“Notably, Chang’s report claims that biological females develop earlier than males do, so requiring girls to enter school at younger ages will create classes in which the two sexes are of more equal maturity as they age. This, the author posits, makes it more likely that those classmates will be attracted to each other, and marry and have children further down the line.”
(…)
“The report does not include evidence of any correlation between female students’ early enrollment and the success rate of their romantic relationships with men. The author also does not detail specific mechanisms by which his proposed policy would increase romantic attraction or birthrates.”
Population shrinking is probably a good thing, but population shrinking too quickly might be all sorts of bad.
It’s hard to see where we really are with so many variables, so many future decisions, but I believe we’ve passed the point of “good shrinking” and are well into “all sorts of instability and disruption”. If replacement rate is 2.1 kids/woman, and South Korea is already like 1.1, that’s a huge difference. As current generations pass, each succeeding one will be half its size. That’s a problem.
That can be solved by welcoming immigrants because it won’t be solved by trying to force people to have kids. When social programs are introduced to help people raise a family you see a little bump in the numbers and then it goes back down again. It’s as if people realize that having a family isn’t just a financial decision, crazy right?