Japan ‘on verge of no longer functioning’ after birth rate plummets to record new low
Japan saw record 1.6 million deaths last year as births marked a 5% fall
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If you want people to actually be able to have a family, you need to enable that. My understanding of Japanese society is that you have medium to no personal freedom over how you spend your time, and meeting people is difficult. It feels like they are so intent on shooting themselves in the foot, and then complaining about their foot hurting.
Even countries that try to enable it don't renew their population, no matter the level of socio-economic equality.
The only way you're reversing the trend is by taking rights from women and I sure hope you don't want that.
Do you have any links to studies/articles about that?
Just stats from a bunch of countries, look at the birthrate over the past 100 years to see the trend, even in Scandinavian countries where socio-economic equality is the highest. If you look at Canada there's quite a drop right as the pill was made available.
It might be highest in Scandinavia, but you still see that one income households are rare there.
But that's the thing, unless you force women to not work, most will still choose to work. Divorce becoming accepted is part of the equation at well, if you might end up single again you won't stay home and be left without any income in you become separated.
There's a whole lot of things mixed up together but in the end the stats are clear everywhere where countries develop, as women gain rights, birthrate lowers.
There's still a lot of downsides to taking off work for one of the parents: not getting career progression, smaller pension, etc. Those are things that should also be fixed in an equitable manner, and as far as I know, no country does that. Basically treat raising children as the full time job it really is.
They've been trying in Sweden by pushing paternal leave to make it so the males are just as likely to take time off as women so it's more equitable, but there was a lot of pushback on "forcing men" to do it and not allowing for "individual choice" as to who takes the parental leave
Quebec is one of the places with the most parental benefits in the world, you can even make money by having kids if you're careful with your spendings, fertility rate is 1.5
People get a year off work with most of their salary paid by the government, then they get child benefits until the kids turn 18, school is super cheap, guaranteed pension fund for everyone...
Sure you have to deal with other issues that might get in the way of your career, but as I mentioned in another comment, unless you force women to stop working and make them depend on the State or their spouse (and making divorce illegal), you're not reversing that trend... And I sure hope that's not something you're ready to do.
It's a very small minority of women that will take a chance and become 100% dependent on others in case shit happens, the only reason they did back in the day was because they didn't have a choice... by law! No body authority unless their father was dead and they weren't married? Well no shit they'll stay home and raise the kids, they can't even open a bank account!
Give women equality and make contraception legal? Well turns out they don't want to have to deal with all the stress that comes with raising children! Just like men!
No, that would be barbaric. But even if you can't fix birthrates quickly, if you don't have women and partners in positions where they feel like they can safely have kids, you're going to compound the issue. My understanding is they've had this cultural issue where if you want to work as a woman that kind of really negatively impacts your career long term, and in terms of long term financial security that's awful.