35% of Korean Adults May Never Marry. Three Decades Ago, It Was 5%. Three decades of data show this isn't delay, and economic shocks is making men undateable, not just unmarriageable
A tight job market does nothing to solve the fact that childless people have more disposable income then child bearing people. A tight job market increases the earnings of the childless as much or more than those with children, and those earnings are used by the childless to bid up positional goods versus the child bearing.
People will have kids when they sense that doing so won’t leave them “behind” relative to those that don’t. Thus the benefits must accrue to the childless bearing and not society at large.
Child bearers can never work as much as the childless, so their work has to be more efficient, which can be accomplished by taxing the labor of the childless but not the labor of child bearers.
Great look at a natural experiment that lets us tease out something important.
QQ - what's driving the divergence between Korean M and F marriage rates? Korean women-but-not-men are still getting internationally married? Serial monogamy marriage, where one man marries two different women over a time period?
"Korea has invested heavily in childcare subsidies, parental leave, and other policies"
Have they? Do they spend 10% of GDP on them?
I agree that boosting the take home pay of married men is the trick to increasing fertility, but I don't see anyone coughing up the money for it.
What me and you considered heavily? No
What the median substack reader thinks? Yes
It's not just about take home pay, it's maintaining an incredibly *tight* job market for years until we fully close the desired fertility gap
A tight job market does nothing to solve the fact that childless people have more disposable income then child bearing people. A tight job market increases the earnings of the childless as much or more than those with children, and those earnings are used by the childless to bid up positional goods versus the child bearing.
People will have kids when they sense that doing so won’t leave them “behind” relative to those that don’t. Thus the benefits must accrue to the childless bearing and not society at large.
Child bearers can never work as much as the childless, so their work has to be more efficient, which can be accomplished by taxing the labor of the childless but not the labor of child bearers.
Great look at a natural experiment that lets us tease out something important.
QQ - what's driving the divergence between Korean M and F marriage rates? Korean women-but-not-men are still getting internationally married? Serial monogamy marriage, where one man marries two different women over a time period?
Pretty much serial monogamy, limited supply of marriageable men at the end of the day