6 ms·

Why has fertility plummeted across East Asia?

12 points by jseliger 3y ago

999900000999 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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 3y ago
      "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 3y ago
        > 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)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    > Why does everyone support wall streets "increase GDP at all costs" immigration platform? All else being equal, more GDP (per person) means more wealth per person. More housing space, more heating, more antibiotics and children's sledges. So yeah, I support more GDP. > Pay a country's people more so that they have more time/resources to dedicate to making a family We've tried that; doesn't work. Not much at least. Sweden and France have had a bit of success, but not enough to even get back to sustainable fertility levels, let alone natural population growth.
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  The better solution would be to fix the problems causing low fertility.
  - marssaxman 3y ago
    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.
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        pi-e-sigma 3y ago
        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.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        trealira 3y ago
        The scheme of there being a retirement age when you get older relies on there being a lot more young than old people. If, hypothetically, there were a 50/50 split between the retired and the working, the living standards of the working would decline and working aged people wouldn't themselves be able to retire at the same age as those before them. They'd probably resent the old retired people and the previous generations for both having no children and retiring, leaving them to deal with the worsening living conditions.
- lumost 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      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. I also think we are being subtly prepared not for a crisis of demography or a crisis of automation but instead a crisis of oligarchy.
  - 999900000999 3y ago
throwawaymaths 3y ago
Apartment living. Probably for china, also environmental destruction is coming soon to really ding fertility a few notches
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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.
  - klooney 3y ago
    France was one of the nations on the frontier of fertility panic in the 1800s.
deafpolygon 3y ago
I wouldn't count out some sort of biological mechanisms that might be encouraging this decline.
spacebanana7 3y ago
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 3y ago
  My money is on easy access to contraceptives and the fact that childbirth really sucks.
  - spacebanana7 3y ago
    In France & Norway there’s abundant access to contraceptives, yet the fertility rate is much higher than Poland or Italy. Looking through the EU, it’s hard to see any relationship between access to contraception/abortion and fertility [1] [1](fig 2) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20210323-2 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
- pipodeclown 3y ago
  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...
  - spacebanana7 3y ago
    It’s problematic because it suggests we don’t really understand why low fertility happens, or what to do about it. Vast amounts of money might be wasted by governments in Poland, Hungary & elsewhere on fertility boosting programs that likely won’t work. And academically, our dataset of countries is relatively small to begin with, so it only takes a few exceptions to break any statistical confidence.
nine_zeros 3y ago
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.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
Countries have declining numbers of people working in agriculture, and agriculture is becoming more mechanized. When you are working a farm with manual labor, children are income producing assets. As society moves away from that, children are costly liabilities, at least until the parent reaches old age. And social insurance decreases the value of having children as insurance against poverty in old age.

12 points by jseliger 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    "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 3y ago
      > 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)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  > Why does everyone support wall streets "increase GDP at all costs" immigration platform? All else being equal, more GDP (per person) means more wealth per person. More housing space, more heating, more antibiotics and children's sledges. So yeah, I support more GDP. > Pay a country's people more so that they have more time/resources to dedicate to making a family We've tried that; doesn't work. Not much at least. Sweden and France have had a bit of success, but not enough to even get back to sustainable fertility levels, let alone natural population growth.
pi-e-sigma 3y ago
The better solution would be to fix the problems causing low fertility.
- marssaxman 3y ago
  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.
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
        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.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - trealira 3y ago
        The scheme of there being a retirement age when you get older relies on there being a lot more young than old people. If, hypothetically, there were a 50/50 split between the retired and the working, the living standards of the working would decline and working aged people wouldn't themselves be able to retire at the same age as those before them. They'd probably resent the old retired people and the previous generations for both having no children and retiring, leaving them to deal with the worsening living conditions.
lumost 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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. I also think we are being subtly prepared not for a crisis of demography or a crisis of automation but instead a crisis of oligarchy.
- 999900000999 3y ago

throwawaymaths 3y ago

Apartment living. Probably for china, also environmental destruction is coming soon to really ding fertility a few notches

CogitoCogito 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
- klooney 3y ago
  France was one of the nations on the frontier of fertility panic in the 1800s.

deafpolygon 3y ago

I wouldn't count out some sort of biological mechanisms that might be encouraging this decline.

spacebanana7 3y ago

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 3y ago
My money is on easy access to contraceptives and the fact that childbirth really sucks.
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  In France & Norway there’s abundant access to contraceptives, yet the fertility rate is much higher than Poland or Italy. Looking through the EU, it’s hard to see any relationship between access to contraception/abortion and fertility [1] [1](fig 2) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20210323-2 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
pipodeclown 3y ago
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...
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  It’s problematic because it suggests we don’t really understand why low fertility happens, or what to do about it. Vast amounts of money might be wasted by governments in Poland, Hungary & elsewhere on fertility boosting programs that likely won’t work. And academically, our dataset of countries is relatively small to begin with, so it only takes a few exceptions to break any statistical confidence.

nine_zeros 3y ago

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.

rufus_foreman 3y ago

Countries have declining numbers of people working in agriculture, and agriculture is becoming more mechanized. When you are working a farm with manual labor, children are income producing assets. As society moves away from that, children are costly liabilities, at least until the parent reaches old age. And social insurance decreases the value of having children as insurance against poverty in old age.