The article has curiously little about what koreans actually want, vs what the author thinks is stopping them (despite their burning desire) to have kids. After all, as the article says the birthrate went way down a long time ago thus it's likely that people would know by now what is stopping them from having more kids
I've personally never had any interest in having kids. Whatever it is that makes kids appealing, I've never had it.
But I think I agree with you and I don't understand why I think I agree with you.
Kids do seem like a crazy financial decision today. But if we wanted to, we could for sure have a kid and get by. Plenty of people have plenty of kids on a lot less money.
Is it that we want to maintain our standard of living more than people did in the past? Plenty of poor people have plenty of kids in 1 bedroom apartments. Do we just demand more comfort today? Are we just more picky? Are kids just not worth what they used to be?
I don't think any of these answers are bad. I just think it's interesting.
FWIW, the things you give as examples are rounding-errors in our budget (though only two of our kids have cell phones so far); we don't have cable, pay $22/mo for streaming services, buy used video games, and pay an average of $60/mo for our phone bill. We spend over $300/mo on groceries for comparison.
I find it interesting that this is almost the only post in the entire thread that arrives at the need to do a little introspection.
Apparently, the ability to do that is much rarer these days than I thought.
I think this is a big part of it. As much social pressure as there is to have kids today, it seems reduced from how it was even a single generation ago.
Raising kids is expensive[1], time consuming, and in general a pain-in-the-ass. With reduced social (and even legal) pressure to stay married, and increased expectations of a career for women (without any accompanying reduced expectations for men), it's entirely unsurprising to myself that many opt-out of it.
1: Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/946/
Am I truly out in left field on this?
You could take a boring remote job with more average pay out in Kansas if family were a priority and pay off a house in a year or two.
What's your salary compared to the median household income in your area? How do other people make it work?
Instead of realizing you can do more with less, many of these people are delaying or rejecting the family phase of life. There's a certain echo chamber that makes this seem like an inevitable outcome in the developed world, which is of course clearly proven wrong by the fact that people in third world countries are having families and prospering on fractions of the income that these "first world victims" are struggling with.
It's more of an "expectations problem" than any hard and fast financial barrier. People in developed countries simply can't afford to have the life they were expecting to have. Meanwhile, the other half of the world continues putting one foot in front of the other because they never expected it any other way.
Just giving birth in the US costs about $20K. It takes a day, and can be done at home by professionals that don't even need to be trained as nurses at 99% of the safety level. It can be done by a woman alone, with no help, at 80% of the safety level. If you can wring $20K out of something that generally happens by itself without a hitch, your system is fucked up.
Life is precarious here, although often luxurious. Exchange that luxury for security, and you'll see a lot more people confident enough in the future to have a baby responsibly. It's not a question of having a suburban yard, it's a question of having something that won't be pulled out from under you quickly. The suburban yard is just a buffer, just like close family that live nearby is. But capitalism atomizes the family, and encourages them to move to find work on a dime. Capitalism is a direct competitor to the family: family is where capitalism isn't. The larger families are, the less capitalism exists.
SK is a US vassal state, so I can't imagine that their health care system is much more humane.
Birth rates have declined just as much or more in the socialist utopias in Europe.