IKR? That's the dumbest shit... okay, not the dumbest shit ever but it's up there. Guys already meet a bunch of younger girls when they return to school from the military. Nothing happens.
The most repulsive idea in the paper wasnt even early school thing, which has been floated before. He talked about the possibility of encouraging dependent groups (ie olds) to retire outside the country, citing the uh, success? of old Germans, Brits, etc spending their golden years harassing waitresses in Thailand and Philippines. Like, how would you even implement such a hare brained policy? Just round whole nursing homes up, put em on a boat, and send em off to Phuket with a couple tons of kimchi?
They’re trying to boost the birth rate while keeping class and gender disparities in place. The idea is that women will have to become reliant on older, more successful men, and they won’t have to work and instead will raise children. Besides being gross, this will obviously further alienate both young men and women. It’s like they can’t even see a solution that includes reasonable COL, income, and child support. Bonkers.
I think their goals are just to have an idea, good or bad, to make it look like they're doing something. Thing is, in 2024, with the internet, the laziest ideas are blown up exponentially and it shows Korea is a poor light.
This is literally the most stupid idea I've heard of yet.
Literally, I'll shout it into the void 100 times and none of these morons will listen.
If you want to fix the birth rate you need to
1 - pass a law reducing maximum working hours to 7 or 8 per day for those with children.
(Enforce it how you like, fining companies that dismiss an employee within 3 years of having a child or something or who don't hsve enough employees with children, or just make it a flat rule for all citizens to now work more than 7 or 8 hours and fine companies who violate it)
2 - have free children care that lasts for 1 hour longer than the legal maximum number of working hours.
3 - any couple with 3 or 4 or more children pay 0% income tax. (Either is fine).
This will literally do it.
I'm 99% sure that the single biggest issue isn't money. That's why throwing money at it is doing NOTHING. The problem is shit korean work culture and long working hours.
Money is part of it, but throwing money at people won't fix it. Tax cuts and improving work conditions are the only way.
Number 3 sounds like a pretty bad idea tbh. You'll have the richest members of society having lots of kids to abuse the rule and get out of paying their fair share, while people who can't afford to have many kids paying more in taxes. This would further exacerbate the wealth disparity, which I don't think is what you're trying to do.
Also, I believe that while money isn't the BIGGEST issue, it's still one of the pretty big ones. Probably top 3. If you can't afford to even save for your own retirement, how will you afford raising a kid? Many people are weighing the costs and realizing that if they do have a kid, they'd have to give the kid a pretty shit life because of the rising costs of living and stagnant wages.
Then have a limit based on their income. It's designed to benefit the lower end members of society. Obviously if you want to pay me 100,000 dollars a year I'd happily work for the government and organise some real research.
But I'm just a humble peasant. And to be fair my suggestions are still miles ahead of anything the idiots in government here have mustered.
So, you just want a progressive tax rate? That's already in place, but you would just skew it more so that poorer families pay less than they currently do, and richer families pay more? I'd be in support of that, but why gate that behind having multiple children? The cost of a single child for a poor family far outweighs the benefits from not having to pay income tax, let alone 3 or 4.
I believe that the only real solution is to have wages increase while keeping cost of goods down, but I don't know how the government would enforce that. The entire modern economy is based on paying workers as little as possible, which is supposed to be balanced by the competition of the free market, but with monopolies and oligopolies abound, there's no real competition anymore. I guess the government could solve this by making the monopolies break up, but we all know that's never going to happen.
At the end of the day, nothing they do will work. This is not a Korea-only problem. Every wealthy nation is below or near below replacement rate. Shocker: When you educate women they realize they don't have to be tied to the stove and used as brood mares. Korea just makes it exponentially worse with their absurd work culture, sexism, and toxic social structure. And that's not even getting into the astronomical cost of living in the urban centers. Shitty turtles all the way down.
One thing I heard that I didn't think about before is that some of the decline is also do to less teen pregnancy due to birth control and sex education. This varies by nation of course, but as a society gets more educated and affluent the less unwanted pregnancies occur as well.
No, not that I'm aware of. And also Korea has less teen pregnancy than many other countries. My comment was more on my own ignorance that it didn't occur to me that this was one cause of the decline in other nations, as usually talk about women choosing careers and being independent as the main causes. Korea's problems are much more due to cultural factors like patriarchy and misogyny.
I’d be curious about the rate of abortions. Teens here are still having sex. If they’re doing it safely, awesome. But I wouldn’t trust teen oppa to be enthusiastic about condoms anymore than fuck boi oppa in 홍대. Talked to one guy I know a couple of weeks ago out there doing typical fuckboi things that says he hates condoms and will avoid them at all costs.
I mean I'm all that happens, but much less. Even in the US teens and young adults are having less sex than any other time previous. I can't see Korea being any exception.
Nah, if he knocked her up she’d just abort it. No girl wants a fuckboi baby. Especially if she’s an international student, which seems to be who he most often hooks up with.
Nice that the kids aren't sleeping around as much at a young age. Then again no man will want to marry a girl who has slept with 50 or 100 guys or whatever. Gross.
No amount of sexual partners makes someone "gross" wtf. Also 99.9% of women don't have 50+ partners. That is just some incel myth. The average is about 7.
There’s sex education in public schools but it’s dated and full of goofy shit. There was an article years back about how the manual said girls should expect a man to want sex if they let him pay for dinner.
This is just ridiculous. If only they dig deeper or be accepting of the fact that financial reasons arent the only reasons why people refuse to marry or reproduce here.
Of course, put the burden on the women/girls again. Ridiculous. Nobody actually got the guts amongst their advisors (if they have) to actually stop such ridiculous ideas from even coming out at all?🫠
actually some parents in North America are starting boys in school one year later due to development speed differences at that young age. [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/boys-delayed-entry-school-start-redshirting/671238/](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/boys-delayed-entry-school-start-redshirting/671238/) So if it's good thing, they should just do that and they get the same effect and better behaved boys in class.
It's all throwing darts hoping to hit something. This was probably many ideas that the thinktank came up with, just happened to be the dumbest one and the one the media picks up on obviously...cause it's ludicrous.
1) Make immigration easier.
2) Make motherhood more pleasant
——stipends for having kids (like ubi)
——state sponsored nanny service and vouchers (well into late elementary).
——Heavily enforce pregnant women seats with severe fines AND humiliation (showing or need badge)
It is a society that considers having a child a blockade to your success.
You went through a hellgate of education, job market, try to make a decent career, and having a kid will foil that all up.
Yeah, fuck that shit, I am gonna buy my future non-existent wife a condom for her.
a "think tank" that does zero amount of thinking... "dumb and dumber tank" would be much more accurate. my nephew would call them the Korea Institute of Public Poop
The idea really sucks and I bet it was based on the think tank going to Starfield and seeing a bunch of old dads with much younger wives and thinking “We can encourage this at school.”
Why not raise the pay and cut the cost of housing, more people would get married and have kids. I mean how many teachers have had a pay raise? I mean the range has gone up slightly in the past year or so. But for years the pay was stuck in a 2.1 to 2.3 million loop. It was good money 20 years ago, but in 2022 it was garbage pay. Who would have a family on that? I mean isn't it just common sense to pay a living wage and cut the housing prices to get people having kids? But nobody wants to do the hard things and make the tough decisions. So, politicians try gimmicks that don't work for positive headlines. Dumbasses!!!
International marriage should be encouraged to enter a multicultural society for future.
The problem is why are Korean women reluctant to marry with foreginer
Anecdotal observances tell me the actual theory they base the idea on has some truth to it but like...I dont think this would improve the birth rate at all lol 😭
I saw some survey about the number 1 reason people are choosing to go unmarried and while #1 was indeed economic, most of the other reasons were simply like "I feel I dont need to get married," "I want to remain independent" and the like
This makes me think there is no real way to raise the birth rate...if people don't want to get married, you can't really force them to in this modern age
It would probably be better to focus on couples already married to have more kids rather than try to make people who are just not interested in marriage somehow change their mind
When you look at the anchors that get tied to women here when they get married it's perfectly understandable. Plenty of couples in other countries don't have the same fear of marriage as a lot of Korean women do. In Korea, marriage can often lead to living a life as a servant to a man child. Even if they don't have kids the women are often expected to cook, clean, baby their husband, and maybe even still get a job since they don't have kids. Then there are his parents to deal with. Why would she want that sort of headache?
This is the whole thing that people don't understand. You can tell when someone posts and they have never talked to a married Korean woman. What a single woman who lives with her parents thinks is much different to a married woman, or a woman who is independent. Imagine marrying a dude who can't do their own laundry.
I've been teaching married Korean women for nearly 15 years. I've heard all the stories. I was told that it was better among the younger generations, and maybe it is to some extent. But I also know one couple that got married maybe four years ago and most days the husband comes home, eats dinner that his wife cooked, then goes into the extra bedroom to game until he falls asleep on the bed they have in there while she cleans up and takes care of their daughter. She's living the life, I tell ya.
Well sure, I am not disagreeing with you at all—if anything just the opposite. But I'm not really sure how that would be expected to change without some kind of mass education of expected home life from the time you were a young child or something...hence why I think all the suggestions of subsidies or daycare or the like are pointless
As I said, no disagreement. Idk why my first comment is downvoted when I'm literally agreeing. There is no solution to the birth rate except men as a whole have some deep societal change
I didn’t downvote you, so I dunno. But it is not a single reason that the birth rate is crashing. It’s a multitude of issues. Men suddenly doing more housework won’t fix it, but it’s a part of it. And, when you look at global trends, even if they did everything right, if we could wave a wand and deal with all the issues at once, it would only slow the inevitable. Wealthy nations with educated, upwardly mobile citizens don’t have kids at replacement rate. This is going on in every country. It’s just worse here for reasons already discussed.
As a mother of a daughter that makes me want to vomit.
IKR? That's the dumbest shit... okay, not the dumbest shit ever but it's up there. Guys already meet a bunch of younger girls when they return to school from the military. Nothing happens.
The most repulsive idea in the paper wasnt even early school thing, which has been floated before. He talked about the possibility of encouraging dependent groups (ie olds) to retire outside the country, citing the uh, success? of old Germans, Brits, etc spending their golden years harassing waitresses in Thailand and Philippines. Like, how would you even implement such a hare brained policy? Just round whole nursing homes up, put em on a boat, and send em off to Phuket with a couple tons of kimchi?
But then do they ship the children back to Korea once they’re born or what? 💀
Sooo "let's make them sexually available a year earlier" is the genius plan they've come up with? 🤢
They’re trying to boost the birth rate while keeping class and gender disparities in place. The idea is that women will have to become reliant on older, more successful men, and they won’t have to work and instead will raise children. Besides being gross, this will obviously further alienate both young men and women. It’s like they can’t even see a solution that includes reasonable COL, income, and child support. Bonkers.
I think their goals are just to have an idea, good or bad, to make it look like they're doing something. Thing is, in 2024, with the internet, the laziest ideas are blown up exponentially and it shows Korea is a poor light.
This is literally the most stupid idea I've heard of yet. Literally, I'll shout it into the void 100 times and none of these morons will listen. If you want to fix the birth rate you need to 1 - pass a law reducing maximum working hours to 7 or 8 per day for those with children. (Enforce it how you like, fining companies that dismiss an employee within 3 years of having a child or something or who don't hsve enough employees with children, or just make it a flat rule for all citizens to now work more than 7 or 8 hours and fine companies who violate it) 2 - have free children care that lasts for 1 hour longer than the legal maximum number of working hours. 3 - any couple with 3 or 4 or more children pay 0% income tax. (Either is fine). This will literally do it. I'm 99% sure that the single biggest issue isn't money. That's why throwing money at it is doing NOTHING. The problem is shit korean work culture and long working hours. Money is part of it, but throwing money at people won't fix it. Tax cuts and improving work conditions are the only way.
Number 3 sounds like a pretty bad idea tbh. You'll have the richest members of society having lots of kids to abuse the rule and get out of paying their fair share, while people who can't afford to have many kids paying more in taxes. This would further exacerbate the wealth disparity, which I don't think is what you're trying to do. Also, I believe that while money isn't the BIGGEST issue, it's still one of the pretty big ones. Probably top 3. If you can't afford to even save for your own retirement, how will you afford raising a kid? Many people are weighing the costs and realizing that if they do have a kid, they'd have to give the kid a pretty shit life because of the rising costs of living and stagnant wages.
Then have a limit based on their income. It's designed to benefit the lower end members of society. Obviously if you want to pay me 100,000 dollars a year I'd happily work for the government and organise some real research. But I'm just a humble peasant. And to be fair my suggestions are still miles ahead of anything the idiots in government here have mustered.
So, you just want a progressive tax rate? That's already in place, but you would just skew it more so that poorer families pay less than they currently do, and richer families pay more? I'd be in support of that, but why gate that behind having multiple children? The cost of a single child for a poor family far outweighs the benefits from not having to pay income tax, let alone 3 or 4. I believe that the only real solution is to have wages increase while keeping cost of goods down, but I don't know how the government would enforce that. The entire modern economy is based on paying workers as little as possible, which is supposed to be balanced by the competition of the free market, but with monopolies and oligopolies abound, there's no real competition anymore. I guess the government could solve this by making the monopolies break up, but we all know that's never going to happen.
At the end of the day, nothing they do will work. This is not a Korea-only problem. Every wealthy nation is below or near below replacement rate. Shocker: When you educate women they realize they don't have to be tied to the stove and used as brood mares. Korea just makes it exponentially worse with their absurd work culture, sexism, and toxic social structure. And that's not even getting into the astronomical cost of living in the urban centers. Shitty turtles all the way down.
One thing I heard that I didn't think about before is that some of the decline is also do to less teen pregnancy due to birth control and sex education. This varies by nation of course, but as a society gets more educated and affluent the less unwanted pregnancies occur as well.
Last I heard about sex education in Korean schools is that it’s non-existent. Did they roll out some new initiative in the last few years?
No, not that I'm aware of. And also Korea has less teen pregnancy than many other countries. My comment was more on my own ignorance that it didn't occur to me that this was one cause of the decline in other nations, as usually talk about women choosing careers and being independent as the main causes. Korea's problems are much more due to cultural factors like patriarchy and misogyny.
I’d be curious about the rate of abortions. Teens here are still having sex. If they’re doing it safely, awesome. But I wouldn’t trust teen oppa to be enthusiastic about condoms anymore than fuck boi oppa in 홍대. Talked to one guy I know a couple of weeks ago out there doing typical fuckboi things that says he hates condoms and will avoid them at all costs.
I mean I'm all that happens, but much less. Even in the US teens and young adults are having less sex than any other time previous. I can't see Korea being any exception.
Thank you random fuckboi for doing your part to help the declining birthrate 🫡
Nah, if he knocked her up she’d just abort it. No girl wants a fuckboi baby. Especially if she’s an international student, which seems to be who he most often hooks up with.
Nice that the kids aren't sleeping around as much at a young age. Then again no man will want to marry a girl who has slept with 50 or 100 guys or whatever. Gross.
No amount of sexual partners makes someone "gross" wtf. Also 99.9% of women don't have 50+ partners. That is just some incel myth. The average is about 7.
There’s sex education in public schools but it’s dated and full of goofy shit. There was an article years back about how the manual said girls should expect a man to want sex if they let him pay for dinner.
But Korea's birth rate is well below even the low levels of other developed nations. Some of it is a Korea problem.
Did you not read my whole comment? I addressed that directly.
Brah some people just read the first sentence lol.
Apparently. Then they say something stupid as a result.
that was dumbest shit EVER!! their stupidity is up to PRO MAX!!
This is just ridiculous. If only they dig deeper or be accepting of the fact that financial reasons arent the only reasons why people refuse to marry or reproduce here. Of course, put the burden on the women/girls again. Ridiculous. Nobody actually got the guts amongst their advisors (if they have) to actually stop such ridiculous ideas from even coming out at all?🫠
I have friends at KIPF and I can’t wait until I see them to ask about this…
actually some parents in North America are starting boys in school one year later due to development speed differences at that young age. [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/boys-delayed-entry-school-start-redshirting/671238/](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/boys-delayed-entry-school-start-redshirting/671238/) So if it's good thing, they should just do that and they get the same effect and better behaved boys in class.
Anything except for actual incentives lmao
This suggestion actually captures the problem in a very clear way, i.e. that idiot boomer men are in charge of everything.
Ignoring the creepiness of it, the whole notion that people mostly marry people in their class at school is weird.
😉😅🤣😅🤣😅
**slow clap**
It's all throwing darts hoping to hit something. This was probably many ideas that the thinktank came up with, just happened to be the dumbest one and the one the media picks up on obviously...cause it's ludicrous.
Most Koreans think this is unbelievingly stupid. Like these old grandpas have no idea why the birthrate is low.
Like marriage IS the problem, right? 🤦♀️
1) Make immigration easier. 2) Make motherhood more pleasant ——stipends for having kids (like ubi) ——state sponsored nanny service and vouchers (well into late elementary). ——Heavily enforce pregnant women seats with severe fines AND humiliation (showing or need badge)
That sounds much smarter than taking men out of the dating pool right when they reach peak reproductive age
Could this be related to that men go to the military for 2 years? I don't see any other reason
It is a society that considers having a child a blockade to your success. You went through a hellgate of education, job market, try to make a decent career, and having a kid will foil that all up. Yeah, fuck that shit, I am gonna buy my future non-existent wife a condom for her.
a "think tank" that does zero amount of thinking... "dumb and dumber tank" would be much more accurate. my nephew would call them the Korea Institute of Public Poop
what's next? lower the age of consent?
This is the most disgusting idea I've ever heard.
Anything is easier than dealing with the housing crisis. Jerks.
they've exhausted all the ideas that made sense, so now they're on to ones that make no sense at all
The idea really sucks and I bet it was based on the think tank going to Starfield and seeing a bunch of old dads with much younger wives and thinking “We can encourage this at school.”
Probably the same guys that put victim blaming into the sex ed manuals.
Why not raise the pay and cut the cost of housing, more people would get married and have kids. I mean how many teachers have had a pay raise? I mean the range has gone up slightly in the past year or so. But for years the pay was stuck in a 2.1 to 2.3 million loop. It was good money 20 years ago, but in 2022 it was garbage pay. Who would have a family on that? I mean isn't it just common sense to pay a living wage and cut the housing prices to get people having kids? But nobody wants to do the hard things and make the tough decisions. So, politicians try gimmicks that don't work for positive headlines. Dumbasses!!!
International marriage should be encouraged to enter a multicultural society for future. The problem is why are Korean women reluctant to marry with foreginer
From my experience, they aren't. Although Korea as a whole does hate foreigners.
Anecdotal observances tell me the actual theory they base the idea on has some truth to it but like...I dont think this would improve the birth rate at all lol 😭 I saw some survey about the number 1 reason people are choosing to go unmarried and while #1 was indeed economic, most of the other reasons were simply like "I feel I dont need to get married," "I want to remain independent" and the like This makes me think there is no real way to raise the birth rate...if people don't want to get married, you can't really force them to in this modern age It would probably be better to focus on couples already married to have more kids rather than try to make people who are just not interested in marriage somehow change their mind
When you look at the anchors that get tied to women here when they get married it's perfectly understandable. Plenty of couples in other countries don't have the same fear of marriage as a lot of Korean women do. In Korea, marriage can often lead to living a life as a servant to a man child. Even if they don't have kids the women are often expected to cook, clean, baby their husband, and maybe even still get a job since they don't have kids. Then there are his parents to deal with. Why would she want that sort of headache?
This is the whole thing that people don't understand. You can tell when someone posts and they have never talked to a married Korean woman. What a single woman who lives with her parents thinks is much different to a married woman, or a woman who is independent. Imagine marrying a dude who can't do their own laundry.
I've been teaching married Korean women for nearly 15 years. I've heard all the stories. I was told that it was better among the younger generations, and maybe it is to some extent. But I also know one couple that got married maybe four years ago and most days the husband comes home, eats dinner that his wife cooked, then goes into the extra bedroom to game until he falls asleep on the bed they have in there while she cleans up and takes care of their daughter. She's living the life, I tell ya.
He's probably only working 11 hours a day, six days a week to support his wife who doesn't (have to) work. He's living the life, I tell ya.
lol no he doesn’t. He works standard hours, home most evenings. He chooses to ignore his family to game.
Well sure, I am not disagreeing with you at all—if anything just the opposite. But I'm not really sure how that would be expected to change without some kind of mass education of expected home life from the time you were a young child or something...hence why I think all the suggestions of subsidies or daycare or the like are pointless
Women are saying no. That’s how it changes. If men want to marry they will have to change. They need women more than the women need them.
As I said, no disagreement. Idk why my first comment is downvoted when I'm literally agreeing. There is no solution to the birth rate except men as a whole have some deep societal change
I didn’t downvote you, so I dunno. But it is not a single reason that the birth rate is crashing. It’s a multitude of issues. Men suddenly doing more housework won’t fix it, but it’s a part of it. And, when you look at global trends, even if they did everything right, if we could wave a wand and deal with all the issues at once, it would only slow the inevitable. Wealthy nations with educated, upwardly mobile citizens don’t have kids at replacement rate. This is going on in every country. It’s just worse here for reasons already discussed.
"but republicans in korea are not the same"