The biggest issue that no one ever wants to talk about is …
… it’s isn’t about the QUANTITY of life
… it’s about the QUALITY of life.
If people are able to have a comfortable, stable and prosperous life, with plenty of their own free time to enjoy without worrying about losing everything then they’ll make time and an effort to have a family and children.
If all our wealthy overlords ever want to do is squeeze every penny out of us all the time, then people will be less likely to want to have children.
It also strongly correlates to women’s rights and access to education. The more educated women are, the less likely they are to have a lot of kids.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data
It’s why you see a renewed attack on women in some developed countries, especially in the US.
Here’s what happened in America.
In the 1960s the “Women’s Lib” movement started. They got a lot of press coverage because it was a good stroy, but didn’t actually change things a lot.
In 1973 the Oil Embargo hit and suddenly one job wasn’t enough for the family to survive. Lots of wives had to go out and look for work to keep paying the bills.
The Right has been lying that women getting jobs is what destroyed the one income family.
Tying the mortgage repayment rate to the median salary of a single individual would go some way towards fixing things then, but that would mean putting price caps on houses which would devalue the currency and also need anti-cartel laws (eg. Laws mandating a maximum amount of homes one can own, as cartels might see artificially low prices as an opportunity to buy up more houses).
Artificially constraining parts of banking and all of residential real estate is likely to have other unforeseen effects on the economy, but may still be worth it.
Another alternative is starting a state bank in which citizens can be part of a rent-to-own mortgage, with minimum but achievable life time repayments. If they don’t meet those minimum payments, the house is sold and the profit from the sale is portioned out between the state bank and the mortgage payer in proportion to how much % they paid off.
That’s a win win, as theyre probably getting a big cash payment when struggling, and the state bank then gets to relist the home.
Frankly, I LOVE the idea of cartel laws for ownership of residences.
Sounds like you figured it out, since the debasement of the gold standard we locked away an inelastic good behind a mountain of debt, where prices rose to whatever interest rates would allow, providing a massive first mover advantage to those born prior. Then we wonder why nobody has kids.
If housing didn’t continue to rise how many boomers would hold it as an investment instead of downsizing and buying an appreciating asset?
This is also why Bitcoin will keep going up and everyone should own at least a little, it leverages the cantillon effect as central banks get looser and looser due to aging demographics and shrinking aggregate demand.
The more appropriate fix would be no land ownership by people or countries that don’t reside in the US, a banishment of investment companies from purchasing houses, and a hard cap of like 5 properties for any individual or company that can be owned as rental properties.
Far too many people/corporations are being landlords as a big business.
We might even expand it to all private ownership, maybe…
That’s a win win, as theyre probably getting a big cash payment when struggling, and the state bank then gets to relist the home.
I like your ideas, but where do they live once they get foreclosed on by the State?
They use their profits from the house sale (which may be substantial depending on how long they’ve been there + market inflation), to rent somewhere.
That nest egg (which they’ve been paying into all this time) would give them breathing room and time to recover and get back on their feet to try again at a more stable point in thier lives.
It’s a win win because the mortgage payer gets a lump sum, and space to reassess what went wrong. The state bank gets the unpaid percentage of the home’s sale price, and then to sell the house again (under a new rent to buy mortgage arrangement).
P.S Part of how this works financially is that most of the money in an economy is created by loans issued from banks, those banks then buy Government Bonds periodically… A state bank would be another entity doing much the same thing, just with a specific purpose in mind.
How do you put price caps on houses? They vary so much in price depending on location. A shack in San Francisco costs the same as a mansion in the middle of nowhere.
No this kind of centralized approach is doomed to fail. We’re much better off with Georgism with a land value tax and the total repeal of zoning laws. People should be able to build what they want, where they want, and the land value tax captures the increases in property values as a result. When a neighbourhood becomes too expensive to afford for single family households it gets converted into apartments.
All of our housing problems come from meddlesome local politicians, their NIMBY supporters, awful zoning laws and easements, and a terrible property tax system which disincentivizes development. A very simple land value tax system along with the total removal of local politicians’ power over housing development solves all of these issues.
You think the gubberment is the problem, think we can know when house prices are too much for families to afford, but can’t possibly know the same to figure out appropriate price caps, think we can’t have centralized federal laws, that “people should be able to build what they want, where they want when they want”… and that developers should be given family homes when they become too expensive so they can “replace them with apartments”.
Look bud, we’ve seen these pro-Capialist libertarian “free” market solution already. Lots of what you’ve said has gotten America where it is today: to an unlivable oligarchy.
People want something different. I’m fine with Georgism, but the rest of what you’ve written is clearly thinly veiled Libertarian and Free Market economics.
You’re just reproducing the ideology that benefits people like Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk - putting the wealthy in power.
I’d prefer a highly regulated, legally transparent, auditable, government system in power. Not people rich enough to build apartment blocks whenever and where ever they want.
Your ideas are incorrect and we’re seeing that in realtime.
Libertarians like you are LYING when they say centralized systems are doomed they’re too inefficienct the most obvious way to disprove that idea is to look at the world wars, what happens to industry during world wars? It gets NATIONALISED. Centralized under government power, we do this in war time because it’s highly efficient - despite the free market propaganda you’ve swallowed whole.
Where as Libertarian become traitors and mercenaries in war time. You may not realize it, but you’re arguing for the wrong team (are we the baddies? Yes, you are), the team that lets Nazi in, and if they have enough money, sits them in the position of advisors and department heads right next to the president.
We want democracy, rights, the freedom of a garanteed place to live… By putting that in the hands of people with “no price caps on building anything anywhere” you’re looking to destroy that freedom. You’re taking security from the poor and exchanging it for freedoms exclusively for the rich who can afford it, developer cartels, and corporations.
So you’re just reproducing the system we’re already in… That’s not a solution. That’s just reproducing the problem.
These people worship their god almost identically to the way religious brain-rot peasants of the dark ages did, it’s just their god is “The Markets,” thinking it bears mircales through human sacrifice and suffering, except for the Divine bloodlines of their billionaire Kings and Queens their suffering is spared because “Where would society be without
Kingsbillionaires.” They think they’re so smart and ahead of the game, they think their bank account proves it, when really they’re dumber and less significant than a medieval peasant. Centrist free-market libertarians are a horrible, gutless bunch of egotistical twerps out there.
Which is the plot to Idiocracy and why the movie is no longer a fantasy and it is now a prophecy.
I love that movie, except for the premise which is actually based on eugenics.
Yeah, the idea that intelligence can only be inherited is the major flaw to it.
It doesn’t have to ONLY be inherited for the effect to be present, it’s about 75% inherited, which is quite enough for a scifi premise to stand up better than most scifi plots.
I wouldn’t say that it’s entirely eugenics. Most of the point they were making is environmental factors like having uneducated parents that don’t enrich the child’s life or being too poor for education because the parents were too poor because they had 10 kids. It’s where we are headed because they are trying to actively destroy our education system and force people into unwanted births.
First, the comparison and core of the intro is about reproduction. Second, welcome to the Internet, where not everyone is from the USA.
But the movie was based in USA
I think it is a wonderful movie exactly because it is applicable everywhere. Berlusconi was already walking that path in the early 2000s in Italy.
You mean eugenics, but it shouldn’t be an ideological position, reality in this case is that intelligence is actually very inheritable, around three quarters is a summary of decades of research.
Yea sorry, I accidentally anglicized.
Skimming over the link, I can see that a clear explanation is still lacking and that environmental theory is showing results.
Believing it is mostly genetic reinforces the claims of the class who has access to better education to maintain those accesses and resources.
It’s either developed countries or the US, you can’t have both
.
“It’s so expensive to have children in Japan that birthrate is further declining.”
I swear to God these people couldn’t connect the dots with a GPS.
Surely if they just instill good Christian moral values like forced birth, racism, and tribal isolationism all their problems will be solved.
I mean, Japan is one of the more isolationist countries on earth. And racism is a massive issue. Christianity isn’t a major factor, but traditional views on the roles of women and the set up of the household are a major challenge.
If you didn’t notice, those aren’t Christian values. They are christo-fascist values.
At least in the US those are basically the same thing
You associate how every you like but I wouldn’t just hand evangelicals the title they so desperately desire.
The other groups largely voted with evangelicals to make our country a fascist nation about 60 40. They don’t deserve as a group to be considered distinct
They don’t deserve to be associated with jesus, what’s your point?
Ah yeah I assumed you meant the extreme interpretations of Christian values.
The problems over there are the same problems Americans are starting to rekon with. That’s why you see Vance and his ilk push for this fetishized version of the American dream where every MAGA male gets their own concubine. It’s fantasy and has the exact wrong chilling effect. As it’s trying to answer the same racist question, “more of us less of them.” While what they need is a healthy population which they refuse to recognize requires a diverse composition with plenty of resources.
I’m not sure why all the sarcasm. I mean, America’s problems have all been solved.
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It’s not that there don’t care as much as they don’t believe it will affect them personally. They believe they their wealth will protect them.
I think plenty of them also think it’s far enough in the future that it won’t affect them (spoiler alert: it’s not)
They don’t care about it getting worse. because global warming is their answer to every goal they have.
It’s the classic “we don’t care if the valley floods, we live on the hill” mentality. They think that if/when the world devolves into chaos that they’ll be safe because they’re well off.
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The problem with conspiracy theories is that they’re trying to assign a single point of blame to a complete systemic failure. The feeling is that if we can simply find out who is doing this and boil it down to one person or one group we can then simply attack that group and solve all our problems. That’s exactly the ox that fascism has yolked on its ride to power in every single generation.
countries have mostly abandoned climate action change,
Elysium but in New Zealand
We’re already slaves. They are just making it more obvious.
It was the government doing window guidance that caused their mess, how do you blame the people who made successful companies that gave Japan its first world living standard?
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I’m not sure how true this statement is. I go to Japan every year and the child care infrastructure there is incredible.
The healthcare is icredible - you can literally summon healthcare assistant if youe kid is sick at any point for free to your home
Then there’s incredible public transporatiob system, parks, everything is equipped with child support and even culture heavily respects kids so they can do most things independently.
I think they mean expensive time and desire wise and Japanese still work incredible hours many of which seem to actually negatively impact productivity. People don’t feel like such investment is worth it and tbh that could easily shift around with cultural changes but Japan is very allergic to those.
This is an interesting point. So apparently the problems of having that terrible working culture are solved for (ish) to promote procreation, but it’s not helping. Gee, I wonder if possibly creating a society of miserable people and making it easier for them to create more people they presume will be miserable doesn’t work because they just don’t want to do that.
But what about housing? If you live in a shoebox with no hope of getting a larger place, it’s unlikely that you’re gonna have kids.
Housing is pretty good in Japan outside of Tokyo, especially if you don’t mind a bit of a train ride
pretty much the same in korea, i think korea is slightly worst off, china is beginning to see its effects too, they already trying to change that by “encouraging more sex”, but they arnt solving the underlying issue, which is the one-child policy that devastated the female to male ratio and HCOL. and they also have harsh work ethic.
slightly worst off
worse* off
My first two kids were born in Japan, and they were actually pretty cheap. The local city gives you some money (a few thousand) when your child is born, and day care was good and super cheap, like $10 per day because it was subsidized.
It really wasn’t very expensive.
You can tell capitalism is super efficient and sustainable by how it totally collapses without fresh babies to sacrifice.
Which is why, in the U.S., the rich are turning back abortion rights and access to birth control, and gutting our public education. They could, instead, work to build a country where people felt safe, and supported–healthcare, jobs with decent wages, education, etc.–but the filthy rich are psychopaths who care only about themselves, and will do nothing that costs them money, power, and control. Instead, they’ll GLADLY watch the people (people they depend, incidentally, for what good is power and control, if there’s no one to wield it over?) suffer at great levels in attempts to achieve their goals.
It takes a lot of poor people to make one filthy rich person.
Babies are expensive and time consuming to develop into useful serfs. The US is not yet hitting most of the consequences from low birth rates because it’s balanced out by immigration. As long as they keep encouraging and welcoming immigration ….
I don’t think any social/political structure would survive without a birth rate
Any system would collapse without newer generations.
Except only one of those systems depends on the exploitation of the working class, ya know, your breeding live stock. Only one of those system destroys a work life balance. Only one leaves the population with little free time and shrinking resources with which to have and raise a kid. Japan is past, and the US is passing, the tipping point. Society may deem it necessary but the potential parents recognize it as untenable.
What happens when the orphan crushing machine has no orphans?Olympic level goalpost mover right here.
True, but no other system disincentives children like capitalism.
Lets see how China handles it down the road before we mark this one a problem of one specific system, rather than just humans seemingly sucking in sustainable long term planning on large scales in general.
China is also capitalist though, and they’re also starting to suffer from the same issue.
No, China is Communist, it says so right in their name.
/sarcasm
No lie, you a funny guy
Had me in the first half lol
Thing is, we don’t really know what’s the reason for the current worldwide trend in much, much lower natality rate. We’ve observed in rich countries and poor countries, religious and atheist countries, capitalist and communist countries (both USSR and PRC, who have had very different economic systems), in countries with no safety nets but also in countries with large social programs, in western countries, but also in eastern countries.
The only thing I can think of these days is education level. Is it possible that education is inversely correlated with natality rates? Or maybe women in the workforce. I’m not arguing for either point, I’m just thinking about what the cause of a world-wide issue might be, because it’s happening everywhere and seemingly without any clear common cause.
I mean, any system collapses if you don’t have the people to actively participate in it.
I’m not saying that as a defense of capitalism, more so as pointing out how dumb your comment is.
The national pyramid scheme
Well, if you prioritize shareholder growth, before Support of children and make sure people have to work super hard to be able to sustain themselves and can’t afford to have a family… Then you should not be supervised that you don’t have any babies in the country
Its not capitalism that causes the over leveraged ponzi scheme, its the lender of last resort they call the Bank of Japan.
In a capitalist lending system you wouldn’t get bailed out for making risky loans, so there wouldn’t be the moral hazard, or the heightened cantillon effect to profit off debt accumulation.
Progressives have made kids useless. In the distant past they could help carry firewood or gay bales around the homestead.
Industrial revolution fucked it up. Sure for a while you could send them down into the mines or get them sweeping chimneys but over time that got outlawed due to the increased danger these jobs involved.
Now, why bother having kids? You can’t do anything with them. Even worse, they play games like Minecraft. You are literally spending your money for them to virtually work in the mines where they don’t bring in any money at all!
Now, why bother having kids? You can’t do anything with them.
You mean you can’t do anything profitable with them. Maybe people should be able to have a family for other reasons than profit
Even without capitalism you need production, and children used to be part of that. Back then you would have as many kids as you could so that they could run your farm.
I’m not defending the current system, but profit isn’t the only reason the birthrate is declining in so many countries.
And the farm would largely be to feed your own family. Not profit.
But I bet they will continue to work people to the bone as a point of pride…like I wonder what could be contributing to this problem.
This right here. It’s not that people don’t want kids. It’s that they’re at their breaking point already.
Even if you provide good living conditions and incentives to people they will choose to not have enough kids to sustain the population if they’re given the choice. Statistics from the past 100 years clearly show it in all rich and even poor countries.
We reached 8 billions humans because people, especially women, didn’t have any other choice.
Yeah, and in a city with no greenery for kids to play in and afraid to let the kids out of their sight for 1 minute.
There’s a surprising amount of green for major cities that otherwise look like concrete jungles. There’s usually plenty of parks and kids are in general very safe. Maybe this is just my comparison from originally living in the states, but it is super safe for children and the amount of expected unsupervised travel kids do in Japan is astonishing.
Dude, Japan is so safe the cops are largely overglorified tourist and traffic guides. The kids run around alone all the time.
That’s an American point of view
They’ve got women’s rights but they hate immigration, this outcome is inevitable regardless of socioeconomic equality among native born.
No one has time for family in Japan
When I watch yt videos about people leaving the workplace at 10pm, I wonder how suicide rate isn’t way higher
There’s a reason so much anime these days is a salaryman dying on the job and reincarnating into a fantasy world.
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Huge amount of japanese descent people in Brazil (including me), but I have the feeling the japanese would rather have their country implode than give us nationality
I guess it’s not limited to Brazil or black people. Any change in their routine seems very complicated.
Who mentioned black people?
Internet don’t know the ethnic diversity of Brazil. They think the German descent community living here comes from a few nazi leaders who fled to Brazil. When in reality they came in droves in 19th century and still speak an old German dialect no longe spoke in German. We have huge communities of Italians, germans, spaniards, portuguese, chinese, japanese, Koreans, syrians, lebanese, nigerians, angolans, haitians, colombians, peruans, bolivians. Brazil is not a ethnic homogeneous country. There are white people, brown people, asians, black people. The term “latino” don’t make sense in Brazil. Brazilians don’t use much less identify with it. Brazilian is just a nationality, don’t mean anything ethnic. Brazilians can be anything.
While we do have black people its such a weird ‘guess’ to make, I still have no idea what the point he was trying to make by mentioning black people. Did he really think the majority of brazillians are black? Cant he even grasp that there thousands if not millions of asians living in Brazil
I assume they were making a point about nationalism and racism in Japan, which is strong to say the least. Especially against dark skinned people.
I assume their comment had nothing to do with Brazil.
Japanese don’t. Unless it’s one of them in blackface.
Seriously, the racism there is painful.
alot of asian countries, china, korea are very similar. china only allows less than 20k/year to become citizens, thier stipulation is you giving up your citizenship of other countries.
That is still miles better than japan, I could actually work towards that. To get japanese citizenship I would need to be born again
I still don’t understand the obsession. Not everything has to be a ponzi scheme where line go up. Things can shrink, it’s ok. Not everything lasts forever. At some point you can abandon areas and let them decay.
I fully agree, but also, the whole concept of a pension plan only works if the next generation pays it forwards. Meaning this generation is paying for the current retired group, and no one will pay for them.
I mean, the way things are now we’ll be living 3-4 generations in a household anyway.
Thats not necessarily true. Pension just needs the economy to grow and even with less people the economy can be stimulated through technology. If 1 japanese with technology can produce product equivalent of 1950s 3 Japanese than that’s growth.
You make the mistake of assuming that pension plans have to be paid by the next generation. Why not use a wealth tax instead?
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This is just like a stock crashing because the quarterly profits did not exceed the very high growth expectations more than a lot, they only exceeded a little.
Not everything has to be a ponzi scheme where line go up.
Yeah sure my personal cup of coffee is not a ponzi scheme AFAIK.
But global capitalism? Definitely a ponzi scheme 100%. Literally destroying the planet to prop it up.
If the Japanese want people to work 80 hour weeks (and go drinking with their boss every night) maybe they should make polyamorous marriage a thing. Kids are a lot easier to deal with if you have help.
That’s certainly a take on “family business”.
A lot of countries are headed there. America isn’t keeping their population growth in the replacement category either. Why do you think abortion and immigration are such an issue in America? They want the white people reproducing, not the immigrants. Wherever there is a super strict, racist or almost racist, immigration policy, look at their population growth.
this story comes out every so often about japan, rarely if ever mentions (slightly) lower births per woman in italy, china, spain, or the same 1.3 as e.g. poland, finland, canada
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_recent_value_desc=false
those are 2022 figures but i doubt there’s been significant change
there’s basically no first world country above the 2.1 replacement rate
I’d say all those EU (and Canada) countries aren’t striving to be the economic powerhouse that Japan is and China already has 1.5 billion people compared to Japan’s 125 million. Plus most countries rely on immigration to make up the difference while I’ve heard (but maybe not true) that Japan is hard to immigrate to due to the disapproving culture toward foreigners.
They actually have quite a bunch of programmes to bring foreigners in. That’s not to say that the cultural issues aren’t there but that’s a separate problem regarding integration rather than immigration.
Sure, but they often aren’t terribly appealing, outside of those that target highly qualified professionals. Japan also needs manpower to make up for shortages in areas like their agricultural and fishing industries, and the terms just kind of suck. Like, I could qualify right now to move there based on my work experience in seafood, but it would be on a 5 year, non-renewable visa, which doesn’t count at all towards establishing permanent residency and doesn’t allow me to bring my family with me.
Those sorts of programs really only appeal to people from nearby developing nations that want to go to Japan for a few years, send a ton of money back home, and then go back to live in Malaysia or the Philippines once they finish building their new house, or paying for their kid to attend a good school, or whatever. It doesn’t do much more than kick the problems of a shrinking tax base and labor pool down the line a bit, nor does it really encourage those participating in such schemes to make serious efforts at integration with the local culture.
Sooner or later, Japan needs to implement a proper immigration reform to offset low domestic birth rates, or they’ll have an elderly population that can’t fund the government and public services, because they aren’t working and the younger generation is too small to carry the load all on their own, and they also won’t have the people to care for them and provide them goods and services in their old age.
In comparison, Italy and Spain have roughly 4x the immigrant population of Japan, and Canada’s number of immigrants is nearly 10x as large.
fair enough. i picked those out as sort of ‘mainstream’ countries that this kind of article doesn’t get published about, while i’ve seen them about japan a few times now. be interesting to contrast immigration rates to countries with similarly difficult language and cultural barriers but that’s a bigger job i haven’t the time for now
to this article’s credit it does end with a couple of paragraphs on the korean government attempts to support “work-family balance, childcare and housing”
Europe has strong immigration policies and can easily correct if needed. Italy is already outsourcing most of elderly care to other Europeans - who’s caring for Japan’s elderly?
i heard alot of them get"abandoned" because theres no one left, or they commit crimes to get taken care of in prison.
nothing about the idea of having children appeals to me in the slightest
Me neither 😆 and now my son is 5 y old
We discovered him about 4 month after creation…
Cultural norms around marriage and work-life balance are strangling Japan’s future. Good article, minus one for not exploring innovative or radical solutions to the crisis.
🐱🐱🐱🐱
Its monetary policy that has done it. The lost decade and all that, caused by the central banks via loose monetary policy.
Had they let prices correct normally it may have been fixed, instead zombie corporations subsist on the back of the government.
Japan will prefer to extinguish itself rather than breaking up with tradition on those cultural points or work ethic and marriage/child rearing
Oh no, not our out of control population growth fueled by resources running out as I type this comment and causing unspeakable damage to the biosphere of the planet.
Whatever will we do if our numbers fall below 7 billion.
Taiwanese family living in Taiwan and frequent Japan prior to having kids and after having kids.
Most people are quick to point out the gruesome work culture, but honestly, that is just a small part of the total issue.
1- Japanese people culturally hate outsiders. So their immigration system is setup to almost never give a foreigner citizenship.
2- Japanese people culturally have a mindset that if you pop one out, it’s you and only you that share that burden. That means that if you’re on a train and struggling with a crying toddler that is tired of standing, nobody and I mean nobody will let you have their seat. Half the patrons will turn up their volume on their headset and the other half with mean mug/glare at you for annoying them. You wanna know the worst part. This mindset transcends to the kid’s grandparents. That’s right. The grandparents will not lift a finger to help you.
Edit: I also want to add that the burden is not even on the father, outside of the finances. The father does not need to help with any baby duties. I have met many Japanese men that has kids that has never even changed a diaper. Why the fuck would a Japanese woman want to have kids?
3- The government is not making it easy to help the families. Do you have a sleeping kid in a stroller? Well, you better hold the kid if you’re using mass transit. Elevators are an afterthought. So once you get off a train, you either have to walk an extreme distance to get to an elevator or in some instances there isn’t even an elevator at all. In some rare occasion there is a designated elevator for strollers and wheel chair access, it’s jammed packed with people who is able-bodied and can take the escalator, all of which won’t exit the elevator to let people with wheel chairs or strollers in.
I went to Osaka Universal studios and ask to rent a stroller. The guy didn’t speak English at all. We eventually used my phone to translate and he asked me my kids age. I said 5. He said, is today his birthday? I said no. He turned 5 a few weeks ago. He then poceeds to deny me from renting a stroller. I reasoned with him telling him my kid is having major jet lag and needs a place to sleep right now. He told me to just go back to the hotel to sleep because he wasn’t going to rent a stroller to me.
I love Japan and the Japanese people, but honestly they all hate kids.
As someone who has always heard how nice Japanese people are, I’m surprised they hate kids that much.
They are courteous and very respectful. It’s built into the culture and even their language. One simple sentence like hello, how are you have multiple ways of saying it depending on who you’re addressing. Addressing incorrectly is very disrespectful. So the culture overly respectful.
After all this you still love Japan and Japanese people?
Yes absolutely. The Japanese has a heavy influence in Taiwan culture. They ruled Taiwan for 50 years. My grandparents only spoke Japanese and Taiwanese when I was growing up here.
That is why there is so much love for the Japanese people. Our cultures are pretty aligned.
What we different is how we view kids in society. In Taiwan, when my wife was visably pregnant, people from all walks of life would give up their seat for her. Even before she was visably pregnant, the government gives you a ribbon to wear and people will let you go first on an elevator and congratulate you.
The government has designated parking spots(marked in pink lines) specifically for pregnant and anyone with kids 6 and under. All larger malls are required to have a clean breastfeeding/pumping room with some malls going the extra mile and having free childcare while you pump.
The people in Taiwan view children as everyone children and everyone has an obligation to bare that burden.
While there are major upsides, the downsides is that people have opinions on how to parent your kids with some parenting for you.
I was in Kaohsiung at a beach and my 3 year old son was taking a stick and hitting it against rocks and the sand. A bunch of grandma’s felt it was too unsafe for my son to be walking around with a stick in his hand and took it out of my kid’s hands and told me that my kid could lose an eye. I know the gesture comes from a good place, but man. Mind your own business.
All people are wired to ‘hate’ outsiders. Countries are forced to open up in order to keep economic growth going. The US needs to import people in order to keep the growth going on. The same with Western Europe. Japan basically took the economic stagnation and said no to opening itself up. I wonder whether that was mostly a top-down sort of decision or not.
Turns out isolationist culture doesn’t stand the test of time. Who knew?
That’s not the main problem here.
Oh? You could optionally expand instead of just stopping at what the problem isn’t.
Other comments had it so I didn’t think it was necessary. Immigration can prop up a low birthrate but that can’t last forever. Need to actually have a culture that supports procreation. And Japan doesn’t really have that. Their work culture is directly responsible for it. I don’t think that’s something easily fixed. Financial incentives could help, but unless it’s pretty hefty it probably wouldn’t be enough.
It did for a few hundred years before they became a vassal state of the US … and wouldn’t you know it the US is also in a birth rate crisis.
Isolationist culture is fine, you just can’t mix it with the crushing reality of capitalism and it’s negative effects on the ability of people to raise families.
