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One core issue is housing. And the core issue with housing is that prices are an arms race where everyone always wants more. Most people would have two or three

One core issue is housing. And the core issue with housing is that prices are an arms race where everyone always wants more. Most people would have two or three kids if they felt like they could afford it. The second core issue is modern dating. That one I don't know how to fix, but the essential issue there is the dynamics of dating not requiring commitment coupled with financial security for women mean long term pair bonding happens at a lower rate and later in life.

nerdponx 5y ago
I'm not sure that dating "not requiring commitment" is the issue. It's difficult to commit to dating when you are time-poor and struggling to even get close to the financial trajectory that your parents were on. It's too easy to blame the kids or whatever, without considering that the kids had and have it harder in many ways than the old people did. Being a millennial in the '00s was pretty good, being a millennial after '08 has not been good (unless you happened to get a sweet high-paying tech job in the '10s).
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  This is actually part of what I'm talking about. The sweet high-paying tech jobs went to a group of people that can comfortably afford to live without marrying off. They date around because they can. I know, because I got that sweet job in 2008 just at the start of the tech wave and I dated around quite a bit and the pressure to get married for financial reasons wasn't there and the social pressure to get married for its own sake wasn't either. This isn't how it looked like in the 1950s or earlier. Most people didn't date 100 different women or wait until they were 35 to start a home with someone. It's partially financial and partially societal. At the other end of the spectrum the increasing gap between rich and poor pushed a lot of men completely out of the dating pool because they can no longer afford basic housing for themselves, so even if they would be willing to commit they don't have options.
  - refurb 5y ago
    This doesn’t jive with the idea that high paying, lower skilled jobs were plentiful in the 50’s and you only needed one income for a family let alone a single person.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    There is a middle way here, which is to partner and commit early, but take some time to enjoy being young adults together before you become chained to a childcare routine. I have a sense that this leads to a more stable family in the long run, and it's what my own parents did. It is pretty hard to find though. It seems people want either hot casual sex or a house in the suburbs within 6 months, not much in between.
pitaj 5y ago
I think one of the biggest issues facing modern dating is the collapse of various socialization activities outside of work. Religion is on a decline so people don't meet at church. Hobby groups are all online now.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Simultaneously movements like MeToo is growing. People tend to avoid relationships with coworker a bit.
aikinai 5y ago
Neither of these apply to Japan, especially Japan decades ago when their birthrate fell to around the current rate. So that’s a pretty strong data point against these theories being key factors.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  What? 1. Yes, obviously Japan housing prices have fallen from their insane 90s peak, but housing is still very expensive in Japan, and especially in urban areas where most Japanese (especially younger Japanese) live, space is famously at a premium. 2. I can barely count the number of times I've read articles on the reasons Japanese women don't want to get married. Unlike some Western nations, there is still a cultural expectation in Japan that women do a ton of housework and childrearing with little help from men, to the point that famously elaborate childrens' bento boxes are a source of stress. Many Japanese women with careers easily see marriage as a net negative, obviously different than decades past.
  - aikinai 5y ago
    1. Space is limited, but always has been. Housing at the scale and quality expected in Japan is still very affordable and isn’t correlated with birthrate. This one is easy to disprove. 2. The reasons you listed are completely different from the one I responded to, and these are certainly potential factors. At least they’re often considered reasonable suspects in Japan.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    > urban areas where most Japanese (especially younger Japanese) live Not "most" people live in where housing price is rising. Foreigners tend to see only metropolis. There are many people living non rural (some are urban? but having car is good) area but affordable housing price.
rjzzleep 5y ago
I don't know about South Korea, but looking at some other asian countries, there are a couple of things, I think the housing part falls into number 3 but is only a small part of the whole: 1. Having children without being married has a bunch of problems, and in some countries like singapore gets punished for it in lack of certain social services 2. Most of these societies expect women to work or have their husband take care of them. Maternity leave is in some aspects as bad as or worse than in the US. 3. Having children is expensive and the education stress that follows for over a decade after giving birth is even more straining. The subsidies people get in Asia hardly even make up for the cost of a c-section. Sure the same might be true for the USA, but we know it's not a good place to compare things to. But birth and housing are also a fraction of the long term pain of raising a child in those societies. Other people have mentioned dating. I think modern societies in general have had a break down in social structures, where people used to get their partners from.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  > Having children is expensive and the education stress that follows for over a decade after giving birth is even more straining. This times 100. The US education system has a lot of flaws, but for the most part, school placement is usually based on geographical location (which comes with its own set of problems), the SAT and ACT are not terribly difficult, and more importantly those college exams can be retaken multiple times a year. East Asian education is extremely competitive with competition for spots starting as early as pre-K (age 3). Japanese media often shows how students get their grades ranked and posted outside of the classroom. The college exams are more comprehensive than the American ones; the South Korean Suneung is scheduled to take 9 hours. The Suneung (and Chinese gaokao, Japanese Center Test, Singaporean GCE) are only held once a year, so if you want to retest you have to wait the whole year. And then there is the problem of school bullying: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/metoo-style-reckoning-over-school-bullying-rocks-south-korea-n1260865 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/metoo-style-reckoning-ove... > “A lot of the people used to say bullying matters in school were merely immature scuffles between teenagers,” she said. “Some would even blame the victims, saying that it is their problem that they cannot fit in.” > Two decades ago, her daughter was beaten by a dozen schoolmates and spent five days in a coma. Yet, when Jo attempted to hold the students accountable, the wider community viewed her as a troublemaker, and her family was forced to move to another area.
ajmurmann 5y ago
How does childcare look in SK? I believe that in much of the Western world, families living further apart is a problem for having children. Having grand parents nearby can make having children so much easier. In the US I think you either need family nearby or have a lot of money to avoid having children becoming totally overwhelming and very negatively impact all other aspects of your life.
iammisc 5y ago
> The second core issue is modern dating. That one I don't know how to fix, but the essential issue there is the dynamics of dating not requiring commitment coupled with financial security for women mean long term pair bonding happens at a lower rate and later in life. One way to fix it is the government deciding to highly encourage 'old-fashioned' social norms. For example, we could have single-sex spaces, which help the sexes develop unique cultures that they then have to rely on each other for. Or we could encourage single-income-earning, realizing more men are going to take advantage of this, and encourage more stay-at-home parenting, realizing that more women will take advantage of this (but by no means should the sex of either role be forced). Or, we could change sex-ed curricula to focus more broadly on family formation and its importance. Encourage church membership, since that used to constitute a large portion of the dating pool, and makes it easier for people to find others like them. Idolize the roles of mothers and fathers and how it's a national duty. There's lots of ways to fix it. The willpower simply isn't there. Of course, many people are in complete denial as to the root causes too. The truth is sexual attraction is fundamentally based on sexual difference. Save for a slim minority of the population, this is true across the board (yes, even in homosexual relationships). The reason why dating sucks and people can't find partners is because we've attempted to eradicate all sexual difference, but every once in a while human nature overpowers even this, and we see phenomena which our current culture cannot explain but is easily explainable in the larger context of the human condition (for example, the popularity of 50 shades of grey amongst women, or the popularity of 'seduction culture' and the manosphere amongst men).
- feoren 5y ago
  Honestly this sounds like a dystopian nightmare. It sounds like you're saying we all need to go back to everyone being a Good Christian who knows Their Place In Society and that will solve everything. Yikes! Maybe I'm reading too much into it, or do you actually want a Handmaid's Tale future?
  - iammisc 5y ago
    How can you honestly compare what I wrote to the handmaid's tale, in which women are forced to breed with men who are not even their husbands? There is no overlap between the two visions. Stop the strawmanning. There is literally nothing 'Christian' (your word, not mine) about men married to infertile women having mistresses. That's literally antithetical to the whole thing. You talk about 'knowing your place in society' as if that's a bad thing. A lot of social problems today descend from the fact that large portions of the population have no place in society.

nerdponx 5y ago

I'm not sure that dating "not requiring commitment" is the issue. It's difficult to commit to dating when you are time-poor and struggling to even get close to the financial trajectory that your parents were on. It's too easy to blame the kids or whatever, without considering that the kids had and have it harder in many ways than the old people did. Being a millennial in the '00s was pretty good, being a millennial after '08 has not been good (unless you happened to get a sweet high-paying tech job in the '10s).

3pt14159 5y ago
This is actually part of what I'm talking about. The sweet high-paying tech jobs went to a group of people that can comfortably afford to live without marrying off. They date around because they can. I know, because I got that sweet job in 2008 just at the start of the tech wave and I dated around quite a bit and the pressure to get married for financial reasons wasn't there and the social pressure to get married for its own sake wasn't either. This isn't how it looked like in the 1950s or earlier. Most people didn't date 100 different women or wait until they were 35 to start a home with someone. It's partially financial and partially societal. At the other end of the spectrum the increasing gap between rich and poor pushed a lot of men completely out of the dating pool because they can no longer afford basic housing for themselves, so even if they would be willing to commit they don't have options.
- refurb 5y ago
  This doesn’t jive with the idea that high paying, lower skilled jobs were plentiful in the 50’s and you only needed one income for a family let alone a single person.
- closeparen 5y ago
  There is a middle way here, which is to partner and commit early, but take some time to enjoy being young adults together before you become chained to a childcare routine. I have a sense that this leads to a more stable family in the long run, and it's what my own parents did. It is pretty hard to find though. It seems people want either hot casual sex or a house in the suburbs within 6 months, not much in between.

pitaj 5y ago

I think one of the biggest issues facing modern dating is the collapse of various socialization activities outside of work. Religion is on a decline so people don't meet at church. Hobby groups are all online now.

fomine3 5y ago
Simultaneously movements like MeToo is growing. People tend to avoid relationships with coworker a bit.

aikinai 5y ago

Neither of these apply to Japan, especially Japan decades ago when their birthrate fell to around the current rate. So that’s a pretty strong data point against these theories being key factors.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
What? 1. Yes, obviously Japan housing prices have fallen from their insane 90s peak, but housing is still very expensive in Japan, and especially in urban areas where most Japanese (especially younger Japanese) live, space is famously at a premium. 2. I can barely count the number of times I've read articles on the reasons Japanese women don't want to get married. Unlike some Western nations, there is still a cultural expectation in Japan that women do a ton of housework and childrearing with little help from men, to the point that famously elaborate childrens' bento boxes are a source of stress. Many Japanese women with careers easily see marriage as a net negative, obviously different than decades past.
- aikinai 5y ago
  1. Space is limited, but always has been. Housing at the scale and quality expected in Japan is still very affordable and isn’t correlated with birthrate. This one is easy to disprove. 2. The reasons you listed are completely different from the one I responded to, and these are certainly potential factors. At least they’re often considered reasonable suspects in Japan.
- fomine3 5y ago
  > urban areas where most Japanese (especially younger Japanese) live Not "most" people live in where housing price is rising. Foreigners tend to see only metropolis. There are many people living non rural (some are urban? but having car is good) area but affordable housing price.

rjzzleep 5y ago

I don't know about South Korea, but looking at some other asian countries, there are a couple of things, I think the housing part falls into number 3 but is only a small part of the whole: 1. Having children without being married has a bunch of problems, and in some countries like singapore gets punished for it in lack of certain social services 2. Most of these societies expect women to work or have their husband take care of them. Maternity leave is in some aspects as bad as or worse than in the US. 3. Having children is expensive and the education stress that follows for over a decade after giving birth is even more straining. The subsidies people get in Asia hardly even make up for the cost of a c-section. Sure the same might be true for the USA, but we know it's not a good place to compare things to. But birth and housing are also a fraction of the long term pain of raising a child in those societies. Other people have mentioned dating. I think modern societies in general have had a break down in social structures, where people used to get their partners from.

bobthepanda 5y ago
> Having children is expensive and the education stress that follows for over a decade after giving birth is even more straining. This times 100. The US education system has a lot of flaws, but for the most part, school placement is usually based on geographical location (which comes with its own set of problems), the SAT and ACT are not terribly difficult, and more importantly those college exams can be retaken multiple times a year. East Asian education is extremely competitive with competition for spots starting as early as pre-K (age 3). Japanese media often shows how students get their grades ranked and posted outside of the classroom. The college exams are more comprehensive than the American ones; the South Korean Suneung is scheduled to take 9 hours. The Suneung (and Chinese gaokao, Japanese Center Test, Singaporean GCE) are only held once a year, so if you want to retest you have to wait the whole year. And then there is the problem of school bullying: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/metoo-style-reckoning-over-school-bullying-rocks-south-korea-n1260865 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/metoo-style-reckoning-ove... > “A lot of the people used to say bullying matters in school were merely immature scuffles between teenagers,” she said. “Some would even blame the victims, saying that it is their problem that they cannot fit in.” > Two decades ago, her daughter was beaten by a dozen schoolmates and spent five days in a coma. Yet, when Jo attempted to hold the students accountable, the wider community viewed her as a troublemaker, and her family was forced to move to another area.

ajmurmann 5y ago

How does childcare look in SK? I believe that in much of the Western world, families living further apart is a problem for having children. Having grand parents nearby can make having children so much easier. In the US I think you either need family nearby or have a lot of money to avoid having children becoming totally overwhelming and very negatively impact all other aspects of your life.

iammisc 5y ago

> The second core issue is modern dating. That one I don't know how to fix, but the essential issue there is the dynamics of dating not requiring commitment coupled with financial security for women mean long term pair bonding happens at a lower rate and later in life. One way to fix it is the government deciding to highly encourage 'old-fashioned' social norms. For example, we could have single-sex spaces, which help the sexes develop unique cultures that they then have to rely on each other for. Or we could encourage single-income-earning, realizing more men are going to take advantage of this, and encourage more stay-at-home parenting, realizing that more women will take advantage of this (but by no means should the sex of either role be forced). Or, we could change sex-ed curricula to focus more broadly on family formation and its importance. Encourage church membership, since that used to constitute a large portion of the dating pool, and makes it easier for people to find others like them. Idolize the roles of mothers and fathers and how it's a national duty. There's lots of ways to fix it. The willpower simply isn't there. Of course, many people are in complete denial as to the root causes too. The truth is sexual attraction is fundamentally based on sexual difference. Save for a slim minority of the population, this is true across the board (yes, even in homosexual relationships). The reason why dating sucks and people can't find partners is because we've attempted to eradicate all sexual difference, but every once in a while human nature overpowers even this, and we see phenomena which our current culture cannot explain but is easily explainable in the larger context of the human condition (for example, the popularity of 50 shades of grey amongst women, or the popularity of 'seduction culture' and the manosphere amongst men).

feoren 5y ago
Honestly this sounds like a dystopian nightmare. It sounds like you're saying we all need to go back to everyone being a Good Christian who knows Their Place In Society and that will solve everything. Yikes! Maybe I'm reading too much into it, or do you actually want a Handmaid's Tale future?
- iammisc 5y ago
  How can you honestly compare what I wrote to the handmaid's tale, in which women are forced to breed with men who are not even their husbands? There is no overlap between the two visions. Stop the strawmanning. There is literally nothing 'Christian' (your word, not mine) about men married to infertile women having mistresses. That's literally antithetical to the whole thing. You talk about 'knowing your place in society' as if that's a bad thing. A lot of social problems today descend from the fact that large portions of the population have no place in society.