Shanghai in China has a fertility rate 0f 0.50
Some parts of South Korea like wards of Seoul and Busan are already in or below 0.30 children per woman
In 2023 Taiwan’s fertility rate was 0.865 and still going downside
The Hong kong one was 0.75 kids per woman
Singapore is 0.97 (and declining very fast)
Japan is the highest at 1.20 (with Tokyo being 0.99) and they’re declining also really fast
Why???
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Common knowledge says an insane work culture leaving little time for personal interaction and little options for childcare which basically means pregnancy is a career ended for women, something many women don’t want to accept anymore.
Kids are expensive.
In a developed world, they’re even more expensive. They don’t die as often, and they need education and starting monies when they get older.
As economies develop, the price of having children goes up and birth rates go down.
The same effect is happening everywhere, most aggressively in the most expensive economies.
For the most part, these countries have a high cost of living that demands more out of men and women. Men and women feel they cannot reach a point where they are mentally and financially able to rear children. They don’t want to bring children into the world if they can’t provide a satisfactory upbringing relative to the current times.
Highly developed societies tend to have less children, we don’t know exactly why and anyone who claims they do doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Generally we can point to some contributing factors, those being higher education, greater gender equality, higher income.
Many nations have tried to offer more money to people who have children and it never works to offset the birthrate, because paradoxically the more income someone has the less likely they are to have children.
It’s not just Asia, although that has the biggest case of it.
I would really like to see information about what fraction of this is down to people choosing not to have kids vs people having fertility difficulties.
South Korea specifically has an issue with young adults fleeing rural lands into the nation’s metropolis for economic opportunity. The city is set up to house single workers, and is expensive as well as inconvenient for child-rearing.
The same thing may well be happening elsewhere in Asia. We have similar problems here in the US, but this is mitigated by expansive suburbs and far better rural infrastructure.
because only working 9 to 5 is a luxury here. because this generation grew up as kids whose two working parents were never home.
until you can afford living off of a single income, why would anyone subject their own children to that?
Politics failed to make sure people have what they need to *want* to have children. They need work security, good work/life balance, access to housing, parental leave, subsidized daycare and so on.
If people need to work 50h weeks or if housing is cramped or inaccessible or of daycare is expensive or if having kids is bad for you career – then people won’t do it.
Heavy work culture, combined with sky high real estate prices then hit gender norms that want a stay at home mother, but you need two salaries to buy a house.
So combine heavy housing prices, stagnant wages, and cultural expectations of ‘breadwinner’ families and it means that very few can meet the norms expected to have a family.
Then on top of this, once you start having less kids, in a while, you have a ton of your population way past childbearing age. Most western countries have this already, but Japan has it more so, that is, much more elders, and retired people don’t really procreate.
For China, part of the problem is that they have a system of “residence”. Just because you live somewhere doesn’t mean you are now a resident of that city/region.
Many people moved from rural areas to major cities far away (but still within China) – but they are not “residents” of those cities. Which means they don’t have certain rights, or access to certain schools.
And their children won’t be residents of those cities either – which means they can’t go to certain schools. And schooling is still a big deal in China.
Also, because people work so many days/hours in big cities, children are usually sent back to the old towns/villages to be raised by grandparents – and only visited a few times a year.
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