President Yoon Suk Yeol declared Wednesday that Korea is in a 'demographic national emergency' due to its declining population, vowing to make all-out efforts to tackle the country's ultralow birthrate.

hahaha

The government has tried various incentives to help entice families to have children over the past decade, but a number of factors, including expensive housing prices, education costs and long working hours, have made young people reluctant to start families and have babies.

Yoon outlined three main areas focused on balancing work and life, improving child care and providing better housing to address the complex issues.

The measures include increasing parental leave allowances and extending leave for fathers, aiming to raise the usage rate of paternity leave from the current 6.8 percent to 50 percent during Yoon’s term.

They also include implementing flexible work hours, extending the age limit for reduced working hours for parents of young children and providing subsidies for employers who hire temporary replacements for employees on parental leave.

Imagine doing capitalism so well you have to revert to socdemery

  • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    29·
    8 days ago

    They’ll try anything except change the balance of income vs. debt vs. working tons of hours so that people can live comfortably and take care of kids.

    • FishLake
      English
      20·
      8 days ago

      Or accepting more than like five immigrants.

  • fubarx@lemmy.mlEnglish
    13·
    8 days ago

    A lot of the countries with birth-rates below replacement rates have known about this since the 1980s. They’re just starting to panic because their tax authorities are showing them the ugly, Excel forecast charts. They could have averted all this back then, but chose to ignore the warning signs.

    Now, the only option is to open up to foreign immigration, or societally encourage Senicide (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senicide) to reduce demand 🤮

    Soon, those options will be gone too. The politicians will be stuck between domestic xenophobia and that young, productive immigrants will have better options.

    • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      7 days ago

      I really, really hate doing “boomer generalization”. No generational war, no war but the class war. There’s plenty of working-class boomers out there who have been fucked over just as bad as the rest of society.

      But I think it’s pretty clear by now that boomers in decision-making roles have generally put zero thought into succession planning. Both on an individual basis, and on a society-wide basis. No training of their own replacements, no thought given to demographic trends that would result from their decisions, just total denial of their own mortality.

  • CTHlurker [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    8·
    8 days ago

    Went to the RoK a month ago and stayed for a week. Received a few comments from people at the university I visited that they could not believe that I was the same age as a bunch of them and had 2 kids. They all said that they would love to have children one day, but it took so much work to get to someplace comfortable that they could not imagine starting over after having a child. Also, Hell Joeseon has a serious problem with male chauvinism, to the point where women complain about it if you are a foreigner and there aren’t korean men nearby.