with technology and automation, any nation, will need less and less people
plus rent in japan is super high, and the country seem over crowded
why be alarmed by low birth rate, as long as its voluntary and not caused by an endemic health concern
People will argue about the cost of caring for the elderly, sovereign debt that will need to be paid back, and so on. Well, perhaps consider the obligations you're originating and foisting on a future that may not pay for them.
Comments I've written with robust citations for this thesis:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799048
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41661724
The page shows 78% of young men with same opinion. But -- what other countries do they think would be better?
At least in there, there's no active war (there is a threat but bullets aren't flying around or you have problem acquiring food and water), and cities are moderately safe, you can buy stuff with a few clicks, many entertainments to choose from, convenient phones etc etc. And you get to take advantage of those without earning a fortune.
It's so absurd to think this is some sort of hell. They don't know actual hell like past and some present people are experiencing.
Why don't those people appreciate the situation they're in?
Lack of free time is hell. Especially if you spend all your days in the same drab office building. Office work is fine in and of itself, but humans are meant to move, to be outside for a good portion of the day. Work-life balance is more important than the latest gadgets.
"Escaping Hell Joseon" is apparently a thing: https://asiatimes.com/2019/12/75-of-young-want-to-escape-sou...
I think only a small percentage of respondents have brought their aspiration into practice, but they obviously think other countries are better than Korea. I'd love to see a poll asking them which countries they would prefer.
I don't think they are entirely wrong. Economic hardship and uncertain future for young people are prevalent in all developed economies, but South Korea also suffers from terrible work-life balance and strict work culture (probably significantly worse than Japan on both counts). And recent admissions scandals[1][2] have made Koreans even more skeptical about the fairness of the system. I'm not sure if Ivy League universities are any better, but the Korean scandals were really in-your-face.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/disgraced-ex-sout... [2] https://graphics.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/Interactives/...
The women: most western European nations probably.
The men: South Korea 30+ years ago
Humans do not operate in absolute metrics, it's always relative.
The doomsayers are probably right, we are in for hard economic times as birth rates decline. But maybe that is a good thing, and we can finally come up with a system that doesn't depend on exponential population growth.
The ones who shall inherit the earth.
They can, but then in some cultures, their religious leaders will tell them they need to go through all that, many times, or else their god will be angry with them.
Citation needed. There are many things influenced by genetic traits. So many that I think the burden of proof is that you'd have to show that there's no influence of genetic traits here. Add to this memetic influences, and it's clear evolutionary biology that those that want to produce children will have more offspring and thus at some point antinatalism should be reduced as a portion of society.
Human beings are the only animal (that I am aware of) that can short circuit the process of reproduction by completely de-linking sex and pregnancy.
It is possible that evolution resulted a trait (cognitive plus physical ability to manipulate nature) that ultimately is not conducive to procreation.
And it is possible that in a million years, perhaps humans continue to exist because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant, or humans don’t exist but some other species exists with a different mechanism of reproduction, or humans figure out how to make babies in artificial wombs, or humans start living a lot longer, etc etc.
> perhaps humans continue to exist because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant
I guess technically it should be “because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant, be financially independent, and physically independent/secure”
I guess there are two types of social evolution, or evolution in general... One is where one tribe changes its customs over time, so evolves through intra tribe competition. Another is where you have multiple tribes with different customs, so evolves through inter tribe competition. Reality would be a mix of these two models.
This is partly why poor people with little social safety net have most kids.
The more safeties exist in a country, the less kids are there.
Simple as that.
Poor women have children because they often don’t have the choice not to have children. That is why every single country when women gain rights and financial independence, the total fertility rate plummets.
Lower and middle class people in developed countries have fewer kids because they want to provide a home with their kids’ own room, be in good school districts because they are afraid of what happens if their kid doesn’t get into a good college, etc. The fear of not being able to provide a certain minimum quality of life prevents many from having kids.
It actually switches back to richer women having more kids because they have more security of owning their home, affording childcare while still being able to save for retirement, having health insurance, etc.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-12/the-ri...
So he married a woman from India and now they've 4 kids.
It wasn't about money, no one was willing to make this sacrifice for him.
I had absolutely no trouble getting dates here when I moved here. There must have been something about your friend that just isn't attractive to Japanese women. Is he religious, overweight, or have a beard? You can't expect a person to be equally attractive to any arbitrary group; different cultures have different standards.
Even if you want many kids, your potential partner might want kids, too, but feel pressured to have them right away if you say 4.
No one wanted kids, he's slight above average looking japanese man with good personality but whenever he tried to get commitment, he got dumped even if relationship was several years long.
He told me it's because they don't want to take risk.
Interesting story, but talking about commitment and having kids is something you need to do before you're even seriously dating someone; it's not something you wait several years to bring up. What you're looking for in a relationship and what you want out of one in the future is one of the most basic compatibility factors in a relationship, so it should be discussed after a few dates or so.
I kinda feel like something's missing from this story.
Most people only ask "if you are open to having kids in future"
Followed by rough estimate of timeline which may or may not materialize with the same person.
A lot of people don't really know much about themselves, change their mind later, or give the compatible answers because they don't wanna lose the anticipated benefits of being with this person.
Was it misogyny when official opinion shapers were demanding people have fewer kids, as some are still doing?
Feminists generally supported these efforts.
Or they are simply overworked and don't have time to raise kids.
So, many "pro-birth" policies are aimed at helping women at work so that they don't have to sacrifice their career. But the government isn't doing much (our current president said people should be "allowed" to work 120 hours per week if they wanted to - and somehow still got elected), and what little policy Korea has is constantly attacked by conservative young men for being "sexist" because it's "feminist propaganda" that victimizes those poor young men.
And every year Korea slides further into population collapse.
If the labor quota is high enough… then nothing else will happen. GDP will rise, but individuals will steadily be sacrificing family, entertainment, and joy.
People will say they want to.
But they'll not make necessary sacrifices because it's outside their comfort zone
There are poor countries than Korea where survival is way more difficult, yet they've kids.
It's not about money or affordability, it never was.
Poor people in any culture have more kids.
Your comment is not based in reality and comes across as if "if I was millionaire I'd have kids".
That was also reflected in past Korean society where people frequently said the cost of one more kid is just "a spoon and a pair of chopsticks."
Very different from modern, industrialized Korea, where the lifetime cost of raising one kid equals multiple years of your salary. Unless you don't care about your kids and think they'll just sustain themselves by working in the rice paddy from age six to seventy.
That perceived cost is above the cost of living of a baby.
That cannot be fixed by simply offering them more money.
Okay, now you're just making stuff up.
Understand, we are complex beings. The desire to reproduce is not conscious. It is innate and compulsive. And if you interfere with that hormonally derived urge, this is the result.
It's not about money. That's on the conscious side. People had scads of kids during depressions and recessions, even when the pill was available, having kids was more important than not.
And if you looka around the world, the amount of children has nothing to do with the country, or culture. Women oppressed or not, it doesn't matter.
And what culture is more unique than Japan compared to the West? It's not culture, for the entire planet has a collapse in birthrates.
We're going extinct.
I think that is hyperbole, but I agree with your general take.
Maybe we are just at the top of the human population sigmoid curve and this is a normal collective correction. We've hit the carrying capacity of the post-industrialized world. Food isn't the limiter as much as an unconscious 'perceived opportunity for growth'.
Like we could not imagine a fairer distribution that would incentivize more people to have children in a positive fashion.
I think we might even go the other direction - circumscribe the rights of women directly to increase the birth rate, Handmaids Tale style.
Given recent events, I think the Republic of Gilead will be a real thing in the USA before too long.
Here in Japan, it's much better: all medical expenses for children are free. There's also a cash bonus for having kids. Daycare is still a problem though, but the cost isn't nearly as awful as in America, however availability is a real problem.
The real costs add up in the 40 hour work week. School, daycare, and even the legal frameworks those operate in are intended for at least one parent to live close to the child and work at most part time.
By and large millennials in the US were the first generation where both parents were raised to work for a variety of good reasons. How many jobs really let parents cut out at 4 to commute home for a 5pm pickup?
Now consider the childcare and opportunity costs of raising children.
That's an American problem because of its car culture. In better societies, there's public transit, and/or cities/towns are walkable, so kids can just walk home by themselves. Here in Japan, kids are far more independent and have no trouble getting themselves to and from school, even with non-working parents.
What a baffling comment to post under an article about the birth rate of a specific country and quite different from that of many others.
As a fact of nature, young adults must do the hard labor necessary to keep the world operating. Historically, there have always been more of them than there were people physically incapable of doing that work: the old and very young.
If there are too many old people and not enough young people, who will take care of the old people?
1. directly: in a democracy where the majority of voters are 60+ years old and retired, politicians will end up seeing the old and retired as their base and pandering to them; and this will lead to them implementing policies that serve the old and retired, to the detriment of those of working age. (See: literally anything about Japan's work culture.)
2. indirectly: social mores evolve over time, but this mostly occurs within the more-flexible, still-identity-forming minds of people of young ages. You can think of "modern" social mores as viral memes that spread easily between the "young" nodes in a social network; but which won't spread to/through the "old" nodes of the network. A a "top-heavy" society, where the old greatly outnumber the young, doesn't have the mean virality coefficient necessary to allow "modern" social mores to spread and achieve fixation. This in turn means that younger generations will feel they are living in a society that is "stuck in the past", with "outdated" thinking, where they cannot affect meaningful social change, despite everyone in their own (usually generational-cohort) social circles agreeing with them.
If population is declining, it breaks how these programs are funding because there’ll be less n the younger generation to pay for the more people in the older generation.
Structure society and economy in a way that makes it appealing to have children (both in that the hypothetical parents feel safe in doing so without endangering their own quality of life, and in that they can imagine the hypothetical children to be happy too), and people will have them.
I’m skeptical that nurses could be enhanced by automation to the degree of them managing more patients, but with the same quality of care as they do now.
Is that all of Japan? or just select cities?
Cause it signifies national decline.
> as long as its voluntary
"Voluntary" is such a tricky word. The low birth rate was entirely manufactured by societal norms instituted by the elites. Not just in japan, but in much of the world ( US, china, russia, EU, etc ).
> and not caused by an endemic health concern
Declining population is an endemic health concern. If you don't put a stop to it, the nation eventually ceases to exist.
Right. And how your nation does directly affects you.
structurally we're not set up for it.
It's bad when a species goes extinct. Especially when that species is humans.
Soon in years, no. Soon in centuries, yes.
And actually it's not all humans who would go extinct, it's modern urban/semi-urban more-liberal people. There are pockets of often-rural highly religious populations that are well above the replacement rate right now. Basically Kamala Harris supporters are going extinct and Donald Trump supporters will populate the future, unless something changes.
This isn't true (the urban sprawl part): while Tokyo is the largest metro area and does have a lot of sprawl, it's also continuously growing upwards, and not that much outwards because there really isn't much room left on the periphery (ocean and mountains are hard limits). Older, smaller buildings are regularly being knocked down and replaced by new, taller buildings.
This is of course true in American cities too, but zoning laws largely prevent new (and taller) housing construction close to the center, so they have no choice but to build outwards. In Japan, building upwards is much more feasible, only requiring that you acquire some desirable existing property first. (Of course, there are some limits to what you can build on it, but it's nothing like in the US so it's much easier to get approval to build some nicer and/or bigger/taller.)