It’s not just Japan, but also a lot of the western world. People are getting married less often and having fewer children and my guess is that it’s largely driven by women opting out as they are a lot more selective in who they date and marry compared to men. Historically women didn’t have much of a say in the matter since they needed to marry for a better life since they lacked the freedoms or resources to go it alone. Now that women have gained their freedom and the resources to to survive on their own (higher rates of education, economy that supports high paying jobs that employees lots of women, etc), they can totally stay unmarried and have fulfilling lives in their social circles and wait until they can select exactly what they want. Men largely take what they can get, they are the selected. Women select. And of course this is just a generalization.
Most women I know 18-30 put hours of their week into their fitness and appearance. The most you get out of men is that some of them try to get nice clothes and go to the gym. Those men have no problem dating, it turns out. Most men? I have to chide some men to take a shower and do their laundry, even.
If incels found out about exfoliating and not turning your depression and anxiety outward into misogyny, maybe they'd get laid.
I don't know where you live but where I am both males and females have the same standards of fitness and hygiene but females can afford to be more picky about to whom they open their legs.
so you think this lack of hygiene or whatever has tripled in the last ten years or what? this betrays a total lack of consideration. sexual market dynamics are shifting rapidly.
i don't call my girlfriend my customer, it's a completely appropriate metaphor when speaking about culture-level aggregate effects. you should reflect on why all of your responses in this thread boil down to attacks on a perceived outgroup instead of engagement with ideas.
> Or maybe, it's too expensive to start a family these days.
There's much more economic uncertainty for the average family as a result of two things.
1. Corporations innovating the labor market and successfully squeezing increasing amounts of wealth out of the workforce: successful union busting, ever more cleverly exploitative labor contracts, the gig economy, unpredictable scheduling, metrics and surveillance, etc.
2. Fewer funds proportionally available to labor thanks to increasing wealth capture by a tiny minority.
It's not only expensive, but it's statistically difficult to overcome the uncertainty and establish a homestead you can believe will prove stable over a kid-raising time frame.
It's easy to understand why people are hesitant to start families in such family-unfriendly economic conditions.
Simple solution: 1%/year tax on wealth and give these money to families with kids. The tricky part is wealth is often stored as shares and if you tax Bezos, he'd have to sell 1% of his shares, thus driving the price of those shares down; then if some hedge fund keeps buying the shares he sells, eventually he may lose control over his company, which is unfair. We might want to define wealth as savings above 5M dollars. This would be easy to work around: register a few companies with highly complex structure of ownership and spread money across them.
How do you ensure our society survives in such an environment? There’s a potential future where the birth rate in open and tolerant communities falls to near zero while the birth rate in closed, ultra orthodox (across numerous faiths and denominations) religious communities within which women are commanded to procreate remains high. If you watch a show like Handmaid’s Tale through this lens you can start to connect the hypothetical dots from here to there.
Seems like you’re saying liberalism is anti-those-things but it’s not, it is anti-coercion though and if that has historically been the solution to what you describe then I could see one drawing that conclusion.
I think the solution is probably to make having children more attractive with government subsidies and labor laws. E.g. free daycare, affordable education (including college), health care, a minimum amount of paid time off per year, etc.
Nobody should be forced to get married or have children if they don’t want to. But if we can alleviate some of the risks/down sides to having children, I think we will see more people choosing to start families and also having more children per family.
> to make having children more attractive with government subsidies and labor laws
This is a bad idea. Russian government have already tried that, and the result was that less wealthy people (mostly alcoholic and drug addicts) started to literally make children to receive subsidies and spend them on themselves.
It's fun to me how Google search results differ for "to make a child for subsidies" and for this same phrase translated to Russian, where it has already became a phenomenon.
Subsidies can be tied up to mortgage: the entire cost of housing can be made deductible from taxes, all expenses related to kids can be reimbursed (by IRS in April: you show checks and they give you money back). On top of that your income can be backed by the government for an extended period of time in case something happens to you, while you still need to pay for everything. You may ask where do we get money for all this? Tax on wealth. Many countries tax investments at 1% a year, not income, but investments. This won't bankrupt the rich people because investments usually make 5-10% per year and the government can take a small fraction of that. And no, the rich won't move their money abroad because safety that the US gives is worth a lot.
Isn't it likely that those ultra orthodox societies would repeat the cycle and we'd still end up back here anyways? It's not like the current situation sprung up out of nothing.
One where I don't witness the majority of my peers doing pointless socially unnecessary work because profit is the dominant justification for most economic activity.
I described something by saying what it isn't. I think you understand the concept of looking for something having some idea of what it is and isn't, but not knowing exactly what it would be.
To me, another outside reader, daenz sounded like the one who knew exactly what answer he wanted to hear, right from the start. This is actually a very strange question to ask that early in a conversation what name such a basic and legitimate but abstract desire could have.
What I want to discuss is the underlying premise of these articles, that by woman being liberated from the burden of the family, they achieve a sort of independence that leads them to increased happiness. And furthermore, that this trend is nothing but the next step in societal evolution and previous models of organization are not only outdated, but a form of subjugation.
It is a bit odd. I suppose by this light, men's increased participation in home life and parenting represents a forgoing of their independence and an reduction in their happiness. This does not seem to be the case e.g. in Scandinavia.
The OP means that if you earn your own money, then you do not depend on your spouse for income. This provides you with more freedom than you would otherwise have. Both because you can divorce and still have income, and because your spouse can no long argue "This money is earned entirely by me, so I have complete discretion over how it will be spent".
Two-earner households obviously have a large independence over single breadwinner households in being able to 1) afford housing 2) afford to pay for education.
'Liberation' has meant that for the majority of women, if they want to raise a family without financial disadvantage, either must work or be very choosy over their husband's earning potential / wealth.
Is that really an increase in choice? Most people do not have the financial cushion to stay at home, even if that's what they really want.
I’m not sure that the titles you offered seem to support your argument that the nyt is pushing the ideology you describe.
Liberation, however, is strongly tied to economic opportunities. Historically, as is cited in TFA, women got married often for financial security and stability.
Yes. That is where age gap between partners comes to play. Among other things, it ensures exactly that. The stereotype at the time was that women want marry soon and men avoid commitment and want to stay single longer.
The other reasons are sex, social pressure and actually feeling in love and marriage being expected expression of that.
> Wouldn't it be easier for them to remain single and enjoy their freedom and wealth?
Men married later then women. That way men got more years of freedom. That was normal.
Women wanted to marry, because economy, because married women had higher social status, to leave parents house, because that was expected of them anyway etc.
Single men were somewhat discriminated against too in employment situations and married men had higher social status.
Nevertheless, stereotype at time was girl trying to force marriage from male afraid of commitment. Perfectly reasonable answer to question about that exactly.
Can any anthropologists answer this: have there been other human cultures that die out due to a lack of desire to procreate, or is this a new development?
Please don't strawman me by suggesting that I'm saying only married people have children. The article also talks about the lack of desire to have children due to the desire for independence, and talks about how it's also a factor in the lack of desire for marriage.
I simply misunderstood what you were saying - it seemed quite a non-sequitur from the main point of the article.
I think it's a little premature to assume that the population of Japan is going to die out. One of the points mentioned is that few Japanese women have children out of wedlock - I imagine this will change as time moves on and fewer couples marry, similar to other countries.
However, I think the main challenge with posing the question "have there been other human cultures that die out due to a lack of desire to procreate" is that culture is quite an ephemeral thing - what would it mean to die out?
As an aside, is strawman a verb these days? Language is hard to keep up with.
I see what you mean. Maybe my question does have a hidden assumption that it is even possible for a culture to die out from a lack of procreation. I'm just trying to better understand the problem... sub-replacement fertility rates seems to be a new development, and nobody seems to know how it plays out in the long run in the modern world.
A 'culture' can die by being replaced by another culture. Of course the most common means of death to a culture is loss of material resources leading to population decline, such as Easter island.
I disagree. People have less sex in our society for about the same reasons they don't have kids. Contraception makes no difference when men and women don't bother to date each other.
But it wasn’t too long ago that people were afraid of exponential population growth leading to wars and suffering and the end of civilization.
Now the global population has started to stabilize and concerns have shifted toward shrinking populations in developed countries. I don’t pretend to know how things will end up, but it’s not a stretch to imagine scenarios where the populations in developed countries could stop shrinking and stabilize.
Well they are on track to have 50% of their population disappear in the next 40 years and a lot of economic upsets because of it. The fact they are isolated does protect against that, but presents other complications.
Indeed, fertility rates can change rapidly. However it's foolish to simply claim it can change so it will. If the current trend continues the Japanese people and culture will be lost to time.
Not an anthropologist, but from my readings of Roman history, the Roman aristocracy stopped having as many children as they had before to the point that Augustus (if memory serves) made achieving political office easier for those who had kids. Didn't make a difference.
> As recently as the mid-1990s, only one in 20 women in Japan had never been married by the time they turned 50, according to government census figures. But by 2015, the most recent year for which statistics are available, that had changed drastically, with one in seven women remaining unmarried by that age
I feel sad reading this article but understand where the women seem to be coming from. It basically seems like two choices
1) get married and because your husband works all day, you get zero assistance managing kids and housework and aging relatives. There’s no safety net there, unlike in the US where, in many cases the husband could take time off or work from home to help out when the wife needs
2) don’t get married and be encumbered to all that. But have to forgo intimacy and the joys of kids.
> There’s no safety net there, unlike in the US where, in many cases the husband could take time off or work from home to help out when the wife needs
A lot of people in the US (both men and women) do not have the flexibility to take time off from work whenever needed. Also in terms of “safety net” - Japan offers affordable (and soon to be free) daycare for households where both parents work full time.
The long work hours Japan is famous are a strain on families to be sure. But with the government actively working to change the culture and also the sheer necessity due to a large percentage of households where both parents work, I think things are changing quickly.
As others have noted, the US is experiencing similar declines in marriage and birth rates. And unlike in Japan where the government is actively working to address the issue, the US government does not seem capable of making necessary reforms to social welfare/child care systems right now and is even actively making things worse by discouraging immigration.
This article read really biased. The part about wife being ruled by her husband is simply not true. In Japanese households traditionally wife stays at home to be a housewife and man earns the money. But when he brings the money home, he gives all of them to wife who traditionally controls household's money and only gives a husband a small pocket money which he is then allowed to spend how he wants.
So obviously the article's allusions to Japanese sexism must be taken with reservation.
Gender-based division of labor is heavily frowned upon in modern society, even if that division of labor still makes a lot of sense for a lot of people.
Those "urban pockets" contain a very large percentage, if not the majority (depending on how you measure and with what granularity), of the US population.
One could just as easily say that it's "heavily frowned upon" by all but the retrograde inhabitants of the country's depopulated and backwards interior.
I'm a liberal but I still have to point out that "the country's depopulated and backwards interior" (your own words) provides the food, agricultural products, and mineral plus other natural resources that cities depend on. Until urban areas manage to figure out how to conjure their food and industrial input out of thin air, rural areas are as important (and arguably more important) than cities.
It's also worth noting that a large portion of the armed forces come from rural areas. Need I point out the potential problem with a military that doesn't hold the same values as the civilian populace it's supposed to protect and obey? Bear in mind that history does have a nasty habit of repeating itself.
(This is not a comment about calling it urban pockets. 123 millions is a lot. Just a note in regard to the statement that it could be called the majority.)
The real problem is that it's a competitive environment. Women understandably want the ability to work -- even if you're married and have kids, picking up a shift at a diner here and there can help get your kids into a better school district.
Until everybody does it. Then you need that shift just to be able to afford to live where you would have without it, and to be in the better school district you need a full time job as a second income. Then everybody does that and we have the two income trap, and the option to just be a stay at home parent evaporates because the other families have two incomes and you're bidding against them for positional goods.
And it's no answer to ask each parent to work half as much and then split the child rearing duties, because that's still an economic disadvantage relative to the family where both parents work full time. It's even worse than having one full time worker and one full time parent, because one full time job pays more than two half time jobs due to the reduced training costs and other administrative overhead.
So instead it creates the requirement that women become full time workers in addition to full time parents, only to have the same quality of life and economic stability they used to have as stay at home parents. And we see fertility rates and female happiness on the decline since the 1970s.
A possible solution might be to fight against scarcity in existing positional goods. So make housing costs low enough that anyone can afford to own a home even with one income or two part time incomes (and build lots more homes to make that possible), untie school quality from housing and let people send their kids to any school they want to as long as they can get the kids there, etc. Another (complementary) option is to increase support for families with children, e.g. bigger child tax deductions/credits. But we clearly need to do something -- we shouldn't just pretend it isn't happening because it's politically inconvenient.
This is a very smart way to organise society, if we think about it: people have to do more and more work to bid against each other for the limited amount of resources. The only flaw is that this reduces birth rate to unacceptable levels. I don't believe that this can be fixed: this very smart ratchet mechanism won't let us work less. Rich countries like USA counter this problem by immigration of qualified individuals. Not so rich countries like Europe have to let everybody in. But this solution won't last for long and eventually the so called advanced countries will be replaced by people that don't give a s..t about women's and anyone's rights and don't have troubles with birth rate. Oh well, maybe this can be fixed, but nobody likes the solution: reimbursement for all kids related expenses and extra to compensate for time - schools, universities, healthcare are free for anyone under 25; better laws related to marriage, kids and divorce - it makes no sense to give up half of your earnings and the house, and this alone deters a lot of otherwise qualified men from starting a family; and there should be an option to delegate raising kids to those who are good at it - the best age to make kids is early 20s when you're healthy, but in our modern society it's a financial suicide to start a family until you are well off (35 if you're lucky) - this type of advanced childcare would be a big shift in our society. Or keep extracting profit from full time working men and women and watch the sunset of the modern civilization in 50 years.
> This is a very smart way to organise society, if we think about it: people have to do more and more work to bid against each other for the limited amount of resources.
It's a very smart way to organize a society if you're a landlord using artificial scarcity to extract rents equal to the productive value created by everyone else. For everyone else it's warm dung.
It's not even economically efficient because it undervalues non-wage labor, of which child rearing is a prominent example that we are now under-producing as a result.
> reimbursement for all kids related expenses
Reimbursement overcomplicates things for no good reason and creates a lot of perverse incentives to overpay for services etc. Just choose an amount per child and make that the amount of the child tax credit.
But that's somewhat separate from the main thing driving the competition, which is artificial housing scarcity (and artificial scarcity in general). That may be the single most pressing problem facing us today, outside of climate change.
What would that fixed child tax credit be? 75k/year to cover education, healthcare, food? Probably not and it would be closer to 15k. It all depends on what kind of families we want to support: some may be happy with 15k.
Not only housing is expensive, there is a good chance to lose this expensive house over a divorce.
This is badly conflating things. Few care how any particular family divides up their responsibilities. It's only the gender part, the lack of agency, that is criticized.
A woman shouldn't have to be a homemaker and a man shouldn't have to be a breadwinner but it's fine if they choose those things for themselves in a society that will accept and respect them regardless.
I guess the key question is whether new cultural norms can be formed that allow both women and men to have the opportunities they deserve while still encouraging and supporting the birth of children.
Liberation doesn't do much good if the culture and way of life that liberated them dies off.
I’m seeing this framing a lot in this thread and I haven’t experienced it before, where does this “back in the day when women had less freedom it was better for humanity” come from? Seems like a negative feedback loop if you’re looking for a date...
Marriage has its roots in slavery, especially of women. The word 'husband' means 'owner of a wife'. The woman was considered property of the man, a slave. The word 'family' meant 'slaves in a household'. Look it up.
No it doesn't. Husband is from Norse hús, meaning House, and bóndi, meaning farmer or tiller of the soil, combining to the Norse húsbóndi meaning the male manager of a household.
Very good now check the etymology of bond https://www.etymonline.com/word/bond
"c. 1300, "in a state of a serf, unfree," from bond (n.) "tenant, farmer holding land under a lord in return for customary service; a married bond as head of a household""
In ancient Mesopotamia, the words describing a husband meant “owner of a wife.” From “Israel’s house : Reflections on the use of “Byt Ysr’l” in the Old Testament in the light of its ancient Near Eastern environment” (PDF) by Daniel I. Block (page 268):
"In the patriarchal Mesopotamian society the father was considered to be the lord of the house.65
65 Cf. “The Code of Hammurabi,” ANET, 171, #129, and 173, #161, where he is called be-el as-sa-tim,“owner of a wife.” […]"
The man was usually indeed lord of the house, the manager among the 'slaves in a household', aka 'family'
family (n.)
early 15c., "servants of a household," from Latin familia "family servants, domestics collectively, the servants in a household," thus also "members of a household, the estate, property; the household, including relatives and servants," abstract noun formed from famulus "servant, slave,"
Can confirm. Wife tells me all the time about how shitty Japanese guys are as husbands (heard all of her friends complain), and how happy she is that I’m not Japanese.
Even stay at home mothers without jobs do an insane amount of work here, with husbands expecting home made meals. This is all anecdotal of course, but I hear Japanese husbands almost never participate in any household chores. Wives don’t even bother asking as they are afraid of being seen as incompetent at doing housework. I can only imagine the schedules for working women! Mind you, Japan is not a society where hiring others to watch your kids is a common thing. Women typically do most of the kid raising on their own, with husbands only around on weekends and holidays.
My wife didn't marry me because Japanese guys are shitty, she was far too young to know better when we met. This is coming from a person who interacts with married women living in Japan. Her personal opinion of Japanese guys was not formed until after interactions with these women. Even then, you could argue she is biased just by the company she keeps. I'm just telling you what I hear from my sources.
The thing that bothers me the most is the lack of consensus.
For every economically free woman there seem to be 5 more that would prefer the man to pay for every date or assume other traditional roles, no matter how it is rationalized. (My experiences in the Americas and most European cultures.) In this article about Japan that seems like an accurate distribution, given that it mentions only 1 out of 7 subscribe to any of the logic/circumstances the article is written about.
To be a male ally for the economically free and liberated woman is almost the worst form of altruism.
The incentives are completely misaligned. All you can do is learn about what the sensibilities are, never publicly disagree with them on record or around a woman striving for these ideals, but do the complete opposite with the much larger population of women that expects a certain traditional heteronormative gender role.
(The goal, of course, is to be an eligible mate - or not ineligible - for all of them)
>The thing that bothers me the most is the lack of consensus.
>For every economically free woman there seem to be 5 more that would prefer the man to pay for every date or assume other traditional roles, no matter how it is rationalized.
Women, like men, are individuals possessed of a diverse set of opinions and beliefs, they do not operate according to a consensus algorithm. To expect "consensus" among an entire gender on a topic like feminist identity and inter (and intra) gender relationship dynamics, particularly at the level of social and cultural expectations, is sexist and diminishing.
>The goal, of course, is to be an eligible mate - or not ineligible - for all of them
No, the goal is, or should be, to support human rights, because that is what womens' rights are. Men should be allies of women and of feminism because the belief that women have the right to bodily, social, political and career autonomy is the morally correct position to hold, not as a pretext to maximizing their chances of getting laid.
Many people deciding what feminism is are speaking on behalf of their whole gender and leave no oxygen for others to point out the lack of consensus on these matters. Its the same filter bubble seen on other polarizing topics, your echo chamber agrees with you and everyone that disagrees is an irreconcilable deplorable.
I agree people should be treated as individuals
Lack of consensus accurately describes my frustration
Is the problem here that Japanese men so stubbornly hold onto traditional morays? I’ve never been and am only passively familiar with cultural tradition, but it seems like the “company man” tradition is still very much alive, along with a lot of other very dated concepts.
There’s really quite a bit of bias here in this short statement that I’d like to highlight:
* Assumes that falling marriage/birth rate is a bad thing. But there are some benefits as well such as fewer unwanted births and unhappy marriages, less environmental strain, affordable housing costs, low unemployment, etc.
* Assumes that only men “stubbornly hold onto traditional mores”. Surely women do this too.
* Assumes cultural differences in Japan are “dated” (and therefore inferior) compared to elsewhere.
Note that I’m not even a cultural relativist. I do think that some cultural traits are objectively better than others. But you do need to be careful to avoid bias.
Finally I’d just point out that marriage and birth rates are on the decline in much of the developed world. Which leads me to believe that the cause must more universal than a single population of men refusing to abandon their stubborn traditions.
I feel like every generation has this in some capacity, and the movement just dies off due to lack of reproduction. Leaving just their artifacts from their writings to inspire a similar distribution of people in a future generation, who also fail to create offspring to instill similar ideals in. Whereas the counterparts are reproducing in heteronormative relationships.
Is there enough data to study this now, just to confirm (or accept completely different findings)
You can view this as the result of the emancipation of women.
Or you can view it as the sacrifice of the private sphere (family, children, home and hearth) at the altar of the economic sphere.
I suppose I view it as a bit of both. I certainly don't like the idea of people being forced into marriage. But I'm also skeptical of the rejection of marriage. I don't think a career can replace a family. The reason I have a career is so I can have a family.
A lot of people in their 20s seem to think that their dayjob is actively involved with "making the world a better place" and will lead to fulfillment. I think "brainwashing" is a fairly accurate word to describe that mentality.
If having children is so wonderful one must wonder why men still haven’t by large decided to pitch in when it comes to the nuts and bolts of child rearing. While I would agree that any vocational claim of making the world a better place is dubious, certainly that is equally true if not more so of bringing more people into the world.
> If having children is so wonderful one must wonder why men still haven’t by large decided to pitch in when it comes to the nuts and bolts of child rearing.
It's, by and large, because those are not the men that women select to have children with. When women consistently choose the man with the six figure salary, but that implies working long hours, what follows is predictable.
There is also a high degree of adverse selection there because a woman can't tell how much a man will help with the children before she has the children, by which point the father is already chosen. So they choose based on what they do know (e.g. salary) which is inversely correlated with that.
Bingo. I was on the kind of career trajectory for a million dollar salary. The most famous school, name brand employers, etc. But when we had a kid I fell in love and I wanted to spend tons of time with him. It’s my wife who had to be OK with moving out of the Bay Area, cutting our expenses, while I transitioned to a job where I basically work 5 hours a day and make less than $200K. Most wives would have said no fucking way. We are going to have more kids and I may even go full stay at home dad.
Incentive models are usually very easily explained by comparing groups that take either road A or road B and see the results.
If we look at top 50% highest earners among men and compare with the bottom 50%, who has:
Highest Social status. Has more children. Bigger social support system. Live longer. Better health. Feeling of happiness and fulfillment.
For comparison do the same with women and take the top and bottom 50% and collect the same data.
From this simple data driven study we can prove if there exist an incentive in the form of pure outcomes between focusing on activities that raise income compared to activities of social value but without any monetary rewards. We also get a gendered perspective on the question.
I suspect this is a bit like people in the 50s asking why, if having a career is so great, have women still not decided to pitch in and club the corporate ladder.
> A lot of people in their 20s seem to think that their dayjob is actively involved with "making the world a better place" and will lead to fulfillment. I think "brainwashing" is a fairly accurate word to describe that mentality.
Could you expand on what you mean by this? Are you referring to private corporations "making the world a better place" by selling products?
I work in public health research, and my day job indirectly (but not that indirectly) leads to reductions in infant mortality rates. Should that not be fulfilling?
> You can view this as the result of the emancipation of women
Or you can view this as a result of men treating their wives like their caretakers.
For all the problems the US has, one very good thing it has going for it is that, in many (most?) social circles, it is expected that men will help out and support their wives and families beyond just earning a paycheck. This chart comes from a study that shows how men do about twice as much housework as they did in 1976, while women do less: https://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/media/images/housework2_h.jpg . Many companies now give as much time for paternity leave as for maternity leave. TBH when that trend first started I didn't understand it: "But men didn't actually have the baby!" I thought. But by equalizing the time off, it takes the burden (and expectation) off the woman for doing all the childcare, with the related harm this can do to a woman's career.
It's not just women, but men also opt out of marriage. Because we have no reason for marriage anymore. The writer, as usual, don't mention the elephant in the room. It must be intentional because she probably want to write about women's right and nothing else.
The reason is nothing but for the lack of money. We, the average Japanese, cannot afford to have a child anymore. We just barely afford to have a life for themselves.
Why did we have to have a marriage? Because of the children. Because in the Japanese society, the children is assumed that they have a parent consists of one male and one female in marriage relationship.
Since we cannot afford to have a child, there is no reason to marriage anymore.
What other functions the marriage offer?
Asset management and inheritance? No. We can't afford to have a reserve or real estate. There is no use for that.
Bonding the families? No, as rural areas are more and more abandoned and everybody concentrate toward a few big cities, there is no traditional bonding of the families in one area.
Sex? Well, Not anymore. Japanese marriage system assume that the marriage is a exclusive sex relationship between single male and single female. It support very narrow traditional sexuality and excluding today's most of the sexuality.
The marriage system is now outdated. Ironically, the traditional marriage system is one of the cause of birth decline. It's an obstacle. Some people still want to have a child driven by natural instinct, but the current Japanese society assume a marriage between a male and a female who share their asset as the one, agree exclusive sexual relationship. Not following that pattern and you have huge negative impact on tax, school, health insurance and everything which makes those who want to have a child but don't agree on traditional marriage system holding to have a baby.
What if our world doesn't really need more people and the economic incentives (not everywhere, but in the west now and maybe everywhere later) are discouraging children? You could see that as bad if you value tradition. But maybe people used to have a lot of children because they were valuable to work the land and now the incentives are different. In the long run is it bad if people have less children for a while? There are more people alive today than ever before.
The US also has a lot of people putting off sex, marriage, etc.
I suspect part of it is just there's stuff to do 24/7. If you have internet access, you can read, educate yourself (with or without credentials), talk to people around the world, watch porn etc etc any time of the day or night.
A former hippy once told me "TV shut off at 9pm. There wasn't anything else to do but sex and drugs."
We have the opposite of that. There are so many things to do, lots of people seem to be forgoing sex. Because: Meh.
It will be never outdated, it is a must for healthy mental grow of children (as you also weakly pointed out). To get love, to be able to focus and deliver, get direction, learn and bring forward traditions, learn social skills, create bond etc.
Of course orphanage also works, but hard to imagine it is the ideal structure, thou it worked for Turkish janissary (there are probably plenty of other examples from history) and now China also trying it with minorities.
Children are not as expensive as one imagine, you might have to give up the most expensive phone/car luxury etc. But just ask any elderly if it worth it.
If your mind thinking more like assets, children has the biggest appreciation value over anything.
I know several unmarried, non-conventional and blended families who seem to disprove the theory that marriage is a necessary condition for a child's healthy upbringing.
And it is clearly false that marriage is a sufficient condition.
With today's variety of sexuality and values, that idea is also outdated.
>Children are not as expensive as one imagine...
Today's average Japanese young generations barely live with any savings. If they have savings, they are living with parents or very lucky. That means they can't even afford to double the food cost.
Children requires more than food. A private room for example. Children deserve a privacy so they deserve a private room. But the housing price is too high. You can't afford to have extra rooms. You can't afford to rent a house with a lot of rooms and you can't afford to have a real estate. If you can't have a money, your only option is to live in a rural less demanding area where the house price is cheaper. But it requires 1.5 hours between your house and office. You work 8 hours per day and waste 3 hours just inside the train.
Education cost is also steadily rising as well as tax. my parent used to say they pay their tuition by working themselves. Sure, when they were a student, school cost was like one week worth of work. Thanks to the lower school cost, higher wage, and most importantly, less tax! It's like straight out from the Old Economy Steve meme.
I'm a foreigner living in Tokyo, it's just supply and demand. Lots of people want to live in the city so inevitably a decent-sized apartment gets pricey.
Which isn't a Japanese only problem either. The countries which has less birth rate and marriage problem are also the ones with better child benefits, health care and education.
It will be the beginning of our extinction least in rich and developed countries, where millennials strive to survive due to poor boomers' financial and political choices (sorry, but nobody mentioned it).
Give millennials more money that they actually receive and you'll see people take marriage as a choice again
I don't think Japanese women have a say in the society, you see very few women rising up, the gender roles are strictly enforced. Had a female friend who was fairly ambitious, she left and moved to the US, since she said there was no way she could pursue those there
I know a Japanese women who went to college in the states and had the opposite opinion so she moved back to Tokyo. I guess our experiences cancel one another out!
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadOr people grew up watching their parents regret starting one too soon and want to avoid that mistake.
People who talk about women being more selective makes me wonder if there's an ulterior motive to choosing that hypothesis. Sour grapes?
If incels found out about exfoliating and not turning your depression and anxiety outward into misogyny, maybe they'd get laid.
Sexually speaking, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
There's much more economic uncertainty for the average family as a result of two things.
1. Corporations innovating the labor market and successfully squeezing increasing amounts of wealth out of the workforce: successful union busting, ever more cleverly exploitative labor contracts, the gig economy, unpredictable scheduling, metrics and surveillance, etc.
2. Fewer funds proportionally available to labor thanks to increasing wealth capture by a tiny minority.
It's not only expensive, but it's statistically difficult to overcome the uncertainty and establish a homestead you can believe will prove stable over a kid-raising time frame.
It's easy to understand why people are hesitant to start families in such family-unfriendly economic conditions.
Nobody should be forced to get married or have children if they don’t want to. But if we can alleviate some of the risks/down sides to having children, I think we will see more people choosing to start families and also having more children per family.
This is a bad idea. Russian government have already tried that, and the result was that less wealthy people (mostly alcoholic and drug addicts) started to literally make children to receive subsidies and spend them on themselves.
It's fun to me how Google search results differ for "to make a child for subsidies" and for this same phrase translated to Russian, where it has already became a phenomenon.
* Japan’s Working Mothers: Record Responsibilities, Little Help From Dads
* In Japan, More Women Fight to Use Their Own Surnames
* Japan Desperately Needs More Day Care Workers. New Mothers Need Not Apply.
* A Princess in a Cage
Seems like NYT has a mission to liberate woman in Japan...
I am really skeptical of this ideology that affirms work and a wage as some sort of spiritual liberation.
What economic system do you propose that has the most individual independence?
All of the greatest problems looming on our horizon are tied to how we organize production and consumption.
Because I asked about it, and you answered by confidently describing it, instead of saying "it doesn't exist."
The OP means that if you earn your own money, then you do not depend on your spouse for income. This provides you with more freedom than you would otherwise have. Both because you can divorce and still have income, and because your spouse can no long argue "This money is earned entirely by me, so I have complete discretion over how it will be spent".
'Liberation' has meant that for the majority of women, if they want to raise a family without financial disadvantage, either must work or be very choosy over their husband's earning potential / wealth.
Is that really an increase in choice? Most people do not have the financial cushion to stay at home, even if that's what they really want.
Liberation, however, is strongly tied to economic opportunities. Historically, as is cited in TFA, women got married often for financial security and stability.
The other reasons are sex, social pressure and actually feeling in love and marriage being expected expression of that.
Men did not want to marry either, but did so out of societal pressure.
Both Man and Woman did not want to marry but did so nevertheless, due to the structure of the society.
What's the alternatives?
Shall we view marriage as some kind of instinctive behavior?
Or some kind of rational decision supported by some game theory?
Men married later then women. That way men got more years of freedom. That was normal.
Women wanted to marry, because economy, because married women had higher social status, to leave parents house, because that was expected of them anyway etc.
Single men were somewhat discriminated against too in employment situations and married men had higher social status.
Nevertheless, stereotype at time was girl trying to force marriage from male afraid of commitment. Perfectly reasonable answer to question about that exactly.
(What part of what I've said is wrong? NYT is not leftist, or leftists don't support egalitarianism? :/ )
I think it's a little premature to assume that the population of Japan is going to die out. One of the points mentioned is that few Japanese women have children out of wedlock - I imagine this will change as time moves on and fewer couples marry, similar to other countries.
However, I think the main challenge with posing the question "have there been other human cultures that die out due to a lack of desire to procreate" is that culture is quite an ephemeral thing - what would it mean to die out?
As an aside, is strawman a verb these days? Language is hard to keep up with.
True, but the fact remains that the fertility rate is below the population replacement rate as well.
Do you have evidence of a < 2.0 fertility rate reversing itself in human cultures?
But it wasn’t too long ago that people were afraid of exponential population growth leading to wars and suffering and the end of civilization.
Now the global population has started to stabilize and concerns have shifted toward shrinking populations in developed countries. I don’t pretend to know how things will end up, but it’s not a stretch to imagine scenarios where the populations in developed countries could stop shrinking and stabilize.
If anyone is curious, the statistics for the U.S. look similar. https://i.redd.it/qn25qiv8fawz.png
...but I wouldn't hold my breath on the NYT writing an article on how rough Japanese men have it.
The problem hasn't changed much.
That was just the first link, I'm sure there are more, but i'm not going to do your homework for you.
A lot of people in the US (both men and women) do not have the flexibility to take time off from work whenever needed. Also in terms of “safety net” - Japan offers affordable (and soon to be free) daycare for households where both parents work full time.
The long work hours Japan is famous are a strain on families to be sure. But with the government actively working to change the culture and also the sheer necessity due to a large percentage of households where both parents work, I think things are changing quickly.
As others have noted, the US is experiencing similar declines in marriage and birth rates. And unlike in Japan where the government is actively working to address the issue, the US government does not seem capable of making necessary reforms to social welfare/child care systems right now and is even actively making things worse by discouraging immigration.
So obviously the article's allusions to Japanese sexism must be taken with reservation.
One could just as easily say that it's "heavily frowned upon" by all but the retrograde inhabitants of the country's depopulated and backwards interior.
But we won't, because that's rude.
It's also worth noting that a large portion of the armed forces come from rural areas. Need I point out the potential problem with a military that doesn't hold the same values as the civilian populace it's supposed to protect and obey? Bear in mind that history does have a nasty habit of repeating itself.
(This is not a comment about calling it urban pockets. 123 millions is a lot. Just a note in regard to the statement that it could be called the majority.)
Until everybody does it. Then you need that shift just to be able to afford to live where you would have without it, and to be in the better school district you need a full time job as a second income. Then everybody does that and we have the two income trap, and the option to just be a stay at home parent evaporates because the other families have two incomes and you're bidding against them for positional goods.
And it's no answer to ask each parent to work half as much and then split the child rearing duties, because that's still an economic disadvantage relative to the family where both parents work full time. It's even worse than having one full time worker and one full time parent, because one full time job pays more than two half time jobs due to the reduced training costs and other administrative overhead.
So instead it creates the requirement that women become full time workers in addition to full time parents, only to have the same quality of life and economic stability they used to have as stay at home parents. And we see fertility rates and female happiness on the decline since the 1970s.
A possible solution might be to fight against scarcity in existing positional goods. So make housing costs low enough that anyone can afford to own a home even with one income or two part time incomes (and build lots more homes to make that possible), untie school quality from housing and let people send their kids to any school they want to as long as they can get the kids there, etc. Another (complementary) option is to increase support for families with children, e.g. bigger child tax deductions/credits. But we clearly need to do something -- we shouldn't just pretend it isn't happening because it's politically inconvenient.
It's a very smart way to organize a society if you're a landlord using artificial scarcity to extract rents equal to the productive value created by everyone else. For everyone else it's warm dung.
It's not even economically efficient because it undervalues non-wage labor, of which child rearing is a prominent example that we are now under-producing as a result.
> reimbursement for all kids related expenses
Reimbursement overcomplicates things for no good reason and creates a lot of perverse incentives to overpay for services etc. Just choose an amount per child and make that the amount of the child tax credit.
But that's somewhat separate from the main thing driving the competition, which is artificial housing scarcity (and artificial scarcity in general). That may be the single most pressing problem facing us today, outside of climate change.
Not only housing is expensive, there is a good chance to lose this expensive house over a divorce.
A woman shouldn't have to be a homemaker and a man shouldn't have to be a breadwinner but it's fine if they choose those things for themselves in a society that will accept and respect them regardless.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the words describing a husband meant “owner of a wife.” From “Israel’s house : Reflections on the use of “Byt Ysr’l” in the Old Testament in the light of its ancient Near Eastern environment” (PDF) by Daniel I. Block (page 268):
"In the patriarchal Mesopotamian society the father was considered to be the lord of the house.65 65 Cf. “The Code of Hammurabi,” ANET, 171, #129, and 173, #161, where he is called be-el as-sa-tim,“owner of a wife.” […]"
The man was usually indeed lord of the house, the manager among the 'slaves in a household', aka 'family'
family (n.) early 15c., "servants of a household," from Latin familia "family servants, domestics collectively, the servants in a household," thus also "members of a household, the estate, property; the household, including relatives and servants," abstract noun formed from famulus "servant, slave,"
Even stay at home mothers without jobs do an insane amount of work here, with husbands expecting home made meals. This is all anecdotal of course, but I hear Japanese husbands almost never participate in any household chores. Wives don’t even bother asking as they are afraid of being seen as incompetent at doing housework. I can only imagine the schedules for working women! Mind you, Japan is not a society where hiring others to watch your kids is a common thing. Women typically do most of the kid raising on their own, with husbands only around on weekends and holidays.
I respect that you admit it's anecdotal, but this goes well into data gleaned from self selection bias.
For every economically free woman there seem to be 5 more that would prefer the man to pay for every date or assume other traditional roles, no matter how it is rationalized. (My experiences in the Americas and most European cultures.) In this article about Japan that seems like an accurate distribution, given that it mentions only 1 out of 7 subscribe to any of the logic/circumstances the article is written about.
To be a male ally for the economically free and liberated woman is almost the worst form of altruism.
The incentives are completely misaligned. All you can do is learn about what the sensibilities are, never publicly disagree with them on record or around a woman striving for these ideals, but do the complete opposite with the much larger population of women that expects a certain traditional heteronormative gender role.
(The goal, of course, is to be an eligible mate - or not ineligible - for all of them)
>For every economically free woman there seem to be 5 more that would prefer the man to pay for every date or assume other traditional roles, no matter how it is rationalized.
Women, like men, are individuals possessed of a diverse set of opinions and beliefs, they do not operate according to a consensus algorithm. To expect "consensus" among an entire gender on a topic like feminist identity and inter (and intra) gender relationship dynamics, particularly at the level of social and cultural expectations, is sexist and diminishing.
>The goal, of course, is to be an eligible mate - or not ineligible - for all of them
No, the goal is, or should be, to support human rights, because that is what womens' rights are. Men should be allies of women and of feminism because the belief that women have the right to bodily, social, political and career autonomy is the morally correct position to hold, not as a pretext to maximizing their chances of getting laid.
Many people deciding what feminism is are speaking on behalf of their whole gender and leave no oxygen for others to point out the lack of consensus on these matters. Its the same filter bubble seen on other polarizing topics, your echo chamber agrees with you and everyone that disagrees is an irreconcilable deplorable.
I agree people should be treated as individuals
Lack of consensus accurately describes my frustration
* Assumes that falling marriage/birth rate is a bad thing. But there are some benefits as well such as fewer unwanted births and unhappy marriages, less environmental strain, affordable housing costs, low unemployment, etc.
* Assumes that only men “stubbornly hold onto traditional mores”. Surely women do this too.
* Assumes cultural differences in Japan are “dated” (and therefore inferior) compared to elsewhere.
Note that I’m not even a cultural relativist. I do think that some cultural traits are objectively better than others. But you do need to be careful to avoid bias.
Finally I’d just point out that marriage and birth rates are on the decline in much of the developed world. Which leads me to believe that the cause must more universal than a single population of men refusing to abandon their stubborn traditions.
Is there enough data to study this now, just to confirm (or accept completely different findings)
Or you can view it as the sacrifice of the private sphere (family, children, home and hearth) at the altar of the economic sphere.
I suppose I view it as a bit of both. I certainly don't like the idea of people being forced into marriage. But I'm also skeptical of the rejection of marriage. I don't think a career can replace a family. The reason I have a career is so I can have a family.
A lot of people in their 20s seem to think that their dayjob is actively involved with "making the world a better place" and will lead to fulfillment. I think "brainwashing" is a fairly accurate word to describe that mentality.
It's, by and large, because those are not the men that women select to have children with. When women consistently choose the man with the six figure salary, but that implies working long hours, what follows is predictable.
There is also a high degree of adverse selection there because a woman can't tell how much a man will help with the children before she has the children, by which point the father is already chosen. So they choose based on what they do know (e.g. salary) which is inversely correlated with that.
If we look at top 50% highest earners among men and compare with the bottom 50%, who has:
Highest Social status. Has more children. Bigger social support system. Live longer. Better health. Feeling of happiness and fulfillment.
For comparison do the same with women and take the top and bottom 50% and collect the same data.
From this simple data driven study we can prove if there exist an incentive in the form of pure outcomes between focusing on activities that raise income compared to activities of social value but without any monetary rewards. We also get a gendered perspective on the question.
Could you expand on what you mean by this? Are you referring to private corporations "making the world a better place" by selling products?
I work in public health research, and my day job indirectly (but not that indirectly) leads to reductions in infant mortality rates. Should that not be fulfilling?
Or you can view this as a result of men treating their wives like their caretakers.
For all the problems the US has, one very good thing it has going for it is that, in many (most?) social circles, it is expected that men will help out and support their wives and families beyond just earning a paycheck. This chart comes from a study that shows how men do about twice as much housework as they did in 1976, while women do less: https://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/media/images/housework2_h.jpg . Many companies now give as much time for paternity leave as for maternity leave. TBH when that trend first started I didn't understand it: "But men didn't actually have the baby!" I thought. But by equalizing the time off, it takes the burden (and expectation) off the woman for doing all the childcare, with the related harm this can do to a woman's career.
Devoting your life to your family? That's slavery. Devoting your life to a corporation? That's emancipation.
Right now, only the poor and the wealthy are procreating.
The reason is nothing but for the lack of money. We, the average Japanese, cannot afford to have a child anymore. We just barely afford to have a life for themselves.
Why did we have to have a marriage? Because of the children. Because in the Japanese society, the children is assumed that they have a parent consists of one male and one female in marriage relationship.
Since we cannot afford to have a child, there is no reason to marriage anymore.
What other functions the marriage offer?
Asset management and inheritance? No. We can't afford to have a reserve or real estate. There is no use for that.
Bonding the families? No, as rural areas are more and more abandoned and everybody concentrate toward a few big cities, there is no traditional bonding of the families in one area.
Sex? Well, Not anymore. Japanese marriage system assume that the marriage is a exclusive sex relationship between single male and single female. It support very narrow traditional sexuality and excluding today's most of the sexuality.
The marriage system is now outdated. Ironically, the traditional marriage system is one of the cause of birth decline. It's an obstacle. Some people still want to have a child driven by natural instinct, but the current Japanese society assume a marriage between a male and a female who share their asset as the one, agree exclusive sexual relationship. Not following that pattern and you have huge negative impact on tax, school, health insurance and everything which makes those who want to have a child but don't agree on traditional marriage system holding to have a baby.
Conclusion: The marriage is outdated.
I suspect part of it is just there's stuff to do 24/7. If you have internet access, you can read, educate yourself (with or without credentials), talk to people around the world, watch porn etc etc any time of the day or night.
A former hippy once told me "TV shut off at 9pm. There wasn't anything else to do but sex and drugs."
We have the opposite of that. There are so many things to do, lots of people seem to be forgoing sex. Because: Meh.
Of course orphanage also works, but hard to imagine it is the ideal structure, thou it worked for Turkish janissary (there are probably plenty of other examples from history) and now China also trying it with minorities.
Children are not as expensive as one imagine, you might have to give up the most expensive phone/car luxury etc. But just ask any elderly if it worth it. If your mind thinking more like assets, children has the biggest appreciation value over anything.
And it is clearly false that marriage is a sufficient condition.
With today's variety of sexuality and values, that idea is also outdated.
>Children are not as expensive as one imagine...
Today's average Japanese young generations barely live with any savings. If they have savings, they are living with parents or very lucky. That means they can't even afford to double the food cost.
Children requires more than food. A private room for example. Children deserve a privacy so they deserve a private room. But the housing price is too high. You can't afford to have extra rooms. You can't afford to rent a house with a lot of rooms and you can't afford to have a real estate. If you can't have a money, your only option is to live in a rural less demanding area where the house price is cheaper. But it requires 1.5 hours between your house and office. You work 8 hours per day and waste 3 hours just inside the train.
Education cost is also steadily rising as well as tax. my parent used to say they pay their tuition by working themselves. Sure, when they were a student, school cost was like one week worth of work. Thanks to the lower school cost, higher wage, and most importantly, less tax! It's like straight out from the Old Economy Steve meme.
Which isn't a Japanese only problem either. The countries which has less birth rate and marriage problem are also the ones with better child benefits, health care and education.
Give millennials more money that they actually receive and you'll see people take marriage as a choice again