Comments by "Peter Jacobsen" (@pjacobsen1000) on "Kishida issues urgent warning on Japan’s shrinking population, saying it poses serious societal risk" video.

All societies have the same problem: Once the cost of having children becomes greater than the benefit of having children, people will start having fewer children. If you live in a poor, agrarian society, children are cheap: Some food (grown on the farm) and some clothes is all you need. By the time they're 5 years old, they can start doing simple tasks to help out on the farm, and soon they can help to earn money. Eventually, society will become developed and rich. Then a child will be an expense for the family for the first 20-25 years with no real return other than love. And when they leave home and start to make money, they will use that money for their own family. Should we find a way to make children profitable? Maybe not. At least I can't see how that could be done in an ethical way.
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@chaoticlife311 " why would they have a child if it is detrimental to society". People don't have children for 'society'. They have children for themselves.
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@zilun If you want an extra room for your child to sleep in, a room of just 10 sqm, in Shanghai that will set you back about RMB 1 million. So yes, there's a high cost to having children.
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@zilun Your comment does not deal with the reality of a young family who is considering having a baby right now and have to consider the costs. You're thinking in macro-economic terms, but the young couple have to think about their own personal economy. What can they afford right now?
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@zilun Yes, renting will solve the problem of needing extra space for a new family member, but there are other expenses. Daycare, schooling, clothes, toys, college, vacations. Many things. It's not impossible to afford a child, as clearly billions of people continue to have children. What I am saying in my original comment is that having children has become MORE expensive in recent decades, and it will likely continue to increase in cost in the future.
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@bowwak5366 I don't think you have evidence for that claim. Places like HK which doesn't provide much in term of pensions and socialism has a TFR of only 0.9, whereas the Nordic countries, which provide very generous social benefits have a higher TFR around 1.6-1.7. USA has a relatively high TFR for its development and social model, but most of it's babies are born by immigrants from lower income countries. The upper middle class in the US also have a low TFR.
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@grassfield5177 "Families are still the backbone of a thriving society". Yes, I agree with that, but when you and your wife decide to have another baby or stop at the ones you already have, society doesn't come in to your considerations. You decide based on what is best for your family.
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@whyitmatters6906 That's not the point. The point is that as society advances, bringing up children becomes increasingly expensive because their skillset has to be as advanced as society in order to succeed (it's no longer enough to just be able to hold a shovel). Therefore, each child becomes a larger and larger part of a family's total expenses to the extent where the family can only afford one child, or none at all. The only way to solve that problem is to decrease the cost of having children, and here I mean the cost to society as a whole, not just the cost to parents, and the only way to do that is to find a way to make children contribute financially. As I wrote, I don't think that is ethical, but it leaves us with an unsolvable problem.
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@yukio9723 And how many children would you like to have? If you want one or two, why not three or four? I think that you, like everybody else, will consider many factors: Cost, time, freedom.
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@mrila-x3e That's basically what I'm saying.
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@reardelt And how does that impact the low fertility rates in many countries around the world?
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@thevigilant6884 As you grow older you'll probably mellow out from that world view.
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Japanese people are already quite short. If the population keeps shrinking, soon we won't be able to see them. But if they only wash themselves in cold water, they won't shrink.
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