I belive an equally good headline would have been: "Japan wants women to have 2.1 kids but they're too scared to make them"
Japan has a Hikkomori problem, which means a 30% reduction in birth rate because those people stay single forever.
Japan also has the issue that large parts of the country will be heavily affected by global warming and you can already see the increase in typhoons right now. Parents are scared if their children will still have a safe home.
And lastly, the economy has stopped growing and turned into a zero sum game. It's a cutthroat competition for who gets promoted because new leadership positions typically only open up if someone dies or retires. That means young families are broke.
The paternity leave is catnip for western newspapers, but in my opinion almost irrelevant.
>Japan has a Hikkomori problem, which means a 30% reduction in birth rate
about 0.5% of the Japanese population are estimated to live like hermits, how are they responsible for 30% in birth rate reductions? If anything this is the Western media catnip, because it's the most overhyped, Japanese stereotype I've ever seen.
I was referring to the wider movement where young people give up on normal participation in daily life. So I'd also count grass eaters, for example. The 30% came from my memory of these statistics:
"About one-third of women (37.4%) and men (36.6%) aged 18 to 24 described themselves as single and not interested in a relationship."
Creating options is the least important step in changing an entrenched cultural norm. What you actually need is a measure to eliminate the symbolic repercussions of using those options.
In the early 2010s, Bay Area startups were famous for "unlimited vacation" policies that resulted in less overall time off because everyone was well aware that taking even a standard amount of vacation would signal a lack of devotion.
What's the solution? Mandatory benefits: make everyone use their allotment, even if they don't want to. Many large banks force all staff to take holidays not only to combat a culture of overwork, but also to prevent fraud by making sure everyone has a block of time where they have to hand over their work to someone else.
If the Japanese government were truly serious about the "ikumen" ideal, it would pass a law requiring 6 weeks of paternity leave. Of course, I doubt that's politically or culturally feasible.
Here in Finland we have generous paternity leave that people aren't afraid to use, yet birth rates are very similar to Japan. IMO it's partially cultural, but also lack of stability in employment, having to spend too many years studying useless degrees and expensive housing (compared to wages) in cities contribute.
I’ve been in Tokyo for more than 15 years. When my son was born, my then-employer - the Tokyo office of a White Shoe NY law firm - gave me 3 days paternity leave. Told me pretty much everything I needed to know.
That's 3 more days than I got in the US... only way I got any time was unpaid days. Outside of some large corporations and government jobs, few people - even the women giving birth - get anywhere near enough time.
A lot of companies will give you at least a month, even if it isn’t mandated by law. We have a family leave pay roll tax in WA, though I’m not sure how hard it is to use for paternity leave.
Japan does much better than the USA on child care so the parents can go back to work.
Taking paternity leave in Japan is a giant PITA if you're living paycheck to paycheck. Because of how it's paid out I didn't see any money until I went back to work three months later. How are you meant to keep the lights on until then?
The problem is that children, rather than free farm labor, are now too expensive, while the wages on which the majority of people depend, are too unpredictable and intermittent for the kind of long term involvement 2.1+ children represent.
If countries want to solve their fertility problem, they can waste their time with various tricks and "incentives" to postpone what they'll eventually have to do for geopolitical reasons alone, which is to go to war with their own business community.
Capital controls, tarrifs, sector bargaining -- the exploding heads of think tank libertarians guide the way like lit torches through a swampy marsh.
If wage earners can be assured that they are taken care of irrespective of the spasms of the global market, they can have children. Otherwise they will persist in their state of soft rebellion, which is marked by low fertility and low laber market participation, among others.
Is that really all to it? Look at Germany, it's pretty stable if you are a wage earner, especially if you have an engineering diploma. They don't make more kids even though they are safe, and they have generous paternity leave.
There is something else going on, I feel a kind of ambiant negativity induced by the global warming news, which seem to block people to have kids.
>Look at Germany, it's pretty stable if you are a wage earner, especially if you have an engineering diploma. They don't make more kids even though they are safe, and they have generous paternity leave.
Even for those stable engineers, it's hard to afford a home. Also you start earning money late at 25, because you needed those pesky degrees. Now you are 30, have a modicum of money, and want to live a little first. So you have fun until 35. Now you're looking for a life partner, you find them at 40. But you need to be financially stable, so you save up for a downpayment, you wait a few years until 45 to start a family.
You now notice you can't have kids because you're too old. The end.
It's a huge host of reasons and they all have a tiny cumulative effect. Also after a while it also reaches a tipping point in that "all my friends aren't having kids so why should I".
The reasons vary based on who you ask and their bias. My bias will be obvious. Here's my list:
- War on traditional family values. That includes marriage and having kids.
- War on men.
- Toxic and degenerate pop culture promoted to teens.
- Hookup culture, dating apps, easy and promoted and celebrated divorces
- Daddy government is there aleays to provide a huge cushion for badly picked marriages. For women at least.
- Men are scared away from marriage due to the legal system being skewed against them.
- Promotion and glorification of party culture. Having kids and a stable marriage is Hard. If everything is handed on a platter to you from an early age and you're shielded from the realities and difficulties of life, this is going to seem like a huge life decision that is too hard.
- We don't realize how much our collective fiddling and tweaking with various parts of our world with laws and incentives is having on society and culture. We're fucking it up royally. Just look at how degenerate pop culture is atm, and look at it honestly, and wonder if it's healthy for society on the aggregate.
Increased education requirements to not live in poverty is the #1 reason in my opinion.
When parents expected young children to perform unpaid manual labor the net cost of upbringing was negligible or even profitable.
Now many people only start earning at 21 or later, and aren't even able to support their parents at the point due to the huge size of mortgage and college loans.
I wish countries stopped trying to "solve their fertility problem." We don't need so many people. We don't need laborers to exploit. We should focus on technological and robotic solutions to the labor shortage.
Either pay companies to achieve paternity leave targets, or fine them if they don’t, and we’ll see what happens to paternity leave rates.
And for those of you who haven’t been through the process yourself, it’s hard to imagine trying to go through the first couple of weeks after a baby is born without it.
For one, if your wife/partner/baby mommy has had a c-section, they will have to stay in hospital for a few days after the birth, because a c-section is nontrivial surgery that they will need to recover from.
They and you will also need to start feeding/changing/bathing/soothing the new baby. If it’s your first, you’re learning how to do all this from scratch. And sometimes this is easy, sometimes it’s not. The logistics of simultaneously using a breast pump, and formula supplementation…let’s just say it’s a lot of work that nobody prepares you for.
If it’s not, you’ve also got other kids who still require the usual amount of looking after, plus a bit extra because they’re often peeved about this new bundle of pooh, wee, and crying getting all the attention.
And then you’ve got the logistics of all the friends and relatives who turn up and want to see your bundle of joy.
And then, frankly, it’s your kid, and most fathers I went through the process with at roughly the same time wanted to be involved in all of this stuff, unlike their Boomer parents. I certainly did.
Readit News
Japan has a Hikkomori problem, which means a 30% reduction in birth rate because those people stay single forever.
Japan also has the issue that large parts of the country will be heavily affected by global warming and you can already see the increase in typhoons right now. Parents are scared if their children will still have a safe home.
And lastly, the economy has stopped growing and turned into a zero sum game. It's a cutthroat competition for who gets promoted because new leadership positions typically only open up if someone dies or retires. That means young families are broke.
The paternity leave is catnip for western newspapers, but in my opinion almost irrelevant.
about 0.5% of the Japanese population are estimated to live like hermits, how are they responsible for 30% in birth rate reductions? If anything this is the Western media catnip, because it's the most overhyped, Japanese stereotype I've ever seen.
"About one-third of women (37.4%) and men (36.6%) aged 18 to 24 described themselves as single and not interested in a relationship."
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-japanese-increasingly-disinter...
Deleted Comment
In the early 2010s, Bay Area startups were famous for "unlimited vacation" policies that resulted in less overall time off because everyone was well aware that taking even a standard amount of vacation would signal a lack of devotion.
What's the solution? Mandatory benefits: make everyone use their allotment, even if they don't want to. Many large banks force all staff to take holidays not only to combat a culture of overwork, but also to prevent fraud by making sure everyone has a block of time where they have to hand over their work to someone else.
If the Japanese government were truly serious about the "ikumen" ideal, it would pass a law requiring 6 weeks of paternity leave. Of course, I doubt that's politically or culturally feasible.
Japan does much better than the USA on child care so the parents can go back to work.
I didn't know this is idiom.
My first intuition was white shoe law firm meant you wear white sneakers instead of black leather shoes. I.e. it was more of a shady, cheap law firm.
Interesting that it means the opposite.
If countries want to solve their fertility problem, they can waste their time with various tricks and "incentives" to postpone what they'll eventually have to do for geopolitical reasons alone, which is to go to war with their own business community.
Capital controls, tarrifs, sector bargaining -- the exploding heads of think tank libertarians guide the way like lit torches through a swampy marsh.
If wage earners can be assured that they are taken care of irrespective of the spasms of the global market, they can have children. Otherwise they will persist in their state of soft rebellion, which is marked by low fertility and low laber market participation, among others.
There is something else going on, I feel a kind of ambiant negativity induced by the global warming news, which seem to block people to have kids.
Even for those stable engineers, it's hard to afford a home. Also you start earning money late at 25, because you needed those pesky degrees. Now you are 30, have a modicum of money, and want to live a little first. So you have fun until 35. Now you're looking for a life partner, you find them at 40. But you need to be financially stable, so you save up for a downpayment, you wait a few years until 45 to start a family.
You now notice you can't have kids because you're too old. The end.
The reasons vary based on who you ask and their bias. My bias will be obvious. Here's my list:
- War on traditional family values. That includes marriage and having kids.
- War on men.
- Toxic and degenerate pop culture promoted to teens.
- Hookup culture, dating apps, easy and promoted and celebrated divorces
- Daddy government is there aleays to provide a huge cushion for badly picked marriages. For women at least.
- Men are scared away from marriage due to the legal system being skewed against them.
- Promotion and glorification of party culture. Having kids and a stable marriage is Hard. If everything is handed on a platter to you from an early age and you're shielded from the realities and difficulties of life, this is going to seem like a huge life decision that is too hard.
- We don't realize how much our collective fiddling and tweaking with various parts of our world with laws and incentives is having on society and culture. We're fucking it up royally. Just look at how degenerate pop culture is atm, and look at it honestly, and wonder if it's healthy for society on the aggregate.
When parents expected young children to perform unpaid manual labor the net cost of upbringing was negligible or even profitable.
Now many people only start earning at 21 or later, and aren't even able to support their parents at the point due to the huge size of mortgage and college loans.
I love this!
Dead Comment
Plenty of well intenioned policy, but its not considering the actual social stigmas/structures behind the issue.
Either pay companies to achieve paternity leave targets, or fine them if they don’t, and we’ll see what happens to paternity leave rates.
And for those of you who haven’t been through the process yourself, it’s hard to imagine trying to go through the first couple of weeks after a baby is born without it.
For one, if your wife/partner/baby mommy has had a c-section, they will have to stay in hospital for a few days after the birth, because a c-section is nontrivial surgery that they will need to recover from.
They and you will also need to start feeding/changing/bathing/soothing the new baby. If it’s your first, you’re learning how to do all this from scratch. And sometimes this is easy, sometimes it’s not. The logistics of simultaneously using a breast pump, and formula supplementation…let’s just say it’s a lot of work that nobody prepares you for. If it’s not, you’ve also got other kids who still require the usual amount of looking after, plus a bit extra because they’re often peeved about this new bundle of pooh, wee, and crying getting all the attention.
And then you’ve got the logistics of all the friends and relatives who turn up and want to see your bundle of joy.
And then, frankly, it’s your kid, and most fathers I went through the process with at roughly the same time wanted to be involved in all of this stuff, unlike their Boomer parents. I certainly did.