I fear SK is a harbinger of what's to come in other developed western countries. Companies seem to follow each other in getting more out of workers. When jobs and career become the most important thing (for survival, professional satisfaction or lifestyle), then family life suffers. Even with superb (albeit costly) child care that I avail, my wife has to throttle down her career to put taking care of the kids first, while I prioritize income generation. I have to put considerable thought into how I spend quality time with my kids (including taking a risk that a delayed email response will have professional costs for me). But I feel far more fortunate than my wife (who has to pay a heavy toll forgoing her professional aspirations). Society needs to evolve to do better to support working parents and caregivers.
I think small scale entrepreneurship might be a solution to the current corp craziness. Also, need to ensure lifestyle creep doesn't occur. Easier said then done.
It's even worse when you look at the studies of child outcomes based on if their mother stayed with them during their childhood vs working/daycare.
It is without doubt beneficial for children to have their mother with them in early childhood. This work over all else society is harming the next generation and ripping new mothers away from their babies a few weeks/months after birth.
The problem will solve itself; political leanings are heritable and in the past couple decades conservative birthrates are significantly higher than liberal birthrates, so eventually the genes that incline people towards prioritising work over family will be bred out.
I have a similar theory, that desire to procreate is heritable, in a way that was previously inextricable from desire to have sex. With easy birth control, those desires can now be fulfilled separately. We're still working through the mass die-off of the genes that mostly just wanted the sex half of the equation.
In a few generations, most everyone alive will be the progeny of people who really wanted children. This is probably heritable and will probably stabilize birth rates.
Maybe. I think the difficulty is that in a place like Korea, the dependency ratio will become extremely high, and so taxes will have to go up sharply. Most voters will be retired and so will vote for the few young people to pay them. This will lead the young people to emigrate unless they’re prevented from doing so.
Could you share, if only for reference and comparison, where you live? I'm assuming, because of the missing work/life balance, that you live in the US?
It always seemed crazy to me that there still are societies and countries out there not offering more support to new parents, and even existing parents. It's literally what makes the country survive long-term, and without new children, you'll obviously end up in stagnation. So why not make it really easy and worry-free?
> having an economy that produces high-paying jobs for most young adults willing to work hard
I was gonna check how it looks like right now in the US, but seems the government been unable to publish official reports about employment for some reason, so hard to know exactly, but suddenly avoiding to release official reports usually isn't a signal that things are going great.
3rd parties seems to indicate the progress of "producing high-paying jobs" isn't going all so well:
> Wednesday’s decision was justified primarily by weakening conditions in the job market. Hiring has slowed markedly since the summer, while unemployment has ticked up and businesses across industries have begun signaling greater caution
> Private-sector signals have flashed more urgency. ADP’s November report showed employers shedding a net 32,000 jobs, the sharpest decline in more than two years
> hiring remained stuck at 3.2%, consistent with what economists and Powell himself have called a “low hire, low fire” labor market. Companies aren’t slashing staff outright—but they aren’t expanding either. That’s enough to worry economists.
Seems to be working so well all those demographic numbers are going up and to the right! That correlation between wealth and number of children is staggering it's almost causal if only I could prove it. Let's double down on it!
Let's take the beautiful state of Massachusetts where I live. For foreigners: it's a liberal mecca, a pocket of Americans with a yearning for european lifestyle. Let's look at the government from a systems perspective and say that we prioritize individuals based on dollars spent on them, shall we?
- How much does the state spend for a pre-k child? <10k/year/child
- An incarcerated inmate? >100k/year/inmate
- Drug-use rehab? >50k/year/user-seeking-rehab
- How much does that leave parents to pay? >30k/year/child (again average, any place where there's a job it's closer to 50k pre-tax)
We don't prioritize children and our societies are actively hostile towards them in terms of dollars spent. As simple as that.
This is actually a good thing for personal autonomy. Instead of accidentally having kids you can't afford, due to modern science, it's completely optional.
The article alludes to this, but the government previously promoted smaller families. Just a few generation ago the birthrate was considered too high.
Realistically to have a growing population you probably want to have around an average of 3 children per couple.
This is economically impossible for most people though. No one has a stable job anymore. We're all temps and gig workers.
If you just do it anyway, and find it's a struggle... Society blames you and calls you careless.
The path of least resistance is to just skip having a family.
Raising kids is expensive, and today young people can't afford their own home - how can they have children? Sure, other things may also be affecting this, but IMO raising inequality correlates very well with lower birth rates (at national level); anecdotally, all my friends with high income are having at least two kids.
Say what you will about Hungary but I think it came up with some great incentives for future parents: income tax cuts. If you have 4 kids you don't pay income tax for life.
Maybe I don't know enough about human biology or sociology but it seems like at some point, the population will drop low enough that natural resources is high per person and people will start having many more kids again.
Am I crazy for thinking this?
Our generation might be the generation where resources can't sustain the population. Hence, people naturally have fewer kids. Zoom out to the macro level and it just seems like humanity is adjusting to the amount of available resources per capita.
In this experiment, a mouse population grew quickly, then at high population density started falling quickly. But rather than recovering when the population decreased, it continued to fall until it was wiped out, in the presence of plentiful resources.
This keeps me up at night. Please someone tell me why it doesn't apply to us.
Because we're not mice. Because he was actually studying the effects of overcrowding and not population growth & decline.
You'd need to look at more than just the population numbers, the issues were around high infant mortality and bad parenting, those are the things you should look out for over low birth rates.
We already have an abundance of natural resources (at least... for the developed countries) The problem is that they aren't evenly distributed enough, to the extent that a lower population cannot counter the increasing wealth inequality.
We already have an abundance of natural resources (at least... for the developed countries)
I'm not convinced this is true.
You can blame the billionaires who own the vast majority of the wealth but that's mostly due to the stock market giving them that value on paper. Physical resources stay finite.
>to the extent that a lower population cannot counter the increasing wealth inequality.
Wealth inequality has nothing to do with it; some of the countries with the lowest wealth inequality like Northern Europe have the lowest birthrates. A hundred years ago wealth equality in most countries was much higher than now and people were much poorer, yet they were still having many more children than people today.
By that point you would need an ubsurd amount of kids per family to recover the birth rates, also mentioning that your checks are paying for a growing elderly population and it becomes nearly impossible to recover.
South Korea went through an astounding period of economic growth. In 1961 its per-capita income was US$93 (inflation-adjusted). Ghana, one of the poorest nations in Africa, had more than double that (US$190). In 2024, Korea's had grown to US$36,624. That is almost 40,000% growth in a single lifetime. It is hard to conceive of in most places where GDP growth averages 1...2% per year. The difference between working hard to get ahead and trying to sit out and keep doing what you were always doing was literally the choice between affluence and destitution. So no wonder you have a population hyper-focused on their careers who pushes what children they have as hard as they can, so that none of them have any time for family now. The opportunity cost of anything else was enormous.
The positive news (if it can be called that), is that this level of growth cannot continue, so something will have to change.
Yea but those men with 106 IQ on average lose out to men with 120 IQ and good looking on dating apps, right?
And the vast majority of those 106 IQ men can't move somewhere else where their IQ advantage comes into play. Passport bros are a thing but they're a very small (but growing) part of the male population.
Maybe I'm weird, but does anyone else have worries about what future their prospective children would inherit? In particular things that worry me: 1. the growing geopolitcal turmoil which is likely to eventually descend into a great war of sorts, the footage coming out of Ukraine is horrifying, 2. climate change isn't going to be dealt with and again, lots of violence will ensure because of that, almost certainly, 3. not sure what to think about AGI, but I'm not entirely dismissive and at best it seems like a dual use technology, 4. a GATTACA-type future where the super rich figure out a way to birth super humans with perfect genetics and top 0.001% IQs. All of those make the future look so unappealing.
> 4. a GATTACA-type future where the super rich figure out a way to birth super humans with perfect genetics and top 0.001% IQs. All of those make the future look so unappealing.
If everything goes alright for them. The thing is that we don't know about knock-on effects and monkey paw results - we can switch this gene on, your child has IQ 190, but later parents will figure out that it has social intelligence of a rock. Or we can switch this gene on, your child is now able to compete with marathon runners, whoops heart attack at 32 years.
I think kids born now will inherit a much better world than in the past.
What sort of world did a child born in Europe in 1900 or 1930 inherit? What about a black child born in the US in 1950, or South Africa in 1960? What about a child born in China in 1950 or (what is now) Bangladesh in 1960 or Sri Lanka in 1970? Their children and grand children will have a much better life.
My grandparents were all born in Europe between the two world wars. Actually, despite humble origins they all had a fairly prosperous life. Even though I have much more education than they did, I don't think I can ever achieve the same level of prosperity as they had.
Like, I certainly cannot afford a family of 12 children. Nor can I afford to buy the amount of land that they acquired, and certainly not by working the same kind of jobs they did.
The poorest people have the most children, and they are not starving; they're usually obese. What has changed is that your definition of "afford children" has come to encompass a vast amount of requirements that your grandparents did not have.
The problem is the same everywhere - The masses rely on income from their occupation, while the ruling elite rely on capital typically amassed by their forefathers, olden day aristocrats.
This is trivially fixed by paying people to have and raise children (edit: pay them more than the cost of the children). That no government does this implies to me that it's not really a huge emergency. That this idea doesn't even enter the public forum implies to me that people are still more terrified of maybe-eugenics than they are of falling birth rates, so again it's not that pressing.
Edit NB: paying people more than the cost of the children would cause a lot of poor or dumb people to have kids just for money, so you'd ideally have some standard to meet before you get this money, which is where the eugenics comment applies
Sorry, I was unclear. I know they pay or give tax breaks to some extent. I meant pay near or even above the cost of raising the kids, i.e. make having kids a net financial benefit. As far as I can tell even the most generous policy is not even close to this.
Wealthy MENA countries functionally does this, and their TFR is either below replacement or trending to below replacement. And they have other pushers like religion and cheap migrant labour / nannies to incentivize large families.
The TLDR is I think state demographic planning cannot positively incentiivize >2 kids. Unless cohort is extremely trad/religion pilled to have as many kids as possible.
At some point need to negative incentivize, i.e. taxes, limits on wealth transfer or additional burdens for not hitting family quota. Probably even more unsavory demographic programs, i.e. birth increased by 2% after roe vs wade overturned. But forcing people to start families is harder than forcing them abort.
They say no childbirth means no children. But must children be such an inconvenience? Even if Korea ceases to produce human infants, AI children may be born in their stead. Or, through reverse-aging, the elderly could become the new children.
Growing up (born in late 70s), all I heard was “OMG OVER POPULATION” and how the planet can’t support the projected N billion people who will be living on it.
Now the birth rate actually slows down to correct itself and we’re not all breeding like rabbits, that’s a bad thing?
This feels like a capitalist concern, “we won’t have enough workers to produce goods and then consume them!”
"Among the major global environmental crises
– climate change, biodiversity loss and land
degradation, and pollution and waste – population
growth is most evidently a key factor in biodiversity
decline. This is largely due to increased demand
for food production, which leads to agricultural
expansion and land degradation (Cafaro, Hansson
and Götmark 2022). As the population grows and
consumption rises, fewer resources and less habitat
are available for non-human species (Crist 2019).
Overpopulation occurs when the total human
population multiplied by per capita consumption
surpasses the capacity of sustainable ecosystems
and resources. Although the global human population
continues to grow, per capita consumption is
increasing at a faster rate. To the extent that people are
disrupting natural habitats and degrading ecosystem
services for future generations, despite regional heterogeneity, some research suggests that most of the world’s nations may be considered overpopulated
(Lianos and Pseiridis 2016; Tucker 2019)"
Specifically going back to 70s overpopulation concerns, thing shifted with the Green Revolution / Norman Borlaug but it came at the cost of reducing groundwater supply and reducing agricultural diversity. See 'The Globalization of Wheat' and https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/groundwater-and-c...
It's possible to have both overpopulation(too large of a population for a given metric like water, energy, pollution, etc) and demographic collapse(too many old people, not enough young workers). It's not intuitive but they are separate phenomenon.
The reaction to overpopulation concerns probably discouraged people from having kids but it's unlikely to be the main cause.
So basically, to save the world countries need to help mothers that work or woman that might want to have kids. because looks like the biggest factor is a sexist and extreme work culture.
Don't flag me for this, i'm just playing devils advocate here. One of the main arguments i've heard against the narrative that the feminist movement freed women to do whatever they want is that instead they are now expected to work for a living. Many women want to have a career and don't want a family, so fine. But many that do find themselves unable to do so. The fact is that once only one member of the family had to go out to work now it's both. I know you can poke holes in that argument, but i feel it has some substance. Of course one comment can't cover any nuance, you would need a book for that. The article even touches onto this effect i described but fails to investigate it at all.
If you want women to raise families you can't also want them to have careers. You can probably draw a venn diagram of how those 2 things can overlap.
In other countries women are more able to do both. You have to reckon with the wage decrease for mothers being especially high in south Korea at least?
This is distracting word-play. It's a problem for anybody wanting to have a child, including pairs of people. The parent's usage of the word "women" doesn't conflict with this unless you are a robot.
> One of the main arguments i've heard against the narrative that the feminist movement freed women to do whatever they want is that instead they are now expected to work for a living...I know you can poke holes in that argument, but i feel it has some substance.
Outside of the maternity leave issue there's a cultural issue with stay at home dads. I believe in essentially all countries, if the family isn't financially secure, it's assumed the dad's a bum, so leaving the financial situation to your better half feels like it can backfire.
Worded like this it sounds stupid but it's just one of those things..
That really should only matter for the direct maternity leave and maybe some disruption at work during pregnancy. The years of child raising after that point is probably more important for this?
By that stage most mothers have already formed emotional bonds to their children which can't easily (at all?) be replaced even by a father. Raising a child isn't some sort of equation, Marx.
Which is a great backup, but they tend to be physically, psychologically and emotionally less suited to it. Most men are less motherly than most women. We are not blank slates.
Men are less "motherly" because we are discouraged by society from being that. Even your choice of words shows your prejudice.
I was my kids primary parent when married and a single dad after divorce. I am MUCH better suited to raising kids than my ex-wife was. That is largely a result of how I was raised to have empathy and care about people.
My implication that being motherly is good for a primary child raiser shows my prejudice? It's actually just a random phenomenon detached from fitness?
To try to remove the word motherly there, your comment could be written as:
Most men are worse parents than most women.
Do you think that is a good representation of what you are saying? Do you think it's true? Are men inherently worse at parenting, or is there something else at play?
And I would also like to know what your evidence is for that.
Men and women play two different, complementary, and equally necessary roles when rearing children. Still, rearing children is more time-consuming for the woman than it is for the man.
> South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. Its population is (optimistically) projected to shrink by over two thirds over the next 100 years. If current fertility rates persist, every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.
> This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a particularly extreme form. The only factor that has little parallel in Western societies is the legacy of highly successful antinatalist campaigns by the South Korean government in previous decades.
South Korea has both a fairly active feminist movement (although small - you can look up their 4b push and etc) and a very active anti feminist political wing. A guy was pardoned for stabbing a retail worker who cut her hair short, there's a lot going on over there.
Please elucidate, my personal takeaway from this post was how women are treated unfairly which leads to lower birth rates. The article goes into depth about this.
Anyone tried to move away from this model where there is two people of opposite gender, living together as a family, working, and raising child(ren) at the same time? Why not have dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?
Kibbutzim in Israel from the 40s-80s tried a fairly radical project of communal child-rearing. It failed when the generation raised there rejected the choice to continue the project.
It was at least a good source for psychological studies. In relation to the article discussed, one of the effects this had was reducing marriage rates.
The theorized reason is these children all grew together and therefore had sexual aversion similar to siblings
We already have daycare and schools, that take care of kids for 8h. And then there's the thing that usually parents like to spend time with their children.
It would be simply better (probably harder) to improve society so one could have a great work-life balance.
> And then there's the thing that usually parents like to spend time with their children.
As another commenter pointed out, I don’t have children, and don’t plan to ever have children, so I may not have the full picture here.
But spending time with their children seems to be just a selfish want of parents, and not something that is beneficial to children themselves. I think people need to think of their children first, and not only of themselves.
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but parents spending time with children is very important to the children. For example, it generally leads to better outcomes for a child to remain with their meth addict parents or their occasionally homeless parents or their violent drunk parents, than for the child to enter foster care. Being away from parents is just that bad.
Homeschooled children, also, have higher educational attainments on average, by a lot. I think you'll find that if you come up with your own proxy measurement for this question it will also point towards more parent time being better.
For one, meth addict or homeless or violent drunk parents would probably not be able to do homeschooling. Then, homeschooling is probably only better because it is 1 on 1, and not 1 on dozens as it is in public schools. For me, it doesn't make sense that parents are somehow magically better than professional educators, if you assume that the professional educators are actually motivated and care (there are people in this thread who are arguing that generally parents care and professionals don't).
> For one, meth addict or homeless or violent drunk parents would probably not be able to do homeschooling.
Two distinct groups of people who for different reasons show kids do better with parents. The point is parents are better at raising kids an people who are trained but not family.
> Then, homeschooling is probably only better because it is 1 on 1, and not 1 on dozens as it is in public schools.
Its not all one to one though. Even when it is one to one it is almost always far fewer hours than at school. A lot of school kids get one to one attention of top of classes (tuition for teenagers has really taken off here in the UK in recent years).
My kids did classes and online courses and taught themselves for some subjects and still did a lot better in those subjects than school kids do. There are advantages to being outside a system individualisation, efficient use or time, learning study skills and self-discipline, etc.
> if you assume that the professional educators are actually motivated and care
Most do, some do not care (they should not be in the profession, but they exist) or are demotivated by the system them work in.
They are also often constrained by the school system. They are pressured to hit metrics which are often not in the best interest of children (especially in the long term). It tends to lead to a lot of studying the exam rather than the subject, for example.
I think parents don't usually like to spend time with their children. I imagine that's the reason why a lot of people are childless these days. If your work and/or hobbies are very exciting, spending time with children is a downgrade.
Most people do not have such exciting work or hobbies, and most parents love spending time with their children.
I can understand people with really fascinating jobs that they care about deeply making that decision, but very few people have such great jobs or hobbies. Yes, if you are an academic, or a monk/nun, or something else you deeply believe in, but for most people there is very little that is more rewarding than having children.
Yes, like an orphanage. I understand that some people may like raising children, but that ignores the fact that most people don’t receive education how to do that properly.
As bad as that sometimes is, have you heard the stories of people who grew up in orphanages? In general it was worse than having below-average parents… That’s a big part of why a lot of the world has moved from institutional care to foster systems.
>that most people don’t receive education how to do that properly.
Incentives matter far more than education; parents have a built-in biological incentive to care for their children, so on average they put in more effort, that's why children at orphanages do so poorly, and homeschooled children do better on standardised testing than public schooled children.
The German Democratic Republic had state-run universal daycare from ages 0 to 18 (Krippe, Garten, POS, FDJ). It was commonly seen as a bad thing by western societies, because it gave ample opportunity to indoctrinate.
PS: POS and FDJ are not really daycare but school and youth org, but they provided services exceeding what we connect with those ideas.
So why would you have children? I love spending time with my kids. What is the point of having them if I do not see them?
I feel really lucky I worked from home and home educated my kids, and feel most people already miss a significant amount of the joy of having kids because of work and school. Your idea would make a significant part of it into all of it.
The point is to have the government control child birth and raising of children, so that the country does not have issues with population numbers, education, and other societal issues that arise from parents doing a bad job.
If the government wants that they can have the kids. What is my incentive to have children in that system?
We have far more problems caused by governments doing a bad job than parents doing a bad job. In general parents do a far better job than government employees do.
> If the government wants that they can have the kids. What is my incentive to have children in that system?
You may not have the incentive, but the country population will decline if you don't. If you are a government, I'm sure there is a number of ways to make people have children, for example https://nhentai.net/g/609087/. If you are something like Russia or Ukraine, you can force women to have children, just like you force men to go to war.
> We have far more problems caused by governments doing a bad job than parents doing a bad job. In general parents do a far better job than government employees do.
But yes, if there is no way to make education workers do good job, then I guess this system will not work.
>Anyone tried to move away from this model where there is two people of opposite gender, living together as a family, working, and raising child(ren) at the same time? Why not have dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?
People in general have a built-in biological incentive to treat their own biological children well. People child-rearing just as a job generally treat children worse than biological parents, and the empirical evidence supports this (e.g. the earlier children enter paid childcare, the worse their outcomes on average). Only a small minority of extremely moral people treat other people's kids as well as their own biological children.
I'm 99% certain you don't have kids. The remaining 1% is reserved for the possibility that you do, and you just hate them and everything they stand for.
Otherwise you would realize what dystopian hellscape of an idea you are suggesting.
What makes you say that? To me it's clearly Japanese (the "-chan" by itself is a dead giveaway) and there's way too many open syllables to feel Korean.
My username does not have anything to do with Korea. It is a reference to a Japanese anime Giji Harem—it is really good and funny if you are into anime, I recommend.
Nitpicking but I hate how "career" is always used when talking about women's choices, when it's just a damn job. Most women work because they have to. It's not a "career".
Most men too. One thing that is missing in these conversations is men's role in child care. The two big steps we need to take are equal parenting and family friendly working hours.
As a single dad in the UK its obvious to me that a lot of people still do not expect men to be raising kids or for a man to be the primary parent (which I was even before I divorced).
>Why not have
dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?
Because to even contemplate that means dismissing the entire notion of a parent child bond. Of course socialism, with it's inherent disdain of existing social structures have tried collective living, famously some kibbutzim in israel tried it, but most sensible people are horrified by such an idea.
I want to let it go but i can't. The suggestion that trained professionals would somehow do a better job of raising a child then parents would is terrible. It's one of the worst ideas i've ever seen here.
I think small scale entrepreneurship might be a solution to the current corp craziness. Also, need to ensure lifestyle creep doesn't occur. Easier said then done.
reply