Are you claiming China and Japan are individualistic, or that people are hiding all the babies somewhere?

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fer... does not show eastern countries as having particularly high birth rates, and the largest eastern countries have the lowest.

The description on that page under Africa, which is the only continent remaining with fertility rate well above replacement rate, does agree with your assessment that it's about the society and its expectations.

(As a side note, I heard that Nigeria is on track to soon becoming the country with the 2nd highest number of English speakers after the US, which stunned me given that India is the most populous country in the world and—I thought—has a fairly high percentage of English speakers.)

> Are you claiming China and Japan are individualistic, or that people are hiding all the babies somewhere

No? A -> B doesn’t mean that B -> A. In the case of East Asia, it’s nearly a century of deliberate anti-natal government policy. China’s one-child policy is the most brutal, but pretty much all East Asian countries had softer forms of encouraging people not to have kids.

It's not like this at all. People aren't having kids in all developed nations, east or west, and also in developing nations as they become more developed, the birthrate falls dramatically. It's not "anti-natal government policy", it's various other factors: cost of living, expectations of how much resources/attention will be devoted to each kid, women's rights, etc.

China's one-child policy is long since over, but their birthrate is very low too. Government policy isn't the problem (if it's even a "problem"). People just don't want to have big families, and now that they have a choice, they don't.

The one child policy was only ended in 2016. Several generations grew up under it, changing the culture significantly. That’s been true in all Asian countries.

> People just don't want to have big families, and now that they have a choice, they don't.

But “choice” is individualism! There are American subcultures that are more educated and affluent than average, like Muslims and Mormons, that have much higher fertility rates than average. And that’s because those cultures exert strong social pressures to conform to expectations about family life instead of leaving it to choice.

It’s not just East Asia. India is under replacement rate at this point and it’s been a constant drastic decline. It’s just a function of kids being expensive to raise with the standards a developed economy mindset imposes. Children become less of a throwaway/what will be will be proposition.

Except such cultures inevitably morph back into individualistic ones, typically once educational attainments and female emancipation kick in.

It's not about culture, it's about economic conditions.

I think this remains to be seen. It's possible that certain less individualistic cultures exposed to individualistic modernity will adapt in a robust way.

Jewish culture, Italian culture, Greek culture, Spanish culture - all famed for big families, worshipping fertility, etc etc. They all fell to the demands of advanced-capitalism demands. A couple of generations and that becomes true of any culture: once women are free to decide their own destiny, and educated enough to know there is a world of life options, they want to dedicate less of their time to child-rearing.

It’s about culture, not economic conditions. A number of American sub-cultures that are more educated and wealthy than average (Mormons, Muslims) also have above-replacement fertility rates.

Maybe we ask Mormon and Muslim women what they think of their education, wealth and expected role in those above-replacement fertility rates?

Don’t forget that those societies also impose heavy obligations on men. Are secular women, many of who are stuck both working and raising kids by themselves without men supporting them, happier on average? I haven’t seen any data to suggest that’s true. Indeed, Mormons are happier overall than other groups: https://news.gallup.com/poll/152732/religious-higher-wellbei.... Maybe there’s a big gender gap there but I’m not aware of any data to support that notion.

It is culture but it's not the pro-individualism enlightenment parts of Western culture that made us great. There's so much anti-natalistic culture to fix (and a little bit of economics)

- make housing cheaper

- fix education so people can start their careers and adulthood earlier

- pass safe harbor laws so that parents and feel safe leaving their kids at home, or letting them take the bus

- also economic incentives help, beef up people's social security if they have kids

> fix education so people can start their careers and adulthood earlier

People can only learn so quickly; you're not going to give people a college-level education by age 15. Modern society requires more education to be productive than past societies, but this is at odds with human biology.

> pass safe harbor laws so that parents and feel safe leaving their kids at home, or letting them take the bus

This is only a problem in the US, but birthrates are low in all developed nations.

Some economic incentives might help a bit, but they're not going to have a dramatic effect: people simply don't want to have big families any more. Kids are a lot of work (and expensive, even with those incentives), so people like to have 1 or 2 and concentrate all their attention on those. They don't want 6 kids.

Their reach of wealthy economic conditions is too recent. Give it a couple more generations and you'll see.