Just like the UK, they would probably be better off with less people, geopolitical considerations aside.
Many countries have tried giving every incentive possible. Cash bonuses, tax breaks, a year+ of mandatory child leave for both men and women, cheap child care, mandatory flexible hours, housing subsidies, cultural campaigns.
Some of them have a short term effect but none of them get the numbers up to replacement levels and the numbers keep going down.
It's hard to blame it on any one thing. Some might say "suburban car centric culture" but that doesn't explain Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc....
I can't personally imagine the numbers going back up.
If you want to see what culture will look like in a few hundred years, try and figure out what’s common between Mormons, Amish, and Muslims.
Those incentives are usually meaningless. Like 100€ monthly cash bonus. Could cover food, but nothing more. A year of child leave is good, but what to do during next 5 years untill you can put kids into the school system?
And don't forget massive opportunity costs. Instead of having a single kid, woman can have few more years of advancing in career. Instead of putting all time into one kid, woman can upskill, get a degree, etc.
And with second child it's three times harder.
Also turns out, many baby boomers are not eager to be present in life of their grandkids. If you pregnant - you are screwed. You and the father-to-be will take a massive hit in every aspect of life.
The are many programs like this all over the world; the issue with them is they don't give out enough money/resources to have a measurable positive effect - they should be much much more funded. Incidentally the biggest baby boom in my country (Slovakia) was during the largest buildout of cheap accomodation for young families in the history, also the maternity leave was increased to 3 years and there were various subsidies. So I think policies like that work if they are properly funded.
Besides that, at a cultural level personal worth and dignity and safety need to be divorced from monetary net worth as that makes it easier for someone to decide where is a comfortable place for them in their society, and then adjust their time between working and child-rearing.
That said, it's also hard to motivate some people to reproduce if there's no greater point to it than some basic primal instinct, which may not be that high in such people. It follows, I guess, that the more educated a populace gets, the less its participants are likely to thoughtlessly reproduce. Tax credits are helpful (said sarcastically).
Total fertility rates in Scandinavian countries (known for their very generous welfare) are falling as well -- not as catastrophic as South Korea's, but way below replacement rate nonetheless. E.g., Denmark's total fertility rate fell yet again in 2024 to 1.466. (Source: https://www.dst.dk/da/Statistik/emner/borgere/befolkning/fer...)
We see this trend internationally too, i.e., Africa vs Europe.
That said, social safety programs aren’t just about money per se, but about freeing up parents from working and investing time in child-rearing. If life is expensive and requires at least two incomes to sustain a household, who has the time to get pregnant, give birth and raise a child? Maybe this is a problem that gets resolved if children can be safely incubated outside a womb, but that still doesn’t solve the problem of who’s going to do all the work that needs to get done on a daily basis to run a household with kids.
TBH need someone to attempt very illiberal effort to make babies because every pro maternity policy has failed to bring TFR > replacement. At this point it should be abundantly clear that short of religion, carrot policies cannot reward their way to 2.1+ TFR. Or I guess embrace immigration.
IMO the problem is fertility rate also laughs at everything "liberalism" and wealth has thrown and true authoritarian measures have not been taken. As in every liberal / pro natal policies (Nordics) have failed to raise TFR >2.1, usually settle at 1.7. I think more illustrative is wealthy MENA countries where culture, religion, resources align but those countries are either <2.1 TFR or declining to <2.1 TFR, i.e. if you have all the government subsidies and families regularly hire maids/nannies from ample cheap migrant workforce (something even most wealthy liberal societies don't have ubiquitous access too) then the carrot solution itself is not enough.
Stick policies, which only authoritarians or societies in extreme fertility stress can even start to contemplate, would be increased taxation / limited wealth transfers, i.e. if you want to inherit anything from your parents or grandparents (including real estate) you better have at least 2 kids. And in case of east asian societies, ban pets / AI relationships that's been eating at relationship formation. Peak authoritarian methods would be civil service that requires women to start making babies (in conjunction with massive support), state orphanage programs to basically raise new bodies and engineer/manage demographics (i.e. women don't have to keep kids but my spend 1-2 years doing state surrogacy). There's also increasing lifespan, i.e. workforce participation duration, but still hits ultimate limits of needing to replacement TFR.
Or again... engineer society to accept immigration.
And in the case of east asian societies, cancel capitalism. Pets / AI relationships are only the escape vents.
Because that policies are bluff to say politicians support family without actually spending much of the budget.
Like give a 100€ rebate for a childcare while it costs 1000€ per month. And also it is closed for a month in summer, so you should care about the baby by yourself.
Real pro-maternity policies will be like this: 1. Free childcare. 2. Free healthcare, including all medicine and vaccination. 3. Free public transport for kids and adults with them. 4. Subsidized shops with items for kids: from nappies to clothes. 4. Subsidized costs of housing for families with kids. 5. Subsidized costs of sport activities. 6. Fully paid maternity leave untill children can be full day in daycare.
Even with generous European policies, having one kid is a huge hit to the lifestyle and savings. But we need to have 2-3 kids to keep the population.
Yes, I think even "real pro-maternity" policies not enough. I written more in comment below, but my gut feeling is to get enough family formation that has 2-3 kids rather than 1-2, you need... basically UBI + slave labour tier support. Think UAE/Qatar, 20% locals doing 30hr/week make shift jobs, access to cheap labour, i.e. living in maid. Their TFR still declining fast, 4->3 in last 10 years but there's a chance they'll settle above 2.1 / replacement. Short of that level of "abundance" I think most will choose less than 2 kids and societies stuck with backfilling with immigration.
Unless that gets extended to household level, i.e. maids/nannies at home, I don't think it's enough. Hence UBI + "slave" labour tier support. Can't UBI way to hiring fellow nationals to be economical due to price hikes, so need economic subclass willing to work labour roles for peanuts with different economic structure subservient to local UBI purchase power.
Frankly this is a wrong take. For one the TFR of religious countries is also trending downward and below replacement. Immigration is a zero-sum game that won't help for long term.
And the issue is carrot policies just don't give out enough carrots (do the math and you'll see that easily). A really generous family support that makes having children wortwhile compared to the alternatives will have the desired result.
IMO take so far data is showing no amount of generous policies will convince people to have more than 1-2 kids (hit replacement TFR) long term unless they're living life of leisure + ample subsidies AND help. At some point stress/obligation of child rearing is going to eat away at other commitments (i.e. work). Hence highlighting MENA countries where religion+resource coordinate but TFR still collapsing and trending below 2.1 TFR.
The statistic exception being being REALLY GENEROUS, Fully Automated Luxury Communism leisure tier support i.e. living in maids, nannies, drivers -> UAE Emiratis and Qataris where locals ex migrant worker pop still has declining TFR that _may_ settle beyond replacement (currently around 3.1, still down from 3.7 10 years ago). But that requires functionally UBI, optional work i.e. state setups 30hr per week "public sector" for locals while expat / cheap / slave labour handles everything else. The latter being key, need UBI tier to be able to cover hiring other humans to do domestic work, maid, nanny, cook, driver etc.
Maybe a do-able level of "abundance" if we look other way on exploitation, already lots of migrant labours in west, but we tend to keep them in factories or fields, not civic/domestic realm. PRC trying to build their army of care taking robots. But IMO that's the minimum, if you can't ensure that level of support (not just money but labour), positive policies won't get past replacement TFR. If Emrati/Qatari TFR stabilize below replacement in 10-20 years, then it's sign to ceiling on human willingness to have multiple kids, i.e. can't subsidize way for locals to reach replacement TFR.
How long is the long-term data we have? Is the generous support at the start of the policy still generous relative to the changed conditions much later?
> If Emrati/Qatari TFR stabilize below replacement in 10-20 years
My guess is they will collapse too; their lifestyle is financed by oil buyers. This will not go on forever and more importantly they have more and more people to feed and pamper but not more oil to sell. And now that we have technologies that can broadly replace oil, they can't raise the prices too much either.
My rough understanding is we have 20-50 years of efforts in the Nordics. Long enough to form "Nordic Paradox" for situation where pro-natal policies still lead to below replacement rates. There's also weird dual cultural shift - Nordic countries women labour participation rate stagnated or even decreased - more wanted to become full time moms/homemakers - so there is desire for family formation. But second culture shift is the desire is still sub replacement level, i.e. people want 1-2 kids. Not enough people want 2 kids to replace themselves. Not enough people want 2+ kids to make up the people that want 1.
> go on forever
Yeah it's more to illustrate the levels of abundance in terms of pro social policies that could sustain culturally acceptable >2 TFR. Be religious. Have UBI. Ensure people work little if they don't want to. Ensure they have access to cheap labour that does all the work for them. Then maybe TFR could settle between 2-3. Right now the few exception are a few million people sustained by disproportionate fossil exports. That model can't scale without another source of abundance.
Having just read [0], this confirms my earlier suspicion the support is not generous enough there. (Also a huge political issue in probably all countries getting older - the political power skews to the older generation making increasing support for young families harder to finance with budget constraints. Welfare for grandparents and poverty for single parents.)
> That model can't scale without another source of abundance.
Yes of course it can't, it's the whole planet financing it for them. But maybe we don't need that level of abundance - previous generations certainly didn't, even some of them already liberal and educated. And I think we are still missing some fundamental cause here. Maybe modern life is not only too expensive, but also too complex and complicated to navigate into parenthood at the right time and place in life and then it's too late?
[0] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-new-nordic-paradox-how-family...
The conventional reason is # of kids is depressed relative to female education levels, but my unsubstantiated pet theory is elimination of boredom - mobile penetration also seems to map well with TFR declines. I think the opportunity cost / effort if >1 kid is too much, and from what I hear about friends with 2 kids that overlap by a few years, having 2 kids is >2 times harder, and they're not shy about sharing it. Modern life has too many comforts/distractions, hence imo positive policies will have hard time making 2+ kids desirable vs also adding punitive making not having 2+ kids undesirable.
But it's getting there, now that dense cities are the only places with decent jobs.
rr808•2d ago
fwsgonzo•2d ago
mytailorisrich•2d ago
South Korea's population was 25 million in 1960, it is 54 million now.
We need to stop going over the top with claims of "population collapse". The 20th century to this day was abnormal at historical scale in that human population exploded like never before, and perhaps like never again and probably for the best considering how we have brought the planet to its knees.
derektank•2d ago
mytailorisrich•2d ago
We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population because the explosion that has happened is unsustainable and so are current global population levels. That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
This does not mean that population should or will collapse to extra low levels...
nec4b•1d ago
Its just math showing the trend and it's not worthless as it should give you something to think about.
>> We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population
Of course, but it will be painful.
>> That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
That simple math, which you deem worthless also tells you this is impossible. There will be a small number of young active people having to support a big group of elderly. They will not have the time to solve world problems. In fact a lot of knowledge will be lost as economy will contract and there will be less people available for specialization.
mytailorisrich•1d ago
We need to embrace this and use existing and new technologies to cope. We have AI, automation, robots progressing fast, this is exactly what we need in addition to investing in education.
The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
nec4b•1d ago
Based on history it hasn't happened. How do you know it's going to?
>>The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
That is absolutely not the only alternative. One would be to have a stable population at the current size. Another on would be decreasing population slowly and not as drastically as it will happen in Korea. A third one would be growing it slowly. The fourth one would be oscillating around the current size, etc.
UncleMeat•1d ago
"The second derivative of population will remain constant for the next 100 years" is just as silly today as it was in 1925.
nec4b•1d ago
UncleMeat•1d ago
nec4b•1d ago
UncleMeat•15h ago
nec4b•9h ago
UncleMeat•1h ago
MaxHoppersGhost•2d ago
thisislife2•2d ago
notTooFarGone•2d ago
We don't know how a society can work that way as it's a first time.
general1726•2d ago
This system can't work. This system is going to collapse. Just matter of time.
UncleMeat•1d ago
50 years ago people were saying "we are doomed" because of overpopulation. We had people saying that the optimal number of humans on the planet was just one billion and that we had to engage in extreme measures of international oppression to force as much of the unavoidable starvation on certain populations and not others. Now we are seeing "the world is doomed" because of underpopulation (despite the fact that the world population is still growing) and we are starting to see the proposed extreme measures of rolling back women's rights in order to address this.
xboxnolifes•2d ago
dyauspitr•2d ago
dijit•2d ago
Estonia for example had quite a lot of investment, you’d be surprised what a regime will invest in to ensure that the optics are positive.
Not saying that happened here, but it is something that has happened.
rr808•2d ago
dijit•2d ago
USA/EU might be putting money into SK.
Both to “prove to the other side” that their ideology is the right one.
rr808•2d ago
ethbr1•2d ago
And funded what looks like ~USD$35B in post-war economic assistance. (Plus other UN funding)
For that, South Korea went from being devastated by 2 wars to around the 13th largest economy in the world. Not a bad return.
China and Russia were welcome to invest in North Korea...
manuel_w•2d ago
dijit•2d ago
MaxHoppersGhost•2d ago
johnnyanmac•2d ago
wagwang•2d ago
HPsquared•2d ago
Edit: I'm undecided if it's capitalist ownership class, or a "late stage socialism running out of other people's money". Still undecided. It's probably both, which is why we're doomed.
wagwang•2d ago
tomp•2d ago
I actually think they pay their workers too much though - for not working.
I think standard unemployment on full salary is 2 years, even if you quit your job yourself!
Generous benefits invite abuse…
nielsole•2d ago
I think three of these claims are wrong
https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/arbeitslos-arbeit-finden/arbei...
oezi•2d ago
You get 60% of last salary, not full salary.
You get it for up to 12 months not 24.
You lose 3 months of unemployment money if you quit rather than being fired.
toomuchtodo•2d ago
[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44851759
Qem•2d ago
People attribute it to empowerment of women, but I wonder if it's more correlation than causation. Women empowerment happened in the same time frame there was a large shift towards urbanization. The situation across the world before was like ~80% of people living in rural areas, and ~20% living in cities. Now those proportions are approximately flipped in many places. IIRC cities appear to be a net population sink for most of history, counting on an steady stream of people moving from the countryside each generation to replenish sub-replacement numbers. Raising children "free-ranging" is more straightforward in the countryside. In cities they demand a lot of micromanagement and resources from parents, because car-infested, cramped urban landscape is expensive and hostile to children. So perhaps the causation arrow flows from accelerated urbanization to both women empowerment and sub-replacement fertility rates, not necessarily from women empowerment to sub-replacement rates.
toomuchtodo•2d ago
> Most demographers now say the population bomb has largely fizzled, and some predict that the long-term trend toward a smaller global population, with fewer consumers and a smaller human footprint on the planet, could benefit the environment.
> There appear to be other upsides to declining fertility. Along with growing individual freedom and economic empowerment of women, the U.N. study also found a rapid drop in the number of girls and teenagers giving birth.
> "The decline of the adolescent birth rates has been, I would say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the past three decades," said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.'s chief population scientist.
United Nations World Fertility 2024 Report - https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389 (additional citations)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392 (additional citations)
(scholar of the global demographic system; urbanization is certainly a component in a declining fertility rate, but the primary driver is women choosing to have less children, delay having them, or not having them at all, while having the means to assert those choices)
algo_trader•2d ago
This i highly doubt. Humans are able to increase per capita (resource) consumption at a far faster rate! Old age care/consumption can also grow to infinity
toomuchtodo•2d ago
algo_trader•2d ago
Fertility fall in rural Africa is far faster than its rate of urbanization
As a quick primer. falling births seem to correlate/caused by:
a. increasing urbanization b. increasing atheism c. increasing women empowerment/education d. increasing incomes
These factors re-enforce each other, and are scale free (we see the same effect at $1/day, $10/day, $100/day etc)
rstuart4133•2d ago
Before going to far down the rabbit hole, have a look at the fertility rate of TSMC employees. TSMC employees make up 0.3% of Taiwan’s population, they are responsible for 1.8% of all babies born in Taiwan. [0]
The average TSMC woman is highly educated and highly paid, which eliminates most of the usual reasons touted for low the fertility rates in OECD nations. "All" TSMC does is make it possible for their female employees to have a career and raise a family, mostly by providing child care in-house and flexible working hours.
To pull that off TSMC must have a culture than prioritizes families and child raising over profit. In most industries with not be possible. Either their higher costs would lead to them being eaten alive by their competitors, or bought out by PE because their employees could be squeezed to pay out more profit to their owners. There isn't going to be a rash of companies with TSMC style family policies breaking out any time soon.
But a government policy could made it happen, which is another way of saying if a society or country decided they didn't want to wither away to nothing because of low birth rates, it could be done. They could mandate every company adopts TSMC style policies, or they could raise taxes and provide free child care (like they do for education), or more likely some mix that has the same effect. Everyone would have to be willing to be a bit poorer of course, because you are forcing people to spend less on fast cars and big houses, and more of child care.
But does seem like it could be done, so if South Korea (or any of the OECD) had the will, there is a way.
[0] https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/on-the-higher-fertility-of-se...
palmotea•1d ago
So the problem is really capitalism run rampant.
MaxHoppersGhost•2d ago
toomuchtodo•2d ago
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-birth-rate-remains-hig...
> In 2020, the total fertility rate among ultra-Orthodox women in Israel was 6.6, while the rate among Arab women was 3.0, and among secular women, it was 2.0— still well above the OECD average— according to a report from the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research.
(dopamine and doomscrolling are just as bad as religion and traditional values, for different reasons, imho)
tpm•1d ago
pona-a•2d ago
wagwang•2d ago
> Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.
pona-a•2d ago
> While the ethnic demography of France has shifted as a result of post-WWII immigration, scholars have generally dismissed the claims of a "great replacement" as being rooted in an exaggeration of immigration statistics and unscientific, racially prejudiced views.[12] Geographer Landis MacKellar criticized Camus's thesis for assuming "that third- and fourth- generation 'immigrants' are somehow not French."[63] Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.[63]
dijit•2d ago
The assumption being made is that they’ll ditch the religion after four generations? I don’t see data for that assumption, maybe it is not 100%, but its certainly not as low as 20% apostacy.
Thus I would take serious issue with that statement, it is evidence of an ethnic or religious replacement.
pona-a•1d ago
And the actual numbers still don’t show a majority shift. Even if every Muslim in France kept their religion, they’d be ~10% of the population — far from "replacement".
dijit•1d ago
Also, you missed the point entirely if the topic is “the population of x has gone from 1% to an estimated upper of 12.5% in 20 years” and your answer is “its below 10% right now”.
Not only are you potentially immediately wrong, since the number today could exceed 10%, it also doesn’t speak to how those demographics might be shaped by disparities in birthrates or continued migration.
But, you know that, you’re just trying to argue for some reason.
dijit•1d ago
Either that’s a strong coincidence or vote manipulation is rife here.
wagwang•1d ago
Also anglicism is like, catholicism without a pope... also it was created by the king, not imported from another continent.
dyauspitr•2d ago
lossolo•2d ago
dyauspitr•2d ago
lossolo•2d ago
dyauspitr•1d ago
lossolo•1d ago
That’s an oversimplification. Dying of old age and being murdered both end in death, but we both know they’re not the same.
> Why grasp so tightly to a genetic window a handful of centuries old?
I believe I explained that in my first comment.
oezi•2d ago
Current net immigration inflows into Germany are below 0.5% of population.
The big immigration waves of the last 20 years can be directly linked to devastating wars: Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine.
How many generations did it take for the Germans to become Americans in the US? Did it make Americans disappear?
MaxHoppersGhost•2d ago
disgruntledphd2•1d ago
palmotea•1d ago
It's not a question of generations. There were a lot of German-speaking towns in the US, but World War I-driven xenophobia pushed them to Americanize.
pessimizer•2d ago
tpm•1d ago
oezi•2d ago
In any case it won't be a catastrophy as life in North Korea.
seanmcdirmid•2d ago
oezi•2d ago
tuatoru•2d ago
Our "plague" "kills" the young and productive - by their never being born in the first place. We are headed for something we have never seen, ever: a society dominated by old people in pure numbers terms.
The worry is that it is a design for stagnation and decay rather than greater strength. (There won't be money or people to maintain infrastructure because the elders will demand healthcare.)
I don't know what will happen and nor does anyone else really.
seanmcdirmid•2d ago
tuatoru•1d ago
South Korea and Hungary (among many others) have tried paying people to have children, without success. It pulls a few births forward in time, but then the birth rate declines again.
There is something more fundamental going on.