Housing is a factor yes, but I think it's just a symptom of the larger problem of cost of living outpacing compensation.
Not only do parents need to pay for housing, but also for more food, more clothes, child care, sometimes school, and depending on the country extra wear and tear on a car or if it's a multi-child family, a larger vehicle like a minivan. And that's just the financial cost… good parenting also requires more time than can be alotted in modern industrialized society which require one's job to be their life.
It's possible for many to just barely scrape by on their wages with kids in tow, but why would anybody subject themselves to that struggle if they don't have to? If one is serious about having kids it's better to wait until both parents-to-be have achieved higher salaries and saved up significant financial padding to help mitigate disaster. Problem is, many people will never make that kind of money, and thus will never have kids. Others who would find themselves facing fertility issues brought on by age by the time the means is available.
The era of mass armies ended decades ago. Military power is now more a function of GDP than population size.
For South Korea, the only significant neighboring countries they might need to worry about are North Korea, China, and Japan. All of those have similar demographic problems.
Don't be so sure. I could easily see a country that has a pretty horrid demographic decline being invaded by a verile neighbour filled with young people who want more space. They will likely view it as taking what is rightfully theirs from their decadent and declining neighbours.
I suspect that will happen quite a bit in the next century. There is never an end to history, no matter how much we wish to believe that. It will just happen the next time around with a lot more remote killing machines and a lot of online multi-channel propaganda.
This is a Malthusian attitude that does not really encourage problem solving and collaboration; it's antihumanist to the core.
We should not retreat from our problems but solve them creatively - how do you do that? By solving's people's needs and enabling them to do what they want without worrying about poverty.
Seems to me that glibly throwing labels at people like that - Malthusian, antihumanist to the core - really doesn't "encourage problem solving and collaboration".
Saying we have too many people is way too close to fringe ideas like ‘useless eaters’ or something worse. Those beliefs need to be challenged at any opportunity as they are borderline dogwhistles.
Ok well, what we (should aspire to) do on HN is not throw labels or say ominously "X is way too close to Y", which also explains nothing, but calmly explain to the GP what, in your opinion, the problem is with what they said. Using facts, reason, shared ground, your experience. Teach us something, if you can. It's not easy, and takes some effort. Just throwing labels or slippery slopes around does nothing but make HN worse.
Or, for example, explain why you say "antihumanist", and someone might be able to engage with your reasoning, argue with your assumptions, or even teach you something.
The world population is still growing. There’s going to be significantly more people wanting to jump into lower middle class and consume even more. Koreans not reproducing changes nothing.
I think it's still perfectly defensible, so long as you're equitable to all, and "other" isn't code for being a racist. Everyone should have access to birth control, family planning and advanced life opportunities. Everyone should have the opportunity to live a sustainable fulfilling life. That's often not possible if you're born into poverty, born to parents who didn't want you, or socially/culturally pressured into having children young.
The solution is better education, better contraceptive access & more sustainable economies that don't rely on endless growth that grinds human lives away for a pittance.
> This statement, being more accurate is much less defensible.
Why is that less defensible? Any other stance will see the end of your people and culture. And if that's desirable, why are you practicing a culture you wish to see end?
Or we could all come together, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
You twist what was said and then you say it is not defensible. Not cool.
There are two ways one can understand what you said and both are terrible takes.
You might imagine that everyone is somehow secretly racist/nationalistic/egoistic and somehow when they say we need fewer people they secretly mean that fewer of other “kind of” people. This is not true. When I say we need fewer people I include “my people” in that too, for whatever arbitrary grouping you would deem “my” people.
The other possible take is that you think everyone who thinks there should be fever people should commit suicide, or if they don’t they clearly mean “fewer other people”. This is also silly. In this context nobody proposes that we should get fewer people by killing anyone. People die. If you just stop making so many of them we will end up with less of them.
Sure they will[1]. Their declining birth rate just lags SK's by a few decades. Birth rate is generally inversely proportional to development and educational attainment in a country. As "global south" countries catch up on these metrics their birth rates will likely decrease.
There aren't going to be fewer people as a result of this, there are just going to be fewer South Koreans in South Korea. When developed nations pursue non-procreative social policies and lose their demographics, they get internally replaced from undeveloped nations. The global population continues to grow.
For a demographic pyramid, just like a car accident, it's the acceleration that does the damage. If this happened more gradually it wouldn't be as much of a problem for the worker/retiree ratio.
Immigrants still revert to native sub-fertility after a generation, or two at most.
Immigration may be a solution for countries in the Anglosphere, as there are countless educated English speakers who want to immigrate.
Countries in the rest of Europe and in East Asia do not have the luxury of educated, native-language speakers in the millions wanting to immigrate. Those who do want to come to us instead of the Anglosphere, either lack marketable skills or lack the language skills necessary to be a part of society. This imposes considerable costs, and our pension systems are not equipped to handle people working here for 20-30 years and then living off a government pension for another 20.
To me this is the clear downside of having a competitive, efficient society: it is so competitive, and so efficient, that people correctly calculate that by bypassing kids, they can save more & lose less time.
That's where the the economic pressure (which societies seem to want, lest people become 'lazy') pushes the next generation. When that's what you incentivize, that's what you get - not just in Korea but all over the modern world.
Current economic trends are a sneak peak - inflation - money being paid out for obligations (gov. bonds -> pension funds) - not enough goods and people to cover the demand.
Only much worse because the trend is increasing on both sides - old people being kept alive with expensive treatments, dropping population of working people.
This. I’m super annoyed that countries consider depopulating as a catastrophe. Instead of immediately encouraging repopulation AND trying to deal with the climate catastrophe, why don’t we accept depopulation as a benefit and put much less pressure on the climate?
In 1990, CO2 emissions equated CO2 absorption by trees. All the goals about CO2 are about coming back to 1990 levels (minus the surplus). So 1990 levels of population is what we should aim for. If a country depopulates, let’s not increase births.
If we accept this, (contrary to the hitherto used economic models of growth) then we 'll need to change priorities in economies, fund more automation, deflate all the useless real estate bubbles etc, take down excess infrastructure, switch to robust nuclear energy etc. There aren't going to be enough ppl in the future to maintain this infrastructure.
Are they really that bad? There are 8 billion people on the planet. We can support more, but it makes more vulnerable to catastrophe.
Japan has had these demographics for a while now but it doesn't seem like they are falling apart. Someone will say-- oh but there economy isn't growing! Better a stagnant economy than a famine or a plague.
Most research I've seen indicates that human population will likely max out at 12 billion and then decline until it reaches a stable level. Except for a few fringe Malthusians, that is.
The problem with population decline is that most countries are built around the naive assumption of perpetual growth, especially when it comes to social security and welfare systems. Of course most of this can easily be fixed by raising taxes but that would fly in the face of the general trend to give tax breaks to higher incomes, abolish wealth taxes and prefer flat tax rates over progressive ones to prevent "wealth flight".
> Most research I've seen indicates that human population will likely max out at 12 billion and then decline until it reaches a stable level.
That kind of research is based on the assumption that the social/cultural trends encouraging people to have less kids continue unabated.
Humans often overcompensate. It is conceivable that a country's population may decline to the point that the threat that poses to its future becomes impossible to ignore – the threat may motivate the general population to change their behaviour, and may lead to the government introducing major incentives to encourage more children. That may lead to the population decline being reversed; but, it may then be difficult to "turn off the tap" of the new culture/policies to stop the population booming again.
There are also countercultural minorities (mostly ultra-conservative religious sects) who stubbornly continue to have lots of kids in spite of the social/cultural forces which discourage mainstream society from doing so. That kind of analysis generally ignores those minorities, because they are so small – true, but if they don't change their ways, eventually they will grow to become the majority, and then we'll be back to population boom again.
Will they eventually change their ways? That is possible, not inevitable. Many of them have been successfully resisting pressure to change their ways for decades; if they haven't succumbed to that pressure yet, why assume it is inevitable that they eventually will? If one considers that there are multiple such countercultural minorities, even if some of them do end up changing course, all it takes is for one to stubbornly resist doing so, for it to eventually become the demographic majority.
The reality is complicated. But as a toy model, imagine: everyone has one kid, at exactly 40 years old; everyone finishes education at 20; everyone retires at 60, everyone dies at 80.
Every 40 years, the population halves. As each pair of parents retire, their one child enters the workforce, and their labour is used to cover their parents’ pensions — taxes for state pension, and whatever share of the wealth they generate that ends up as corporate profit for private pension.
I don’t know about South Korea, or indeed the statistics of the incidence rate and duration, but from experience I know that late-stage dementia care in the UK costs about twice the average UK earner’s headline salary. I think this may at least show the way it could go wrong, given this is all just an illustration.
Society wants the benefits without paying the true costs for parents to raise kids and not have the experience suck. Even in countries with robust pro natalist policies, people want less or no kids.
At a minimum optimizing for "replacement" theoretically allows a population to continue to exist as it is (assuming all kinds of things like everyone backfills the jobs that are already filled, etc, etc)
A shrinking population is terrible as there are less and less people to support existing institutions like social services, infrastructure, healthcare, etc.
A very simple example is social security. It is a net wealth transfer from working age people to retirement age people.
If there's not enough working age people then there is not enough to support the retirement age people.
But the question is whether there is a benefit to having children once you get old, even if nobody else does (ie including getting old yourself in “the calculation”).
Demographically you’re in a world of trouble still, but then having children is actually far more important if society and its safety nets are collapsing.
I don't think we see it play out this way. Japan is the poster child for this. They also like technology and don't like immigration. But their economy has deep structural issues.
Does it have more issues for the people living there than in other countries, or is it just that capitalists doesn't feel they can make enough profit in Japan? Often times the "economy" just refers to the amount of profits and not the amount of value delivered to end users.
This is looking at it from the wrong perspective though. People, by and large, optimize their choices for their self, not for "society". Replacement rate is a concept that exists at an abstraction level above the individual. It's not something that an individual can fix, and optimizing for it doesn't necessarily help the individual. At best its something that you may see cultural push for.
By having ppl indoctrinated to accept being at lower caste to produce babies and contributing, where the ppl at top of the pyramid are sucking all the blood from the bottom. Yeah that would work out
That sounds more like the modern secularism than at least Christianity or Islam. Indeed, the latter is more egalitarian. Nearly everyone can take pride in raising a family. Only a relative cognitive elite can forgo having kids to pursue a demanding career.
How are Christianity or Islam more egalitarian? Don't their elites have way more power to define what the bottom feeders can do or say? How is giving ppl less right more egalitarian? What kind of backward logic are you talking about?
They're more egalitarian because there's a authority that is written. I can use the Bible or the Koran to judge the minister or the organization. I don't know if this is done in Islam, but it is in at least some strains of Christianity.
I am not talking about the book. I am talking about in practice. I am not even getting the nitty gitty details of things like women's rights.
I am only asking one question. Has there been a time in history where there are really no elites group in the religious groups and everyone is equal? When did that happen? It's such a hypocrisy that all the religions have a good idea that we should have a god above men so that we don't worship human as god, but in the end it never translated to the practice isn't it?
They’re more egalitarian because their vision of a good life (working hard, getting married, raising kids, and following the rules) is attainable for nearly anyone. Even the elites must abide by that definition at least publicly.
In modern secular society, elites use their power to define a vision of a good life that reflects their own life, but is unattainable for the average person: living comfortably in a big, interesting city, having an interesting or impactful or glamorous professional job, being a famous performer or fame-adjacent, etc.
How about change it to forever? Has there ever been a time where everyone is equal? I have NEVER seen that happen in practice, just like the communists' so called 'equality'. Let's put it in this way, I have never seen 'All animals are equal'. I have only seen 'but some animals are more equal than others'. You should read Animal Farm.
That's what people are indoctrinated with, causing a lot of people to start a family too soon. However, I assure you many who have kids are not happy, especially while raising them in poverty or on unlivable wages.
"indoctrinated". You say that like people who say this are selling rotten fruit as new.
You can verify this for yourself. Go to an old folks home. Ask them about their lives. See how many don't bring up their children. Or mention them with regret. Look into their eyes as they speak of them.
In my experience everyone wears their children like badges of honor and any regrets are about not doing enough for them or having their priorities not family oriented enough.
This is the perspective of the oldest among us with the longest time here to contemplate what they find most important.
Yes, we preach it, have preached it. This doesn't make it any less true, because it is true. Your being given the keys to life and your appear to want to question.
Today's poor people are richer than rich people way back when those old folks were raising children.
I've been quite poor and with children. I'm intimately familiar with the pain of being poor. Speaking from my experience, in 20 years your poorness won't matter, but your children, if any, will.
Waiting for perfection before having children is like never shipping because there are flaws in the code. Sure, you try not to ship crap but it still must go out as best as you can manage.
As a product of generational trauma, I find the "no perfect time, just have kids" mentality disgusting. Perhaps these old people's regrets about not doing enough for their children are because they didn't prepare properly to actually have children. Children being used to prop up your own self image strips both you and your child of their individuality. People should want more in life than to "have children" and need to give the decision to have children the proper weight it deserves. If someone does not feel satisfied in their own self or their relationship, they should avoid having children hoping to fill a void. People should not assume or default to their purpose in life being to simply have children.
I assure you that just hoping the poorness goes away after 20 years doesn't magically result in it happening, nor does time effortlessly unwind the trauma or mend the damage done by generations of people who were ill prepared to take care of children.
> As a product of generational trauma, I find the "no perfect time, just have kids" mentality disgusting.
The families of the earth do need improvement. That starts with individual choices to be better, do better. However, you are disgusted at the wrong thing. Having children isn't the issue. Being bad to then is. And money isn't the fulcrum you make it out to be.
> Perhaps these old people's regrets about not doing enough for their children are because they didn't prepare properly to actually have children.
Generally it was along the lines that they regret their unnecessary selfish pursuits over family time. Working more for a nice car or boat, an example.
> assure you that just hoping the poorness goes away after 20 years doesn't magically result in it happening,
That isn't really my argument now is it. And this isn't the only time in your response where you do this. Makes a conversation kind of pointless when you just put whatever words and points in my mouth you feel like and ignore the main points.
> nor does time effortlessly unwind the trauma or mend the damage done by generations of people who were ill prepared to take care of children.
Your life has challenges. Most do.
You are human like the rest of us. Stop blaming your forebears, even if they have some fault, and rise to the occasion.
I think your attempts to be profound come off as incredibly naive with regards to the realities of a traumatic upbringing. These relationships impact your whole life.
You do not get to choose your parents. Your parents should choose a good time & place to have children & not cave to pressure from foolish people waxing poetic about finding meaning by living through their children.
I absolutely will blame my abusers, and I will blame their abusers too. I don't see how "earth families" will improve without accountability. We certainly don't need people telling victims to stop asking for it.
Depends on if one values quality of life for the children, in my opinion. Birthing lots of kids into circumstances that are easily turned desperate seems undesirable in my eyes, particularly if we're aiming for a society composed of mentally healthy adults.
I would be shocked if Americans were “mentally healthier” than say Indians or Chinese. Living in a world of physical limits rather than endless possibilities has a way of focusing the mind.
As an American I think our mental health, at least among millennials and gen Z is generally in shambles, largely thanks to financial stress. We have a lot of depressed young people feeling like there is no bright future to strive for and that they're going to be working some menial job until the day they die.
> We have a lot of depressed young people feeling like there is no bright future to strive for and that they're going to be working some menial job until the day they die.
I agree that stress about this eventuality is the root of a lot of mental health issues. But I would say the problem is actually that recent generations have been socialized into thinking that the average person can expect any more than that. A blessing Indians and Chinese have is being free of that socialization.
No, it didn't. Having lots of babies is terrible for all sorts of reasons, and generally holds poor countries back and keeps them poor. Much like with money inflation, a human inflation target of 2% seems wise. Higher or lower than that leads to trouble.
Societies have periods of (population) growth and (population) decline. Wanting, and managing for a steady 2% growth rate is technocratic, unrealistic, and will lead to more trouble than having natural periods of growth and decline. (Same with steady money growth too.)
That's a funny way of saying that people are so economically desperate (whether due to low income, lack of savings, job insecurity, weak familial ties, etc) that they delay having children.
I wonder what the % of people currently in a long-term relationship looks like. Those also don't tend to do well under economic duress.
South Koreans are richer than ever, so if that's the problem why aren't they having more kids?
> due to low income, lack of savings, job insecurity, weak familial ties, etc
Almost every couple I know who is not having kids makes good $$. It's my friends who make less and are more working class (and work longer hours at that) are the ones having kids. So that sounds like the opposite of what you're suggesting.
Not everything is about current income. Sure, they make good money but are they able to cut hours to spend more time at home with an infant or toddler? Can one of them take a few years off work and still have their career recover from that? Will they be able to maintain their lifestyle if they have to pay for another human being? There are a lot more considerations than raw money and a higher income doesn't help with that unless you can also build up considerable savings or have a strong support network. It takes a village, and all that.
When you make $100k vs $50k that usually means your skillset is in higher demand and rarer, so you have better long term job security. Working class people don't have that luxury.
So yes I think people who earn more have better job security and ability to support a spouse during mat leave. I also live in Canada with liberal mat leave laws so that's not an issue.
If anything the biggest pressure on my wealthy urban friends vs working class suburban/small town people is a) cost of housing and b) lack of savings.
But OP said "a competitive and maximally efficient society" dissuades kids.
First, a competitive economy should generate plenty of housing for people with the $$ to pay for it.
Secondly, an efficient economy should provide plenty of ways to save/invest beyond just housing. The public stock market is highly exclusive and controlled. The primary other way (besides housing/stocks) is investing in or starting a small business. New small business rates have declined in recent years. Housing is the only game in town for most people and what politicians spend 90% of focus on incentivizing in capital markets + culturally, but keep supply artificially limited.
So if anything regressive policies which prevent competition/efficiency leads to less kids.
> Almost every couple I know who is not having kids makes good $$. It's my friends who make less and are more working class (and work longer hours at that) are the ones having kids.
Those you see making good money, if they intend to have kids, are probably holding off until they feel they're ready (I'm in this group myself). Couples who aren't earning much might feel that someday may never come and have kids since they're going to be somewhat financially stressed either way, plus some in that group have kids as a way to add some meaning and motivation to keep on with the everyday grind.
That said, the answer to population problems clearly not to make more people impoverished, but rather to bring the bar of "ready of kids" down to a level that's accessible by more people more quickly.
If you and your partner want kids and are waiting for some arbitrary financial goal my advice would be don't wait, do it now.
We had our first when I was 25 and then seeing all our peers wait until 35+ health wise you're going to cope better when you're younger. Plus you get that much longer when them in your life, and more time being able to play competitive sports with them.
But kids are expensive you say? Well they can be, but only if you spend money on them, and most of that spending is school years anyway so you still have time to figure out out.
South Korea is richer and more successful than most countries on earth. If "economic desperation" was an actual, as opposed to a stated, reason for South Koreans to have fewer babies, the vast majority of humanity would have fewer children still, since their "economic desperation" is objectively much worse.
I have a hard time rectifying the idea that Korea's economy is highly state managed and largely operated by monopolies with a society "so efficient and competitive" that people are opting out of humanity in order to compete and store money.
I almost think you have it entirely backwards. In a society where competition and choice is so severely limited you see people adopt these strategies because there is far less room to make a mistake or to engage with economically sub optimal decisions like having a child.
I think you're seeing this effect creep into the US as well, as we've allowed more mergers and acquisitions financed by cheap interest from the Fed that people are effectively feeling this same squeeze here. Plus, I don't think people are at all effectively factoring in the consequences of the lock downs and crash of small businesses that were associated with it.
This is a government monopoly problem, not a lazy population problem.
Children have value in the hyperefficient society you describe, but it's emotional rather than monetary. It's hard to compare abstract, future emotional upside to dollars spent on diapers and sleepless hours lost to infant childcare in the here and now. Society does a poor job helping young people understand how to balance investment into children, friends, family, and community against investment into professional work which often results in more immediate and measurable results.
It very much depends on how the society (your peer group, your parents, etc) defines success.
In societies, having many kids is seen as a sign of success; ideally not just the number but also their prosperity.
In other societies, personal consumption and personal display of wealth and influence prevail; likely it's the case of the urbanized part of the SK society.
For obvious natural reasons, the trait of not having kids is self-eliminating. Those who don't care that their culture will end with them will be outnumbered and eventually replaced by those who do.
If it were actually efficient we'd see less issues. I'd say the Korean economy is hyper-competitive but fairly inefficient. Lots of social problems because people who secured a nice, well-paying job don't want competitions and will do everything to block others from getting the same job. All the way from lawyers limiting the number of lawyers, to doctors doing the same thing, to full-time factory workers discriminating against part-time workers in the same factory.
So (1) there are fewer and fewer decent jobs, and (2) once you fall off the "correct career path" for any reason, there's no way to get back, or at least that's the universal perception. So everybody fights tooth and nail to keep whatever they already have, which further distorts the market, and the cycle continues.
Disclaimer: have been living in the US since 2011, so my understanding is from reading news and stuff.
> If it were actually efficient we'd see less issues. I'd say the Korean economy is hyper-competitive but fairly inefficient.
I remember once visiting the head office in Seoul of a major South Korean firm – they had a rather large development team working on some rather quotidian internal corporate needs (identity management, corporate intranet/portal, etc). And yet, they were being subjected to the kind of limitations one would expect only on some classified national security project – e.g. Internet access blocked so they couldn't access StackOverflow/etc, personal electronic devices had to be put in lockers at the building security desk, etc. The restrictions were very obviously impeding their productivity. It appeared that the company's management was very paranoid about corporate espionage, to a degree which seemed out of place given the actual business this company did.
A Korean colleague told me that a lot of South Korean companies were like that. His theory was that senior management at many firms is dominated by retired military officers, who take from their military background a culture of secrecy which may well be justified in the military, defence contractors, super-high-tech firms such as leading-node semiconductor fabrication, etc–but isn't appropriate for your average business, and this particular firm wasn't doing anything like that. What do I know, but his theory seemed plausible to me.
Unfortunately it seems that cultural aspects like accepting homosexuality, allowing women to run their own lives and valuing higher education and a scientific mindset are correlated with not prioritizing the reproduction of their culture to the next generation.
I'd like the average human in a 100 years to be a bit more like me and a bit less like the average human today. But the rest of the Western world doesn't seem to see it that way.
> Unfortunately it seems that cultural aspects like accepting homosexuality...
Are you aware of the research that correlates homosexual traits in men with higher fertility in women from the same genes[1]? These factors are not a strict net-negative. In addition, "culture" isn't transmitted genetically. You could spread a culture with below replacement reproductive rates if the culture was persuasive enough. There's not a "democracy" gene that suddenly emerged and spread from 17th century England. It was the ideas that spread.
So will every country eventually. Usually countries solve this with immigration but Asian countries (as opposed to Western ones) are quite xenophobic based on personal experience and those of talking with others. As such, they don't let in many people and those that do find a hard time becoming a citizen (Japan's resident foreigner population is 2.29% according to Wikipedia).
There is also not a huge reason to have children, I think many are finding. The societal pressure from decades or centuries past is simply not there much anymore. They already have jobs, are making money, so why spend it on raising a child which can be very expensive? Or they're not making enough money to raise them (see rising rent prices and stagnating wages), so again, why spend all that money they don't have on raising a child?
When I went to South Korea earlier this year, I was denied entry to a business while my ethnically Korean friends were allowed. I was astonished that this kind of thing happened in this day and age.
I think a lot of people want children but can’t afford them so they’re delaying. Living in a tiny apartment in a questionable neighborhood makes people say later and not being able to afford help and having to dedicate every moment to attending your child just isn’t that appealing.
> Living in a tiny apartment in a questionable neighborhood makes people say later
I think people had more kids in far worse conditions than this in the past. So it's not unthinkable. But I think what we're seeing is a decline in living standards in relative terms. People want their kids to have a life at least as good as their own childhood and that's becoming out of reach for many as housing, healthcare, and education become unaffordable.
Sure, in the past. It's not the past. In the past having children was also an econnomic benefit because they'd help you with your livelihood.
"People used to have children while living in squalor, why aren't they choosing this now?!" isn't a convincing argument.
So much of the cost of living is just based on housing inflating everything else. Middlemen got in the way realizing that housing isn't elastic and people will just pay. Especially when you can convince people that house prices are going to inflate so get in now and get yours!
The only way out is to eject the leeches from the real estate market and intentionally drop housing prices significantly keeping policy in place to keep the investors out.
If it doesn't happen intentionally, it's going to happen anyway when population decline leaves housing empty. That crisis is coming one way or the other.
Maybe it'll end up being something like the old Roman bailout where the state would just cancel all debts.
Are Asian countries xenophobic, or do they not want the cultural changes that come from immigration? Those are two completely different things.
I’m a south Asian with a beard, and apart from racial profiling at the airport, I’ve been treated uniformly pleasantly in Tokyo. But they would object to millions of south Asians moving there and bringing their differing cultural attitudes. They would have to say goodbye to spotless Tokyo streets and everyone patiently walking two blocks to get to a cross walk instead of jaywalking! If a New Yorker wouldn’t want a million Appalachians moving to their city and changing the culture, that wouldn’t be xenophobia. Same thing for Asian countries who don’t want different cultural groups in their country.
It seems like that's not as much of a factor as one expects, as evidenced in Scandinavia and Finland [0]. Researchers said that even with high parental care policies, people still aren't having as many children. This is I think more related to people simply not wanting kids rather than policies relating to parental and child care.
Interestingly, DRPK, at 1.86 births per woman, has a significantly higher birthrate than ROK at 0.84. Should these trends continue, we might see the two halves of Korea diverge into rich, old, low population south vs poor, young, high population north.
I think that the commonality in places that are having falling birth rates are:
- expensive housing
- very expensive to raise kids, e.g. day care.
- women expected to remain in the workforce, or they need to remain in the workforce because of the cost of living.
This makes kids seem incredibly inconvenient and also it isn't clear your kids will have a better life than yours. Kids are not a joy, but a burden.
I think we need to let the primary caregivers of children, women or man, not have to have a stressful a full-time job while raising kids.
Also we need affordable housing and affordable child care.
Big cities are not setup for this - the bigger the city the more expensive and inconvenient raising kids are. Thus the remote work trend may be part of the solution to this. I also think that living in rural areas is pro-fertility (for these same reasons) and given that this tends to trend Republican, there is likely a Republican pro-fertility advantage over the long term, at least in North America.
BTW any notice that Elon Musk says we need more kids while at the same time has cut parental benefits and also killed work at home at his companies? Also he pushes "hard core" hours that would annoying any parents. That guy doesn't make sense to me.
People keep saying economic factors dont matter, but having a comfortable home is key. It was the norm for most of human history; you could simply build one by yourself. It is probably still true in dirt-poor places with high-fertility rates. Family is conceptually proportional to a person's property and the tiny or temporary 21th century spaces just don't leave a lot of space for "let's have a kid"
(I think that 's the reason why the US has higher fertility that europe: bigger homes)
Large houses also feel empty, and then you want to fill it. Also a large house lets you get away from the kids when you or they need it, which leads to happiness. And having a yard or a street where they can play with friends is also amazing. I'd be so paranoid about my kids safety if I lived in a crowded downtown core.
Half the Swedish population lives in apartments, but 70% of the children live in houses.
As our cities grow larger, chasing higher concentration and productivity, the costs of owning a house within reasonable commuting distance soar. So instead we cram into little shoeboxes where we do not even have enough space for ourselves, let alone children.
Urban populations have historically never been able to maintain their population without people moving in from elsewhere. But this century we are going to see 80% of humanity live in cities. There won't be enough people elsewhere to fill up the empty apartments left by childless city-dwellers.
Cities have been places where people come to work, live, and die without continuing their line for millennia.
Cities generally vote Democrat, but minorities do too and they have higher fertility than rural whites, who are predominantly Republican.
But I would be wary of drawing any conclusions for future voting patterns from current demographic trends. Politics and the trends can change in mere months or years, the impact of the trends on politics takes decades to emerge.
Elon Musk has probably realized that wealthy white people like him will become a smaller and smaller part of the global population if they cannot reproduce their numbers. Naturally he doesn't include his employees in this important group.
An aristocrat worried about the nobility dying out wouldn't encourage the peasantry to reproduce.
> Cities have been places where people come to work, live, and die without continuing their line for millennia.
Has it? Interesting. I didn't know what.
> But I would be wary of drawing any conclusions for future voting patterns from current demographic trends. Politics and the trends can change in mere months or years, the impact of the trends on politics takes decades to emerge.
For example, a group such as Hispanic voters can be slowly growing over decades as a result of higher fertility.
But their voting patterns may change from one election cycle to another. Hispanic voters are not so solidly Democrat as they have been. So if in 2006 you forecast that the growth of the Hispanic community would tip the scales in favor of Democrats by 2016, you'd be in for a surprise.
I used to think that the future of the US was Democrat rule due to demographics, now I'm not so sure. I think other factors will weigh heavier.
You can do a forecast assuming everything stays static, and note the point where fertility will be the deciding factor. But because fertility is such a slow process compared to most of politics, your forecast would be quite inaccurate.
I suppose the best summary I can make is that political party messaging and voter group preferences will evolve a lot faster than group sizes due to differences in fertility. Trends in turnout are more relevant in your typical political timescale. By the time fertility has had an impact, your forecast is far enough into the future that you have a lot of unknown unknowns, and so it doesn't tell you that much.
I'm sorry if that doesn't make it clearer, it's quite late on a Friday for me but I decided to leave all explanations I could think of so you can pick which ones make sense. I might be wrong too, of course. I have no relevant qualifications in the subject.
Culture is a powerful thing. My dad spent his career in public health, exporting to Asian countries contraception and the idea that children are a burden to economic and social development. And it was amazingly effective. In our home country of Bangladesh, the total fertility rate has dropped from 5.7 kids per woman the year I was born to under 2 in 2020. But the new cultural attitudes towards having kids seem entrenched now, and it seems like we will overshoot the targets and go well below replacement levels all across Asia.
The economic consequences of that aren’t going to be pretty. Japan and Korea face many economic headwinds, but among them is the fact that there will be fewer consumers in 50 years. Immigration isn’t a solution to that either. The culture you can create with a homogenous population where everyone is socialized in the same norms from birth just can’t be replicated in an immigrant nation. London and Toronto are fine, but Tokyo and Kyoto are remarkable and different and I doubt they can be maintained in that state by non-Japanese.
Tokyo and Kyoto are remarkable and different but not like they were 50 years ago or 100. The U.S. is remarkable and different in way that's not like it was before a 100 years of immigrants came here. There's a thru line though - a path dependence in the U.S. that takes immigrants and changes them as much or even more then it's changed by them.
There's a world culture homogenization which is unfortunate in some ways but immigration is only part of the story. I don't think it's even a big part of it.
> There's a thru line though - a path dependence in the U.S. that takes immigrants and changes them as much or even more then it's changed by them.
Apparently not as much as we think: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594 (“Full assimilation in a generation or two, Jones reports, is a myth. And the cultural traits migrants bring to their new homes have enduring effects upon a nation's economic potential.”)
Cultural homogenization due to mass media and the internet is of course unavoidable. But Tokyo is the product of more durable attitudes. There is an orderliness to it that comes from it being populated by Japanese people who were raised by Japanese parents who were raised by Japanese grandparents—even if they watch American movies.
As you acknowledge, immigration changed America, destroying the republic as originally conceived and making it something different. Italians and Irish didn’t come to America and assimilate into the small government Anglo-Americanism. They retained their statist orientation and voted in FDR (who would have won without them), whose judicial appointments rewrote the Constitution. Whether you think it’s better or worse, it’s hard to deny it’s different. And it’s quite reasonable for people in any country to want to resist such changes that immigration can cause.
The political issue for 2040 is going to be countries in demographic crises pretty much everywhere trying to drastically change housing, employment, and childcare to try to get their populations to reproduce.
The rent seeking which has made so much of people’s lifetime income dedicated to housing which is getting progressively smaller makes investing or just affording children unreasonable to very many people.
Society will need to reorganize itself so that people can have children younger and afford the space to raise them in comfortably which means working parents who can hire childcare so that they can have lives outside of only raising children.
This doesn’t happen with high density city property development which is about the only thing people advocate for.
We need zoning in cities that forces the presence of big spaces for people that actually want them including parking for vehicles and significant tax penalties for vacancy.
Housing needs to be a bad investment.
Facebook ads seem to think I’ma real estate investor and one of the ads I’m seeing a lot is bragging about sixty percent returns on property development projects. That is not adding value and charging appropriately for it, it’s just theft.
I think you're very confused about how development in cities works. It's the parking requirements, large lot requirements, large size requirements etc., plus the general absurd difficulty of getting any kind of permit to build anything anywhere, that makes housing so expensive in the first place.
If we took a pro-development attitude and made it easy to build everything by relaxing requirements, the market would respond with a much broader variety of housing options, including some large family-oriented spaces but also a lot of small single-person oriented spaces.
As you say "housing should be a bad investment," I think that's true to a degree, but the best way to make that happen is to relax the rules and make it an extremely competitive market with abundant supply. Then the price of housing would be mostly determined by the cost of construction, which would be much cheaper than the current market where prices are driven by scarcity to societally damaging heights.
Absolutely right. Unfortunately, this won't come to pass. Housing is the one point of leverage my parents generation have over my generation. It will be the leverage of my generation over my children's generation.
By keeping homes scarce, we create an asset class that old people naturally have more of, since they bought in earlier.
And we will need all the leverage we can get when every working age person has to support one or more retired people.
Building housing should actually be a great investment, owning housing should be a bad investment. The problem is that with construction being so mired in inefficiency and red tape, there has to be an expectation of many years of great returns in order for anything to be built.
I think all these modern societies are finding out that you need to make civil life about more than just extracting the maximum effort from people for the least possible compensation. If that's the way things are set up, then it's only a matter of time before the machinery of the economy leaves no space for everyday life to occur.
There are obviously not enough healthy marriages in culturally corrupted (in a bad or good way depends on how you see it) countries. Obviously marriage is not likely in a big swinger party.
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