people saying that are avoiding a potentially sensitive topic which they do not care to engage in. (which I probably should as well, so yes, ethnic food is the reason)
All else being equal, more GDP (per person) means more wealth per person. More housing space, more heating, more antibiotics and children's sledges. So yeah, I support more GDP.
> Pay a country's people more so that they have more time/resources to dedicate to making a family
We've tried that; doesn't work. Not much at least. Sweden and France have had a bit of success, but not enough to even get back to sustainable fertility levels, let alone natural population growth.
No it doesn't. Young people need to be taken care of also. If there are fewer young people needing infant care, daycare, then education, that frees up resources that can take care of old people instead of taking care of young people.
Today young people who go to college aren't productive for almost a quarter century. Average length of retirement is 18 years.
Perhaps part of the problem is that we see individuals only as workers?
Supposedly we've had decades of productivity growth, so you'd think that it would be possible for a smaller cohort of workers to keep everything going, and yet it is apparently a creeping disaster that there may not be enough of them to maintain modern civilization in the not-so-distant future. Like many aspects of modern life, it just isn't really adding up to me.
There is a glaring contradiction there that I think has more than a little to do with the way capital dictates the shape of modern political discourse.
I also think we are being subtly prepared not for a crisis of demography or a crisis of automation but instead a crisis of oligarchy.
It's a great thing less people are being pressured into starting families or having unplanned families.
When so much of life is given to the pursuit of jobs, careers, mortgages, and the general rat race, there is little time left for dating, marriages, child birth, and raising kids.
Religiosity generally increases fertility, but countries like Poland have both high religiosity and low fertility.
Urbanisation generally decreases fertility, but Israel has a high population density and high fertility.
Economic growth tends to decrease fertility, but periods of recession also decrease it. Moreover, Western Europe has both more wealth & fertility than Eastern Europe.
Social programs like benefits & maternity leave intuitively make it easier to have children - but many European & Asian countries have these with less fertility than the US & Australia (for whom social support is generally lower).
Looking through the EU, it’s hard to see any relationship between access to contraception/abortion and fertility [1]
[1](fig 2) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
Vast amounts of money might be wasted by governments in Poland, Hungary & elsewhere on fertility boosting programs that likely won’t work.
And academically, our dataset of countries is relatively small to begin with, so it only takes a few exceptions to break any statistical confidence.
But exclusively with the highly religious population, no?
Christians & Muslims also high fertility in Israel.
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
Possible explanation: Secular people in a society with large numbers of highly religious people, some of the habits of the highly religious will rub off on them. Whereas, secular people in a more secular society, that is less likely to occur.
Also, “secular” is a broad spectrum ranging from hardcore atheist at one end to “I believe in a religion in theory but I ignore it in practice” at the other. People at the latter end of the spectrum are still open to being influenced by the religious, sometimes without even realising it
For example: Israel does have a high fertility, but it’s more to do with religiosity than urbanization. The Orthodox and Arabs are more fecund than secular Jews.
Most of the fertility in America is due to Bible Belt Americans (who also generally happen to be in rural areas) and newly arrived immigrants (who also tend to be religious) and less to do with social support programs.
Women of Jewish descent who identify as secular in Israel still have a high fertility rate.
Religiosity works well statistically in the US but it really breaks down in Europe, where it’s hard to see any substantial correlation in the interstate data.
Above average compared to Germany but still exceptionally low compared to most middle and lower income countries. However the Haredim would give Nigeria a run for its money.
> Religiosity works well statistically in the US but it really breaks down in Europe, where it’s hard to see any substantial correlation in the interstate data.
I think this is proving the point that there are many of the factors listed in the parent that matter and it’s a continuum.
Religious traditions differ in how pro-fecund they are.
Israel’s high fertility: Haredi Jews view large families as a religious duty; religious Zionists view the state as spiritually significant, and children are necessary for its future
Poland: in practice, mainstream Catholicism doesn’t really encourage large families any more. Pope Francis even tells Catholics “not to breed like rabbits”. Even with the opposition to contraception, many Catholics just ignore that, and for those who take it seriously, there is always NFP. There are subgroups of Catholicism for which this is different - the trads, Opus Dei. But the vast majority of Polish Catholicism is mainstream conservative, not trad or Opus Dei
It isn’t really an exception if one understands it as needing high religiosity and pro-fecundity religious traditions. Poland has much more of the first than the second.
But I fear it becomes a bit circular - can we really say our explanation for countries having a high fertility is merely their cultural/religious desire to have big families?
Both the US and Israel have high fecundity countercultural religious minorities, such as ultra-Orthodox/Haredi/Hasidic Judaism. The difference is, that minority in the US is such a small percentage of the population, that even though they are growing exponentially, they are still a rounding error in the demographics of the country as a whole (it may be a very different story by the time the 22nd century comes around, but we won't live to see that); whereas, in Israel, they are over 13% of the population, and will likely be 16% by the end of this decade [0] – so their impact on national demographics is much more substantial.
[0] https://en.idi.org.il/media/20567/annual-statistical-report-...
When you are working a farm with manual labor, children are income producing assets. As society moves away from that, children are costly liabilities, at least until the parent reaches old age. And social insurance decreases the value of having children as insurance against poverty in old age.
Probably for china, also environmental destruction is coming soon to really ding fertility a few notches