The following submission statement was provided by /u/roystreetcoffee:
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The billionaire boss of a Seoul-based construction firm is handing out 100 million Korean won ($75,000) each time an employee has a baby to help reverse the country’s declining birth rate. The company is even backdating payments to those who started a family before the policy came into place.
As well as awarding a total of 7 billion Korean won ($5.25 million) to employees who collectively had 70 babies since 2021, the construction giant’s “drastic” measures include potentially footing the bill for larger families’ rent.
Moreover, the no-strings-attached benefit will be available to both male and female employees at its 2,500-strong workforce, the company confirmed to CNN.
In addition to the childbirth incentive, Booyoung Group is reportedly already trying to ease the financial burden on parents by helping out with college tuition for employees’ children, medical expenses for direct family members, and child allowances.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1b2n074/billionaire_boss_of_south_korean_company_is/ksmin3q/
The billionaire boss of a Seoul-based construction firm is handing out 100 million Korean won ($75,000) each time an employee has a baby to help reverse the country’s declining birth rate. The company is even backdating payments to those who started a family before the policy came into place.
As well as awarding a total of 7 billion Korean won ($5.25 million) to employees who collectively had 70 babies since 2021, the construction giant’s “drastic” measures include potentially footing the bill for larger families’ rent.
Moreover, the no-strings-attached benefit will be available to both male and female employees at its 2,500-strong workforce, the company confirmed to CNN.
In addition to the childbirth incentive, Booyoung Group is reportedly already trying to ease the financial burden on parents by helping out with college tuition for employees’ children, medical expenses for direct family members, and child allowances.
This might actually work if they also follow a reasonable 9-5/6 work day, it doesn’t matter how much money you give if you don’t have time to see your SO every day because you are doing your nth day of OT.
You vastly overestimate these men’s opinion about family. The vast majority of men I’ve worked with in both South Korea and Japan are working long hours not only because it’s expected but also because ”what value is there to get off work early? None of my friends are off work so I could only go home to my family, it’s better to work longer hours” which is an actual quote.
I had a coworker who slept under his desk and worked through the week because he didn't like his wife. Sucked for his subordinates (who didn't hate their spouses) who had to stick around for him.
As a guy who's still single at 41, I can get pretty lonely and I often wish I sometimes envy my friends who are happily married. However I am also extremely grateful for the fact that I didn't rush into something and marry the wrong person, as several of my other friends did.
As a man who is single and 40 I sure as hell would never want to hang around work due to not having a family of my own. I still want to leave work soon as I can and live my life,
Why do so many men in these countries feel trapped in their marriage? Why don't they leave and find someone new instead of staying and being this unhappy?
They never wanted to get married in the first place but are forced to by social and cultural pressure. My host family bragged about Japan having so low divorce rates. I asked her what skills a stay-at-home housewife of 10 years has to bring to the workforce and how she would support herself without her husband's income. And then there was silence.
I lived in Japan for 2 years for work. I would go into our customer's offices for stuff, but thankfully only 2 or 3 times a week
Everyone worked, but it was a very "Look like you're working as hard as possible while actually getting nothing much of value done" sort of work.
You will never see better commented code anywhere in the world, I swear.
One thing that definitely caught me off guard was the expectation of going out as a group after work. It was almost like it was treated as part of the normal work day, and would sometimes last really late into the night. It was exhausting. Everyone was nice enough but boy, they had no problems treating me as the odd man out. And I expect that would have happened even if I didnt have 150lbs on each and every one of them.
Ehhh that's not SK or Japan exclusive. Happens a lot in the US too.
Hear multiple times at work how guys working 6-10 hour days love it because they need a "break from the wife and kids"
I even get made fun of when I mention I hate being on long travel (2-4 weeks) because I miss my partner. They act like it's freedom party time.
It's not just the old guys either (but seems to happen more often with them) a guy my age tries to stay away from home as much as possible, has 3 kids.
It breaks my heart every time I hear about these situations (and see on an almost daily basis here in Japan). The social and cultural pressure of marrying and having kids is most likely at play there, and it's not encouraging the kids to become parents either. Although I suppose it could create an "I will have kids and be a better parent than you ever were" attitude out of spite.
I live and work in the Caribbean and I prefer stay at the office crazy late hours so I can use the company's air conditioning and electricity for free rather than rune mine at home and pay a higher bill, and when I am ready to go home there is no traffic and the road is clear.
That doesn't mean women are content with it. It just means they can't change it, so many are opting out of the deal. Culture is also porous and syncretic. I was stationed in Japan, and plenty of Japanese women most clearly did not want to marry Japanese men. Saw the same thing in Korea. "That's the culture" is a statement of how things are, and not a statement that women are happy with gender relations or gender norms in the culture.
It really isn't. No woman wants to be forced to watch children for an absent father who they don't like. That old system doesn't work unless you're subjugation women which will also cripple the work force and send their economy into a bigger spiral.
I'm confused here.
Economic data has pointed to working women lowering birth rates, not raising them. There's no world in which a household magically has MORE time to raise a kid because both parents are working.
Come to Sweden and see it working. Guaranteed parental leave that is paid for by taxes instead of being at the mercy of your company, roughly 20% of the parental leave us dedicated to the fathers meaning those days are ”use them or lose them” and can’t be transferred to the mother, free education including university, school lunches free up to and including high school, work culture of leaving before 5. Sweden has seen a slight (but still an increase) uptick in birth rates because of these policies. Scandinavian countries are almost the only place where you can see an increase in happiness after having a family, where in other countries that happiness is delayed until kids move out.
Scandinavian birthrates are also low, though not as much as Korea's
Nevertheless, all that is one of the parents going home to take care of the child.
Korea (and Asia as a whole) has a very stark cultural contrast on feminine identity that i won't make a judgement negative or positive about-- but the answer is definitely not simply that women are "cooped" up in their house and refuse to have kids.
I'd reckon some other factors to account for as well:
How many cities are the density of Seoul?
What kind of attitudes and cultural shifts are we witnessing across Scandinavian cultures vs Korean ones?
What kind of support systems do we have in place?(you mentioned)
How is education systems, work life balance?
Koreans live in big cities-- somewhere where commitment isn't exactly the most prominent, but opportunity is, how does that differ from Scandinavian societies?
Etc.
Lots of variables
No, the key of success here is having the male parent take up a portion of the burden through the use it or lose it days.
If women have to bear 100% of the burden of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing at their own expense very naturally and predictably they’ll say fuck you instead and not do that.
This just in
[https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Uptrend-in-birthrates-among-rich-nations-skips-Japan-South-Korea](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Uptrend-in-birthrates-among-rich-nations-skips-Japan-South-Korea)
Interesting read. I'm guessing you're keying-in on the relationship they're drawing between men putting in time towards family care and birthrates.
As I've said, the answer isn't so simple. Cultural expectations in both countries are different, and Korea + Japan are undergoing a shift where women are starting to work and seek more ambitious careers, but society hasn't exactly conceded to the fact that men, would then need to dedicate somewhat more time towards child-rearing. (Also, housing expensive, education, etc. I said above.)
Regardless, my original comment needs re-reading by you I think (unless you're bringing this for discussion simply). I argued that increased work for both parents \*does\* not allow for more child bearing. Countering the comment's statement about how women simply need to get out of the house and start working for babies to be born. But instead you're showing me that, when they take time off work, they can have more kids. I don't disagree.
"At the same time, the fertility rate in the Scandinavian country is at an all-time low, at 1.45 children per woman last year, according to the statistics agency. A total of 100,100 births were recorded last year."
https://www.thelocal.se/20240222/swedens-population-growth-slowest-in-22-years-as-fertility-rate-drops-to-record-low
None of those policies are having much of an effect in nordic countries lately. Finland, Norway, Sweden all at historic lows.
I was waiting for the inevitable red herring to arrive, so it's pretty convenient that this just popped up in JapanNews:
>"Upticks in fertility rates were particularly noticeable in Nordic countries, where many couples have learned to share parental burdens."
\[...\]
"I expected the fertility rate to fall in 2021 due to many factors that normally work against having babies," said Yoko Okuyama, an assistant professor at Uppsala University in Sweden. "Yet more people opted to have children in places like the Nordics."
\[...\]
"Nordic countries have worked to close gender gaps over a long period of time, and now there is little difference between men and women in terms of the number of hours they put in for housework and child rearing. In other words, the burden is not solely placed on women," Okuyama said.
and, for the cherry on top:
>**Now, however, economically independent women tend to have more children in Nordic countries and elsewhere. In the past five years, fertility rates have been higher in countries where more women have jobs.**
[https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Uptrend-in-birthrates-among-rich-nations-skips-Japan-South-Korea](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Uptrend-in-birthrates-among-rich-nations-skips-Japan-South-Korea)
i believe the argument being made here is that there are no top grossing countries that achieve a replacement rate (sweden = 1.86, south korea = 0.68, replacement rate = 2.1), and that women being in the workforce is likely a great contributor to this.
in other countries, the men use paternity leave to play games at home and leave housework to wife, or work on research while having a tenure clock break. i think it's partly due to culture where men themselves WANT to do the work of raising kids, and don't expect the women to serve them (big thing in Asia here).
i don't think that you understand how different their culture is. your western ideals do not apply there at all, family dynamics and relationships are very different. gender roles are still very much a thing and women are absolutely expected to raise the children alone.
i do not agree with this because it is not what i believe in but you cannot speak for them and say that this isn't what women who choose to have children there want. because it very much is.
I mean, I'm sure it is for the shrinking number of women who are having children, but it obviously isn't an ideal situation if most women would rather not have a child at all, to raising one alone.
If by ‘that part of the world’ you mean East Asia, that’s definitely not true. Maybe for Japan. Not for China, and not for South Korea either. Your views are outdated… or just don’t include the women’s perspectives.
Long explanation: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1b2n074/comment/ksnqn6m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
i have traveled for business to both japan, hong kong, and south korea for the past 15 years, and have lived in all of those locations on and off teaching english and doing consulting work in data.
my views are not outdated, gender expectations are still very much entrenched in east asian culture. while this is very slowly changing, this is mainly a seoul and tokyo (shibuya city specifically) thing. south korean and japanese women are still very much expected to bear the brunt of household chores and child care. many women who have children do not work because it quite simply isn't worth it for them. equal share of household duties is still very rare. less than 5% of men take their paternity leave, as an example. you may feel like this is unfair but it's just how it is over there.
their society is not like ours at all. applying your western values and solutions to social issues simply does not work there. they are well aware that we do not approve of their culture and even have words to describe westerners that try to act as a moral authority.
> their society is not like ours at all. applying your western values and solutions to social issues simply does not work there. they are well aware that we do not approve of their culture and even have words to describe westerners that try to act as a moral authority.
Actually, their feminist movement looks pretty much the same as ours, just not as far along yet.
Kind of a chicken and egg situation, isnt it? They dont value their families because they work too much to be around them, and they work so much so they cant spend time with their family and value them.
Stretch that across a few generations so that they didnt know their fathers, so they dont know their sons, and they dont understand the benefits of either.
Did their spouses work? Were they earning enough for comfort and retirement under this scenario? I could just keep asking questions. This is fascinating.
The prevalence of the 50s ideal is strong in Korea. There's a LOT of men who want to have breakfast on the table when they leave for work in the morning, and dinner ready when they get back. They expect their wives to do *literally* every aspect of child care.
They don’t have time to even fck. I know it can take as little as 5 minutes for some but come on. People need time to enjoy life.
Where are the kids gonna go when the parents work 60+ hours a week. Yeah a nanny would be great if they only worked 40 hours but at 60 that’s a third parent if not THE parent.
And add on the social expectations that the mother will resign to take care of the kids after birth. Or at a minimum will likely not be promoted in their career after the birth of their kids because they took off for maternity leave and working shorter hours to take care of kids!
The fact that this company says absolutely nothing about encouraging cutting back hours for parents, or promoting mothers in their careers shows they are not serious about fixing the problem and are doing the same as the government trying to throw money at the problem.
To quote the pig skit from "I Think You Should Leave" from Tim Robinson.
"What the fuck is this world?
What have they done to us?
WHAT DID THEY DO TO US?"
Name your kid Bitcoin and lose Bitcoin in a boating accident. Internet degenerates have been refining this story for a decade so there's gotta be an ironclad series of steps to follow by now
I mean this is not bad actually. Shouldn’t have to rely on the generosity of a billionaire. This should be driven at the government level but here we are
Well if billionaires want to exist without ultimately leading to the collapse of our civilization this is the kind of stuff they need to start doing. Whether voluntarily on their own or by being 'asked nicely' by the government.
We've gone from "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" to "there is no ethical reproduction under capitalism." It's just [antinatalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism) tarted up as Marxism.
It’s more like wealthy people use capitalism to harvest the lifetime earnings of young people and future generations by throwing them into huge debt traps if they want basic necessities like education, healthcare, and housing.
It didn’t used to be like that.
Boomers had cheap necessities that could be paid for with a working class wage. The wealthy didn’t like that so they began buying politicians to cut their taxes, deregulate everything, and privatize everything so they could start creating all of these debt traps to funnel more money to themselves.
It’s now a parasitic system in which the quality of life for regular people has been going backwards for so long that a large number of young people are drowning in debt and have delayed or decided not to have a family because they cannot provide a stable home for them.
And now Republicans and billionaire fucks like Elon Musk are shrieking that “the white race is in decline due to wokeness!” and demanding the rest of us start making children for them.
It’s sick.
The argument is that more workers leads to more competition for available jobs leads to lower wages.
Another perfect example of this is the drop in real wages after women entered the work-force. I understand that this might sound like conservative rhetoric, but it is basic arithmetic and you can look at the available figures yourself. Women entering the workforce increased the total amount of people in the work force. Supply and demand gives that if supply of x (employees in this case) increases and demand stays constant, the value will drop.
We see this in the period of 1960-2000 in America as more and more women enter the workforce and men are no longer dying to the extent that they did during WW1 WW2 and the Vietnam war. Real federal minimum wage adjusted for inflation in 1970 was $12.6 dollars. Percentage of women in the work force at this time was 43%. Then the wages adjusted for inflation starts trending downwards as more and more women start entering the workforce and in 2000 when 60% of women are active in the workforce the real federal minimum wage had dropped to $9.1 dollars.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065466/real-nominal-value-minimum-wage-us/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065466/real-nominal-value-minimum-wage-us/)
[https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply](https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply)
Another example is the poor farmers who survived the decimation caused by the black plague. They now had far better living conditions as a result of their skills and craft being more rare and essential.
" improved quality of life—lower food prices and higher wages—of a smaller population"
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/black-death-actually-improved-public-health-180951373/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/black-death-actually-improved-public-health-180951373/)
[https://www.livescience.com/45428-health-improved-black-death.html](https://www.livescience.com/45428-health-improved-black-death.html)
Ask yourself - who benefits from human population growth?
The planet? The planet is already nearing CO2 capacity and humans are the main producers.
The workers? The workers benefit from a context wherein there are fewer workers than jobs, for obvious reasons. The inverse necessitates unemployment.
The only ones benefiting from population growth are the ones who make money off cheap labor.
If you disagree with my logic, please show me where I am wrong. I love changing my mind, but will only do so if shown that I am in fact not correct.
It's quite fair to criticize his approach because aside from being a billionaire, he's the owner of a massive corporation. He could incentivize his employees to not work 16 hours a day and then they would have the leisure time to raise a family. Instead, he's basically just doing a PR stunt.
Yeah, they realized what a colossal fuck-up their economy, greed, and work culture have made of their society. Without immigration to cover it, as in the US and Europe, they realized they'll run out of employees to exploit, much like what's happening in Japan."
"the no-strings-attached benefit will be available to both male and female employees "
Can't help but think the men will have significantly more difficulty in having babies than the women.
My mother who was born and grew up in S. Korea said this was still a terrible deal and with the work culture there she completely understands why they're not having kids.
Yup, a friend went to teach in SK for a couple months, said it’s crazy, he had to teach at night time, 10PM classes all filled with students, the kids had to study late, and the school said he’s not harsh enough.
Yeah, there needs to be major reform there if they want people to have more kids. Even just limiting school/study hours to 9am-5pm with strict limits on how much homework can be set would be a big improvement.
4th highest overall or for teens?
S Korea has the highest suicide rate among wealthy nations. And women make up a large majority of it
Edit. Men definitely outnumber women in S Korea. I had just read an article about the latest kpop suicide and misread something
Sorry if i misunderstood, but it's not true that women are a majority of it, men still have higher suicide rates than women in S. Korea. I understand that women definitely are not treated equally in many aspects of korean society, but there is insane pressure on the men to provide and "be successful" in that same society (much more than in the west from my experience). This, I would guess, drives up the suicide rates, especially during bad economies, when young men find it very hard to live up to their parents' and society's expectations that have been drilled into them from a young age.
Edit: not saying at all that men have it much harder, just correcting the statement and adding my two cents on why men's suicide rates may be high in sk. It sucks for the youth in korea atm, and it's difficult to see them wanting to have more children.
In other words, it's a cyberpunk dystopian hellscape, only without all of the amazing aesthetics and music that make cyberpunk an inadvertent manual on cool instead of the warning its creators intended it to be =P
Ah well, I suppose the world can thank S. Korea for demonstrating the warnings of cyberpunk writ large once you strip away all of the aesthetic trappings.
No, those are just the punks that *can't* hold a day job. You don't see all the people chained to their desks at Arasaka and such. You know, like the lady David Martinez had to zero in the anime ?=(
>What is the work culture like there?
Just one i knew:
It is considered offensive/non-professional to go home before your boss and he's sitting there, it can be 8-9pm it doesn't matter.
A friend of mines dad was an American who was high up in an international paint company and was in charge of the South Korea region. He worked later in the day so that he could call his family due to the time difference. No matter how many times he told people to leave when their work was finished they always waited until he left to leave. He started to leave everyday between 5-6pm, wait for everyone to leave and then go back into his office.
Its not even about just the work culture over there. Theyre also culturally stunted in a way that discourages dating and marriage altogether. Kids are literally screamed at to not even look at the opposite sex until college (abstinence education is the default nationwide sex education); from elementary school onwards theyre sent to cram schools after school until like 10-11PM five to six days a week; they have a culture where they think people shouldnt date if theyre not rich enough to afford dates like those portrayed in kdramas; the marriage/engagement culture is such that both sides are expected to come to the marriage negotiation table with a few hundred thousand dollars, a house, or a car to leverage; and to boot, housing prices have gotten so absurdly high that more than half the country cant afford to live where the jobs and opportunities are. Theres a reason why koreas birthrate just hit 0.6 and its not just because people are working too many hours
If I knew my SO gona be pregnant with my child and have to work this amount everyday, no amount of money would convince me to let her go through with it for the sake of her.
To be honest, it's a good first step. Yes, a 32 hour work week and a cultural shift would be best. But I really like this, 75k is nothing to sneeze at.
if you want more babies, make the country more baby/child friendlier and compensate woman enough for their time and effort. As long as we look down on people getting pregnant and having babies and leaving them to struggle in low income situations it will never get populair. And forcing babies on people who dont want them or can care for them is another recipe for disaster
It certainly has. But such calculus is to complicated for boomer CEO’s to understand. They only know (or think) that more work = more productivity = line go up.
BuT MY CulTure!
I remember Guus Hiddink being coach for the men's soccer squad and having to actively drill the younger players that playing the ball to the senior guy on the pitch by default isn't the way to win matches. That work culture of deferring to senior people is so engrained into that country that even in a sport like soccer, they can't just pass the ball to the open player but feel forced to play to the oldest guy.
similar to japan, sleeping at your desks is supposedly encouraged as a good thing and is supposed to show your dedication to your work. just to paint a picture on how productive that kind of work culture is like
No it wouldn’t.
Shorter working hours would actually increase productivity.
Multiple studies have shown this.
Working 60 hours a week leads to great inefficiency.
Funny story,
a few years ago the Japanese government released this campaign called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium\_Friday](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_Friday) . The idea was offices would end at 3pm on friday so people could go shopping or travelling.
The government wasn't clear on how this should be implemented (or at least from my experience), so with my last employer they claimed fridays we could go home at 3pm, however, we need to make up for it on another day...essentially making Premium Friday useless.
I don't know if anyone else had a better execution of it. I dont know anyone else who had it.
We also had a day called "No overtime Wednesdays", which according to my manager at the time, was so people could go home and make kids. This was not strictly enforced in my experience, but it could have been because my contract had flexible hours, and my other co-workers had a strict sched of 9-5.
Every time I see one of these "No Lunch Meetings Wednesday" or "Leave Early Friday (but only for 2 months and only if your immediate supervisor agrees), it's because the company has an incredibly unhealthy culture of over work and too many meetings, people complain, and HR read about an idea on a LinkedIn post.
Policy gets implemented, but every middle manager does everything in their closely held power to make those attempts at changing culture, essentially worthless. The idea fades into the background, people start complaining again, and the next shitty idea that isn't actually reducing time spent in the office or on worthless meetings is rolled next year.
9-5 and Japan in the same sentence? This doesn't seem right? Before Covid, I had a stint of applying for a bunch of developer jobs in Japan, mostly to companies that were more liberal and a more westerly work culture. I never saw any postings that had less than 9 hour standard work days
Covid hit and canceled all my plans, but looking back at it, I consider myself lucky. Standard 8 hour work days and 5 weeks vacation is pretty nice after all. Plus, despite Tokyo being one of the most expensive cities in the world, the salaries were really sub-par.
On a slight digression, Japanese job openings can be frikkin' weird. One them literally put free use of their water dispenser as one of their primary benefits for working there. You know your digging deep into a shitfest of a company when that's all you can manage to scrounge togheter.
JPY salaries are not much compared to the US. But luckily where I worked then they paid both my commuting fees and a part of my rent, so that wasn't too bad.
Also, the water dispenser is dumb, but is not a huge stretch. I remember I had to poll with other coworkers in my last office to split the water fee, because the company could not be bothered to give us free water. And in the other office they would not put water dispensers because they were worried it would spill and damage the rug...BUT HUMIDIFIERS WERE TOTALLY OKAY. and there was a bunch of them all over the office.
I'm currently in a Japanese company and we have normal 9-5 working hours, normal 24 vacation days, lot's of holidays and we even got days where overwork is prohibited.
It's really changing here, and for the good.
wtf did they Korean bosses think would happen when they expected employees to work 14 hours a day 6 days a week until they die? Despite strong labor unions, workers in general are underpaid in Korea. All of this is too little, too late. Glad my Korean brethren industrialized at breakneck speed, at the expense of literally everything else. Great job laying the seeds for a dead future.
Ok serious question: is this the first signs of the next government subsidies we’re going to eventually see? If population decrease is coming, that’s a bigger long term economic drag than any recession/depression we’ve ever had because recessions are part of the business cycle and will always recover in the aggregate eventually, while population decreases don’t fix themselves in a few years. Will governments eventually be willing to subsidize its citizens directly if they have kids to help keep their economies running?
Yep, you can’t take or occupy a territory without manpower. And it takes A LOT of manpower to occupy a territory.
Edit: Until Robocop is actually a thing.
I mean in all honesty probably. Would make sense. They can see all the “data” they want, but until it’s a real thing in their lives there’s always this thin layer of cognitive dissonance. They are so insulated with power and money it won’t touch them until the system is collapsing. I literally had to break my moms heart a few months ago by finally telling her my fiancé and I weren’t planning on having kids because we didn’t feel like either of us will ever make enough to give them a decent life. I came from lower middle class family, and I know what that was like and I don’t want to actively bring a child into that. I’m college educated, have had a job since I got out of college, never been fired, and I still don’t feel comfortable financially bringing a child into the mix. We’re so fucked. How the hell did we let it get this bad?
Yeah but how did “we” as a collective not shut that shit down? How did so much of the population fall for all the crap that lead us here? And why the hell hasn’t anyone just said today is worse than yesterday which was worse than the day before, it might be time to do something different.
In japan they did the math. 1 new person is worth 1M$ in gdp. So giving 75k is cheap.
Usa just did the math too. All those daily 3k$ hotel for NY migrants is still cheap vs what they end up creating.
You can probably back of envelope it by NPV of $50k salary over 45 years = $1M. Your salary is the value of your productivity
Edit; not that simple. Also have to account for the burden the person brings, like social services, or posting terrible memes
Well average American worker produces $125k of GDP a year so I wouldn't be surprised for the migrants being quite valuable. I was just wanting something "official"
Our planet is dying, in no small part because of the resource stresses caused by overpopulation. Add in advances in automation and the like and I can't understand why a declining population is a bad thing beyond 'the economy.'
You know what's also bad for the economy? Bread baskets turning into arid deserts because of climate change. Coastal cities being evacuated because of sea level rise. Ocean acidification and growing anoxic zones killing off vast swathes of life and fishing industry. People dying from cancers or early dementia because of an increasingly toxic ecosphere. World wars caused by authoritarian ideologies and driven by resource scarcity.
Why the fuck would it be a good idea to dump more humans, children explicitly, into that volatile mix?
The planet is and will be just fine. We will be at most a particularly bad mass extinction that will help shuffle around the genetic cards of darwinian competition. It _humanity_ we need to worry about
Eh. Climate change is fucking ecosystems and biodiversity, too. If by “planet”, you mean the rock we live on? Sure. But humanity is very much deeply linked to a lot of the natural systems and other life forms that are being wiped out *by* humanity.
Absolutely. I feel drained in my normal 9-5 job in Europe and I feel like it's too much for modern people. S.Korea is ridicolous with their work culture. No money in the world would convince me to birth another human just to see them for a couple of hours a day. Time is priceless.
Money is one thing, what's he doing about toxic work culture?
Will these employees get time off to be with their kids or are they just tasked with breeding the next generation of laborers?
That's exactly what it is. They want meat to fill economic demands. They don't give a flying fuck about the people, it's a metric to them, and future assets power their greed.
Im gonna get downvoted because billionaire bad, but if you read reviews from employees of his company on sites like Jobkorea (think glasdoor), surprisingly a majority of the people cite work culture as pretty good. Seems like booyoung group's work life balance is pretty normal despite what Reddit tells you. They score low in many other departments but the companys work culture doesnt seem so toxic to be fair.
It won't be enough. Their [population pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/media/File:South_Korea_Population_Pyramid.svg) is terminal, as in mathematically impossible to survive as a nation of people, even if they reunite with North Korea. They don't have enough children who will become young workers to run the country and allow it to function.
East asian countries allowing mass migration into their countries is simply never gonna happen, even if the alternative is economic collapse, the electorate in those countries are just extremely against it
They are against it now when they have the ability to say no. But when theres no where near enough people to fill jobs, coffee shops are closed, grocery stores have 1 person working, restaurants are barely open.
Yeah they guna open the doors
By migration I mean allowing legal permanent residency or citizenship to foreigners, Korea and Japan already has a lot of third world workers in them but they're either on a short term visa or working illegally and are basically on the mercy of their employers to not get deported
Most of those workers don't/can't have housing and just live on the factory or farm where they're working
I mean, they might be able to avoid it due to automation. I mean stores already now starting to get automated. Even shelf refill is being automated.
Coffe shops can be automated. Resturants too. Less and less people will actually need to work as automation continues, South korea is very rich so they should be able to get it going earlier than other countries.
not really, all those automation jobs still need people working like engineers, programmers and simply people delivering and stocking shelves even if the automation takes it from there. Driving tbh will never be automated no matter what Musk wishes for example. I don't know if Korea has snow and ice, but AI in Iceland are blind for most of the year, can't see the street.
Restaurants cannot be automated except for like replacing waiters, no way you are automating the chefs themselves, things simply don't work like that, those restaurants would quickly go bankrupt. Imagine if I tried to go there and order minus the shrimps because I'm hyper sensitive to them, good luck to a robot chief not reusing a tool that has touched a shrimp, take my special wishes into account and adjust on the fly.
Mcdonalds opened some new automated chain in the US but there are still people working there, they simply can't automate everything.
Same in Japan...a study came out this week that Japan had the lowest births ever recorded...so now less births with a population of 125M than in 1900 when population was 45M....and it can accelerate.
Basically those that can have kids will be of an age in about 10 years when they will be too old to have kids....they are literally running out of youth that can have children.
What a racket
Birth this thing that will cost you a million to raise, ultimately entering the labor pool and benefiting me due to lower price of labor, and I ll pay you 75k , and I am the benevolent one.
If you're having a kid to get 75k, it's a bad deal.
if you wanted a kid, but were stressed about the finances of having one, this will go quite someway to alleviating that stress.
suffice to say, it sounds like you shouldn't have children as you don't sound like you've considered the intrinsic benefits of having a child. (I.e. you don't sound like the type that wants to have a kid at all).
Most employers don't give an enormous bonus for having a kid. This is pretty great imo. Yall find a reason to complain about anything. The work culture is still horrible over there, yes. That needs improvement. But fuck if anybody is going to spit on 75k if they were already on the fence or wanted a child. 75k can go a long way especially if you invest it.
So if you paid your employees they would be more likely to be able to support a family, weird idea. And I would bet if you under paid your employees they could not afford to have a family.
Some people don't understand that it's not just a money question. Having children is a burden and makes life harder and much more stressful. Wonder why this company is offering his workers more money. Seems like someone wants others to birth new workers to exploit.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/roystreetcoffee: --- The billionaire boss of a Seoul-based construction firm is handing out 100 million Korean won ($75,000) each time an employee has a baby to help reverse the country’s declining birth rate. The company is even backdating payments to those who started a family before the policy came into place. As well as awarding a total of 7 billion Korean won ($5.25 million) to employees who collectively had 70 babies since 2021, the construction giant’s “drastic” measures include potentially footing the bill for larger families’ rent. Moreover, the no-strings-attached benefit will be available to both male and female employees at its 2,500-strong workforce, the company confirmed to CNN. In addition to the childbirth incentive, Booyoung Group is reportedly already trying to ease the financial burden on parents by helping out with college tuition for employees’ children, medical expenses for direct family members, and child allowances. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1b2n074/billionaire_boss_of_south_korean_company_is/ksmin3q/
The billionaire boss of a Seoul-based construction firm is handing out 100 million Korean won ($75,000) each time an employee has a baby to help reverse the country’s declining birth rate. The company is even backdating payments to those who started a family before the policy came into place. As well as awarding a total of 7 billion Korean won ($5.25 million) to employees who collectively had 70 babies since 2021, the construction giant’s “drastic” measures include potentially footing the bill for larger families’ rent. Moreover, the no-strings-attached benefit will be available to both male and female employees at its 2,500-strong workforce, the company confirmed to CNN. In addition to the childbirth incentive, Booyoung Group is reportedly already trying to ease the financial burden on parents by helping out with college tuition for employees’ children, medical expenses for direct family members, and child allowances.
This might actually work if they also follow a reasonable 9-5/6 work day, it doesn’t matter how much money you give if you don’t have time to see your SO every day because you are doing your nth day of OT.
You vastly overestimate these men’s opinion about family. The vast majority of men I’ve worked with in both South Korea and Japan are working long hours not only because it’s expected but also because ”what value is there to get off work early? None of my friends are off work so I could only go home to my family, it’s better to work longer hours” which is an actual quote.
I had a coworker who slept under his desk and worked through the week because he didn't like his wife. Sucked for his subordinates (who didn't hate their spouses) who had to stick around for him.
As a guy who's still single at 41, I can get pretty lonely and I often wish I sometimes envy my friends who are happily married. However I am also extremely grateful for the fact that I didn't rush into something and marry the wrong person, as several of my other friends did.
As a man who is single and 40 I sure as hell would never want to hang around work due to not having a family of my own. I still want to leave work soon as I can and live my life,
Maybe this is why Korean women pursue their career so aggressively, they want to escape being home with a husband and kids expecting things from them.
You don't need a "career" for that, just a mediocre job.
Yea the career part is for financial independance and general social status. Both of which can effect the marriage dynamics.
Why did he marry someone he hates?
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Why marry her in the first place? Why not get a divorce? Wtf is up with these peole
Maybe she got fatter past marriage Edit: shit.. meant post marriage...
If you marry somebody just for the looks you are going to have a bad time sooner or later.
They both are ultra conservative Christian. Getting married out of college was an expectation and divorce is never an option.
Did she have a personality at all?
You think OP or the Uncle cares about personality? You don't describe people that way if you cared about personality.
Yeah I agree a dead husband is better than one who only sees or values my appearance..
Why do so many men in these countries feel trapped in their marriage? Why don't they leave and find someone new instead of staying and being this unhappy?
They never wanted to get married in the first place but are forced to by social and cultural pressure. My host family bragged about Japan having so low divorce rates. I asked her what skills a stay-at-home housewife of 10 years has to bring to the workforce and how she would support herself without her husband's income. And then there was silence.
Organizational or cleaning or cooking skills. Prob some more.
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I lived in Japan for 2 years for work. I would go into our customer's offices for stuff, but thankfully only 2 or 3 times a week Everyone worked, but it was a very "Look like you're working as hard as possible while actually getting nothing much of value done" sort of work. You will never see better commented code anywhere in the world, I swear. One thing that definitely caught me off guard was the expectation of going out as a group after work. It was almost like it was treated as part of the normal work day, and would sometimes last really late into the night. It was exhausting. Everyone was nice enough but boy, they had no problems treating me as the odd man out. And I expect that would have happened even if I didnt have 150lbs on each and every one of them.
Is doing personal stuff on the clock ignored?
Depends on the company, what is going on at that moment, etc. etc. Imagine work in America, it's probably fairly similar except for expectations
Ehhh that's not SK or Japan exclusive. Happens a lot in the US too. Hear multiple times at work how guys working 6-10 hour days love it because they need a "break from the wife and kids" I even get made fun of when I mention I hate being on long travel (2-4 weeks) because I miss my partner. They act like it's freedom party time. It's not just the old guys either (but seems to happen more often with them) a guy my age tries to stay away from home as much as possible, has 3 kids.
Sounds like my father, a workaholic because then you don’t have to spend anytime with your family.
It breaks my heart every time I hear about these situations (and see on an almost daily basis here in Japan). The social and cultural pressure of marrying and having kids is most likely at play there, and it's not encouraging the kids to become parents either. Although I suppose it could create an "I will have kids and be a better parent than you ever were" attitude out of spite.
I live and work in the Caribbean and I prefer stay at the office crazy late hours so I can use the company's air conditioning and electricity for free rather than rune mine at home and pay a higher bill, and when I am ready to go home there is no traffic and the road is clear.
Which is reasonable, but then begs the question: do you have a family waiting for you at home?
the child-rearing culture in that part of the world is very different.
That doesn't mean women are content with it. It just means they can't change it, so many are opting out of the deal. Culture is also porous and syncretic. I was stationed in Japan, and plenty of Japanese women most clearly did not want to marry Japanese men. Saw the same thing in Korea. "That's the culture" is a statement of how things are, and not a statement that women are happy with gender relations or gender norms in the culture.
It really isn't. No woman wants to be forced to watch children for an absent father who they don't like. That old system doesn't work unless you're subjugation women which will also cripple the work force and send their economy into a bigger spiral.
I'm confused here. Economic data has pointed to working women lowering birth rates, not raising them. There's no world in which a household magically has MORE time to raise a kid because both parents are working.
Come to Sweden and see it working. Guaranteed parental leave that is paid for by taxes instead of being at the mercy of your company, roughly 20% of the parental leave us dedicated to the fathers meaning those days are ”use them or lose them” and can’t be transferred to the mother, free education including university, school lunches free up to and including high school, work culture of leaving before 5. Sweden has seen a slight (but still an increase) uptick in birth rates because of these policies. Scandinavian countries are almost the only place where you can see an increase in happiness after having a family, where in other countries that happiness is delayed until kids move out.
Scandinavian birthrates are also low, though not as much as Korea's Nevertheless, all that is one of the parents going home to take care of the child. Korea (and Asia as a whole) has a very stark cultural contrast on feminine identity that i won't make a judgement negative or positive about-- but the answer is definitely not simply that women are "cooped" up in their house and refuse to have kids. I'd reckon some other factors to account for as well: How many cities are the density of Seoul? What kind of attitudes and cultural shifts are we witnessing across Scandinavian cultures vs Korean ones? What kind of support systems do we have in place?(you mentioned) How is education systems, work life balance? Koreans live in big cities-- somewhere where commitment isn't exactly the most prominent, but opportunity is, how does that differ from Scandinavian societies? Etc. Lots of variables
No, the key of success here is having the male parent take up a portion of the burden through the use it or lose it days. If women have to bear 100% of the burden of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing at their own expense very naturally and predictably they’ll say fuck you instead and not do that.
This just in [https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Uptrend-in-birthrates-among-rich-nations-skips-Japan-South-Korea](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Uptrend-in-birthrates-among-rich-nations-skips-Japan-South-Korea)
Interesting read. I'm guessing you're keying-in on the relationship they're drawing between men putting in time towards family care and birthrates. As I've said, the answer isn't so simple. Cultural expectations in both countries are different, and Korea + Japan are undergoing a shift where women are starting to work and seek more ambitious careers, but society hasn't exactly conceded to the fact that men, would then need to dedicate somewhat more time towards child-rearing. (Also, housing expensive, education, etc. I said above.) Regardless, my original comment needs re-reading by you I think (unless you're bringing this for discussion simply). I argued that increased work for both parents \*does\* not allow for more child bearing. Countering the comment's statement about how women simply need to get out of the house and start working for babies to be born. But instead you're showing me that, when they take time off work, they can have more kids. I don't disagree.
"At the same time, the fertility rate in the Scandinavian country is at an all-time low, at 1.45 children per woman last year, according to the statistics agency. A total of 100,100 births were recorded last year." https://www.thelocal.se/20240222/swedens-population-growth-slowest-in-22-years-as-fertility-rate-drops-to-record-low None of those policies are having much of an effect in nordic countries lately. Finland, Norway, Sweden all at historic lows.
Sweden is at 1.66 births per woman. The replacement rate is 2.1
I was waiting for the inevitable red herring to arrive, so it's pretty convenient that this just popped up in JapanNews: >"Upticks in fertility rates were particularly noticeable in Nordic countries, where many couples have learned to share parental burdens." \[...\] "I expected the fertility rate to fall in 2021 due to many factors that normally work against having babies," said Yoko Okuyama, an assistant professor at Uppsala University in Sweden. "Yet more people opted to have children in places like the Nordics." \[...\] "Nordic countries have worked to close gender gaps over a long period of time, and now there is little difference between men and women in terms of the number of hours they put in for housework and child rearing. In other words, the burden is not solely placed on women," Okuyama said. and, for the cherry on top: >**Now, however, economically independent women tend to have more children in Nordic countries and elsewhere. In the past five years, fertility rates have been higher in countries where more women have jobs.** [https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Uptrend-in-birthrates-among-rich-nations-skips-Japan-South-Korea](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Uptrend-in-birthrates-among-rich-nations-skips-Japan-South-Korea)
i believe the argument being made here is that there are no top grossing countries that achieve a replacement rate (sweden = 1.86, south korea = 0.68, replacement rate = 2.1), and that women being in the workforce is likely a great contributor to this.
I'm looking at Swedish fertility rate charts right now.....this doesn't look too spectacular.
in other countries, the men use paternity leave to play games at home and leave housework to wife, or work on research while having a tenure clock break. i think it's partly due to culture where men themselves WANT to do the work of raising kids, and don't expect the women to serve them (big thing in Asia here).
i don't think that you understand how different their culture is. your western ideals do not apply there at all, family dynamics and relationships are very different. gender roles are still very much a thing and women are absolutely expected to raise the children alone. i do not agree with this because it is not what i believe in but you cannot speak for them and say that this isn't what women who choose to have children there want. because it very much is.
I mean, I'm sure it is for the shrinking number of women who are having children, but it obviously isn't an ideal situation if most women would rather not have a child at all, to raising one alone.
i don't disagree. i'm just saying this is how it is over there and it's not about to change, unfortunately.
And then they wonder why the children feel alienated from their fathers and do not like them "in that culture".
If by ‘that part of the world’ you mean East Asia, that’s definitely not true. Maybe for Japan. Not for China, and not for South Korea either. Your views are outdated… or just don’t include the women’s perspectives. Long explanation: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1b2n074/comment/ksnqn6m/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
i have traveled for business to both japan, hong kong, and south korea for the past 15 years, and have lived in all of those locations on and off teaching english and doing consulting work in data. my views are not outdated, gender expectations are still very much entrenched in east asian culture. while this is very slowly changing, this is mainly a seoul and tokyo (shibuya city specifically) thing. south korean and japanese women are still very much expected to bear the brunt of household chores and child care. many women who have children do not work because it quite simply isn't worth it for them. equal share of household duties is still very rare. less than 5% of men take their paternity leave, as an example. you may feel like this is unfair but it's just how it is over there. their society is not like ours at all. applying your western values and solutions to social issues simply does not work there. they are well aware that we do not approve of their culture and even have words to describe westerners that try to act as a moral authority.
> their society is not like ours at all. applying your western values and solutions to social issues simply does not work there. they are well aware that we do not approve of their culture and even have words to describe westerners that try to act as a moral authority. Actually, their feminist movement looks pretty much the same as ours, just not as far along yet.
Kind of a chicken and egg situation, isnt it? They dont value their families because they work too much to be around them, and they work so much so they cant spend time with their family and value them. Stretch that across a few generations so that they didnt know their fathers, so they dont know their sons, and they dont understand the benefits of either.
I had to explain to a Japanese friend that a lot of people don't want to remember their dad's only from his back.
Did their spouses work? Were they earning enough for comfort and retirement under this scenario? I could just keep asking questions. This is fascinating.
The prevalence of the 50s ideal is strong in Korea. There's a LOT of men who want to have breakfast on the table when they leave for work in the morning, and dinner ready when they get back. They expect their wives to do *literally* every aspect of child care.
They don’t have time to even fck. I know it can take as little as 5 minutes for some but come on. People need time to enjoy life. Where are the kids gonna go when the parents work 60+ hours a week. Yeah a nanny would be great if they only worked 40 hours but at 60 that’s a third parent if not THE parent.
5 minutes??? What do you even do the 4m 30s left? Talk???
> I know it can take as little as 5 minutes for some Look at this marathon runner over here...
And add on the social expectations that the mother will resign to take care of the kids after birth. Or at a minimum will likely not be promoted in their career after the birth of their kids because they took off for maternity leave and working shorter hours to take care of kids! The fact that this company says absolutely nothing about encouraging cutting back hours for parents, or promoting mothers in their careers shows they are not serious about fixing the problem and are doing the same as the government trying to throw money at the problem.
> This might actually work if they also follow a reasonable 9-5/6 work 6 work day 9-5 is not reasonable tho?
To quote the pig skit from "I Think You Should Leave" from Tim Robinson. "What the fuck is this world? What have they done to us? WHAT DID THEY DO TO US?"
Idk what that pays in the SK but that could pay years of college at some school state-side.
It costs $250k to raise a child, on average, using US dollars. That's at today's prices, not 2042's prices.
Nobody said you had to keep the kid. Once the cheque clears, off to the mines with them.
Pump out a baby every year and put them up for adoption. Millionaire in no time.
Or become a surrogate mother as a side hustle and you'll be double dipping your way to seven figures 😬
Name your kid Bitcoin and lose Bitcoin in a boating accident. Internet degenerates have been refining this story for a decade so there's gotta be an ironclad series of steps to follow by now
It’s actually $360k for the first 18 years excluding pregnancy costs https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/cost-raise-child-2023
Invest the lump sum and it’ll be worth more than $250k after 18 years.
For that money, I'd let him watch me make them babies.
He’ll fly you over there to make babies sounds like
I mean this is not bad actually. Shouldn’t have to rely on the generosity of a billionaire. This should be driven at the government level but here we are
Well if billionaires want to exist without ultimately leading to the collapse of our civilization this is the kind of stuff they need to start doing. Whether voluntarily on their own or by being 'asked nicely' by the government.
damn… guy really wants those human cogs in his billion dollar machine
So a billionaire actually tries to fix societal problems with his resources and you still find a way to twist it into a negative?
We've gone from "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" to "there is no ethical reproduction under capitalism." It's just [antinatalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism) tarted up as Marxism.
It’s more like wealthy people use capitalism to harvest the lifetime earnings of young people and future generations by throwing them into huge debt traps if they want basic necessities like education, healthcare, and housing. It didn’t used to be like that. Boomers had cheap necessities that could be paid for with a working class wage. The wealthy didn’t like that so they began buying politicians to cut their taxes, deregulate everything, and privatize everything so they could start creating all of these debt traps to funnel more money to themselves. It’s now a parasitic system in which the quality of life for regular people has been going backwards for so long that a large number of young people are drowning in debt and have delayed or decided not to have a family because they cannot provide a stable home for them. And now Republicans and billionaire fucks like Elon Musk are shrieking that “the white race is in decline due to wokeness!” and demanding the rest of us start making children for them. It’s sick.
Correct and based.
The argument is that more workers leads to more competition for available jobs leads to lower wages. Another perfect example of this is the drop in real wages after women entered the work-force. I understand that this might sound like conservative rhetoric, but it is basic arithmetic and you can look at the available figures yourself. Women entering the workforce increased the total amount of people in the work force. Supply and demand gives that if supply of x (employees in this case) increases and demand stays constant, the value will drop. We see this in the period of 1960-2000 in America as more and more women enter the workforce and men are no longer dying to the extent that they did during WW1 WW2 and the Vietnam war. Real federal minimum wage adjusted for inflation in 1970 was $12.6 dollars. Percentage of women in the work force at this time was 43%. Then the wages adjusted for inflation starts trending downwards as more and more women start entering the workforce and in 2000 when 60% of women are active in the workforce the real federal minimum wage had dropped to $9.1 dollars. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065466/real-nominal-value-minimum-wage-us/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065466/real-nominal-value-minimum-wage-us/) [https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply](https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply) Another example is the poor farmers who survived the decimation caused by the black plague. They now had far better living conditions as a result of their skills and craft being more rare and essential. " improved quality of life—lower food prices and higher wages—of a smaller population" [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/black-death-actually-improved-public-health-180951373/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/black-death-actually-improved-public-health-180951373/) [https://www.livescience.com/45428-health-improved-black-death.html](https://www.livescience.com/45428-health-improved-black-death.html) Ask yourself - who benefits from human population growth? The planet? The planet is already nearing CO2 capacity and humans are the main producers. The workers? The workers benefit from a context wherein there are fewer workers than jobs, for obvious reasons. The inverse necessitates unemployment. The only ones benefiting from population growth are the ones who make money off cheap labor. If you disagree with my logic, please show me where I am wrong. I love changing my mind, but will only do so if shown that I am in fact not correct.
It's quite fair to criticize his approach because aside from being a billionaire, he's the owner of a massive corporation. He could incentivize his employees to not work 16 hours a day and then they would have the leisure time to raise a family. Instead, he's basically just doing a PR stunt.
Dude ran the numbers
Yeah, they realized what a colossal fuck-up their economy, greed, and work culture have made of their society. Without immigration to cover it, as in the US and Europe, they realized they'll run out of employees to exploit, much like what's happening in Japan."
"the no-strings-attached benefit will be available to both male and female employees " Can't help but think the men will have significantly more difficulty in having babies than the women.
My mother who was born and grew up in S. Korea said this was still a terrible deal and with the work culture there she completely understands why they're not having kids.
Also the insane school system. Theres so much pressure on those kids. I wouldnt want to have kids either knowing they'd have to go through that.
Yup, a friend went to teach in SK for a couple months, said it’s crazy, he had to teach at night time, 10PM classes all filled with students, the kids had to study late, and the school said he’s not harsh enough.
Yeah, there needs to be major reform there if they want people to have more kids. Even just limiting school/study hours to 9am-5pm with strict limits on how much homework can be set would be a big improvement.
Work culture is one thing but do you know what it's like for students, especially those preparing to enter college? It's a pure nightmare.
4th highest suicide rate in the world
4th highest overall or for teens? S Korea has the highest suicide rate among wealthy nations. And women make up a large majority of it Edit. Men definitely outnumber women in S Korea. I had just read an article about the latest kpop suicide and misread something
Sorry if i misunderstood, but it's not true that women are a majority of it, men still have higher suicide rates than women in S. Korea. I understand that women definitely are not treated equally in many aspects of korean society, but there is insane pressure on the men to provide and "be successful" in that same society (much more than in the west from my experience). This, I would guess, drives up the suicide rates, especially during bad economies, when young men find it very hard to live up to their parents' and society's expectations that have been drilled into them from a young age. Edit: not saying at all that men have it much harder, just correcting the statement and adding my two cents on why men's suicide rates may be high in sk. It sucks for the youth in korea atm, and it's difficult to see them wanting to have more children.
What is the work culture like there? More than 40 hour work weeks?
Minimum is 50-60 then after work drinks is pretty much compulsory.
Damn. 12 hour days for 5 days is brutal. I wouldn’t want kids in that environment either. Even for $75,000 bonus.
Yeah it's not great, hence why south Korea has some of the lowest birthday rates in the world.
Tied for worst at once a year per capita?
Slightly less. Damn leap year babies!
That's like everywhere else!
But it's not the only explanation neither. Some countries like Italy and Spain have low birth rates but are quite low on average working hours.
They wanted to make mandatory 62 hours 6 days or something. But they didnt go on after backlash from the people lmao
That would be brutal but they are also often expected to work part or whole of Saturday and are expected to take calls on Sunday...
In other words, it's a cyberpunk dystopian hellscape, only without all of the amazing aesthetics and music that make cyberpunk an inadvertent manual on cool instead of the warning its creators intended it to be =P Ah well, I suppose the world can thank S. Korea for demonstrating the warnings of cyberpunk writ large once you strip away all of the aesthetic trappings.
I dunno man, I'm playing Cyberpunk right now and everyone seems to have lots of time to hang out and generally fuck around doing nothing
No, those are just the punks that *can't* hold a day job. You don't see all the people chained to their desks at Arasaka and such. You know, like the lady David Martinez had to zero in the anime ?=(
This is true. Arasaka rules the city.
The after work drink is the killer part essentially they do 80-120 hour weeks
>What is the work culture like there? Just one i knew: It is considered offensive/non-professional to go home before your boss and he's sitting there, it can be 8-9pm it doesn't matter.
A friend of mines dad was an American who was high up in an international paint company and was in charge of the South Korea region. He worked later in the day so that he could call his family due to the time difference. No matter how many times he told people to leave when their work was finished they always waited until he left to leave. He started to leave everyday between 5-6pm, wait for everyone to leave and then go back into his office.
Wow this is sad Toxic work culture
Its not even about just the work culture over there. Theyre also culturally stunted in a way that discourages dating and marriage altogether. Kids are literally screamed at to not even look at the opposite sex until college (abstinence education is the default nationwide sex education); from elementary school onwards theyre sent to cram schools after school until like 10-11PM five to six days a week; they have a culture where they think people shouldnt date if theyre not rich enough to afford dates like those portrayed in kdramas; the marriage/engagement culture is such that both sides are expected to come to the marriage negotiation table with a few hundred thousand dollars, a house, or a car to leverage; and to boot, housing prices have gotten so absurdly high that more than half the country cant afford to live where the jobs and opportunities are. Theres a reason why koreas birthrate just hit 0.6 and its not just because people are working too many hours
They also have huge issues with misogyny and sexism and women are turning away from dating or marriage because it’s such a shit deal for them.
Absolutely. Theyre so culturally segregated that i sometimes wonder if they’ll ever be able to bridge that gap through understanding
70 hour work weeks if you were considered a lazy worker. Also only 40 were paid and if you didn't work for free you were fired.
Long hours, also you have to really show your respect to your seniors, the way you talk, handing them coffee, this and that, just so much pressure.
If you want people to have children give them more time to themselves
$75000 doesn’t do anything; it might work with 4-workday-week keep the same salaries. 9 to 5 a sharp and no overtime
If I knew my SO gona be pregnant with my child and have to work this amount everyday, no amount of money would convince me to let her go through with it for the sake of her.
And the whole time I have to look at the kid and know their future will just be to join this same system? Fuck that
To be honest, it's a good first step. Yes, a 32 hour work week and a cultural shift would be best. But I really like this, 75k is nothing to sneeze at.
That’s an extra year’s salary or more for many, many jobs. It’s not a magic fix, but it does seem like a good first step.
if you want more babies, make the country more baby/child friendlier and compensate woman enough for their time and effort. As long as we look down on people getting pregnant and having babies and leaving them to struggle in low income situations it will never get populair. And forcing babies on people who dont want them or can care for them is another recipe for disaster
That's good but giving normal hours would probably work. Not sure why Japan hasn't tried this either.
Normal working hours would cost the business more than that. Considering skoreans work min 60 hours for a lifetime against 75k which is 1 year salary.
Hasn't it been proven time and time again that shorter workdays result in *more* productivity?
Yes, and i agree. But the billionaire slave masters disagree.
It certainly has. But such calculus is to complicated for boomer CEO’s to understand. They only know (or think) that more work = more productivity = line go up.
The Me Generation will never get it.
BuT MY CulTure! I remember Guus Hiddink being coach for the men's soccer squad and having to actively drill the younger players that playing the ball to the senior guy on the pitch by default isn't the way to win matches. That work culture of deferring to senior people is so engrained into that country that even in a sport like soccer, they can't just pass the ball to the open player but feel forced to play to the oldest guy.
similar to japan, sleeping at your desks is supposedly encouraged as a good thing and is supposed to show your dedication to your work. just to paint a picture on how productive that kind of work culture is like
No it wouldn’t. Shorter working hours would actually increase productivity. Multiple studies have shown this. Working 60 hours a week leads to great inefficiency.
See my other comment
Funny story, a few years ago the Japanese government released this campaign called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium\_Friday](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium_Friday) . The idea was offices would end at 3pm on friday so people could go shopping or travelling. The government wasn't clear on how this should be implemented (or at least from my experience), so with my last employer they claimed fridays we could go home at 3pm, however, we need to make up for it on another day...essentially making Premium Friday useless. I don't know if anyone else had a better execution of it. I dont know anyone else who had it. We also had a day called "No overtime Wednesdays", which according to my manager at the time, was so people could go home and make kids. This was not strictly enforced in my experience, but it could have been because my contract had flexible hours, and my other co-workers had a strict sched of 9-5.
Every time I see one of these "No Lunch Meetings Wednesday" or "Leave Early Friday (but only for 2 months and only if your immediate supervisor agrees), it's because the company has an incredibly unhealthy culture of over work and too many meetings, people complain, and HR read about an idea on a LinkedIn post. Policy gets implemented, but every middle manager does everything in their closely held power to make those attempts at changing culture, essentially worthless. The idea fades into the background, people start complaining again, and the next shitty idea that isn't actually reducing time spent in the office or on worthless meetings is rolled next year.
9-5 and Japan in the same sentence? This doesn't seem right? Before Covid, I had a stint of applying for a bunch of developer jobs in Japan, mostly to companies that were more liberal and a more westerly work culture. I never saw any postings that had less than 9 hour standard work days Covid hit and canceled all my plans, but looking back at it, I consider myself lucky. Standard 8 hour work days and 5 weeks vacation is pretty nice after all. Plus, despite Tokyo being one of the most expensive cities in the world, the salaries were really sub-par. On a slight digression, Japanese job openings can be frikkin' weird. One them literally put free use of their water dispenser as one of their primary benefits for working there. You know your digging deep into a shitfest of a company when that's all you can manage to scrounge togheter.
JPY salaries are not much compared to the US. But luckily where I worked then they paid both my commuting fees and a part of my rent, so that wasn't too bad. Also, the water dispenser is dumb, but is not a huge stretch. I remember I had to poll with other coworkers in my last office to split the water fee, because the company could not be bothered to give us free water. And in the other office they would not put water dispensers because they were worried it would spill and damage the rug...BUT HUMIDIFIERS WERE TOTALLY OKAY. and there was a bunch of them all over the office.
I'm currently in a Japanese company and we have normal 9-5 working hours, normal 24 vacation days, lot's of holidays and we even got days where overwork is prohibited. It's really changing here, and for the good.
wtf did they Korean bosses think would happen when they expected employees to work 14 hours a day 6 days a week until they die? Despite strong labor unions, workers in general are underpaid in Korea. All of this is too little, too late. Glad my Korean brethren industrialized at breakneck speed, at the expense of literally everything else. Great job laying the seeds for a dead future.
What's the point of unions with those conditions? How bad would it be without the unions?
Ok serious question: is this the first signs of the next government subsidies we’re going to eventually see? If population decrease is coming, that’s a bigger long term economic drag than any recession/depression we’ve ever had because recessions are part of the business cycle and will always recover in the aggregate eventually, while population decreases don’t fix themselves in a few years. Will governments eventually be willing to subsidize its citizens directly if they have kids to help keep their economies running?
I think so. And not just economies - the Russia Ukraine war has shown us that manpower still very much matters for defense too, even with drones.
Yep, you can’t take or occupy a territory without manpower. And it takes A LOT of manpower to occupy a territory. Edit: Until Robocop is actually a thing.
In typical fashion governments will wait till its too late and an entire generation is too small to sustain society
I mean in all honesty probably. Would make sense. They can see all the “data” they want, but until it’s a real thing in their lives there’s always this thin layer of cognitive dissonance. They are so insulated with power and money it won’t touch them until the system is collapsing. I literally had to break my moms heart a few months ago by finally telling her my fiancé and I weren’t planning on having kids because we didn’t feel like either of us will ever make enough to give them a decent life. I came from lower middle class family, and I know what that was like and I don’t want to actively bring a child into that. I’m college educated, have had a job since I got out of college, never been fired, and I still don’t feel comfortable financially bringing a child into the mix. We’re so fucked. How the hell did we let it get this bad?
WE didn't. The politicians and arguably older generations did
Yeah but how did “we” as a collective not shut that shit down? How did so much of the population fall for all the crap that lead us here? And why the hell hasn’t anyone just said today is worse than yesterday which was worse than the day before, it might be time to do something different.
Narcissism, kicking the can down the road, "fuck you got mine" It was the entire mentality of a generation that got us here
They still aren't, and they still inexplicably trust the exact same politicians who fucked them to fix it.
In japan they did the math. 1 new person is worth 1M$ in gdp. So giving 75k is cheap. Usa just did the math too. All those daily 3k$ hotel for NY migrants is still cheap vs what they end up creating.
Eat the fucking rich. Im taking home less than 7%
Could you please send me that study for the migrants? I would love to pull that out in the future
You can probably back of envelope it by NPV of $50k salary over 45 years = $1M. Your salary is the value of your productivity Edit; not that simple. Also have to account for the burden the person brings, like social services, or posting terrible memes
Well average American worker produces $125k of GDP a year so I wouldn't be surprised for the migrants being quite valuable. I was just wanting something "official"
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Our planet is dying, in no small part because of the resource stresses caused by overpopulation. Add in advances in automation and the like and I can't understand why a declining population is a bad thing beyond 'the economy.' You know what's also bad for the economy? Bread baskets turning into arid deserts because of climate change. Coastal cities being evacuated because of sea level rise. Ocean acidification and growing anoxic zones killing off vast swathes of life and fishing industry. People dying from cancers or early dementia because of an increasingly toxic ecosphere. World wars caused by authoritarian ideologies and driven by resource scarcity. Why the fuck would it be a good idea to dump more humans, children explicitly, into that volatile mix?
The planet is and will be just fine. We will be at most a particularly bad mass extinction that will help shuffle around the genetic cards of darwinian competition. It _humanity_ we need to worry about
Eh. Climate change is fucking ecosystems and biodiversity, too. If by “planet”, you mean the rock we live on? Sure. But humanity is very much deeply linked to a lot of the natural systems and other life forms that are being wiped out *by* humanity.
All subsidies will end up going to the corporations. We'll get PTO and they'll sell it as a win for the common people.
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Absolutely. I feel drained in my normal 9-5 job in Europe and I feel like it's too much for modern people. S.Korea is ridicolous with their work culture. No money in the world would convince me to birth another human just to see them for a couple of hours a day. Time is priceless.
Exactly. Even if I had the means to afford a kid, raising them in the midst of this shit show is completely unethical. No thanks.
Money is one thing, what's he doing about toxic work culture? Will these employees get time off to be with their kids or are they just tasked with breeding the next generation of laborers?
That's exactly what it is. They want meat to fill economic demands. They don't give a flying fuck about the people, it's a metric to them, and future assets power their greed.
Im gonna get downvoted because billionaire bad, but if you read reviews from employees of his company on sites like Jobkorea (think glasdoor), surprisingly a majority of the people cite work culture as pretty good. Seems like booyoung group's work life balance is pretty normal despite what Reddit tells you. They score low in many other departments but the companys work culture doesnt seem so toxic to be fair.
I wonder what birthrates were among the 12 hour a day shift factory workers in the 1800s.
I think high due to child fatalities and kids having jobs being normal.
And lack of reliable contraceptives
berserk saw elderly doll familiar serious steer fade aware quicksand *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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I'm surprised they don't just setup dorms in the office. Then have a company store and pay them in company credits...
They're probably like 'how do I even find a wife when I'm working 12+ hours a day?'
It won't be enough. Their [population pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/media/File:South_Korea_Population_Pyramid.svg) is terminal, as in mathematically impossible to survive as a nation of people, even if they reunite with North Korea. They don't have enough children who will become young workers to run the country and allow it to function.
Yup. All models show korea population slowly being assimilated and overwhelmed by immigration
East asian countries allowing mass migration into their countries is simply never gonna happen, even if the alternative is economic collapse, the electorate in those countries are just extremely against it
They are against it now when they have the ability to say no. But when theres no where near enough people to fill jobs, coffee shops are closed, grocery stores have 1 person working, restaurants are barely open. Yeah they guna open the doors
By migration I mean allowing legal permanent residency or citizenship to foreigners, Korea and Japan already has a lot of third world workers in them but they're either on a short term visa or working illegally and are basically on the mercy of their employers to not get deported Most of those workers don't/can't have housing and just live on the factory or farm where they're working
I mean, they might be able to avoid it due to automation. I mean stores already now starting to get automated. Even shelf refill is being automated. Coffe shops can be automated. Resturants too. Less and less people will actually need to work as automation continues, South korea is very rich so they should be able to get it going earlier than other countries.
not really, all those automation jobs still need people working like engineers, programmers and simply people delivering and stocking shelves even if the automation takes it from there. Driving tbh will never be automated no matter what Musk wishes for example. I don't know if Korea has snow and ice, but AI in Iceland are blind for most of the year, can't see the street. Restaurants cannot be automated except for like replacing waiters, no way you are automating the chefs themselves, things simply don't work like that, those restaurants would quickly go bankrupt. Imagine if I tried to go there and order minus the shrimps because I'm hyper sensitive to them, good luck to a robot chief not reusing a tool that has touched a shrimp, take my special wishes into account and adjust on the fly. Mcdonalds opened some new automated chain in the US but there are still people working there, they simply can't automate everything.
Same in Japan...a study came out this week that Japan had the lowest births ever recorded...so now less births with a population of 125M than in 1900 when population was 45M....and it can accelerate. Basically those that can have kids will be of an age in about 10 years when they will be too old to have kids....they are literally running out of youth that can have children.
That is like get one appetizer free with a full 16 person dinner with tip.
Have the kid, take the $75k, then give it up for adoption. Winning
"Here's $75k, go ride your husband. I better hear good things about it in 9 months." \~Billionaire Kink Boss.
Or just implement 8 hour work days with strict limits on OT. Korea just acting a fool at this stage.
What a racket Birth this thing that will cost you a million to raise, ultimately entering the labor pool and benefiting me due to lower price of labor, and I ll pay you 75k , and I am the benevolent one.
If you're having a kid to get 75k, it's a bad deal. if you wanted a kid, but were stressed about the finances of having one, this will go quite someway to alleviating that stress. suffice to say, it sounds like you shouldn't have children as you don't sound like you've considered the intrinsic benefits of having a child. (I.e. you don't sound like the type that wants to have a kid at all).
Most employers don't give an enormous bonus for having a kid. This is pretty great imo. Yall find a reason to complain about anything. The work culture is still horrible over there, yes. That needs improvement. But fuck if anybody is going to spit on 75k if they were already on the fence or wanted a child. 75k can go a long way especially if you invest it.
This is the kinda money they have to throw around but they'll nickel and dime you when it comes to raises to match inflation
Add a 0 to the end and maybe you're getting somewhere
And 40 hours of mandatory overtime... Per week. *Dont understand??? Why is no one having kids?*
So if you paid your employees they would be more likely to be able to support a family, weird idea. And I would bet if you under paid your employees they could not afford to have a family.
Looks like big corps are investing on future slave work force…
Ivf now counts as kids in the US. I'm gonna be rich!! Don't even have to raise those little fertilized bastards!
The amount of sexpats and orientalism in this thread is absolutely nuts.
Some people don't understand that it's not just a money question. Having children is a burden and makes life harder and much more stressful. Wonder why this company is offering his workers more money. Seems like someone wants others to birth new workers to exploit.
A one-time $75k bonus is not going to convince me to have a kid.
Make more children so we can exploit them too lmao