“Notably, Chang’s report claims that biological females develop earlier than males do, so requiring girls to enter school at younger ages will create classes in which the two sexes are of more equal maturity as they age. This, the author posits, makes it more likely that those classmates will be attracted to each other, and marry and have children further down the line.”
(…)
“The report does not include evidence of any correlation between female students’ early enrollment and the success rate of their romantic relationships with men. The author also does not detail specific mechanisms by which his proposed policy would increase romantic attraction or birthrates.”
“We’ve got a birthrate crisis, maybe we should make it so a single income of someone working 40 hours a week can support a family of 4?”
“… Or we could explore literally every other option no matter how ridiculous and not do anything which would impact corporate profits even a single penny.”
I mean, after all, their problem is that they want more workers, so they can make more money. Letting people work less defeats the point.
It’s our fault for ever thing they would try to fix their problem by making their own problem worse.
Any sensible country will think about providing more incentives to women & couples to have more children and fix financial stressors that’s scaring people away from parenthood.
But no let’s try some nutjob theories 😂
They have done some but it’s not been enough to fix their issues
And then you plan to force people to have kids too? Because otherwise it’s not going up.
Actual answer: stop overworking your fucking population.
Won’t fix it, unless women want to stop working and stay at home, couples aren’t having more kids.
The solution is better population distribution, we’ve got overpopulated countries and countries where the birthrate isn’t high enough, no need to be a genius to get it.
Edit: Thanks for the downvotes, how about you propose an actual realistic solution? It’s not 1850 anymore, people have goals other than making sure their family name lives on, no matter how easy you make it to have kids, more and more people just don’t want to have them because it’s socially acceptable and they don’t want the burden. What then? Let the population go down until the average age is over 70? There’s not a single birth policy that respects people’s freedom of choice that has achieved the objective of making the local population have its birthrate go back over 2.1, none.
How does that fix anything? You keep some parts of the world as human breeding mills and send them to the places where quality of work/life balance is so bad that they can’t have kids there either?
No, at some point the human population won’t be able to increase forever and as conditions are improving in poorer nations their birthrate is decreasing, I’m just pointing out the obvious, immigration is the solution to birthrate problems in some parts of the world and it’s the solution to overpopulation in other parts.
Heck, that’s exactly what multicultural countries are doing, it’s an issue with Asian countries that refuse to welcome people of other cultures.
the human population won’t be able to increase forever
Just gonna point out that this isn’t a problem.
I would argue it is a problem in a capitalist society where constant and eternal economic growth is necessary.
Then again, I would also argue that capitalism is the problem.
Correct. If the masses benefitted from industrialization rather than just the corporations, we could have a high quality of life for everyone, population growth be damned.
Never said it was, but it’s ridiculous to think it’s normal to let certain territories become empty out of nationalistic pride when people are suffering out of lack of resources in other territories.
Just to chime in. I was interested to randomly see in my feed the other day about how divorce between an American husband and Japanese wife, is at a lower rate than is between Japanese citizens.
I found it interesting that some cultures might be slightly more compatible with each other.
Anyway.
Not surprising, Americans living in Japan don’t tend to adopt the crazy work schedule that’s considered normal over there.
Raise the price of labor to the point that a working family can afford to have children at the standard they consider socially acceptable.
That would devalue investment accounts though, so it won’t happen until there is suffering on a scale not seen outside of major wars.
It won’t make people have enough kids to renew the population though otherwise birthrate would have been higher than it was in the 70s and 80s
In what country?
I’m talking about raising wages by 40-70% in the US.
Pipe dream, but if it happened the fertility rate would increase.
It’s the same story in all countries as they become developed, access to birth control and people having other more interesting shit to do means they don’t want to have kids, no matter how easy it is for them.
Finland: 1910 to 1930 4.7 to 2.4, 1950 to 1975 3.4 to 1.6, between 1.5 and 1.9 since then.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033730/fertility-rate-finland-1800-2020/
Look at Canada’s numbers the second the pill becomes available in the 60s (years before Reaganomics and at a time where people were still able to make it on a single income)
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91f0015m/91f0015m2024001-eng.htm
UK, going down since the end of the industrial revolution
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033074/fertility-rate-uk-1800-2020/
People just don’t want enough kids to renew the population when they’re given the choice to do something else, it’s that simple.
Heck, increased income is associated with decreased fertility, it’s been known for decades at this point! How come the rich don’t have tons of kids? They don’t have to stress about money, right? How come poor people have more kids than the middle class? It’s not as if they have a surplus of cash or can afford to only have one parent working, right?
France made childcare and education free and relatively high quality and look at that! They have just under replacement level fertility!
Some people do want children. Not everyone, but lots of people do. It’s true that wealth depresses fertility, but you can have a sustainable society if you give people financial security.
I’m willing to believe there are some cultural issues at play, not just the economics, but that is for demographers to tease out.
The American congressional representatives have an average of 2 children. Replacement rate. Get our standard of living up to that and you will see fertility go up.
https://fr.statista.com/statistiques/472322/natalite-france/
Downward trend
Longer term
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033137/fertility-rate-france-1800-2020/
Downward trend
Replacement rate is 2.1, not 2
Nice for congressional representatives, did you take a look at their age? Average is 58 and 64 in the Senate, median is 58 and 65 respectively from what I’m finding. They’re not people who are making the choice to have or not have kids right now.
Give women AND men the opportunity and means to stay at home for childcare and stop putting the burden solely on the women might actually help.
But I guess treating women like actual people and with equity is way too much to expect.
South Korea has a huge misogyny problem to the point where young women choose celibacy and staying single over marriage and family to escape their bad situation under the current patriarchy. They actively choosing not to have children, because men treat them like shit.
Data shows it’s not the case otherwise rich people would have way more kids instead of being poor people that have the higher fertility rate.
Also birth rate goes down with improvement to women rights, not up. If there was less misogyny in South Korea people wouldn’t have more kids than they do at the moment.
You think the world wasn’t misogynistic when people were having 10+ kids in the 18th and 19th century?
My main argument wasnt about money, but if you stop putting the burden of hild rearing soley on women and share these responsibilities equally they will be more willing to have children. In most cases, more rights for women meant they are paying for the privilige with double the work. Still doing all the work at home and all the work of having children in addition to the job they can now have and gives them a choice.
Yes of course Birthrate goes up, if you take away women’s agency and give them no choice. Take away the means to control family planing and make being a wife and mother the only survivable option. As it was for women in those centuries.
You want to live in a world, were women are again slaves and property of the men in the family and forced to be birthing machines and maids to their husbands?
But that’s exactly what I showed isn’t true with rich vs poor! Rich people can afford not to work or to pay someone to take care of their kids yet they have smaller families than poorer people who need both parents to work and less than poor people where only one parent works.
Also, birthrate isn’t any higher in places where there’s social programs to help people with that either. Heck, in Canada the parents get a year of parental leave, in Quebec specifically there’s super cheap kindergarten since the 90s as well and the birthrate is one of the lowest in the world.
I’m not saying I want to live in a world where women are forced to have kids, I want to make people understand that they’re trying to find tons of excuses why people don’t have kids but the reason is simply that when people are actually given the choice to have them or not, the people who actually want to have kids don’t have enough to renew the population and that won’t change no matter how “easy” we try to make it. Having kids is a huge responsibility and people realize that they have other things they want to do with their lives.
Rebalancing is only a temporary solution. Birthdate in developing countries is also dropping: they may still be in the “good” part of the stop, but there’s no reason to expect it won’t keep dropping. Predictions vary widely but in about half a century, the overall population will start dropping, regardless whether you rebalance.
The thing that really hasn’t been tried is to value parenthood, value children. Sure, we may culturally and may even give a few incentives, but it has always been a huge burden on parents. Very few countries with the possible exception of a couple Scandinavian ones, do much to help make this easier
US is particularly bad at this
- parental leave is minimal
- healthcare is expensive
- childcare is even more expensive
- many jobs don’t give flexibility to take care of kids (especially since schools insist on you going there during their business day)
- pre-school is mostly not public, expensive
- college is extremely expensive
- housing is extremely expensive, especially trying to fit more people
- if a child has special needs, now all of these are even more expensive, and may be needed for their entire life
I’ve read estimates that parents spend on average $250,000 to raise a kid, and that’s an old number so I don’t see how it’s anywhere near that low. Who can afford that?
And that’s not counting the work, the attention, the hardship of raising kids. I always wanted kids and regret not having more than 2, but raising them is neither easy nor cheap, and society does very little to help
How come Scandinavian countries don’t have a higher birthrate then?
How come you can see birthrate fall at an alarming rate the second birth control becomes easily available even in the 60s when traditional families were still the norm?
How come millionaires don’t have bigger families than poor people if they don’t have the financial burden or the need for both parents to work?
Valuing children also means educating them and you know what happens the more people are educated? That’s right, birthrate drops.
The truth is, we’re not going back to numbers over 2.1 unless we take away women’s freedom and I’m sure no one with half a brain wants that.
I disagree. I think more people actually do want to have families but the systems in place just aren’t set up to enable that. This is anecdotal, of course.
But the system has changed quite a lot during the last century yet birth rate has been going down even when things were going better.
Hell, you see it extremely well in Canada, the second the pill becomes available, fertility starts dropping. That’s in the 60s, people were still able to afford to raise a family with a single income.
It’s extremely short-sighted to just look at today to make an opinion.
South Korea, are you ok?
It can’t possibly be the crushing weight of capitalism that is impacting young people’s lifestyles.
No. And neither is its education system.
check the authors’ browser history
This idea is a complete non-starter from a practical standpoint. Parents would complain about it either way. Either they wouldn’t want girls in school early or they’d want boys in school early, too.
It’s just much easier to treat children all the same.
Also, I personally think this plan would backfire. Girls graduating wouldn’t want to have to be adults earlier than boys, so they’d stay in school longer. And from what I’ve heard, the most reliable way to reduce birth rates is to educate women more.
I think everyone also knows how to ethically increase the birth rate. Make having children easy and affordable. Lots of government assistance. Make sure everybody has access to cheap or free childcare.
And there’s also the generational problems. Young adults can see the problems that the previous generations caused. You can’t go back in time to fix those. It will be expensive to change this sort of thing.
But quick fixes aren’t going to change the underlying problems.
The best way to increase birth rates in advanced countries is: Work life balance. Restore the traditional tax rates on the rich.
Work life balance meaning one parent can stay home and raise the children without needing that second income to put food on the table.
If both parents work, the birth rate is always going to be lower, even with better work life balance.
Even with a parent at home people weren’t having enough kids to renew the population from the moment they had access to birth control methods.
For real man. We were so overworked when both of us had a full time job and no kids. Now we have one kid and one full time job. It is easier, hard in another way but somehow easier. Soon I’ll have to go back to work and I don’t even know how we will survive. We would love to have another kid but we either can’t afford it or we will go insane trying to afford it.
The other part is that stupid part time career pit. Ideally we would both work half jobs, but this will mean none of us can have a well paid job (per hour). But this also means that if my husband is laid off while I am at home, were fucked. Job security is a huge factor in work life balance.
But also, we are the “risky” ones. Most of my friends from school wanted to wait until they are “settled” financially. I don’t have one mom friend from school/university. They are either still settling in their careers or have given up on feeling settled and now have fertility issues.
Just for context, our kid arrived shortly before I turned 30. My friends are in their 30s and 40s. None of them is really “financially secure” since job security is just not a thing anymore.
Not just work life balance, but also the cost of living. I can barely afford to take care of myself, so I’m completely disinclined to go and create a whole new person that will be absolutely dependent on me to provide for it for years. If people can afford to live reasonably comfortably and conditions give them confidence that conditions will remain stable for the next 10-20 years, I bet you’ll see them start having kids. When they’re worried they could be homeless next year if things worsen and their retirement plan is advocating for the right to end one’s life on their own terms, it shouldn’t be a shocker that people don’t want to add kids into the mix.
Also, perhaps decades of social stigma that said having a bunch of kids is something only poor, ignorant people do that represents a moral failing amongst the upstanding daughters of decent society is a bad thing to maintain when you want folks to keep cranking out more kids to feed into the meat grinder of the workforce.
“cheap or free childcare” No
“stay at home parent” Yes
Lower the work hours per week with same wage so both parents can be there for their children: inconceivable
Why has birthrate been lower than 2 in most developed countries starting in the 60s/70s even if there were social programs and people were able to afford to have a family with a single salary?
Maybe people who don’t have access to birth control have accidents and they need to deal with the consequences and in fact, when given the choice, people don’t have enough kids to renew the population? Crazy, right?
Really, there’s nothing specifically wrong with having a low birth rate. On a large scale, we have an overpopulation problem, and there’s not really a negative for each person having fewer children. Of course, smarter people will decide to have fewer kids. But eventually, it will all balance out.
Exactly my point in another message, there are people desperate to get out of their overpopulated country and countries where they need new people yet leaders can’t do the math.
It’s really easy, and I’ll explain it once again for the idiot governments in the back.
GIVE LARGE FINANCIAL INCENTIVES FOR HAVING CHILDREN AND RAISING FAMILIES.
This concludes my Ted Talk.
People don’t need large incentives. They need help with daycare/eldercare, education, and healthcare. They need to be able to afford places to live that can fit a family. These are things that everyone needs, it’s just more critical to having a family
Doesn’t work. My country gave around 15% of minimal pay per kiddo. People who shouldn’t have children had lots of them. People who should…had the same amount as before that. Slightly better finances tho, but they still waited till they were able to provide for child.
What country are you from?
Fuck that, I’m not paying for breeders to ruin the planet more.
Right?
It’s that easy in most countries (though really just making it not a financial detriment to reproduce is better), but in South Korea it’s more than the money. A lot of South Korean women are withholding reproductive labor due to the intensity of the cultural misogyny
No government can afford giving large enough baby bounties to move the needle. Kids are really, really expensive.
what is it now, $200k+ from 0-18? (depending on where you live)
Maybe try dealing with the massive reactionary anti-feminist incel movements that continue to victimize Korean women and girls daily? Just a thought.
Being this out of touch with reality is the problem with countries right now. The elites and politicians don’t know what’s going on because they are staying in power long past their usefulness.
the elites and politicians never once in their life had the life of a normal person. that’s what. they born into their wealth and power and just think the rest of us are lazy for not being born into it.
This report imparts the image of a sweaty old man with steepled fingers tapping against each other panting heavily and grunting “little girls…develop faster…” And then letting that statement hang in the air, festering.
They do anything before they pay people more.
I’m of the opinion we just need to stop focusing so hard on raising the birthrate and focus more on taking care of the people and population we have. We don’t need more people on the planet - 8 billion humans is plenty. We need to figure out successful economic strategies that don’t require perpetual population growth rather than trying to breed our way into economic security.
They have a problem with patriarchy and not with birth rates. Birth rates are just the symptom.
Seeing that there is a big trend in young Korean women to abstain from men, marriage and family, I’d say starting to treat women like actual people could very well make a difference.
But yeah, getting them into school earlier and probably indoctrinate them earlier into good obedient wives could work too.
Do you have sources for the statistic you’re using to drive your conclusion? Such as the trends of abstinence.
I wouldn’t call this a “source”, but it’s an interesting explanation of the 4B movement.
https://www.thecut.com/2023/03/4b-movement-feminism-south-korea.html
Jumping through hoops after Hoops after hoops all to avoid admitting that the problem is capitalism. Classic
Capitalism? How about people just might not want kids enough for birthrate to be higher than 2?
Even North European countries with all their social programs and safety nets are way under 2.
Yeah but what about eco-anxiety which is another big reason to not wanting a child, and which is another effect of capitalism
Eco anxiety wasn’t a thing in the 70s and 80s, birthrate in rich nations was still under 2 for locals.
During the time period when the highest tax brackets fell from 70% to 50%… Down to now 37%.
Surely the people holding the most money paying near half the taxes they used to didn’t cause them to hold onto that money and drive more and more money up into their hands.
But I have it invested! So you can’t tax it yet, but I rolled it into a company so you can’t tax it or if you can you can’t tax me the same way!
For capitalism to work there has to be strong legal bindings to taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor to make sure they don’t get steamrolled by the system.
We having been pumping the breaks for years on those responsibilities, and more and more people in turn will get steamrolled and forced into starvation, homelessness. The mental health rates being low are directly tied to money in the middle and lower classes.
If we made a rule that for every 10 people who committed suicide do to scarcity that the richest person would be killed as well, we would run out of rich people not trying to promote subsidizing the poor pretty quick and trying to get the happiness of the people up instead of only worrying about profits.
That’s crazy obviously… But we need healthier motivation to make the world a better place. That isn’t a healthy one.
Look at historical data, birthrate just goes down as nations develop, it’s true everywhere no matter how taxed the rich are or how much fertility programs exist. The whole world isn’t the USA.
It’s almost like once you’ve stopped exerting religious and social pressure for every woman to have five kids and given access to birth control… The birth rate is going to drop.
And you know, that’s not a bad thing. Especially when the global birthrate is still higher than replacement, and the planet is finite.
Short term, East Asia should be less racist and take a few immigrants. Long term, we will need to figure out another way to keep the species going within the next few centuries.
Or simply accept that population will go down
Population shrinking is probably a good thing, but population shrinking too quickly might be all sorts of bad.
It’s hard to see where we really are with so many variables, so many future decisions, but I believe we’ve passed the point of “good shrinking” and are well into “all sorts of instability and disruption”. If replacement rate is 2.1 kids/woman, and South Korea is already like 1.1, that’s a huge difference. As current generations pass, each succeeding one will be half its size. That’s a problem.
That can be solved by welcoming immigrants because it won’t be solved by trying to force people to have kids. When social programs are introduced to help people raise a family you see a little bump in the numbers and then it goes back down again. It’s as if people realize that having a family isn’t just a financial decision, crazy right?
Medium term, yeah. After a few centuries you’re reaching dangerously small levels, though, assuming normal mortality. Maybe you’re onboard with extinction, but for a couple reasons I’m not, even as shit as we are.
Ok, so the only way to reverse it is to reduce access to birth control and go back on women rights.
There’s a whole lot of stuff that people in this discussion are blaming for birthrate going down but if you look at historical data it was going down even before these things were issues, just because people are more educated, have access to birth control and women have rights over their body. You’re not moving back above 2.1 without getting rid of these things.
Have you ever read A Brave New World? If we can get artificial wombs going - in a few centuries, which is a reasonable timeframe, I think - we could do it that way.
Yes, I know, it wasn’t supposed to be a society to emulate, but that part at least seems fine to me. Getting rid of birth control would be dumb, absolutely agreed.
Bingo and people here can’t wrap their head around that
This simply doesn’t matter. It’s a purely economic issue that can be solved other ways besides the birth rate.
How come the stats are the same everywhere and numbers have been going down since way before the economy became an issue? Was the economy an issue in the 60s? Because people keep saying “back then you could raise a family on a single income!” but the birthrate was still going down!
It’s funny how education, women rights and access to birth control are a much better indication of fertility levels than the economy, it’s as if the economy doesn’t have as much of a role in it and people are blaming it because that’s the issue they’re facing at the moment while ignoring that poor people have more kids than rich people.
Korea has that issue but the issue is the same everywhere and global population is predicted to start dropping by the end of the century, it won’t just be an economic issue at this point.
“My source is I made it the fuck up”
TBF, it’s possible this guy knows it’s crap, but had to deliver an original idea.
Is there something similar to national service in Korea? Just wondering how the guys keep up in the job market when the girls have a 2 year head start.
All South Korean male citizens are required to perform 18-21 months of military service.
All it really amounts to is a small headstart. It seems like a big gap initially because you’re comparing 0 years of experience vs 2 years of experience.
But across a 30 year career its a mere 7% difference. Frankly after 5 to 10 years of experience it becomes a lot less about how long you’ve worked, it instead becomes more about how you’ve spent those years and how that translates into benefitting the company. When a company is hiring for mid level and above, it doesn’t really matter to them that someone has 8 years vs 10 years. An extreme example would be someone with 5 years at Google vs someone who spent 10 years jumping between small start ups.
Wait, are you joking?
i think he mean how korean males are at a disadvantage because mandatory military service. singapore has something similar but the rift is not as extreme as korea. korean males really despise feminism movement both because of that and cultural hierarchy. moon channel discussed this topic in length if youre interested
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
moon channel discussed this topic in length if youre interested
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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I’m surprised, this is a surprise. Living in the US, Mexico has forced conscription just south of us for a while. We’ve also had a draft. All that being said, you made a lot of good points. We should probably credit the people who came up with this a LONG time ago.
I was going to post this video. I highly recommend it (and don’t stop at its title, it covers a large amount of subjects).
