“South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on February 13 ordered his administration to develop tax incentives and subsidies for companies that encourage their employees to have children.”
This seems fishy to me.
Why not develop tax incentives and subsidies for the parents directly, instead of giving companies another loophole?
South Korea is run by a handful of enormous family owned companies. This is probably related to the fertility rate.
Small FYI: Those are named “Chaebol” in South Korea, if anyone want’s to look further into this.
South Korea is run by a handful of enormous family owned companies
As an American I can not relate to this at all since it so so fucking foreign
What?
And abandon their system of government, corporate feudalism?
My sister lived in S Korea a few years ago, and keeps up on some stuff. She mentioned the feminist 4B movement. Quoting an article:
4B is shorthand for four Korean words that all start with bi-, or “no”: The first no, bihon, is the refusal of heterosexual marriage. Bichulsan is the refusal of childbirth, biyeonae is saying no to dating, and bisekseu is the rejection of heterosexual sexual relationships. It is both an ideological stance and a lifestyle, and many women I spoke to extend their boycott to nearly all the men in their lives, including distancing themselves from male friends.
So some of this might be the movement, which is against the patriarchal society Asian countries are famous for (and part of why so many weeb incels want Asian “submissive” wives). Has my respect too. Iirc some men have been violently attacking women over it, bur I can’t find a link in the limited time I have atm.
Sooo… political lesbianism.
TIL I’m ALL 4B’s.
$75,000 for ONE child seems almost reasonable. $22,400 is a fucking joke.
Even 75k seems small for one child. I would expect an amount enough to support a kid until they are 18.
Oh, I know. “Almost seems” is doing some heavy lifting in that statement.
You’re going to spend minimum $350,000 on that child.
But because my son got my German citizenship he get’s nothing, even though both his parents pay huge amount of taxes. We even need to pay for the Kindergarten out of pocket, which just so became quite more expensive too.
But to be honest, I don’t want him to grow up here in Korea with all the pressure and the bleak outlook into the future where one worker will need to pay for one retired person too, especially for all the retieries who didn’t have children for whatever reason.
all the retieries who didn’t have children for whatever reason
Could be that the grind at work doesn’t leave any space for having a familiy.
Sure, I said for whatever reason, valid reasons or invalid. That doesn’t change that it will get worse for the next generation.
Your last sentence just put a different spin on the “it takes a village” quote that I constantly hear from parents.
It takes a village to raise a child. But it also takes a village to care for the elderly.
What happens when that village is no longer cooperating?
That’s why the Silent Generation created industrialized elder care. Nothing like a hospital setting to help with the old dementia.
If I were offered $75k to have 1 kid, I’d still have to turn it down.
It’s not enough, the math doesn’t make sense. 18 years of foods, diapers, creches, outings, gifts, hobbies, clothes, housing and education? Just to produce a another slave for profit? Nope. Get kittens or puppies if you can afford them. If not, look at pics.
Amazing to see marxist theory in action like that. It’s so on the nose too, if that was in a novel it would look rather shoehorned in.
I was like “(companies) paying parents to have children” belongs to a caricature of capitalism, but here we are. (My bad, it’s companies paying parents to have children, and not some bigger entity, like the government. I already edited the previous sentence for clarity.)
If you don’t mind me asking though, what “marxist theory in action” do you see in this article?
In this case that the cost of replacement of labor power factors in to the wage a company has to pay in order to maintain production.
The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour. If a machine costs him, for example, 1,000 shillings, and this machine is used up in 10 years, he adds 100 shillings annually to the price of the commodities, in order to be able after 10 years to replace the worn-out machine with a new one. In the same manner, the cost of production of simple labour-power must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear of the machine.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Wage_labour_and_capital
edit: replaced quote with an imo more fitting quote from the same book.
One of the most frustrating things about academic Marxism is that it hypothesizes that “capitalists” (whom they bung together with remarkable aplomb) do things like figure in the reproduction cost of labor. They don’t. They’re focused on the next quarter and maybe the next year. Maybe even the next five years. But no one ranging from Elon Musk to (not sure who his opposite would be so I’m kinda taking a stab here) Warren Buffett is thinking in terms of generational replacement. First, they’re not going to live that long. Neither are their shareholders. Plus capital is mobile - it’ll just go someplace else.
This is a headline precisely because it’s a man bites dog story. If your company gives you paid parental leave it’s either because it’s legally required or for retention. It’s not in the hope that the little toy will become a software engineer at the company in 25 years.
One of the most frustrating things about academic Marxism is that it hypothesizes that “capitalists” do things like figure in the reproduction cost of labor.
It doesn’t? It never postulates that capitalists actively control the economy or do more than the bare minimum, on the contrary that they are bound to the laws of the market is one of the main points of marxism. That the cost of replacement factors into the cost of labor power is like the cost of replacement factoring in for any other commodity on the market. I highly suggest you read the booklet I linked, it’s very short.
I’m actually pretty well read on the subject, both from the 18th to 19th century literature and from modern Marxist and other socialist economists. I’m also a biologist who has a bit of a specialization in pro-social models of behavior from a mathematical perspective and who derives data from real world observations and experiments.
The idea that capital controls the labor market is fairly central to the Marxist approach to capitalism. Both Marx and Adam Smith attributed dynamics to conscious actions that today we, as sophisticated systems theorists, would come up with better models to explain. They had an attitude towards human action that in some ways were the forerunner to modern sciences of collective behavior, but they’re still ridiculously primitive compared to modern theory.
Again, I am not the only academic to make this point. You find it is ubiquitous in modern Marxist literature. There are still some traditionalists, of course. I’m sure you know a particular white bearded professor who has what I honestly believe is the best introduction/course on Capital ever created. I honestly really like his work.
But what I don’t like is when communists or socialists refer to themselves as “Marxists.” I particularly don’t like it when they shoot down an idea using something that was written by someone in the 19th century, as if we haven’t had multiple revolutions in understanding economics and the science of complex systems since then.
What I’m saying is that you can read Marxist forums on line, and you can read Marxist academics publishing papers in Marxist journals, who argue that so-and-so is wrong because Marx(or whomever) said X. Nobody, and I mean nobody, quotes Darwin to refute a point in biology. Darwin was a genius, but he was a product of his time and got some very basic and very important stuff completely wrong. Ask a biologist about it and they’ll tell you it’s completely wrong and we figured it out a hundred years ago. They won’t canonize Darwin, even if they really really want a Darwin bobblehead for their desk.
Again, and I cannot make this more plain and I am not the only academic to say this: it’s called evolutionary biology, not Darwinism. I have friends and colleagues at places like the econ department at the New School, and they refer to what they do as “economics.” That’s where I’d prefer things to go.
Thanks for the explanation.
It reminds me of the concept of depreciation in accounting, in which you’re accounting for the “loss of value” of a piece of machinery as time goes on. I guess it fits how the capitalists view people (labor) as yet another kind of machine. I dunno how it fits with what you’re trying to explain here, but it somehow clicks for me. So that the factory owner can keep buying machinery, they must allocate some of their funds not just for the upkeep of the equipment, but also save up for the cost of buying a new one.
Admittedly, I’m not very well-versed with neither accounting nor the theories put on display here, but we learn something new every day, right?
(PS: I’m still working through the pamphlet you’ve linked. I might have gotten a lot of things wrong, and in that case, I apologize.)
Stupid question, but why not just target more immigration? It’s not like there aren’t enough people in the world. Having babies first taxes the economy, then eventually helps it. Letting immigrants in now helps now. And they’ll probably have babies.
Korea is absolutely not prepared for any kind of immigration. And they’ve been isolated for so long they really don’t know hor to deal with people who aren’t from their culture.
I’ve not been but the impression I get is that systems just have trouble handling foreigners who aren’t there for business purposes.
If by “have trouble” you mean “are explicitly designed to exclude”
I think immigration is a short term fix Comes with a lot issues like language/culture barrier, they can’t join stuff like the army.
They might not even have babies, like the rest. Also there is a higher chance of leaving the country.
Bring Koreans to Mexico and South America!
They love anything Asian and we are totally unaware of anything related to historical disputes of all kinds. So we would probably grow really cool hybrids…Mexikoreans or Korexicans. I didn’t know, but most Koreans I know are tall people. I always assumed all Asian people were short, but that is certainly not the case. So tall people in Mexico do get an advantage.
I’d be willing to migrate as a skilled worker to some first world country desperate for tax payers and people who aren’t too socially repressed to have a family.
But… naaah, I’m a dirty foreigner. What do I know? I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
Would you want to work in a country that is known to have such a shitty work life balance that people aren’t having children because of it?
I wasn’t even going to touch that. But yeah… Japan is kind of the same thing, I think China is going to start trying to get migrants desperately in the next couple of decades because of the one child policy working too well. But if they are kind of assholes about it, being racist and making life very hard to settle, what’s the point then?
Idk about Korea but here it’s mostly because you can’t afford to. I could barely support myself and someone else (most of that cost would be rent which wouldnt even change, either) before bringing children (whole bunch of new costs) into the mix.
I work a skilled job with half a decade of experience, and am in the correct salary range for the area, as well.
Yeah. I’m being sarcastic but I know it’s not that simple.
Finally somebody listened to me. JFC you have to pay people to have and raise kids, it’s stupidly expensive.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A South Korean firm is offering employees up to $75,000 to have children and help lift the country’s ailing birth rate.
The announcement comes after Booyoung Group, a construction firm based in Seoul, earlier this month declared it would give a $75,000 per-child bonus to employees who have babies, CNN reported.
The company’s employees have collectively had at least 70 children since 2021, so the firm is on the hook to disburse $5.25 million in cash to its workers, per CNN.
Like in China and Japan, South Korea’s aging and increasingly imbalanced population means there could be a surge in retired older people who require medical care while the country’s supply of younger workers dwindles.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on February 13 ordered his administration to develop tax incentives and subsidies for companies that encourage their employees to have children.
In Seoul, municipal authorities are giving $750 every month to parents who have children until their babies turn one year old.
The original article contains 305 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Vouchers for babies lol
How are the social laws in Korea for this? Like parental leave, healthcare, government support for kindergarten and schools, housing?
