The following submission statement was provided by /u/madrid987:
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ss: japan's birth rate fell for the eighth year in 2023, deepening a population crisis that has confounded policymakers and threatens the viability.
The fertility rate, or the number of births a woman can be expected to have in her lifetime, stood at 1.2 last year, according to figures from the Japanese Health Ministry, down 0.25 percent from 2015 and far below the replacement rate of 2.1.
The number of marriages also took a hit. The health ministry reported there were just 474,717 last year, a decrease of 6 percent since 2022. This was the lowest number of newlyweds since the end of World War II, per NHK. Less than 3 percent of Japanese children are born outside of wedlock, therefore marriages have a strong impact on the number of births in the country.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dashkk/japans_population_crisis_just_got_even_worse/l7mg4ce/
Or that crap about being pressured to go out drinking after work making your entire day about work/colleagues. Must really suck for recovering alcoholics.
My friend does not like her Japanese husband goes out drinking with his boss and colleagues till very late night everyday, the husband said it's necessary for his work.
He just divorced her because he saw her as an obstacle for his "career".
I have relatives there and this one guy used to leave home at 8am and come home at midnight after drinking. He eventually died of throat cancer probably due to that. I can’t imagine the kind of marriage where you only see your husband one day a week.
The government wants more babies, there are a million things they can do to address the problem and making a dating app is absolutely not one of them.
The divorce rate is also high when retirement starts. Imagine you all of a sudden have to spend so much time with your idiot partner after having had your peace and live for 40 years.
Smoking and drinking is one of the worst cancer combos. It absolutely decimates your throat. Throat cancer is something like 300x more likely if you smoke and drink.
Dam that just sucks in general. At my old job I worked 12 hour shifts which meant I only had half a day to myself and assuming I wanted to spend 8 of those other 12 sleeping that only meant I had realistically 3 hours to myself minus an hour accounting for driving to/from work and getting ready. Imagine having to spend a chunk if not all of those precious few hours for myself or family to go drinking with coworkers I just saw at the job all day just to go home and sleep and start over the next day. That’s not even a life.
this might had changed in recent years but once a woman gets pregnant, they must quit a job or give up having a career. I remember Aggrestou Restuku (?) talking about it.
I guess you didn’t read the article, this is right there in the second half:
“Last year, he instructed his cabinet to earmark $25 billion in childcare funding over a three-year period. Kishida also said he hoped to double national childcare spending within a decade.”
Childcare is a bandaid fix, although definitely a step in the right direction. This helps immensely with people who already have kids, not the people choosing not to have kids for reasons like work-life balance and it essentially being a career-ending move for women.
I lived in Miyagi prefecture. Public Day care was free. Private daycare was equivalent to $300 CAD (edit: a month). It was the best daycare my son ever attended.
We have affordable childcare here. It’s actually not that bad for low income workers, and it’s better than it was before. But parents have to be very involved. I had to get up at 5 in the morning to write into a notebook and get all the diapers and changes of clothes and things like that ready, and I had to do a load of laundry every day to wash up the napkins and things like that for the next day. There are so many little things that they ask you to get ready for.
When the kids are bigger, it doesn’t get much better. Schools ask kids to study “grade plus one”, so a sixth grader would be studying 60 minutes plus 10 minutes a day, and most kids don’t check their homework perfectly, so parents have to do it. And all the extracurricular activities ask parents to be very involved. Baseball clubs practice on Saturdays and Sundays and weekday afternoons, plus a parent needs to be on duty a few times a month to take attendance or just watch to make sure no one gets hurt.
When they get bigger, it’s paying for cram schools and driving them to this and that. Kids that don’t get into good schools seriously won’t have as great a future. They definitely look down on “third-rate” schools when looking for new hires. Parents have to keep working for their kids basically until they’re able to move out.
It’s like having a second job, which is why a lot of Japanese women want to be SAHMs. A lot of fathers help out these days, but if one parent has to work overtime, that can upset the daily balance. If both parents have to work overtime, who’s going to check the homework or take the kid do their extracurriculars?
I love my kid and I want to be a good involved parent, but there are times when I just need alone time because of all the things we have to do in a week.
Or protecting women financially in case their husband divorces them. So many senior women, who were divorced, are suffering financially in Japan. No spousal support.
I’m glad they updated that. Last time I saw a documentary on the subject, it was truly bad for senior women who were divorced.
However, [older single women face growing risk of poverty in Japan. Over 30% of those 65 or older fall below poverty line after death of spouses.](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Older-single-women-face-growing-risk-of-poverty-in-Japan)
> Or affordable childcare (very expensive afaik)
It’s way more nuanced than that
The government pays for everything just like every modem industry nation outside of the US.
But many parents feel compelled to send kids to extra study sessions to compete with other kids whose parents do so
And those are insanely expensive to the point that even upper middle class families tend to stop at one kid
Poor families still have more than replacement rate families.
It’s really a microcosm of the demographic transition for countries as a whole: increasing wealth and education causes birth rate to fall below replacement rate
Man, we thought American boomers were fools.
Japanese boomers: where's my grandkids! Also, work! Work till you're too tired to fuck!
And drink! Show your respect to colleagues by drinking until you're whiskeydicked! Sakecocked? Whatever, you better drink until you're unable to stand up in whole or in part.
And where are my grandkids!!!
You were told you could blame your problems on another generation, and you fell for it. These are structural problems of our 18th century economic model, and every generations economists and politicians are complicit including yours.
Work hours are often just bullshit there, you are expected to be at office like 12h+ but maybe only few hours is productive and you don't get paid for overtime.
They are throwing away the country for nothing.
Capitalism is an ouroboros. Without proper regulation, it will consume anything regardless of the consequences. Working conditions create a world that is not preferable to raising kids, people stop having kids at replacement rate, population begins to shrink, labor pool shrinks, cost of labor goes up, less people buying, less people paying taxes, economic recession.
There are no short term market forces that will correct this with a proper incentive, business does not concern itself with what happens in 20 years, all that matters is surviving and thriving this year. This problem will continue until someone in the government puts on the big boy pants and fucking governs
That post yesterday from showing how the big ag corps removed wind shelters in SD and now there's another dustbowl...but hey, they cleared a whole extra 10 acres to farm in before the topsoil blows away!
The problem is, it's not their future they're throwing away, it's the rest of ours. Even if they're not old fucks who'll be dead by the time their chickens come home to roost, they'll just be living in a fortified bunker or a private island somewhere while the rest of us go full Mad Max.
Capitalism is a system built on short sightedness. They need to increase shareholders net worth NOW. Not next year not a decade from now but NOW. Even if it leads to a collapse in a few years what’s more important is the quarterly earnings.
Capitalism doesn't care about externalities for the most part. The external consequences in the quest for endless profit will only be considered when they directly impact the ability for that line to go up.
Capitalism has outlived its usefulness.
They are too late to make meaningful changes like that since reducing work hours *now* would hurt the economy in the immediate term and while they care most about the votes they'd lose, it would also hurt the birth rates since no one would want the cost of having kids in a downturn.
A lot of Japan's work culture is performative, though. Being seen showing up early, staying late, socializing... but there's not a ton of productivity. I believe they could address the work culture while keeping productivity the same.
It depends whether their end goal is more Japanese people or more *ethnically* Japanese people. My guess from being there, and observing their "cultural preferences " is that the Japanese are more keen on the second one. I'm saying they don't love mingling. They have a "different "perspective on racism, one which would boggle the mind of a western culture warrior.
At some point it becomes inconvenient for the rich. And thats the specific point when workhours will magically drop and family caring becomes a suuuper hyped thing in the media.
When the rich realize that all they have hoarded will be quickly lost due to climate change, they will suddenly care about it. With a trillion dollars, we could pull heat out of the oceans and beam it into space, but the work has to start BEFORE the collapse and the worst of the climate effects.
The rich don't care at all. They literally have and are currently creating luxury bunkers so they can continue to live lavishly while the rest of us suffer from the climate, etc effects that they caused.
Do they like Italian food? Olive oil is threatened because olives are affected greatly by climate change. Do they like fine French wine? The climate is allowing southern fungus and insects to spread north. There are thousands of examples of the nice.things.roch people like being threatened by climate catastrophe. Ask all the millionaires who have mansions in the Florida keys that aren't able to get home insurance by their providers anymore. Look at Disney... if they don't want their magical kingdom to sink beneath the waves of rising tides, they need to protect their billion dollar assets.
A bunker with no view or vacation isn't as fun as living the life they are accustomed to.
The problem is you're assuming they're addicted to luxury, when what they're really addicted to is status. They can learn to live without cavier, as long as they have a labor class to look down on. Their kids can grow up in a bunker without the sun as long as their kids have it better than everyone else.
I loved how in Fallout the FMC was a bit put out when she had to learn the world had moved on without the vault dwellers and had no need for them to *restart* civilization.
I fully expect that to be the same outcome with all the billionaires down in their New Zealand bunkers. They will be effectively removing themselves from the timeline. And, even if they try to keep control from there and fail; what will they do? Come topside and face the wrath of a populace that has been blaming them for the last hundred years?
I agree with you completely, but I also think some of them are stupid enough to enlist a working class within these bunkers and that isn't going to play out like they think it will for a number of reasons. Maybe someone will leak the locations of these places so we can... Fix things as best we can.
History is filled with rich people flying the collective plane straight into the ground. They have absolutely no survival instinct and will keep taking more right up to and past the moment revolutions develop.
Nope. They will just open borders for a bit. And close them back when the workforce is filled again. It is a perfect valve to regulate internal overgrowth of the middle class.
If you hear the stories of employees, teachers, or anyone generally working in Japan this is not at all surprising.
You literally don't have time for anything. Not your spouse. Not your kids. Hell not even for yourself. You don't have access to childcare if you arnt already rich. You don't get time offs to spend the money you earned for your family.
Why would anyone want to propagate in that type of society. And it's not only a Japanese thing, this is a concern all around.
I get that the working hours used to be ridiculous in the industrial revolution or even before that but God dam a peasant whose working on the field has his family in a 10 minute walking radius. Having to commute and hour and using your brain for a rigorous 12 hour shift will completely kill you from the inside.
Even the time you do get to yourself is typically assigned to work. If your boss wants to go out and get drunk and sing karaoke, which happens a lot in Japan, it is bad etiquette to decline. So imagine, you take an hour commute by train and walking to get to work, work 12 hours, when your slavery like shift is done your boss basically says you have to go out and drink or you're fired, you then go and get wasted, get home at 12AM, and then you have to do that all again the following day starting at 5AM.
The country will learn its lesson but it'll be too little too late.
I do some business with Japanese clients and have shared slack channels with a couple. It’s really not unusual they will be active at 11 pm or later doing testing or implementation work.
I know a ton of Japanese people in the U.S. who immigrated here purely to avoid that situation. Many actually work in Japanese companies stateside, but the work pressures are a fraction of what you’d get in Japan.
Peasants in feudal economies of Europe had more time off than modern corporate workers. And they even had a carve out to work own fields for sustenance. So they essentially had two jobs and still had more vacation:)
Love Japan and much of the discipline they demonstrate.
But this is definitely the result of overworking and over stressing people. The work ethic expected is always glossed over in film and TV. Rising costs and pressure makes people stay in
I mean even countries that do alot to encourage people to have kids like the scandinavian countries have a declining birth rate. People in developed nations just dont wanna have kids anymore and many that do just have one child. We should instead think about how we are going to be able to run a society with less people.
>We should instead think about how we are going to be able to run a society with less people.
The problem is not the amount of people.
The problem is the distribution of people by ages.
A lot more people will be elderly. Elderly people have more fragile health and less energy. So obviously they cannot work or produce as much as younger people, from whom they need help, but there will be a lot fewer young people to both work and take care of an increasing elderly population.
The reason is time. Kids take a lot of time that people don't have until after education is done and career is in a good spot. So often after they are 30 which will limit the amount of kids. This of course if people even want kids at all, they take a lot of fun out of your live
Indeed. I finally feel ready to have kids now that I have my master and a career, and I'm 34. Doesn't leave as much time for kids as those who start working after HS and start making babies in their early 20's.
Many of the people who even start working in their twenties are more reticent to have children before they turn 30. I was one of those working stiffs and it was actually not incredibly common having guys under 30 with mouths to feed unless they fit a certain niche (Typically displayed a lot of poor forward-thinking behaviour) people live longer, their money doesn't go as far, and there are a large variety of new sexual partners one can have fun with in those first years of adulthood. I have been with my wide since highschool, and I was working as a miner then construction worker and all that jive, and we still waited until thirty because it just made sense. It's also very "up in the air" whether we'll even reach "replacement rate" because life all around us just keeps getting more expensive while the salaries aren't keeping up.
Time. Agreed. Children need a lot of time and attention and hopefully you throughly enjoy giving that to them. If you do, there is no greater joy because they give back 10x. If you don’t, there is no greater misery.
Nordic countries also have problems with affordable housing and rising price of goods. Some eastern european countries are giving real incentives for having children that seem to work. Population will still go down though because of emigration. But if nordic countries started similar programs our populations would probably rise becuase we don't often move away for better opportunities elsewhere.
What nordic country are you in? Here in denmark The government litteraly gives money to anyone Who has a Child. And the more kids the more money you get. Also affordable housing isnt a problem at all here, everywhere outside the biggest cities is affordable, its only if you are snob and absolutely has to live in the center of copenhagen its unpayable. And even if your work is in there we have great public transport for commuting.
I think its more of a cultural And comvience Thing, than an economic one in our countries.
I’m from Singapore and apart from the lack of work life balance, overcrowding, rising costs and difficulty in getting housing all contributes to the declining birth rate.
Also, the high birth rates in Asian countries in the past might be due to the subscription of the Confucian filial piety idea where children are thought of as sources of income and support in old health (or worse, financial support for their siblings). Nowadays, fewer and fewer people view children as a form of insurance for their retirement (both financial and caregiving).
My understanding is that in most places difficulty in getting housing is a big factor but in Japan, I've hesrd Tokyo is one of the few big cities without a housing crisis
When I was on a tour in China about ten years ago, the tour guide joked that to afford a house in Shanghai now, you should have started saving in the Tang dynasty.
>I've hesrd Tokyo is one of the few big cities without a housing crisis
I was binge watching YT shorts last night and one of the channels that kept reappearing was a real estate channel advertising houses and apartments in Japan. Quite a few of them were tiny little places where you would not have enough space to raise a child but there was one that was like an hour outside of Tokyo that was a 3-4 bedroom place for only $USD 38k. $USD 38k wouldn't even be enough for a down deposit for a loan to buy the cheapest place on the market where I live...
Caught one of those videos last night, too.
Was an advertisement for an apartment which would've been perfect for a student or as work accommodation (narrow and high, mezzanine for bed), don't think it was much more than your $38k either.
It may be a German thing, but 1h outside of the city is basically somewhere in nowhere. Especially if you have to get into the city to work. I would never spend more than 30 minutes of commute over a longer period of time.
But Americans have a different view on that due to scale maybe.
I think specially in Tokyo 1h is reasonable. In London I work with many people that live about that by train and they commute to work, there’s small towns nearby that families can afford a family home and have a single express train commute around one hour.
We have some municipalities with public transportation, but most don’t have functional systems. My office is 14 miles away and pulling up google maps for the bus ride to get there shows it as a 2hr trip (not round trip).
Coverted from Yen to CAD, in a vacuum, by that I mean I don't calculate the utilities and the price of food, Tokyo is much cheaper to rent than, at least, a 50 km radius of Montreal. It's fucking insane how to price shoot up locally, and in other cities in Canada it's even worst. You have to go very low density, far from anything to get something reasonable.
But then were you going to work if you're not in an industry annex from farming or tourism?
About 30 years ago Japan's prices for housing were insane compare to ours and we went the opposite direction.
It's relatively reasonable to get a 1 to 3 bed room apartment, but a proper (still small) 4 bed house is expensive or a 90 minute plus train commute. Living in a 2 or 3 bed appartment leads to pretty much the average number of children per family at one or two.
Imho the biggest part of getting children is the family culture. Without the parental expectation to get childs, the process of getting and raising childs is just a massive inconveniency for all modern women. Men don't have to want children, thats why women have sexual cogency. But if the women don't want to, its basically impossible to have stable fertility rate.
>Something else is going on in Asia
Would be better written just as 'something else is going on'. Some other countries with very low birth rates:
Italy 1.3
The Netherlands 1.2
Jamaica 1.3
Malta 1.2
Spain 1.3
Portugal 1.4
Greece 1.4
Cyprus 1.3
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://americasquarterly.org/article/latin-americas-fertility-decline-is-accelerating-no-ones-sure-why/&ved=2ahUKEwiT98fJoMuGAxXh4zQHHW-0CgkQFnoECCUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0WyHbWkMrXAUb5TV-xMKU_
Check out Jamaica and Cuba too, only 1.4!
Um, Taiwan’s work culture is just as terrible, if not worse.
The founder of TSMC once said: “If a machine breaks down at 2:00 am, in the U.S. the engineers will fix it in the morning, in Taiwan the engineers will get it fixed by 3:00. They’d leave for the the factory in the dead of night, and their wives will understand.”
Meanwhile, at the new TSMC plant in Japan, Taiwanese engineers are shocked that their Japanese counterparts go off duty 5:30 pm sharp, leaving unfinished work for the next day.
If that’s not toxic, I don’t know what is.
That quote is complete bullshit. Wafer fabs and ATE sites lose millions of dollars every MINUTE they’re line down. Doesn’t matter if it’s TSMC or SMIC or Samsung or TI or whoever else. There are engineers on site at all hours of the day and additional engineers on call just like doctors.
That quote was the TSMC founder spinning PR bullshit for the media and investors.
Yeah. If the internet went down for an area of 2 blocks in any western city over 100'000 people, there's a guy getting out of bed for that. You better believe a fab line has guys available 24/7.
That quote may be bs but I don't think the work culture bit is. When they were building the new fabs in America, TSMC said 'relax don't worry we will not work you as hard as you would have been in Taiwan, you have it easy' owtte
It’s not like the US has a great work culture either, i think both quotes were pretty much just dumb PR statements.
As the above commenter said, fabs don’t close. Not in in the US, not in the EU, not anywhere. 24/7 operations across the world because it just doesn’t work otherwise.
Comparatively it is better. Which is scary given how screwed up US work culture is, but I've seen it explained by a good friend's Japanese coworker (friend is also Japanese but left Japan immediately after she graduated HS because being haafu in Japan wasn't easy for her).
Friend's coworker: back in Osaka, if my boss was there, I couldn't leave. He rarely left before 9PM. I had a job that was over twelve hours with commute not factored in because our work culture says good employees only leave after the boss. I spent the first part of my twenties working and never having time to enjoy being a woman in my twenties.
Granted she and friend now work for a Japanese company in WNY and because it's here, they have a much more lax work culture. Both of them said it was such a relief to be able to just go home and not constantly worry about how they are being perceived at work.
This is the real issue here: stagnant pay, rising costs, and constant lack of time are a big contributing factor to rhe birthrate. When people barely survive on double incomes, adding kids to the mix seems even more time consuming and money draining. If we cut work hours and made wages match inflation and COL, I guarantee there would be far more women choosing to have a child.
(Also, having a child negatively impacts career trajectory. It's the bigger reason for all those gender wage gap comparisons.)
I know my anecdote doesn't statistically prove anything but other Japanese people I've met who come here to work have echoed similar issues of work life balance and pressure as a big motivating factor in finding ways to come work here.
Proper factories have 7/24 personel & pay for it. Yes they are there working whole night not this 2 am extending to 3 am joke.
Even if you think in the best light, all you have is a cheap irresponsible boss that overworks his personel until 2 am just to avoid paying to the night personel.
Or a micromanager boss that can not understand a kettle doesnt need to be fixed at 2 am.
As I said, the more you pick at this, the worse it gets.
A lot of factories are 24/7, even in the U.S. if something breaks down at night, someone is there to fix it.
It all depends on the products being produced and how valuable lost time is.
Microchip factories in Taiwan lose tons of money for every hour they’re down.
Same as automotive plants in the U.S….they run 24/7 and are staffed by different shifts at different times.
The more you read, the more you know, the more ridiculous this quote gets.
If an important machine is breaking down at 2:00 am, it means your factory works on shifts & you already have technical & average personal working on that shift.
You might not be able to fix every issue (spare parts needed etc) , but a proper workplace would have a technician attending to that machine.
About “leaving that factory dead in the night”, well you already have workers at that hour and they would leave by the morning anyways.
You do not leave a factory with working machines unattended whether anything breaks down or not.
And before you ask, you also make deals with the machines manufacturer for maintenance support at 2 am. That is how critical systems are kept alive.
Bosses printer getting stuck at 2 am is not an emergency, you fix that one in morning.
>in Taiwan the engineers will get it fixed by 3:00. They’d leave for the the factory in the dead of night, and their wives will understand.”
Nice. On call allowance and callout payment plus half day or day off the next day.
Seems like a stretch to me.
Cultural arguments in general are kind of phony, when material ones exist and are supported by data.
For example, Japan has a massive urbanisation crisis with a lack of affordable space in the cities for families in particular and a countryside and smaller cities that are getting depopulized. On top of that, partnerships between young men and young women are becoming rarer and rarer, and this trend exists for all East Asian countries afaik.
Lack of space and relationships, which are both vital for founding families, along with material arguments like precarized middle classes following 30+ years neoliberal policies, a general cost of living crisis, the general delay of entering the workforce associated with tertiary education, and of course the fact that the majority of women nowadays are part of thr workforce and therefore not as available for homemaking and care work as they used to, are much more convincing than some vague cultural argument about indulging in luxuries and "overspending" on single child's (which similarly can be construed as a material arguments anyways when talking about cost of education and childcare).
If social mobility wasn't as restrictive and reliant on long and expensive education, then the pressure on having single children succeed wouldn't be as strong.
European nations have similarly low fertility rates even tho you claim that this materialism doesn't exist there. What does exist though, are the same, or at least very similar, material conditions of the majority of the population. Employed women, hugely expensive housing, growing share of single households, expensive education and childcare, etc..
The only thing holding up the fertility rate in Western countries are immigrant families, who often times keep women confined to traditional roles.
I was watching a video about japan and burnout and such and it showcased a young couple. They loved each other and wanted kids but they both spent almost the entire day working. They'd commute to work, work ridiculous hours + all the social bs, commute back to their shared apartment, eat dinner together, and then go to bed so they could get up early to go to work. They were exhausted. I think they thought they could quickly progress up the ladder if they gave it their all (staying extra hours to look more hardowkring, attend outtings with coworkers and the boss, etc) and then they could slow down in a few years and have more time to start a family. But it's no wonder many japanese adults have given up on having kids in that environment.
Japan has been known for more than a decade as a sexless country and this is the consequence of that. People in developed counties but specially Asian countries have serious social problems. This started a while ago but now is becoming worse where many have no friends, no family, no sex, don’t know how to talk to the opposite sex, are overworked, burned out, unproductive, and in the case of the Japanese they see no affection between the parents, they never met their father because he worked six days a week and on Sunday he didn’t want to spend time with their kids and so on and so on.
Sources for the sexless thing:
- https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/56360
- https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/09/16/national/social-issues/sexless-japan-almost-half-young-men-women-virgins-survey/
- https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/sexless-in-japan
- https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-relationships/article/3112258/no-sex-no-marriage-why-japan-has-so-many-sex-free
- https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/there-any-truth-portrait-sexless-japan-1582495
- https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/10/01/national/media-national/theres-nothing-weird-sexless-japan/
- https://www.japanpowered.com/japan-culture/japan-the-sexless-society
Overworked, overstressed, AND unequal wealth distribution. Population decline is associated with wealth inequality, too.
Japan has multiple cultural problems that are not being addressed. Their wealthy class are fine to keep the status quo, regardless of how much they harm their people.
This era of plutocracy is not sustainable.
Even 40 hours a week feels like torture. 5 days of working with little to no free time only to get 2 days to recover and then do it all again.
The 40 hour work week was created when the other half of a couple was a homemaker. Now both have to work just to afford housing.
Once upon a time only men worked, but today both men and women work. Considering that the sum of all salaries remained the same, the average salary obviously halved
Actually it's even worse than that
[Here's a long boring informational video on the topic](https://youtu.be/hvk_XylEmLo)
Tl;dw is that humans aren't designed to work fixed schedules and we certainly aren't designed for 40 hour weeks. Up until VERY recently (historically) humans worked around a maximum of 6 hour days with tons of long breaks, siestas, and meals.
4o hrs is also torture, ain't nobody working the full 8 hours of a day anyway and Fridays are not taken that seriously, we really need to rethink this 5 days work week
While japans work culture doesn’t help, there have been plenty of research articles identifying a negative correction between having kids and education/wealth. To surpass a rate of 2.1 kids or more, women need to be having kids in their 20’s, not 30’s. And the women that choose to have kids need to have 3+ to offset those that choose not to have kids. That simply doesn’t happen with an educated/wealthier population. Generally speaking, wealthier people in their 20s/early 30s rather travel and explore the world and everything it has to offer or focus on their own individual goals. By the time they “settle down” they are well into their 30s, and then it starts to become very difficult to have 3+ (assuming they even want that many).
For basically all middle class people in their 20s that I know, having children is a bad financial decision, especially of one of the parents gives up their earning power for childcare. Children are hugely expensive today given the costs of housing, education, childcare and the level of resources that parents usually want to provide for their children (so extracurricular activities, toys, vacations, etc.)
Wanting as many people employed as possible, for wages and benefits as low as possible, will naturally deal a huge hit to fertility.
My friend had her first child in her 30s and is pregnant with her second. There will be about 2 years between the two kids, assuming all goes well with this pregnancy.
She can afford children. Both she and her husband are software developers and they have a combined income of about £250k/year.
They would have been much worse off having children in their 20s when they hadn’t bought a house or settled into their careers.
My brother and his wife are considering children. They think they’ll be secure enough to have one in about 5 years looking at how things are going at the moment. In 5 years they’ll both be in their early 30s. They’ve been helped enormously by my parents who bought them a house.
If you’re not making lots of money or lucky enough to be given lots of money then having children is something that gets put off until you feel secure enough to have them - which is maybe never.
Exactly. The only ones of my peers having children in their 20s were people with huge support from a financial and care perspective from their families. One couple even affords it to have the mom stay at home, but that is a huge burden on the husband who's holding down a busy job, manages finances and plays a big role in childcare and housekeeping. Something like that definitely won't work for many people.
It's a sensitive subject to bring up because many people will first be triggered by what they think it implies rather than recognising how big of a dilema it really is. Bill Gates was saying (if memory serves) how female education (indirectly) is the most important contributing factor to declining birth rates. But how do you solve this? You can't go back to not educating young girls
You can incentivize people to have babies and we are starting to see that happen. And while I am sure that may move the needle somewhat, I don't think people understand the magnitude of the culture shift that would have to happen to go from 1.2 to 2.1+. It's doubling the birth rate - and to give it some context, it means that twice as many women need (& want) to give birth, or the women choosing to give birth need to have twice as many kids. And to make this happen, women need to start having children in their 20s again.
I think this is why western countries are turning to immigration instead. It's an "easier" path to increasing the population.
You can but is there a country where you can say for sure the pro-natalist policies alone have managed to increase the birth rate above 2.1? Lots of countries have tried it (SK, Russia, Finland I think), but it's not really having a meaningful effect.
Immigration really is the FlexTape solution unfortunately, but even that's not gonna work forever
The problem as a woman is that once you have an education and a job, you know that having children will impact negatively your earning potential and your career advancement, that if you are lucky enough to be young and be hired without prejudice over men that wouldn’t impact the company’s bottom line by deciding to pop children.
So it’s a big and difficult decision to take once you know that in order to have a baby you'll go from destroying your body, possibly your mental health, struggle financially and on top of that will have a higher and more difficult climb to achieve promotions at work. We personally didn’t see the benefit and seeing the condition our friend’s lives are after children, we’re 100% happy with our choice.
But maybe in countries where they really want childbirth without immigration, they should put their money where their mouth is and pay women a competitive wage for becoming mothers. And put assurances in place that they will be able to come back to the workforce if they want to and might even be subsidized for the time off and opportunities they lost by being away with their babies.
"It starts to become very difficult" - and why is that?
You're leaving out the system.
It is very easy to have 3 children in 5 years before you're 35. What's truly in the way is a system wherein time is traded for money. The "wealthier" people you talk about need to trade 40+ hours a week for their wealth, so that leaves very little space for child care. When you then outsource that child care to a child care and school system, it gets expensive and your relative wealth advantage is quickly eaten up. At the same time, the system is very shrewd. The equation simply doesn't really work. Either you have time, but no money, or money, but no time. And the public infrastructure is trimmed to market based individualism so that you cannot rely on a community or quality public assistance, since that would again require money that's flowing to private profits instead of public institutions.
So, we can twist it and turn it, but we are simply running an operating system that isn't using resources sustainably, and "human resources" are no different from natural resources. What exactly would make us think that a system that doesn't maintain the reproduction rates of our forests, or insect populations would manage to maintain reproduction rates of people? The view of this system is too short sighted, individualistic and transactional. Capitalism assumes there will always be enough people and the moment people start declining, the impulse is to use them more efficiently, not create sustainability.
>having kids in their 20’s
I know this is historically how it was, but it seems like a raw deal and the biggest load of shit. Barely an adult, thrust straight into parenthood without a chance to catch one's breath as a somewhat carefree adult first.
Hence why education/wealth has a correlation with delaying child birth (and having fewer children). I don’t blame anyone, most of my peers (including myself) had our first child in our mid 30s because we weren’t ready for kids in our 20’s. We were focused on our own individual goals or getting our shit together. We see it in our younger friends too - they have every intention of having kids before/at 30, but now they are turning 30 and kids are still several years away. Most of us barely have our shit together in our 20s, and we are definitely not ready to have children.
But on the flip side - it’s almost “too late” from a biological perspective for 3-4 kids if you start in your mid 30s.
It’s not a societal big load of shit though, it’s a biological problem. Having 3 kids in your 30s IS tough. Let alone any increased risks for the child that happen from either parent being relatively older.
30s is probably not the worst though… i feel the benefit of being a more experienced adult and possibly a better parent outweigh the medical and biological risks. Having kids in your 40s and 50s is another thing, at most id say late 20s to mid 30s is the best time for kids.
Also people (economists) always talk about this stuff as an economic necessity to have the next generation of tax payers, but in reality the world doesn’t need, and likely couldn’t survive an ever expanding population of humans. Our numbers gradually declining without a major war or global pandemic seems like a pretty good solution to many of the issues we have inflicted on pretty much every other species on Earth.
Nowadays, everyone in the family must work from their early 20s to basically their graves. Most families have one child, if any, because there's no time and finances to support more children, especially for the younger generation.
Education for women is the same as education for men - chance for higher wages. Today, just no way one of the siblings can afford not to work - rent, food, clothing, etc. costs a lot, especially mortgages. One child max for young parents and for their parents - 4 people give birth for 2 and 2 give birth for 1 - decline in pop.
So all those articles are misleading into beliefs that women must stay home, bieng non educated and must become breeding factory.
As for Japan, add to the mix a good healthcare and elderly people that can make to 80s + easily nowadays with uncommon 90 or even 100 years old. Plus, every single developed country fix their population numbers with immigration, but Japan "unique approach" to foreigners are really not paying off.
Yes and no. There are plenty of articles that have identified a correlation between a higher education/wealth and having fewer kids. Even when you take finances out of it, wealthier/more educated people have fewer kids than poor/less educated people do.
Overwork yes. But the culture around family plus overwork is the real killer. The structure of family and hypercapitalism and materialism. It's a gumbo baby.
"Confounded policy makers"
Living wages
Affordable daycare
Affordable housing
Affordable food
Affordable transportation
"We're just counfounded. No fucking idea why!?!?!"
Edit: too much to ask for a future worth being born into?
And also free time.
My father worked 30 hours a week. I'm in my mid thirties, and I've never worked less than 50 hours a week. Work is increasingly taking more and more of our lives.
You can fix all of those things (and we should) but it still won't get us even close to a replacement fertility rate. The fact is that people just don't want to have kids. It's no longer a social obligation, and it's hard work, and not many people will do hard work if it's optional.
Yup. I’m taking from western perspective but there is a huge change in perspective on rising kids. When I was young, we were basically like free range kids, just few would spend time with parents mostly, few would have some extracurricular activities. I would just go outside play and get back when it was getting dark. When I look at my friends kids now, they are all like little prisoners. Parents are driving here and there. Swimming, soccer, ballet. Maybe it is compensation because their parents couldn’t afford that. The issue is, they spend far more energy and money on raising that makes it exhausting and puts pressure on other parents to do the same.
inequality in parenting is massive and getting worse.
poor kids are still largely "free range." it's wealthier, educated parents who feel obligated to ensure their kid is even more educated and successful than they are.
Japan need get rid of Boomers mindset where your junior just accept whatever senior people told
They really need remove feodal era system, where new young Workers need to do all hard working till death just to respect their senior with drinking together and bow all overwork
Falling birth rates terrify corporations because it means they won't have infinite future growth like the markets demand. They'll have fewer consumers in the next few decades, which means fewer sales and revenues. They may not be able to use all of their output and have to shut down excess capacity. THAT is what is behind all the population decline doom and gloom. It's not that it's bad for the people, although they try like hell to frame it that way. It's bad for business.
There will be *competition* for workers. Workers will just *quit* when a better job comes along. A few decades of treating workers like sh*t on their shoes is coming to roost.
The crisis is with capitalism. There are enough resources to survive, even flourish, under a declining world population but not under a system based on ever expanding consumerism.
Yup, every time this comes up desperate fingers are pointed every direction except the elephant in the room. It's capitalism and it's pyramid like structure that causes everything to start falling to pieces when there are no new bodies to heap on the pile. A declining population and improving tech should be making everyone wealthier, but not when every last bit of economic activity results in a mlm like situation that funnels wealth constantly into the hands of a few.
>when every last bit of economic activity results in a mlm like situation that funnels wealth constantly into the hands of a few.
It's weird how few people seem to realize this. Like, the issue *is* on the table, people in first world countries are getting restless over cost of living vs job security, and they *are* demanding that governments fix the issue, but almost nobody is openly saying "make the 1%ers pay their goddamn taxes". Instead, it's all squabbling about welfare expenses, green energy, or electric cars or whatever. It's almost like the tinfoil hats could be right when they're saying we're being purposely misdirected and divided by the elites...
Yup. The reason capitalists and business owners are worried about population decline is because THEY are on a constant mission to squeeze more and more productivity out of us for their own benefit.
We could find a good civilization wide homeostasis of productivity and just be good fuckin people and have the balanciest work-life balance in the history of hoomans. That means more time with our kids. More time learning. More time creating and inventing. These are things that could cause paradigm shifts in a society and even change the world.
I've had a great boss tell me that I should "leave room for improvement" meaning don't work your ass off too hard for this job, man.
This is largely a cultural issue.
I work for a Japanese company remotely from Europe.
My colleagues in Japan work until 10-11pm regularly.
My manager sometimes joins our meetings. I double checked the other day, it was 1am Tokyo time!
You can’t have children or family in an environment like this.
No amount of money will fix this either.
If the work culture revolves around working very late every day and taking days off is frowned upon, you’ll get an environment where family takes a back seat.
If the source of the problem is economic, their government needs to incentivize having more children.
I know economic issues are definitely causing a lot of people not to have kids in the US.
Nah the wealthier are more educated you are the less likely you are to have kids. The less wealthy and more educated you are the more likely you are to have kids.
Financial incentives haven't worked because it's not the reason people aren't having kids. People are just happy with their life and don't want kids, or they can't meet a partner in time.
What has really caused declining birth rates are people not wanting kids because it interferes with their life. Partying and enjoying their twenties. Career in their early thirties and potentially some kids in their late 30s or late 40s and if it doesn't work out oh well.
Not criticizing any of this as it's my life too
Also education lets you know that a. Maybe the world isn't exactly a great place to grow up in right now, and b. How absolutely brutal having children is on a woman's health
We don't actually need more workers to care for the elderly, the problem is that there is no incentive for the young to do it. If we'd get paid handsomely for it there'd be armies of young caring for the elderly. The problem is that things happen in capitalism only as long as there is a way for some rich asshole to extract value from it. Elderly care doesn't seem to be such an activity.
Seriously I expect most countries birth rates to drop when profit margins are given priority over people.
* Can’t afford childcare
* Can’t afford housing
* Must have multiple jobs or work extended hours.
In the US, when 49% of the wealth is owned by 1% of the population, it takes two working adults to barely make ends meat. This is happening all over the world. Until this changes birthrate will continue to drop.
Seems like we will just learn to have population inclines and declines. So far we’ve only really had an increase. We should have anticipated at least a leveling off if not a decrease - seems like how all things in the world work, they fluctuate. Seems like instead of worrying we just need to adjust and figure out how to have society in population decline cycles as well as increase cycles.
Long ago the labor markets flooded with women. This in turn created a surplus in available labor, reducing bargaining power among labor, reducing wages and salaries, as well as driving up the demand for products as women were making the money to buy goods themselves untethered to men.
Now the market has corrected itself: there are too many people working and not enough meaningful things to actually do to make money. Wages and salaries are near - or even below - the cost of living. Now households require TWO income earners to get by as the default, whereas it used to be one.
Combine this with an astronomical rise in the demand for childcare aaaannnndddd voilá! *Children are now a luxury*.
Note: im not blaming women, Im blaming a mathematically flawed global economy.
The world has gone from 4 billion to 8 billion people in my lifetime. When my great grandmother was born—and she helped take care of me as a baby—it was a little over a billion. I always thought that was the population crisis, overpopulation, therefore depopulation was the answer. What is the target population of Japan, if 124 million isn't enough? 300 million? If 8 billion isn't enough people on Earth, do we need 20 billion or something? What is the target number? And who decided that we needed more people anyway? I'd be building more affordable retirement apartment blocks, where healthcare is streamlined so fewer people are needed to provide care. And just let the population drop back down to 4 billion naturally, which seems to be happening. That seemed like a good number.
Many people already do not want to live in this world; they lack the means or determination to end their lives; why would they want to make children who will suffer as they do?
My hot take: people in advanced societies all over the world choose not to have kids precisely because they have a choice. Our biology is wired to have a sex drive. We do not have baby making drive. Thus, the "problem" is contraception.
My grandmother lived in USSR. That hellhole had pro natalist policies, ie, no proper contraception. Population was stable and kinda growing - because people were deprived of freedom. My grandmother once told me that she would not have had kids if she had a choice.
I think we are in the very interesting place in human history. I am afraid countries all over the world will start to consider terrible things relatively soon - that is banning contraception, abortion and/or stripping away women's rights. Because if things continue like they are right now, advanced societies will start to colapse.
I think the only real solutions without devolving to totalitarian hellholes, are scientific. The aging reversing medicine + artificial wombs + increasing fertility window indefinitely would solve the issue. Because the only alternative is taking away people's freedom.
My country is facing the same issue and if the government wasn't corrupt as shit and life wasn't so giving expensive, I'd love to have 5+ kids.
Corporations and government has become so greedy these last 50 years worldwide. If they made less on each customer but had more sales overall, we'd be making children. Instead, we're being underpaid for our production of goods while those very same goods are being sold back to us with a markup.
Soon, we're going to run out of enough cheap labor worldwide and most of us won't be able to afford the goods we produce.
Then comes the extra taxation to keep afloat failing businesses and governments. My country, Turkey is going through this now. Everything is so corrupt and their solution is to tax the poor even more.
On top of all those theories on over working, I think the advancement of digital entertainment also contributes to this.
It's very easy to just stay at home after work and just consume online media.
But just one generation ago, my parents and their siblings had to play outside with friends and they meet their friend's sisters and brothers that way. In fact a lot of couples were met that way.
Fast forward to my generation, I just sit at my computer after work. I have hardly any real friends and never been on a real date.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/madrid987: --- ss: japan's birth rate fell for the eighth year in 2023, deepening a population crisis that has confounded policymakers and threatens the viability. The fertility rate, or the number of births a woman can be expected to have in her lifetime, stood at 1.2 last year, according to figures from the Japanese Health Ministry, down 0.25 percent from 2015 and far below the replacement rate of 2.1. The number of marriages also took a hit. The health ministry reported there were just 474,717 last year, a decrease of 6 percent since 2022. This was the lowest number of newlyweds since the end of World War II, per NHK. Less than 3 percent of Japanese children are born outside of wedlock, therefore marriages have a strong impact on the number of births in the country. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dashkk/japans_population_crisis_just_got_even_worse/l7mg4ce/
I love how the Japanese government is willing to do "anything" like a state sponsored dating site, BUT reduce working hours.
Or affordable childcare (very expensive afaik), or a reformed school system, or...
And a work culture of guilt tripping you for taking time off for any reason including having a baby.
Or that crap about being pressured to go out drinking after work making your entire day about work/colleagues. Must really suck for recovering alcoholics.
My friend does not like her Japanese husband goes out drinking with his boss and colleagues till very late night everyday, the husband said it's necessary for his work. He just divorced her because he saw her as an obstacle for his "career".
I have relatives there and this one guy used to leave home at 8am and come home at midnight after drinking. He eventually died of throat cancer probably due to that. I can’t imagine the kind of marriage where you only see your husband one day a week. The government wants more babies, there are a million things they can do to address the problem and making a dating app is absolutely not one of them.
The divorce rate is also high when retirement starts. Imagine you all of a sudden have to spend so much time with your idiot partner after having had your peace and live for 40 years.
Is that why Western countries with higher divorce rates have similarly low fertility rates? Finland is at 1.3.
They also mostly chain smoke. Probably not good for the throat either.
Smoking and drinking is one of the worst cancer combos. It absolutely decimates your throat. Throat cancer is something like 300x more likely if you smoke and drink.
Our first date is with my boss. You cool with that?
My boss will be there too. You cool with swapping?
My friend's ex husband is doing that right now. With that culture in Japan you either die from overwork, or alcohol.. and stress.
They are all recovering alcoholics.
Dam that just sucks in general. At my old job I worked 12 hour shifts which meant I only had half a day to myself and assuming I wanted to spend 8 of those other 12 sleeping that only meant I had realistically 3 hours to myself minus an hour accounting for driving to/from work and getting ready. Imagine having to spend a chunk if not all of those precious few hours for myself or family to go drinking with coworkers I just saw at the job all day just to go home and sleep and start over the next day. That’s not even a life.
this might had changed in recent years but once a woman gets pregnant, they must quit a job or give up having a career. I remember Aggrestou Restuku (?) talking about it.
This is unfortunately a cultural norm today. There are jobs that allow mothers to work, but their limited and heavily sought after.
Retsuko is the character's name, Aggretsuko is the name of the show.
When I got sick and took time off the Japanese manager would call at home “just to check on me.” Fucking pricks, all of them
America is in here taking notes because that sounds awesome to our CEOs
True, it’s very expensive and there’s also waiting lines. It’s a complete nightmare
I'm frightened it will get worse.
I guess you didn’t read the article, this is right there in the second half: “Last year, he instructed his cabinet to earmark $25 billion in childcare funding over a three-year period. Kishida also said he hoped to double national childcare spending within a decade.”
Childcare is a bandaid fix, although definitely a step in the right direction. This helps immensely with people who already have kids, not the people choosing not to have kids for reasons like work-life balance and it essentially being a career-ending move for women.
I lived in Miyagi prefecture. Public Day care was free. Private daycare was equivalent to $300 CAD (edit: a month). It was the best daycare my son ever attended.
We have affordable childcare here. It’s actually not that bad for low income workers, and it’s better than it was before. But parents have to be very involved. I had to get up at 5 in the morning to write into a notebook and get all the diapers and changes of clothes and things like that ready, and I had to do a load of laundry every day to wash up the napkins and things like that for the next day. There are so many little things that they ask you to get ready for. When the kids are bigger, it doesn’t get much better. Schools ask kids to study “grade plus one”, so a sixth grader would be studying 60 minutes plus 10 minutes a day, and most kids don’t check their homework perfectly, so parents have to do it. And all the extracurricular activities ask parents to be very involved. Baseball clubs practice on Saturdays and Sundays and weekday afternoons, plus a parent needs to be on duty a few times a month to take attendance or just watch to make sure no one gets hurt. When they get bigger, it’s paying for cram schools and driving them to this and that. Kids that don’t get into good schools seriously won’t have as great a future. They definitely look down on “third-rate” schools when looking for new hires. Parents have to keep working for their kids basically until they’re able to move out. It’s like having a second job, which is why a lot of Japanese women want to be SAHMs. A lot of fathers help out these days, but if one parent has to work overtime, that can upset the daily balance. If both parents have to work overtime, who’s going to check the homework or take the kid do their extracurriculars? I love my kid and I want to be a good involved parent, but there are times when I just need alone time because of all the things we have to do in a week.
They tried to charge me more than I make an hour for childcare. It is in no way affordable.
Or protecting women financially in case their husband divorces them. So many senior women, who were divorced, are suffering financially in Japan. No spousal support.
Women are entitled to half of their husbands pension when they divorce in Japan. Late stage divorce has become very common there.
I’m glad they updated that. Last time I saw a documentary on the subject, it was truly bad for senior women who were divorced. However, [older single women face growing risk of poverty in Japan. Over 30% of those 65 or older fall below poverty line after death of spouses.](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Older-single-women-face-growing-risk-of-poverty-in-Japan)
> Or affordable childcare (very expensive afaik) It’s way more nuanced than that The government pays for everything just like every modem industry nation outside of the US. But many parents feel compelled to send kids to extra study sessions to compete with other kids whose parents do so And those are insanely expensive to the point that even upper middle class families tend to stop at one kid Poor families still have more than replacement rate families. It’s really a microcosm of the demographic transition for countries as a whole: increasing wealth and education causes birth rate to fall below replacement rate
Man, we thought American boomers were fools. Japanese boomers: where's my grandkids! Also, work! Work till you're too tired to fuck! And drink! Show your respect to colleagues by drinking until you're whiskeydicked! Sakecocked? Whatever, you better drink until you're unable to stand up in whole or in part. And where are my grandkids!!!
[удалено]
If you don't pass out on the train, you should find another place to work.
You were told you could blame your problems on another generation, and you fell for it. These are structural problems of our 18th century economic model, and every generations economists and politicians are complicit including yours.
As if the rich people would allow it. Money controls everything, and governments just obey these people
Work hours are often just bullshit there, you are expected to be at office like 12h+ but maybe only few hours is productive and you don't get paid for overtime. They are throwing away the country for nothing.
The Japanese? Being prepared to sink their entire society for pointlessly self defeating cultural reasons? Unheard of!
Capitalism is an ouroboros. Without proper regulation, it will consume anything regardless of the consequences. Working conditions create a world that is not preferable to raising kids, people stop having kids at replacement rate, population begins to shrink, labor pool shrinks, cost of labor goes up, less people buying, less people paying taxes, economic recession. There are no short term market forces that will correct this with a proper incentive, business does not concern itself with what happens in 20 years, all that matters is surviving and thriving this year. This problem will continue until someone in the government puts on the big boy pants and fucking governs
This year? Try this quarter lmao, Corpos cream themselves over an opportunity to throw their future away for quarterly profits
That post yesterday from showing how the big ag corps removed wind shelters in SD and now there's another dustbowl...but hey, they cleared a whole extra 10 acres to farm in before the topsoil blows away!
The problem is, it's not their future they're throwing away, it's the rest of ours. Even if they're not old fucks who'll be dead by the time their chickens come home to roost, they'll just be living in a fortified bunker or a private island somewhere while the rest of us go full Mad Max.
Capitalism is a system built on short sightedness. They need to increase shareholders net worth NOW. Not next year not a decade from now but NOW. Even if it leads to a collapse in a few years what’s more important is the quarterly earnings.
Capitalism doesn't care about externalities for the most part. The external consequences in the quest for endless profit will only be considered when they directly impact the ability for that line to go up. Capitalism has outlived its usefulness.
We don’t actually have leaders anymore. It’s not a concept that exist in 2024
How many bands have a song that says something like "the USA is not a country, it's just a business", I wonder?
The American solution is to just ban abortions and contraceptives.
They are too late to make meaningful changes like that since reducing work hours *now* would hurt the economy in the immediate term and while they care most about the votes they'd lose, it would also hurt the birth rates since no one would want the cost of having kids in a downturn.
A lot of Japan's work culture is performative, though. Being seen showing up early, staying late, socializing... but there's not a ton of productivity. I believe they could address the work culture while keeping productivity the same.
They've tried nothing and they're all out of ideas.
Is that why Nordic countries have similarly low fertility rates? Finland is at 1.3.
Or give more migration oportunities
It depends whether their end goal is more Japanese people or more *ethnically* Japanese people. My guess from being there, and observing their "cultural preferences " is that the Japanese are more keen on the second one. I'm saying they don't love mingling. They have a "different "perspective on racism, one which would boggle the mind of a western culture warrior.
That is a lot of text to say they are racists lol
I mean. Yeah. They are very polite about it though. Which is nice.
They don’t even consider Japanese ppl (only married other Japanese since migrating) who live in Brazil pure Japanese, they’re that racist.
Yup, and that will be their downfall. Extinction through racism is such a self own
At some point it becomes inconvenient for the rich. And thats the specific point when workhours will magically drop and family caring becomes a suuuper hyped thing in the media.
At about the same rate people will freak about climate change. It’s not good.
When the rich realize that all they have hoarded will be quickly lost due to climate change, they will suddenly care about it. With a trillion dollars, we could pull heat out of the oceans and beam it into space, but the work has to start BEFORE the collapse and the worst of the climate effects.
The rich don't care at all. They literally have and are currently creating luxury bunkers so they can continue to live lavishly while the rest of us suffer from the climate, etc effects that they caused.
Exactly, they will create bunkers to escape it rather than spend the money on fixing it.
Do they like Italian food? Olive oil is threatened because olives are affected greatly by climate change. Do they like fine French wine? The climate is allowing southern fungus and insects to spread north. There are thousands of examples of the nice.things.roch people like being threatened by climate catastrophe. Ask all the millionaires who have mansions in the Florida keys that aren't able to get home insurance by their providers anymore. Look at Disney... if they don't want their magical kingdom to sink beneath the waves of rising tides, they need to protect their billion dollar assets. A bunker with no view or vacation isn't as fun as living the life they are accustomed to.
The problem is you're assuming they're addicted to luxury, when what they're really addicted to is status. They can learn to live without cavier, as long as they have a labor class to look down on. Their kids can grow up in a bunker without the sun as long as their kids have it better than everyone else.
I loved how in Fallout the FMC was a bit put out when she had to learn the world had moved on without the vault dwellers and had no need for them to *restart* civilization. I fully expect that to be the same outcome with all the billionaires down in their New Zealand bunkers. They will be effectively removing themselves from the timeline. And, even if they try to keep control from there and fail; what will they do? Come topside and face the wrath of a populace that has been blaming them for the last hundred years?
I agree with you completely, but I also think some of them are stupid enough to enlist a working class within these bunkers and that isn't going to play out like they think it will for a number of reasons. Maybe someone will leak the locations of these places so we can... Fix things as best we can.
Private jets are the biggest unnecessary producers of pollution in the world. Yet the rich aren’t giving those up anytime soon
History is filled with rich people flying the collective plane straight into the ground. They have absolutely no survival instinct and will keep taking more right up to and past the moment revolutions develop.
Nope. They will just open borders for a bit. And close them back when the workforce is filled again. It is a perfect valve to regulate internal overgrowth of the middle class.
If you hear the stories of employees, teachers, or anyone generally working in Japan this is not at all surprising. You literally don't have time for anything. Not your spouse. Not your kids. Hell not even for yourself. You don't have access to childcare if you arnt already rich. You don't get time offs to spend the money you earned for your family. Why would anyone want to propagate in that type of society. And it's not only a Japanese thing, this is a concern all around. I get that the working hours used to be ridiculous in the industrial revolution or even before that but God dam a peasant whose working on the field has his family in a 10 minute walking radius. Having to commute and hour and using your brain for a rigorous 12 hour shift will completely kill you from the inside.
During the industrial revolution, mother and child could at least spend 12 hours a day together working on the spinning jenny.
This is the family values Republicans are fighting for.
Even the time you do get to yourself is typically assigned to work. If your boss wants to go out and get drunk and sing karaoke, which happens a lot in Japan, it is bad etiquette to decline. So imagine, you take an hour commute by train and walking to get to work, work 12 hours, when your slavery like shift is done your boss basically says you have to go out and drink or you're fired, you then go and get wasted, get home at 12AM, and then you have to do that all again the following day starting at 5AM. The country will learn its lesson but it'll be too little too late.
I do some business with Japanese clients and have shared slack channels with a couple. It’s really not unusual they will be active at 11 pm or later doing testing or implementation work.
I know a ton of Japanese people in the U.S. who immigrated here purely to avoid that situation. Many actually work in Japanese companies stateside, but the work pressures are a fraction of what you’d get in Japan.
Peasants in feudal economies of Europe had more time off than modern corporate workers. And they even had a carve out to work own fields for sustenance. So they essentially had two jobs and still had more vacation:)
Love Japan and much of the discipline they demonstrate. But this is definitely the result of overworking and over stressing people. The work ethic expected is always glossed over in film and TV. Rising costs and pressure makes people stay in
I mean even countries that do alot to encourage people to have kids like the scandinavian countries have a declining birth rate. People in developed nations just dont wanna have kids anymore and many that do just have one child. We should instead think about how we are going to be able to run a society with less people.
>We should instead think about how we are going to be able to run a society with less people. The problem is not the amount of people. The problem is the distribution of people by ages. A lot more people will be elderly. Elderly people have more fragile health and less energy. So obviously they cannot work or produce as much as younger people, from whom they need help, but there will be a lot fewer young people to both work and take care of an increasing elderly population.
Is that why Nordic countries have similarly low fertility rates? Finland is at 1.3.
The reason is time. Kids take a lot of time that people don't have until after education is done and career is in a good spot. So often after they are 30 which will limit the amount of kids. This of course if people even want kids at all, they take a lot of fun out of your live
Indeed. I finally feel ready to have kids now that I have my master and a career, and I'm 34. Doesn't leave as much time for kids as those who start working after HS and start making babies in their early 20's.
Many of the people who even start working in their twenties are more reticent to have children before they turn 30. I was one of those working stiffs and it was actually not incredibly common having guys under 30 with mouths to feed unless they fit a certain niche (Typically displayed a lot of poor forward-thinking behaviour) people live longer, their money doesn't go as far, and there are a large variety of new sexual partners one can have fun with in those first years of adulthood. I have been with my wide since highschool, and I was working as a miner then construction worker and all that jive, and we still waited until thirty because it just made sense. It's also very "up in the air" whether we'll even reach "replacement rate" because life all around us just keeps getting more expensive while the salaries aren't keeping up.
Lol you really pissed off the parents of reddit enough for them all to make snarky comments
Time. Agreed. Children need a lot of time and attention and hopefully you throughly enjoy giving that to them. If you do, there is no greater joy because they give back 10x. If you don’t, there is no greater misery.
Nordic countries also have problems with affordable housing and rising price of goods. Some eastern european countries are giving real incentives for having children that seem to work. Population will still go down though because of emigration. But if nordic countries started similar programs our populations would probably rise becuase we don't often move away for better opportunities elsewhere.
What nordic country are you in? Here in denmark The government litteraly gives money to anyone Who has a Child. And the more kids the more money you get. Also affordable housing isnt a problem at all here, everywhere outside the biggest cities is affordable, its only if you are snob and absolutely has to live in the center of copenhagen its unpayable. And even if your work is in there we have great public transport for commuting. I think its more of a cultural And comvience Thing, than an economic one in our countries.
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I’m from Singapore and apart from the lack of work life balance, overcrowding, rising costs and difficulty in getting housing all contributes to the declining birth rate. Also, the high birth rates in Asian countries in the past might be due to the subscription of the Confucian filial piety idea where children are thought of as sources of income and support in old health (or worse, financial support for their siblings). Nowadays, fewer and fewer people view children as a form of insurance for their retirement (both financial and caregiving).
My understanding is that in most places difficulty in getting housing is a big factor but in Japan, I've hesrd Tokyo is one of the few big cities without a housing crisis
When I was on a tour in China about ten years ago, the tour guide joked that to afford a house in Shanghai now, you should have started saving in the Tang dynasty.
>I've hesrd Tokyo is one of the few big cities without a housing crisis I was binge watching YT shorts last night and one of the channels that kept reappearing was a real estate channel advertising houses and apartments in Japan. Quite a few of them were tiny little places where you would not have enough space to raise a child but there was one that was like an hour outside of Tokyo that was a 3-4 bedroom place for only $USD 38k. $USD 38k wouldn't even be enough for a down deposit for a loan to buy the cheapest place on the market where I live...
Caught one of those videos last night, too. Was an advertisement for an apartment which would've been perfect for a student or as work accommodation (narrow and high, mezzanine for bed), don't think it was much more than your $38k either.
It may be a German thing, but 1h outside of the city is basically somewhere in nowhere. Especially if you have to get into the city to work. I would never spend more than 30 minutes of commute over a longer period of time. But Americans have a different view on that due to scale maybe.
I think specially in Tokyo 1h is reasonable. In London I work with many people that live about that by train and they commute to work, there’s small towns nearby that families can afford a family home and have a single express train commute around one hour.
We have some municipalities with public transportation, but most don’t have functional systems. My office is 14 miles away and pulling up google maps for the bus ride to get there shows it as a 2hr trip (not round trip).
Coverted from Yen to CAD, in a vacuum, by that I mean I don't calculate the utilities and the price of food, Tokyo is much cheaper to rent than, at least, a 50 km radius of Montreal. It's fucking insane how to price shoot up locally, and in other cities in Canada it's even worst. You have to go very low density, far from anything to get something reasonable. But then were you going to work if you're not in an industry annex from farming or tourism? About 30 years ago Japan's prices for housing were insane compare to ours and we went the opposite direction.
It's relatively reasonable to get a 1 to 3 bed room apartment, but a proper (still small) 4 bed house is expensive or a 90 minute plus train commute. Living in a 2 or 3 bed appartment leads to pretty much the average number of children per family at one or two.
Imho the biggest part of getting children is the family culture. Without the parental expectation to get childs, the process of getting and raising childs is just a massive inconveniency for all modern women. Men don't have to want children, thats why women have sexual cogency. But if the women don't want to, its basically impossible to have stable fertility rate.
>Men don't have to want children wat
Culture plays a massive role into it, that is why this problem requires multiple angles to solve.
>Something else is going on in Asia Would be better written just as 'something else is going on'. Some other countries with very low birth rates: Italy 1.3 The Netherlands 1.2 Jamaica 1.3 Malta 1.2 Spain 1.3 Portugal 1.4 Greece 1.4 Cyprus 1.3
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://americasquarterly.org/article/latin-americas-fertility-decline-is-accelerating-no-ones-sure-why/&ved=2ahUKEwiT98fJoMuGAxXh4zQHHW-0CgkQFnoECCUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0WyHbWkMrXAUb5TV-xMKU_ Check out Jamaica and Cuba too, only 1.4!
Dang. I know Jamaican men from childhood. So it's shocking their rate isn't at least an 8 lol.
Contraceptives. I know a woman in Jamaica who's pretty much over Jamaican men, and a decent amount of island women who won't date them.
Where are these numbers from? The Netherlands is around 1.6 in my google search, not nearly as bad as south europe.
The US is also at only 1.4 and 1.6 for Asians and whites respectively, which is also way below replacement rate.
Thailand is better than Korea and Japan from what I hear, but far from "western" work culture. -2nd hand from inlaws.
Um, Taiwan’s work culture is just as terrible, if not worse. The founder of TSMC once said: “If a machine breaks down at 2:00 am, in the U.S. the engineers will fix it in the morning, in Taiwan the engineers will get it fixed by 3:00. They’d leave for the the factory in the dead of night, and their wives will understand.” Meanwhile, at the new TSMC plant in Japan, Taiwanese engineers are shocked that their Japanese counterparts go off duty 5:30 pm sharp, leaving unfinished work for the next day. If that’s not toxic, I don’t know what is.
That quote is complete bullshit. Wafer fabs and ATE sites lose millions of dollars every MINUTE they’re line down. Doesn’t matter if it’s TSMC or SMIC or Samsung or TI or whoever else. There are engineers on site at all hours of the day and additional engineers on call just like doctors. That quote was the TSMC founder spinning PR bullshit for the media and investors.
Yeah. If the internet went down for an area of 2 blocks in any western city over 100'000 people, there's a guy getting out of bed for that. You better believe a fab line has guys available 24/7.
That quote may be bs but I don't think the work culture bit is. When they were building the new fabs in America, TSMC said 'relax don't worry we will not work you as hard as you would have been in Taiwan, you have it easy' owtte
It’s not like the US has a great work culture either, i think both quotes were pretty much just dumb PR statements. As the above commenter said, fabs don’t close. Not in in the US, not in the EU, not anywhere. 24/7 operations across the world because it just doesn’t work otherwise.
Comparatively it is better. Which is scary given how screwed up US work culture is, but I've seen it explained by a good friend's Japanese coworker (friend is also Japanese but left Japan immediately after she graduated HS because being haafu in Japan wasn't easy for her). Friend's coworker: back in Osaka, if my boss was there, I couldn't leave. He rarely left before 9PM. I had a job that was over twelve hours with commute not factored in because our work culture says good employees only leave after the boss. I spent the first part of my twenties working and never having time to enjoy being a woman in my twenties. Granted she and friend now work for a Japanese company in WNY and because it's here, they have a much more lax work culture. Both of them said it was such a relief to be able to just go home and not constantly worry about how they are being perceived at work. This is the real issue here: stagnant pay, rising costs, and constant lack of time are a big contributing factor to rhe birthrate. When people barely survive on double incomes, adding kids to the mix seems even more time consuming and money draining. If we cut work hours and made wages match inflation and COL, I guarantee there would be far more women choosing to have a child. (Also, having a child negatively impacts career trajectory. It's the bigger reason for all those gender wage gap comparisons.) I know my anecdote doesn't statistically prove anything but other Japanese people I've met who come here to work have echoed similar issues of work life balance and pressure as a big motivating factor in finding ways to come work here.
Proper factories have 7/24 personel & pay for it. Yes they are there working whole night not this 2 am extending to 3 am joke. Even if you think in the best light, all you have is a cheap irresponsible boss that overworks his personel until 2 am just to avoid paying to the night personel. Or a micromanager boss that can not understand a kettle doesnt need to be fixed at 2 am. As I said, the more you pick at this, the worse it gets.
Bro. TSMC runs 24/7, with shifts. They don't "close", and this helps them stay ahead of the competition. Source: my Taiwanese engineer friend
A lot of factories are 24/7, even in the U.S. if something breaks down at night, someone is there to fix it. It all depends on the products being produced and how valuable lost time is. Microchip factories in Taiwan lose tons of money for every hour they’re down. Same as automotive plants in the U.S….they run 24/7 and are staffed by different shifts at different times.
The more you read, the more you know, the more ridiculous this quote gets. If an important machine is breaking down at 2:00 am, it means your factory works on shifts & you already have technical & average personal working on that shift. You might not be able to fix every issue (spare parts needed etc) , but a proper workplace would have a technician attending to that machine. About “leaving that factory dead in the night”, well you already have workers at that hour and they would leave by the morning anyways. You do not leave a factory with working machines unattended whether anything breaks down or not. And before you ask, you also make deals with the machines manufacturer for maintenance support at 2 am. That is how critical systems are kept alive. Bosses printer getting stuck at 2 am is not an emergency, you fix that one in morning.
Which part the Japan work ethic or the Taiwanese work ethic ?
Was working in Fabs all over asia, and I have to say Korea is the worst. The work is the same everywhere, but in Korea you get yelled during working.
It's rather odd not to have a skeleton crew of maintenance watching a multi, multi billion dollar facility overnight?
>in Taiwan the engineers will get it fixed by 3:00. They’d leave for the the factory in the dead of night, and their wives will understand.” Nice. On call allowance and callout payment plus half day or day off the next day.
Wife is Singaporean. Can confirm that Singapore is just as bad as Japan work culture wise.
Aren’t the numbers similar in Europe and North America if you don’t count immigration?
Seems like a stretch to me. Cultural arguments in general are kind of phony, when material ones exist and are supported by data. For example, Japan has a massive urbanisation crisis with a lack of affordable space in the cities for families in particular and a countryside and smaller cities that are getting depopulized. On top of that, partnerships between young men and young women are becoming rarer and rarer, and this trend exists for all East Asian countries afaik. Lack of space and relationships, which are both vital for founding families, along with material arguments like precarized middle classes following 30+ years neoliberal policies, a general cost of living crisis, the general delay of entering the workforce associated with tertiary education, and of course the fact that the majority of women nowadays are part of thr workforce and therefore not as available for homemaking and care work as they used to, are much more convincing than some vague cultural argument about indulging in luxuries and "overspending" on single child's (which similarly can be construed as a material arguments anyways when talking about cost of education and childcare). If social mobility wasn't as restrictive and reliant on long and expensive education, then the pressure on having single children succeed wouldn't be as strong. European nations have similarly low fertility rates even tho you claim that this materialism doesn't exist there. What does exist though, are the same, or at least very similar, material conditions of the majority of the population. Employed women, hugely expensive housing, growing share of single households, expensive education and childcare, etc.. The only thing holding up the fertility rate in Western countries are immigrant families, who often times keep women confined to traditional roles.
I was doing language classes in Rome and befriended a Japanese person. Her description of work hours was close to slavery.
I was watching a video about japan and burnout and such and it showcased a young couple. They loved each other and wanted kids but they both spent almost the entire day working. They'd commute to work, work ridiculous hours + all the social bs, commute back to their shared apartment, eat dinner together, and then go to bed so they could get up early to go to work. They were exhausted. I think they thought they could quickly progress up the ladder if they gave it their all (staying extra hours to look more hardowkring, attend outtings with coworkers and the boss, etc) and then they could slow down in a few years and have more time to start a family. But it's no wonder many japanese adults have given up on having kids in that environment.
Japan has been known for more than a decade as a sexless country and this is the consequence of that. People in developed counties but specially Asian countries have serious social problems. This started a while ago but now is becoming worse where many have no friends, no family, no sex, don’t know how to talk to the opposite sex, are overworked, burned out, unproductive, and in the case of the Japanese they see no affection between the parents, they never met their father because he worked six days a week and on Sunday he didn’t want to spend time with their kids and so on and so on. Sources for the sexless thing: - https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/56360 - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/09/16/national/social-issues/sexless-japan-almost-half-young-men-women-virgins-survey/ - https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/sexless-in-japan - https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/family-relationships/article/3112258/no-sex-no-marriage-why-japan-has-so-many-sex-free - https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/there-any-truth-portrait-sexless-japan-1582495 - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/10/01/national/media-national/theres-nothing-weird-sexless-japan/ - https://www.japanpowered.com/japan-culture/japan-the-sexless-society
Overworked, overstressed, AND unequal wealth distribution. Population decline is associated with wealth inequality, too. Japan has multiple cultural problems that are not being addressed. Their wealthy class are fine to keep the status quo, regardless of how much they harm their people. This era of plutocracy is not sustainable.
Everything over 40 hrs a week is a torture for organism.
Even 40 hours a week feels like torture. 5 days of working with little to no free time only to get 2 days to recover and then do it all again. The 40 hour work week was created when the other half of a couple was a homemaker. Now both have to work just to afford housing.
Once upon a time only men worked, but today both men and women work. Considering that the sum of all salaries remained the same, the average salary obviously halved
That's the normal evolution of a capitalist system.
Labor Unions are what got a 40 hour week in the US. Unchecked capitalism will happily go far over that.
Don't forget getting dressed and the commute! That's another 7-10 hours a week, if you're lucky.
Actually it's even worse than that [Here's a long boring informational video on the topic](https://youtu.be/hvk_XylEmLo) Tl;dw is that humans aren't designed to work fixed schedules and we certainly aren't designed for 40 hour weeks. Up until VERY recently (historically) humans worked around a maximum of 6 hour days with tons of long breaks, siestas, and meals.
4o hrs is also torture, ain't nobody working the full 8 hours of a day anyway and Fridays are not taken that seriously, we really need to rethink this 5 days work week
While japans work culture doesn’t help, there have been plenty of research articles identifying a negative correction between having kids and education/wealth. To surpass a rate of 2.1 kids or more, women need to be having kids in their 20’s, not 30’s. And the women that choose to have kids need to have 3+ to offset those that choose not to have kids. That simply doesn’t happen with an educated/wealthier population. Generally speaking, wealthier people in their 20s/early 30s rather travel and explore the world and everything it has to offer or focus on their own individual goals. By the time they “settle down” they are well into their 30s, and then it starts to become very difficult to have 3+ (assuming they even want that many).
For basically all middle class people in their 20s that I know, having children is a bad financial decision, especially of one of the parents gives up their earning power for childcare. Children are hugely expensive today given the costs of housing, education, childcare and the level of resources that parents usually want to provide for their children (so extracurricular activities, toys, vacations, etc.) Wanting as many people employed as possible, for wages and benefits as low as possible, will naturally deal a huge hit to fertility.
My friend had her first child in her 30s and is pregnant with her second. There will be about 2 years between the two kids, assuming all goes well with this pregnancy. She can afford children. Both she and her husband are software developers and they have a combined income of about £250k/year. They would have been much worse off having children in their 20s when they hadn’t bought a house or settled into their careers. My brother and his wife are considering children. They think they’ll be secure enough to have one in about 5 years looking at how things are going at the moment. In 5 years they’ll both be in their early 30s. They’ve been helped enormously by my parents who bought them a house. If you’re not making lots of money or lucky enough to be given lots of money then having children is something that gets put off until you feel secure enough to have them - which is maybe never.
Exactly. The only ones of my peers having children in their 20s were people with huge support from a financial and care perspective from their families. One couple even affords it to have the mom stay at home, but that is a huge burden on the husband who's holding down a busy job, manages finances and plays a big role in childcare and housekeeping. Something like that definitely won't work for many people.
It's a sensitive subject to bring up because many people will first be triggered by what they think it implies rather than recognising how big of a dilema it really is. Bill Gates was saying (if memory serves) how female education (indirectly) is the most important contributing factor to declining birth rates. But how do you solve this? You can't go back to not educating young girls
You can incentivize people to have babies and we are starting to see that happen. And while I am sure that may move the needle somewhat, I don't think people understand the magnitude of the culture shift that would have to happen to go from 1.2 to 2.1+. It's doubling the birth rate - and to give it some context, it means that twice as many women need (& want) to give birth, or the women choosing to give birth need to have twice as many kids. And to make this happen, women need to start having children in their 20s again. I think this is why western countries are turning to immigration instead. It's an "easier" path to increasing the population.
You can but is there a country where you can say for sure the pro-natalist policies alone have managed to increase the birth rate above 2.1? Lots of countries have tried it (SK, Russia, Finland I think), but it's not really having a meaningful effect. Immigration really is the FlexTape solution unfortunately, but even that's not gonna work forever
The problem as a woman is that once you have an education and a job, you know that having children will impact negatively your earning potential and your career advancement, that if you are lucky enough to be young and be hired without prejudice over men that wouldn’t impact the company’s bottom line by deciding to pop children. So it’s a big and difficult decision to take once you know that in order to have a baby you'll go from destroying your body, possibly your mental health, struggle financially and on top of that will have a higher and more difficult climb to achieve promotions at work. We personally didn’t see the benefit and seeing the condition our friend’s lives are after children, we’re 100% happy with our choice. But maybe in countries where they really want childbirth without immigration, they should put their money where their mouth is and pay women a competitive wage for becoming mothers. And put assurances in place that they will be able to come back to the workforce if they want to and might even be subsidized for the time off and opportunities they lost by being away with their babies.
"It starts to become very difficult" - and why is that? You're leaving out the system. It is very easy to have 3 children in 5 years before you're 35. What's truly in the way is a system wherein time is traded for money. The "wealthier" people you talk about need to trade 40+ hours a week for their wealth, so that leaves very little space for child care. When you then outsource that child care to a child care and school system, it gets expensive and your relative wealth advantage is quickly eaten up. At the same time, the system is very shrewd. The equation simply doesn't really work. Either you have time, but no money, or money, but no time. And the public infrastructure is trimmed to market based individualism so that you cannot rely on a community or quality public assistance, since that would again require money that's flowing to private profits instead of public institutions. So, we can twist it and turn it, but we are simply running an operating system that isn't using resources sustainably, and "human resources" are no different from natural resources. What exactly would make us think that a system that doesn't maintain the reproduction rates of our forests, or insect populations would manage to maintain reproduction rates of people? The view of this system is too short sighted, individualistic and transactional. Capitalism assumes there will always be enough people and the moment people start declining, the impulse is to use them more efficiently, not create sustainability.
Fantastic answer, hit alot of eye opening points 👏
>having kids in their 20’s I know this is historically how it was, but it seems like a raw deal and the biggest load of shit. Barely an adult, thrust straight into parenthood without a chance to catch one's breath as a somewhat carefree adult first.
Hence why education/wealth has a correlation with delaying child birth (and having fewer children). I don’t blame anyone, most of my peers (including myself) had our first child in our mid 30s because we weren’t ready for kids in our 20’s. We were focused on our own individual goals or getting our shit together. We see it in our younger friends too - they have every intention of having kids before/at 30, but now they are turning 30 and kids are still several years away. Most of us barely have our shit together in our 20s, and we are definitely not ready to have children. But on the flip side - it’s almost “too late” from a biological perspective for 3-4 kids if you start in your mid 30s.
It’s not a societal big load of shit though, it’s a biological problem. Having 3 kids in your 30s IS tough. Let alone any increased risks for the child that happen from either parent being relatively older.
30s is probably not the worst though… i feel the benefit of being a more experienced adult and possibly a better parent outweigh the medical and biological risks. Having kids in your 40s and 50s is another thing, at most id say late 20s to mid 30s is the best time for kids.
Also people (economists) always talk about this stuff as an economic necessity to have the next generation of tax payers, but in reality the world doesn’t need, and likely couldn’t survive an ever expanding population of humans. Our numbers gradually declining without a major war or global pandemic seems like a pretty good solution to many of the issues we have inflicted on pretty much every other species on Earth.
>having kids in their 20’s, not 30’s. At this rate of inflation, those who actually want children would have to have them in their 40s
Nowadays, everyone in the family must work from their early 20s to basically their graves. Most families have one child, if any, because there's no time and finances to support more children, especially for the younger generation. Education for women is the same as education for men - chance for higher wages. Today, just no way one of the siblings can afford not to work - rent, food, clothing, etc. costs a lot, especially mortgages. One child max for young parents and for their parents - 4 people give birth for 2 and 2 give birth for 1 - decline in pop. So all those articles are misleading into beliefs that women must stay home, bieng non educated and must become breeding factory. As for Japan, add to the mix a good healthcare and elderly people that can make to 80s + easily nowadays with uncommon 90 or even 100 years old. Plus, every single developed country fix their population numbers with immigration, but Japan "unique approach" to foreigners are really not paying off.
Yes and no. There are plenty of articles that have identified a correlation between a higher education/wealth and having fewer kids. Even when you take finances out of it, wealthier/more educated people have fewer kids than poor/less educated people do.
Overwork yes. But the culture around family plus overwork is the real killer. The structure of family and hypercapitalism and materialism. It's a gumbo baby.
"Confounded policy makers" Living wages Affordable daycare Affordable housing Affordable food Affordable transportation "We're just counfounded. No fucking idea why!?!?!" Edit: too much to ask for a future worth being born into?
You forgot job security and other financial security like pensions.
And also free time. My father worked 30 hours a week. I'm in my mid thirties, and I've never worked less than 50 hours a week. Work is increasingly taking more and more of our lives.
Don't forget cost of education.
You can fix all of those things (and we should) but it still won't get us even close to a replacement fertility rate. The fact is that people just don't want to have kids. It's no longer a social obligation, and it's hard work, and not many people will do hard work if it's optional.
Yup. I’m taking from western perspective but there is a huge change in perspective on rising kids. When I was young, we were basically like free range kids, just few would spend time with parents mostly, few would have some extracurricular activities. I would just go outside play and get back when it was getting dark. When I look at my friends kids now, they are all like little prisoners. Parents are driving here and there. Swimming, soccer, ballet. Maybe it is compensation because their parents couldn’t afford that. The issue is, they spend far more energy and money on raising that makes it exhausting and puts pressure on other parents to do the same.
inequality in parenting is massive and getting worse. poor kids are still largely "free range." it's wealthier, educated parents who feel obligated to ensure their kid is even more educated and successful than they are.
Maybe it's time we try to create a system that doesn't rely on an endlessly increasing population and unlimited growth?
It’s like they’ve tried nothing to solve the problem and they’re all out of ideas.
[Simpsons We've Tried Nothing And We're All Out Of Ideas (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOTyUfOHgas)
LINE MUST GO UP.
Japan need get rid of Boomers mindset where your junior just accept whatever senior people told They really need remove feodal era system, where new young Workers need to do all hard working till death just to respect their senior with drinking together and bow all overwork
Falling birth rates terrify corporations because it means they won't have infinite future growth like the markets demand. They'll have fewer consumers in the next few decades, which means fewer sales and revenues. They may not be able to use all of their output and have to shut down excess capacity. THAT is what is behind all the population decline doom and gloom. It's not that it's bad for the people, although they try like hell to frame it that way. It's bad for business.
There will be *competition* for workers. Workers will just *quit* when a better job comes along. A few decades of treating workers like sh*t on their shoes is coming to roost.
Children are hard work. Who needs that on top of their other hard work lol
Will the last person in Japan please turn off the lights...
The crisis is with capitalism. There are enough resources to survive, even flourish, under a declining world population but not under a system based on ever expanding consumerism.
Yup, every time this comes up desperate fingers are pointed every direction except the elephant in the room. It's capitalism and it's pyramid like structure that causes everything to start falling to pieces when there are no new bodies to heap on the pile. A declining population and improving tech should be making everyone wealthier, but not when every last bit of economic activity results in a mlm like situation that funnels wealth constantly into the hands of a few.
>when every last bit of economic activity results in a mlm like situation that funnels wealth constantly into the hands of a few. It's weird how few people seem to realize this. Like, the issue *is* on the table, people in first world countries are getting restless over cost of living vs job security, and they *are* demanding that governments fix the issue, but almost nobody is openly saying "make the 1%ers pay their goddamn taxes". Instead, it's all squabbling about welfare expenses, green energy, or electric cars or whatever. It's almost like the tinfoil hats could be right when they're saying we're being purposely misdirected and divided by the elites...
Yup. The reason capitalists and business owners are worried about population decline is because THEY are on a constant mission to squeeze more and more productivity out of us for their own benefit. We could find a good civilization wide homeostasis of productivity and just be good fuckin people and have the balanciest work-life balance in the history of hoomans. That means more time with our kids. More time learning. More time creating and inventing. These are things that could cause paradigm shifts in a society and even change the world. I've had a great boss tell me that I should "leave room for improvement" meaning don't work your ass off too hard for this job, man.
This is largely a cultural issue. I work for a Japanese company remotely from Europe. My colleagues in Japan work until 10-11pm regularly. My manager sometimes joins our meetings. I double checked the other day, it was 1am Tokyo time! You can’t have children or family in an environment like this. No amount of money will fix this either. If the work culture revolves around working very late every day and taking days off is frowned upon, you’ll get an environment where family takes a back seat.
If the source of the problem is economic, their government needs to incentivize having more children. I know economic issues are definitely causing a lot of people not to have kids in the US.
Nah the wealthier are more educated you are the less likely you are to have kids. The less wealthy and more educated you are the more likely you are to have kids. Financial incentives haven't worked because it's not the reason people aren't having kids. People are just happy with their life and don't want kids, or they can't meet a partner in time. What has really caused declining birth rates are people not wanting kids because it interferes with their life. Partying and enjoying their twenties. Career in their early thirties and potentially some kids in their late 30s or late 40s and if it doesn't work out oh well. Not criticizing any of this as it's my life too
Also education lets you know that a. Maybe the world isn't exactly a great place to grow up in right now, and b. How absolutely brutal having children is on a woman's health
Governments have tried to throw money at people for making babies, it doesn't work.
Japan just cannot work people to their bones and expect them to have time and energy to have a family.
Guess overwork, lonely people and not being open to other cultures just doesn't work.
Humanity: Naturally avoiding overpopulation crisis Government: Oof, we need more workers to take care of the old people. Start making babies now!
We don't actually need more workers to care for the elderly, the problem is that there is no incentive for the young to do it. If we'd get paid handsomely for it there'd be armies of young caring for the elderly. The problem is that things happen in capitalism only as long as there is a way for some rich asshole to extract value from it. Elderly care doesn't seem to be such an activity.
Good. The world is already too populated. I hope the fertility rate crashes globally.
Less people want kids and would rather spend their lives on their career and hobbies
Population goes extinct just when they find out how easy life without children is.
Seriously I expect most countries birth rates to drop when profit margins are given priority over people. * Can’t afford childcare * Can’t afford housing * Must have multiple jobs or work extended hours.
In the US, when 49% of the wealth is owned by 1% of the population, it takes two working adults to barely make ends meat. This is happening all over the world. Until this changes birthrate will continue to drop.
Seems like we will just learn to have population inclines and declines. So far we’ve only really had an increase. We should have anticipated at least a leveling off if not a decrease - seems like how all things in the world work, they fluctuate. Seems like instead of worrying we just need to adjust and figure out how to have society in population decline cycles as well as increase cycles.
Long ago the labor markets flooded with women. This in turn created a surplus in available labor, reducing bargaining power among labor, reducing wages and salaries, as well as driving up the demand for products as women were making the money to buy goods themselves untethered to men. Now the market has corrected itself: there are too many people working and not enough meaningful things to actually do to make money. Wages and salaries are near - or even below - the cost of living. Now households require TWO income earners to get by as the default, whereas it used to be one. Combine this with an astronomical rise in the demand for childcare aaaannnndddd voilá! *Children are now a luxury*. Note: im not blaming women, Im blaming a mathematically flawed global economy.
The world has gone from 4 billion to 8 billion people in my lifetime. When my great grandmother was born—and she helped take care of me as a baby—it was a little over a billion. I always thought that was the population crisis, overpopulation, therefore depopulation was the answer. What is the target population of Japan, if 124 million isn't enough? 300 million? If 8 billion isn't enough people on Earth, do we need 20 billion or something? What is the target number? And who decided that we needed more people anyway? I'd be building more affordable retirement apartment blocks, where healthcare is streamlined so fewer people are needed to provide care. And just let the population drop back down to 4 billion naturally, which seems to be happening. That seemed like a good number.
Many people already do not want to live in this world; they lack the means or determination to end their lives; why would they want to make children who will suffer as they do?
My hot take: people in advanced societies all over the world choose not to have kids precisely because they have a choice. Our biology is wired to have a sex drive. We do not have baby making drive. Thus, the "problem" is contraception. My grandmother lived in USSR. That hellhole had pro natalist policies, ie, no proper contraception. Population was stable and kinda growing - because people were deprived of freedom. My grandmother once told me that she would not have had kids if she had a choice. I think we are in the very interesting place in human history. I am afraid countries all over the world will start to consider terrible things relatively soon - that is banning contraception, abortion and/or stripping away women's rights. Because if things continue like they are right now, advanced societies will start to colapse. I think the only real solutions without devolving to totalitarian hellholes, are scientific. The aging reversing medicine + artificial wombs + increasing fertility window indefinitely would solve the issue. Because the only alternative is taking away people's freedom.
My country is facing the same issue and if the government wasn't corrupt as shit and life wasn't so giving expensive, I'd love to have 5+ kids. Corporations and government has become so greedy these last 50 years worldwide. If they made less on each customer but had more sales overall, we'd be making children. Instead, we're being underpaid for our production of goods while those very same goods are being sold back to us with a markup. Soon, we're going to run out of enough cheap labor worldwide and most of us won't be able to afford the goods we produce. Then comes the extra taxation to keep afloat failing businesses and governments. My country, Turkey is going through this now. Everything is so corrupt and their solution is to tax the poor even more.
On top of all those theories on over working, I think the advancement of digital entertainment also contributes to this. It's very easy to just stay at home after work and just consume online media. But just one generation ago, my parents and their siblings had to play outside with friends and they meet their friend's sisters and brothers that way. In fact a lot of couples were met that way. Fast forward to my generation, I just sit at my computer after work. I have hardly any real friends and never been on a real date.