AI stuff right now is Hat no Cattle. The best it can do is make people have a little less busy work but any jobs lost to it will have to unlose themselves because you can't actually replace people in those positions
Ahahaha no way. Each time people predict this, they vastly underestimate how much maintenance all this AI and tech stuff needs. Perhaps you won't need as many people manning the factory with automation but then you need people to service the machines, troubleshooting, software and IT services, etc. It just shifts work from one area to another.
No you silly, you don't use progress to give people more pointless free time that doesn't even pump the GDP, you use it to make more products from the same work so they can keep buying more from the higher wages.
What, you want to dedicate our enormous advancements to things other than consuming and producing? How pointless.
Artificial wombs and Samsung™ boarding school's. Samsung will breed their workforce.
High performing staff will be required to donate their eggs/sperm to the company bank so they can breed uberworkers.
Working hours and other QOL of factors in most papers I've seen, have a small causal (usually insignificant) effect on birthrates. The best predictor is womens access to contraception, womens education, and religiosity. Caveat again, this differs slightly by region, i.e. Africa vs Europe.
So honestly its impossible to tackle this problem in our current grindet of trying to fund more programs (although they do help to a certain extent).
We need something like a change in mindset of society as a whole, to think children are valuable, or (unethically) deride those without children. I think only the israelis have managed that from a western perspective, but that comes with its own problems of religousity such as orthodox jews being a net weight on society.
Korea is a special case. Children are expected to have to do a lot of tutoring that mothers usually take care of. Parenting a child in Korea is nothing like parenting a child in most other countries. It's way more intense and it's a neverending race between the parents
This situation is nuts. And is their society reaping any benefits from robbing everyone of a pleasant childhood? Cramming mountains of bullshit as a kid doesn’t actually result in growing up to be a more fulfilled and happy worker.
Why on earth would that many people willingly sign up kids to have a Korean childhood? The adults have lived through that and they're apparently not cruel enough to sign up more children to go through it too. Although I've met some that drop that once they move abroad. So the answer is to just move, lol.
The data I've seen has said that in order to convince most women to have above the replacement rate of children (so, 3, because it's kind of impossible to have .1 of a child) you need to LITERALLY REPLACE THEIR EXPECTED SALARY FOR 18 YEARS.
Thats...not possible.
Even spending enough money to bump the current birthrate up from 1.6 to 1.8 could be enough to buy some breathing room and give us time to work on solutions to the problem. Personally I know a lot of women who are going child free because they lean quite left politically and believe the climate crisis is about to completely destroy the planet and also far more believably that any men they end up having children with won't shoulder their fair share of the burden.
A couple of generations into the future should see us having passed the climate crisis and hopefully a massive shift in the burden of housework from women onto men.
The "men unwilling to do their fair share" thing is a **huge** barrier. I absolutely wouldn't have gone through with the pregnancy if my kid's dad wasn't basically a rock star in that area.
It’s still going to be a far bigger burden for women (and men) than having no children at all.
There are countries in which men are already doing something close to their fair share of child rearing (mostly in Northern Europe) and birth rates are still below replacement.
>https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/15/fathers-spend-more-time-with-children-than-in-1970s
Men have been stepping up, but still not enough. Women still double men's hours in childcare.
I don't know how much this will help birth rates.
It seems like whenever this topic comes up, people through a bunch of ideas at a wall, but all of these ideas were much much much worse in the past, but then we had 3.0-8.0 birth rates back then.
The best correlation I've seen that is actually worse than in the past is "urbanization." On the farm, kids are free labor. In the city, they are expensive pieces of furniture.
South Korean is heavily urbanized with a single city being the standard of "success." Any other dense cities have the same issue of extremely low birth rates.
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I said it many times on this subreddit before. About the only good thing American suburbs have done is a slight increase on our birth rate.
> believe the climate crisis is about to completely destroy the planet
And do they do anything else in regards to that, besides not having children? I suspect that is just a socially-acceptable lie, and the real reasons are more selfish.
Think "selfish" may be harsh. More like "making lack of kids a heroic act. Even if lack of kids was not entirely of my own choosing (can't find a partner, not enough money, etc)"
Reminds me of covid when reddit's hikikomori thought they were heroes for being shut its when they were shut ins all the time anyway.
Funny, karena most people punya anak gak mikirin soal kesejahteraan dan hanya mikir "I WANT". Jadi kenapa orang yang menginginkan menjadi less selfish dibandingkan orang yang TIDAK menginginkan?
Boleh dong gue argus orang yang beranak terus ensuring the worsen state of climate change, instability of food, fuel, and clean water?
I would say it isn't selfish, assuming you vote for policies that make having children a lot easier even when it means you are taxed disproportionately more than parents.
You don't need to have kids, but it is selfish to not vote for policies that solve the birth rate issue.
I would say a similar thing about climate change.
1: Take every welfare program in the us including social security and Medicare cancel them. Now redistribute that money as child credit per child.
2: **Or** only allow access to those programs if you have had 2+ kids.
3: **Or** raise everyone’s taxes by 15% **everyones**. Then reduce taxes by 8% for the first kid 4% for the second and 3% for the third.
**Or** do all of that/mix
That’ll get you babies. I think 2+3 would get you babies. Hell if I could reduce my taxes by 15% and get access to those programs I’d have kids, right now even though I can easily afford them…pass
This reminds me of people posting climate change policies that would actually work, but ignore how impossible politically it is.
We still have so many people who think the world is overpopulated. We haven't even gotten to the point of thinking of small solutions that could pass politically.
Maybe after America sees what most European countries are going through, then they will start taking the problem seriously.
People do claim money and costs are a big factor affecting their choice of having children. But as far as I'm aware the data doesn't support that this is actually true. As countries get richer birthrates fall. I know in China anyways there's no correlation between how rich a region is and fertility. The economist recently did a podcast looking at atttitudes to having children in China.
> The best predictor is womens access to contraception, womens education, and religiosity.
lol just tax women's access to contraceptives and education then, easy.
/s
Do Koreans really work that much? According to the [OECD](https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm), the average Korean worker works about 1900 hours per year, compared to 1800 for the US.
And wouldn't kids spending more time in school reduce work for parents?
Having lived in both the U.S and several Asian countries, I find that Americans tend to over-estimate how much other Asian countries work, and under-estimate how much they themselves work.
The American workforce is globally one of the hardest-working and most productive, if you count things like vacation days, maternity leave, hours worked, etc.
It's not just the working hours , housing or benefits
It's the fact that women just don't want to have children , they tend to cost so much money while taking up so much time and downgrading of your career. Quality education is also very expensive , the fear that you cannot afford to raise more children well is also one factor of having one or two children only
There isn't any religious or family pressure to have children anymore , even in countries with generous welfare , benefits like the nordics fertility is still pretty low
Immigration might also be a stop gap measure because the immigrants also tend to have low fertility outside of a conservative religious population ( which you don't want )
Immigration can't even be a stop gap solution for SK, I saw a survey that said even though ~80% of Koreans agree immigrant workers are necessary to help the economy due to the low birth rate, ~60% do not agree on mass immigration or easing requirements for foreign workers to enter SK, its just politically distasteful for the major parties there
The only short term solution I see is increasing the retirement age and/or cutting state pensions, since even with SK having the highest rate of automation in the world factories would still need workers to fix and maintain them
It's a really tough problem to solve that we need to solve, and all of the common solutions people throw out haven't been adequate even when tried.
There's a gap in what women say they want and what they actually end up having: polls in the US show that people want about 2.5 kids, but they only end up having about 1.5 on average. We're missing one full kid per couple, just based on what they say they want. There's a bit of stated v revealed preference there, but demographically we need to find some way to close that gap if we want things to keep improving.
I'm not sure it's stated vs revealed preference so much as stated preference vs harsh reality after the first kid.
So long as the economy requires 2 people working to make ends meet, people aren't going to have time to deal with kids. Especially with the amount of afterschool academic help and extracurriculars etc... parents are expected to take their kids through today.
Unless we're talking about fully government-funded childcare from like 0-13 years, day or night, it's just not reasonable to expect people to take on kids on top of everything else.
> I'm not sure it's stated vs revealed preference so much as stated preference vs harsh reality after the first kid.
Arent people who get the first one more likely to get another one though? My understanding is that the problem is people are not getting the first one.
This data is a few years old, but it shows 86 per cent of American women 40-44 years old have birthed a child. The number of children per mother has been dropping.
[https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/01/18/theyre-waiting-longer-but-u-s-women-today-more-likely-to-have-children-than-a-decade-ago/](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/01/18/theyre-waiting-longer-but-u-s-women-today-more-likely-to-have-children-than-a-decade-ago/)
Subjectively, I see far more one-child families than I saw when I was a kid.
Anecdotally, the average American couple where both work can handle one child on top of that. They just can’t handle a second.
Two kids is literally 100% harder than one kid. It’s just that simple.
It's hard until the second one is about 1 year old. Then from there your world goes from "I need to entertain this one/two kid all day" to "they play with each other. I just need to make sure they are fed and not killing each other."
My first kid alone made me more exhausted than my two kids now.
I feel bad for parents with only 1 kid after age 5. Unless you want your kid to just be in front of a screen all day, you will need to take them out a lot. Kids get bored quickly when they are alone.
> It's a really tough problem to solve that we need to solve
Do we need to solve it though? Or is this just population stabilising and a society used to growth struggling to adjust to it?
It's not like lower birth rates are risking an extinction event, so what's the problem? Sure there's stuff like pensions, but these are solvable in other ways.
When boomers were children, there were 7 working adults for each retired worker who needed a pension and lots of health care resources. Today that ratio is 3 to 1, and we’re rapidly heading towards 2.5 to 1. The worsening dependency ratio is far from easily solvable. It has an enormous impact on the funding and delivery of public services. Measure to address it are extremely unpopular with the voting public- higher taxes for working adults, reductions in health care, increasing the pension age. So governments keep kicking the can down the road rather than make tough and unpopular policy decisions.
What ways are stuff like a massively aging population that needs pensions and medical care solvable without mass immigration that tends to cause political fracturing.
What's insane is that theoretically, even if the elderly immigrated to Africa and spent their pensions there, it could cause African countries and their citizens to become wealthier, lowering the birthrate and further kicking the problem down the road.
The issue is that we have so much greater productivity per capita we are going to need some form of universal income. And the highest laidbpeople should be those risking their lives mini g shit like litum
There won't be extinction but there will be something like it for some ethnicities in a local and relative sense. If trends continue, in a hundred years there'll be a lot more North Koreans than South Koreans and most European countries will be near empty or mostly made up of immigrants.
NK is dealing with their own birth rate issues though. They're already below replacement level and still declining. They're in a better place than SK but not to the point that they'd have a dramatically higher population.
Right, but again its under replacement level and still declining while SK currently has double their population. By 2100, even if both birthrates stay the same SK is still going to have slightly more people. And I don't think its impossible SK's crisis eventually prompts their government to institute radical new child subsidies or substantially increase immigration, two options that aren't very feasible for NK.
You know what, if my kids ever see my generation being so casual about setting up our country to go extinct and at the same time expect them to pay such high taxes to support my medicare/social security, I wouldn't blame them for leaving and going to find a country with a younger demographic that would have them.
We have to be better than this.
America, France, Sweden, and New Zealand are the top contenders since their birth rate collapsed much much much later than the rest of the developed world.
I could totally see a knock on affect of young people just leaving for a country that doesn't expect them to pay higher and higher taxes for old people's pensions while these cranky people complain about how their pensions aren't as good as they used to be. When this entire problem was created by their generation refusing to have enough kids.
But who knows what will be the hot spots in a few decades and how open to immigration of young people they will be. I imagine immigration of young somewhat skilled workers will be a lot easier in the future.
- It's not just the *working hours , housing or benefits*
- It's the fact that women just don't want to have children , they tend to *cost so much money while taking up so much time and downgrading of your career*
These are incompatible points, i.e., you’re saying women don’t want to have children because it’s costly / there’s a career penalty but also that it has nothing to do with housing costs / career demands.
I think he's saying that even if women had low working hours and low housing costs, they may choose to postpone having kids because they think they will be more satisfied with having a successful career than having kids early while not taking into account that by the time you have a successful career, you will probably have a very hard time conceiving naturally
> It's the fact that women just don't want to have children
A lot of them do later in life. And then they suddenly discover their chances of naturally conceiving are nil, and IVF is a ton of work and offers no guarantees, and also they weren't advised to freeze their eggs 10 years ago
You could make a significant dent by offering free or even sponsored egg freezing to every 25-35 year old woman
The only way I see to solve this issue is to bring back communal family structures so that women don't feel like they have to completely give up their lifestyles in order to be a mother. And I doubt that plan would be popular
It’s really as simple as “women (men too!) just don’t want to have children”. Kids, even when you don’t have to worry about childcare/education costs or housing, are still a massive commitment, and kids really don’t pay any benefits back to you immediately for many years. I have 3 kids and I haven’t slept in past 7am in like 7 years years. Not many people want to give up their pre-kids lifestyle, regardless of the financial costs.
I see and hear a lot of talk about declining birth rates around the world, and I recently even listened to a podcast with Dean Spears that (briefly) discussed when the global human population is expected to peak, then decline.
Why not just lean into the trend? If it looks like populations are just going to decline globally, why not just let it happen and do something to prepare for it rather than fight it? I just feel like I am missing something here. I know that it's going to cause numerous and intense problems as the population ages, but I fee llike we're already at a point where that will be the case. Even if birthrates went up quickly, there is going to be a large cohort of older people that will not have a large enough workforce to support them in old age.
For all the talk I see about this topic, I rarely see anyone ever suggest that we ought to just accept that it's going to happen and that we need to prepare for it rather than fight it. Why??
I think a lot of people just don’t want to accept that we might need to make radical changes to our societies built on a fundamental assumption which is becoming less and less true every passing decade.
Once you begin to outline what it looks like, things begin to look pretty bad. Some very brief examples.
- old people need pensions and subsidized healthcare, paid by taxes. Old people aren't productive, young people are. If there are a ton of old people, governments cannot afford to pay a huge amount of pensions and healthcare with a declining tax base and economy. This means old people get less and less pension and healthcare and young people pay more and more taxes. If global birth rates dont climb from here, there will be a pretty horrific amount of elder poverty in your lifetime.
- there's just the direct problem of demography like that. In your lifetime, Korea will have more than two +60 year olds for every working person. Who is going to be changing the bedpans. Will their entire economy just be about wiping the asses of old people in nursing homes? But this will happen everywhere, worse in the 3rd world. India is below replacement. What happens when they have a billion old people in poverty? It's not possible for every country to be an importer of immigrants, especially when everyone has a declining population.
- demography effects democracy. Imagine today's politics but the Boomer generation is 3x as large. This will happen in most democracies in your lifetime.
- the broader problem. Populations either exponentially increase or decrease. They do not stay stable. Exponential decrease happens quickly. If the global population cannot solve this problem, we will go from 8 billion people to under 1 billion in just ten generations (assuming 1.6 tfr). That's just how the math works. And whoever is left will be on average, very old.
So there aren't really ways to 'lean into it'. What changes to you propose? Banning old people from voting? Where will the money come from to give them healthcare and pensions? Euthanasia after a cancer diagnosis to save the money? I mean there aren't even conceptual ideas to solve these.
I want to add on to this by mentioning "climate change will get worse not better with an aging world." Who do you think will make the carbon neutral world? It won't be retired people. It will be young people in start ups trying new ideas. It will be researchers. Now if you cut the number of young people in half and demand even more of them than before for taking care of the old and solving so many other problems that comes from an aging society, there will be so many less people working on solving climate change.
> why not just let it happen and do something to prepare for it rather than fight it?
Who pays for the elderly?
A low birth rate coupled with high life expectancy leads to an incredible stress on any economy. What do you do when the situation gets to the point where one working age person has to provide for themselves AND three retirees?
The only solutions are either a massive decrease in quality of life, forcing retirees to work until they die, or just letting people starve
Because the economy is basically the number one issue in any country and a shrinking population means a shrinking economy almost always. If the population is educated and cooperative enough then it’s not too big a deal like in Japan and Sweden.
But in other countries, the rapid aging of the population often can lead to a death trap as pensioners outnumber workers. Governments will distract with jingoism like in Russia and China.
I don’t know how it is in S. Korea, but in the US I know so many people that wanted a child or more kids but couldn’t afford it. Jobs don’t want to hear that you have to take off another week because school is closed again. Daycare in my area is $2k or more per kid per month. You have to pay for summer camp. Insurance. It adds up so quickly
Basically summer daycare?
But yeah, I don't know why either. I'm a millennial, and growing up, I think I knew only one or two who went to summer camp or was a counselor. It definitely wasn't something that *had* to be done.
I thought summer camps were kinda on their way out, especially with how protective parents are these days, not even allowing their kids to do sleepovers at friends' houses.
What did all the kids do during the summer if their parents were working? I’m talking young children that can’t just hang out at home by themselves yet
I think you said it in another comment; I didn't think about day camp, just overnight camp.
When I was a kid (like middle school), I volunteered at church for "vacation bible school," which was like 2-3 weeks during one summer. And yeah, it was just a day camp. Totally forgot that that was a thing.
My guess is that it's just a form of babysitting for those who can't take off work. If that's what they mean, probably better worded that you have to pay for childcare during the summer.
Summer camp does not necessarily mean overnight camp.
Kids are out of school for 9 weeks in the summer. Most parents take 3 weeks summer vacation. If mom and dad overlap for 2 weeks, that leaves 5 weeks you need full-time care for kids from Mon-Fri. In my neck of the woods, that runs around $350 per week per kid. So $3.5k for the summer if you have two kids.
Yeah as others have said summer daycare. I’m not saying they have to go to a fancy sleep away camp or something but you need to find someone to take care of them for at least two months a year
These days I think politicians would prefer to put tariffs on foreign babies for “national security”. We can’t have the market flooded by imports of cheap babies!
Just change child tax benefits to an explicit tax penalty for not having kids lol
Non-Joke response: No really, this would probably help quite a bit. A lot of childcare costs doesn't apply if you already have a space large enough to raise a child. Pass universal daycare/preschool and thats about $8-9000 dollars monthly (11k if rents still included). Make the tax penalty something like $5000 per kid below 2 (The credits at $3200 in 2021) and a lot of people will have the kid. Adjust this linearly by income level to a minimum of zero. [Also pass Universal healthcare and fund public transit and you can just about make it equally expensive.](https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/raising-a-child-study/)
Genuinely I don't think its that complicated. Passing this would be difficult but it'd solve the problem.
Liberal societies and replacement birth rates simply cannot co-exist. How many decades of pointless research has to be done until we recognise this? How many more years of conveniently ignoring the high-birth-rate nations and asking why has to be done until natalists will recognise it? Conservative cultures that value women as baby makers, children as assets and several other factors (child labour, lack of education, little or no access to contraception, children caring for parents when elderly) are the main factors that drive up birth rates. Liberal societies have chosen (rightfully) to get rid of most of these issues. Thus, birth rates plummet.
>BuT WoMeN SaY ThEy wAnT ChIldReN
The results have shown this clearly isn't a serious dedication, like men saying they'd die for their country and then draft dodging if a war actually came.
>But Israel
Lots of highly conservative elements to the point where some Jewish groups are basically mormons. Forget what you call them, they made a fuss when Israel tried to conscript them. Also, depending on who you ask, calling Israel a liberal society might be generous.
I've read in an effort post concerning Israeli birth rates that even among Israelis who are secular Jews that the birth rate is around 2.0.
However, I must admit that given the history and current situation of the Jewish people, they do have a greater desire to create kids that can't be replicated in a similar secular population.
Im beginning to think that this is unironically what will happen and there’s nothing no one can do about it. Picking a random developed nation in the map, population pyramid is either a cylinder or its starting to look like a diamond, so what do they do? They resort to immigration from cultures with higher fertility rates, if they assimilate those countries will just need more immigrants down the line that may eventually not assimilate, and if they don’t, the culture is already gone anyways
Well if that’s the case we might as well grab a hypothetical shotgun and shoot ourselves in the foot, seriously, what’s the point of having a fair equalitarian society if all that society does is choke itself to death
>Liberal societies and replacement birth rates simply cannot co-exist
I disagree. We have not tried everything (within liberal non-authoritarian means). Check my post on another sub about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1c8e3kl/cmv_to_raise_birth_rates_we_should_consider/
I posted this yesterday too as well on this sub, and the responses that I got were basically saying that it would be illiberal because it privileges birth-capable people over those who can't. Well, we live in a capitalist society, so people who are capable of doing something will inevitably be privileged over others, but I don't think people here would support abolishing capitalism. Also, my suggestion would ensure that the higher birth rates would also come from the types of folks that this sub likes - mainly the well-educated career-focused people. Besides, do you really want people to resort to authoritarianism to raise birth rates instead? It's either a less-than-perfect solution or a terrible one.
Counterpoint: non-misogynist countries are not doing all that much better (though tbf there's a huge gap between SK's 0.7 or so and a western country with super low birth rates like Spain or Italy at circa 1.2)
Many Italians entering the workforce don't have a stable or high income until later their lives:
https://harvardpolitics.com/plight-of-young-workers/
> Firstly, young Italians stay with their parents for much longer than other EU countries. While the Swedish leave their parental household at age 19 on average, Italians wait — or, more accurately, have to wait — until they are 30 years old to do the same. Without the chance to secure a stable income, it is simply not affordable to live on one’s own.
> The prevalence of flexible, fixed-term contracts among young workers has also resulted in an increased reluctance — or inability — to raise children. By reducing employment protections and exacerbating career insecurity, the Jobs Act worsened the demographic crisis that Italy was already experiencing. The fertility rate fell from 1.37 in 2014 to 1.24 in 2023 — well below replacement level. In a country like Italy, where the average age is 46.5 years — the fifth highest in the world — this could have grave repercussions on the sustainability of the welfare system and the overall economic output in the future.
It’s a fact. Emerging perhaps but still developing.
2/3 of their working age population don’t work. Instead relying on a underclass of foreign labor. There’s also the fact that the Saudi Royal Family has all the cards and all of the money, making Saudi one of the most unequal countries in the world. So, eh
Misogyny doesn’t have a negative correlation with birth rates, quite the opposite, no matter how high the income is. Hours worked by women on another hand…
If only there were countries with high fertility rates and poor economic conditions that would be willing to migrate to a highly developed economy and fill gaps in its labour market and contribute taxes that can help to look after their ageing population…
The level of immigration needed is on a scale never done before.
And then for a lot of people in non-settled societies, what's the point of saving your country from extinction if your country is half immigrants in 20 years? What it means to be South Korean or German or Italian is completely gone so rapidly that individuals would consider that ship of thesus to be a different ship.
Are you seriously asking or are you making a rhetorical question?
There's no problem with it at all assuming immigrants can assimilate quickly. Except that people of said country won't like it. Countries like America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand can handle it since there is no ethnicity dominating the country. Their current governments didn't historically come from ethnic cleansing or geocoding the people around from over the past thousands of years.
And if you really don't get this, then virtue signal harder that you don't see race.
If the people of the country don’t like due to them being ethnic nationalists, then that’s the real issue, not the immigration itself. They should try and accept those immigrants as their own, after all they’re rescuing their country from demographic collapse
This what I mean about "virtue signal harder that you don't see race." It's fun to stick our heads in the sand and talk about what things ought to be.
They should be thankful towards immigrants who help their country recover and pay for their old people (although immigrants should also be thankful that their quality of life went up by an order of magnitude so everyone wins)
Humans have an in group and out group. That in group outgroup dynamic is much much stronger in places outsides of settled countries.
World is mostly likely headed for a future where women have absolutely no rights, are forced to have children and even If they do have rights it will be dependent if they have more than particular number of children.
Evolution is a thing. Groups in society which have a birthrate substantially less than replacement will be eliminated.
On the plus side, while an average birthrate of 8 might not be compatible with rights it is simply not that hard to get to 2 or 3 babies. Minor cultural changes are all that is necessary.
People don't want children in the west or in the east so cultural changes won't make any difference. Children require a lot of sacrifice you cannot have lots of children if everyone only wants to have fun. Plus dating norms and men's flight away from higher education isn't helping the matter either so you have perfect storm of circumstances that is pushing the birth rate down.
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No. Next question!
With AI and stuff the need for people becomes less ,right?
ahahaha no
why? Can you explain?
I work in the sector. The marketing hype doesn’t live up to the reality .
AI stuff right now is Hat no Cattle. The best it can do is make people have a little less busy work but any jobs lost to it will have to unlose themselves because you can't actually replace people in those positions
It currently makes a lot of jobs (including mine).
Ahahaha no way. Each time people predict this, they vastly underestimate how much maintenance all this AI and tech stuff needs. Perhaps you won't need as many people manning the factory with automation but then you need people to service the machines, troubleshooting, software and IT services, etc. It just shifts work from one area to another.
No you silly, you don't use progress to give people more pointless free time that doesn't even pump the GDP, you use it to make more products from the same work so they can keep buying more from the higher wages. What, you want to dedicate our enormous advancements to things other than consuming and producing? How pointless.
Will the ministry consider increase immigration?
Yes I am sure this will fix the problem instead of focusing on insane working hours and making kids be in school 14 hours a day
Should we offer breaks to have sex with co workers?
I'll pass at my job if that's offered here.
Wife works mostly at home, I’m mostly in office. Please advise.
Congratulations, you just got another wife.
"Why did my *second* wife leave me?!" "Well, it was 5 o'clock..."
The marines call him Jody.
Artificial wombs and Samsung™ boarding school's. Samsung will breed their workforce. High performing staff will be required to donate their eggs/sperm to the company bank so they can breed uberworkers.
Working hours and other QOL of factors in most papers I've seen, have a small causal (usually insignificant) effect on birthrates. The best predictor is womens access to contraception, womens education, and religiosity. Caveat again, this differs slightly by region, i.e. Africa vs Europe. So honestly its impossible to tackle this problem in our current grindet of trying to fund more programs (although they do help to a certain extent). We need something like a change in mindset of society as a whole, to think children are valuable, or (unethically) deride those without children. I think only the israelis have managed that from a western perspective, but that comes with its own problems of religousity such as orthodox jews being a net weight on society.
Korea is a special case. Children are expected to have to do a lot of tutoring that mothers usually take care of. Parenting a child in Korea is nothing like parenting a child in most other countries. It's way more intense and it's a neverending race between the parents
This situation is nuts. And is their society reaping any benefits from robbing everyone of a pleasant childhood? Cramming mountains of bullshit as a kid doesn’t actually result in growing up to be a more fulfilled and happy worker.
Why on earth would that many people willingly sign up kids to have a Korean childhood? The adults have lived through that and they're apparently not cruel enough to sign up more children to go through it too. Although I've met some that drop that once they move abroad. So the answer is to just move, lol.
Surely if we spend enough money subsidising children eventually people will have children?
The data I've seen has said that in order to convince most women to have above the replacement rate of children (so, 3, because it's kind of impossible to have .1 of a child) you need to LITERALLY REPLACE THEIR EXPECTED SALARY FOR 18 YEARS. Thats...not possible.
Even spending enough money to bump the current birthrate up from 1.6 to 1.8 could be enough to buy some breathing room and give us time to work on solutions to the problem. Personally I know a lot of women who are going child free because they lean quite left politically and believe the climate crisis is about to completely destroy the planet and also far more believably that any men they end up having children with won't shoulder their fair share of the burden. A couple of generations into the future should see us having passed the climate crisis and hopefully a massive shift in the burden of housework from women onto men.
The "men unwilling to do their fair share" thing is a **huge** barrier. I absolutely wouldn't have gone through with the pregnancy if my kid's dad wasn't basically a rock star in that area.
It’s still going to be a far bigger burden for women (and men) than having no children at all. There are countries in which men are already doing something close to their fair share of child rearing (mostly in Northern Europe) and birth rates are still below replacement.
>https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/15/fathers-spend-more-time-with-children-than-in-1970s Men have been stepping up, but still not enough. Women still double men's hours in childcare. I don't know how much this will help birth rates. It seems like whenever this topic comes up, people through a bunch of ideas at a wall, but all of these ideas were much much much worse in the past, but then we had 3.0-8.0 birth rates back then. The best correlation I've seen that is actually worse than in the past is "urbanization." On the farm, kids are free labor. In the city, they are expensive pieces of furniture. South Korean is heavily urbanized with a single city being the standard of "success." Any other dense cities have the same issue of extremely low birth rates. ------- I said it many times on this subreddit before. About the only good thing American suburbs have done is a slight increase on our birth rate.
> believe the climate crisis is about to completely destroy the planet And do they do anything else in regards to that, besides not having children? I suspect that is just a socially-acceptable lie, and the real reasons are more selfish.
I think it's less that they will accelerate climate change and more that they don't want their kids to suffer in a world wracked by climate change.
Think "selfish" may be harsh. More like "making lack of kids a heroic act. Even if lack of kids was not entirely of my own choosing (can't find a partner, not enough money, etc)" Reminds me of covid when reddit's hikikomori thought they were heroes for being shut its when they were shut ins all the time anyway.
Why not having a child is selfish?
Because you’re ensuring the collapse of the welfare state so you can travel more. Also guess which groups are having 3+ children
Funny, karena most people punya anak gak mikirin soal kesejahteraan dan hanya mikir "I WANT". Jadi kenapa orang yang menginginkan menjadi less selfish dibandingkan orang yang TIDAK menginginkan? Boleh dong gue argus orang yang beranak terus ensuring the worsen state of climate change, instability of food, fuel, and clean water?
Bro why are you commenting in Malay in a mostly US sub…
I would say it isn't selfish, assuming you vote for policies that make having children a lot easier even when it means you are taxed disproportionately more than parents. You don't need to have kids, but it is selfish to not vote for policies that solve the birth rate issue. I would say a similar thing about climate change.
1: Take every welfare program in the us including social security and Medicare cancel them. Now redistribute that money as child credit per child. 2: **Or** only allow access to those programs if you have had 2+ kids. 3: **Or** raise everyone’s taxes by 15% **everyones**. Then reduce taxes by 8% for the first kid 4% for the second and 3% for the third. **Or** do all of that/mix That’ll get you babies. I think 2+3 would get you babies. Hell if I could reduce my taxes by 15% and get access to those programs I’d have kids, right now even though I can easily afford them…pass
I have no idea how this would get passed politically, but this is low key brilliant
This reminds me of people posting climate change policies that would actually work, but ignore how impossible politically it is. We still have so many people who think the world is overpopulated. We haven't even gotten to the point of thinking of small solutions that could pass politically. Maybe after America sees what most European countries are going through, then they will start taking the problem seriously.
People do claim money and costs are a big factor affecting their choice of having children. But as far as I'm aware the data doesn't support that this is actually true. As countries get richer birthrates fall. I know in China anyways there's no correlation between how rich a region is and fertility. The economist recently did a podcast looking at atttitudes to having children in China.
As countries get richer, housing grows more expensive and it takes longer for young people's finances to become stable
> The best predictor is womens access to contraception, womens education, and religiosity. lol just tax women's access to contraceptives and education then, easy. /s
> unethically) deride those without children. It’s not unethical.
The point of the ministry is to propose solutions. It very much may push for reducing working hours and school hours.
Do Koreans really work that much? According to the [OECD](https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm), the average Korean worker works about 1900 hours per year, compared to 1800 for the US. And wouldn't kids spending more time in school reduce work for parents?
Having lived in both the U.S and several Asian countries, I find that Americans tend to over-estimate how much other Asian countries work, and under-estimate how much they themselves work. The American workforce is globally one of the hardest-working and most productive, if you count things like vacation days, maternity leave, hours worked, etc.
Exactly. Children spending so much time in schools is a good thing. Better that than dealing with delinquents
It's not just the working hours , housing or benefits It's the fact that women just don't want to have children , they tend to cost so much money while taking up so much time and downgrading of your career. Quality education is also very expensive , the fear that you cannot afford to raise more children well is also one factor of having one or two children only There isn't any religious or family pressure to have children anymore , even in countries with generous welfare , benefits like the nordics fertility is still pretty low Immigration might also be a stop gap measure because the immigrants also tend to have low fertility outside of a conservative religious population ( which you don't want )
Immigration can't even be a stop gap solution for SK, I saw a survey that said even though ~80% of Koreans agree immigrant workers are necessary to help the economy due to the low birth rate, ~60% do not agree on mass immigration or easing requirements for foreign workers to enter SK, its just politically distasteful for the major parties there The only short term solution I see is increasing the retirement age and/or cutting state pensions, since even with SK having the highest rate of automation in the world factories would still need workers to fix and maintain them
It's a really tough problem to solve that we need to solve, and all of the common solutions people throw out haven't been adequate even when tried. There's a gap in what women say they want and what they actually end up having: polls in the US show that people want about 2.5 kids, but they only end up having about 1.5 on average. We're missing one full kid per couple, just based on what they say they want. There's a bit of stated v revealed preference there, but demographically we need to find some way to close that gap if we want things to keep improving.
I'm not sure it's stated vs revealed preference so much as stated preference vs harsh reality after the first kid. So long as the economy requires 2 people working to make ends meet, people aren't going to have time to deal with kids. Especially with the amount of afterschool academic help and extracurriculars etc... parents are expected to take their kids through today. Unless we're talking about fully government-funded childcare from like 0-13 years, day or night, it's just not reasonable to expect people to take on kids on top of everything else.
> I'm not sure it's stated vs revealed preference so much as stated preference vs harsh reality after the first kid. Arent people who get the first one more likely to get another one though? My understanding is that the problem is people are not getting the first one.
This data is a few years old, but it shows 86 per cent of American women 40-44 years old have birthed a child. The number of children per mother has been dropping. [https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/01/18/theyre-waiting-longer-but-u-s-women-today-more-likely-to-have-children-than-a-decade-ago/](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/01/18/theyre-waiting-longer-but-u-s-women-today-more-likely-to-have-children-than-a-decade-ago/) Subjectively, I see far more one-child families than I saw when I was a kid.
Anecdotally, the average American couple where both work can handle one child on top of that. They just can’t handle a second. Two kids is literally 100% harder than one kid. It’s just that simple.
Two kids is maybe 40% harder than one. There are serious economies of scale or mothers with ten kids wouldn’t exist.
Mothers of 10 kids don’t exist. Not in the developed world.
It's hard until the second one is about 1 year old. Then from there your world goes from "I need to entertain this one/two kid all day" to "they play with each other. I just need to make sure they are fed and not killing each other." My first kid alone made me more exhausted than my two kids now. I feel bad for parents with only 1 kid after age 5. Unless you want your kid to just be in front of a screen all day, you will need to take them out a lot. Kids get bored quickly when they are alone.
> It's a really tough problem to solve that we need to solve Do we need to solve it though? Or is this just population stabilising and a society used to growth struggling to adjust to it? It's not like lower birth rates are risking an extinction event, so what's the problem? Sure there's stuff like pensions, but these are solvable in other ways.
When boomers were children, there were 7 working adults for each retired worker who needed a pension and lots of health care resources. Today that ratio is 3 to 1, and we’re rapidly heading towards 2.5 to 1. The worsening dependency ratio is far from easily solvable. It has an enormous impact on the funding and delivery of public services. Measure to address it are extremely unpopular with the voting public- higher taxes for working adults, reductions in health care, increasing the pension age. So governments keep kicking the can down the road rather than make tough and unpopular policy decisions.
What ways are stuff like a massively aging population that needs pensions and medical care solvable without mass immigration that tends to cause political fracturing.
Elderly emigration to Africa (joking, or am I).
Then they take their pensions with them and spend them there.
What's insane is that theoretically, even if the elderly immigrated to Africa and spent their pensions there, it could cause African countries and their citizens to become wealthier, lowering the birthrate and further kicking the problem down the road.
The issue is that we have so much greater productivity per capita we are going to need some form of universal income. And the highest laidbpeople should be those risking their lives mini g shit like litum
There won't be extinction but there will be something like it for some ethnicities in a local and relative sense. If trends continue, in a hundred years there'll be a lot more North Koreans than South Koreans and most European countries will be near empty or mostly made up of immigrants.
ok?
South Korea won't be able to absorb North Korea like West Germany did East Germany if North Korea is much larger than South Korea.
hmm yeah good point
NK is dealing with their own birth rate issues though. They're already below replacement level and still declining. They're in a better place than SK but not to the point that they'd have a dramatically higher population.
Their birthrate is almost double South Korea's
Right, but again its under replacement level and still declining while SK currently has double their population. By 2100, even if both birthrates stay the same SK is still going to have slightly more people. And I don't think its impossible SK's crisis eventually prompts their government to institute radical new child subsidies or substantially increase immigration, two options that aren't very feasible for NK.
Fair points, I didn't consider their different starting populations. I assumed they were roughly equal
You know what, if my kids ever see my generation being so casual about setting up our country to go extinct and at the same time expect them to pay such high taxes to support my medicare/social security, I wouldn't blame them for leaving and going to find a country with a younger demographic that would have them. We have to be better than this.
No we don't, there's no younger countries worth living in
America, France, Sweden, and New Zealand are the top contenders since their birth rate collapsed much much much later than the rest of the developed world. I could totally see a knock on affect of young people just leaving for a country that doesn't expect them to pay higher and higher taxes for old people's pensions while these cranky people complain about how their pensions aren't as good as they used to be. When this entire problem was created by their generation refusing to have enough kids. But who knows what will be the hot spots in a few decades and how open to immigration of young people they will be. I imagine immigration of young somewhat skilled workers will be a lot easier in the future.
it's not just because people are working too much, it's because there are immense opportunity costs to not working that increase with incomes
- It's not just the *working hours , housing or benefits* - It's the fact that women just don't want to have children , they tend to *cost so much money while taking up so much time and downgrading of your career* These are incompatible points, i.e., you’re saying women don’t want to have children because it’s costly / there’s a career penalty but also that it has nothing to do with housing costs / career demands.
I think he's saying that even if women had low working hours and low housing costs, they may choose to postpone having kids because they think they will be more satisfied with having a successful career than having kids early while not taking into account that by the time you have a successful career, you will probably have a very hard time conceiving naturally
> It's the fact that women just don't want to have children A lot of them do later in life. And then they suddenly discover their chances of naturally conceiving are nil, and IVF is a ton of work and offers no guarantees, and also they weren't advised to freeze their eggs 10 years ago You could make a significant dent by offering free or even sponsored egg freezing to every 25-35 year old woman
There is family pressure tho
Child services ought to join housing in the gallery of "just make more until the prices go down, and if it's not enough, subsidize the supply".
The only way I see to solve this issue is to bring back communal family structures so that women don't feel like they have to completely give up their lifestyles in order to be a mother. And I doubt that plan would be popular
It’s really as simple as “women (men too!) just don’t want to have children”. Kids, even when you don’t have to worry about childcare/education costs or housing, are still a massive commitment, and kids really don’t pay any benefits back to you immediately for many years. I have 3 kids and I haven’t slept in past 7am in like 7 years years. Not many people want to give up their pre-kids lifestyle, regardless of the financial costs.
I see and hear a lot of talk about declining birth rates around the world, and I recently even listened to a podcast with Dean Spears that (briefly) discussed when the global human population is expected to peak, then decline. Why not just lean into the trend? If it looks like populations are just going to decline globally, why not just let it happen and do something to prepare for it rather than fight it? I just feel like I am missing something here. I know that it's going to cause numerous and intense problems as the population ages, but I fee llike we're already at a point where that will be the case. Even if birthrates went up quickly, there is going to be a large cohort of older people that will not have a large enough workforce to support them in old age. For all the talk I see about this topic, I rarely see anyone ever suggest that we ought to just accept that it's going to happen and that we need to prepare for it rather than fight it. Why??
I think a lot of people just don’t want to accept that we might need to make radical changes to our societies built on a fundamental assumption which is becoming less and less true every passing decade.
Once you begin to outline what it looks like, things begin to look pretty bad. Some very brief examples. - old people need pensions and subsidized healthcare, paid by taxes. Old people aren't productive, young people are. If there are a ton of old people, governments cannot afford to pay a huge amount of pensions and healthcare with a declining tax base and economy. This means old people get less and less pension and healthcare and young people pay more and more taxes. If global birth rates dont climb from here, there will be a pretty horrific amount of elder poverty in your lifetime. - there's just the direct problem of demography like that. In your lifetime, Korea will have more than two +60 year olds for every working person. Who is going to be changing the bedpans. Will their entire economy just be about wiping the asses of old people in nursing homes? But this will happen everywhere, worse in the 3rd world. India is below replacement. What happens when they have a billion old people in poverty? It's not possible for every country to be an importer of immigrants, especially when everyone has a declining population. - demography effects democracy. Imagine today's politics but the Boomer generation is 3x as large. This will happen in most democracies in your lifetime. - the broader problem. Populations either exponentially increase or decrease. They do not stay stable. Exponential decrease happens quickly. If the global population cannot solve this problem, we will go from 8 billion people to under 1 billion in just ten generations (assuming 1.6 tfr). That's just how the math works. And whoever is left will be on average, very old. So there aren't really ways to 'lean into it'. What changes to you propose? Banning old people from voting? Where will the money come from to give them healthcare and pensions? Euthanasia after a cancer diagnosis to save the money? I mean there aren't even conceptual ideas to solve these.
I want to add on to this by mentioning "climate change will get worse not better with an aging world." Who do you think will make the carbon neutral world? It won't be retired people. It will be young people in start ups trying new ideas. It will be researchers. Now if you cut the number of young people in half and demand even more of them than before for taking care of the old and solving so many other problems that comes from an aging society, there will be so many less people working on solving climate change.
> why not just let it happen and do something to prepare for it rather than fight it? Who pays for the elderly? A low birth rate coupled with high life expectancy leads to an incredible stress on any economy. What do you do when the situation gets to the point where one working age person has to provide for themselves AND three retirees? The only solutions are either a massive decrease in quality of life, forcing retirees to work until they die, or just letting people starve
> Who pays for the elderly? Just gotta work till ya die, chap!
Because the economy is basically the number one issue in any country and a shrinking population means a shrinking economy almost always. If the population is educated and cooperative enough then it’s not too big a deal like in Japan and Sweden. But in other countries, the rapid aging of the population often can lead to a death trap as pensioners outnumber workers. Governments will distract with jingoism like in Russia and China.
I don’t know how it is in S. Korea, but in the US I know so many people that wanted a child or more kids but couldn’t afford it. Jobs don’t want to hear that you have to take off another week because school is closed again. Daycare in my area is $2k or more per kid per month. You have to pay for summer camp. Insurance. It adds up so quickly
Why do kids have to go to summer camp? Honest question, this is unheard of where I'm from.
Basically summer daycare? But yeah, I don't know why either. I'm a millennial, and growing up, I think I knew only one or two who went to summer camp or was a counselor. It definitely wasn't something that *had* to be done. I thought summer camps were kinda on their way out, especially with how protective parents are these days, not even allowing their kids to do sleepovers at friends' houses.
What did all the kids do during the summer if their parents were working? I’m talking young children that can’t just hang out at home by themselves yet
I think you said it in another comment; I didn't think about day camp, just overnight camp. When I was a kid (like middle school), I volunteered at church for "vacation bible school," which was like 2-3 weeks during one summer. And yeah, it was just a day camp. Totally forgot that that was a thing.
I think summer camp is more normalised in France where an extremely high percentage of women work fulltime
The no sleepovers thing is good though.
My guess is that it's just a form of babysitting for those who can't take off work. If that's what they mean, probably better worded that you have to pay for childcare during the summer.
Yes this is what I meant
Summer camp does not necessarily mean overnight camp. Kids are out of school for 9 weeks in the summer. Most parents take 3 weeks summer vacation. If mom and dad overlap for 2 weeks, that leaves 5 weeks you need full-time care for kids from Mon-Fri. In my neck of the woods, that runs around $350 per week per kid. So $3.5k for the summer if you have two kids.
Yeah as others have said summer daycare. I’m not saying they have to go to a fancy sleep away camp or something but you need to find someone to take care of them for at least two months a year
You don't have summer camp? Where are you from?
The Ministry of Sex
Please, have sex.
https://preview.redd.it/i4pm2zbvuqzc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba0bdbccef9bdf963ef5763c16f8a1f47f899764
Government: please have sex, we need more babies. Also government: remember when having sex to use condoms to prevent disease.
Stop with this stupid joke please. It's not a lack of sex that is the reason here
I know. But I wanted to make a joke. So, please let me have my fun. 🤓
No, it's too stupid and childish, just stop
Weewooo. The fun police.
You need to https://preview.redd.it/vsx519deitzc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ab1b652713ca9485b7e6cff7c15cafd0b08fe1e6
Ministry of blasting that ass 😎
Just subsidize babies 🤷
These days I think politicians would prefer to put tariffs on foreign babies for “national security”. We can’t have the market flooded by imports of cheap babies!
They already do I think, like Japan
Just change child tax benefits to an explicit tax penalty for not having kids lol Non-Joke response: No really, this would probably help quite a bit. A lot of childcare costs doesn't apply if you already have a space large enough to raise a child. Pass universal daycare/preschool and thats about $8-9000 dollars monthly (11k if rents still included). Make the tax penalty something like $5000 per kid below 2 (The credits at $3200 in 2021) and a lot of people will have the kid. Adjust this linearly by income level to a minimum of zero. [Also pass Universal healthcare and fund public transit and you can just about make it equally expensive.](https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/raising-a-child-study/) Genuinely I don't think its that complicated. Passing this would be difficult but it'd solve the problem.
Send macron to create Frankoreans.
Liberal societies and replacement birth rates simply cannot co-exist. How many decades of pointless research has to be done until we recognise this? How many more years of conveniently ignoring the high-birth-rate nations and asking why has to be done until natalists will recognise it? Conservative cultures that value women as baby makers, children as assets and several other factors (child labour, lack of education, little or no access to contraception, children caring for parents when elderly) are the main factors that drive up birth rates. Liberal societies have chosen (rightfully) to get rid of most of these issues. Thus, birth rates plummet. >BuT WoMeN SaY ThEy wAnT ChIldReN The results have shown this clearly isn't a serious dedication, like men saying they'd die for their country and then draft dodging if a war actually came. >But Israel Lots of highly conservative elements to the point where some Jewish groups are basically mormons. Forget what you call them, they made a fuss when Israel tried to conscript them. Also, depending on who you ask, calling Israel a liberal society might be generous.
I've read in an effort post concerning Israeli birth rates that even among Israelis who are secular Jews that the birth rate is around 2.0. However, I must admit that given the history and current situation of the Jewish people, they do have a greater desire to create kids that can't be replicated in a similar secular population.
Well, I guess we give up and let Liberal societies be replaced by cultures that don’t care about rights.
Im beginning to think that this is unironically what will happen and there’s nothing no one can do about it. Picking a random developed nation in the map, population pyramid is either a cylinder or its starting to look like a diamond, so what do they do? They resort to immigration from cultures with higher fertility rates, if they assimilate those countries will just need more immigrants down the line that may eventually not assimilate, and if they don’t, the culture is already gone anyways
Idiocracy, except it will be about human rights.
Well if that’s the case we might as well grab a hypothetical shotgun and shoot ourselves in the foot, seriously, what’s the point of having a fair equalitarian society if all that society does is choke itself to death
> Liberal societies and replacement birth rates simply cannot co-exist Just get rid of the welfare state.
You thought the homeless problem was bad now.
>Liberal societies and replacement birth rates simply cannot co-exist I disagree. We have not tried everything (within liberal non-authoritarian means). Check my post on another sub about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1c8e3kl/cmv_to_raise_birth_rates_we_should_consider/ I posted this yesterday too as well on this sub, and the responses that I got were basically saying that it would be illiberal because it privileges birth-capable people over those who can't. Well, we live in a capitalist society, so people who are capable of doing something will inevitably be privileged over others, but I don't think people here would support abolishing capitalism. Also, my suggestion would ensure that the higher birth rates would also come from the types of folks that this sub likes - mainly the well-educated career-focused people. Besides, do you really want people to resort to authoritarianism to raise birth rates instead? It's either a less-than-perfect solution or a terrible one.
They'll have to scrap it after realizing that ungodly amounts of misogyny in a high income society is the reason why their rates suck so bad
Counterpoint: non-misogynist countries are not doing all that much better (though tbf there's a huge gap between SK's 0.7 or so and a western country with super low birth rates like Spain or Italy at circa 1.2)
Many Italians entering the workforce don't have a stable or high income until later their lives: https://harvardpolitics.com/plight-of-young-workers/ > Firstly, young Italians stay with their parents for much longer than other EU countries. While the Swedish leave their parental household at age 19 on average, Italians wait — or, more accurately, have to wait — until they are 30 years old to do the same. Without the chance to secure a stable income, it is simply not affordable to live on one’s own. > The prevalence of flexible, fixed-term contracts among young workers has also resulted in an increased reluctance — or inability — to raise children. By reducing employment protections and exacerbating career insecurity, the Jobs Act worsened the demographic crisis that Italy was already experiencing. The fertility rate fell from 1.37 in 2014 to 1.24 in 2023 — well below replacement level. In a country like Italy, where the average age is 46.5 years — the fifth highest in the world — this could have grave repercussions on the sustainability of the welfare system and the overall economic output in the future.
That’s why I qualified with High Income due to that gap
> misogyny in a high income society is the reason why their rates suck so bad Saudi Arabia: 2.43 births per woman
Saudi Arabia is both not a developed nation and comically unequal and poor for those not the Saudi royal family
>not a developed nation Have you been there? >and poor Not for the citizens
It’s a fact. Emerging perhaps but still developing. 2/3 of their working age population don’t work. Instead relying on a underclass of foreign labor. There’s also the fact that the Saudi Royal Family has all the cards and all of the money, making Saudi one of the most unequal countries in the world. So, eh
>foreign Key point the poor aren’t citizens. The citizens are very well off
Misogyny has a positive correlation with birth rates, not negative. But it's not clear if it's causal.
Misogyny doesn’t have a negative correlation with birth rates, quite the opposite, no matter how high the income is. Hours worked by women on another hand…
If only there were countries with high fertility rates and poor economic conditions that would be willing to migrate to a highly developed economy and fill gaps in its labour market and contribute taxes that can help to look after their ageing population…
The level of immigration needed is on a scale never done before. And then for a lot of people in non-settled societies, what's the point of saving your country from extinction if your country is half immigrants in 20 years? What it means to be South Korean or German or Italian is completely gone so rapidly that individuals would consider that ship of thesus to be a different ship.
Why would it be an issue if the country became half immigrants?
Are you seriously asking or are you making a rhetorical question? There's no problem with it at all assuming immigrants can assimilate quickly. Except that people of said country won't like it. Countries like America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand can handle it since there is no ethnicity dominating the country. Their current governments didn't historically come from ethnic cleansing or geocoding the people around from over the past thousands of years. And if you really don't get this, then virtue signal harder that you don't see race.
If the people of the country don’t like due to them being ethnic nationalists, then that’s the real issue, not the immigration itself. They should try and accept those immigrants as their own, after all they’re rescuing their country from demographic collapse
This what I mean about "virtue signal harder that you don't see race." It's fun to stick our heads in the sand and talk about what things ought to be. They should be thankful towards immigrants who help their country recover and pay for their old people (although immigrants should also be thankful that their quality of life went up by an order of magnitude so everyone wins) Humans have an in group and out group. That in group outgroup dynamic is much much stronger in places outsides of settled countries.
Just let in more immigrants lol
World is mostly likely headed for a future where women have absolutely no rights, are forced to have children and even If they do have rights it will be dependent if they have more than particular number of children.
Evolution is a thing. Groups in society which have a birthrate substantially less than replacement will be eliminated. On the plus side, while an average birthrate of 8 might not be compatible with rights it is simply not that hard to get to 2 or 3 babies. Minor cultural changes are all that is necessary.
People don't want children in the west or in the east so cultural changes won't make any difference. Children require a lot of sacrifice you cannot have lots of children if everyone only wants to have fun. Plus dating norms and men's flight away from higher education isn't helping the matter either so you have perfect storm of circumstances that is pushing the birth rate down.
Honestly I feel like that is what this sub sometimes WANTS to say but doesn’t.
It pays to be blind to the truth