Is this a failure of policy, an outcome of a unique culture, or simply another manifestation of the loneliness epidemic? What is the root issue here and what can be done to mitigate it?
It angers people to hear it, but societies with high wages and particularly those where women can work have awful birth rates. Education correlates to lower birth rates. The ones with high birth rates are the ones where people barely scrape by, the ones where workers have no rights, the ones where people focus on getting by today and not plan for a poolside retirement 40 years down the road, the ones where menstruating women are considered filthy and isolated for a week from the men, the ones where having loads of kids makes important figures in your religion happy and there's nothing that matters in life beyond that. You need to change your country to have one (or many) of these conditions to induce high birth rates.
The birth rates in Japan are really no different from any other first world country. The west simply has a massive amount of immigrants to supplant the losses of the barely reproducing locals. Those immigrants might have 2 or 3 kids, and maybe their kids will have 2 kids. Then it reverts back to the mean of 1.2 kids basically everywhere.
There's lots of talk on reddit and other communities that if every country were like (XYZ country they consider paradise) and gave loads of vacation, paid high wages, gave everyone free college and housing, etc that the problem would disappear overnight. But you look at the birth rates of the locals in those countries, and it's always 1.2-1.4.
Mass immigration is a band aid. It makes governments and corporations hope, pray, and potentially strong-arm other countries into being underdeveloped and oppressive in a way that causes high birth rates, and makes the people who live there desperate to find better lives elsewhere. People aren't mass immigrating to first world countries because they decided on a whim that they want to work there, like rich westerners do when they decide they want to retire in SE Asia and be pampered the rest of their life. They move to first world countries because their home country is not a place that makes them happy to live in.
It's no surprise that educated ones will reject that, as a sibling comment mentions, Japanese women labour participation is lower than in Western societies.
I think you’re massively overstating that, and probably misinterpreting what the Quran actually says.
English translation, which probably misses some of the nuance of the original text:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstruation_in_Islam
And they ask you about menstruation. Say: It is a harm (painful situation); therefore keep aloof from the women during the menstrual discharge and do not go near them until they have become clean; then when they have cleansed themselves, go in to them as Allah has commanded you; surely Allah loves those who turn much (to Him), and He loves those who purify themselves.
For anyone who’s lived with women who have a hard time of menstruation, that’s not entirely unreasonable advice, and it indicates women are given less strict rules to follow due to the difficulties they’ve to contend with as women, which also seems not entirely unreasonable.
There are other versus that deal with the treatment of women specifically, and those versus also have at least some not entirely unreasonable advice, especially given the context of a world with less advanced medicine, I mean historically, as did we all, and the idea that menstruating / pregnant women ought be given additional consideration.
Women are isolated from men during menstruation, to various degrees from limited touching to full exile to menstruation huts, in other religions and cultures.
But it is interesting that you immediately jump to defend Islam in saying it's misinterpreting it, then say it is true and not unreasonable. Pretty bizarre.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/12/17/7878085...
And fwiw, if men didn't shoulder the burden of going to war, maybe we'd stop having wars? That's a good thing.
With all of your facts wrong, I'm fairly confident your conclusion is wrong also.
What's the source of your "facts"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
I'm not sure where you're getting "substantially higher" from.
That said, Alice Evans writes extensively on declining birth rates and she'd be my first port of call if I wanted to understand the reasons behind it: https://bsky.app/profile/draliceevans.bsky.social
The population pyramid becomes inverted with huge numbers of economically inactive retirees dependant on ever fewer numbers of working age people to care for them. Politics becomes hyper conservative as the young liberal voter base shrinks ever smaller. Military strength falls because the number of potential soldiers declines.
Thus, arguably a lower population is the best long term solution for a sustainable human presence on this planet while maintaining or expanding living standards, but indeed this comes with big challenges (which governments and obviously business interests do not want to face).
I don't fully agree with this. Would you rather live on a planet with a population of 5 billion that primarily used coal energy and meat food? or a planet of 10 billion that primarily consisted of renewable energy and vegetarianism?
My concern is more economic and social. With high population levels it seems too much wealth and power goes to the holders of land and natural resources. The Gulf state monarchs and London landlords being the 20th century manifestations of this.
Renewable energy, at least low-zero emission energy, will take over in any case but emissions are only one issue. Our negative impact on the environment goes far beyond that and it is driven by population.
Nobody has a good answer for this.
It's not about wealth. Huge amounts of money have been spent on incentive programs in Poland, Hungary and South Korea without success. Between countries, wealthier nations tend to have lower fertility rates. Eastern European countries tend to have lower house prices than France but also have lower fertility rates.
It's not about religiosity. Qatar, Iran and the UAE all have negative fertility rates. As does Catholic Poland.
It's not about social or employment policies. The Nordics have very generous maternity leave and benefits but still have terrible fertility.
The only exception of a wealthy country having a long term positive fertility rate is Israel.
Which is constantly at war(s). I wonder how long (20+ year) peace might affect Israel fertility rate.
The only credible approach to this is issue can be found in this corner of the discourse: https://www.natalism.org/
Balaji Srinivasan, Bryan Caplan, Kevin Dolan and Cremieux are quite bright and a good reason to attend, I don't know most of the others.
If the country needs more kids to secure its long term future, then the government should invest in this and (in effect) pay people to have them. I suspect that this would be an unpopular policy, as for whatever reason, people hate the idea of someone receiving lots of money from the government just because they have kids. They especially hate this idea when the person receiving the money is the person who did the hard work of childbirth. But anyone who thinks that low birth rates are a crisis ought to be open to this kind of solution.
I also, frankly, would prefer it if my colleagues with kids took lots of subsidized time off work, had access to proper childcare, and then were fully present and focused when they actually were at work. (I am aware of the irony of complaining about people being unfocused while posting on HN during working hours :D)
Having fertility rate of around 2.1 to produce a stable population level is ideal. Otherwise you eventually end up with exponential problems one way or another.
I think Hungary may have already reached this level. Families can get income tax reductions / exemptions, maternity leave, childcare support, preferential mortgagee rates and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary
All modern countries are facing similar problems with falling birth rates. At some point the crows will come home to roost and we'll have to tackle the actual problem - that we have an unsustainable economic system that relies on constant growth. The human population can't grow infinitely, especially while we're still constrained to a single rock in space.
Japan is already increasing its immigration quotas to meet the demand for labor, and this will only get worse.
The concern is that most developed economies are essentially a ponzi scheme where the workers are taxed to support the children, those on benefits and the older members of society.
People will support that system to some degree, because they contribute to it while they're working, with the promise of a state pension or other benefits when they are older (I realise as writing this that this is quite a Euro-centric and socialist mindset).
The problem these countries are facing once the population declines is that the population as a whole is older on average. Sure, some old people will be dying, but if the rate of births falls below the death rate, then inevitably, the average age of the population increases. This means that more of the population as a percentage will be receiving benefits from the state, and the cost of that is borne by the decreasing percentage of the population that is working.
This is more than just pensions and socialist benefits though, even in an extreme hypothetical country with no tax and no benefits at all, and aging population still places an increased consumption demand on a smaller workforce that can produce goods to satisfy that demand. Such an economy will necessarily have to shift their trade balance more towards importing goods to maintain the same standard of living. A smaller workforce is also likely to have a lower GDP.
The falling birthrate also becomes important, because any policies to try to reverse the trend also have a massively delayed effect on the economy. A falling birthrate now means a huge problem in 20-60 years time when the effect will be felt in the working population. Likewise, any policies to incentivise couples to have children will take 20 years to benefit the economy. If the problem isn't addressed now, it will be too late.
The reason the baby boomer generation has been so successful is because the working population massively outnumbered the population needing to rely on benefits.
I'm assuming of course, that we think that a decreasing GDP or "standards of living" are a bad thing. Most people would say yes, but maybe the reality is that the baby boomer generation have just had it too good.
Population levels have been at crisis levels for a while now, with a global population now that's double that of 50 years ago or 4 times that of 100 years ago. Our capacity to keep producing food can't keep increasing at that rate, and huge numbers of people live in overcrowded conditions. Even more significant is that access to fresh water is at a near critical level in many places, and there have been predictions that future wars might well be triggered by fighting to secure access to drinking water.
The current predictions are that global population will peak at 10 billion (another 25% above now) in another 50 years and start dropping off. That means that all of the things above will get worse over the next 50 years - even more overcrowding, less food, less access to drinking water, as well as worsening GDP and ability to maintain the same standard of consumption as before. Perhaps only after we see a massive collapse in global population can we start existing more sustainably as a species again.
When I talk to people it seems that they all have this concern, I doubt it's something that can be changed drastically in the short term.
But this is basically the same story everywhere. Living costs are really high. Add children to the mix and how do you manage?
If I put my pessimist hat on, it's just a matter of time till the same happens in Europe/US.
Heck, I already see friends in Ireland and UK struggling with that and they are all high earners.
It is pretty easy to look at millionaires and billionaires and see that money isn't what is holding down birthrates.
Just look at the millionaire CEO of your own company. Do they have 6 kids? They probably don't even have 4 kids.
And there have been studies (though I don't have any at hand) that sudden exogenous wealth (e.g. winning the lottery) doesn't really lead to people having more kids like they claim they wanted to.
Or do cross-country comparisons. The US birthrate is (very roughly) the same as countries that have (even adjusted for purchasing power parity) dramatically lower incomes.
Or look at low engagement levels of grandparents nowadays despite being dramatically richer than in previous generations.
It isn't (mainly) about money. It is just that it is okay to complain about money but not as okay to complain "I'd honestly rather do my hobbies than have another kid".
I'm a loser and don't want to condemn my kids by virtue of creating them to be losers to. Money of course a part of being a loser. I say that here anonymously. In real life i of course say something general like everybody else about money, time, etc.
But, at least, if you don't have a village and so it's all on you, that's a lot more work...
Couldn’t this also be evidence that money is the issue? i.e. you can’t get to that millionaire CEO spot if you have a lot of kids you need to pay for. Instead the successful are those having fewer kids.
Cost of having children is definitely very high. But I wonder if this is in part due to shifts in global culture.
Was the cost lower in the past? Perhaps state schools and nurseries were better and more available. But also less money went into things we grew accustomed to as consumers - fancier cars, new phones, holidays. Also non-consumerist things - perhaps people worry more about quality education for their potential kids. When children were more of a necessity, families found the money somehow.
Housing is expensive. But it is more so in booming megacities where the good jobs are. Were people more content in the past to plod along in their small town buying their affordable house?
This isn't a "drink less lattes" takedown, I have kids too and feel the pinch - and above all I might just be looking at it all wrong. But I'm having a hard time reconciling this observation with the fact that we are so much richer as a society than we were in say 1970. Presumably even the poorer people are, in absolute terms, wealthier than they were then.
In the 19... well, at least the 1950s, maybe even the 1970s, kids didn't each need their own bedroom, and bedrooms were smaller. (I mean, if you've got neurodivergent kids, it's really helpful for them to have their own space.) It didn't have that much of a yard; you didn't need a power mower for it. Our standards have changed.
In the 1970s, you probably drove a car that didn't have air conditioning, unless you lived in Arizona or something. Your house may not have had it, either.
It's not just lattes. It's housing and cars. The houses people lived in in the 1970s are now in the "less desirable" parts of town. The cars people drove... well, they may have been top-of-the-line cars in those days, but the equal functionality now is a very low-end car.
You can maybe survive as a family the way a family did in the 1950s - one breadwinner working a factory job, one car, small house, no cell phone plan, no cable TV, books from the library. But it's not the 1950s anymore and nobody wants to live that way.
Is this really true though? Yes, in 1970, we did not have computers in our pockets, fine. But, in 1970, my parents owned their own home in their 20s just from the tiny salary of a single school teacher. They financed their educations without loans. They had easy and cheap access to health care. Their day-to-day costs still allowed them to save money. They had a strong safety net and a local community that cared.
We don't have any of that today, but we do have billionaires skewing the "average" higher and higher. I wouldn't say that anyone but them are in real terms wealthier today than in 1970.
In 2022, the infant mortality rate in Sub-Saharan Africa was 49 deaths per 1,000 live births, while the infant mortality rate in the United States was 5.6 deaths per 1,000 live births. Cost isn't excuse. Cost is what for example decreases infant mortality. And that is just the start what the cost does, all the way to the better education and beyond.
So steering people away from having children gets baked into the culture haphazardly by people who will later be scratching their head about why they can't find labor and start advocating for the next-easiest short term solution. The mechanisms don't quite matter. They do, but they're a distraction. Both because they're entirely replaceable with other things that would accomplish the same goals, and they're very tricky to discuss in polite company.
Analyzing the tradeoffs of having children does not lead to some profound realization—mostly people recognize that it would take a lot of their time, and that sounds like that might make them less happy. But we also know that humans are not really very good at judging what would make them happy.
We also know that as you say, economic forces have normalized a situation where it's difficult for two people to find the time to justify the value of child-rearing. But I find it hard to see how we reverse this trend if the only discussion is economic—people don't have more children in Scandinavia even though the economic burden is lower.
As for a solution short of canceling pension plans? That would do it, of course, but ... of course this is exactly what current governments in EU, US, Japan, ... are effectively doing: canceling pension plans. They can either cancel pensions in the future ... or they can choose to spend much less now. So of course they are really reducing pensions (from already insufficient levels to basically nothing...) That won't help the current generation choose children, although that may turn out to be the smart play. The trouble is humans largely don't learn rationally, we learn from example. So we first need to see a large number of Americans and Europeans (and ...) fall into destitution after 65, and see the few that did have many children get rescued by their children from that fate, only then will we choose to have children again.
I guess this is how natural selection stabilizes the human population.
This has happened before and it will happen again. (seriously, human birth rates change in "waves")
Imagine leave home at 7am to ride a full train, getting to work at 8:15 (because you need to be ready to work by 8:30!) Then staying late till 7pm so you get home around 8:15pm to your small one-room studio. You eat, shower and clean. It’s time to sleep. You start doom scrolling in bed till 1am when you fall asleep.
Would you want to marry and have kids?
what for? it is a pretty legitimate choice for a society to have less children. Does the society have any issues that can be solved only by increasing birth rate? With AI/robots the issue of taking care of elders will be solved anyway. The AI will also possibly make the labor market even tougher, so less people may be better. Anecdotally, when i look at IQ charts and birth rate charts of various countries for the last several decades i see negative correlation between directions those two parameters move, and the higher IQ/lower birth rate doesn't look like a bad strategy for the projected technological future.
Re-establish the social contract that was unceremoniously thrown away in the ‘90s and was replaced with a ragtag collection of weak measures and inaction.
Large swathes of the population that used to live comfortably and relatively stress free in terms of money are now paranoid, sometimes reasonably, sometimes not.
This paranoia on top of structural changes just crushed the velocity of money.
The Victorians had a bit of a higher birthrate as compared to their continental cousins. This is due to Queen Victoria's penchant for her husband and the subsequently large amount of children she had. Essentially, since the queen had a lot of children, it was fashionable to have more children.
Ulaanbaatar is also a fair bit above the fertility rate for the rest of central Asia. Most commenters state this is because of the social status that mothers receive. Mongolia is pretty urbanized, in that most everyone lives in Ulaanbaatar. So parking gets hard, and they have laws that preference mothers with a lot of children for things like parking. They also get little medals/feathers that they wear about and thow in the faces of other women. Since Ulaanbaatar is the place in Mongolia, demographically, these social status rewards end up highly coveted, so people have more kids to get the rewards.
Based on these 2 examples, and pretty much nothing else, I'm gong to say the way Japan can reverse the fertility crisis is via social engineering. And based on the Victorians, you can use the power and prestige of the imperial family to accomplish this.
Currently, the only young people in the family are Princess Kako (30), Prince Hisahito (18, second in line to the throne), Princess Aiko (23), Princess Akiko (43), Princess Yohko (41), and Princess Tsuguko (38).
Essentially, you'd need Prince Hisahito and Princess Aiko (maybe Princess Akiko) to marry quickly (not each other, of course) and have a whole mess of kids. Then play up every little thing possible about these kids growing up in the press. Follow their every move. Make having kids fun and gossipy and a sign of social status. Have the Princesses talk about how easy it is, how hard it is, how fun it is, how they pity women without children. Really be mean about it and hammer it home all the time. Lots of paparazzi stuff, standard British royal family treatment (showing my ignorance here).
I'm not Japanese, so what I'm saying here may just be outright impossible though due to cultural expectations.
You might not care but in terms of the mechanics, this is just the natural consequence.
It won't look that way when you look within a smaller unit, but on a global scale, it must be significant.
East Asian countries were never keen and when they see what has happened in Europe I doubt they will change their mind (or they will be extremely careful and picky)
Well, many governments today seek to limit reproductive rights specifically to encourage pregnancy over other options. Limits on the termination of pregnancies, along with discouragement of contraception and education, have the net effect of making more women pregnant. We in the glass houses ...
An actual improvment could include not only reducing working hours but cultural norms such as staying longer than actually needed. Also building more living spaces around cities to reduce costs.
Most Japanese are expected to graduate high school(18 years), more than half of them get a degree(22 years minimum). Then you start working for many years.
The issue is clear. If we make our life self-sustaining in late teen, problem will be solved.
I have an idea that works but nobody(including myself) appreciate it.
Spread certain religions like Christianity or Islam.
Significantly reduce University students.
Significantly reduce high school students, especially female students.
Abandon modern health care so significant percentage of people die before reaching 15 years old.(It may sounds like counter-intuitive, but this situation motivate human to give more birth)
It has serious moral issue as well as political and economical issues. We somehow manage to keep the political stability and food supply under this condition.
I think it's more reasonable we wait for the natural selection that evolve the human to give a healthy first birth in their 50s.