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Korea, Japan, and America have conservative or conservative-leaning governments supposedly concerned with "the family." Korea and Japan keenly feel this, as their respective populations are in a precipitous decline. They aren't producing enough children to replace the old and dying. Both nations have negative population growth. (America's population is just above replacement level due to immigration and the births thereof. Native American, African-American and white childbirths have been declining for decades).
American conservatives' fascination with "the family" is more about the disintegration of "traditional" family units: that of a father, mother and children. The rapid rise of single-parent (often single-mother) households amongst all races and demographics (but particularly poorer, younger white women, blacks and Latinos) over the last two generations is admittedly alarming.
All three nations are correct: vanishing families, negative birthrates and/or single-parent families aren't good for the country and their respective economies. A bevy of social ills and pathologies are often attendant to these negative population/familial trends.
Negative birthrates can lead to a quickening of concentrated, hereditary wealth, stagnation of the economy and severe straining of most social insurance programs (monetary assistance for the poor and indigent, pensions, and medical care for the elderly are examples). In this scenario, there aren't enough new workers and taxpayers to pay for these services.
Some of this is already occurring, even in America. The United States also has the aforementioned single-parent trend. Single mothers and their children are more likely to be poor and stay in poverty. Their children are more likely to perform far below their wealthier counterparts in primary education, and they are less likely to graduate high school, acquire tertiary education or maintain gainful employment. Children from single-parent households are also more likely to be incarcerated, and like their single parents, have low or no access to quality healthcare and positive health outcomes.
Impoverished American women will also die far earlier than their wealthier cohorts, a particularly startling statistic considering that the life expectancy, and indeed, the quality of life, for most of the population in America and other advanced countries have increased over the last few generations.
Advanced societies see some decline in marriage and birth when women gain access to education and wealth.
But while some nations like Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark have gone to great lengths in extending the social network of services meant to aid in parenting and childrearing, Korea, Japan and America have made it as difficult as possible to raise children.
Korea and Japan have an infamous and well-deserved reputation of fostering a brutal work environment of long hours, lack of daycare, lack of paid maternity and paternity leave, stagnant wages and a patriarchal, sexist system of employment and advancement in both the public and private sectors. Work conditions are so toxic is these countries that said environment makes sustained and healthy female participation in the workforce, juxtaposed with motherhood, an impossibly difficult and unattractive proposition to embrace.
These three countries' governments, and their respective societies as a whole, will not cope with some simple truths.
Fiscal policies, like trickle-down economics, over the past four decades, have led to a concentration of wealth and resources at the top, and a steady diminution of wages for the larger populace. This, technology, and globalization have made well-paying, low/middle-skilled jobs scarcer and scarcer. Low-paying jobs make marriage (of which financial stability is an integral part) less and less desirable.
Tax cuts for the moneyed gentry, and trickle-down economics, both under Reagan and Bush, helped the wealthy, but did not help the poor. Empirical evidence bears this out: 75,000 people were lifted out of poverty under Reagan, over 7 million under Clinton, and 20 million were made poor under Bush II.
The Korean and Japanese governments rhetorically exhort their citizens to get married and have more babies, yet don't supply the funding necessary to make such rhetoric meaningful. Companies in both nations balk at supplying daycare services for their employees, and dislike policies encouraging more flexible work hours. There is some paid paternity and maternity leave in Korea, but the work culture looks down upon people availing themselves of this legal, government-subsidized benefit. Korea and Japan are at the bottom of all advanced countries insofar as providing employment opportunities for women, equitable wage distribution amongst the sexes, and even the semblance of a work/life balance.
As with climate change, governments and societies are very slow to make much-needed, but uncomfortable advancements in securing a better future for their citizens, and the world. The costs to switch to all renewable, carbon-neutral energy sources will be expensive. The costs to make our societies places where families are readily created and prone to thrive aren't cheap either. Yet, the costs of doing nothing are much more expensive and damaging in the long run than addressing these emerging challenges now.
Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory and is currently an English professor outside of Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.
