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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

The socioeconomic system is broken, not the people. Population boom only happened because women weren't empowered, contraceptives weren't wildly available. For the human, this is great, if it is their choice (we should want to support agency and autonomy imho). For the systems? Bad for them. Build better systems. If your economic system requires a total fertility rate floor above what a combination of desired and realized fertility is, you're gonna have a bad time.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41035224

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There is always this uncomfortable undercurrent of misogyny in all these fertility discussions along the lines of "how do we coerce women to have more children?" or "it's a woman's duty to breed." I'd like to hope we are more enlightened than that, but the sentiment is worryingly pervasive.

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.

That's not really what's happening - in Korea, there are many young people, male and female, who would be willing to have kids if life is easier. They don't because they can't afford a house, or they don't want their kids to go through the brutal education system they suffered themselves.

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.

How much of this is due to housing price increases? It naively seems like rising house prices trigger an arms race in education and productivity among young people to afford housing.

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.

At least at 120 hours a week you no longer need a house and can just change at the gym instead.

That's completely false.

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".

In poorer nations people have more children because, while life is hard, it doesn't get much harder if you have one more kid. You don't have to put your kid to 12 years of education; you don't have to worry about college fund. If you are a subsistence farmer life may actually get easier because a kid is a free labor.

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.

Cost of baby in Modern Korea is risk to female figure, health, risk of death.

That perceived cost is above the cost of living of a baby.

That cannot be fixed by simply offering them more money.

> Cost of baby in Modern Korea is risk to female figure, health, risk of death.

Okay, now you're just making stuff up.

That's the most cited fear in antinatal community

My developer friend in Japan who always wanted a family never received much dates and when he did not one commited.

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.

>My developer friend in Japan who always wanted a family never received much dates and when he did not one commited.

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.

Edit: if he put right in his dating app bios "I'm looking for a woman who wants 4 kids!" I can see why he didn't get many responses from Japanese women.

He only wanted 1 kid but his wife convinced him to have 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.

>whenever he tried to get commitment, he got dumped even if relationship was several years long.

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.

Other than this, this is not how dating works.

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.

I mean that's a lot of pressure for anybody if it's already a set number. I'd say it's better to advertise that you're open to having kids, or at most that you want to have kids.

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.

This comment is a perfect example of my point…

Explain?

[flagged]

What’s the problem with the phrasing? Having kids is a sacrifice, and especially for the woman who has to go through labour.

I don’t think any native English speaker would use this word choice. Probably not a native English speaker… user name implies Indian.

Not just misogyny, but racism as well. The overall human population is still on the rise, but that’s primarily happening in Africa.

i think it's only happening in Africa. Every other continent is experiencing a decline

Many countries have decades of explicit anti-natalist policies, including Japan.

Was it misogyny when official opinion shapers were demanding people have fewer kids, as some are still doing?

Feminists generally supported these efforts.

This is an important point that's usually under discussed. From the 70s onwards, you had multiple governments with anti-natalist policies from Malthusian fears. You had China with the one child policy for urban dwellers, in India max two children were encouraged if you want to be in polite society, feminism encouraged anti-natalist thinking in almost all countries. It was only relatively recently, maybe last 15 years, that concerns about low fertility rates started being discussed.

More likely birth control will filter out anti-natalists in the long term.

“Anti natalism” is not a genetic trait that gets inherited. Any woman can look at what another woman goes through during pregnancy/childbirth/infant rearing and think they might want to avoid that. Or avoid doing it multiple times.

OTOH there are some with a great desire to procreate even though it might mean (temporary) hardship or doesn't fit with their socioeconomic status. I know several of those.

The ones who shall inherit the earth.

>“Anti natalism” is not a genetic trait that gets inherited.

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.

It is possible for genes to influence the desire to birth more children, but it seems apparent to me that humans are capable of sufficiently complex cause and effect analysis that genetic influence would be insufficient to drive this specific decision making process, since it’s not a snap decision and there’s so many opportunities to reverse course.

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.

More likely social evolution will take care of it long before biological evolution. Muslims have fertility rate of 3.1, for example.

Yes, that is what I meant with

> 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”

Well more typical would be something like the tribe that survives into the future has always removed women's ability to not get pregnant while the other tribe dies off.

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.

I think that children inherit a lot of their values from their parents, its not all genetics

Evidently, not for this topic, since outside of a couple cult-ish tribes, total fertility rate dropped precipitously across the globe.

>Any woman can look at what another woman goes through during pregnancy/childbirth/infant rearing and think they might want to avoid that.

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.

Yes, I was alluding to that. My greatest concern for my daughter or her kids is the eventual loss of women’s rights simply due to shrinking of population of tribes that support women’s rights and proliferation of tribes that do not.

Yes, I don't have a daughter, but I'm also very concerned about that. It feels like there's an assumption that the tribes that don't support women's rights will adopt that cultural mindset over time, but I'm not so sure it's a good assumption.

Desire to have kids is driven by mostly fear, uncertainty, death.

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.

Completely wrong in my experience.

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...

> 83% of young korean women think of south korea as “hell”

The page shows 78% of young men with same opinion. But -- what other countries do they think would be better?

I just find it hard that these times, it's more like heaven from human history point of view.

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?

The working culture in South Korea absolutely seems like hell compared to most of human history. People had much more free time in agricultural societies, and they mostly spent it outdoors, instead of slaving it in the offices doing meaningless work to make shareholders richer.

People starving, born with disabilities/incurable diseases, people at the front line of a war, especially if critically wounded, people caught as a prisoner being tortured, people living their lives as a slave with physical violence and any other serious situations I couldn't imagine, seem like worse than someone at least with physically safe condition and possibly a way to escape if one wants to.

Exactly. And hedonic adaptation makes all that entertainment with phones, TVs etc meaningless.

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.

Hedonic adaptation. Humans can quickly become accustomed to circumstances, rich or poor, and then they can start criticizing it. This is in fact one of the prime drivers for innovation in the world, because those that thought everything was already good enough wouldn't be the ones innovating.

The term "Hell Joseon" was widely popularized (Joseon is the old name of Korea, and incidentally still the name used for North Korea in Korean, Chinese and Japanese). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Joseon

"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 page shows 78% of young men with same opinion. But -- what other countries do they think would be better?

The women: most western European nations probably.

The men: South Korea 30+ years ago

It doesn't matter what they think, Hell and Heaven are relative not absolute

Humans do not operate in absolute metrics, it's always relative.

No. Pollution, likely microplastics are preventing and interfering with reproductive behaviour.

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.

> 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'.

It’s amazing that rather than recognize that the rich have too much and we too little, we’d rather organize around them hoarding so much wealth that the population declines.

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.

People don't want to have kids even with all the incentives in the world. For many, it's now a lifestyle choice. And I mean, who can fault them, no one can be forced to have kids (unless you want to go through some unsavory means).

What incentives? That really depends on where you are. In the US, having kids is horrifically expensive. You can look forward to tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, even with good insurance, just for one hospital birth. Then having to pay tons of money for medical insurance for your kid, plus all the other regular expenses that come from child-rearing. Don't even get me started on the costs for daycare. In the US, there's enormous disincentives to having children.

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.

Child birth is a small fraction of the cost.

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.

>How many jobs really let parents cut out at 4 to commute home for a 5pm pickup?

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.

Does that apply when they are under 3?

Kids aren't going to school at 0-3 years old.

Not the US, I mean in Europe, specially Scandinavia. They've tried so many things to incentivize people but still people don't have kids. It seems to be that as countries develop and get richer, the number of kids born tends towards zero.

Scandinavia didn't try anything that could help. Let them try inexpensive houses or 20k Euro tax rebates per child.

>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.

> the amount of children has nothing to do with the country,

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.

I like to joke that microplastics are responsible for social changes, and I don't deny that it has some effect but it is probably minor in the grand scheme of things

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