South Korean City Doing “Matchmaking” Events to Try to Boost World’s Worst Birth Rates

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the birthrate problem is not a result of people not being able to meet each other.

Seoul is extremely urbanized. People meet people from the opposite sex every day. They could be having sex with those people and producing children.

The reason that is not happening is feminism. Women do not want to have kids. They want to have adventures.

If you want to increase the birthrate, the only option is to reduce women’s rights.

Maybe tax incentives can help. But the big thing is making it unaffordable for women to remain single.

Reuters:

Against the backdrop of Christmas songs, 100 South Korean men and women gathered at a hotel near Seoul dressed in their best with name tags hanging on their clothes, hoping to find love.

The government hopes they make babies.

They were participants at a mass blind-dating event hosted by Seongnam city, an attempt by the local government to reverse a falling birth rate in a country where the popularity of marriage and enthusiasm towards parenthood have nosedived.

Yeah.

The participants, in their 20s and 30s, sat quietly next to one another until a relationship coach kick started the event with a rock-paper-scissor game, quickly filling the room with chatter and laughter.

The city appeared determined to arrange a match, preparing red wine, chocolates, games, free make-up services, and even background checks for the participating singles.

Lee Yu-mi, 36, who works for the city government, said she had to apply three times to finally get a spot at the event.

Lee Yu-mi, 36

“I had no idea it would be this competitive,” she said.

After five rounds of events this year, 198 people among 460 left the event as “couples,” agreeing to exchange contacts with their pairs, the city said.

The South Korean capital Seoul had considered a similar event but put the plan on hold after facing criticism that it would be a waste of taxpayers’ money that failed to tackle the reasons behind people opting not to marry and have babies – most notably the sky-high costs of housing and education.

South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.78 last year in yet another grim milestone for the country with the world’s lowest number of expected children for each woman.

The number is far below 1.66 in the United States and 1.3 in Japan in 2021. The average rate among countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development stood at 1.58 the same year.

It’s sad.

But the cost of living stuff is really a red herring.

The government should do something about cost of living. That wouldn’t hurt.

But who is thinking about that? It’s not men. Men want to get married and have kids, and their thinking is “we’ll figure out the details later.”

Women demand huge amounts of money before they commit.

The problem is women.