TSMC employee newborns in Taiwan make up 1.8% of country's 2023 total | Hacker News Reader

TSMC employee newborns in Taiwan make up 1.8% of country's 2023 total

focustaiwan.tw

34 pointsnabla97 comments

If I'm calculating correctly, that's a birth rate more than 6X Taiwan's average. (But the article is fairly vague, and also talks about employees of affiliated companies, and several other caveats might apply.)

Might anyone familiar with Taiwan comment, at least on other major barriers to parenthood there? (In the U.S., the triplet costs of medical care, housing, and education make parenthood a rather distant dream for much of the current middle classes.)

Taiwan, like many other nations, has universal healthcare. If it’s like other implementations, it would probably be half or less of the cost compared of the US. If you price risk, stress and hassle, probably much less than half.

https://www.vox.com/health-care/2020/1/13/21028702/medicare-...

I'm Taiwanese American so only slightly familiar. But from what I've heard from family and acquaintances still living there, it's the usual suspects: super high rent relative to salaries (and even crazier cost to own) especially amongst the youth, with no great job prospects.

It's a shame but I feel like this is the trend all over East Asia - work super hard and compete from the age of 5 and for what?

I'm lucky my father shipped me over to the US to live with my uncle because it was easy mode compared to Taiwan.

Easy mode hit a major road bump in the US. I had my own place at age 17. Decent homes were plentiful and under 100k. Jobs were plentiful, and supposedly still are, but entry level wages are pretty much the same (effectively lower) than when I struck out on my own. Health care costs have gone through the roof. When I was 18 I had full blown Cadillac healthcare coverage for free at work. No deductibles.

There have been so many new healthcare innovations over the last few decades that I doubt any company could afford to cover 50% of the available state-of-the-art, even with a huge deductible.

Probably covering just a quarter is already miles better then the absolute best Cadillac plans of 30 to 40 years ago.

I wish the article made an attempt at providing a benchmark. I imagine that TSMC has a lot of prime age families so you can’t compare it against the overall population. Without it, one cannot make any inference in whether it’s low or high, rendering the article useless.

Intel could learn more from TSMC, get sexier employees

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