Why South Korean women aren't having babies

There is no mystery to declining birthrate - it correlates universally to economic development at state level, which in turn is dependent on increasing women labour force participation. Economic development does not happen without women entering the market economy, yet when this happens women stop having enough children to replace those in the population who die. This is the same phenomenon everywhere, we are only seeing the most acute manifestation in East Asia first because they never had mass immigration to temporarily fix the numbers.

Knowing about South Korean work culture and years of cramming required to join it, what is the purpose of bringing kids there?

If a culture claims to be so hard-working, so smart, but fails to construct an environment where people would like to bring new people, it's absolutely normal that it is going to die out together with the carriers of the culture.

"Yejin works a traditional 9-6 job (the Korean equivalent of a 9-5) but says she usually doesn't leave the office until 8pm and there is overtime on top of that. Once she gets home, she only has time to clean the house or exercise before bed. " I mean, that seems pretty clear. My wife and I have two kids and fairly reasonable work hours but that still means pretty much all my time is work, spending time with kids, and chores. If I got home 3 hours later it would mean I'd basically never spend any time with my children.

Folks overlook the obvious explanation for the especially low fertility rates in East Asia: government policy. These are more collectivist societies where people are relatively receptive to government messaging and social norms. For two generations, Korea had anti-natal government policy: https://www.prb.org/resources/did-south-koreas-population-po.... It was a “soft” one-child policy that sought the same results as China’s, though with less draconian means.

Two generations of Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese were raised with the idea that having more than one or two kids is a bad thing, why the surprise that they act accordingly?

I think the reason behind declining birthrates is simple.

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.

Since this has not been mentioned in the comments yet, this article is asserting that it is a failing of the men in societies where women are highly educated that keeps the birthrate down. The women want to contribute to the workforce after having children, but without their spouses stepping up to contribute to childcare and housework, it is not an option. Women without children see this among the women with children and realize they must make a choice between the two options, and they cannot have both.

Does the world really need that many people?

Yeah there are old people and there’ll be a generation of some pain, economic output may go down.

However if per capita affordability is rising in real income that is a beautiful thing.

That means less but happier people.

We should celebrate fhat.

Human cattle we call "workers" happen to know their own offsprings will have to sacrifice most of their lives making powerful men even richer. Of course it's rational to not have children if you know they will become slaves themselves.

Is not it just to expensive?

While having a child you must pay for daycare, school, evening baby sitting. Next to that if the family splits the woman is doing most of the child care alone. Sounds like to much risk.

Because the government does not provide (they "provide" for "announcements") any resources to help (or support) families. (Both man and women)

But the fun thing is, they've supported to cut the bulls to stop making babies in 70s. Because they've thought there are too much.

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