For what I’ve heard japanese spend a lot of time working and their economy isn’t that great. People mostly avoid having children under these conditions for good reasons.
It’s not much better in the rest of the West too. Turns out that building a society where money and career determines your social status and doing unpaid work like taking care of a family and raising children is not valued at all and even very expensive makes people choose to have less or no children.
People of course do want children, but those that do very often will choose one or two children, below replacement rate.
pays for the children of non-working people (there’s a shitload of subsidies going into their pockets),
Do children deserve to starve because their parents aren’t employed?
When you work 8 hours a day, have 1 hour lunch break, waste 2 hours commuting, to earn barely enough of what Adam Smith considers ideal (twice the cost of living), it’s hard to sustain a second person, much less a third that requires near constant monitoring for over 7 years.
From a pure economic perspective, a child is a total money sink for at least 18 years. In many places (mostly urban), it’s simply not viable to have one.
It’s crazy how much doesn’t even get done. No one wants to leave before their boss, so they space out their work and give the appearance of being busy.
For what I’ve heard japanese spend a lot of time working
According to the OECD, the average Japanese worker works just about the same number of hours per year as the average EU worker. It’s actually pretty surprising because the average Japanese worker seems to work less than workers in countries that most people do not think of as being overworked (e.g. Canada, Spain, Italy).
Of course, averages don’t account for distribution, so there absolutely are workers who are chronically overworked. There’s also more part-time workers in Japan, which kind of explains things. On the other hand, you then have to ask how/why it’s financially feasible for so many people to sustain their livelihoods with only part time work.
