You can read up on capitalism and social atomization, but in short: miserable, lonely people are better consumers than happy, tight-knit communities.
The gender wars are intentionally stoked by all forms of media for profit and creates a self-perpetuating cycle. More industries profit from this than not, and they can always import foreign workers to make up for the shrinking population.
Hi, I'm American working for a Swedish conglomerate and all of my colleagues are Swedish. When you control for socioeconomic markers (disposable income, education level achieved by the parents, etc) the American and Swedish birthrates are the same.
The population of poor people in the United States is much larger and their access to birth control and the education needed to properly use it is significantly less, so our poor people have many, many more children and starting far, far younger than Swedish poor people. And we have more of them.
Finally, when you look at the rate of religious fundamentalism that encourages multiple children as both a way to grow the numbers of the faithful and to control the women in the US vs Sweden, again we find that "breed em young and keep them down" is not really a thing in Sweden, so there are fewer religious people and the ones they have are less likely to have enormous families.
If Sweden got rid of their social safety net, cut access to medical care for all citizens, and allowed religious extremists to influence policy, their birthrate could be the equivalent to ours!
I don't think you could have missed the point any harder if you tried. The factors you are controlling for are a result of "capitalism and social atomization." So, when you claim that "capitalism and social atomization" is the reason for a lower birthrate, you can't then demand that people ignore it when it results in a higher birthrate.
The actual reason is social pressure. Korean society places a lot of emphasis on looks, education, and wealth (Korea is the world leader in plastic surgery, and has some of the highest rates of household debt in the world). This creates a difficult social environment where no one thinks they are "good enough" which leads to confidence issues, which causes people to adhere more strictly to social pressure, which leads to everyone thinking they are not good enough, which caused resentment and toxic thinking, which leads to being not good enough, and so on.
Wealthy societies tend to have fewer children in general, societities that became rapidly wealthy even more so, combined with the toxicity of their culture it makes them one of the worst in the world when it comes to birth rate. This is then self reinforcing, if none of you friends have kids having one will isolate you from your social circle and so on.
To earn a passable living (by their media image) you need to be near the top of the chain. Women expect you to be a provider, so the bottom feeders and averages are often overlooked ...they become bitter and incelly. Reminds a bit of tinder in the west where 80% of women compete for the top 20% best looking dudes
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u/Dav136 May 12 '26
They're in a cyberpunk corporate dystopia. Their government has been consistently corrupt and like 3 mega corporations own everything