[HN Gopher] Why has fertility plummeted across East Asia?
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Why has fertility plummeted across East Asia?
Author : jseliger
Score : 9 points
Date : 2024-01-19 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ggd.world)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ggd.world)
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I'm watching for these countrues to open up immigration. China
| will have more than enough internal migration to last for a very
| long time.
|
| But Korea, via its new digital nomad and culture visas seems to
| be opening up. If current trends presist we're headed towards a
| future where people from high population growth countries end up
| immigrating.
|
| I actually don't see this as a problem. The world is full of
| willing workers. They might just need a visa
| mwbajor wrote:
| Why does everyone support wall streets "increase GDP at all
| costs" immigration platform? It seems to be astroturfed alot.
|
| Pay a country's people more so that they have more
| time/resources to dedicate to making a family. Even better,
| incentivize families. Or is that too expensive for bankers?
| adriancr wrote:
| > Pay a country's people more so that they have more
| time/resources to dedicate to making a family. Even better,
| incentivize families. Or is that too expensive for bankers?
|
| For that to happen, resources need to be reallocated from
| somewhere else towards this. For that to happen, people would
| need to express this via voting.
|
| > Why does everyone support wall streets "increase GDP at all
| costs" immigration platform?
|
| Those resources don't come out of nowhere, so there is a need
| for immigration as well to get work done.
| mwbajor wrote:
| "Those resources don't come out of nowhere, so there is a
| need for immigration as well to get work done."
|
| Efficiency gains in a process certainly create extra
| "resources" whatever they might be. But I do applaud you
| for not saying "we need immigration because we need ethnic
| food" like most people say nowadays.
| adriancr wrote:
| > Efficiency gains in a process certainly create extra
| "resources" whatever they might be.
|
| Sure, and most of the world has much better lives already
| because of that then their parents.
|
| This is excluding US which had a unique position after
| ww2 which has eroded to some extent but is still much
| better then the rest of the world..
|
| > But I do applaud you for not saying "we need
| immigration because we need ethnic food" like most people
| say nowadays.
|
| I would guess that is dismissive on purpose, people
| saying that are avoiding a potentially sensitive topic
| which they do not care to engage in. (which I probably
| should as well, so yes, ethnic food is the reason)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| downvoted for implying bad faith. not everyone who holds an
| opinion is being paid to do so.
| pi-e-sigma wrote:
| The better solution would be to fix the problems causing low
| fertility.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Why would we want to do that? Low fertility is a solution for
| many of our other problems related to ecological overshoot.
| It will be vastly easier to reduce energy consumption and
| pollution output (including of course CO2) in a world where
| the population is no longer rising.
| mwbajor wrote:
| Almost every person that has told me about the perils of
| overpopulation...more people, has also told me that its in
| my best interest have open borders e.g. more people. Why
| the hypocrisy in message? The unbelievable immigration in
| my country is causing a reduction in quality of living not
| unlike what I would expect with overpopulation because....
| it is overpopulation.
| pi-e-sigma wrote:
| The fertility only needs to be increased back to the level
| providing stable population size, it doesn't have to be
| ramped up to the level causing the population to grow
| again.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I see no reason we shouldn't stabilize the population at
| a size rather lower than the one we currently have. This
| is a problem our grandchildren can solve, if they want
| to.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| The problem is having young, able-bodied people being
| outnumbered by aged-out-of-work dependents. The balance
| of young vs old, not just a matter of "less people over
| time"
| pi-e-sigma wrote:
| The problem is our current economic system will not
| survive shrinking population. We know already that ever
| growing population is not sustainable, either. But the
| stable population size is still workable within the
| current system.
| lumost wrote:
| It is fundamentally strange to look at a society which stops
| having children to the extent that it will no longer exist
| within 2-4 generations as having a problem of "not enough
| workers."
|
| Perhaps part of the problem is that we see individuals only as
| workers?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| The focus on workers is a result of the fundamental problem
| of depopulation being economic. One family growing old
| without replacing themselves with a gaggle of grandchildren
| is one thing, but an entire country becoming predominantly
| retired is an economic disaster for those retirees. It's
| about maintaining economic growth so that old people can live
| off their investments, which requires the post-productive
| folk to be outnumbered by still-productive folk.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| You know, I spent some time in college learning economics,
| and lots of time after that listening to podcasts about
| economics ("Planet Money" has long been great), but like
| almost every other belief I had when I was younger, I seem
| to have lost this one as well.
|
| Supposedly we've had decades of productivity growth, so
| you'd think that it would be possible for a smaller cohort
| of workers to keep everything going, and yet it is
| apparently a creeping disaster that there may not be enough
| of them to maintain modern civilization in the not-so-
| distant future. Like many aspects of modern life, it just
| isn't really adding up to me.
| pydry wrote:
| It's funny how AI/automation discussions are dominated by a
| jobpocalypse but when the topic is demographics or (god
| forbid) putting down the retirement age suddenly it's a
| lack of workerpocalypse and "quick, find some immigrants!"
|
| There is a _glaring_ contradiction there that I think has
| more than a little to do with the way capital dictates the
| shape of modern political discourse.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Apartment living.
|
| Probably for china, also environmental destruction is coming soon
| to really ding fertility a few notches
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| People have lived much denser in apartments in cities for
| hundreds of years. Whole families used to live in a room on
| Paris a couple hundred years back. Was the fertility as low in
| those cities back then too? (This is a serious question I just
| don't know.)
| pi-e-sigma wrote:
| Increasing the standard of living actually lowers the
| fertility. Everywhere! Not only in the capitalistic
| societies. Even in the Soviet Union the fertility started to
| drop as the standard of living increased.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Could just be another confounding variable like education,
| general cultural change, etc. I mean if "increased standard
| of living" meant "everything stays the same but taking care
| of kids is now easier" I would expect an increase in
| fertility. Obviously we shouldn't simplify too much, but I
| don't think increased standard of living alone makes much
| sense as explanation. I think something else is probably
| driving it.
| scarmig wrote:
| It depends not just on absolute level of ease but
| relative. Suppose having and raising a child takes some
| normalized 100 units of work and some basket of luxuries
| takes the same 100 units. Even if having a child drops to
| 50 units of work, if that same basket of luxuries drops
| to 25 units, you'll still see a decrease in fertility.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I wouldn't count out some sort of biological mechanisms that
| might be encouraging this decline.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Every suggested cause of low fertility has problematic
| exceptions.
|
| Religiosity generally increases fertility, but countries like
| Poland have both high religiosity and low fertility.
|
| Urbanisation generally decreases fertility, but Israel has a high
| population density and high fertility.
|
| Economic growth tends to decrease fertility, but periods of
| recession also decrease it. Moreover, Western Europe has both
| more wealth & fertility than Eastern Europe.
|
| Social programs like benefits & maternity leave intuitively make
| it easier to have children - but many European & Asian countries
| have these with less fertility than the US & Australia (for whom
| social support is generally lower).
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| My money is on easy access to contraceptives and the fact that
| childbirth really sucks.
| pipodeclown wrote:
| Why is that problematic? Doesn't the fact that is has very
| exceptions make it a rule? This basically means there is a wide
| set of confouding factors at play...
| nine_zeros wrote:
| In Asia, the transformation to a life where education takes 22
| years and marriage only happens after 28 years is pretty new.
|
| When so much of life is given to the pursuit of jobs, careers,
| mortgages, and the general rat race, there is little time left
| for dating, marriages, child birth, and raising kids.
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