I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but this does not surprise me in the least. The life in Korea is way too competitive and stressful. The hellscape begins in pre-school and primary school where parents make kids go to private school AFTER school, often till late evenings. This progressively gets worse and worse until university.
In my father's generation, people could relax after getting into university. They could party around, barely pass and still get decent jobs. Nowadays, that's definitely not the case. Getting a good job is insanely hard. You need to take care of your GPA. English certs like TOFLE/TOEIC are pretty much mandatory and you'd probably want other cert/ extra curricular experience.
Okay. So you've went through all that and you've got yourself a good job. Now that's all done, can you finally start to relax and enjoy life? Haha, no. 52-hour weekly working limit has only recently been introduced, and the current president wants to get rid of that. Even if you work your ass off, it is _very_ unlikely that you can ever afford an apartment in Seoul.
In the end, you have tired and jaded people without a fun childhood, who can't even buy their own house. I certainly would not choose to have children in these circumstances.
I've "escaped" and live a decent life outside of Korea now. But I have many friends in Korea who have "given up" (in various ways) in light of all this . There are some friends who are married and have kids, but they all have rich parents or studied/hustled really hard. In spite of all this, I miss Korea so much. But I don't think I'll be going back.
This is only one reason in declining fertility rate. There are many more (some mentioned in other comments) but this comment is already getting too ranty.
---
EDIT: This comment got much more attention than I thought it would and I'd like to add some positive stuff too. There are certainly people who enjoy life in Korea by refusing to participate in the rat race and by prioitising building meaningful communities in their lives. Some things are getting better, albeit slowly, with each generation.
> you have tired and jaded people without a fun childhood
Man this hits really hard because I spent my first 20 years growing up in China... Good thing is that now I'm in a much less authoritarian place with a job that has decent work-life balance. Have been trying to cultivate some hobbies in the past few years, feels like I've been trying to reclaim the childhood I never had.
We're talking about 4 days work week for adults, but no one is talking about 40 hours work week for kids. 7 hours of school, 3 hours of homework, then karate, piano, swimming and football on weekends.
I've complained about that my whole life. Going from high school to college was wonderful because I had so much time time my first semester in college. (I ended up blowing that by overloading myself in subsequent semesters, but that's another story.)
I always hated the idea of homework in school (outside of college/university) because I have never understood being at "home" but still required to do "work" for a place I just spent 7-8 hours at and most days 2-3 more hours for sports or band.
I just never did homework, half-assed projects and did the bare minimum for tests. I had an unusually liberal school though. I probably would have dropped out if it wasn't illegal here.
If those karate, piano, swimming and football are intense enough to be counted as "work" rather than leisure, then something is wrong. Are hobbies not a thing anymore?
Oh. That’s batshit crazy (the college application thing). Why should non-academic achievements make any difference whatsoever when applying to college? Is that a thing anywhere except the US?
As for show and prestige, that’s usually what the parents want, so that’s squarely in the "something is wrong" category.
I thought it was a case of everyone apeing the Ivy Leagues when they kept on changing the rules to keep their hardworking minority numbers down to make their New England old money look superior. So the excuse was they are going for "well rounded with extracurriculars" students, back when there were too many Jews for their liking. Then repeat the same thing with Asians once exams and extracurriculars are optimized for.
Blind unthinking mimicry drives the educational system. I was in early elementary school when analogies were removed from the SATs. They went from "very important" to disappearing off the face of the earth, only occassionally showing up in two questions at most per standardized test.
colleges have decided they want balanced students who have some of everything (except free time, because lmao they dont need that). so its karate or swimming oe soccer or football or baseball for athleticism, usually 2 during childhood. its piano or violin. its starting extra language study early. boy scouts or national honor society for leadership. speech and debate, model un or working for a campaign to show political consciousness. 100+ nonprofit work (actually documented) or starting your own of you want to stand out.
all these can be fun but as a kid you are not doing them to have fun, there is constant pressure to win awards and be the best at these. and the list is picked more from appearance on a college application than enjoyment for a child.
this is most american kids now with any ambition of getting into a prestigious school. it will not get you scholarships though.
it is also not mentioning that "academic excellence" in high school has moved from straight As to 6-8 AP exams in a single year, i shit you not.
> it is also not mentioning that "academic excellence" in high school has moved from straight As to 6-8 AP exams in a single year, i shit you not.
That is because even when I attended high school 15 to 20 years ago, letter grades/points were extremely inflated. AP exam scores (and SAT/ACT) are the only objective academic measures.
As an example, I am pretty sure a C was the lowest grade possible to get (translated to a 2 on the point scale). Then a B was a 3, and A was 4. For a class, there was a final numerical score (arbitrarily determined), and an A was something like 93 to 100, B was 85 to 92, and so on.
But that was for the “regular classes”. If you were in an honors class, you got +5 added to your final number grade for the course. And AP class added +10. So if you ended up with 93, you actually got 103 in the class. And so you had an A, but the grade point average was calculated from 103/100*4 = 4.12. And then this grade point average was used to rank you relative to others in the grade for purposes of determining valedictorian.
In any case, as you can see, the whole thing was a joke and anyone who attended class got a C, and anyone who put in half an ounce of effort got an A, and the higher achievers had GPAs higher than 4 on a 4 point scale.
Obviously, colleges are not dumb, so they know the whole grade inflation ruse, and it also continues in many classes. After all, at many colleges, their customers are paying them $30k to $70k per year for that grade.
> it is also not mentioning that "academic excellence" in high school has moved from straight As to 6-8 AP exams in a single year, i shit you not.
Same in India.
There is 0.1 to 0.6% chance of getting into any prestigious university depending on the demographic factors of student. This is after extensive filtering in high school.
99% of students spend 6-8 hours in coaching daily for years to get rejected since we follow stack ranking with limited seats.
What's sobering is government tried to increase elite universities but people don't perceive them as such even if they have better infrastructure, faculty, and education without the same low acceptance rate.
Those are not hobbies in this case though. I've been attending music school (violin) for 7 years (7-14 y.o.) and only by the time I hit 30 I reasised the problem with the whole system.
Teachers (and to some point parents) expect you to invest as much in this music school as you invest (at least expected to) in your regular school.
And I never though about it this way. For me this was always a place to escape most of my classmates and have fun if possible. Or just relax. "Why are all those people are shoutin at me? Can't we all just have a good time?"
This is one of those problems that goes away when you're an adult.
I studied piano as a boy and there was always some friction with my Polish teacher for whom piano was her life's work, and try as she might she couldn't quite get her head around a student who didn't want much more than play Bohemian Rhapsody at parties. Tried to get me to love Chopin as much as she genuinely loved him, but it never caught up and I took university as an excuse to quit.
After Covid I picked up the violin, I made it clear to both the school and to my teacher that it's strictly a hobby for me, and we got along wonderfully. On our first meeting she remarked that I never asked the one question that new students always ask, i.e. "how long will it take me to be able to play <insert piece of music>" - I had had that thought, but intentionally withheld it because I didn't want anything like expectations or timetables in my brain-clearing hobby.
I can tell that you will play your violin with life gusto while your Polish teacher do it with life burden. Music should be like that. So many students I saw for the past decades having achive diploma level in piano or violin or sometime both before they attend University ended up throwing away their musical gift. So sad.
>This is one of those problems that goes away when you're an adult.
True, I'm still grateful to my teachers and mother who persueded me to finish the school. I bought a violin at 24 and a guitar around 30 and now can practice both at my own pace whenever I have time.
Just finished "Stolen Focus" and it has a whole chapter on how lack of free play and helicopter parenting completely destroys a child's ability to thrive and focus. What we are doing to kids is criminal, and it's getting worse. Solution? Just give them some pills. We are destroying a whole generation, and their brains are already mush from social media.
I have friends who spent a couple of years in Korea and they get quite sad when they talk about the kids they saw. They just seemed to have no life outside of an endless stream of classes and tutors.
I'm trying to strike a balance with my kids. We encourage them to do things like learn music, take up sports etc, but not let that just consume all their free time. I want them to have time to just play freely, read comics, or just be a bit bored sometimes.
As other people have mentioned, its about not being able to afford to buy a house to raise kids in.
I do want to also mention though, a unique Korean system called "Jeonse", which is a large deposit that is 50-80% of the property value. After putting in the deposit, you can live there on yearly basis without paying rent. This system has been and is being used as property ladder for young families (as they don't have to "lose" money on rent) but as "Jeonse" is pegged to property value, they've been rapidly rising as well AND frauds around Jeonse has been on rise, in which case you can lose the whole deposit or be tied up in court battle for years.
Barely anyone I know was raised in a house, or has a house today (but rather apartments). It's very weird seeing this as some kind of condition for having a family.
>As other people have mentioned, its about not being able to afford to buy a house to raise kids in.
Why do you need a house to raise kids?
In many advanced countries there are some systems which will keep your kids feed and clothed even if you have no money at all.
This is one of the reasons you often see economically unsuccessful people have way more children and thus a larger influence on humanity's future.
I think OP is talking about _buying_ an apartment.
The property may simply be owned by who bought it a while ago and are now sucking up the majority of wages of the younger generation.
Speculation but: apartments might have less supply than there is demand from those people. And to "us" 52 workweek and perfect GPA might sound like being upper of the uppest but in Korea, as GP frames it, it sounds median.
This is very accurate. I’m Irish, and when my Korean wife and I were leaving the US with our two young kids, Korea wasn’t even considered as a place to raise them. She had such a needlessly tough time as a kid, and her siblings are having to put their young kids through exactly the same exhausting upbringing.
It’s not worth it. We’re luckily to have the choice of moving home to Europe and raising our kids in a way that they get to play a lot (I’m writing this while on a bench in a playground with them bouncing around in the sunshine) and also have school, art and sports.
Korea is actively discouraging Koreans from raising their kids there, especially if they have any other option
> by refusing to participate in the rat race
That does indeed sounds like a rat race! I have just came across this art which visually resembles what you described https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDk&t=7s
This whole experience sounds very labour camp like. Minus the electric fence. The way out is no longer that easy.
Of course the decorations are nicer and there are some who are kept around to work as "worser off" examples. But all in all, i guess most would cheer for the fall of this.
Well if competitiveness is the reason for low birth rates, this should fix itself once the older generations age out of their posts and the companies need to look for replacements among a much smaller workforce.
Ah but the younger generations will need to support the older non longer working people who also happens to have more votes. Korean national pension is going to run out in 10 years or so, and there is already talk of raising the mandatory contribution from 9% to 18%.
Well that's a bit complicated. Traditionally, yes. Korea has been a Confucian society, which meant that the eldest son gets the parent's house, lives with them and takes care of them. Incidentally, being a wife of the eldest son is also very hard, because you are supposed to take care of your in-laws (boy do I have some horror stories).
With modernisation, this has changed.
1. Most women no longer wants to be servants for the in-laws (rightfully so) and wants to live separately
2. With less children, you won't necessarily have a son.
So now, parents live separately, until they are unable to do so anymore. When this happens, the children might take them into their house and care for them or admit them into hospice or retirement home.
You might ask, what happens if your children don't take care of you and you don't have money? Well you are kinda f-ed, as seen with the high elderly poverty rate.
> [Korea has] the highest elderly poverty rate among OECD countries
Oh, Korean national pension is also set to run out within 10 years or so, which will make the issue worse and/or make the future generation pay disproportionate amount of tax :)))
Probably they used to be able to keep the poor, poor via something brutally effective and simple, like only a tiny minority even getting the chance to go to decent schools or universities. Now they need a lot of wasted effort to convince people that the people at the top are working really hard and deserve it to maintain the same elite dynamic.
evidence: 7% got to tertiary education in 1975, and recently peaked at above 100% (not sure how that works to be honest, but the trend is clear)
Might a contributing factor be the older generation saw in their lifetime the change from extreme poverty to relative wealth brought about by the industriousness of the population?
the difference also is that your father generation (if he is 50 or more) did not really have a lot of good job. most of the jobs were blue collar. now it changed a lot as most of the jobs are really for the highly educated and its very competitive
Is nobody really doing anything irresponsible anymore, en masse? where is the party, hookup, pregnancy and carry-to-term scene? is that not happening, or is the party, hookup scene all just that risk-free right now - even when pregnancy occurs
because the latter suggests that people really just don't want kids, and possibly never really did
its hard for me to think that all of society uniformly is successfully planning for children now, instead of many children being a bunch of accidents that the parents just go along with
"Failure to plan is planning to fail": given the potentially life ruining costs of pregnancy and raising a child, there's a lot of incentive to not make that mistake.
> where is the party, hookup, pregnancy and carry-to-term scene? is that not happening
Did that ever really happen in Korea? Even in the West having a "hookup scene" in the first place was a product of having effective contraception available, and a whole set of controversial cultural changes.
This kind of planning implicitly happens when women are expected to have a career instead of finding their identity in successful motherhood. I don't know much anything at all about Korean women's professional labor, but I'd be very surprised if it did not play a role. Country fertility rates correlate extremely well with female full time non domestic labor participation.
Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years, the living memory of a single life.
Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources.
Has it occurred to people that, maybe, modern fertility is a tragedy of the commons? If everyone chooses to act in their own interest, society is worse off than collectively pressuring to have more kids? Ideally, that would look like major subsidies and benefits to parents to account for the extra work they are doing for society.
I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off the planet, and the traditionally oppressive-to-women societies will evolutionarily outlast us.
At this rate, there will only be 3m South Koreans in 3 generations. I don't see how you expect a country to survive that decline. In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
There's just a lump in the population vs. age graph and you're fixating on the back side of the lump as if it's inevitably going towards zero.
After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
Wanna guess what happens in that welcoming environment? My guess is people feel inclined to make some babies.
I don't understand why people tend to treat these low fertility rates as some kind of invariable biological dysfunction. These aren't infertile masses of people; they're perfectlycapable of multiplying like rabbits.
The planet has shitloads of people, maybe we're finally reeling things in from an overshoot and are on the inevitably pendulum-like path towards population stability. There's no reason to panic unless you've got substantial evidence these people are physically incapable of having children.
Edit:
How about some DATA: go to https://population.io, select Rep. of Korea, plug in some age/gender b.s. and scroll down to "Age Distribution" at the left column. Now look to the left of ~20yo (younger than 20), it's a nearly horizontal line. What does that tell you? There's a uniform rate of Korean babies per year under 20 years old. To the right of this, there's a massive lump of elderly people with a slightly smaller lump of middle-aged people. There's no reason to believe this horizontal line left of 20yo won't just continue into the future; it looks quite stable for the last ~20 years.
>Wanna guess what happens in that welcoming environment? My guess is people feel inclined to make some babies.
I would assume the exact opposite given that this will probably probably crank up pressure on working-aged people as more and more old people need to be supported by fewer and fewer young. I would also assume a significant exodus of the young to places with actual opportunities rather than a country sized retirement home where no one wants to invest in the future because anything built to fit the needs of the population at any given moment will be massively overbuilt in the near future.
This was my exact same though while reading OP's comment. Taxes will go way up since the number of people having to support all the old people will be fewer and fewer. The increased taxes will cause people to have fewer and fewer children. It's a vicious cycle.
we have the same kind of situation in America just a little behind, so here are my thoughts "as a young person": none of my peers want to pay for that. we're not going to sit around letting old people leech from us instead of working. and at the end of the day younger people hold more physical power and more working ability so we will have the final say regardless of how many old people there are to vote themselves our $. i expect that if they try this a couple things might happen:
1. young people leave for better states
2. young people outvote old people (not likely)
3. young people refuse to pay and force the government to raise the social security age to 83.
i hope it's 3. in 1935 the average life expectancy was 60 to a social security age of 65, so 1.08 times the life expectancy. the life expectancy now is 77, so keep the same 1.08 times and we have a minimum age of about 83.
it really baffles me how the same generation that talks about how "millennials and gen z wont work hard" literally wants to force us to pay for their retirement. they had 65 years to save up money, they can pay for it themselves.
> young people refuse to pay and force the government
How they would be able to "refuse to pay" if payment will come as form of taxes for goods and services? And moreover they won't be able to "force" government to anything since government will be representing and working for the majority of people who voted for them: older generations
Fortunately tax policy can be adjusted to encourage things you want to happen within a society. If taxes are punitive, tax credits for having children would lead to a baby boom based on the same logic.
I'm not sure encouraging more children will help long term though. Eventually we need to figure out how to make society work without population growth.
This feels like a non-issue. The boomer generation is probably one of the wealthiest generations in history. And the younger generations have for the most part been fairly underemployed. Feels like there is more than enough slack in the labor markets to handle the extra work, and taxes could be targeted towards the wealth assets of the boomers (stocks, real estate, etc...).
Don't know what it's like in Korea, but in China, it's pretty common to have pension higher than local average salary if you were in the state job system, which is absolutely huge. This is due to the polical power dynamic.
Many provinces are barely scraping by, young workers are not only effectively directly supporting pensioners, they are now delaying young workers retirement age, and you better not believe the old folks will willing to eat into their own money.
> After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
It will take 90 years for this lump to pass, and another 20 years for the newborns to grow up... you're talking about a recovery that will take a century...
A century of decline seems like a pretty good reason to panic to me...
> It will take 90 years for this lump to pass, and another 20 years for the newborns to grow up... you're talking about a recovery that will take a century...
More like ~53 years for all the current lumps to pass given a life expectancy of ~86.
> How about some DATA: go to https://population.io, select Rep. of Korea, plug in some age/gender b.s. and scroll down to "Age Distribution" at the left column. Now look to the left of ~20yo (younger than 20), it's a nearly horizontal line. What does that tell you?
Yeah, something is definitely wrong with the site because actual population pyramid data looks much more alarming:
Also it matches up with the article, which says 261k babies were born last year. wikimedia show about that, with ~130k male and ~130k female. population.io says 454k which is way off.
> it's a nearly horizontal line. What does that tell you?
That the data must be wrong, there should be some small variation and it doesn't pass the sanity check of declining birth rates.
> After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
I like your optimism, but do we see anything like that in the real word after depopulation? There are many shrinking cities or areas, eg Detroit in the US or East Germany (people moving to the west), and the results are hugely negative and a downward spiral. Instead of people enjoying lack of traffic congestion, shrinking cities can't afford their oversized infrastructure anymore, which begins to deteriorate from lack of upkeep.
Grossly, south korean couples each makes 1 child. So its population is going 1/2. To correct that and return to previous level, every couple formed among those children would have to bear 4 children.
Why do you assume the current population is the correct one? There’s a reasonable argument to be made that humans are over the Earth’s carrying capacity nearly everywhere, and are causing environmental and social damage to maintain the current size. It is quite normal in ecology to see crashes and recovery in the event of overpopulation. If we assume humans are biological organisms, it all seems pretty normal.
Except unlike the foxes which eat their rabbits to near extinction, and therefore soon join them, humans can change the rules of the system they're in.
Calculating the carrying capacity of the world before agriculture would have given you a much different number than after it.
Okay, sure, but none of that changes what I wrote. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Nor that improvements to Earth’s habitability will be timely, nor whether incentive structures will line up to implement the changes needed.
My scenario is several orders of magnitude more common than yours. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong; miracles do happen. It must be nice to have so much blind faith in technological progress and human exceptionalism, but I’m going to stay with my ecology and statistics.
It's several orders of magnitude more common in species which have orders of magnitude less ability to impact their environment and change the way they live (and to humans in the past when we were no different).
It is not blind faith to say that we should expect that the different dynamics could be different when the rules of the game are different.
Again, if the foxes see the rabbit population declining and can start producing rabbit substitute before they start starving, of course we would expect a different dynamic to be possible.
Except that humans are now in a situation where modern medicine has also allowed us to live much longer. The natural cycle of birth-aging-death has been disrupted. You suddenly have a world where there are too many 80 year olds and not enough 8 year olds.
After that lump passes through, you may have suffered a huge drain of adults expected squeezed so hard for child and elder care that they've since taken their productivity elsewhere.
Apologies for ranting but this topic resonates too much.
Housing prices are 9x salary vs 4.5x salary in the 70s and it takes a while to save up. Personal data point: it took me winning an IPO lottery to start thinking about having kids for real. Having kids while earning minimal wage? Terrifying, especially in the US where getting yourself or your kid sick could bankrupt you in the blink of an eye - and if you want multiple kids you increase the risk.
So we think we have to have it all before we start trying having kids and have no sense of community whatsoever. Societal focus on hedonism and career leaves little to no time to raise kids. And at the end of the day you end up having no support from the society that slowly but surely ages.
I agree with you on the latter point, but I want to also point something out on the former. Many people who are of no "proper" means to do so continue to have children. And they make it work, even if it may be uncomfortable and require sacrifice. So the issue is not one of finances, but priorities. Winning an IPO lottery being the baseline where you feel comfortable for having children doesn't mean that such is the inherent baseline, but that you simply prioritize comfort and wealth over raising a family. And that is okay.
This nuance is important; it emphasizes the real issue is not economics, but culture! We've created a society that values the pursuit of wealth and comfort more than family, and it's likely this system is not sustainable. Not everybody can be wealthy, because wealth is relative and mediated by what exists. If 30% of people want something and there's only enough for 3%, then it doesn't matter what the relative wealth is among these people: 90% of people won't be able to "afford" it, and that will never change. A post-scarcity society will never exist alongside consumerism; we'll simply take what we can have for granted and lust over the new scarcities.
We shouldn’t ignore the trauma that those children often experience, though. My parents had me at 17 and 19 years old, and I had a rough, complicated upbringing that caused me lasting damage. Because of that, I personally don’t see myself as having children ever, and I’m lucky enough to have a partner that feels the same.
>Many people who are of no "proper" means to do so continue to have children. And they make it work, even if it may be uncomfortable and require sacrifice.
Unfortunately many people who are not properly equipped to raise children (financially, temperamentally or otherwise) have lots of children and don't make it work. The result is a permanent underclass and a serious crime problem in many of our major cities.
I think we can find some middle ground between "I won't have kids until I can afford to send them to Harvard" and "I'll have 7 kids while being addicted to drugs and having no family to support me".
I think a lot of that underclass is artificially propped up too, sort of along the lines of thinking you hear with open immigration vs generous welfare state pick one.
But the people having kids are the ones with less money. The parents in my neighborhood are middle class (I mean like cops and admin assistants) and there’s three families with three kids just within 8 houses. Meanwhile among my law school friends, 0 kids is far more common than 2, and while I’m sure someone else besides me in my class (200 people, late 30s) has 3, I don’t know them.
One thing I think gets really overlooked is that college and job searches tear apart extended families, which in more traditional societies are a huge part of the child care strategy.
Yes this is what I've noticed too. My friend who installs HVAC systems for a living just had his third kid before 30 and they're doing fine. Other friends who are DINK attorneys are watching the biological clock run out and they feel they "can't afford" a kid.
I think your HVAC friend may actually be earning more than your attorneys. Unless you're in a prestigious law firm, they don't make all that much. And HVAC is so high in demand these days that they can raise prices to the moon and still be booked for months in advance.
I have not yet found a single planned 3rd child among my colleagues and associates in situations where both husband and wife work full time (without live in help, or at least someone who comes to the house full time to watch the kids before and even a little after the parents come home). Not saying it won't happen that I will eventually find one, but I find it to be the single biggest predictor of having more than 2 kids.
She lives in a Catholic faith community in South Bend. There’s lots of kids of all ages and so always people around to babysit, etc. It’s like my dad described his village in Bangladesh. Nobody takes care of their kid all the time like in America. (The women have to go into the rice fields during the day too.) The kids get passed around.
That's fascinating. I'm starting to awaken to the fact that America has a bunch of expensive solutions to problems and create these impressions that there is no other practical way. People figure out stuff all the time but somehow those means never become communicated to become mainstream or even purported as an alternative. It's interesting to put ideas to the "but does it scale" test. I think that idea of individual parents fully monitoring their kids maybe doesn't scale when the kids begin to outnumber the parents. Interesting stuff to ponder.
Monthly mortgage payments are the same though. (Lower interest rates, etc.)
Also building costs gone up. (The plague of single family homes, stricter building codes, higher quality requirements from buyers, while buildings are still produced using the old labor intensive methods.) And due to fucked up zoning building low-cost housing is just not happening :/
So folks are basically forced to buy expensive houses.
Surely this is an option, but the risk is higher than ever. If you win the genetic lottery - good for you but cry havoc if you don't and not well-employed/have savings... chances are that you and your loved ones will have a miserable life.
I'm not saying people shouldn't take the risk, but it does seem that more people are either not willing to, or the risk profile changed since 70s, or both.
Tradition and ideological homogeneity was much stronger back then.
The world was simply much simpler.
The number of practically available paths forward were less. So why wait? Nowadays people are in an analysis paralysis, so they just wait. (Or try to find better mates, better jobs, better social groups/communities, move around more.)
And due to less homogeneity it's seems harder to find someone. (And probably is harder.)
Also the acceptable mortality was higher. Wars were more common, losing people due to illness was also more common, etc.
And nowadays we have endless alternatives to getting married. Single life is very enjoyable. (see Netflix et al :))
I think to some degree, what the parent says is true, but I think it has more to do with how much richer parents feel they need to pour into getting 'the best' for their child. Decent preschool and daycare is expensive. Private education is expensive, or test prep to get into good selective private schools. Tertiary education is extremely expensive, more so if you're trying to pad your kid's application with a bunch of expensive extracurriculars to get them into the Ivies and Stanfords and MITs and whatnot.
If anything the Korean system is even more intense; at least with American SATs or ACTs it's only three hours, you can retake them as many times as you want, multiple times a year, and getting into a mid-tier university for undergrad is still okay. South Korea has a university test that is eight hours long, only held once a year (so you wait a whole year to retake results) and the chaebols (the South Korean conglomerates that control the economy, like Samsung or LG) only really hire from top tier universities. South Korea has a university graduate unemployment rate of 25%, compared to the US at 4%.
Yes the system doesn't want children, if the children have an easy time we just add more roadblocks. I can't wait until everyone has a PhD before they can start their career as a barista.
> Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years
Does the change necessarily have to be societal?
> In 1992, a study found a global 50% decline in sperm counts in men over the previous 60 years. Multiple studies over subsequent years confirmed that initial finding, including a 2017 paper showing a 50% to 60% decline in sperm concentration between 1973 and 2011 in men from around the world.
These studies, though important, focused on sperm concentration or total sperm count. So in 2019, a team of researchers decided to focus on the more powerful total motile sperm count. They found that the proportion of men with a normal total motile sperm count had declined by approximately 10% over the previous 16 years.
The science is consistent: Men today produce fewer sperm than in the past, and the sperm are less healthy. The question, then, is what could be causing this decline in fertility[0].
Infertility is not the leading issue when people are asked, 'why are you not having children?'. Until it is, I don't see how it can be more important than societal barriers.
The same things that cause a higher average life expectation? Maybe the microplastics floating through the atmosphere everywhere? The constant stress about what is happening with the whole world instead of just your neighbor?
When you can't afford to have children due to low pay, sperm count is out of the equation.
What doesn't make sense to me is the people that are concerned about society "changing", the native population not having enough kids, we are being "overrun" with immigrants etc. Are the same people that refuse to vote for politicians advocating higher minimum wages, more benefits and fairer taxes.
It can't work both ways, either you want to crush the average person with low wages and taxes, or you want the native population to thrive.
No one is going to subject themselves to poverty to help balance the demographics for the privileged.
>Men today produce fewer sperm than in the past, and the sperm are less healthy. The question, then, is what could be causing this decline in fertility[0].
This has everything to do with monogamous relationships and marriages in most of the developed human world.
In the natural world, there are many factors at play that help ensure only the "healthiest" males conceive with females. Most factors are indirect, such as males physically fighting each other for a mate wherein the "fittest" male would more likely come out superior and successfully mate.
One direct factor that has been practically eradicated from humanity, however, is direct competition between sperm. Some animals and many plants are polygamous, wherein a female receives sperm (or other forms of genetic material as applicable) from multiple males. The sperm have to compete with each other to reach the egg first and conceive, this encourages males with the "healthiest" sperm to pass their genetic material onto the next generation.
Monogamous relationships and marriages as seen in humans remove this factor completely, the "fitness" of a given male human's sperm is irrelevant to conception because competition between sperm has ceased to exist. Both unfit and fit sperm alike can conceive, assuming other indirect factors at play allow for it. Indirect factors that care not for the "fitness" of sperm.
Sure, maybe a percentage or two could be explained by this, but 60% in 50 years? Natural selection takes millions of years to accomplish a feat like that.
Humans may naturally be monogamous, at least to a degree. It is a common occurrence in the animal kingdom, in many bird species for example. Monogamosity is therefore a very unlikely candidate for fertility drop.
Apes are mostly polygamous though. And even if polygamy wasn't the norm culturally, the results of procreation have been polygamous. For example this study analyzed dna and shows how 8,000 Years Ago, 17 Women Reproduced for Every One Man.
This seems to be based on the idea that the only feedback mechanism for improving sperm is to have sperm fight with other sperm. That's not correct though. Whatever trait in sperm leads to pregnancy more often will be evolutionarily selected for. There doesn't need to be any direct fight between sperm.
The basis for how "healthy" sperm is is implied to be how mobile it is, and in an environment where sperm are competing to reach the egg first, being more mobile is absolutely a trait that will be evolutionarily selected for because less mobile ("less healthy") sperm will conceive less.
But in an environment where that doesn't matter anymore, it's only natural that sperm "health" will consequently deterioriate. Natural selection doesn't select for "the best", it only selects for "good enough". And if "unhealthy" sperm that can't move sufficently is "good enough", well so be it. Especially if we take factors like in-vitro and artificial insemination into account, those really remove the "health" of sperm from the equation of pregnancy.
If health has no effect on conception success, I don't see any reason to be worried about declining health.
I agree that in-vitro and artificial insemination could remove an important feedback mechanism for sperm evolution, and that would be a cause for worry.
My understanding is that it is starting to (presumably anyway) have an effect on conception, because a sperm that can't move is a sperm that can't fertilize an egg, and there aren't competing superior sperm to make up for the shortfall.
Which by itself is fine, really. Sperm that fails to reach an egg means the genes that made that sperm do not "deserve" to reproduce. However, if people want to make a fuss over low birth rates, and this is one factor behind it, it's going to get attention.
It was something I saw many years ago on NHK as one theory of why human sperm quality keeps deteriorating. As far as I'm concerned, it makes sense to me. Remove more and more factors that would encourage healthier sperm and it's only natural that our sperm will deteriorate.
As others have said, the decline is much too rapid in the last couple of decades for it to be explained by evolution. It sounds more like a theory spouted by chemical-/food-/etc companies who worry about getting the blame.
> Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years, the living memory of a single life.
Women gained financial freedom and the ability to choose when they get pregnant. Societies will now find out the market price for birthing children (as well as women finding out the price for not birthing children).
I guess I do not know enough about South Korean fertility to make a credible claim, but if most of the fertility decline is due to birthing children at older ages, then I would file that under the same category as women gaining financial independence and ability to choose when to have kids.
Women basically saying in order for me to risk what I have to risk to have a child(ren), I need <x> security first. Which can manifest as working to save and achieve higher income levels instead of having kids.
But I suppose there could be a huge environmental or whatever biological factor causing reduced pregnancies. Marriage rates might help tease this out.
One can also frame it as society’s fault for not providing both women and men with sufficient incentive to procreate. Note that the word “fault” typically has a negative connotation, but I am not intending to use it with positive or negative connotation, but simply as a causative factor.
The comment I replied to stated something changed, to which I wanted to clarify what I think the biggest variable that changed. Of course, men also may not want to have as many kids as in previous years, but I would still bet this is a much smaller factor than women saying no.
It does sound like we were relying on alcohol, a lack of contraceptives, a lack of choice for women and good old forcing people into marriage to subsidize the lack of incentive to have children.
There's a trend happening in many countries where economical stagnation or downturn push young people and couples to wait for better days to engage in romantic relationships or build families.
You could shelve that as "society not providing enough incentives", but to me it looks like a more complex issue than what's covered by carrot/stick mechanisms.
Not all issues leading to forgoing procreating are that complex, but putting any of them as "women chose to xxxx" is I think only useful at a micro level, and kinda misses the reasons why they chose to do so, which are usually not in any individual's hand.
Capitalism has a minimum profitability requirements, simply being wealthy and having abundance does not mesh well with capitalism, instead the go to solution has been to send people to war and destroy all the wealth we built up so the rebuilding phase is profitable again. The fact that this profit is utterly pointless and does not increase human well-being doesn't matter.
Basically, that's my theory. Back in the "old days", women didn't get to choose their jobs, or when (or if) they had children. Basically, women were little better than slaves.
Now that women have freedom, society is imploding in a way, at least in terms of population.
So to get back to replacement levels of fertility, we either need to 1) turn women into slaves again, or 2) look at some other way of running the society. #1 doesn't sound very good if you value human rights.
1) is basically arguing that women are monopolizing procreation and are taking it hostage and charge unreasonable fees, how about we don't listen to them? It sounds ridiculous because women are usually stuck with the children and end up in classic single mother poverty.
Talking about “developed countries” here, not SK specifically.
Is declining fertility really such a societal and evolutionary danger when we’re talking 1.4-1.5? If you think of us all as one race, the human race, the fact that a few corners of the world are declining in fertility is arguably an environmental victory that could soften some crises’s in the future. We are like 99.9% genetically similar, why risk gutting the carrying capacity of the planet to preserve the 0.001% of genes that give us sparkling blue eyes?
The whole contention that it’s terrible that high birthrate countries are so much more
feminist than low birthrate ones, well I mean just because the genetics of feminist counties might wane, that doesn’t mean their cultures will. Memetics is just as powerful as genetics, do rich countries really have to be the world’s stud? Can’t we see the poorer countries investing in people and the wealthier countries investing in things as teamwork?
> If you think of us all as one race, the human race, the fact that a few corners of the world are declining in fertility
It is not a few corners of the world. It is currently "developed countries", but we have no reason to believe that the non-"developed countries" will do any better.
> is arguably an environmental victory that could soften some crises’s in the future. We are like 99.9% genetically similar, why risk gutting the carrying capacity of the planet to preserve the 0.001% of genes that give us sparkling blue eyes?
Putting to a side for now the blase attitude to several societies slowly disappearing due to lack of births:
1. Much of society is built around the implicit assumption of there being more people in the future.
2. The carrying capacity of the world is only of interest to us as long as we are around for it. All of humanity suddenly disappearing tomorrow would also do wonders for the world's carrying capacity.
Regarding the idea I’m taking a blase Attitude. My arguments allow for two separate defences against this argument. Both that humans are not very genetically different so a change in genetics should hardly affect culture, and that culture isn’t dependent on genetics. How blase can I be while preparing two different defences against your allegations?
Regarding argument 1, I will say there is no problem with the supply of people, global population is growing. It doesn’t need to grow everywhere simultaniously, insisting that it must will inevitably lead to a bias towards population growth. The population HAS to shrink somewhere for things to stay stable, since it will invariably grow in a few places, and at this point the growing countries outweigh the shrinking ones sharply.
With 2, I’ll expand on this argument. Unrestrained pollution will lead to a future where the earth warms which can rapidly leading to famine and population decline after an era of sharp population growth. You are worried about a decline in children in a set of countries, but that problem is a lot less of a problem when it’s happening in a few countries, than when it’s happening in every country at the same time. Then things go worse for every individual country involved, as immigration is not an option.
Perhaps my use of "society" overemphasized the culture aspect that you pick up on. "perserving culture" is of a secondary importance to me, what's more important is the people themselves. As you say, the memes will be able to fend for themselves and survive even if the people in the society do not. People are not merely the transmission vectors of DNA and memes.
> there is no problem with the supply of people, global population is growing.
> and at this point the growing countries outweigh the shrinking ones sharply.
Global population may be growing (for now) but the rate at which its growing is decreasing [0].
Further, (and I wish I had a source at hand) the problem with relying on immigration to sustain population levels in a country is that many countries do too good of a job at assimilation. The fertility rate of immigrants rapidly converges to the local level over the course of 2-3 generations.
> You are worried about a decline in children in a set of countries. I’m worried a decline in children, immigrants, population, in every country in the world simultaneously.
I don't think that's true. You and I are worried about the same thing. I look at Japan and Korean as habringer of what's to come for the rest of the countries in the world (and thus the world as a whole), i.e. an aging population without enough children to maintain any semblence of the current way of life working, much less to replenish the population.
Honestly I'm trying to play devils advocate here a bit for the sake of dialouge, cheers mate.
I would love to save western cultures and the genetics are part of the culture. They just are. The regional adaptions people's bodies have to their climate and geography and local food sources really does influence their interests and their cultures to a degree. Peoples bodies are different and that makes them do different things, that's one example I can think of genetics influencing culture. If all the whites die off for instance there will probably be less people doing extreme snowboarding while chugging milk.
Yet the concerns I've raised I believe we should at the very least be wary of.
We may be genetically similar but there are literally millions/maybe billions of people in the world who do not agree with LGBT or women's rights. Some of these places execute people for expressing their authentic selves. Some of these places do not believe in science and progress, and are extremely insular and religiously conservative.
So no, I don't think it is a victory unless human rights and progress don't mean anything. I'm from one of these places where birth rates are high but the quality of life is awful and government corruption is astronomical. Most people there will probably shun you if not actually harm you for doing something that nobody cares about in the US or some western countries. Recently I saw a post about how the Norwegian health ministry released some images of people doing various sexual poses as part of some sex-ed. I thought it was quite neat, and it features multiple sexualities. I will bet my life savings you try doing that where I'm from that it won't go so well and the number of fundamentalist minded people is rising.
I think it's less about preserving sparkling blue eyes and more about the negative effects of a declining population on a country's economy. Sam Harris had a guest (Peter Zeihan) a few episodes ago who talked about the downsides of population decline, and he was pretty interesting.
One of the key points he made that seemed fairly intuitive is that as your population declines you eventually wind up with significantly fewer long term experts in various fields of science and engineering. This means that the people who train up the next generation of scientists and engineers are spread thinner, and therefore less depth of expertise in those fields as the decline continues.
I'm not sure how much that idea is backed up by evidence, but it at least makes some sense.
Population decline had never really registered as a problem to me until I heard that episode - I always kinda figured that less people around would be a net good. Definitely worth a listen if you're interested in the topic.
> One of the key points he made that seemed fairly intuitive is that as your population declines you eventually wind up with significantly fewer long term experts in various fields of science and engineering.
Good thing we have books, the Internet, billions of video recordings, et al.
Minor nitpick - Sam is not the one making these points in the referenced episode - it's the guest who wrote a book on the topic. In fact Sam brought another guy onto this show to act as a backstop, admitting up front that he didn't feel he knew enough about the topic to have a deep conversation without some help. The other guy pushed back on various points that Zeihan made and it's a pretty interesting discussion.
As for immigration, no arguments there. But that point leads back to the question of why a society hits population decline in the first place. Presumably the same things that cause your "native" population to stop reproducing eventually affects your immigrants after a generation or so, so while it can definitely slow the population decline, it's not a full solution.
To your point about the loss of deep expertise - I think the problem is still worth thinking about. Yes, we can make new experts. And those experts might even be more productive than the last generation of experts. But at the end of the day, it takes longer to make them, and you still have less.
I'm not sure how much I agree with Zeihan, but he makes some interesting points which I hadn't previously considered.
>Presumably the same things that cause your "native" population to stop reproducing eventually affects your immigrants after a generation or so, so while it can definitely slow the population decline, it's not a full solution.
I think it could be a full solution. In theory there could be 2 populations, a slow population and a fast population, and the fast population continually donates people to the slow population via immigration to sustain it. The worry would be if some idea from the slow population infects the fast population and causes it to slow down.
That point doesn't seem particularly intuitive to me. A society in population decline is a society where the old outweigh the young. You would seemingly have a higher ratio of long-term experts to young learners than you do under a population growth scenario.
If there is a risk, your risk isn't that you have too few experts to offer training, it's that the young learners are spread too thin. There aren't enough people looking to learn for all the people who have knowledge to pass down and so you lose knowledge in that transition.
--------
With that said, I find the general premise that we would be looking at some kind of dark age with the level of population decline any of us are likely to see in our lifetimes, nearly comical.
The global population now is around 8 billion. It was around 3 billion in 1960 (4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999). It doesn't seem to me that the pace of change or technological advancement was particularly slow in any of those time periods, and the substantial productivity gains since then would alone suggest that we'd be more efficient for those population levels than things were at that time.
> Is declining fertility really such a societal and evolutionary danger
Yes. If modern (western dominated) society is not self-sustaining, this should be a big hint, that there is something deeply wrong with our culture.
> If you think of us all as one race, the human race
But that doesn't mean populations are interchangeable?
"since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.
You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century."
> Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years, the living memory of a single life.
Industrialisation.
The UK began industrialising in the mid-to-late 1700s. Western Europe and North America got going in the early 1800s. Central Europe and Japan followed along, while Russia didn't really industrialise until the Soviet Union. China and Korea, by contrast, just started in the 1950s-70s, easily within a human life time. Their societies made the leap from subsistence farming to CPU design _so_ much faster than most of the developed world, it's unreal.
Pretty much everything I can find says it started in Britain with textiles. Everything from Wikipedia, National Geographic, to Encyclopedia Britannica all say the same thing.
You can look for M. Bairoch's research for instance ("Révolution Industrielle et Sous-Développement")
Some other put the "start" of industrialization way before, at the end of the Renaissance.
As I understand it, there was a progressive flow of industrialization that was clearly visible in Belgium/Netherland, and also started brewing in the other surrounding countries, but the "Industrial Revolution" term was coined by a British author for a specific point happening first in England, then in Belgium/France/the US etc. afterwards.
It kinda comes down to where you set the stake of what is meant by "industriailzed", a bit like where you set the beginning of the "space conquest" and thus decide who was first to reach the critical milestone.
By your earlier logic, he shouldn't be trusted with this claim any more than Wikipedia or Britannica should be trusted with the claim of British origins.
Seems like we'd need a non-British, non-Belgian source to make any definitive claim, right? /s
You are totally right, why should we trust him more than any other single author ? There’s no reason to trust blindly and anyone who cares should totally get as many other sources and evidences that they can afford to.
Everything I can find says that it (industrial revolution) spread from the UK to continental Europe, which a massively oversized chunk of industrial tech coming from the UK. I'm happy to have my mind changed but the general consensus is that it did start in the UK. The book you cite is in French and appears to have very little in the way of reviews or anything? One book against the consensus of the field is certainly not without precedent but it's kind of difficult to evaluate.
The “industrial revolution” term was spread from Engels’s book about England (“The Condition of the Working Class in England“). So basically, the definition of “Industrial Revolution” is bound to the phenomenon that started in England.
“industrialization” is another thing, and was a more progressive thing that was already prominent earlier than that. That book I cited is widely studied and reviewed…but you’ll have guessed, you’d need to step a bit away from caring about only the (First) Industrial Revolution. And it also mattered mostly to french/duch speaking regions, so again fewer english results is the norm.
Think of it like the ‘Space Race’, it’s a term that is bound to a specific stream of events that was started by the US. Another country starting to “race” to reach “space” won’t be about that specific stream of event.
That's probably fair, I wouldn't make the claim that industrialisation itself was unique to the UK. You've piqued my interest though so I might attempt to read some more about that stuff in French with my rusty B1.5 level :-)
This kind of dangerous logic is how you end up with anti-vax conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and mind control, about how one could trust Pfizer’s Phase 3 vaccine trial data they submitted for approval, etc.
On the one hand, yes of course: sources matter and you need to consider whether anyone has a motive to mislead, or even merely a motive to not dig too deeply into a claim they might wish to believe.
But on the other hand, a company merely merely being founded decades ago by a someone of a particular nationality does not on its own constitute strong evidence that any claims about that country are tainted or self-motivated. That connection is just too weak — you need to bring other evidence!
I discovered that, while the pages seem to follow the exact same structure and I suspect were written by the same person, the Dutch and English pages differ in a significant way: the English page says Wallonia/Belgium was the first industrialzed country in mainland Europe, while the Dutch page does not mention that qualification [1]. Elsewhere I found thr claim that Wallonia was the first fully industrialized region, but without year or source.
> Has it occurred to people that, maybe, modern fertility is a tragedy of the commons? If everyone chooses to act in their own interest, society is worse off than collectively pressuring to have more kids? Ideally, that would look like major subsidies and benefits to parents to account for the extra work they are doing for society.
Or maybe the tragedy of the commons was having 6 children per family within living memory? Maybe now by dropping our population we are doing much better for the world society as a whole. It all depends on your perspective I guess. I fail to see the problem with a drop in world population.
> At this rate, there will only be 3m South Koreans in 3 generations. I don't see how you expect a country to survive that decline. In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
Maybe South Korea won't survive in its current form. The world will keep revolving the sun nonetheless.
Surrogacy will be the next big thing. Women in poorer countries will birth the children for wealthier nations. This will aid in the reduction of family formation in poorer countries and serve as population control. While ensuring no one country becomes too populated.
H.G. Wells pointed out that we cannot have population control in one nation of the world, but not another. It must be worldwide, or it'd result in severe unrest.
Julian Huxley, H.G. Wells, Charles Pincus (and many more) made this one of the defining issues of the 20th century. The Pill and IVF were long in the works and heavily funded as a means to avoid the "Population Bomb."
They envisioned a new world without war or environmental destruction. Their solution was to reduce the birth rate, through various means. The reduction of family formation being one of them.
It's interesting to read through these older works and realize the world they'd envisioned has to some extent come to fruition.
Yeah. Their idea was to reduce the population until you reach a number low enough that is viable for the ecosystem. The population would then be "maintained" at a stable level. Most people would not be able to afford children.
You could make child-rearing unaffordable enough to require government assistance. Then that assistance could be limited by quota. There's a lot of things that could happen in the future. We don't really know. It's just a guess.
Another thing that In vitro fertilization solves is allowing for women to focus on their careers from age 20 - 50. If people in the future are going to live longer and be healthier, then it'd be feasible to have children (through surrogate) at the age of 50. If you'd already amassed enough wealth (or had privy to subsidies), I couldn't see why not...
If a woman has a child in her 50s she will spend her 50s (and maybe part of her 60s) taking care of the toddler and then raise them to be 10 years old. These are not easy years I can tell you that having gone through that more than once. And I was in my 30s and early 40s. Then, when she's in her mid-to-late 60s she'll have to deal with a moody and irrational teenager and try to make sure he/she won't screw up so bad as to ruin the rest of their lives. And she won't see them grow up to be independent adults until she's in her 70s. Is that what you envision yourselves doing in your last healthy years (and for many of us beyond that)?
We had our first kid in our early twenties, and by the end of the first two years, I couldn't for the life of me understand how anyone older than 30 can have their first child. Toddlers and babies are incredibly hard on the knees, back, shoulders, and your entire body. They're rough, active, and constantly demand various physical actions that will quickly exhaust anybody.
It's so strange having parents in our neighborhood two or three decades older than we were. It must be really hard.
I'm looking forward to my fifties where my eldest children are past college, hopefully giving me grandchildren to play with. I highly encourage young parenthood. It gets increasingly harder. The money part which so many get hung up on is easy. Babies are incredibly cheap, and your income has 18 years to grow.
Population growth is a solved problem as countries become wealthier. If you want to reduce population quickly, perhaps look at reducing the number of elderly people or reducing their economic dead weight cost (encourage euthanasia, export to cheaper countries, deathly games or sports, encourage pandemics, encourage depression, early payout for future euthanasia, et cetera). This could also solve the housing crisis (and housing is a driver for economic growth, and growth is really the main driver for global harm).
Direct costs for the elderly are currently ~40% of government expenditures in New Zealand and growing.
My guesstimate 23G$ ($==NZD in this comment) for superannuation/pension[1] and 16G$ healthcare costs[2] of 110G$ total expenditure for ~16% of population (789k of 5M in 2020, projected to 20% in 2030, and 25%+ eventually[3]).
That is ~60k$ per person. 50% of people retiring now can expect[4] to live 2 decades i.e. cost ~1M$ (totally ignoring discount value!).
> feasible to have children (through surrogate) at the age of 50
If you think it is okay to orphan 1 in 20 children, and that children don't have live grand parents, although maybe benefits of help with elderly care and passing on inheritance? 65 year old helping 90 year old is challenging and very common).
That would definitely reduce population (2 children per 2 adults reproducing at 50 has maybe 40% less total population count, compared against population count if reproducing at 25).
> Surrogacy will be the next big thing. Women in poorer countries will birth the children for wealthier nations.
So you think women in poorer countries are willing to "pre-sell" their children? That's insanely absurd, and an absolute human rights violation if forced. No. This will not happen.
It doesn’t matter if someone provided the fertilized egg. Woman A has a child and then it becomes part of Family B, sometimes with money changing hands and/or the threat of lawsuits or jail if Woman A has a change of heart.
The only way this can possibly be morally acceptable is in very carefully vetted on-off situations AND no penalty or pressure for a changed mind.
There is no morally-defensible way to do this “at scale”. Please do more research if you have even the slightest doubt.
But... why? Most women I know are fine and even happy with the pregnancy part. Why would they want to outsource that part? They love the attention. The birth part? Not so much, but that part is difficult to outsource.
I’ve witnessed 7 births in person (cesarean, vaginal natural, and vaginal with epidural). Though I haven’t experienced it myself, I’m fairly familiar with childbirth.
No it won't. Poor countries arent that stupid. Many don't allow surrogacy for ethical reasons. What they want is for current rich countries to impoverish themselves so there's room for more competition.
That comparison rings backwards to me? Pakistan is a deeply troubled, dangerous, and poorly run country. Korea is one of the best places to live on Earth.
I'm pretty sure Korea has pretty shit work/life balance. And if you lose your job you're also SoL. There's still a substantial amount of instability and psychic stressors that could lead to someone not wanting kids, on top of constantly fearing war with NK
>>In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
Social factors are not considered enough. As societies get more materialistic, and socio-economically advanced, there seems to be more individualistic, privacy[in the wrong way, escalating to extreme isolationism], lack of social interaction and bonding etc.
I myself felt odd during the time I stayed in the US, the whole concept of individualism and privacy was taken too far, and everybody felt lonely in their own way. People moved around in fixed schedules and paths, almost like an open air prison. Given limited social interaction outside work[where you can't even sneeze without offending some one]. This really felt like passion and purpose in life was slowly fading away. I can imagine how a society with this sort of a lifestyle could fare on the longer run. People would want lesser and lesser people around them, and interact with them even lesser as time would proceed.
Countries like India and Pakistan definitely have third world infrastructure, but the social infrastructure is very strong and likely to remain, this is due to socio-religious reasons. For this reason, people get married and have 2+ kids.
> Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources.
There's a scary implication. If having to support more elderly causes one to produce less offspring, we have a positive feedback loop resulting in population collapse.
Yes, and immigration almost always brings tension because of cultural clash.
I think a lot of people in developed countries voluntarily or involuntarily adopt a psychological willingness to not have kids and let their culture collapse because the emotional distress of a life in a post-growth world. A world where your freedoms, privacy, and economic opportunities are shrinking, to extract temporary value and stability for the upper class, out of you and your labour/compliance. The only worldly way out of it is to basically step on the others while going up to implement these changes, which feels horrible to a naturally empathic creature like man. It's a cursed state of being.
As usual, society is not preparing itself for new economic realities (many I speak to do not understand this particular one at all), but, has it occurred to you that this is very good news in terms of livability on planet earth and our continued existence? Sure, humans will adapt but only when it's too late, as usual, but at least this is a change in positive direction. Forever growth is nonsensical, and this isn't the worst way it could end.
The only way your hypothesis is plausible (ignoring everything else that’s weird and troubling about it) is if everyone on the planet decides to go along with it. Not every society has this problem of low fertility, and those who own the future are the ones who show up.
Fertily reduction correlates strongly with increased prosperity worldwide. Policy making and cultural attitudes play a role too, but the correlation is uncontested and rather evident.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s a short term trade off. If you carve out of the effort budget that portion allotted for rearing the next generation and swap it out for or bias it strongly toward higher technology development, deeper universities, or whatever, then you cut yourself off the branch you sit on so to speak when the degree of that bias is so out of proportion. Maybe a generation can afford to delay the investments into the demands of population continuation. If the delay prolongs too long and bleeds into the next generation and interferes with how they define fulfillment in terminal non regenerative endeavors then they have effectively made their choices and continuation is not one of them.
That phrase the meek shall inherit the earth, I wonder about lately. The meek, the non power searching types who don’t busy themselves with all the variety of non regenerative endeavors that consume all those who chart courses out into deep space and all its loneliness perhaps avoid these population traps and mentalities that lead to the end of a people. The salt of the earth, those who preserve humanity effectively. What a startling pack of implications seem to be packed into that statement so pregnant with meaning.
What are you rambling about, how do more poorly educated children help? If we need those we can just import them.
Also, if someone actively desires and seeks out the end of humanity maybe they have a reason for that and are fully aware of what they are doing rather than being ignorant about the wonders of poorly planned procreation.
That slogan has caught my eye too—the future belongs to those who show up. I’ve been thinking about these things in terms of generational investment. To pour time and resources etc into oneself is an investment in generation 0 with respect to the individual. If our societies don’t encourage investment in generations beyond 0 (ie in our children) then they effectively vote their genetics and those of their ancestors to be not worthy of continuing. They exit the cosmic stream of existence.
I’ve often pondered seeing in my own children the echoes and higher order harmonics of combinations of traits and proclivities of their living ancestors which show up in their unique combinations of their being. I daydream about perhaps catching glimpses of non-living ancestors whom I never met and what things we inherit from them. That thought translates to other family lines and I wonder about that vast set of traits and peculiarities I will never experience once they’ve departed this life.
>If our societies don’t encourage investment in generations beyond 0 (ie in our children) then they effectively vote their genetics and those of their ancestors to be not worthy of continuing.
Societies with more investment per child have less children. You are getting everything backwards.
While developed nations are below replacement rate, many developing nations are having over half a dozen children per family. The aging population of developed countries is not conducive to production and a healthy economy. This will lead to immigration. If this trend continues, people from the developing nations will eventually inherit the developed world. Until they too fall below replacement rate.
You haven't looked at the data it seems. There are only a couple of countries left with 6 children per family. Every other country is already on its way to 2 children or below.
The global average is now 2.5 children per women.
The age of huge population growth is effectively over.
As an American (immigrant) I'm honestly really alarmed by seeing the high birth rates in countries that are well, to put it bluntly, kinda backwards (I'm from one of them btw).
One of the reasons we moved to a country like the US is to be away from a backwards minded, theocratic af, corrupt society. To see that these types of countries are actually booming while highly progressed ones are depressing is super depressing.
In poor countries, kids are free labor and your future source of pension. In rich countries kids are expensive pets that don’t fit in your small apartment.
Try to bribe a police officer in the US next time you get pulled over at a traffic stop. Try to bribe the immigration officer at any US airport. My congressman's office didn't even let me give him a small non-cash thank you gift basket when he resolved a very sensitive and urgent administrative matter with my visa.
Basically what happened was that the USPS lost my passport in the mail a few days before I was supposed to move overseas. I called his office and they were able to lean on the The Department of State to have a new one printed up and issued to me within 48 hours. How he did it, I don't know, but I assume getting a call from a sitting congressman lights the proverbial fire under the ass of paper pushers at the Department of State.
I had never met, spoken with, or donated to my congressman before this took place.
This is what concerns me. There shouldn't be this "shadow process". I've heard from other individuals in the same situation who were left with no recourse.
The only process should be the official process as laid out by the Department of State.
The right way to bribe them is through campaign contributions or donating to their "charity" foundation. People without election campaigns or foundations are much harder to bribe.
Last I checked the government isn’t lynching people. Do we have crazies? Duh. But to compare the “crazy” in US to some of these places is either privileged ignorance or willful ignorance. There’s a reason we moved here, even with the issues present here. They’re magnitudes less.
OP's commment doesn't actually imply eugenics - it doesn't assert that people in other countries are somehow fundamentally inferior, you're just reading this into "corrupt and backwards minded society". But that is a matter of culture, not genetics.
Genetic Koreans are not necessarily staying in Korea, so a low birth-rate in country doesn't mean their genes will be wiped off the planet. Korea is a pretty serious exporter of people.
Obviously, the greatest thing that changed over those last 60 years is they're no longer recovering from a war that killed a pretty hefty amount of their population. While I'm sure it didn't need to decline quite so much, fertility rate was never going to stay what it was in the late 50s. You can see a pretty obvious recovery spike here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m.... It was only in the past 20 years that they declined below 1920s level.
It's also worth remembering that being oppressive to women is (definitely at least probably) not a genetically tranmissible trait. If the 22nd Century really does end up being dominated by Pakistanis, you can't just automatically assume they'll stay culturally identical to what they are today. Presumably, the Korea of the 19 century was a lot more oppressive to women than the Korea of today.
The resources of korea and their technology will not go away, they will now be at the hands of fewer people, so more wealth / person. Historically it was small states that dominated the world, the populous ones were ravaged by poverty and famine.
People are calculating (correctly) that our future technology does not need a lot of hands, and that is true. Look at the tech sector , which employs a tiny percentage of the population but has enormous output.
As for the egoist act of genetic heritage/perpetuation, well let's be honest, in 10 years people will be modifying their genes and removing our clunky and faulty dna so there goes our glory.
As for wars/security, those are already fought with drones
> I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off
The trend will not continue forever
To me , this all highlights that we need to ramp up anti-aging technology fast and hard. It s much higher priority than sending humans to mars
> Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources.
There a tenancy to forget that 60 years ago one working person would have to support a wife and several children.
It kinda amazing how we could probably point a point where productivity peaked that is how many people single working person can support. As before that depending on location pretty much everyone worked on one level or an other...
I don’t think that’s OP’s point (plus I’m not convinced we really are more productive). OP’s point appears to me to be something like “a good measure of productivity is how many people a single working person can support”. Today, most families need to have two parents working. This makes a pretty good inference, I think, about how much things have changed.
Most families do not need to have two parents working if they live like people 60 years ago. Ie one car, a 1000 sq ft home, vacations in the local area, home made lunches, hand me down clothes, no AC, no electronics, no braces.
Good luck convincing people that they should be happy to raise children with the living standard of 60 years ago and they don't have to worry about money because there's free activities to do with your children.
What you call "chasing the joneses" is perfectly expected human behavior. People compare themselves to their current metaphorical neighborhood in time and space (not to their grandparents or to hunter-gatherers) and they make their life decisions based on that: college, career, having children. It's just nonsense to dismiss it as "hey, that's jealousy" at a population level.
OR we could say "you had 65 years to save up, no way in hell are we going to keep crippling the economic prospects of our youth to fund your retirement"
I really see no way out of this unless our economic models change drastically.
For the population to actually grow, some people will need to make three kids. I just don't see that happening at scale at all. Most won't even make two kids, forget about three.
"our future", last time I check, Pakistan wasn't invading any foreign territory, aside from some normal border disputes it's problems are usually within it's own borders. This seems like paranoia that the "others" will come and ruin our civilization.
If Pakistan, and other countries like India and China, continues to modernize, eventually the population should stable out and historically that comes with better rights for all.
> I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off the planet, and the traditionally oppressive-to-women societies will evolutionarily outlast us.
As the standard of living rises, birth rates are dropping precipitously even in those countries that are relatively more oppressive.
Absent socioeconomic reasons, there are still females that naturally desire having plenty of children, despite there not being any societal pressure in favor (or even against) that. They will be genetically selected for.
We’re lucky enough to afford childcare and healthcare, but I can’t imagine how anyone making significantly less can do it.
Healthcare costs are ongoing, and obscene. Routine newborn vaccines are around $900 per visit even with partial insurance coverage. Not to mention any unforeseen hospital visits that will force you to hit your deductible in the first two quarters of the year ($10k per child in our case).
In most tier 2/3 cities in the US you can expect daycare to cost $1,000-$1,800 per child per month.
In any tier 1 city, especially west coast cities like Seattle and SF, expect to pay at least $2,000/child per month.
On top of that, you’ll have a mortgage. With median housing prices around $1.2-$1.6m and rates in the mid 5% you’re looking at anywhere from $6,500-$8,000/month for a mortgage depending on taxes.
So right out of the gate, you’re at $10k of post tax income just going to daycare costs and a mortgage. You likely have other costs that equal at least $1,000/month. And that’s for 1 kid. Add another kid and you’re easily approaching $15k per month.
If you do the math, you’ll need to make at least $250k if you have one kid considering at least 40% is going straight to taxes (aka military funds since we get nothing in this country for the insane amount of taxes we pay).
>Routine newborn vaccines are around $900 per visit even with partial insurance coverage.
Per ACA, all routine newborn care (including vaccines and routine blood draw) is 100% paid by insurance company. The specifics are all listed in the links below.
>Not to mention any unforeseen hospital visits that will force you to hit your deductible in the first two quarters of the year ($10k per child in our case).
This is not true for the US. The maximum out of pocket legal limit for 2022 is $17.4k for a family. If you have a half decent employer, deductibles are far lower (in the $3k to $5k range), and so are out of pocket maximums (in the $5k to $10k range at most).
I would budget at least 2 years of out of pocket maximums to have on hand. In our case, we hit out of pocket maximums of ~$5k and ~$7k during the year of birth, otherwise it costs $150 to $250 for a regular pink eye/ear infection consult and $400 to $500 for a specialist consult. This is in a very high cost of living area.
Unfortunately that’s not exactly how it works. We don’t have a marketplace plan, so our insurance has no responsibility to pay for anything really.
The link you shared says this.
“All Marketplace health plans and many other plans must cover the following list of preventive services for children without charging you a copayment or coinsurance. This is true even if you haven’t met your yearly deductible.”
Maximum out of pocket only kicks in once you’ve hit the deductible on 2+ family members, at least for our plan. So for us, the max is $20k.
By purchasing insurance not compliant with marketplace regulations, one chooses to pay less in premiums in exchange for accepting the risk of paying more at point/time of care.
>Maximum out of pocket only kicks in once you’ve hit the deductible on 2+ family members, at least for our plan. So for us, the max is $20k.
Out of pocket maximum has nothing to do with deductible. Copays/coinsurance “kick in” after deductibles are reached.
If you had purchased ACA complaint health insurance, then OOP max is simply OOP max, a single number that once you reach, you do not pay further for in network services (and now for out of network emergency services also).
Edit: note that a “Marketplace” (or ACA complaint) plan explicitly transfers wealth from young and/or healthy to old and/or unhealthy, where healthy and unhealthy mean “does not need healthcare” and “needs healthcare”. So by choosing to go with a non Marketplace plan, they are placing their bets on not needing healthcare…which is probably not a winning bet for people birthing and raising young children.
> note that a “Marketplace” (or ACA complaint) plan explicitly transfers wealth from young and/or healthy to old and/or unhealthy, where healthy and unhealthy mean “does not need healthcare” and “needs healthcare”. So by choosing to go with a non Marketplace plan, they are placing their bets on not needing healthcare…which is probably not a winning bet for people birthing and raising young children.
The unfortunate reality is that paying $2000/month to an employer managed health plan is cheaper than going through the federal government ($5,000/month for a family of 4 the last I checked). If marketplace plans had lower premiums and lower deductibles that would be the ideal option.
For a silver level Horizon BCBS plan (Omnia Silver HSA, pretty broad coverage, never seen a provider not in network), you would be looking at $300 to $700 per person, calculated using the age rating factors at the bottom. And I know from experience the max OOP was $10k or a little less.
Even if you were older parents, the total would come in under $3k per month for a plan that covered 70% of expected healthcare expense, which is what qualifies it to be labeled silver.
I know priced in California were not too much more than NJ. There is a Kaiser pdf showing a detailed breakdown of premiums nationwide, but pretty much everywhere scales from $300 to $1k per month from age 20 to 65 for a silver level plan.
And this is all for buying via healthcare.gov. I would bet all big employers provide far more subsidized ACA compliant health insurance, so if you are employed, I would budget for employers to pay 70% of the premium, so individuals would pay 30% of $2k for family coverage = $700 per month and be subject to $5k per year deductible, and $10k oop max per year.
Basically, you can expect to insure your whole family for unlimited (in network and out of network emergency) healthcare expense for $20k per year if you work for a big company, and $40k per year if you are paying yourself, maybe $45k if you’re over 50 years old.
> Has it occurred to people that, maybe, modern fertility is a tragedy of the commons? If everyone chooses to act in their own interest, society is worse off than collectively pressuring to have more kids?
Before we start talking about tragedy of the commons with fertility, how about we fix the surrounding factors that cause people to have babies later in life or only one (subsidies are a good start, but they need to be massive if the surrounding systems and culture don't change)? And if we are worried about "dysgenically wiping ourselves of the earth" (a phrasing which I observe, with no implications intended, to jvery close to those used in the great replacement and white genocide conspiracy theories), how about we start massive immigration-and-integration programs? And stop doing business with the most oppressive ones...personally know a Qatari woman trying to escape that country but she can't leave without a male guardian signing off on it.
What? Declining birth rates have nothing to do with oppressing women. Worker exploitation, poor social safety net, and wealth disparity are squarely to blame.
> Declining birth rates have nothing to do with oppressing women.
I think the point was the opposite: countries with limited respect and opportunities for women have higher birth rates because women have less control over whether they have children and if good careers aren’t an option anyway there’s less opportunity cost to staying home with a child.
Just implement a repartition retirement system and small incentive per child which diminish after the third, boom, 2.1 fertility rate for most of the 21rst century.
At least for now, the destruction of our retirement system and our current trend towards capitalization is already killing our fertility rate, and the idiots pushing this will once again realize this too late, because this is what they do.
The adversarial framing here is a poor way to express the same point. Raising children is hard and has significant risks for the mother. If that cost is primarily paid by the mother many women will choose to have fewer children, space them further apart, etc. unless they aren't given as much control of their own lives. That's the oppressiveness we're talking about and it's not a simple “do women have basic rights?” boolean parameter — for example, Japanese women have many rights but there's a strong social expectation that women have to pick an entire package where getting married means they're expected to stop working as soon as they have a child and will stay home taking care of the child and their husband's parents, which extends to things like whether an employer will give them a job.
France is a good illustration of that point (along with Scandinavia) — there are less rigid expectations around family structures (children don't force you to stay in a bad relationship), women aren't considered bad mothers if they keep working, and especially having state-funded childcare and financial support. I've never lived in the EU but have friends from a number of countries and the contrast is pretty stark — the Germans talked about how much better the U.S. is at not shaming mothers for not giving up their professional careers, the French/Danish/Dutch parents talked about how much you have to pay out of pocket for things which are provided by their taxes. (Everyone talked about how much more healthcare costs & how frustrating the billing is, of course.)
> boom, 2.1 fertility rate for most of the 21rst century.
This has nothing to do with the policies you mention. It has everything to do with the fact that the most popular name for newly born boys is now "Muhammed" (or some other spelling variant of it).
It's not that simple: France appears to have higher birth rates even if you exclude the children of immigrants, which does suggest that other policies factor into it:
I know, I'm saying the original point is wrong. People stopped having children because raising children costs a ton, is a lot of work, and they don't have the financial means to do so while supporting themselves. It has nothing to do with how oppressed women are.
I think your problem is that you’re framing this as a contradiction when it’s actually the same point from another angle: in more egalitarian societies, women say that’s a lot of work and choose not to have as many (or any) children.
If anything, it is the parents who destroy the commons by conceiving more polluters. You postulate that "fertility" is a good thing but that's far from indisputable. The earth is already vastly overpopulated. It's high time that other people follow the Korean example and give nature some respite.
I suspect having children is similar to keeping slaves, in the sense that we realized that slavery is unethical even though it was "just what we do" since time immemorial, and was necessary for our lifestyle levels. People will realize that it's unethical to create beings, burdening them with the struggle to maintain the life they've been attached to, in order to (explicitly, in your case) 'benefit society'.
Society is made up of people but those people, ever more, should each suffer for society's sake? come on
I read around, I can't find any explanation of what that means. It seems irrelevant. Sure, life can be enjoyable, and people love each other - but when you read
>Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources.
and the proposition is to Shangai people into being, with no say in it, to meet this onerous workload, how is that defensible? You could say they aren't going to be forced to labor, but they are because otherwise they will starve and suffer.
My wife and I are Korean-American, albeit with many ties to our country of origin.
Something I've noticed is that many couples that do want a child have a very difficult time conceiving. People are having kids at a later age on average, but even younger couples seem to have a hard time.
Various gynecological disorders seem to be very common too - fibroids, endometriosis, adenomyosis, amongst others, all of which affect a woman's fertility.
My wife and I have been trying for a kid but have been unsuccessful. Many of our friends are experiencing the same, and are resorting to clinical fertility procedures like in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination.
I don't know how true it is, but one of my friends outright said that the majority of women in Korea are conceiving through some kind of fertility procedure, and that if we really wanted a baby, not to waste our time and just go ahead and do the same.
One thing that makes me believe him is that there are a ton of twins amongst the couples in our social circle. My understanding is that naturally twins are a rare phenomenon, but much more likely if doing something like in vitro or artificial insemination?
Us, we've already decided that push comes to shove, we'll most likely adopt.
One problem of modern medicine is the use of fake-hormones.
When Progesterone USP (bio-identical) is applied to the skin, it gets into circulation and avoids first pass metabolization by liver. When the appropriate solvent is used to dissolve the Progesterone USP powder, the progesterone is transported through the liver.
Steroidogenesis refers to the process whereby the body makes steroids for itself. The key jump - from cholesterol to pregnenolone - is facilitated with Vitamin A and thyroid (T3).
Know a couple who were trying to conceive, after suppressing her fertility with fake hormones (and an IUD) for maybe 8+ years. Lots of miscarriages. They eventually went for IVF, which didn't work either. They gave up and started getting their house ready for adoption. Then they got surprised. I don't think she used topical Progesterone, just the megadoses in Prometrium (liver can't destroy it all on the first pass).
I've seen people bring up the idea of the covid vaccine reducing fertility many times, both in person and online. I've never seen any evidence. I think people on HN just get tired of seeing the same weird theory brought up with no evidence over and over again.
There's no difference in trajectory around when the covid vaccine was introduced. So I think we can safely say the declining birth rate is not due to the covid vaccine.
The problem is that there is not much to “talk” about. Do you have scientific evidence in the form of published papers in scientific journals? That is the baseline here.
If anything, the problem with vaccines and why it has become politicized is that there’s too many people “talking” about it. Talk. Talk. Talk. But zero scientific discourse.
See my comment above, but I don't have faith even in scientific journals. Science, academia, media, etc are beholden to corporate interests as is the governance structure. The world we live in is bent - legislation, funding, the 'reality' presentation is all bent to serve corporate-governmental control.
I don't have faith or trust.. Are you saying I should? I don't even trust that the provided data is real.
However, everyone else seems to have faith in what they are told. No one checks anything, but they believe the studies they are provided, the articles, etc. And, frequently, they don't believe their own experience!
Your "crime" is just bringing up vaccines in a context where it's wholly irrelevant, presumably as a low effort way of stirring up more low quality argument about vaccines and related subjects. This follow-up post of yours is supporting evidence that you brought up vaccines for no good reason.
Is it inconceivable that vaccine could cause difficulties for people in conceiving? If so, how is it irrelevant?
Re evidence, I have posted articles about data analysis etc. These are also frequently flagged.
In general though, I have little faith in the scientific establishments. It seems clear that they are politicised, and are serving agendas. In what world can an 80 year old be in charge of medical policy for decades, with ethical oversight being provided by his wife! Or re-defining what vaccines and viruses are? Or re-defining what can be put on death certificates as cause of death (ie, with, not from, covid)? Or that we can invoke emergency legislation and expedite unacceptably tested treatments which are effectively mandated by corporations? Etc. That's not the scientific method - it's a political stitch up.
So I don't think sciencific studies or those reporting on them, merit our trust - we are not get the impartial information. And hacker news is a part of the control structure, only allowing corporate messaging to be shared.
"I recognise that science, media, politics, education, etc have been perverted to serve corporate governance interests, and that the truth is secondary to those interests" would be a fairer quote.
"I recognise that science is imperfect, and that occasionally it can mislead, but that overall it is moving us forward" would perhaps surmise your position. Obviously this is to weak for me, I think the scale of corporate governance is far greater than this.
I find this topic very interesting. My observation (anecdata-lly, but I would love to see RCTs or perhaps a cleanly designed ANOVA study) is that these symptoms of infertility are particularly (world-wide) prevalent in people who have (usually undiagnosed) metabolic syndrome & low cholecalciferol.
In almost all South-east Asian countries in particular, I have noticed high levels of sucrose consumption so I am curious if Korea is the similar to SEA, or if either of these factors apply to either of you?
Koreans have famously long working hours, but as you are not there, those stress factors should likely not apply to you.
Another point to note is that I have heard adoption is at least as difficult as IVF, emotionally & financially speaking, although there's less physical pain. At least IVF can point you to where the problem lies (the knowledge of that can be disconcerting) providing you perhaps avenues to mitigate/ameliorate those factors, which could improve your overall QoL and also lead to better health-outcomes.
I'm Korean born, but spent most of my life in the US. My wife is a much more recent immigrant so she is a product of the Korean education system as well as the Korean corporate world and all that entails.
We have some friends that have adopted, so are aware of the potential issues. Most of them seem perfectly fine, but one had some initial problems with the child adjusting to his new life. These were all toddlers (3-5 years old).
Probably because it comes through as tall claims based on anecdata? But I've lived in Europe, America, Asia, ME & Australia (also visited every SEA country) and the prevalence of male feminization & rich-people obesity (esp central adiposity) in certain regions is quite staggering.
And almost every single person I know personally with difficulty conceiving (various races, various countries, various diagnoses including ectopic/fibroids/undiagnosed) had some obvious-to-me metabolic-syndrome/cholecalciferol/ferritin issues going on, particularly Asian-sub-continentals in northern sun-starved climates who were not supplementing cholecalciferol.
Aside: How does one tell downvotes? I suppose I should look in the FAQ. IIRC only established members can downvote. Despite my account being from HN's 2007 inception, I do not have enough established-karma to have my own downvote button. So I generally don't bother about it, as it's a bit of a circular dead-end karma-spiral which I had thought the HN mechanics were supposed to avoid.
Downvotes: I'm so glad you asked, as I often wonder the same on "you're being downvotes because" comments. Eventually a post goes grey, but prior to that I have not been able to spot an indicator of downvotes happening. And I do have the downvote button.
There is a karma threshold for downvoting, you likely haven't reached it yet. It's in the FAQ.
However, as to HN culture, typically anyone complaining about downvotes will be further downvoted. It usually does not matter what the rest of the comment says, if you complain about downvotes, HN will give you a lot more of them. I like to think that it is a way for the community to remind individuals that these are all imaginary points anyway and to not be attached to one's karma number anymore than one is attached to the number of the nearest speed limit sign.
What do you mean by male feminisation? I get the impression from context that you're referring to biological differences but that could easily be interpreted as "man aren't real men these days and that's why they can't conceive".
I think they mean feminization in the biological sense: It's the reason fat men usually have visible breasts: the body has a pathway for converting cholesterol into estradiol[0], excessive cholesterol causes some feminization due to that.
This is exactly what I meant. Particularly visible in richer social strata in SEA, especially in the Philippines and to a lesser extent in Malaysia & Singapore. The amount of sucrose consumed in that first country beggars belief. Everything at breakfast is full of sucrose, even the pork & of course, bacon.
Also, I appreciate your use of the singular "they" :-)
The weirdest part of it all is I see censorship, gaslighting when you bring up contraception possibly having impact on fertility. All discourse around it is stopped. We can't even question it. But we do know that contraception in developed countries were pushed heavily and is it concidence that in countries that don't have access to it have unchanged birth rates?
Even without evidence of contraceptions impact on fertility, when you repeatedly disrupt a natural process such as through abortion, is it any surprise that most development countries have dwindling birth rates? Is it a surprise that a country like South Korea with high abortion rate have the lowest birth rate?
Correlation may not mean causation but the probability is high. What doesn't help is that we censor/cancel people for even mentioning that abortion/contraception have unknown impact on fertility and we are left guessing what else it could be: plastic? air pollution? marijuana? All of these have been without previous generation but what was absent then compared to today was the ready availability of contraceptives/abortion.
Women have more power and independence than anytime in history, they can have a career, they can be sexually active, they can abort their fetus or put in their body all sorts of ways to prevent pregnancy. Is it any surprise that they are now finding it difficult to conceive?
It’s been studied, I don’t know any links off the top of my head but they’ve consistently found that fertility returns to normal within a couple of months / menstrual cycles. The hard part is knowing when you are fertile: since there are only a few days each menstrual cycle when the egg is available to be fertilized if you’re just coming off contraception and don’t know your natural cycle length it’s easy to miss those days.
You don't actually have to do that before having a child, you can do that while having a child.
If you are not wasteful (constant new things, fancy vacations etc), young children are not expensive. It really only gets expensive when you have to pay tuition.
Anecdata point: my wife and I chose not to have kids for the reasons outlined in the GP post (and more). Mortgages are so large these days that for people lucky enough to even be able to own a home, becoming comfortable enough with ones financial position that you feel you could give a child the kind of upbringing that you'd want for them (equivalent to your own, for example), takes long enough that the window of fertility is past. Plus, honestly, the world seems pretty bleak at the moment to myself and a lot of my smart friends. It's raining PF[AO]S, the climate is an unsolvable disaster, microplastics are everywhere, we're on the brink of war, inflation is rampant, housing is completely unaffordable, politics is a polarised mess, who'd want to bring a kid into a world like that without at least some kind of solid financial certainty? (There are positives, the world has it's amazing moments too, but hoo boy there are a lot of challenges to be solved).
Your list is basically "recentism" where current things seems much worse than old things. In modern history the world has never been cleaner, never been safer, never had less war than it does right now. The climate is not going to be a disaster, the worst that will happen is a ton of people will need to move - but the climate will change so slowly you'll barely notice. Inflation has been worse in the past, and while polarize politics makes me quite upset, I suspect it's been worse in the past.
This isn't about discrete reality. It is about perception and self-rationalisation. Unlike economics, I don't think people are "rational actors".
There are more factors nowadays that convince people (rationally or not) that bringing a child into this world would be to give someone the gift of a lifetime of misery.
My irrational argument for having a child? To combat the stupidity of the next generation. If the good people (And who doesn't think they themselves are the good guys?) don't procreate then the evil/stupid win by default.
"Default? The two sweetest words in the English language! De-FAULT! De-FAULT! De-FAULT!" - Homer
I know of this problem in Korea and even know one couple affected. I've thought that it may be caused by the stressful nature of Korean life. Is this difficulty in conceiving also prevalent among persons of Korean ancestry raised in America?
A big part of our social circle consists of recent immigrants from Korea (< 10 years) - my wife included (I've been here 30+ years).
But it does seem to affect Korean-Americans that have been here longer too.
Even amongst our close family, my cousin is affected, two of her cousins are affected. All three were born and raised in Korea to adulthood and came here within the past 10 years. My cousin has an American (Caucasian) husband, her two cousins have born-in-the-USA Korean-American husbands.
Interestingly enough, our friends of other nationalities don't seem to be as affected - or maybe they just don't talk about this subject as openly? Either way, I have not noticed the twins phenomenon there.
To be honest, this sounds environmental in nature…
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is intentional. That said, all I have is the constant drum of “the world is over populated” by leaders around the world to back up my reasoning for potentially being intentional.
> If people are intentionally trying to limit births, why would that lead to a large amount of fertility procedures?
Those fertility procedures are not the desired way to go about having a baby. The vast majority of the time it's a procedure of last resort (i.e. can't get pregnant another way). These procedures are expensive and often don't work.
It could be intentional that a government, organization or pharmaceutical / chemical company is knowingly sterilizing / making it more difficult to conceive. This could either be through a willingness to look the other way (i.e. a side effect) or intentional (North Korea for instance may do some sabotage or government is intentionally pushing population reduction)
For instance, the US government gives funding to Planned Parenthood which provides birth control, abortions, and other drugs to support people looking to not have children. This organization advertises and gives a lot of birth control out for free or low fees. That's an overt intentional act of reducing population growth.
Similarly, a concern I have is purposefully downplaying the risks of long-term birth control via "the pill". Then having policies that make that pill easy to acquire (without being knowledgeable of said side effects) AND with the ability for minors to obtain them without parental awareness. Those are intentional policies intended to reduces fertility.
> Similarly, a concern I have is purposefully downplaying the risks of long-term birth control via "the pill".
Depo-provera - the monthly injection of medroxyprogesterone - was temporally associated with my friend's first psychotic break. Medroxyprogesterone causes cortisol deficiency; psychosis is associated with an inability to produce cortisol...
"The pill" uses fake hormones to shut down ovulation. But the doctors are trained to tell women their hormonal cycles are being 'regulated' with 'hormones, so that's what women get told. Tragic.
a bunch of girls i know had their depression massively improve after getting off it as well and their sex drives really improved. women are really complicated hormonally and messing with their hormomes is dangerous. tbh i think a consequence of mostly men designing the pill is that people didn't really realize that.
> It could be intentional that a government, organization or pharmaceutical / chemical company is knowingly sterilizing / making it more difficult to conceive. This could either be through a willingness to look the other way (i.e. a side effect) or intentional (North Korea for instance may do some sabotage or government is intentionally pushing population reduction)
For others reading, remember that no evidence is being provided for this hypothesis.
> For instance, the US government gives funding to Planned Parenthood which provides birth control, abortions, and other drugs to support people looking to not have children. This organization advertises and gives a lot of birth control out for free or low fees. That's an overt intentional act of reducing population growth.
You've provided no basis for this claim that Planned Parenthood provides birth control, abortions, or other drugs as part of a US program to intentionally reduce population growth.
> You've provided no basis for this claim that Planned Parenthood provides birth control, abortions, or other drugs as part of a US program to intentionally reduce population growth.
Any funding of birth control or abortions by definition will slow population growth.
Further and specifically in regard to planned parenthood
> Sanger was so intent on her mission to advocate for birth control that she chose to align herself with ideas and organizations that were ableist and white supremacist. In 1926, she spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) at a rally in New Jersey to promote birth control methods. Sanger endorsed the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that states could forcibly sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge. The acceptance of this decision by Sanger and other thought leaders laid the foundation for tens of thousands of people to be sterilized, often against their will.
What you said was that this was a US program to intentionally reduce population growth. I see no basis for that claim. Feel free to retract that claim or provide actual evidence.
You can certainly suggest that a result of family planning activities such as birth control, condoms, abortion, or abstinence result in slower or no population growth, but I do not see this as the primary purpose of these tools/activities, which is to enable people to decide when they are ready to have children.
This is the important point from your link, which naturally you took out a single quote out of context either out of malice and bad intentions, or because you simply didn't read further. I'll assume the latter.
> Planned Parenthood believes that all people — of every race, religion, gender identity, ability, immigration status, and geography — are full human beings with the right to determine their own future and decide, without coercion or judgement, whether and when to have children.
> Margaret Sanger’s racism and belief in eugenics are in direct opposition to Planned Parenthood’s mission. Planned Parenthood denounces Margaret Sanger’s belief in eugenics. Further, Planned Parenthood denounces the history and legacy of anti-Blackness in gynecology and the reproductive rights movement, and the mistreatment that continues against Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in this country.
The fact that they call out their history (which somehow still lacks being a US program) and are explicit about what they stand for and what they don't stand for is admirable and honest. You cherry-picking a quote isn't.
> What you said was that this was a US program to intentionally reduce population growth. I see no basis for that claim. Feel free to retract that claim or provide actual evidence.
I think you have to not read what I’m writing to make that argument.
The US government is funding an organization which has the explicit goal of reducing the number of children women have. By definition that is reducing population growth.
I pointed out it was founded with that purpose. But even if you look at what it does today: provide birth control and abortions (among other services). Again, by definition that will reduce population growth.
Might be for a good reason or a reason you agree with. Might be admirable, I personally don’t have any moral position. I’m just stating as a fact by funding that organization the US is funding the reduction in population growth through birth control and abortion services
But allowing people to decide when to have children via birth control doesn't reduce the population, it just means the children have better lives as their parents can afford them and don't need to rely on welfare.
The only reason to want population growth is to have more people to pay taxes, if they're unwanted unaffordable children they're not going to be paying more taxes than they cost the state in benefits.
> That said, all I have is the constant drum of “the world is over populated” by leaders around the world to back up my reasoning for potentially being intentional.
You might want to consult with a professional, that’s paranoid thinking.
Have you heard of planned parenthood? The government gives them money to aid in reducing fertility. Particularly in populations that would find children “burdensome”.
It’s not a stretch to consider the idea the government, organization or company might knowingly hide side effects of something detrimental. Alternative the government could say, urge it’s medical staff to hand out “the pill”. Schools already urge students to use condoms and give them out in some cases.
A quick google search leads me to an NYT article: "In the last several days, the British government’s environmental adviser declared it “irresponsible” to have more than two children. And Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, asserted that including contraception in the stimulus package could reduce government spending."
If China wanted to reduce population in 2022, would it announce a mandatory one-child-policy? Or would it use any number of other more subtle techniques to reduce fertility?
So OPs remark doesn't sound very paranoid to me. It sounds unjustified--I can think of a million innocent reasons fertility is decreasing.
China has not just repealed the one-child policy, but are pushing for more children, because they, like a lot of governments, are now more concerned about falling birth rates than about overpopulation. China is set to start seeing population decline within a decade or two at current rates.
While you might find individuals in governments some places that still worry about overpopulation, most places outside of sub-Saharan Africa, the concern now is a growing demographic timebomb as populations age and birth rates are falling below replacement almost everywhere. (Sub-Saharan Africa is also seeing sharp declines, but is not there yet)
> So OPs remark doesn't sound very paranoid to me. It sounds unjustified--I can think of a million innocent reasons fertility is decreasing.
For the record I actually agree with this. I think it’s most likely not intentional. That said I wouldn’t be surprised if it was intentional [as there is precedent] (which is what I initially said).
I can confirm what another commenter wrote - what I was told by my doctor is that this is very uncommon now, at least in California, where the guidance is to only do it in very limited circumstances.
On the other hand, even one IVF embryo has much more likelihood of splitting and creating twins than natural. I saw the science at 10X chance but a quick Google search shows slightly lower.
I know for a fact that at least some of our friends here in the US have gone to Korea to have the procedure done, not in the US, due to cost reasons. And obviously our friends still in Korea would have had it done in Korea.
That could also explain why I don't notice the prevalence of twins amongst our friends of other nationalities here.
> "My understanding is that naturally twins are a rare phenomenon, but much more likely if doing something like in vitro or artificial insemination?"
There are various factors that increase the chances of having fraternal (non-identical) twins. Genetics (a women who is a twin herself is more likely to have twins), age (older women are more likely to have twins), and, of course, fertility drugs which stimulate ovulation can result in more eggs being released and thus more likely to produce twins.
Identical twins, on the other hand, are a natural phenomenon that occurs in about 1 in 250 pregnancies. There are no known factors that increase the chances of identical twins.
father of twins (10 Y/O) via medical help here. 10 years ago our doctor said, "30 years ago the natural rate of twins was 3 sets per 1000 births. Now it's 3 sets per 100 births". After a quick search I couldn't find any data supporting a 10x increase in twins over the past 40 years but plenty of articles showing something closer to a 2x increase in the rate of twin births. I suspect the rate of twins amongst our peer group is skewed though since we're upper middle class surrounded by similar peers who can all afford fertility treatments so it appears that there are way more twins then ever...
I know personally 20+ families with twins. Of my close personal friends, ie. those that I see regularly and chat with regularly, 7 of them have twins. My neighbors on both sides of my house have twins. There are so many families with twins these days, it's nuts!
As soon as you hit 30-32 the rate of issues conceiving and issues with the baby grow exponentially.
How long have you been seeing this trend?
There’s a lot of experts who have been arguing that everything from pesticides to vaccines will slowly degrade our ability to produce [healthy] offspring. The general reasoning is fairly straight forward - if one thing damages your DNA or what have you, then it might be anywhere from 0 to 3 generations for issues to crop up.
There’s also social factors - fear, stress, isolation, etc will all impact willingness to reproduce (imo that’s not it).
Finally, there’s general stagnation. Ie if your not eating well, working in a field, etc you’re not going to be healthy.
Reality is probably a combination of everything, BUT women should also seriously research side effects of birth control. I have a sneaking suspicion birth control mediating hormones will have many long-term effects. I know women who were impacted by this.
Average fertility rate for women at 35 years old is half of what it is in their 20's. It basically goes from it's maximum to near zero during the 30's, that's a very rapid and significant decrease.
>>There’s a lot of experts who have been arguing that everything from pesticides to vaccines will slowly degrade our ability to produce [healthy] offspring.
Basically anything that can kill bacteria, mosquitoes or rats, can also kill tissues in your body. Nobody knows what tissues because body is a complicated structure of pathways. Most of the things we take in have an entry through mouth and nose, but no real exit path. They could kill things in your body.
Now many times that's tissues in your pancreas, or thyroid glands. Which perfectly explains diabetes and thyroid epidemics in countries like India.
if you're eating a lot of plants, look into phyto-hormones, those might be preventing fertility.
There are a few anecdotal stories from the carnivore/keto forums, that fertility came back after cutting out carbs.
Edit: Some Artificial hormones are found in plastic, rates go up when it's recycled plastics.
Disclaimer: I am quite firmly in that camp now, although at first I considered them all nutters. Some thing has been driving global ill-health in our post-disease world (excluding viruses) from 1920 onwards... imho there's clearly a complex ætiology with factors such as:
- carbohydrate (especially fructose) vs animal-protein/-fat consumption
- types of fat (our bodies only contain certain kinds)
- xenœstrogen & hormones of all types not just phyto-œstrogens
- Vitamin D, Magnesium, ferritin, pre-eclampsia, anæmia (lack of hæme iron consumption)
- more recently the whole statin-cholesterol debacle, Goodhart's law in action
so soy protein, dried or boiled soybeans, tofu, tempeh, and meatless soy products....but Koreans have been eating it forever. perhaps the processing in mass industrial scale has impact?
yeah I heard of the plastic theory and I think the air pollution in Korea is an overlooked factor. The fine dust particulates must have some impact on the reproduction system.
maybe even Ramen? Koreans consume a ton of instant ramen. High rate of alcohol?
I am interested to hear more about the impact of plastic. It is unavoidable and its widely used in Asia.
...what I really think is contraceptives is having an impact and that we are politically blocked from discussing it. What happened in Korea since 2010s? Huge amount of contraceptive pills were sold as society adopted a more laissez faire attitude towards sex. 10 years later those women are not trying to have babies and cannot. Is this too far fetched?
We are seeing the same issue in most western countries that correlate with high contraceptive usage. There is just less children being born but not an issue where contraception is tough.
If it’s contraceptives it might be possible to create a comparison group with some stricter religious group that does not take contraceptives and measure fertility levels between that group and a group that did take contraceptives.
> Some Artificial hormones are found in plastic, rates go up when it's recycled plastics.
I do know that some chemicals, possibly also found in some plastics (soft plastic probably) function a bit like estrogen, potentially reducing male fertility.
Watching her friends and my friends' wives go through it, we've been scared off.
Add to that, the usual HN phenomenon that we're observing how the world and our countries (USA & Korea) seem be going down the toilet, and that makes us feel hesitant to bring a new human being into the world, especially when there are kids already here that could use a loving family.
The world has always been going down the toilet. The only difference now is that we have higher visibility of and lower tolerance for the bullshit. You shouldn’t be so pessimistic.
The other difference now is that we're pretty close to wiping out crucial ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest and show no signs of taking climate change as seriously as we should.
I was downvoted in my other comment, so I think I should explain what I meant.
My point was that there is no “we” when we speak of humanity as a broad aggregate this way. There are specific constituencies—for instance, Bolsenaro and his supporters in Brazil—who are blocking the policies that most of us want to implement to stop climate change. It’s not “we” who are the problem, it’s “them”.
If you blame humanity in the aggregate you misdirect your energies and misidentify the solution.
The thing to do is to apply the appropriate political levers to weaken and oppose the constituencies who prioritize status-quo fossil-fuel energy policies over civilizational stability and the well-being of life on Earth. Blaming all of humanity is the equivalent of giving up and doing nothing, and makes the problem worse.
But still, the word has really been going down the toilet for humans for a long time, famines, wars, plagues, pandemics. It's all been going down the shit shoot for a long time. But then you see a nice sunset, eat a decent meal and feel lucky. If my children get to experience some of those simple pleasures, maybe it's mission accomplished ?
Great comment. Your absolutely right. I'm often personally far too pessimistic about the future (climate change, nuclear annihilation, etc). There is no real benefit to such pessimism.
I agree with you in many ways, but I think humanity has never had this level of capability to destroy the earth. We'll either be unable to breathe freely or lose most of civilization in a nuclear war by the end of the century.
Not to detract, but "one kid" would only make the problem worse because a woman needs to give birth to at least two children in order for population counts at large to maintain parity.
That is, one kid per woman halves the population. If the axiom is at least maintaining, ideally growing the population, every woman needs to give birth to at least two and ideally three or more kids.
Of course, this isn't to say I'm telling other people what to do regarding offspring, because I hate that kind of intrusive attitude. I've already decided I'm having no kids, because fuck the human world; and anyone who comes bitching at me about it one way or another can take a hike and pound sand. So I'm not going to be hypocritical and turn around and tell other people what to do in the bedroom.
But if the purpose for all the noise behind childbearing is to take population count trends out of the negatives, advising "one kid" not only doesn't help solve the problem but actively makes it worse.
Within the wider context of population decline due to low birth rates, both are bad because both lead to population decline anyway. 2 kids is a hard minimum for maintaining population count, 3 or more kids for increasing population.
As for what decafninja (or any individual for that matter) decides upon in the bedroom, that's for him to decide and his business alone. I'm not going to comment because it's none of my business.
Because the longtermists are betting on 10^58 humans being alive one day. If you don't have children and population growth isn't exponential anymore their whole ideology comes crashing down.
If people voluntarily self limit the size of the population that is a good thing because it means we won't need to shoot each other if it turns out we are straining the earth too much.
You're asking the wrong guy; I don't care either way. :P
I'm just pointing out that in a wider discussion of "oh noes population decline oh noes low birth rates", it's not constructive to be talking about having 1 kid when there's a hard minimum of having 2 kids and ideally more.
Yeah, this is not to be underestimated in the context of Korea and Korean culture.
Thankfully, in our case, our parents don't care, and neither do we.
I'm also an only child, as is my wife, so this means both our branches of our families' genetic bloodlines are effectively ending (albeit the onus for this is on the male side). But again - we don't care.
Counterpoint: our species has very little genetic diversity, we’re all pretty closely related. The odds that there’s there’s something unique or special about any one person’s lineage is pretty low.
It depends on the difference, because genetic differences aren't always beneficial. The Hapsburg Dynasty's Charles II famously had an inherited birth defect due to the heavy inbreeding[1] among the ruling class, for example. It was of no value to anyone.
The true reason for valuing lineages is more about social rank/class protectionism.
The value of that intermarriage was ability to maintain an empire of significant power and influence, as well balance relationships with nearby royals, who were all cousins.
"no value" here is probably in tens, maybe hundreds of trillions of dollars in the present time PPP basis.
I heard the most bizarre & unexpected opinion first-hand from an obgyn. Prior to this I was firmly in the nurture camp of nature/nurture, but this obgyn's opinion on adoptions shocked me out of my complacency.
I am hoping Sapolsky's latest book may shed some light on the subject without the Wade/Murray "bell curve" implications.
Curious as to what you mean. I think you're implying that the personality makeup of the adopted child that comes from his/her biological parents is not to be underestimated? Is that really a questionable or controversial topic though?
The thought has occurred to me. I would describe both my wife and I as being stable mannered and not prone to rash decisions. Odds are a biological child of ours might resemble that personality.
I also acknowledge a child we adopt may have had biological parents with very different personalities than us, and therefore the child may be very different from us in personality.
At the same time, I don't believe that just because the child's biological parents might have been wild and crazy, the child is doomed to the same fate even with our care.
> At the same time, I don't believe that just because the child's biological parents might have been wild and crazy, the child is doomed to the same fate even with our care
Tell me you haven't read many behavioral genetics papers without telling me you haven't read many behavioral genetics papers :).
adoptee turned to hard drugs (opiods) in his teens. the opinion was: what do you expect, the father was an addict too. at the time I was shocked as I was so firmly in the nurture camp.
Addiction, and specifically OUD is complicated, but there is real evidence that genetics plays a sizeable role in the physiological dependence side of it.
However the main risk factor for trying and then abusing opioids, for example, is trauma, typically but not only in childhood. Basically, it’s both nature and nurture, as most things are. Where the percentages lie for both, I don’t think we know yet.
For instance parents who have genes that increase impulsivity are more likely to e beat their kids exposing them to trauma, the kids are more likely to do dumb things that expose themselves to trauma, and the kids are more likely to do impulsive things like try drugs.
So it's hard to disentangle what portion of the effects of trauma are direct and which are confounds.
Oh yeah, definitely. It's a complicated mess of variables, that I don't even know how one would begin to tease them apart, but that's also why I firmly come down on the side of "it's both" -- as not all trauma is directly from biological parents, for example.
yes, I agree with you. It's just at the time I was unaware that brain chemistry could be genetically dependent; although as you say that's pre-disposition, and the trigger can be trauma, and sometimes knowing you are adopted can be the source of that trauma, thus triggering the behaviour.
I can only speak from personal experience but that is what happened to my family. My brother is a sociopath who caused our family a lifetime of difficulty. The biological mother was drug addict and abusive before adoption and he became an addict. My sister also adopted from different family was less of a problem but also had some issues. My dad was very kind and not abusive and spent way too much trying to help. Who knows maybe it was environment and early abuse or something but nature stacked the deck I think in my family. The other issue with adoption is limited access to family medical history.
I don’t really understand your argument. Wearing dresses isn’t heritable, we know that because most women’s grandmothers wore dresses and most women wear jeans or casual wear.
Heritability isn’t proof that a trait is genetic, but it’s strong evidence once you start addressing confounding factors. As I recall, the IQ heritability research was done with twin studies.
This is like shocking to me we’re even debating this. I would have assumed it’s conventional wisdom.
Wearing dresses is heritable! Heritability is simply the ratio of genetically-caused variation to total variation for some trait across a population. Bad driving is heritable. So is risk aversion. So is musical taste. So is how much TV you watch. All of these: studied.
Traits can trivially be minimally heritable and totally genetically determined. The number of fingers on your hands is genetically determined by your Hox genes. But the variation in the number of fingers on your hand (more precisely: across the population) is overwhelmingly not genetically determined. Genetically determined, low heritability.
Traits can trivially be maximally heritable and not at all genetically determined. Whether or not you wear lipstick is largely decided by XY vs. XX. But there's no gene for wearing lipstick; if the cultural ball had broken a different way, we might all be wearing lipstick, or none of us. Genetically unencumbered, high heritability.
So: you haven't said anything. You're not even wrong. All you pointed out was that you can do a study and determine that population variations in intelligence (or bad driving, or social trust, or fear of dentists) are traceable to genetic variance. That doesn't mean that genes literally encode the outcome.
Heritability isn't "strong evidence". It's barely evidence at all. It's literally just a framing of the question, which your argument simply begs. Irresponsibly, at that. None of this should be news to you.
I don't even have to take a position on the blighted question of whether intelligence is genetically determined (or whether we can measure it meaningfully at all, or whether it's fixed at birth or fluid, or whether outcomes in intellectual performance are epigenetic). And I'm not. I'm just pointing out that your argument, the one I replied to, was literally vacuous.
> As I recall, the IQ heritability research was done with twin studies.
No, it wasn't. Such a set up is impossible because of lack of samples and sampling bias.
All that "IQ is X% heritable" means is that they ran a linear regression on a large data set and saw that the variance error in the regression reduced by X% when they plugged in parental IQ as a covariate in the regression.
This is a correlational study as causal studies are impossible. Correlational studies are inherently spurious and ignore lots of confounding factors. Nevertheless, we can say that what we routinely observe in real life - smart parents having smart kids, has been grounded in real data.
For getting effect of race on IQ you plug in race as a covariate. Typically, most of the race based IQ research remove parental IQ as a covariate. All of these regression based studies are dubious and there is no real way to correct it. A large data set of twins who were separated at birth could help, but there are caveats there as well.
As an aside, Jordan Peterson seems to love these race IQ regression models and likes to call them hard undeniable science. He immediately switched sides when talking about climate models and how these models can't be trusted, because the simple choice of covariate included creates absolutely unreliable and biased models.
We have relatively strong evidence for a significant degree of genetic determinism in athletic ability (at least for some sports). We do not for intelligence.
It's always interesting to look at what these numbers exactly mean because it's deeply counter-intuitive. For the sake of simple modeling, imagine we have a society with 100 people with a fertility rate of 1, that give birth at 20 and die at 80. Here is how that looks:
---
Year 0: 100 newborns
Year 20: 100 twenties, 50 newborns
Year 40: 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns
Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns
Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns
Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns
Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn
---
In spite of having an extinction level fertility rate, the population nearly doubled in the first 60 years, going from 100 to 187. And it took 80 years to even see the population begin to decline. But then suddenly over the second 60 years, the population exponentially declined going from 187 to 22. This is very akin to the scenario in Korea, because they went from a fertility rate of 6+ to < 1. So they're starting with a large "newborn" population.
Because of the fact that we live much longer than we are fertile, it really damages any idea of "Well we'll just solve this when it becomes a problem." When it starts to become obvious there's a problem, the decline is already coming at an exponential rate. And it's entirely possible that such a small youth population supporting a suddenly massive elderly population will drive fertility rates even lower.
It increasingly seems that the future of our planet will not be decided by politics, ideology, or anything of the sort. It will simply be decided by whichever groups have children at healthy rates.
As recently as 1960 [1] their fertility rate was above 6. The neat thing too is that we can actually fill out the missing data perfectly due to the fact that the relative population sizes will always be driven entirely by fertility rates. A fertility rate of six means each older group will be exactly 1/3rd as large as each younger group, similar to how a fertility rate of 1 means each older group will be exactly twice as large as the younger group.
So here is what the table looks like if we assume that Year 0 was the final year of 6 fertility:
It is always unclear to me if this is a bad thing.
In a shrinking population, are individual people worse off, or does it just look like a decline when you look at the country in aggregate? There is no shortage of squandered talent in the world. So many people work below their capability because there are just more people than opportunities. It seems like it’s not a problem to keep running the modern world, even with a fraction of the current world population.
And besides, many smart folks think we are deep into overshoot, not just on carbon emissions, but on almost every resource we use to run the global economy. If we are beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, then we either need to become massively more efficient or just have massively fewer people on the planet. And given that there is no current hope of sustainable living on any other planet, seems like lowering birth rates can only be a good thing that will give us some chance of surviving our ecological bottleneck.
Everything is fine if reality and expectations are in line. But many societies are projecting economic growth at levels that have historically been underpinned by the increase in demand from sheer population growth, as well as the increase in supply of labor.
Edit: The other issue is tribal. The global tribe has lots of sufficient labor and young people to offset decreasing numbers of young South Koreans, but humans are not fungible. There will be many types of conflict due to cultural differences, as well as shifting power dynamics and the resulting lack of acceptance of newcomers on the same level as native tribe members, etc.
Historically population drops were bad. When you lose population, you lose the labor required to support as many specializations, and civilization regresses. Now, though, fertilizers and modern medicine support excess human population, fossil fuels are an energy wellspring that helps reduce the need for physical labor, and AI can free people from repetitive mental work.
Combine this with the fact that yes, our overshoot is horrific, I really do not see why declining birth rates in this era are a bad thing.
You're missing the demand side and the dependents problem. AI, Automation, etc. may replace factory workers but those workers also consumed products. With less consumers you have less demand thus your revenues are doomed to shrink year on year.
Just about every society has dependents who can no longer work and younger workers who support them through tax revenue. With fewer and fewer young workers and more and more dependents you have no good options. Cutting services would be bad for the elderly and likely impossible to pass in a democratic society as they would make up the majority of the voting population. Not cutting services would accelerate flight of workers and worse birth rates as overwork youth don't have time to start their own families.
We might have lower demand for consumption but have higher demand on "global works" - fight global warming, upgrading with AI the economy, space development. You can think of them as technical debt we have to pay.
It would seem common sense that growth cannot continue on a finite planet forever without catastrophe, hence our current situation. The overarching problem is that no system has been able to replace the one we have currently in order to prevent or mitigate the consequences of loss of population or growth on society, but that was never an easy problem to solve.
Most of the past century's gains in quality of life were tightly correlated with rising labor. If the population crashes, then who will do all the specialized work? Another thing to think about is excess capital and investment. With a large population, excess savings become investments into new companies, technologies, etc. Without excess savings there will be no tech industry, improvements in science, infrastructure investments or much of anything interesting.
Environmentalists say that fewer people will be good for the environment. But what about investments and research into green energy and carbon removal? Those will simply not happen unless the economy is still growing.
It’s complicated, my understanding is that the current idea of the western state and middle class traces itself back to the period right after the Black Death created one of the largest population shocks in history, which effectively ended serfdom and loosened the grip of the Catholic Church. Basically the effects of population dips are not cut and dry.
It’s not clear to me it would necessarily play out as people stopping all non critical work to take care of old people. Maybe it would, on a family level - People would spend more time taking care of their parents, and then maybe conclude they should have more kids to take care of them when they are older like they do in the developing world. But the modern pyramid-shaped pension program is a recent invention and not necessarily one I think would be so durable as to destroy other industries?
This is a joke. Excess savings are economically pointless, they serve no purpose, excess savings mean people are saving more than they invest, leading to economic decline.
>Without excess savings there will be no tech industry, improvements in science, infrastructure investments or much of anything interesting.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. Governments borrow more and more money to artificially turn excess savings into regular savings by increasing the investment rate, any benefits you think come from excess savings actually come from turning excess savings into regular savings aka savings = investment.
If savings are above investment it means aggregate demand is below aggregate supply and we are failing millions of people.
TL;DR: it's more about demand than labor supply. Same result.
I don't think it is as binary as you suggest. There will be lower total saving after a delay. There will certainly be less investment more immediately.
What will happen is this.
If you borrow money to make and sell (say) shoes, and the population is doubling every 35 years (2% growth), then your market doubles in 35 years also. (You need money because your buildings and equipment wear out, if not for materials.)
Your lenders have it relatively easy in this situation, because fewer of their borrowers go bust, so interest rates (which are partly compensation for risk) are lower.
With negative population growth, your market is shrinking, so your lenders' risk of loss increases.
Anyone who still has excess savings demands higher return on investment. Fewer potential investments can jump the higher hurdle. Total investment decreases, total income decreases and everything spirals down.
There is no advantage to excess savings with fractional-reserve banking; and there is even less need for any savings with MMT. We are in an MMT world now, your savings have no bearings on the economy.
I think it's a problem because most societies rely on working age folks to support retirees. As birth rates fall off, the ratio of young to old reduces and too few people in the society are working for it to function well.
And the other issue is that the productivity in care work is still rather low. So we have to put quite large part of work force to something that is for general economy unproductive.
Let's name the elephant in the room: No government is going to make a significant part of the workforce work in (unproductive) elderly care. Societies will eventually start to just get rid of their old, first encouraging life-ending treatment, and eventually enforcing it if there are not enough takers.
The counter to this argument is that time begets wealth - thus the oldest folks are the most likely to have capital. Those with capital impact economic decision making: thus the real trap is that we will all eventually spend all of our time taking care of the elderly - it will be the last job in town - as the elderly will have the last wealth at the last moment. Government policy of today certainly favors the old and wealthy - why should that not continue?
Depends on capital they hold. Capital only has value because there is either demand or it produces something. If everyone in town is working to take care elderly, the capital in factories is worth nothing as there is no labour to produce things. Or the houses are worthless as there is no demand for them. Later can already be seen in certain locations. So they are out of luck unless they own the nursing home or production for necessary goods in taking care of them.
It will not continue because it is ultimately unworkable. We are seeing that already today, with increasingly larger parts of the population becoming aware of the "boomer problem". Eventually this will become evident enough so that governments can no longer ignore it.
That being said: Capital of a few old people becomes pretty meaningless when your economy is collapsing. See any country that went through capital collapse in the last 100 years or so.
I think there are many strong arguments against this, but most are debatable. So I'm going to focus on one of the arguments that I do not feel especially strongly about, but one that I think is simply undeniable.
A smaller world population in the longrun is a defacto nonstarter. Many places in the world continue to have extremely high birth rates. And the wealth/education correlation that claims to predict the change of this seems, at best, extremely weak when put under scrutiny. Billionaires have high wealth, high education, and high fertility. Places like Thailand have extremely low education/wealth levels, yet their fertility rate is lower than even the US. Israel is the third most educated country in the world, has an advanced economy, and a fertility rate that is even competitive against some African nations at 3.0.
The issue is one of prioritizing wealth more than family, which also explains why the trend collapses at billionaires (for whom family has effectively 0 impact on their wealth), even though the correlation would expect them to be having effectively 0 children. And this pursuit of wealth over family holds true in the West, but there's no reason to expect such ideology to spread. So the question is not one of a smaller world population, but of a smaller population of the groups that are not reproducing vs those that are. In other words should the West simply accept its own extinction, likely alongside those of its values? And to me, the answer to that question is no.
There are 102 countries having fertility rate above 2.1, a lot of these countries are in Africa or Near East. Still in a lot of these countries, fertility rate is dropping year by year
> It is always unclear to me if this is a bad thing.
In a shrinking population, are individual people worse off, or does it just look like a decline when you look at the country in aggregate? There is no shortage of squandered talent in the world. So many people work below their capability because there are just more people than opportunities. It seems like it’s not a problem to keep running the modern world, even with a fraction of the current world population.
It's debatable. Population declines are good for the environment. But rapid drops has cultural, political, economic and geopolitical consequences. e.g. South Korea doesn't really trust NK or China or that they can't really be a manufacturing economy without young workers.
There is nothing wrong with it as long as people are prepared for the effects: higher taxes combined with reduced social benefits (as fewer workers support more retired). A stagnant or declining standard of living. A house that goes down in value not up over time. More challenging education for children as schools are closed and consolidated.
> In a shrinking population, are individual people worse off
Yes.
A shrinking population means an ever-smaller number of workers need to support increasing numbers of retirees.
If you can work that out, then you've still got a small pool of workers producing goods for a large, mostly economically-inactive population, which means inflation and plenty of it.
The supply and demand for a good may go up or down as population decreases, depending on if a good was artificially constrained, etc...
I feel like for people living in big cities, where things are expensive simply because too many people want to live there, things might start to get easier.
It's simple, in commerce terms it directly implies lower future consumption, lower future labour supply and consequently lower value to investors. Losing economic strength will be a very large concern for any country.
I have been in and out of Korea for many years and know several families where the norm went from several children to one within two generations. The main factors that I think caused this trend are:
1. Husband and wife both now work, not just in jobs, but in careers they are heavily invested in.
2. Getting and prospering in a career is really tough. I heard something like among current college graduates, only 20% are expected to ever find a full-time permanent position.
3. The education system is so competitive that doing well requires effort to the limits of physical endurance. It is not just the financial cost. Supporting a child to adulthood is draining on the parents in other ways. The families I know are in the top 10% for educational attainment, so I don't know how well this applies to working class families.
4. This is relatively minor, but there is a perpetual housing crunch and this affects prices.
I have no evidence for this beyond my own anecdotal experience but my guess is the biggest factor is lack of affordable housing. The average price of an apartment in Soul is 1.18 billion won (883k usd). It’s very difficult to buy a home and live off a single income as a young Korean, this is forcing people to start families later or not at all.
One compounding factor could be the extension of childhood, which has been a very successful strategy for humans, and is more prevalent in the developed world.
If "buying a home" just means buying a shoebox apartment, why is it important in the first place for starting a family? Doesn't that mean you're just as well off renting?
buying your own place gives you permanence you can plan around. you know where you will live, you know where your kids will go to school, you know your neighbors and neighborhood your kids will grow up in, and probably most important, you know how much it will cost each month, and you won't get thrown out on your butt because land lord wants to liquidate or have nephew Timmy live there next year.
this type of stability is an important factor for family planning
So renters in Korea actually have to move a lot, and the awareness of this dynamic actually matters in practice, or you're just assuming that much because that's how America works?
Edit: Don't mean to come down hard, it's just that in the kinds of topics I often see people casually assume certain things are "obviously" important for starting families, which it turns out other first-world countries do without just fine.
Ah I see your confusion. You’ve missed that renting is more expensive than buying a home and gets more expensive each year, possibly forcing you to move away from your local area and hence your child’s school. There are some places where rent controls and renters rights can mean renting can work for families. But few places are like Berlin.
That depends entirely on the rent/buy ratio and other factors like transaction costs and frequency of moving. It’s not a “confusion”, especially in places with competitive housing markets like Japan.
Since your following sentence agrees that renting isn’t universally cheaper, then you need to actually bring some relevant information on that point to have a substantive, non-confused comment.
What do you think your comment was accomplishing beyond calling confused? This discussion still lacks any evidence whatsoever that renting in Korea implies frequent relocation.
4-member family house rent/buy ratio in Korea is really high because of its unique Jeonse system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeonse Nobody rents 4 member family house because rent is more than mortgage.
On the other hand, bachelor studio is rather cheap even in the downtown Seoul(like 1k USD per month at most)
Jeonse system is unique in Korea and it really weird. It took me a few years to understand it and it shouldn't really work anymore because the housing price has stabilized in last 4 decades or so.
The point being, any of these commentors here who haven't heard of Jeonse, they don't know anything about housing in South Korea.
In China it's directly tied to you eligibility to nearly all local civil services, since something like 60% of the condo price goes to local government in the form of land sales (70 years rental actually) plus taxes, not to mention the mortgage rate from predominantly state-owned banks doubles that price again.
It's state-owned condo cartel, naturally, prices just keep skyrocketing, hence the "6 wallets for a down payment (the couple and their parents)" meme, but they'll just blame the greedy capitalist developers like Evergrande.
So combining the two factors, buying at least one condo is a prerequisite for marriage now.
My first kid just reached 18. Now I'm seriously thinking of having another one.
Remember when we were younger and the world's population hit 7 billion, everyone was really, really concerned about overpopulation??? I even did not want to have any kids because of this.
Now, Korea is seriously going to be worse than even Japan. And faster too.
Back in Jamaica one of my grandma had 7 children, the other one had 8 (with 2 stillborn). Now most women there have 1 child.
Here in Thailand today, we see much of the same thing. Talking to people they report their grandparents having 4-8 kids. Now most Thai women are lucky to have even one child. Same in Vietnam and Indonesia, which I frequent regularly too.
An outlier is when I was in Qatar recently, it was very common to see large (3-7 kids) families everywhere from all over the Middle East.
The answer is easy. Middle easterners want kids for cultural and religious reasons. I know any talk of religion and/or culture is verboten in modern American discourse but it's a significant factor in most the world. Yet it makes most Americans uncomfortable
It also helps that Qatar (along with the UAE and Kuwait) provide hefty benefits to married couples for marriage and childbirth.
Emirati and Qatari women have almost 50% more children than Saudi women despite cultural similarities because their government offers crazy good benefits.
Saudi Arabia has less money per citizen so families bear more of the cost and opt for smaller families.
Culture plays a huge role but so do government incentives.
Qatar is a pretty developed country, and has a higher than average female workforce participation. This is not to say it has perfect freedom for anyone. I honestly can't answer your question. These things remain to be seen.
People keep saying high child death rates mean people have more children. But i have yet to find any proofs or research paper for this. What I really find is that as people's expectations of better living go up (not living expenses per se), then people have less children.
At first I disagreed, but after reconsidering I think absence of other evidence the increased child death rate and child birth rate are coincidental. I haven't seen data actually supporting the evidence that more children were born because more children died. I think it's plausible that the increased rights and health of people within our society both lead to decreases in child births and child deaths, but I've seen nothing to suggest that the death rate is causal to the birth rate.
Interestingly enough in Korea the mortality rate in 1955 was the same as in 2005. It increased in the 60s, peaked in the 80s, and has been declining again since the 90s
-- Our study suggests that even modest habitual alcohol consumption of more than 5 units per week had adverse effects on semen quality although most pronounced associations were seen in men who consumed more than 25 units per week. Alcohol consumption was also linked to changes in testosterone and SHBG levels. [a]
Women in the highest alcohol consumption group (14 units or more per week) had 37 pregnancies in 307 cycles, and those who did not drink had 1,381 pregnancies in 8,054 cycles. These figures equate to an 18 percent decrease in the probability that the women would conceive. [b]
South Korea handily dominates the list of countries, drinking more than twice as much liquor per capita as any other country. [c] --
Birth rates are low pretty much everywhere in the developed world, but South Korea is an outlier in how low they are. For example, Japan's fertility rate is 1.3, compared to Korea's 0.84. That's a huge difference.
It's possible there's something unique to South Korea that causes it. Perhaps it's mandatory 2 years of military service for males. Or maybe their famously judgmental culture. I don't know.
As an opposite data point: in Israel, military service of 3 years is mandatory for males, 2 years for females. Israel has BY FAR the highest fertility in the OECD. So military service probably isn't a strong correlation here.
> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.
> Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
The fact that it's both men and women in Israel could be significant. I heard stories about people meeting their romantic partners in the army during the mandatory service.
Yah I could see that. Opposite sexes commingling during the strength of youth required for military duties and which also happens to coincide with peak fertility. I’m convinced that peak fertility and sexual urges during our 20s is no coincidence—-it’s our bodies screaming a large signal at us that this is the time. That strength and ability to pull all nighters sure comes in handy caring for a newborn. Taking on such a challenge 20 years past the peak without the aid of a 10 or 12 year olds helping hands is a high burden no doubt.
I’m starting to become more convince that economies which fundamentally squander this peak fertility moment will shoulder a burden that will lead to their demise. How long can we get the fertility timing wrong before we are no more? I guess we’re about to find out.
something unfortunate to keep in mind is your emotional intelligence at that age. it's clear an 18 year old is not as mentally prepared as even a 28 year old, let alone 30+ when your brain development has really hit its peak.
it's all fine and dandy to think people should be parents in their early 20s, but think about where you were at 20. did you stay with the same person? I think if you ran surveys in the west, you'd find a disproportionate amount who either didn't have anyone, or who broke up not long after. I like to think I'm a much kinder, calmer, and more self-aware person than I was at 18, or even 25.
at 30 you might be a more tired but hopefully at that point you've:
(1) dated enough to know what to look for in a partner;
(2) have found that partner who is a good match;
(3) have progressed enough in your work that you're less at risk at big economic suffering
I think people who try and save up in advance of kids are a little nutty - focus on your retirement, and emergency fund, they can borrow money. it's almost never an advantageous position for it to be paid off.
3 can definitely be solved by good policy. But I think it's just foolishness to suggest that people can start having kids whenever. At least in my experience and my peers' experience, finding the person who likes you enough to consider that is the blocker by a long shot. Everything else can be solved with money.
by the way, comments earlier about Israeli military service were interesting -- it makes sense to me as an accelerant in bonding, same as some university experiences. That was however not my experience in university undergrad...
The culture I came from in 20th century America somehow established this significant period of prolonged adolescence as it’s been called. So I think there is some growing up to do society wise so that folks are equipped to be in optimal biological alignment at the appropriate age and not waste time dilly dallying with 20 years of unproductive living. I don’t think this was always so in past centuries and certainly not intrinsic to the 20s demographic.
Maybe our newfound prologued lifespan gave the illusion we could shift fertility out into the suboptimal band of years indefinitely. But if our economy is structured in a way that demands this shift I have to think it comes at a long term cost where we become too top heavy so to speak and have increasingly diminished returns on how much reproduction we can sustain at those biologically suboptimal band of years with whatever guarantees that may come from deferring reproduction to that better time that may never actually come.
I don't know how people can say that - it definitely takes extra time. Ferrying them to different extra-curricular activities (all of them don't have to like the same thing), teaching at home/different homework, the constant fights. Cooking for 4 instead of 1 may not make a big difference but the extra dishes don't wash themselves. I'm not even getting into additional parent teacher meetings, doctor's appointments and so on.
on reddit they seem to be fixated on the "korean women needs to be liberated by chivalrous white male no wonder korean women dont want to marry korean men"
I have 3 kids with one due at the end of the year. All are from the same woman and we’ve known each other since being teenagers. We are planning to have 5-7 total. They really add a richness to life. It’s fun to see people stare when we go out.
Yeah at our church the average is probably 4-5. There are dozens of families like this. Were planning 5-6 like you.
Events with all the kids are lovely and many of the adults who grew up in this church know the other adults because they all used to be kids here once.
We're at 3 kids, planning for 4. I agree on the important of fellow kids at church. The older kids have an incredible time playing with our younger kids. Its such a joy to watch.
Bonus is we live in Japan and get to enjoy the surplus of an aging/retiring society. Cars are cheap, houses are cheap. We got a mortgage for a new build house as two newly weds at 25 years old, no down payment as is common in this bank-deposit-surplus country. Society is pretty broken in lots of ways, but with family you can side step the foolishness. The important skill is to say no when society suggests a silly idea.
What a great slogan. Say no when society suggests a silly idea. I love it. Fruitless endeavor, no thank you.
Sometimes I day dream about our kids perceptions of things in the future never having been exposed to the constant barrage of advertising conditioning them to buy buy buy and find satisfaction in material crap. I’m excited to see the sort of people they will become, there’s already great excitement at their growing virtues and strengths. Amazing stuff.
People are always surprised that we have no television in our household, and our consumption of media is limited to pre-purchased movies on particular occasions (sickness, holidays, etc)
You don't have to engage with everything society tells you you need. You can just... ignore it. In my experience, many people speak highly of freedom, yet don't behave freely themselves.
My fiance (soon to be wife) and I are both devout Catholics, having children is a gift for us.
We won't be using contraception after we are married, only NFP (or abstain) and if she gets pregnant, then it's a cause for celebration by both the community and our families. We have average jobs and no one in our extended family is rich either, yet they all had many kids.
The truth is that having children requires a lot of sacrifice and not many people are up for it. Who could blame them? outside of strong cultural / religious boundaries, you will spend the majority of your time climbing a corporate ladder, going for a bigger degree, constantly thinking about retirement and finances,.. etc.
However, I personally think that no matter which one of those summits you climb, it will fade away. So for us, unless we will literally be out on the street due to financial stress, we are looking forward to having kids, who could deny such grace?
Anyway, just wanted to throw out a different point of view into the mix here.
"Afford" is said in many ways. I know my kids will probably have to take out student loans to go to school. Other than that, you live frugally. Health insurance costs usually cap out at 3 kids.
My ex and I split over this issue. She wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and "the kids can take out loans like me if they choose to go to college." I wasn't going to bother with children unless I could reasonably guarantee all the benefits to my children that my parents provided me (a.k.a. covering a significant portion of my college expenses).
I mean, if things are anything like they are now, they'll end up paying $100/mo on a salary of ~$130,000 to cover the cost of $70,000 in loans that are going to get written off by the federal government in ten more years. (The fact that my wife does not work and we have two children obviously brings down the monthly rate to a significant degree).
It's not exactly the incredible expense some folks imagine it to be; it's certainly not worth not having children over.
Unless of course you're dead-set on sending your children to Oberlin or Harvard or something and coming out of it with no debt, I don't think it's a reasonable objection. And even if you were dead-set on it, shouldn't you be making enough to be able to afford to let your wife stay at home if she wanted to anyway?
I have 2 kids and I wouldn't mind more, but where do you put them? Our house has 3 rooms. If we have bunk beds they're probably going to be annoyed as teenagers. Maybe I'm thinking about this too hard lol
As someone born in a situation like this (east Germany also had a fertility rate of 0.8 in the mid nineties, albeit under different circumstances), I now find it interesting how unimportant that is to you as a child. Sure, in retro-perspective it is clear that all those schools closing or down-sizing was an extreme trend but that aside, I cannot say that I ever felt like we were few kids. I mean, I had all my friends at school and many of those had siblings, neighbors had usually kids, most of my parents friends eventually had kids. And when we were starting university, we thought we were too many as mandatory military draft was abolished and hence more students were starting that year.
I am not sure what this tells me but probably that there must have been a marginalized fraction of the population that I never noticed (and living in a relatively young university town probably helped at that). Then again, obviously, our fertility rate was only that low for a couple of years and 'rebounded' to 1.3-1.5 soon after.
Kids are too expensive to raise, housing in major cities with jobs are unaffordable, and women are having a hard time continuing their career after giving birth.
It really comes down to these three problems.
The government is aware and making efforts but it's not enough to convince young married couples to have kids.
I have just one child. I thought it was kinda sad that they're an only child but I didn't think about that its more than that. They wont have any nieces or nephews, if they have one child with a partner who is an only child my grandchild wont have any uncles, aunts or cousins either.
Its a huge contrast to other branches in my family where there are like dozens and dozens of cousins all living close to each other and always hanging out.
Korean politics is blaming feminism for this phenomenon, but it's really a mix of all the issues in the comments, as well as sexual crime injustices (bare minimal sentencing for sex crimes) and women afraid of bringing a child into such society. It's just a natural evolutionary reaction.
yeah this is a bad take that people on r/korea are pushing which consist drum roll please....mostly white men/women who keep this echo chamber narrative going...so that they think that korean women are going to flock to westerners more (?) its bizarre to me as somebody who has many Korean friends who just crack up when I translate that subreddit for them.
first feminism in korea is toxic. they are female version of incel culture. very few things translate well to western audiences who unfortunately do not read past headlines on reddit. one example is this left/right equating to US left/right wing. this Korean feminist is also similar, it is not an counterpart to the US feminist movement. there are very few moderate feminists in the mainstream. it is of the radical variety calling for violence against men. for example, they caused controversy for instance streaming sexually assaulting underaged boys and poisoning patrons at a restaurant and uploading it in their community groups. In fact many Japanese feminists point out how toxic the feminist in Korea are, they are not about equality, they are about usurping. Most just live with their parents.
now thats out of the way, sex crimes are treated differently in korea due to the complex judicial system that is the result of multiple period of colonialism. its not as rampant as reddit has you believe but the punishment is also too lenient and should be stronger.
more women are entering the workforce and they are afraid to lose their careers. the same is true in advanced economies, women in these part of the world have far more choice and power than in third world countries. of course they are not going to give up their comforts. the redpill take you are subscribing to is NOT what Korean Koreans subscribe to. After all there is a record number of cohabiting men and women in Korea, they just simply choose not to have kids or get married anymore.
also if you think you have game in korea just because of your skin color, trust me, they know exactly why you are here and they dont care. the "white sexpat" have ruined it for rest of us here. most international marriage in korea is between neighboring countries. this is true for Japan and China as well. People who look like each other but are from different cultures.
just want to add that you do a dis-service for calling out feminism in korea without providing some context. decades of treating women basically as second class citizens or worse with no outlet "created" this environment. there's an equally large incel base in korea and we can argue to death who "started" it first, but history has shown it's usually the men heh.
this doesn't excuse or condone the toxicity, but this brand of feminism didn't just rise up out of nowhere.
agree w/ everything else u said, and part of it (part of, not all) here is women realized they can just live as a single or have their careers and not worry about the bullshit in-law drama and what have you.
> decades of treating women basically as second class citizens or worse with no outlet "created" this environment.
you mean like japan? what about US where women have unfair advantages?
so your solution is for those women to marry you right?
where do you get this idea that a culture "treats women like shit"? if anything telling women to whore themselves to rich men inject drugs and kill their fetuses seem to me like that definition if we are gonna play stereotypes.
uh what? my solution is for women to do whatever the hell they want with their lives with no expectation of what they "should" be doing? i get this idea based on the struggles that i hear women around me going through.
i honestly have no idea what point you're trying to make lol. none of it addresses what i said.
Has there ever been a society in history that was so bad that "women afraid of bringing a child into such society." was a thing? In the very short term, sure, but forever?
Historically, many societies treated women as property whose opinion simply did not matter and having kids was a numbers game that was part of your retirement plan. Have ten kids and maybe a few will survive long enough to take care of you when you are old and needy.
In many countries that is a situation that was common until fairly recently and in some countries this is still the status quo. E.g. my parents are from Dutch catholic families and they have countless relatives. My mother had a couple of dozen aunts and uncles. Their generation was a lot less productive. I only have one sibling and neither of us has had any children. We're both middle aged and I doubt it will happen. I know many people my age that have made similar choices.
Korea is an example of a conservative society where women are empowered to say no both technically (birth control) and legally (they don't end up being forcibly married by their families anymore). That's pretty much the case around the world with some notable exceptions of very conservative and/or poor countries; typically with a distinct lack of democracy and other freedoms.
Economical circumstances make having kids a really expensive choice in Korea. So, people are no longer being forced to marry and have kids, they can practice birth control, and can't afford to have kids. So, they don't unless they really want to and are able to secure the funding. You see the same patterns in other places in the world where housing is expensive and people are literate. They have kids later or not at all. Even countries that are notoriously very egalitarian with extensive child support programs (e.g. Sweden) have rather low birth rates these days.
If you'll allow me to shift the goalposts, then it was men deciding to have kids. Has there ever been a society where men thought the world was too terrible to puts kids into? Assuming men and women have similar interest in the quality of life of their children, it should be the same feeling among women.
Of course women have all sorts of other reasons for not having kids, which they'll be using to actually have fewer kids, but imagining that they'll suffer from the bad world doesn't sound like a real reason and more of a political statement to make it look like they're very concerned about the popular worries about the world.
I imagine booming populations in Africa will likely offset much of the working population in these countries with low birth rates.
As a European I can imagine what impact having high immigration from Africa mixed with all the property being unaffordable and owned by older white generations will have i.e. huge disparity in wealth between black and white, quick growth of black population and decline in white population, rise in racial tensions, rise of far right and claims of being assimilated.
I'm pretty ignorant about places like Korea and Japan though. Is there any hope they won't suffer the same difficulties?
Those are unhealthy attitudes. It would be good if they addressed this, but sadly societies and cultures are rarely rational about how they develop. Much of modern life is determined by culture, but despite culture being entirely man-made, we don't seem to be able to control it.
> booming populations in Africa will likely offset much of the working population
Not really , as they don't do today, because they are not educated , and there is not enough time to wait for second-generation immigrants. Also, africans have no obligation to become subservient again to the developed world via immigration.
You can't really compare today to the future if the population is meant to increase exponentially... By 2050 it could be the most populated country in the world, the idea that, that population wouldn't immigrate especially when other countries will be in desperate need of workers seems absurd.
Especially when, as you say, they will be uneducated and that education will likely be available in those nations.
I'm a bit confused by your choice of words "subservient" and "obligation", it seems you're trying to imply more but not caring to say it.
Immigrants are cheap labor for europe and the US, even though it's not commonly admitted. Emigrating is not the only option for those countries. For example china, due to its development, did not end up with massive waves of emigration.
I hate when journalists use nasty tricks to make their point stronger. This is not good journalism.
Look at the "Rich but Shrinking" graph in the article. I'll report the numbers here for simplicity:
Country / number of babies per woman
Israel: 2.9
Mexico: 2.1
France: 1.8
US: 1.6
Australia: 1.6
UK: 1.6
Germany: 1.5
Canada: 1.5
Spain: 1.4
Japan: 1.3
Korea: 0.8
(all numbers as of 2020 except Korea)
Now, there are a few things happening with this.
1) Numbers are wrong. Based on World Data [0], Spain is 1.2, not 1.4.
2) Notable countries are missing from the list: Hong Kong (0.9), Singapore (0.9), Italy (1.2).
3) "Korea is the world’s fastest-aging nation among economies with per capita GDP of at least $30,000," conflicts with the fact that you include Mexico in your list of countries (Mexico's GDP is below $30,000), just to make Korea's problem look worse.
Singapore is small and an educational pressure cooker like Korea, but makes up for its low birthrate with huge amounts of both permanent skilled immigration and temporary unskilled foreign labor. This is an unusual combo, but it's unlikely to face a demographic crunch anytime soon.
What's the harm? By the end of the century robots will be doing most of the work anyway. People can concentrate on the things that matter to them instead.
Who's going to build and service the robots? Who's going to build the chips necessary to build the robots? Who's going to operate the ships required to move the parts to the destination to be assembled? Who's going to build the ships? Who's going to to secure the shipping lanes? Who's going to grow and process the food?
We don't have the parts that we need now to build new cars and tractors. Can we really afford to be building robots?
Well, there will be some jobs in robot service, but most of that work should be done by...robots. Self-driving ships don't need humans. Robots should be doing most of the ship building.
Growing and processing food should be highly automated, and soon. If we have "infinite" (renewable) energy we can cut down on the chemical input and have robots plucking each weed and carefully metering out the water. The price of "organic" should drop close to or even below "conventional".
> We don't have the parts that we need now to build new cars and tractors. Can we really afford to be building robots?
half a billion people have food insecurity, and with climate change that is growing. Can we really afford to build more meat puppets?
More to the point, the article talked about the population of SK dropping by a half by the end of the century. A transient parts problem today is irrelevant, especially given we have to design better robots over the next 78 years.
There is a lot of semiconductor investment going on right now. My employer is pledging $300B of investment in the next decade, with $40B here in the US. I would expect other companies are doing the same, especially as the EU and the US look to bolster semiconductor manufacturing through subsidization.
How many people would you need, in order to build robots? Not many, and most of it'll be automated anyways. And remember the birth rate is not 0.0 it's 0.8. So I think fewer people will be there because we don't need more people. Society will change to accommodate to low birth rates.
By the end of the century robots will be doing most of the work anyway
1) What if they don't? 2) The end of the century is 78 years away, somebody's going need to turn you on your side every few hours when you're in that old folks home - what happens if there aren't enough people to do those jobs?
> somebody's going need to turn you on your side every few hours when you're in that old folks home - what happens if there aren't enough people to do those jobs?
Obviously we will have robots doing that job! Elder care is already a major area of robotics effort in Japan.
And if the robots don't get there? Well, it's not terrible. A smaller population doesn't need as many buildings erected, or crops grown etc. Some people can move in from other countries. I'm confident it will all work out.
What do you mean? Hopefully they will be surrounded by family members and friends, none of whom were burnt out or financially ruined by looking after an elderly relative but instead are receiving and providing love and support while robots do the "dirty work" as it were.
You might look how elderly patients and other end-of-life patients are treated by their (almost all quite low-paid) carers. It's pretty shocking, but the experience of being the person providing that care is also pretty shocking.
I think you underestimate the emotional and physical labour involved in looking after a dying person, and in particular a relative. I saw (mostly remotely) my mother in law die and her two younger daughters restructured their lives to help her -- and this despite the twice daily visits from the Diakonie to change dressings, attend to medication etc. And, because that was in Germany there was no meaningful financial burden for this process.
There's another factor: my mid-80s mother (herself a physician) doesn't want human caregivers for privacy and prodding sake. She doesn't mind human physiotherapist or actually talking to another doctor about her complaints. But she doesn't want people fussing over her. And her mother in law (my grandmother), from a completely different culture from a completely different continent, also hated the consequences of losing her autonomy. She was still delivering meals on wheels at 89, and when she finally needed assistance in her 90s, just couldn't stand it.
IMHO machines that support more autonomy for people are an unalloyed good.
I mean this sincerely. I will kill myself before I become such a massive burden on society. I will not needlessly cling to life at the expense of others.
I can say the same right now, while it's still a distant abstract thought. I've said to my wife repeatedly that I'd rather leave my family some inheritance and go on my own terms than have the nursing home take it all so that I can live, bedridden, for a few extra years.
But I might feel different in a few decades if my physical body starts breaking down while my mind still works. Maybe I'll become afraid of death, or I'll suddenly want to stay alive watch my kids/grandkids grow up.
Robots don't buy products or services, meaning your revenues are shrinking. Meanwhile growing numbers of elderly citizens who require care are going to be supported by an ever smaller pool of young workers who will be overworked instead of starting families of their own. You have a spiral of death which is likely unavoidable.
At that point the actual workers might decide to just stop pouring endless resources in to keeping elderly people alive at all costs.
This is only a problem because we gained the ability to keep people alive much longer given extreme resources. If we just cap the resources dedicated here we would have no issue.
Robots are not free yet. Even if energy was free and we had automation that could produce any product so labor is free, we still need raw materials that might be hard to come by or conflictual in origin.
you re not wrong, but people are always looking for meaning in life. If kids are not there, they will look for meaning elsewhere. But maybe kids are too demanding and have repetitive needs, which is off-putting for meaning-driven uberhumans. Well then maybe we should automate the raising of kids , but wait, daily school already exists and now we have tablets too. OK so how did the adults find meaning now that their hands are untied? Oh, they are in social media all day
So my dad spent his career working on US family planning efforts abroad. (We came here from Bangladesh because of my dad's work at a US public health company.) And the results have been positive in many ways: the fertility is down from 7 when my dad was born to 2 today. At the same time, the whole shtick was kind of "there's too many Asians!" I can't help but think that these efforts condemned these countries to long term decline. There was a generation who had it ingrained in them that having kids is bad. We have three kids (about average in my American wife's family) but my parents definitely gave us the side-eye when we got pregnant with the third. I wonder if Korea is Bangladesh's future? Maybe Islam will help avoid a sub-1.0 fertility rate, who knows.
The decline in fertility has a palpable effect on society. Despite being raised in the US, this country, at least the places where I've lived in coastal metros, feels so lonely to me. I've felt that especially acutely since we had kids. We had our first at 27, and for the better part of a decade we were the odd-one-out among most of our friends showing up to places with a kid. There is a numeric basis for this feeling. In 1960, when the U.S. fertility rate was 3.5, fully 35% of the population was children. Today, it's 22%. You can see that difference just around your neighborhood.
That odd one out deal I picked up on too in my experience. It really awoke in me a perception of the whole sense of family friendly vs adult oriented. I realized I had been on an adult only train for decades never contemplating the absence of children as being anything abnormal. I just assumed for the most part they were around just not in the venues or circles I mingled with. Eventually I realized they’re mostly absent never having been born. That was a pretty stark realization I think that hit me when Kaiser released some document about “Children, California’s Most Precious Resource”. The adult oriented world I realized was a diversion into all sorts of endeavors unrelated to continuing the species. There’s a saying I heard like in the last 2 years let’s say—-a place that isn’t crying is dying. Ie no cries of children being heard that group of individuals will be no more in say 60 years.
It’s a stark stark difference. Going into a restaurant in DC versus say a heavily Hispanic suburb of Texas. Nearly everything’s family friendly by default in the latter place. Just because you’d have no customers if you weren’t.
1. Financial security, I can barely afford putting food in my own mouth let alone a wife and baby.
2. Community support, having a kid would mean no more working on my startup in spare time, which also means less money.
I don’t feel like I have a village to raise a child with, I’m a rootless cosmopolitan floating about the planet from one yuppie opportunity to the next. It’s not really satisfying and I’ll likely pull the trigger soon anyway.
My interest lies in how many zeros of population are required to support certain technology strata.
E.g. about a million workers are required to build and maintain aircraft. How many for nuclear power (counting everyone from teachers to healthcare etc.)
I'm wondering if we can build an open source repository of "how to build anything" - schematics, materials, step by step instructions. Combined with generic tech like computers and 3D-printers it would make a universal factory.
A "self replicating factory" - capable of producing a copy of itself but also anything else - could be enough to bootstrap economy anywhere. Colonising Mars is probably going to contribute research in this direction.
Fraction of labour force that is has STEM degrees and relevant vocational fields. My guestimate is much less than most would think. Like Samsung has ~300k employees and has vertical in almost every SKR strategic industry.
I think that this trend is self-reinforcing: When you have fewer children, you need to activate a larger part of your young population for work. A big pool (the largest?) is women who traditionally don't work or work less than men. Working makes it difficult to raise children (and might make the decision to have them difficult, too). In consequence, you end up with less children this year and run short of workers 20 years later.
Child care will never fully remove this effect for three simple reasons: Child care workers are scarce (as they are, traditionally, mostly women), children can only deal with child care for a certain amount of time (it is really exhausting for smaller kids), and getting the kids to and from child care acts like extra hours of unpaid work for the family.
So if a state wants to have a more stable local population, I think it will be inevitable to subsidize families more directly: Reduce working hours for parents (equally, of course) and fully pay the difference (would be really interesting to do a cost/benefit calculation here). Give out other perks (cheaper mortgages, maybe parking space or other permits, first choice when it comes to vacation, maybe the parents get a vote for their children and so on). Finally, the state might even turn to penalizing child-less adults or "nudge" people into having babies (e.g., by taxing contraceptives).
If you don't agree with such an active role of the state, consider the alternative: active control of migration. This in turn brings its own set of problems that all nudge the state to take authoritarian measures (for instance border control ala US-Mexico).
Consequently, any industrialized state has to take an active role regarding demographics and I think it will look somewhat dystopian in our eyes.
From what I've heard South Korea is very capitalist and people are overworked. Suicide rates are crazy. It's all pointing back to Maslow's hierarchy again; perhaps people just don't have the energy to start a family amidst all that pressure and stress.
Is there a direct, inverse relationship between per-capita economic productivity, and fertility rate?
It seems intuitive to me: a major way per-capita economic productivity goes up is by working more hours, both at school, and in the workplace. Since you're competing with other max-hours workers for stuff like housing, the price rises to match. Soon, you're in a situation where there's no space in the average budget/apartment for kids.
Widespread misallocation of human resources (i.e. unemployment, part-employment, etc) would presumably drive in the opposite direction.
Peter Zeihan wrote a really interesting book about this topic recently - "The End of the World is Just the Begining". He sees population decline as one of the gravest dangers facing civilisation. Implication being in the title of the book.
I love Peter Zeihan and recommend him to everyone. His commentary on the intersection of population decline and Russia's geopolitical goals from The Accidental Superpower in 2014 also turned out to be on point.
To give context to those who are unfamiliar, he basically predicted the Ukraine invasion before the Crimean Annexation and was proven correct again with Russias further attempt to invade the entirety of Ukraine this year.
I don't think low birth rates will be an end of the world. Birth rates and death rates naturally fluctuate. Just because the fertility rate is .8 doesn't mean it'll stay this way. When there'll be a need for people birth rates will go up. Automation, AI have reduced the number of people we need. So low birth rates aren't out of blue. It's just a normal reaction for a reduced demand for workers.
Yes but the house price in Seoul will remain the same-ish while all the other regions crash first. Korea already has a 50.4% of the population living in/ around Seoul and this is going to get worse as population drops off. This would mean the demand to live near Seoul might stay constant even with the absolute number of population in Korea dropping. Later though, the house price of Seoul will drop as well.
A bit absurd to roll out all these fertility stats but never even mention social issues behind these trends, like a patriarchal culture, excessive over work, poor conditions for retirees…
To me, goverments 'green' measures are just patches that won't work, but are very likely to ruin the lifestyle of the middle class, while the affluent keep theirs untouched.
At the same time, the only real solution that is population decline, is 'spontaniously' happening without any policies like one child per couple, and so.
If the economics of an older population are much easier to solve than our progressive destruction of the environment... Why not incentivice policies to keep people childless?
I predict a future in which a much greater proportion of the child-rearing responsibility is taken over by governments. A futuristic boarding school kinda thing
The closest thing we have to a crystal ball is Japan, which is a few decades ahead in demographics, and it's been much more prolonged slump than sudden crash there.
but japan has largely been successful at flattening the curve while Korea is in a serious crisis here. if I have to guess, when there are more older people than young, the society destabilizes.
immigration is going to happen regardless of koreans want it or not and I finally understand why the Korean governments has been pushing soft power for so long, they were planning for this scenario.
I don't think the outcome is going to be as bad as some nationalists make it out to be, for sure most immigrants are going to come from other Asian countries but I do not see it say reaching the dysfunctional state of Western Europe with mostly muslim/african migrants. This is not to say that Southeast Asians won't be pushed to the fringes and experience discrimination that puts them on the same anti-host country culture like in France for example.
Japan has a much higher birthrate at 1.3 (still low worldwide, but way ahead of SK, and not that far from other places), so it's not nearly as bad. More recently, Japan has been encouraging increased immigration to make up for the decline.
That's probably mostly due to terrible childhood nutrition. The same thing happened to humans when they switched from being hunter-gatherers to using agriculture: they dropped a foot in height.
I see lots of references to difficult economic situation as justification for low fertility rate in advanced economies, which obviously is a huge external factor but another one IMHO is the cultural shift towards individualism.
Why sacrifice personal rights for other people (aka children)?
We shifted from huge social-religous pressure to procreate to zero (or negative) pressure to do so.
if the kdramas are indicative of their society, they believe kissing will make you pregnant ;-) seriously, they should take a page out of japan's playbook- legalize pornography and establish a contest to encourage economic and population growth :-)
No, it's not. It's their closest neighbor, somewhat similar culturally, and while the birthrate is still low, 1.3 is still much higher than 0.8. It's a big improvement.
Pop culture references != broader societal concerns.
Of all the places to draw conclusions about societal concerns from, mass-market consumer pop culture in a culture known for relative strictness on what is acceptable/taboo is the last place you should be looking.
I read so many comments here trying to make having zero kids into some kind of FU to the system.
While what will eventually happen is professional families birthing and raising as many children as the state and corporations need, making the regular nuclear family obsolete. It will also make the family superfluous, enabling govt to completely disregard it.
People are worried that over-population is problem, some idiots even decide not to have children. But real problem is the opposite - population collapse. How do you plan to retire if there's not enough young people to sustain ever growing older population. Rough times are ahead of us, something we haven't yet experienced.
> Higher efficiency, higher wages especially in social security jobs, and of course a universal social security system
efficiency has its limits. And we are reaching it, I would argue we reached it already. Without full automation there's not much room for "efficiency". There's no growing population on the west, it is declining sharply if you exclude immigration. There's not enough people to work with elderly. Germany desperately tries to import people for elderly care for years.
Also, from what I read and researched the LARGEST single polluter on entire planet is the US military complex. Even if entire world switched to electric cars, eat less meat, it wouldn't make a dent in a greenhouse gas emissions. Not to mention that 50% of all produced food in the west is a waste. There's place for 20b people on this world, no shortages of land, resources. We just need to change our habits and drop consumerism (as we know it). If everyone bought only what they need, and consumed 99% of food they bought, that would result in less pollution than 3b people buying 200-300% more that they need.
There are enough people to work with elderly, they just don't get paid well enough.
That's the main reason germany imports workforce from poorer countries.
>Higher efficiency, higher wages especially in social security jobs, and of course a universal social security system
Greater social security benefits and higher wages in social security jobs means raising taxes a lot, because there's far more old people than there are younger working people to support them. This will drive all the workers out of the country to other countries with lower taxes, creating a feedback loop and collapse.
.png){kind=link}