Legalize polygyny for rich men who can financially support multiple wives.
Japan's population decline appears to be caused not by women giving birth to fewer children, but by an increase in the number of childless women. It appears that 1 in 3 women remain childless into their forties, compared to 1 in 20 in prior decades.
Women remain childless for several reasons, but my guess is they can't find a man who can support them financially and/or who they find themselves attracted to.
The traditional household arrangement is the man is at the office 24/7, the wife gets his paychecks and uses them to raise the children and occasionally go on vacations, and the man gets an allowance (but doesn't go on the vacations because he has to be at the office). Not much room for a harem there.
There are many rich people in Japan who can afford to have multiple wives and support all of them financially. Some of them might do that in secret with a mistress but in the current social and political environment they probably wouldn't have children with their mistresses.
It's traditionally pretty normal for a married couple to drift apart over the years. People marry for appearances, social status, and to raise a family. They then seek gratification elsewhere.
The men who engage in this aren't looking to knock up more women. They already have a mother to their children. They want gratifying sex and emotional connection.
I've seen some posts by Japanese women suggesting they would be open to being the second wives of wealthy men but I'm not sure if they are the kind of women that rich men would be interested in.
It hasn't been two minutes and I already have a downvote.
I understand many people do not "like" this kind of solution because it conflicts with modern people's sensibilities.
But consider what the future would look like if you don't increase the birth rate:
Already one third of the population is over 65. Japan has about 120 million people. When you normally hear this number you imagine a country full with lots of human resources, but the fact that a large portion of these people are retirees. This is already causing a alrge portion of young men to checkout of society because they see no economic prospect for themselves.
Can you imagine what the situation will be like when that portion reaches 50% percent? Perhaps in only a few decades. The trend will accelerate: even more people will checkout of the ecnonomy, making things worse for everyone.
I think you're being downvoted because people consider your original comment poorly constructed and poorly thought out.
That men can participate in polygamy does nothing to encourage birthrates; what is the incentive of the wives to want children? What is the incentive for the man here to want children?
Unless it's implied in your idea that the purpose of marriage is to produce children, polygamy solves nothing here. If that is the presumption that the arrangement requires children, how does this counteract the very common reasons for not having children?
- It's extremely time consuming and life changing; you have to commit substantial time or resources (or both) to ensuring the child is cared for
- A person or persons simply don't want children
- There isn't a strong reason to have children outside of one's own desire to do so (there isn't incentive to maintain a lineage of successors, build out an army of loyal subjects, and so on for the grand majority of people anymore)
- Even within religions, the impetus for having children just isn't emphasized in many sects like it was in the past
- Social mobility, while nowhere near perfect, is far more achievable via other arrangements or even to a degree with personal effort; it won't be the peasant to noble move that existed previously, but it's more possible than it has been in the past (though social mobility is still ridiculously difficult and fraught with discrimination and exploitation, so understand I am not at all saying that it's in a good spot)
Your idea doesn't really address any of the actual reasons a lot of people hold off from having children, it just presents a suggestion to "legalize polygamy for rich men", implying that this somehow addresses the many reasons that people aren't having children.
Your follow-up comment here I think also misses a lot of points as to why people check out and undermines the idea that society can incentivize its way out of these problems. If the problem is a bleak economic future for people, trying to utilize childbirth as a pyramid scheme to overcome this economic uncertainty isn't really a great idea, as that means you need to somehow convince the children of the already checked-out persons that "no, really, it's a great system. Ignore why your parents are so miserable, it will be different for you for reasons."
I don't think you can just economically incentivize your way out of a declining population, not in any meaningful way aside from temporary trends which will fade. If the root cause of the issue is poor economic conditions and unstable comfortable living conditions, you need to first understand why those are happening in the first place. If it turns out that it's because only a select group have the economic stability to support a life that includes children and this select group is not a huge portion of the population, aside from mandating child birth, you haven't actually given incentive to make more children, you just have given special status to the already elite.
> But consider what the future would look like if you don't increase the birth rate:
I have, and I imagine we probably see more adoption of universal income and automation, and far more acceptance of such a system and interest in keeping such a system where you don't need to struggle for basic needs in place by investing time and effort into the system. There's a lot of this which of course is fantastical thoughts right now, but we're already seeing this in many nations, and the quality of life in these places is pretty good while birthrates are just "so-so".
I'd argue that legalizing polygyny would encourage more men to participate in the economy more eagerly: if they succeed they can have multiple wives and have multiple children with each. This is not a small prize.
Contrast to the current situation: if you work your ass off, the best you get is a wife who will treat you with resentment and disrespect in a couple years, expect you to do chores at home and help change children's diapers, etc. If you divorce she can take half your wealth, and has the power to prevent you from seeing your children (until they turn 18 and decide to go look for you themselves, if you manage to stay alive til then).
A large portion of young men around the world (not just in Japan) are opting out of society because they don't see a point. "The juice is not worth the squeeze".
> Your idea doesn't really address any of the actual reasons a lot of people hold off from having children, it just presents a suggestion to "legalize polygamy for rich men", implying that this somehow addresses the many reasons that people aren't having children.
People are not holding off from having children. What's happening is there are more people who are failing to pair bond in order to have children. More men check out of society because they don't find the offer interesting, and as a result more women are unable to find a suitable mate.
Legalizing and normalizing polygyny solves the probem for a lot of women: just because someone is "taken" doesn't mean he's out of reach for her anymore.
Controversial truth: women prefer sharing a high value man than having the full attention of a low vaue man. Of course, they would prefer having the full attention of a high value man, but failing that, they'd rather share him than downgrade to a lesser man.
> If you divorce she can take half your wealth, and has the power to prevent you from seeing your children (until they turn 18 and decide to go look for you themselves, if you manage to stay alive til then).
This isn't mentioned enough in relation to the marriage/birth-rate subject. Men in developed countries (and it is typically developed countries with very pro-woman divorce laws/courts) are completely disincentivized to start families.
Edit to make it a more substantive point: me and my spouse are currently 35 and 36 years old and after much deliberation together (as well as observations of friends who did have children) we don't think our lives would be substantially improved by having children.
The vast majority of women who end up single and childless into their forties don't do it by choice. At least not directly. They _want_ to find a partner and have children; they just didn't succeed at making the right decisions in their life to end up in that desired destination.
Arranged marriages, known as "omiai", are still a thing in Japan, especially if someone is desperate for a marriage. If a man or woman doesn't marry, that is in the vast majority of cases by choice.
Future generations will replace you and your wife with those who think quite differently. If you feel that your values or culture are worth preserving, you have kids.
Observing someone else’s family and deciding that you don’t enjoy their kids is the saddest way to decide not to have a family, and indicates a deep lack of parental empathy. Your kids are nothing like other kids, for all values of “your”.
There are many ways to impart ones values onto society, children being only one of them. It's a very myopic view to think that your children will copy your values and/or culture without developing a mind of their own.
In any case, observing other couples was only one of many reasons we decided on this. We made the decision as well-informed adults and whether you think it "sad" or not is not all that important to us.
No, but if I ask my friends who have been to the restaurant about how it was, then I can glean enough information from their responses to gauge whether I want to go there as well. Even if they feel compelled by social mores to say it was all great, you can observe how they act in addition to the things they say. We decided that while no doubt others love their children very much, it wasn't a lifestyle we were interested in.
Why are parents so predisposed with trying to convince other people to have children as well, especially those who have made a decision not to, either way?
How are those analogous? People can live perfectly fine without a child but can't without a job (unless they live at home with their parents which coincidentally a lot of hikikomori do).
The ability to attract and successfully integrate hundreds of thousands of immigrants per year to support an oversized elderly population is not a luxury that most countries that can afford.
For most communities, normalizing childless will only come back to bite people in some form or another.
Not that I'm against having kids, but this argument is silly. If you feel that your values and culture are worth preserving, it's much more effective to write a book.
> Future generations will replace you and your wife with those who think quite differently.
If that is so, how can people like this exist today, after hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution? Could it be that biological evolution alone does not predetermine one's desire to procreate?
Of course it holds. Desire for sex was what was under evolutionary pressure which was a direct proxy for procreation. Because of contraception this link was severed. Only recently procreation is under evolutionary pressure.
So what? I'm not going to live my life for future generations, we only have a limited amount of time in this universe and personally, I don't want to waste it having and raising children for the next couple of decades. I know what one would rebut with, that it's "your" kids and that there's a lot of fun in raising children, and that may be true, but again it is not something that appeals to me and many other people these days.
That fine as long as you realize somebody else's children will have to take care of you when you wont be able to. And if enough people would think the same way as you do, than there certainly wouldn't be enough children to take care of the elderly generations.
Humean ethics don't seem to work particularly well in day-to-day society. If I have enough retirement savings, I will hire said children to take care of me either way, as there is no guarantee my own children would take care of me anyway.
I would say that deciding not to have a family by observing others' is a lot better than deciding not to have a family after direct experience with it.
People should be allowed to self-select them selves out of reproduction. On the long term this is a eugenic pattern: it means the next generation will be more likely to have more people who value reproduction.
There is no guarantee your children will visit or take care of you in old age, and if you're having children due to the above reason, that is a very poor reason indeed to have children, as it seems to be more of an argument for the parent's well being, rather than the child's. If you don't want to be alone, cultivate lifelong friends.
These are all novel cultural values not common in any traditional society with normal birth rates. In fact, this attitude is one reason why birth rates are so low.
It is totally normal to expect children to care for you in your old age. The guarantee is that other people can and should ostracize people for not caring for their parents. When an acquaintance tells me they don't visit/call/care for their parents with pride, I make a mental note to not be friends with that person. If you can't keep the most basic relationships straight... that's not a great sign, realistically.
That is certainly...one opinion. You don't know what those people have been through, they could have had abusive parents for example and don't talk to them anymore. If the parents don't take care of the child well when raising them, I consider it more than fair to not take care of them in old age (or even simply once the child leaves the nest, so to speak). Taking care of one's parents is not an immutable law of nature (indeed, many if not most organisms simply breed and leave their children), nor should it be. That you implicitly "make a mental note to not be friends with that person" is quite telling indeed.
As a parent myself I can tell you that they are very likely referring to having two to three children close together rather than a single child ... ie. having both a six year old (eldest) and a child in diapers | stroller (youngest) at the same time.
After that period things are great!
. . . until you've faced with a household full of teenagers rebelling against anything and everything in overly dramatic ways.
> we don’t think our lives would be substantially improved by having children.
By that logic you should evade your taxes and park in handicapped spots. Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.
And that’s not a moralistic point but a basic economic one. Any sustainable society needs people to have and raise 2.1 children on average. That’s self-evidently true in subsistence agricultural societies. But our society is still closer to those than to some hypothetical post-scarcity one where robots do all the work and replacement humans are created in artificial wombs. We can afford some people to be childless, but it can’t become a widespread thing.
You can paper over that temporarily with immigration, but you’re really just outsourcing a key social function to immigrants. Those immigrants then have to bear the burden of raising kids a toxically individualistic society that’s hostile to children.
>By that logic you should evade your taxes and park in handicapped spots. Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.
Doesn't that then beg the question; if a society can't convince it's enough of it's members of the value of that obligation, does that society/culture really deserve to continue to exist as is?
The Christian sect known as "Shakers" illustrate what you describe: They had a rule of celibacy and as a result have essentially died out; their Wikipedia entry says that as of 2021 their total membership was three people.
Unless those 3 people (and those in recent decades who have now died) were hypocrites and broke the rules, then the only way the sect has survived this long is immigration (we'd call it "converts" in this context, since they're not a country). However, while it's kept them alive since the 1800s, 3 people is pathetically small.
> Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.
I get what you mean, but fuck that idea into the flaming sun.
All we need now is the state and society to force us to have children, on a planet with 8 billion souls.
Fuck that idea. Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation". When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?
It’s not an “idea.” It’s like saying “paying taxes is a social obligation” or “having a job if you’re able bodied is a social obligation.” At bottom those assertions rest on factual observations about society and the economy. If everyone evaded taxes civilization as we know it would quickly collapse. If able bodied people dropped out of the work force en masse, the economy would collapse. If we found out that the last child had been born in America, your retirement funds would quickly tank. These are such fundamental facts that societies have added a moral or religious gloss to them, but the underlying facts don’t go away even if you strip away that gloss.
If you won’t do those things, someone else will have to pick up your slack. Unless your retirement plan consists of hoarding canned food and ammo, or perhaps drifting out to sea when you can no longer work, you’re going to be depending on the children of the people who did the work of raising kids. And until we have robots that can wipe old people’s asses, that’s going to be an inescapable fact of society.
> Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation".
Now that’s an “idea.”
> When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?
You’ve got it backward. Until five minutes ago, everyone agreed that everyone has a social obligation to carry out the various work necessary for society to function. “Do whatever you want with your life” is a blip in human cultural history. It’s a blip even in the history of western civilization. And to date every society to adopt that notion has essentially doomed itself to obsolescence.
> Unless your retirement plan consists of hoarding canned food and ammo, or perhaps drifting out to sea when you can no longer work, you’re going to be depending on the children of the people who did the work of raising kids. And until we have robots that can wipe old people’s asses, that’s going to be an inescapable fact of society.
All of these "outlandish" alternatives are seriously entertained by at least some members of the class of people who frequent HN.
caused by... an increase in the number of childless women.
Has there not also been an increase in the number of childless men? Or are men having as many children as they did decades ago, and it's only the women who are having fewer?
I want to respond to this as I think you just have a fundamental misunderstanding on how wealth, relationships, and childbirth can be related.
A child is not made by the equation (One Female Parent + One Male Parent) + Marriage = Child.
This is not the actual requirement. It just requires sperm + ovum + body to carry the organism to birth. I interpret your comments here as attempting to take a purely logical/fact based approach, but you tie yourself to an unnecessary old fashioned notion of one man and one woman in a contractual union.
A woman and two men can absolutely be parents by inseminating the woman's eggs with their sperm and having someone else carry it, or artificial/manual insemination involving other women. I don't think you take your idea of efficiency here anywhere near the much more natural and sensible conclusion of "for-hire birthers", which already happens. A person, regardless of how they identify, should be allowed to do this; for simplicity sake though, I don't see why you don't mention this in your model -- a rich woman, paying for successors, and having multiple male partners who meets her scrutiny/desires raising the children and passing on genes/knowledge/personality traits.
You can suggest that your ideas imply this possibility, but frankly speaking I don't accept this suggestion; if you meant it, you would just say as such and/or use neutral terms for identifying the progenitors in your examples.
If it's legal + acceptable for all men, then it undermines the advantage of the elite in this regard. Plus I don't think "stigma" matters to them at all.
Japan's population decline appears to be caused not by women giving birth to fewer children, but by an increase in the number of childless women. It appears that 1 in 3 women remain childless into their forties, compared to 1 in 20 in prior decades.
Women remain childless for several reasons, but my guess is they can't find a man who can support them financially and/or who they find themselves attracted to.