I mean, some cash is nice but the reason people don’t have kids is
- a bleak future in the face of a collapsing ecosystem
- late stage capitalism forcing people to work all day just to be able to afford existing
- degrading childcare infrastructure amidst missing teachers, preschool educators, daycare workers, etc. And a general social climate hostile to raising children
- and lastly of course the crippling loneliness epidemic, leaving many people (particularly men) unable to find partners
All that, but sure, those little green pieces of paper ought to do the trick.
Gen Y/Z: we require legitimate action on climate change, ecocide, housing security and affordability, wealth inequality, economic mobility, work/life balance, social welfare, education, healthcare, greedflation, monopolies!
Capitalism: We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas… How about a pizza party?
75K is not nearly enough little papers to raise a child.
Far from it. And such a pittance does nothing to alleviate the horrors of existence on that list.
“South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on February 13 ordered his administration to develop tax incentives and subsidies for companies that encourage their employees to have children.”
This seems fishy to me.
Why not develop tax incentives and subsidies for the parents directly, instead of giving companies another loophole?
South Korea is run by a handful of enormous family owned companies. This is probably related to the fertility rate.
Small FYI: Those are named “Chaebol” in South Korea, if anyone want’s to look further into this.
South Korea is run by a handful of enormous family owned companies
As an American I can not relate to this at all since it so so fucking foreign
What?
And abandon their system of government, corporate feudalism?
TBH I knew it was going to be something like this from the headline alone. Plutocrats never roll out this kind of thing without it somehow ending up in the hands of people who need it the least. Just like the USA’s Paycheck Protection Loans.
My sister lived in S Korea a few years ago, and keeps up on some stuff. She mentioned the feminist 4B movement. Quoting an article:
4B is shorthand for four Korean words that all start with bi-, or “no”: The first no, bihon, is the refusal of heterosexual marriage. Bichulsan is the refusal of childbirth, biyeonae is saying no to dating, and bisekseu is the rejection of heterosexual sexual relationships. It is both an ideological stance and a lifestyle, and many women I spoke to extend their boycott to nearly all the men in their lives, including distancing themselves from male friends.
So some of this might be the movement, which is against the patriarchal society Asian countries are famous for (and part of why so many weeb incels want Asian “submissive” wives). Has my respect too. Iirc some men have been violently attacking women over it, bur I can’t find a link in the limited time I have atm.
Sooo… political lesbianism.
TIL I’m ALL 4B’s.
$75,000 for ONE child seems almost reasonable. $22,400 is a fucking joke.
Even 75k seems small for one child. I would expect an amount enough to support a kid until they are 18.
Oh, I know. “Almost seems” is doing some heavy lifting in that statement.
You’re going to spend minimum $350,000 on that child.
But because my son got my German citizenship he get’s nothing, even though both his parents pay huge amount of taxes. We even need to pay for the Kindergarten out of pocket, which just so became quite more expensive too.
But to be honest, I don’t want him to grow up here in Korea with all the pressure and the bleak outlook into the future where one worker will need to pay for one retired person too, especially for all the retieries who didn’t have children for whatever reason.
all the retieries who didn’t have children for whatever reason
Could be that the grind at work doesn’t leave any space for having a familiy.
Sure, I said for whatever reason, valid reasons or invalid. That doesn’t change that it will get worse for the next generation.
Your last sentence just put a different spin on the “it takes a village” quote that I constantly hear from parents.
It takes a village to raise a child. But it also takes a village to care for the elderly.
What happens when that village is no longer cooperating?
That’s why the Silent Generation created industrialized elder care. Nothing like a hospital setting to help with the old dementia.
You couldn’t pay me a million to make another being have to live on this planet.
It probably takes a lot more than that to keep them alive long enough for society to crush any means their ancestors had of supporting themselves.
A million dollars buys so much booze and cannabis which makes things so much easier.
This is the part I can’t get with all the moral panic. What sort of horrible person are you that you want to force other people to live this way? Isn’t inaction and breaking the cycle of violence and pain a better idea?
I actually think life, for all its faults, is a beautiful and amazing opportunity. It’s a special blink of existence where we get to witness the unimaginable beauty in our universe.
Perhaps our lives (in the West, at least) have gotten too easy. Not that I want to go back or live a harder life - I don’t. But for most of human history, there was a pretty solid chance you were going to live a sick, miserable, religion-filled life as a soldier, slave, or peasant. All the while, you’d have pretty much no control over what happened to you. Even the wealthy and powerful were shitting in holes and sweating in the heat. Today, it costs you about two hours of easy labor to get a bidet and maybe 10 hours of labor to get an air conditioner that will keep you cool for many years. People still found meaning and reasons to keep going through the thousands of years of famine, plague, war, and slavery. They kept seeing something that made them want to have babies and love them.
The world isn’t perfect but it’s better than it’s ever been in most ways. Even if we don’t survive climate change and late-stage capitalism, I think the time I’ve already had with my son has been beautiful and meaningful. I only hope he gets to experience love, satisfaction, simple pleasures, etc. Even just a comfortable nap or the feeling of accomplishment after completing a task. It’s all so fragile and temporary. We are the universe experiencing itself and it’s really beautiful despite the miserable parts.
Talk for yourself. When you’re healthy AND lucky, yes life in the the West is maybe easy. But the minute you get disabled, you’re being systematically pushed into poverty. And despite saying free healthcare to pester Americans, we all know it’s not ‘free.’
The latest dentist I called asked me to transfer 400€ before I even got an appointment. So stop pushing this narrative that life’s too easy. Maybe for you.
I don’t really want to play adversity Olympics with you but since you insist.
My parents were on food stamps and going to food pantries when I was a kid. Father was an absent alcoholic and drug addict. I myself struggled with heroin addiction in my teens and 20s and ended up ruining my life - or so I thought.
I managed to climb out of that hole (using Obamacare and the support of my family) to find a whole new perspective on my life.
I was angry, bitter, nihilistic, and selfish. I was obsessed with how bad and unfair the world is, and it gave me every excuse to keep buying bundles and nodding into oblivion.
Once I got clear of the horrible opiate withdrawal and paid back the considerable money I owed - once I stopped wanting to overdose and kill myself - I realized how nice it is to be able to take a walk on a warm day and just check out the birds. I realized a cup of coffee and a sandwich is a blissful experience, especially when shared with a friend or loved one.
When I think about the eternity I will spend in non-existence after I die, I know that I have very limited time to enjoy this strange and beautiful trip I’m on. I know this little blip would be the envy of the non-existent. If ghosts were real, I bet every one of them would kill to come back and just feel the sensations of smell, taste, touch, and sound. Or to look at something pretty.
Like dude, I’ve had parts of my life that were fucking miserable. Please don’t tell me it’s so easy. I’ve just decided to enjoy it and practice gratitude. Whatever happens to me, I remind myself that it’s better than going through opiate withdrawal on a plastic cot and wishing I was dead while everyone was disgusted with me.
Life, on average, is much easier now than it’s ever been. The wealthiest men alive didn’t have access to basic over the counter medicine that we have today. If you die of some horrific disease tomorrow, you’ve still had a higher quality of life than most of the richest people who have ever lived.
You know why my ramblings about the beauty of life sound so corny? It’s because a lot of people have realized it before. Because it’s so often said that it sounds cliche. There is a reason so many people have come to these conclusions.
My advice to you is to touch grass. No joke. And if you don’t want to touch grass, go watch a movie that makes you feel awe. Go read a book that moves you. Otherwise you’re going to have your eyes opened on your death bed and wish you had lived differently. Happens all the time man.
Ok Carl Sagan you have a way with words and rock the leisure suit turtleneck combo but this isn’t the 90s anymore. It is 2024. The Middle East is on fire over who has the best skydaddy, American democracy has under a year left before the evangelicals start opening concentration camps, Russia is about finished up in Ukraine, and the PRC is going to make sure that there is one China soon.
So excuse me for not being hopeful when I am having to spend money and time making sure my daughters have citizenship in another country to flee to before we go all Gilead.
Imagine having all the collected knowledge of the human race and its history in your pocket and not thinking that the world is safer and more secure than it’s ever been.
Imagine not knowing what a mean is. Doesnt really do much good for some kid in Jerusalem or Gaza with dead parents to know that the population of Kenya is doing slightly better off, as a whole, compared to fifty years ago.
So sick of neoliberal bullshit
A 10h of labour airco will create a vacuum and not keep you cool.
Two hours of labor is like 30 bucks, a bidet on the other hand is at least 10 times that.
An old friend had a funny Dutch thing he used to say: het smoesje is goed, maar het praatje deugt niet. Basically pointing out the fact that you’re talking out of your ass.
I have to admit that life indeed has gotten too easy for most, making them lax and unmotivated to live it while blaming “high costs” (bad spending habits). I see loads of people getting excessively priced food deliveries multiple times a week when their wage barely allows to afford it once a month. They will stroll around barely doing any work at all while claiming they are either too smart for their job or deserve a ceo’s wage.
Then you wonder when an employer pets them on the back, how businesses are going down left and right when 85% of their workforce consists of these useless beings.
Rant over.
Bidet attachment https://www.amazon.com/Bidet-Non-Electric-Mechanical-Attachment-Self-Cleaning/dp/B00P2XZDGG
And I grew up with window unit air conditioners. They kept a couple rooms cool no problem.
I don’t see how I’m talking out my ass.
Nah easier to hate 49% of the human race. I mean just look at Christians they hate 68.8% of the world without even breaking a sweat.
If I were offered $75k to have 1 kid, I’d still have to turn it down.
Especially considering it takes far more money and time to raise one.
Well if you already have a few it could cover it. Economies of scale.
It’s not enough, the math doesn’t make sense. 18 years of foods, diapers, creches, outings, gifts, hobbies, clothes, housing and education? Just to produce a another slave for profit? Nope. Get kittens or puppies if you can afford them. If not, look at pics.
Maybe not be so openly racist south Korea.
Everyone I know that’s gone to work that has told me of the openly - although polite - racism that takes place there.
Wanna go this tat club with you south Korean friend? Oh sorry you can’t because your not native.
Fall in love with a local? Hope you plan on moving outta the country because everyone will hate the both of you.
Nope. Did it to themselves.
Think I read somewhere they are the most pure race anywhere in the world.
Yeah, a lot of people don’t realize that the most racist nations tend to be the ones with the least diversity.
Truly the master breed 🙏 \s
Stupid question, but why not just target more immigration? It’s not like there aren’t enough people in the world. Having babies first taxes the economy, then eventually helps it. Letting immigrants in now helps now. And they’ll probably have babies.
The reason they don’t do that is Racism. Almost every modern nation with population decline has racist anti-immigration policies.
Korea is absolutely not prepared for any kind of immigration. And they’ve been isolated for so long they really don’t know hor to deal with people who aren’t from their culture.
All the more reason to force them to fix their shit.
I’ve not been but the impression I get is that systems just have trouble handling foreigners who aren’t there for business purposes.
If by “have trouble” you mean “are explicitly designed to exclude”
I think immigration is a short term fix Comes with a lot issues like language/culture barrier, they can’t join stuff like the army.
They might not even have babies, like the rest. Also there is a higher chance of leaving the country.
Seems like all of those issues are ones that can be solved over time.
The longer they wait to integrate, the harder it becomes.
The whole point of increasing the birthrate is the youth will eventually replace the older generation. So the younger and earlier, it’s the better for integration / assimilation I guess.
Still think migration it’s a short-term solution. Good for filling out some jobs her and there now. But doesn’t solve the birthrate problem itself.
Bring Koreans to Mexico and South America!
They love anything Asian and we are totally unaware of anything related to historical disputes of all kinds. So we would probably grow really cool hybrids…Mexikoreans or Korexicans. I didn’t know, but most Koreans I know are tall people. I always assumed all Asian people were short, but that is certainly not the case. So tall people in Mexico do get an advantage.
Amazing to see marxist theory in action like that. It’s so on the nose too, if that was in a novel it would look rather shoehorned in.
I was like “(companies) paying parents to have children” belongs to a caricature of capitalism, but here we are. (My bad, it’s companies paying parents to have children, and not some bigger entity, like the government. I already edited the previous sentence for clarity.)
If you don’t mind me asking though, what “marxist theory in action” do you see in this article?
In this case that the cost of replacement of labor power factors in to the wage a company has to pay in order to maintain production.
The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour. If a machine costs him, for example, 1,000 shillings, and this machine is used up in 10 years, he adds 100 shillings annually to the price of the commodities, in order to be able after 10 years to replace the worn-out machine with a new one. In the same manner, the cost of production of simple labour-power must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear of the machine.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Wage_labour_and_capital
edit: replaced quote with an imo more fitting quote from the same book.
One of the most frustrating things about academic Marxism is that it hypothesizes that “capitalists” (whom they bung together with remarkable aplomb) do things like figure in the reproduction cost of labor. They don’t. They’re focused on the next quarter and maybe the next year. Maybe even the next five years. But no one ranging from Elon Musk to (not sure who his opposite would be so I’m kinda taking a stab here) Warren Buffett is thinking in terms of generational replacement. First, they’re not going to live that long. Neither are their shareholders. Plus capital is mobile - it’ll just go someplace else.
This is a headline precisely because it’s a man bites dog story. If your company gives you paid parental leave it’s either because it’s legally required or for retention. It’s not in the hope that the little toy will become a software engineer at the company in 25 years.
One of the most frustrating things about academic Marxism is that it hypothesizes that “capitalists” do things like figure in the reproduction cost of labor.
It doesn’t? It never postulates that capitalists actively control the economy or do more than the bare minimum, on the contrary that they are bound to the laws of the market is one of the main points of marxism. That the cost of replacement factors into the cost of labor power is like the cost of replacement factoring in for any other commodity on the market. I highly suggest you read the booklet I linked, it’s very short.
I’m actually pretty well read on the subject, both from the 18th to 19th century literature and from modern Marxist and other socialist economists. I’m also a biologist who has a bit of a specialization in pro-social models of behavior from a mathematical perspective and who derives data from real world observations and experiments.
The idea that capital controls the labor market is fairly central to the Marxist approach to capitalism. Both Marx and Adam Smith attributed dynamics to conscious actions that today we, as sophisticated systems theorists, would come up with better models to explain. They had an attitude towards human action that in some ways were the forerunner to modern sciences of collective behavior, but they’re still ridiculously primitive compared to modern theory.
Again, I am not the only academic to make this point. You find it is ubiquitous in modern Marxist literature. There are still some traditionalists, of course. I’m sure you know a particular white bearded professor who has what I honestly believe is the best introduction/course on Capital ever created. I honestly really like his work.
But what I don’t like is when communists or socialists refer to themselves as “Marxists.” I particularly don’t like it when they shoot down an idea using something that was written by someone in the 19th century, as if we haven’t had multiple revolutions in understanding economics and the science of complex systems since then.
What I’m saying is that you can read Marxist forums on line, and you can read Marxist academics publishing papers in Marxist journals, who argue that so-and-so is wrong because Marx(or whomever) said X. Nobody, and I mean nobody, quotes Darwin to refute a point in biology. Darwin was a genius, but he was a product of his time and got some very basic and very important stuff completely wrong. Ask a biologist about it and they’ll tell you it’s completely wrong and we figured it out a hundred years ago. They won’t canonize Darwin, even if they really really want a Darwin bobblehead for their desk.
Again, and I cannot make this more plain and I am not the only academic to say this: it’s called evolutionary biology, not Darwinism. I have friends and colleagues at places like the econ department at the New School, and they refer to what they do as “economics.” That’s where I’d prefer things to go.
Thanks for the explanation.
It reminds me of the concept of depreciation in accounting, in which you’re accounting for the “loss of value” of a piece of machinery as time goes on. I guess it fits how the capitalists view people (labor) as yet another kind of machine. I dunno how it fits with what you’re trying to explain here, but it somehow clicks for me. So that the factory owner can keep buying machinery, they must allocate some of their funds not just for the upkeep of the equipment, but also save up for the cost of buying a new one.
Admittedly, I’m not very well-versed with neither accounting nor the theories put on display here, but we learn something new every day, right?
(PS: I’m still working through the pamphlet you’ve linked. I might have gotten a lot of things wrong, and in that case, I apologize.)
Finally somebody listened to me. JFC you have to pay people to have and raise kids, it’s stupidly expensive.
I’d be willing to migrate as a skilled worker to some first world country desperate for tax payers and people who aren’t too socially repressed to have a family.
But… naaah, I’m a dirty foreigner. What do I know? I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
Would you want to work in a country that is known to have such a shitty work life balance that people aren’t having children because of it?
I wasn’t even going to touch that. But yeah… Japan is kind of the same thing, I think China is going to start trying to get migrants desperately in the next couple of decades because of the one child policy working too well. But if they are kind of assholes about it, being racist and making life very hard to settle, what’s the point then?
Idk about Korea but here it’s mostly because you can’t afford to. I could barely support myself and someone else (most of that cost would be rent which wouldnt even change, either) before bringing children (whole bunch of new costs) into the mix.
I work a skilled job with half a decade of experience, and am in the correct salary range for the area, as well.
Yeah. I’m being sarcastic but I know it’s not that simple.
Hey Canada. This is what people want if you want us to breed.
Why add the company middleman? Just pay the parents directly.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A South Korean firm is offering employees up to $75,000 to have children and help lift the country’s ailing birth rate.
The announcement comes after Booyoung Group, a construction firm based in Seoul, earlier this month declared it would give a $75,000 per-child bonus to employees who have babies, CNN reported.
The company’s employees have collectively had at least 70 children since 2021, so the firm is on the hook to disburse $5.25 million in cash to its workers, per CNN.
Like in China and Japan, South Korea’s aging and increasingly imbalanced population means there could be a surge in retired older people who require medical care while the country’s supply of younger workers dwindles.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on February 13 ordered his administration to develop tax incentives and subsidies for companies that encourage their employees to have children.
In Seoul, municipal authorities are giving $750 every month to parents who have children until their babies turn one year old.
The original article contains 305 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Vouchers for babies lol
How are the social laws in Korea for this? Like parental leave, healthcare, government support for kindergarten and schools, housing?
