There's a bunch of cultural reasons for the low birthrate but a bunch of encouraging benefits might help address that.
It’s like the “unlimited” vacation days that some scummy companies offer. They do so confident that people will be shamed by the behaviour of their peers into taking very little vacation.
There’s a Pros/Cons table where the first row almost seems like a paradox. A “pro” of a high population density is that you have access to resources. A “con” is that the resources are still limited.
S Korea is very similar to Japan, also facing the same problem of population decline, you can view S Korea(or even Taiwan) as a lately developed and peninsula version of Japan. Each of them with limited resources and a dense population, in which made J and K what they are today (You can look up how these two countries developed, I am not an expert historian). Even China, has a significant decrease in newborn population, despite its vast landmass and less developed population.
So basically, the achievement of development is brought by whatever suppresses the population at the same time, they are sort of at the local maximum of their country at current time point. The Nordic countries meanwhile are much loosely populated, higher average resources and so on, although not as capitalist as US. Again I am not a Nordic expert, but the distinction is significant enough that I can say applying their policies in Asian countries will not work.
Each country has its own "ecology", that are of course constantly interacting with each other so to speak, but still inertial wrt some policies that are do not cope with it well.
While it might be true that everyone has a price, if we plucked someone off the street and they told us they never wanted children (at all, or more than they have now), how much money do you think it would take to persuade them to have a kid?
Do you think it would be $1000? How about $4500? Maybe it costs a whole $12,000 right? These are the sorts of incentives that are offered in Europe, in South Korea, etc. They don't seem to influence much extra in the way of births. And it's not difficult to see why... those people are told (whether true or not) that children are far more costly than those sums. So we're still talking about it being net negative.
In some publications, people in the western world are told that it's some large fraction of a million dollars to raise a child to adulthood. How many babies could Japan afford, if it had to pay parents $500k for each?
It's even worse than that though. Many Japanese women of child-bearing age aren't even in circumstances where it is plausible for them to consider having a child. No husband, or a husband whose career doesn't make being the sole provider possible. Little chance of those circumstances changing before motherhood is out of the question. Etc.
https://japantoday.com/category/crime/illegal-amounts-of-ove...
In fact, no single one highly and densely populated developed region can have a significant positive growth in population. There is much more than just scale of economy.
What the Nordics in general do well, and Germany does ok, is preserve the ability of mothers to have careers, thus making motherhood a bit less of a drastic decision (it’s still a drastic decision. You’re committing to unconditionally love someone who will, say, bite you hard on the shoulder because you had the temerity to suggest it was time to go potty instead of play with trains, and to take the physical damage of pregnancy that has so far led to my first broken bone and back pain that never quite goes away)
But I’m still working in my pre-maternity department, in a scaled-back version of my old job, and more critically, keeping up with our industry about as well as my not-mother colleagues, so once the little nipper can escort himself home from school, I can more easily go back to full time.
And in case my husband loses his job that currently is our main source of income, we have the backstop of my job and the potential to go back to my full time IT income.
This would be far more difficult in a country where my large employer was not obliged to let me work part time for several years, and Elterngeld didn’t make taking a year off after the birth of a child fully expected and planned for by employers. My husband was also able (and expected) to take a month off after the birth, and then another when I went back to work. A lot of men in relatively conservative Bavaria were initially hesitant to take those two months, but it’s now normal. We’re not at the point that it’s normal for most fathers to also exercise their right to switching to a part time schedule for their children’s first few years - no idea if this happens more often in Berlin or Hamburg.
Germany has its own demographic problems, but not as severe as Japan’s.
But, even if that could help, the cultural changes Japan requires to make that possible, just aren't feasible in fewer than half a dozen generations. Which is sort of what they're running out of anyway.
Germany will get to where Japan is, and it will be within our own lifetimes.
I didn’t even read the pollution part. That’s a whole different topic that wasn’t being discussed.
But thanks for the downvote! Next time, please make sure your reply is up to par if you feel the need to downvote.