[정책에세이] Marriage is a loss, no gain… .

It is only recently that the perspective of research on the issue of low fertility has shifted from ‘society’ to ‘individual’. Research from a social perspective mainly focuses on structural problems such as employment difficulties, housing difficulties, and childcare facility shortages caused by the concentration in the metropolitan area. On the other hand, research from the individual perspective focuses on factors that hinder marriage and childbirth, especially the opportunity cost of marriage and childbirth. The background of the low birth rate is both social and individual. Therefore, it is positive that research focusing on individuals is increasing. However, there is a lack of prescriptive research on how to solve the problem in terms of opportunity cost.

Structural issues aside, if marriage and childbirth support policies are made in terms of opportunity costs, the means should be in the direction of minimizing the losses incurred by marriage and childbirth or increasing the utility of marriage and childbirth enough to offset the opportunity cost.

First, how can we minimize the opportunity cost?

The ‘actual opportunity cost’ of marriage and childbirth includes employment disadvantage and career interruption due to childbirth and childrearing, childrearing and housework alone due to the fixation of orthodox gender roles, personal life constraints due to family-centered life, and burden of childrearing and education expenses. there will be However, this real opportunity cost is declining. With the expansion and establishment of a system to support work-family balance, gender discrimination in employment on the grounds of childbirth and childrearing has decreased, while men’s participation in childrearing and housework is increasing. Support for childcare and education expenses has expanded rapidly over the past decade. Still, the birth rate is declining every year. After all, lowering the real opportunity cost isn’t everything.

Another level of opportunity cost is ‘cognitive opportunity cost’. Cognitive opportunity costs are getting higher and higher. In some extreme online communities, men and women are divided and fight over ‘marriage is a loss to us’. For them, marriage is a way to meet ‘Hannam (a slang term for Korean men), suffer from single parenting and housework, the way to be sold as a slave to parents-in-law, and a ‘money-making machine’ for the spouse who came to wash the past. is the way to be Community members share a belief system and become more strongly convinced of that belief over time.

Outside the community, all kinds of media promote prejudice and hatred. If you look at the marriage and parenting entertainment programs that are pouring out, marriage and childbirth are nothing to do. Marriage is unhappiness, parenting is hell. A program in which parents who have given birth during adolescence are suffering from ‘demands for abolition’ while increasing their stimuli.

It is practically impossible to lower the cognitive opportunity cost through policy. Sanctions against harmful communities, reinforcement of media education, revitalization of offline communities, and strengthening of the public interest of broadcasting programs may be methods, but it is dictatorship that the government plays this role. There is no choice but to rely on the improvement of the level of consciousness in society as a whole and midnight.

Then there is only one way left. It is to increase the utility of marriage and childbirth enough to offset the opportunity cost.

In Korean society, it is considered normal to have children after marriage. Therefore, marriage support policy is also childbirth support policy.

However, most of the current marriage and childbirth support policies target unmarried youth and newlyweds with children. There are few policies for childless newlyweds. Support for newlyweds with children is understood as supporting ‘additional childbirth’, but the purpose of support for unmarried young people is unknown. Only politics can be seen in the recently poured youth policies, such as the Youth Leap Account and special provision for youth. Do you think that when young people save money and secure stable housing, they will hope for marriage ‘regardless of the opportunity cost’?

If you do not want young people to become ‘glamorous singles’, and if you want to see the effect as much as you spend money, you need to turn support policies for unmarried youth into ‘marriage conditions’. Introducing the Hungarian-type support policy proposed by Na Gyeong-won, former vice chairman of the Committee on Low Fertility and Aging Society, to non-metropolitan areas may also be an option. The important thing is to make the marriage ‘beneficial’. Now there is only opportunity cost.