Why South Korean women aren't having babies
bbc.comThis is a problem in many developed nations, the general reasoning boils down to
1. Cost of living and child care
2. Work, stress and lack of free time
3. Little to no support from society and community.
The reason this is affecting Korea, Japan and China so much is that there aren't many immigrants to offset the lack of new children being born.
There is a lot of wealth being generated but most of it goes to people who are already wealthy, so most people don't have the "luxury" of enough disposable income, free time, and support to have children.
This is not women's fault, its society's failing
The problem with this theory is that studies that have looked across countries with different levels of social/economic support find it does very little.
When countries get richer, people start having fewer kids, and giving parents money does not offset this (even if that's what people say they want).
Maybe they’re just not giving them enough money - I’m sure for $5m most people would have a child and for $5000 most people wouldn’t, because that doesn’t cover even close to the amount it would cost. It would have to be in between, maybe 100-250k.
When a couple has a child they have to consider both the cost of the child (food, education, childcare) and also the potential lost earnings that they’re suffering from by taking time off work to look after it.
Indeed. One of the things neglected in the cost discussion is opportunity cost of kids.
As society gets richer, opportunity cost of kids goes up.
1. Wages not made. If you're making $100K/year and you take a year off for the kids, that's 100K.
2. Career progression. Harder to put a number on this, but easily worth 6 figures + in certain careers in opportunity cost.
3. Alternative: daycare (runs $2-4K a month or more in HCOL cities).
I hypothesize that a ~100K incentive for having a kid would definitely move the needle for a lot of people and account for at least some of the opportunity costs for middle-high wage earners (I know because the paternity leave at my company was roughly in that range in terms of economic incentive, and it certainly affected my choices). All of the cash programs to date have been a fraction of that at best.
At $100k per child, it would effectively open up "babymaker" as a career. US median household income is ~$75k, so a family doing nothing but having a baby every 16 months would average out to median household income.
I assume that's not great, but it might be better than working the late shift at Taco Bell for the rest of someone's life.
I'm conflicted on this. On one hand, it could be a solution to low birth rates.
On the other hand, it toes a very fine line on sexism.
It's a pretty bad image for women that we're willing to pay them more to reproduce than most other things. A woman having a baby every 12 months makes 30% more than the median household income. There are economic justifications, but it's a bad look.
While it's nominally a voluntary process, it can be viewed through a lens where we as a society make being poor awful (or fail to make being poor bearable) and the only reliable escape we offer is reproducing, casting doubts on how voluntary participation really is. If a woman is going to get evicted and the only means she can find to get out of that is having a baby, is her participation really voluntary?
I also don't know whether we should financialize having children. That may lead to a very different and less optimal kind of parenting.
The last I've found is disparate impact on genders. I generally get that the benefits are for the child, but $100k is enough that I think it could create dramatically disparate outcomes. We'd practically be offering a down payment on a house, or a way to avoid bankruptcy, or seed funding for a startup, but only to women. Straight men would need to couple with a woman to qualify, gay men wouldn't be able to qualify at all.
That may not apply if this program applies to adoptions too, as it probably should.
Alternatively, maybe they just aren't taking away enough money. Lets bump all tax brackets up 20 percentage points and take 5 off for each of the first two kids and ten off for the third kid had within a marriage and leave that in place while the kids are under 18 and see what happens.
Do those studies understand why they’re observing that? I don’t think they’re very strong evidence otherwise.
The low birth rate is a macro phenomena in response to massive population boom and limits to growth, a significant one being living space.
Packing even more people into these nations, with the added political tensions of making them foreign immigrants vs domestic growth of native population would exacerbate the original problem with added downside.
Look at the density, cost of living and other factors that flow from "too many people in one place". The natural counter trend must run its course.
Sorry, but you have a very cursory understanding of the issue. Please read the article.
South Korea has a TFR of .7. France is 1.6. Those aren't the same, and the difference isn't immigration, or easily explained by money. There are huge cultural issues in South Korea.
The culture exacerbates the issues, but they're the same issues that's affecting families everywhere. If I'm making minimum wage, or close to it, and I don't have stability in my job, then I'm not having kids. The only less wealthy people left having kids are those that don't use birth control and don't condone abortion. I had decided that the time was right to have a child after I'd been employed for 6 years in a decent paying job and I wasn't concerned about being laid off. Employers now are preferring younger candidates, those fresh out of college, ones who don't have kids that they have to pick up / drop off from school. They want you connected 100% of the time, checking your email/chat on your time off. That leaves people with offspring feeling like they don't belong. Until that changes, there's going to be less births.
The Korean women want careers, and if they're open to having children, they want husbands who are willing to split the housework and childrearing fifty-fifty. Going by the article, the complaint is that it's hard to find potential husbands open to that arrangement. Also, going by the testimony of one woman quoted in the article, apparently some of them, when they do find a husband agreeable to splitting the housework—in this particularly case, the dish washing—find that the husband doesn't do the housework to their satisfaction.
I don't have a solution for these women, but I notice that the BBC spent a year interviewing Korean women, but no Korean men.
I think a solution for the Korean men who maybe want children and wives who neither want careers of their own nor who insist that the domestic duties be split evenly would be something equivalent to the United States's H1-B Visa: namely, aspiring Korean husbands should be able to sponsor and marry foreign wives when no suitable native born candidates can be found.
> aspiring Korean husbands should be able to sponsor and marry foreign wives
Nearly any foreign wife will be eaten alive by how competitive Korea is. Even worse, everyone else in that society will look down on them for not putting their children through the same things - like spending more than they can on extra-curriculars that start at age 4.
The second especially sounds like a recipe for a truly miserable marriage
sounds like a(nother) society that destroys itself.. fine for me.
Men don't want to work 12 hours a day then come home to do chores
And neither do women. Which is precisely why some of these women are choosing to be single and/or childless.
Who is forcing them into 12 hour day jobs? Maybe they think they're 'empowered' but let's face it the country is collapsing so most of their careers aren't going to go anywhere.
It's still women who still expect men to be high earners, now men have to do half of the housework on top of spending time with children in the evenings then get screamed at for having mediocre finances when their careers flatline.
They didn't interview men because the responses would not fit the narrative that the BBC seeks.
>Who is forcing them into 12 hour day jobs? Maybe they think they're 'empowered' but let's face it the country is collapsing so most of their careers aren't going to go anywhere.
>It's still women who still expect men to be high earners, now men have to do half of the housework on top of spending time with children in the evenings then get screamed at for having mediocre finances when their careers flatline.
It sounds like you had a bad experience and are now using that to generalize about a large population of people. Why is it only acceptable for men to seek independence and fulfillment from a career? No one is forcing men into a 12 hour a day job, either. It seems only reasonable that if both partners are working, that they split the household chores and child rearing.
Perhaps it’s the working hours, high cost of living, traditional expectations of women and ultra competitive culture that is collapsing society, and not the women wanting better for themselves. Unless your solution is to rollback the clock several decades or force women into motherhood and domestic labor, I’m not even really sure what your point is here.
The solution that many S. Korean women have found for themselves, in order to have a fulfilling career/not be dependent on a husband, is to remain single and/or childless. Clearly these women are fine living on a single income and cleaning up after themselves, so it’s pretty evident that many women aren’t just after high earnings or that they “still expect men to be high earners.” For women who want a career, they don’t also want to come home and be solely responsible for taking care of their husband and kids. If men want to be in a relationship with these career women, then they need to help out around the house. If they don’t want to do that, then it’s pretty clear that these S. Korean women are completely fine being on their own.
> They didn't interview men because the responses would not fit the narrative that the BBC seeks.
Yeah, it’s an article about South Korean women. Not about S. Korean men. Are you saying that the account of these S. Korean women should be totally discounted because they didn’t interview any men?
It is called being a passport bro. It is gaining popularity for men in the US to go abroad to find wives.
I wonder how does North Korea is faring when compared to its southern rival. Are they experiencing problems on this front too?
They are starving. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65881803
> "Sometimes at the weekends I go and get an IV drip, just to get enough energy to go back to work on Monday," she adds casually, as if this were a fairly normal weekend activity.
Wonder what that IV is full of?
I live in Korea. It's common here, vitamin drips, just a concoction of vitamins and amino acids. Here is a Canadian clinic offering the same thing: https://torontofunctionalmedicine.com/the-iv-lounge/
I've had them a few times, to be sure, they make you feel awesome.
TIL. Does it "work"?
Feel great after them!!! Def works. Strong recommend from me.
I guessed it would just be saline for hydration, but it looks like they do vitamins, minerals, and amino acids via IV in some places[1].
1. https://expatguidekorea.com/seoul/hydration-iv-therapy-seoul
High population density, like many of the other low birth rate nations. At some point people don't thrive living so close and crowded together. The carrying capacity of civilization has its limits.
People don't like to hear it, but the ultra-dense apartments clearly shred fertility.
There's no country with people primarily living in high-rise buildings where TFR is measurably above 1.
That’s a really interesting observation. This would presumably drive a measurable difference within the same country between the high-density cities and the rural areas. I wonder if stats are available on a per-locality basis anywhere?
Probably because that is prohibitively expensive for them in terms of money and time. This more or less translates to many modern countries. The only way to solve this problem probably is to provide everyone with great free child care services covering 90%+ of the hassle.
It's not though, if you have a baby in SK, you get a lot of perks, FTA:
>Couples who have children are showered with cash, from monthly handouts to subsidised housing and free taxis. Hospital bills and even IVF treatments are covered, though only for those who are married.
It's not pay after you have a baby that makes people want to have a baby, it's job stability, decent pay and working hours that makes people want to have children.