Asia’s advanced economies now have lower birth rates than Japan

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.vn&#x2F;9At4b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.vn&#x2F;9At4b</a> (Article from May 2022)

This might be a long shot argument but I think a big issue with what is now making societies bad for having large families is individualism.<p>People are so different and have a hard time agreeing on things they find it hard to get married. Then those who do find it hard to stay married. Those who marry and have kids have a hard time finding families to be friends with. The world is changing at such a rapid pace, If you have no shared values you will just have too large a range to find points of commonality.<p>Also in large cities the the density is a problem. Abundance of choice creates paralysis. Choice of partners and lifestyle. Creates more ways to cheat on your spouse without being caught. Life in general is more complex. I believe that there is a lag between rural people moving to cities and low birthrates. They may have more kids due to their families being large but their kids will most likely have less kids. Also large cities seem lonely because you become a replaceable part of it.<p>Sure I making child care more accessible is great and should be done but I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the one thing holding people back.

I wonder if we understand our low birth rates. What if a significant factor is, that after WW2, we all insist both parents work outside fulltime jobs? I feel humanity is like the guy teaching his horse not to eat.

Does anyone have an intelligent strategy for investing in a world with low birth rates and an aging population? It&#x27;s happening everywhere including the USA. I don&#x27;t think stocks etc. will work in a world without constantly growing GDP.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afrugaldoctor.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;japans-lost-decades-30-years-of-negative-returns-from-the-nikkei-225" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afrugaldoctor.com&#x2F;home&#x2F;japans-lost-decades-30-ye...</a><p>If we look to Japan as the model and forerunner for what is happening to the rest of the world, what investments worked there the past few decades if any?

Because East Asia is all about competition<p>The competition starts from kindergarten, parents are competing with each other for things like:<p>1. How many English words your kid know already?<p>2. How many classic poetries they can recite?<p>3. Mathematics above requirement<p>etc.<p>It is a rat race and it is suffocating. And in East Asian system, one failed academic assessment is pretty much a failure and deemed useless, you will be discriminated in so many aspects of your life.<p>And it is curve based system, so no matter how hard you try, 50% will never go to college anyway.<p>And ofc, this system will accompany you all they way through your career as well.<p>People are always looking for something they can compare against, pick the winner and loser, and judge you upon it.<p>As a result, having kids and raising them up to societal standard costs big money, people choose to have none or one and invest everything they can to that one kid.

It&#x27;s fitting that this article is from &quot;economist.com&quot; because mostly, the only people who care so much about this are &quot;economists&quot;.<p>Find me an environmentalist who is worried about there being less people because frankly, I doubt they exist.<p>Yes, having less people in a relatively short amount of time won&#x27;t be without issue, but I do feel like the people who seemed most worried about low birth rates are politicians and economists.<p>We need to keep the consumers coming right?<p>I&#x27;m optimistic because while there is obviously going to be issues with there being less people on earth, it feels like the planet could do with a rest.

its like the whole world’s population is a pyramid scheme not sustainable

The article compares data from 1990 and 2020, yet doesn’t mention covid as a confounding variable (while talking a lot about housing).<p>I think the more telling numbers will be over the next few years. Will there be a post-covid bump and then normalize back to pre-covid levels? Will things just stay the same with incredibly low covid-level birth rates?<p>Only time will tell, but this article is sloppy. The economist can do better.

India which has second largest population after China has reduced fertility of 2.1(lower than replacement rate of 2.2)

Competitive working life, expensive housing, poor quality childcare, long distance from my and spouse’s parents and the climate change are the main reasons why I seriously consider whether to have another child.<p>Out of these housing, childcare and distance from parents could be solved simply by companies offering full remote work as an option. Even better if also educational institutions followed. Forcing people to move into cities for work sucks.

Great, this is how it should be. The real problem is trying to artificially induce population growth in highly developed and consuming countries, rather than allowing them to naturally peak and reach a sustainable level.

Kids are expensive. If you can barely pay rent (forget about getting buying something with a mortgage) and living expenses, then how possibly could you raise children? Add to that many people working very long and sometimes uncertain hours. It&#x27;s a perfectly rational outcome for people to realize they don&#x27;t have the resources for kids and so they remain childless.

What if we tend to have less children as we get crowded together, and this is a compensation for over population. Japan has like 10x the population it probably averaged for the last two millennium. Maybe its population could half at that would be OK.<p>I know, I know. Less growth, less innovations and all the things the economists say. But the innovation per capita would be the same. And probably purchasing power parity would be better.

This is a good thing for the environment and may help us avoid malthusian catastrophe.

My unsolicited and uninformed opinion: Marriage is becoming a status symbol and I personally believe low birth rates are being driven by men more so than women. If you’re a medium to high earning male in NYC, there are so many women to choose from that are pining for commitment (I believe biology plays a factor here). Most of my well to do friends are uninterested in marriage and are just churning through girls.<p>I am happily married - largely driven by personal values religiously influenced moral principle. For most my friends, the question they pose is what is the benefit of marriage? You tie yourself down to monogamy, give up your personal life and risk losing half of it plus a life of child support and alimony in a divorce.<p>I don’t have an answer but I think the root cause may be different than increasing access to child care (which certainly helps) on the margin.<p>Edit for another random anecdote: almost all my Jewish friends in their mid 30s who are well to do are married. Can’t think of one that isn’t. I believe there are cultural correlations that can be drawn.

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First developed country to enact anti anti-natalist policies (restricting birth control, strengthening marriage etc) to win; or you could just drive off the fertility cliff like lemmings with females all working or in edu until 45+.

Raising children in advanced economies for what we call well off life is really hard. Advanced economy capitalism is enforcing 1 child or none per family much better than China ever did.

Is Japan even doing anything about this? The japanese people are going to disappear if this goes on for long enough. I always assumed the 98% ethnically homogeneous nation would want to prevent such an outcome.

People like to criticize it every time someone says it, but anyway here it goes: Idiocracy is a documentary. When the pill was invented, people all of a sudden discovered an easy, &quot;100% effective&quot;, way of avoiding having an &quot;unexpected&quot; baby. Guess what: for most of human history, most of the babies were &quot;unexpected&quot;. People can try to deny it, but having a kid is a HARD JOB, expensive and, for many people, just not worth it. From a thermodynamic point of view, we are beings that exist in a universe where you are rewarded for expending the least ammount of energy you can. So, we&#x27;re basically LAZY, on average. Nature &quot;knows&quot; this, so it put sexual pleasure encoded in our genes in order to make us reproduce, even if in every other area of our life, we are rewarded for choosing the easiest alternative. So, &quot;unexpected&quot; babies it was for 99.999999999999999% of human history. Now, everyone who has an IQ of 100 or more is able to avoid those unexpected pregnancies, and so they are doing it. And it leads to the UNAVOIDABLE conclusion that as time passes, the average IQ of the people that keep having babies will be lowered. Natural selection is a law of physics in this universe. Over time, birth rates will start to go up again, be it in 100 years or more, but it will. Since the people of the future will be the descendants of the people that, even today, with easy and effective contraception, choose to still have kids (or simply had no idea how to no to). But I&#x27;m pretty sure we&#x27;re not headed to the Star Trek future, it&#x27;s Idiocracy from now on. I really don&#x27;t care. I&#x27;m lazy and probably will end my lineage at this point in time anyway.