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SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. Th

by calmd 5y ago

SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea How does the developed world pull out of this type of tailspin? Japan and other nations are also facing this exact same issue and we seem to be not paying attention to it. The core issue is that in most of the developed world, people do not have enough children. And even immigrants in their second generation and beyond also do not have enough children, as such it appears to be a cultural/way of life/society norms problem. It is as if the developed modern world is currently designed as a population sink. This is going to be one of the grand challenges of the 50 years.

nwienert 5y ago
There’s no problem with low birth rates, this is a meme that is told by a few economists and yet a very slight depopulation is not only survivable but has upsides as well and so far both South Korea and Japan (for going on three decades) have maintained incredibly competitive across nearly all metrics, certainly far better off than the US in so many ways. I got in an extensive debate over this with statistics a few months back on HN and have yet to see convincing evidence: lots of news articles that are inconclusive, and charts that show them doing as well or better than any European country or most any country in the world.
- maeln 5y ago
  Yes it is possible to manage ... when you have almost no government run retirement system. In country where the workforce pay for the retired, like France and a lot of European country, having your workforce shrink is a huge issue.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  It's another offshoot of the "growth at all costs!" mentality you see in Wall Street and governments.
  - refurb 5y ago
    What do you think pays for your healthcare, public pensions, infrastructure as your population ages out of the workforce? The Grenadier Guards?
    - nwienert 5y ago
      As long as gov spending per capita is not near or above income (ie, responsible fiscal policy) and you don't over-inflate, there's no reason you can't support all this with declining population.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      We've seen an immense growth of productivity since the 1970s in the US, with stagnant wages. Perhaps it's time some of that goes into the issues you mentioned instead of wealthy pockets?
      - refurb 5y ago
        But with a declining population that’s declining GDP and with an aging population fewer working so less taxes. How does it work again?
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        Increased per-worker productivity, automation, and a realignment of goals from lining pockets to contributing to society.
- calmd 5y ago
  Let's take that at face value. If shrinking populations are okay, what is the desired population level? Right now no country seems to be able to stop this decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just currently shrinking.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > If shrinking populations are okay, what is the desired population level? The answer might simply be "we don't know" here. > Right now no country seems to be able to stop this decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just currently shrinking. Why is that being treated as inherently bad, though?
    - calmd 5y ago
      > Why is that being treated as inherently bad, though? We are not making this decision completely willingly, it is more just happening and it is out of the governments control. To me this means it is risky, and can we pull out of it? How do we pull out of this shrinkage? I guess the good thing is that the developed world is all in this together, rather than only parts of it. That reduces the chance of massive disparities as a result of the changes it causes. If would feel much more comfortable that we completely understood it, and how to control it. There will be a lot of changes that will occur. For example conservatives are less effected by population shrinkage than liberals in the US -- probably just because conservatives are less likely to be city dwellers? Or maybe it is conservatives have different values... or a combination of values that effect whether they live in the cities. Atheists have lower reproduction rates than those who are religious as well. (which probably correlates with liberalism/conservatism as well.) I wonder if there are any genetic contributions to conservatism/religiousness? If so this may be a period of rapid genetic evolution...
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        > We are not making this decision completely willingly, it is more just happening and it is out of the governments control. To me this means it is risky, and can we pull out of it? How do we pull out of this shrinkage? Isn't all this equally true of population growth as well as shrinkage?
- Clewza313 5y ago
  There is no problem with low birth rates in the long term. There are, however, massive problems during the many decades when the population pyramid is inverted and there are 4 or 5 retirees for every child, a ratio which Japan is about to hit and where South Korea will be in a couple of decades as well. As for why this is a problem, Japan's pension system is already insolvent and the country is starting to experience massive manpower shortages in sectors like nursing, agriculture and construction. Sometime last year Japan passed the point where the amount of money & effort needed to maintain existing infrastructure exceeded the country's capability to build it, and the depopulation and dilapidation of Japan's second/third tier cities and the countryside is already striking and poised to accelerate rapidly as villages, towns and cities can no longer fund their basic obligations.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - citrusybread 5y ago
    I mean, you could almost make the same argument for Canada & the US. It's mostly due to political gridlock here, but look at all the crumbling bridges and dams -- the transit that never got built, and the feeling that somehow we are wealthy yet we never have any money for important issues. Japan's GDP per capita still keeps growing. And the average Japanese still has an excellent quality of life. Japan also has so many pointless infrastructure projects; things like laying concrete into river beds to control their flows, or retention systems to stop mudslides that only started because they clear-cut forests and replaced them with sugi as a make-work project... The workers are there, if they got rid of the make-work projects.
  - skhr0680 5y ago
    > Sometime last year Japan passed the point where the amount of money & effort needed to maintain existing infrastructure exceeded the country's capability to build it Can you share where you found that? I'd like to read more about it > and the depopulation and dilapidation of Japan's second/third tier cities and the countryside is already striking and poised to accelerate rapidly as villages, towns and cities can no longer fund their basic obligations. Isn't that a worldwide phenomenon though? Podunk towns can't keep their young people around because there is nothing for them to do and within in a generation or two they fade away. It's sad, but is there even a reason to save those towns?
- CrimpCity 5y ago
  Can you link to your previous thread? I’m just curious if you considered military concerns since war is a young man’s game as they say.
  - calmd 5y ago
    I think robotized war changes the equation a bit here. At least with regards to non-adjacent conflicts. But for adjacent conflicts between non-superpowers, if one area is depopulated, it may be much easier to walk in and keep that territory.
    - CrimpCity 5y ago
      I'm no military strategist I just play one on the internet aka I'm about to talk some shit haha so take it with a grain of salt. Robotic war is interesting and specifically drone warefare in my mind is similar to the role carriers played in World War 2 which is having a great cost benefit ratio along with great flexibility on damaging enemy ships and allowing longer range bombing runs. I agree that killer robots would definitely alter the battlefield equation but over the long run I think youth should still get the edge. Having said all of that based on WW2 technological advantages eventually get countered or erode in a war of attrition with the largest industrial base eventually winning by simple over production and/or reducing the enemy's industrial capacity through strategic bombing of factories / input resources. Either way in a total war scenario where attrition crowns the eventual winner devising counter measures and other cognitive work in general is easier when workers are <50 since there's measurable cognitive decline after that at least productivity wise. The average age of the Manhattan project scientists was ~24-25. Additionally, a country needs to be able to simply replace it's productive experienced workers with new workers after it's factories get bombed and having a fatter more numerous population pyramid would definitely help. It's also entirely possible that robotic workers / automated factories get degraded over time due to missing parts when the enemy blows up supply chains or other resources required to get the to full robo productivity. To sum up my entire argument/assumption youth + more population is robust to the chaos of war.
- 100011 5y ago
  This is correct. There is no logical reason or empirical evidence that opening country to mass immigration will help fixing native birth rates. Problems such as housing will just increase as there's more competition for a 5 square meter flat.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  Very interesting. I would like to listen more to this side of the debate. Everywhere I read is "demographic bomb" or "chaos", which seems to be a bubble. Would you be able to point some references for different arguments?
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> going to be one of the grand challenges of the 50 years I’m sceptical of this claim. Demand per capita grows unabated. Working lives are lengthening. A smaller population living well is economically indistinguishable, in the aggregate, from a large one living poorly. Maybe post-industrial civilisations settle into a lower-population steady state than ones requiring lots of unrefined labor. Yes, dependency ratios will mean re-jiggering the skewed benefits almost every country provides its old at the expense of the young. But that, too, isn’t a bad thing, particularly if it encourages labor force participation. (There is another comment arguing demographic the dividend’s inverse is a myth. I don’t go that far. I just think it’s a manageable problem versus a catastrophe.)
- nerdponx 5y ago
  I am very much looking forward to a lower-birthrate future in which fewer people live better and more sustainably. The problem is in the short/medium term, figuring out how to pay for all these checks that politicians have been writing over the last 50 years. The problem isn't that "the young" have to support "the old", it's that a lot of promises were made on the assumption of indefinite growth.
  - thow-01187 5y ago
    Unfortunately, low fertility rate is not a one-time problem of boomer generation followed by a stable plateau. It leads to a perpetual spiral of gerontocracy, high dependency ratios, under-investments and general vitality being sapped out of the populace. It's no coincidence that Italy and Japan, once vigorous and creative, are not exactly bursting with enthusiasm in the past ~20-30 years
    - atom_arranger 5y ago
      Random idea: What if the votes of each age group were weighted to account for the size of that group, e.g. making the votes of 18-20 have the same weight as the votes of 40-42, even if there may be more people in the 40-42 group. This would prevent an aging population from giving too many benefits to older age groups, and would encourage policies that consider long term impacts more.
sct202 5y ago
It's going to be hard to convince couples living in 1 bedroom apartments to cram in 2 kids just so that the country can hit replacement level fertility rates. Large urban cities just don't seem built for families, especially with the way that larger spaces are priced.
- calmd 5y ago
  So urban cities are anti-child? Thus we will see cites change or depopulate? Does low fertility correlate with dense urban dwelling and sky high real-estate prices? I suspect it probably does, but I haven't seen any proof. Maybe this shift to remote-first work that happened over the last 18 months will help....
  - wastedhours 5y ago
    > So urban cities are anti-child? Thus we will see cites change or depopulate? Or, people now value cities more than they value having more children, leading to depopulation due to replacement rate reduction, rather than people leaving to have more children.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    I am not a professional in this field at all, but my personal experience suggests that we need more smaller cities, more densely connected, or perhaps more and smaller "downtown" areas within a single city. Then people could have a bit more personal space (less geographic concentration reduces demand and price pressure in specific areas), while keeping density and interconnectedness high to support mass transit, walking/cycling, and socially connected communities. I think this would make cities a bit more "pro-child" than they are currently.
    - jonpurdy 5y ago
      You are describing Seoul and Tokyo perfectly. Despite having tens of millions of people and average densities much higher than most cities, they’re both among the most livable cities in the world. Both of them inherited pre-war street layouts (in Tokyo’s case, despite being bombed, the layouts stayed the same). So neighbourhoods have narrow streets which makes them safer to walk (due to cars needing to drive slowly) and more interesting. And most neighbourhoods have older 2-4 storey or newer 10-20 storey apartments that provide the density to enable local shops and amazing public transit. So much easier to raise children when you have everything you need within walking distance in the same neighbourhood, including child care.
fleaaaa 5y ago
This is very true as a Korean living outside of the country, It's happening slowly but the cultural resistance and all kind of shitstorm related low-birthrate/immigration is about to happen. It's pretty ugly situation inside right now it seems like. Koreans still have the idea that it is a homogenous country and majority of korean is pretty extremely conservative about this new policy obviously, you could easily imagine it's like ticking bomb.
- neom 5y ago
  My wife is from Busan and her parents don't speak English nor are they educated, and I would consider them extremely "Korea Conservative", nevertheless, they're aware of the issue and it is discussed openly, how to continue to emerge Korea, and I think it is this issue that primarily made them comfortable with their daughter marrying a foreigner, of the options, marry a foreigner or destroy the country, I suspect Koreans will take the latter. If I had to guess, your countrymen will fair a lot better than expected, likely through policy of controlled "acceptable foreigners", strong demand of cultural adoption of said "acceptable foreigners", and through Automation/Robotics/AI. I was very surprised to see a lot of conversation among the young people in Korea about the future of the society surrounding the themes of what a hybrid socialist/capitalist robotics AI utopia would look like, if I was to bet on anyone getting there, it would be SK.
rdevsrex 5y ago
As far as I can see the only problem is with how the pension systems are structured. A falling birth rate by itself doesn’t really mean that much. In fact there might be benefits for employment, like there was after the black death. But as it is our current economic system is based on growth and having more young people supporting the elderly. So it seems like if the trend continues we will have to restructure retirement benefits.
3pt14159 5y ago
One core issue is housing. And the core issue with housing is that prices are an arms race where everyone always wants more. Most people would have two or three kids if they felt like they could afford it. The second core issue is modern dating. That one I don't know how to fix, but the essential issue there is the dynamics of dating not requiring commitment coupled with financial security for women mean long term pair bonding happens at a lower rate and later in life.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  I'm not sure that dating "not requiring commitment" is the issue. It's difficult to commit to dating when you are time-poor and struggling to even get close to the financial trajectory that your parents were on. It's too easy to blame the kids or whatever, without considering that the kids had and have it harder in many ways than the old people did. Being a millennial in the '00s was pretty good, being a millennial after '08 has not been good (unless you happened to get a sweet high-paying tech job in the '10s).
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    This is actually part of what I'm talking about. The sweet high-paying tech jobs went to a group of people that can comfortably afford to live without marrying off. They date around because they can. I know, because I got that sweet job in 2008 just at the start of the tech wave and I dated around quite a bit and the pressure to get married for financial reasons wasn't there and the social pressure to get married for its own sake wasn't either. This isn't how it looked like in the 1950s or earlier. Most people didn't date 100 different women or wait until they were 35 to start a home with someone. It's partially financial and partially societal. At the other end of the spectrum the increasing gap between rich and poor pushed a lot of men completely out of the dating pool because they can no longer afford basic housing for themselves, so even if they would be willing to commit they don't have options.
    - refurb 5y ago
      This doesn’t jive with the idea that high paying, lower skilled jobs were plentiful in the 50’s and you only needed one income for a family let alone a single person.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
According to China, one solution is to kill after school for-profit education, which is crippling families due to unbounded competition.
- kccqzy 5y ago
  Isn't the Chinese solution just to convert these for-profit education companies to non-profit education companies? That only hurts these companies and their shareholders. Parents who want their children to be competitive will continue to enroll their children in these after-school classes; now that they are non-profit perhaps they will be cheaper and parents can afford more classes!
  - liuyipei 5y ago
    In addition to what you said, this policy is supposed to alleviate a complementary problem for kids in the top 1-20% socioeconomic class. There, the biggest issue is that there is excessive competition to no good end. This policy is supposed to alleviate that and bring more room for fostering creativity
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machiaweliczny 5y ago
Invent/make artificial womb. It's already feasible I think. Probably tons of money to be made. Why it's not a thing yet? Women have many options/entertainment now and don't want to go through pregnancy especially multiple times. This coupled with fact that you have only 10 years for childbearing (before 40) and you drastically cut carrier advancement when it just started explains a lot IMO. Requiring two people to support family in XXI century feels like a scam and race to the bottom. It's mostly due to scarcity of land that you have to bid on housing (that owned by too rich people in many cases, so they literaly can manipulate market to extract rent) and all profitable activity moved to cities so you also want bw there. Make housing cheaper => I think will happen with decentralisation of energy sources and cheaper transport (tesla). Also some family friendly social policies (china?). I think remote work made a lot of people choose to live in houses instead and this might lead to some positive change in demography. But the cheapest way IMO is to just make families trendy via Hollywood (instead of this homo propaganda on Netflix)
- robjan 5y ago
  Who benefits from the artificial womb? The bearing of the child is much less of a disincentive than other factors like money, space and the ultra competitive school system we have in many Asian regions.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Women would benefit the most from artificial womb, given how strenuous bearing actually is, and all the health risks associated with it. Lois Bujold explored this subject - and, specifically, the socioeconomic and cultural implications - thoroughly in her Vorkosigan series, although it is referred to as "uterine replicator" there. And she is a married woman with children, so it's not exactly an abstract subject matter for her.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Pay people to be stay at home parents so they don't face an enormous opportunity cost / survival threat to having a kid.
- danmaz74 5y ago
  They do that in France, and birth rates are actually higher than most Western nations
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    I could not find anything on this. I see that they have payments to support households with kids but do they specifically pay people to be stay at home parents?
  - iammisc 5y ago
    Except the USA where we don't do anything. Don't even have paid maternal leave.
    - mushbino 5y ago
      This is why the US relies heavily on immigration. Keeps profit margins higher.
      - iammisc 5y ago
        Except non-immigrants and immigrant americans both have higher birth rates, even if immigrant's are higher.
100011 5y ago
There is no reason to believe that 'immigration' can fix the native birth rates of South Koreans. This is an implicit assumption dreamt by the utterly deranged.
- michaelt 5y ago
  No, but if the problem is "we don't have enough carers to care for our elderly people" then importing carers via immigration is a quick fix.
thow-01187 5y ago
I'm continually amazed how this isn't #1 topic on governments' agenda across the developed world. We're looking at South Korea losing 95% of its generational cohort size in 100-year timeframe. 80% for Japan or Italy, 70% for Germany, etc. Climate change is on everyone's mind - but what's the point of solving climate change if there's barely anyone left to inherit the planet? Black Death, Mongols, world wars, not even intentional genocides managed to inflict this level of population loss. And it's met with yawns and shrugs, as if it's unavoidable like gravity. And no - people's desire to have children hasn't dropped all that much: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility-is-falling-short-of-what-women-want.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility... https://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF_2_2-Ideal-actual-number-children.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF_2_2-Ideal-actual-number-c...
- tpm 5y ago
  Barely anyone left? Africa alone is projected to have a population of 3 billion by 2100. https://qz.com/africa/1881468/how-fast-is-africas-population-growing/ https://qz.com/africa/1881468/how-fast-is-africas-population...
keewee7 5y ago
The solution is immigration but with high barrier to entry. I live in Denmark, a country portrayed as anti-immigrant by American and British media. However there is no opposition to educated professional immigrants from India, China, Iran and Eastern Europe. Brain drain of these countries could be a problem but countries like India and Iran are probably producing many more highly educated individuals than they can domestically employ.
- Balero 5y ago
  This is hopefully just a temporary solution though. What happens when these places get rich enough that their birth rates also drop? To butcher an unrelated saying: "We can't all get immigrants from each other".
  - backprop1993 5y ago
    Iran scheduled to peak in 2060: https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/iran-population https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/iran-population
  - scbrg 5y ago
    Perhaps we need to find another way to fuel the economy than the never ending pyramid scheme called population growth. At 8 billion (causing massive environmental damage) a drop in population would certainly not be a bad thing.
    - simmanian 5y ago
      My hot take is that we need to find a new system that doesn't depend on perpetual economic growth. With both China and India rapidly developing (that's what, 3 billion people with money to spend), climate change will only accelerate until and unless we find an alternate model.
- mathverse 5y ago
  You cant just easily immigrate to CJK countries.You will not become a part of the society.That's just impossible.Not even those of us that married koreans,speak the language and know the customs are that accepted in the society.We are tolerated and easily live and work there but you will never become korean or japanese or chinese. You will always be the "foreigner".
csomar 5y ago
Not really. Immigration has become an issue lately because a human (or a bare-human) is worth much less. 1.000 years ago a bare illiterate human had some considerable value. He could work in the field or he could fight. More humans, more food and production. More humans, more manpower to fight your enemies. Now a bare semi-educated human is a liability. Which is why most countries are refusing their entrance. Times have changed. In a near future where wars will be fought with robots and drones, you need less manpower (and their wives/kids); and thus you need much less of your general population; and much more of a few specialized people to achieve your goals. We are getting there, whether we are self-aware of it or not.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of a shrinking workforce, though. And as retirees continue to make up a larger portion of the popular vote - they'll continue to demand more from a shrinking workforce. At some point (I imagine in my lifetime) - the straw will break the camel's back.
  - csomar 5y ago
    > And as retirees continue to make up a larger portion of the popular vote - they'll continue to demand more from a shrinking workforce. Sure, if you fail to outsource to other countries; or automate your economy enough. > There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of a shrinking workforce, though. For most countries, you can get access with a job offer. Countries are not against people who can get employment where they have shortages. But a "bare human" is barely employable which is how he turns into a liability. ie: immigrating more people (randomly) will generate a negative return at least in the short-term.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of a shrinking workforce, though. For the developed world, where a lot of the wealth coming in is capital returns from global corps whose ability to generate wealth isn’t constrained by local population size, that just means you need to tap that more effectively. It’s a problem for the payroll tax model of social support funding, perhaps, but unless you are emotionally attached to that model, I don't see that as a big cost.
baybal2 5y ago
> How does the developed world pull out of this type of tailspin? 1. Find a young woman 2. Make her happy, and confident in you 3. ? 4. Pull your family for the next 30-40 years With all respects, I always seen a family as a man's responsibility, and a failure at creating/maintaining one to coming from man's deficiencies first. In virtually every human culture in the world, even matriarchal societies, it is by default that a man needs to put more effort than a woman to score a marriage. It is very deeply ingrained into human culture. A man can always always find another woman if one does not want a family with him up until mid-thirties. A lot of time. And yes, I really want to have a family, and I really want to work hard to have one. It really sucks for bachelors. Unmarried people in most of Asia effectively lost 2 years of their reproductive life, and probably will lose at least 1 more year. It's completely incorrect to think that China had any much of normal life after quarantine succeeded. Last 12 months was a life in constant paranoia, extreme social unease, and daily life disruptions from periodic Covid breakthroughs.
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
  A man can always always find another woman if one does not want a family with him up until mid-thirties. A lot of time. If you filter out the overweight, tattoo-covered ones, having kids by another man etc. you are left with just a few percent though.
  - baybal2 5y ago
    In comparison to Russia, or China, America is a paradise for late marriage. The higher up you are on the social ladder, the quicker are the spouses taken from the marriage market. I was fortunate to go into somewhat prestigious highschool back in Russia. The last 3 bachelors from my class are all the people who managed to get it abroad. Everybody else was gone by mid-twenties, anybody with higher education by 23 at most. Seeing an unmarried woman with PhD level education, job, own roof over her head, and no skeletons in the closet over 30 in Russia is likely a hallucination. In Canada, I met new such almost monthly, and I grew rather rather complacent.
- iammisc 5y ago
  You should not be downvoted. Historically, this was the view. A traditional 'family' was mainly seen as a man's responsibility. The word 'husband' itself literally means a man bound to a house (i.e., a family or a lineage). Best of luck in your search for a wife. As a married man with kids, starting a family is the most wonderful thing. I feel terrible for young men and women during COVID, it's just a terrible human tragedy created by the government. IMO, dating should have been considered an essential activity. It would have been good for restaurants and the economy and young people. Tell the married people with kids to stay home while the young people can all go dance it up and get hitched. It's foundational to society.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. Its kind of amazing how often people make judgements based on extrapolating demographic trends over much longer terms than there is any reason to think that they will hold, and then as soon as they fail turn around and do the same thing based on the new demographic trend. Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its important. OTOH, most of the arguments I’ve seen for it actually being important (in the near term) are the kind where you scratch the surface and underneath is pure racism, so I’m not all that concerned.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > OTOH, most of the arguments I’ve seen for it actually being important (in the near term) are the kind where you scratch the surface and underneath is pure racism, so I’m not all that concerned. Can you go into more detail on that? In some respects "demographic suicide" solved with immigration has many (but not all) of the characteristics of colonization, and I think it's a reasonable speculation that colonized and diminished cultures would be unhappy with more than just the coercive aspects of their colonization, and that a non-racist person could have reasonable anxieties about their culture becoming diminished and dying out in the future. Though I suppose racists probably see an opportunity to exploit those anxieties to spread their racist ideology.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Can you go into more detail on that? A typical example is a two-step argument equating race/biological heritage with culture and/or ethnic identity coupled with appeals to an imperative to preserve culture and/ot ethnic identity. Something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28051854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28051854
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > Something like this: Honestly that comment doesn't read "racist" to me. Maybe the disconnect is taking "culture" too literally, or using "culture" when one really means "people" (i.e. a combination of culture and ancestry/descent). Also even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption. Immigrant populations may tend to take on certain cultural characteristics (e.g. economic and political ones) of the population they get socialized into, but those characteristics may not actually be the ones particular individual cares the most about preserving (e.g. culture in a narrower non-anthropological sense, like religion and and attachment to certain literature). And even assuming a full memetic replication of a culture, I don't think the last member of a colonized people would be entirely happy that his people went extinct even if some of the colonizers fully took up his culture.
lvl100 5y ago
You’re assuming a lot here and utilizing an outdated view. Population growth is not necessary when you’re primarily an export-focused country such as South Korea. And more specifically when your biggest trading partner is none other than China.
tootie 5y ago
I think the solution lies not in more people but in more sustainability and shift away from competitive capitalism as an economic model. I genuinely think that it's inevitable. The great challenge of the next century will climate. We're on the fence right now between a climate-induced nightmare world and a post-scarcity economy where resource competition no longer drives global conflict.
jinseokim 5y ago
I live in SK, so I have a lot of things to talk about the birthrate. The reason why the birth rate strangely low, is quite interwoven. TL;DR: People (think they) are not capable enough to raise a child. First: Real estate prices is skyrocketing. This bizarre phenomenon began in the 2000s. The 17th administration completely reversed the situation, which became another problem, and the 18th administration made real estate prices to soar again. The 19th (present) administration tried to control real estate prices with complicated regulation, but it never worked so far. Second: An educational craze. 386(1960s) and X(1970s) generations believe that children should go to the prestige university to survive in this harsh world. So they let their children go to 'hagwon'[1], something like cram school but really competitive. E.g. (a) Almost students in SK go to hagwon. (b) Some 6th~9th grade students study 10AM~10PM everyday in hagwon during the vacation, to pass an enterance exam specialized high school(10th~12th grade). (c) Some kindergartens promotes themselves as "English Kindergarten"; where every teacher and student speaks English. The problem is -- because of these craze, a lot of childless family concern that they can't afford expenses for hagwon($300~400/mo in average. In the case of the above-mentioned entrance exam, It goes more than $1000/mo) so their child won't be happy because they'll fall behind when they grow up. Third: Saving for retirement. Because of these problem, rearing child in Korea costs an arm and a leg. In the past, education was not overheated like this, and Korean-specific mindset forced family to give birth. However, starting with military administration's birth control policy, people changed their mindset, and now a significant number of people are more interested in saving for retirement than give birth. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagwon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagwon
BurningFrog 5y ago
Extrapolating current trends to infinity always predicts some kind of disaster. But current trends never continue forever. In large part because we like to avoid disasters.
sandworm101 5y ago
Why is immigration the answer? All you need is workers, not immigrants. SK will probably do what the gulf states do. They will bring in foreign labor but with a clear separation between expat workers and potential "immigrants". These people will work finite contracts and then be literally sent home once the contract is over, mooting any concept of naturalization. Gulf states have done this relatively successfully for decades.
- juskrey 5y ago
  With complete degeneration of nearly everything else
- fomine3 5y ago
  Japan already do that, with some bad reputation. https://www.jitco.or.jp/en/skill/ https://www.jitco.or.jp/en/skill/
com2kid 5y ago
> How does the developed world pull out of this type of tailspin? Make childcare easier. Traditionally people lived in the same town as their parents and in-laws. Now days it is thousands of dollars a month in day care. Want your kids to go to college? In 18 years that is expected to cost well over 100k for a state school. Raising kids has gotten more stressful and more expensive, of course people aren't having kids! And those who do stop after one. Not that I have any good idea for childcare. Real estate prices in cities are so high that opening a day care is not the wisest financial decision. Home day cares are a solution, but licensing and compliance issues abound that can also destroy their ability to stay in business. Heck in America if I want a care that seats more than 4 (I'm ignoring the "5th" middle seat) I am stuck buying a bloody SUV or minivan. Can't even get a 3 row compact people mover because CAFE rules quite literally ban their existence. So 2 kids is basically has a "get a giant vehicle" tax attached to it. Live in a city? Have fun parking that SUV! And how about schools? In my city, a house that is zoned to good schools has a 200-300k price premium! Want to move to an area with really good schools? That can become a 500k premium. Japan has separate issues, if fathers are working 10-12 hours a day and are never home, and women are expected to just stop their careers after having kids, well of course women aren't jumping at the chance to start a family. Raise a kid with an absentee husband? No wonder that isn't going over well. tl;dr life is too expensive. We've created a society that does not promote having children or having a family. Everything down to our underlying infrastructure is anti-family.
BurningFrog 5y ago
Hungary and Poland are making serious efforts to boost their birth rates. Hungary gives life time tax exemption to mothers of 4 children, and may lower that to 3. It's too early to tell if it's working. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-fit-the-nationalist-agenda-but-do-they-work https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f...
- iammisc 5y ago
  Hungary and Poland also have incredibly interventionist governments who are happy to not only ecourage family formation through economic policy but also cultural policy. The former is fairly easy and many other developed countries are going down that road. The latter is the part that some countries in Western Europe and the USA do not want to touch with a ten foot pole, but it is the more important metric. You want more families? You need to unashamedly celebrate your nation and culture.
  - afjl 5y ago
    No offense, but this seems like a very weak, and virtually un-falsifiable, theory. Is there rigorous data that suggests culture is a major factor in driving population growth? Economic policy, housing and family-planning policy, education and labor policy, are the only true factors that undeniably and reliably drive population growth.
pishpash 5y ago
Why is it a tailspin? People do not have children because of over-population, except instead of this being controlled by Malthus, it is now controlled by Adam Smith's invisible hand. The market is signaling resource constraints and desires fewer humans and more robots.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
SK doesn't have a large amount of land to grow into which means real estate is expensive which in turn limits population growth (people have less kids when real estate is expensive). SK has one of the highest population densities in the world [1] Having a stable population with that kind of constraint on land seems like a good thing. [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/south-korea-population https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/south-korea-popu...
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
> This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country. They'll have to unite with North Korea eventually. Make of that what you will.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  > They'll have to unite with North Korea eventually. Make of that what you will. I don't know. United Germany was still within living memory when reunification happened, and it cost a huge amount to integrate East Germany, even though they had a functional society and industry. For example, Zeiss Jena (East German) camera lenses were competitive with those from the west. That would be like North Korea making good phones in the modern day.
  - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    I think consumers are more valuable for GDP than industry today. Also, there are non-economic factors at play, too. For example, South Korea could grandfather in North Korea's nuclear arms.
info781 5y ago
We have lots of people on earth, they just need to be able to move to where they want to go. Low birthrate issue is nonsense. Let a couple million people from the Philippines in to Korea problem solved.
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deeviant 5y ago
> The core issue is that in most of the developed world, people do not have enough children The carrying capacity of the planet earth would like to have a talk with you. Continuing exponential population growth is obviously not a sustainable path forward. At some point, The world's economies are going to have to realign to a flat population and will have to adapt to the demographics there of. And if humanity does not choose not to do so, at some point in the future, the choice will be made for us.
- fomine3 5y ago
  declining isn't flat.
pepperonipizza 5y ago
These countries must invest in ectogenesis. I really don't understand why this is never talked about when the low fertility rate in the developed world is discussed. South Korea has invested billions in trying to have its fertility rate increase by giving incentives to couples, it has only worsen. We must get to the idea that it will be almost impossible in the developed world to get back to a fertility rate above 2. Ectogenesis can be one of the solution.
- hackeraccount 5y ago
  You'd have to know the fundamental reason why people in SK (or anywhere) aren't having kids. Maybe it's women not wanting to be pregnant or give birth but maybe it's not - if it's for example, people aren't up for the investment that kids require then ectogenesis will get you nowhere.
mushbino 5y ago
Why is the issue low birthrates and not an economic system that relies on perpetual growth? Is there a more sustainable system?
throwaway4good 5y ago
One simple alternative to "massive immigration": Reunification with North Korea.
- kapp_in_life 5y ago
  Simple is doing a lot of legwork in this sentence I think.
Animats 5y ago
SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. Yes, by 2100, the population might be all the way down to where it was in 1980. Also, at some point, South Korea and North Korea may settle up, much as West Germany and East Germany did, and for much the same reasons.
jollybean 5y ago
Demographic decline is only a bad thing from a fairly singular, industrialist, globalist perspective. While it definitely means some reduction and prestige and power, and in some areas scale does provide advantage - in most ways, it's not decline in anything but the 'major shareholders of the economy'. It's a 'Investor Problem' for the most part. Japan never needed 180M people to maintain their standard living, so from the average person's perspective it looks different. Otherwise, it's a little bit of an economic Ponzi scheme. Of course, 'permanently fewer children' to the point where population goes to 0 - well that's a problem, but hopefully they will mitigate that and find a happy equilibrium.
Dig1t 5y ago
I recently had this thought and I'm wondering if any experts in biology/genetics can chime in and help me. Yes it seems to me that this will be a problem faced by the developed world for the short-medium term future. But does evolution also play a role here as well? By creating a shrinking population, does that not sort of "select" for people with a natural inclination to have more children? How strongly is the desire to have more children tied to genetics? I can imagine this problem solving itself on some timeline if that is the case e.g. people with a strong desire to have children have more kids, their genes are more prevalent while people inclined to have fewer kids sort of select themselves out of the gene pool by having 1 or 0 kids. This seems to me entirely possible, as I know genes can code for basically any arbitrary behavior, but I'm not an expert.
- backprop1993 5y ago
  Conservatives and the more religious tend to have more kids. Non-religious, liberals have the least kids. If there is any genetic contributions, then this will be under intense selection pressure. Maybe this is why religion has survived so long? It tends to our reproduce the non-religious?
Tsagadai 5y ago
Automation? You don't necessarily need infinite population growth, Japan and other nations with low immigration and population growth may be able to make things better than it seems. Look at corporate tax bases and number of employees in major companies. You could totally run a high income economy with fewer people and better outcomes. Population growth is not a requirement for economic growth, it is just one of the laziest ways to move the dial up.
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by calmd 5y ago

nwienert 5y ago

There’s no problem with low birth rates, this is a meme that is told by a few economists and yet a very slight depopulation is not only survivable but has upsides as well and so far both South Korea and Japan (for going on three decades) have maintained incredibly competitive across nearly all metrics, certainly far better off than the US in so many ways. I got in an extensive debate over this with statistics a few months back on HN and have yet to see convincing evidence: lots of news articles that are inconclusive, and charts that show them doing as well or better than any European country or most any country in the world.

maeln 5y ago
Yes it is possible to manage ... when you have almost no government run retirement system. In country where the workforce pay for the retired, like France and a lot of European country, having your workforce shrink is a huge issue.
ceejayoz 5y ago
It's another offshoot of the "growth at all costs!" mentality you see in Wall Street and governments.
- refurb 5y ago
  What do you think pays for your healthcare, public pensions, infrastructure as your population ages out of the workforce? The Grenadier Guards?
  - nwienert 5y ago
    As long as gov spending per capita is not near or above income (ie, responsible fiscal policy) and you don't over-inflate, there's no reason you can't support all this with declining population.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    We've seen an immense growth of productivity since the 1970s in the US, with stagnant wages. Perhaps it's time some of that goes into the issues you mentioned instead of wealthy pockets?
    - refurb 5y ago
      But with a declining population that’s declining GDP and with an aging population fewer working so less taxes. How does it work again?
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        Increased per-worker productivity, automation, and a realignment of goals from lining pockets to contributing to society.
calmd 5y ago
Let's take that at face value. If shrinking populations are okay, what is the desired population level? Right now no country seems to be able to stop this decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just currently shrinking.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > If shrinking populations are okay, what is the desired population level? The answer might simply be "we don't know" here. > Right now no country seems to be able to stop this decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just currently shrinking. Why is that being treated as inherently bad, though?
  - calmd 5y ago
    > Why is that being treated as inherently bad, though? We are not making this decision completely willingly, it is more just happening and it is out of the governments control. To me this means it is risky, and can we pull out of it? How do we pull out of this shrinkage? I guess the good thing is that the developed world is all in this together, rather than only parts of it. That reduces the chance of massive disparities as a result of the changes it causes. If would feel much more comfortable that we completely understood it, and how to control it. There will be a lot of changes that will occur. For example conservatives are less effected by population shrinkage than liberals in the US -- probably just because conservatives are less likely to be city dwellers? Or maybe it is conservatives have different values... or a combination of values that effect whether they live in the cities. Atheists have lower reproduction rates than those who are religious as well. (which probably correlates with liberalism/conservatism as well.) I wonder if there are any genetic contributions to conservatism/religiousness? If so this may be a period of rapid genetic evolution...
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      > We are not making this decision completely willingly, it is more just happening and it is out of the governments control. To me this means it is risky, and can we pull out of it? How do we pull out of this shrinkage? Isn't all this equally true of population growth as well as shrinkage?
Clewza313 5y ago
There is no problem with low birth rates in the long term. There are, however, massive problems during the many decades when the population pyramid is inverted and there are 4 or 5 retirees for every child, a ratio which Japan is about to hit and where South Korea will be in a couple of decades as well. As for why this is a problem, Japan's pension system is already insolvent and the country is starting to experience massive manpower shortages in sectors like nursing, agriculture and construction. Sometime last year Japan passed the point where the amount of money & effort needed to maintain existing infrastructure exceeded the country's capability to build it, and the depopulation and dilapidation of Japan's second/third tier cities and the countryside is already striking and poised to accelerate rapidly as villages, towns and cities can no longer fund their basic obligations.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- citrusybread 5y ago
  I mean, you could almost make the same argument for Canada & the US. It's mostly due to political gridlock here, but look at all the crumbling bridges and dams -- the transit that never got built, and the feeling that somehow we are wealthy yet we never have any money for important issues. Japan's GDP per capita still keeps growing. And the average Japanese still has an excellent quality of life. Japan also has so many pointless infrastructure projects; things like laying concrete into river beds to control their flows, or retention systems to stop mudslides that only started because they clear-cut forests and replaced them with sugi as a make-work project... The workers are there, if they got rid of the make-work projects.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  > Sometime last year Japan passed the point where the amount of money & effort needed to maintain existing infrastructure exceeded the country's capability to build it Can you share where you found that? I'd like to read more about it > and the depopulation and dilapidation of Japan's second/third tier cities and the countryside is already striking and poised to accelerate rapidly as villages, towns and cities can no longer fund their basic obligations. Isn't that a worldwide phenomenon though? Podunk towns can't keep their young people around because there is nothing for them to do and within in a generation or two they fade away. It's sad, but is there even a reason to save those towns?
CrimpCity 5y ago
Can you link to your previous thread? I’m just curious if you considered military concerns since war is a young man’s game as they say.
- calmd 5y ago
  I think robotized war changes the equation a bit here. At least with regards to non-adjacent conflicts. But for adjacent conflicts between non-superpowers, if one area is depopulated, it may be much easier to walk in and keep that territory.
  - CrimpCity 5y ago
    I'm no military strategist I just play one on the internet aka I'm about to talk some shit haha so take it with a grain of salt. Robotic war is interesting and specifically drone warefare in my mind is similar to the role carriers played in World War 2 which is having a great cost benefit ratio along with great flexibility on damaging enemy ships and allowing longer range bombing runs. I agree that killer robots would definitely alter the battlefield equation but over the long run I think youth should still get the edge. Having said all of that based on WW2 technological advantages eventually get countered or erode in a war of attrition with the largest industrial base eventually winning by simple over production and/or reducing the enemy's industrial capacity through strategic bombing of factories / input resources. Either way in a total war scenario where attrition crowns the eventual winner devising counter measures and other cognitive work in general is easier when workers are <50 since there's measurable cognitive decline after that at least productivity wise. The average age of the Manhattan project scientists was ~24-25. Additionally, a country needs to be able to simply replace it's productive experienced workers with new workers after it's factories get bombed and having a fatter more numerous population pyramid would definitely help. It's also entirely possible that robotic workers / automated factories get degraded over time due to missing parts when the enemy blows up supply chains or other resources required to get the to full robo productivity. To sum up my entire argument/assumption youth + more population is robust to the chaos of war.
100011 5y ago
This is correct. There is no logical reason or empirical evidence that opening country to mass immigration will help fixing native birth rates. Problems such as housing will just increase as there's more competition for a 5 square meter flat.
rmbyrro 5y ago
Very interesting. I would like to listen more to this side of the debate. Everywhere I read is "demographic bomb" or "chaos", which seems to be a bubble. Would you be able to point some references for different arguments?

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> going to be one of the grand challenges of the 50 years I’m sceptical of this claim. Demand per capita grows unabated. Working lives are lengthening. A smaller population living well is economically indistinguishable, in the aggregate, from a large one living poorly. Maybe post-industrial civilisations settle into a lower-population steady state than ones requiring lots of unrefined labor. Yes, dependency ratios will mean re-jiggering the skewed benefits almost every country provides its old at the expense of the young. But that, too, isn’t a bad thing, particularly if it encourages labor force participation. (There is another comment arguing demographic the dividend’s inverse is a myth. I don’t go that far. I just think it’s a manageable problem versus a catastrophe.)

nerdponx 5y ago
I am very much looking forward to a lower-birthrate future in which fewer people live better and more sustainably. The problem is in the short/medium term, figuring out how to pay for all these checks that politicians have been writing over the last 50 years. The problem isn't that "the young" have to support "the old", it's that a lot of promises were made on the assumption of indefinite growth.
- thow-01187 5y ago
  Unfortunately, low fertility rate is not a one-time problem of boomer generation followed by a stable plateau. It leads to a perpetual spiral of gerontocracy, high dependency ratios, under-investments and general vitality being sapped out of the populace. It's no coincidence that Italy and Japan, once vigorous and creative, are not exactly bursting with enthusiasm in the past ~20-30 years
  - atom_arranger 5y ago
    Random idea: What if the votes of each age group were weighted to account for the size of that group, e.g. making the votes of 18-20 have the same weight as the votes of 40-42, even if there may be more people in the 40-42 group. This would prevent an aging population from giving too many benefits to older age groups, and would encourage policies that consider long term impacts more.

sct202 5y ago

It's going to be hard to convince couples living in 1 bedroom apartments to cram in 2 kids just so that the country can hit replacement level fertility rates. Large urban cities just don't seem built for families, especially with the way that larger spaces are priced.

calmd 5y ago
So urban cities are anti-child? Thus we will see cites change or depopulate? Does low fertility correlate with dense urban dwelling and sky high real-estate prices? I suspect it probably does, but I haven't seen any proof. Maybe this shift to remote-first work that happened over the last 18 months will help....
- wastedhours 5y ago
  > So urban cities are anti-child? Thus we will see cites change or depopulate? Or, people now value cities more than they value having more children, leading to depopulation due to replacement rate reduction, rather than people leaving to have more children.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  I am not a professional in this field at all, but my personal experience suggests that we need more smaller cities, more densely connected, or perhaps more and smaller "downtown" areas within a single city. Then people could have a bit more personal space (less geographic concentration reduces demand and price pressure in specific areas), while keeping density and interconnectedness high to support mass transit, walking/cycling, and socially connected communities. I think this would make cities a bit more "pro-child" than they are currently.
  - jonpurdy 5y ago
    You are describing Seoul and Tokyo perfectly. Despite having tens of millions of people and average densities much higher than most cities, they’re both among the most livable cities in the world. Both of them inherited pre-war street layouts (in Tokyo’s case, despite being bombed, the layouts stayed the same). So neighbourhoods have narrow streets which makes them safer to walk (due to cars needing to drive slowly) and more interesting. And most neighbourhoods have older 2-4 storey or newer 10-20 storey apartments that provide the density to enable local shops and amazing public transit. So much easier to raise children when you have everything you need within walking distance in the same neighbourhood, including child care.

fleaaaa 5y ago

This is very true as a Korean living outside of the country, It's happening slowly but the cultural resistance and all kind of shitstorm related low-birthrate/immigration is about to happen. It's pretty ugly situation inside right now it seems like. Koreans still have the idea that it is a homogenous country and majority of korean is pretty extremely conservative about this new policy obviously, you could easily imagine it's like ticking bomb.

neom 5y ago
My wife is from Busan and her parents don't speak English nor are they educated, and I would consider them extremely "Korea Conservative", nevertheless, they're aware of the issue and it is discussed openly, how to continue to emerge Korea, and I think it is this issue that primarily made them comfortable with their daughter marrying a foreigner, of the options, marry a foreigner or destroy the country, I suspect Koreans will take the latter. If I had to guess, your countrymen will fair a lot better than expected, likely through policy of controlled "acceptable foreigners", strong demand of cultural adoption of said "acceptable foreigners", and through Automation/Robotics/AI. I was very surprised to see a lot of conversation among the young people in Korea about the future of the society surrounding the themes of what a hybrid socialist/capitalist robotics AI utopia would look like, if I was to bet on anyone getting there, it would be SK.

rdevsrex 5y ago

As far as I can see the only problem is with how the pension systems are structured. A falling birth rate by itself doesn’t really mean that much. In fact there might be benefits for employment, like there was after the black death. But as it is our current economic system is based on growth and having more young people supporting the elderly. So it seems like if the trend continues we will have to restructure retirement benefits.

3pt14159 5y ago

One core issue is housing. And the core issue with housing is that prices are an arms race where everyone always wants more. Most people would have two or three kids if they felt like they could afford it. The second core issue is modern dating. That one I don't know how to fix, but the essential issue there is the dynamics of dating not requiring commitment coupled with financial security for women mean long term pair bonding happens at a lower rate and later in life.

nerdponx 5y ago
I'm not sure that dating "not requiring commitment" is the issue. It's difficult to commit to dating when you are time-poor and struggling to even get close to the financial trajectory that your parents were on. It's too easy to blame the kids or whatever, without considering that the kids had and have it harder in many ways than the old people did. Being a millennial in the '00s was pretty good, being a millennial after '08 has not been good (unless you happened to get a sweet high-paying tech job in the '10s).
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  This is actually part of what I'm talking about. The sweet high-paying tech jobs went to a group of people that can comfortably afford to live without marrying off. They date around because they can. I know, because I got that sweet job in 2008 just at the start of the tech wave and I dated around quite a bit and the pressure to get married for financial reasons wasn't there and the social pressure to get married for its own sake wasn't either. This isn't how it looked like in the 1950s or earlier. Most people didn't date 100 different women or wait until they were 35 to start a home with someone. It's partially financial and partially societal. At the other end of the spectrum the increasing gap between rich and poor pushed a lot of men completely out of the dating pool because they can no longer afford basic housing for themselves, so even if they would be willing to commit they don't have options.
  - refurb 5y ago
    This doesn’t jive with the idea that high paying, lower skilled jobs were plentiful in the 50’s and you only needed one income for a family let alone a single person.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

According to China, one solution is to kill after school for-profit education, which is crippling families due to unbounded competition.

kccqzy 5y ago
Isn't the Chinese solution just to convert these for-profit education companies to non-profit education companies? That only hurts these companies and their shareholders. Parents who want their children to be competitive will continue to enroll their children in these after-school classes; now that they are non-profit perhaps they will be cheaper and parents can afford more classes!
- liuyipei 5y ago
  In addition to what you said, this policy is supposed to alleviate a complementary problem for kids in the top 1-20% socioeconomic class. There, the biggest issue is that there is excessive competition to no good end. This policy is supposed to alleviate that and bring more room for fostering creativity

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machiaweliczny 5y ago

Invent/make artificial womb. It's already feasible I think. Probably tons of money to be made. Why it's not a thing yet? Women have many options/entertainment now and don't want to go through pregnancy especially multiple times. This coupled with fact that you have only 10 years for childbearing (before 40) and you drastically cut carrier advancement when it just started explains a lot IMO. Requiring two people to support family in XXI century feels like a scam and race to the bottom. It's mostly due to scarcity of land that you have to bid on housing (that owned by too rich people in many cases, so they literaly can manipulate market to extract rent) and all profitable activity moved to cities so you also want bw there. Make housing cheaper => I think will happen with decentralisation of energy sources and cheaper transport (tesla). Also some family friendly social policies (china?). I think remote work made a lot of people choose to live in houses instead and this might lead to some positive change in demography. But the cheapest way IMO is to just make families trendy via Hollywood (instead of this homo propaganda on Netflix)

robjan 5y ago
Who benefits from the artificial womb? The bearing of the child is much less of a disincentive than other factors like money, space and the ultra competitive school system we have in many Asian regions.
- int_19h 5y ago
  Women would benefit the most from artificial womb, given how strenuous bearing actually is, and all the health risks associated with it. Lois Bujold explored this subject - and, specifically, the socioeconomic and cultural implications - thoroughly in her Vorkosigan series, although it is referred to as "uterine replicator" there. And she is a married woman with children, so it's not exactly an abstract subject matter for her.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

Pay people to be stay at home parents so they don't face an enormous opportunity cost / survival threat to having a kid.

danmaz74 5y ago
They do that in France, and birth rates are actually higher than most Western nations
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I could not find anything on this. I see that they have payments to support households with kids but do they specifically pay people to be stay at home parents?
- iammisc 5y ago
  Except the USA where we don't do anything. Don't even have paid maternal leave.
  - mushbino 5y ago
    This is why the US relies heavily on immigration. Keeps profit margins higher.
    - iammisc 5y ago
      Except non-immigrants and immigrant americans both have higher birth rates, even if immigrant's are higher.

100011 5y ago

There is no reason to believe that 'immigration' can fix the native birth rates of South Koreans. This is an implicit assumption dreamt by the utterly deranged.

michaelt 5y ago
No, but if the problem is "we don't have enough carers to care for our elderly people" then importing carers via immigration is a quick fix.

thow-01187 5y ago

I'm continually amazed how this isn't #1 topic on governments' agenda across the developed world. We're looking at South Korea losing 95% of its generational cohort size in 100-year timeframe. 80% for Japan or Italy, 70% for Germany, etc. Climate change is on everyone's mind - but what's the point of solving climate change if there's barely anyone left to inherit the planet? Black Death, Mongols, world wars, not even intentional genocides managed to inflict this level of population loss. And it's met with yawns and shrugs, as if it's unavoidable like gravity. And no - people's desire to have children hasn't dropped all that much: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility-is-falling-short-of-what-women-want.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility... https://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF_2_2-Ideal-actual-number-children.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF_2_2-Ideal-actual-number-c...

tpm 5y ago
Barely anyone left? Africa alone is projected to have a population of 3 billion by 2100. https://qz.com/africa/1881468/how-fast-is-africas-population-growing/ https://qz.com/africa/1881468/how-fast-is-africas-population...

keewee7 5y ago

The solution is immigration but with high barrier to entry. I live in Denmark, a country portrayed as anti-immigrant by American and British media. However there is no opposition to educated professional immigrants from India, China, Iran and Eastern Europe. Brain drain of these countries could be a problem but countries like India and Iran are probably producing many more highly educated individuals than they can domestically employ.

Balero 5y ago
This is hopefully just a temporary solution though. What happens when these places get rich enough that their birth rates also drop? To butcher an unrelated saying: "We can't all get immigrants from each other".
- backprop1993 5y ago
  Iran scheduled to peak in 2060: https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/iran-population https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/iran-population
- scbrg 5y ago
  Perhaps we need to find another way to fuel the economy than the never ending pyramid scheme called population growth. At 8 billion (causing massive environmental damage) a drop in population would certainly not be a bad thing.
  - simmanian 5y ago
    My hot take is that we need to find a new system that doesn't depend on perpetual economic growth. With both China and India rapidly developing (that's what, 3 billion people with money to spend), climate change will only accelerate until and unless we find an alternate model.
mathverse 5y ago
You cant just easily immigrate to CJK countries.You will not become a part of the society.That's just impossible.Not even those of us that married koreans,speak the language and know the customs are that accepted in the society.We are tolerated and easily live and work there but you will never become korean or japanese or chinese. You will always be the "foreigner".

csomar 5y ago

Not really. Immigration has become an issue lately because a human (or a bare-human) is worth much less. 1.000 years ago a bare illiterate human had some considerable value. He could work in the field or he could fight. More humans, more food and production. More humans, more manpower to fight your enemies. Now a bare semi-educated human is a liability. Which is why most countries are refusing their entrance. Times have changed. In a near future where wars will be fought with robots and drones, you need less manpower (and their wives/kids); and thus you need much less of your general population; and much more of a few specialized people to achieve your goals. We are getting there, whether we are self-aware of it or not.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of a shrinking workforce, though. And as retirees continue to make up a larger portion of the popular vote - they'll continue to demand more from a shrinking workforce. At some point (I imagine in my lifetime) - the straw will break the camel's back.
- csomar 5y ago
  > And as retirees continue to make up a larger portion of the popular vote - they'll continue to demand more from a shrinking workforce. Sure, if you fail to outsource to other countries; or automate your economy enough. > There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of a shrinking workforce, though. For most countries, you can get access with a job offer. Countries are not against people who can get employment where they have shortages. But a "bare human" is barely employable which is how he turns into a liability. ie: immigrating more people (randomly) will generate a negative return at least in the short-term.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of a shrinking workforce, though. For the developed world, where a lot of the wealth coming in is capital returns from global corps whose ability to generate wealth isn’t constrained by local population size, that just means you need to tap that more effectively. It’s a problem for the payroll tax model of social support funding, perhaps, but unless you are emotionally attached to that model, I don't see that as a big cost.

baybal2 5y ago

> How does the developed world pull out of this type of tailspin? 1. Find a young woman 2. Make her happy, and confident in you 3. ? 4. Pull your family for the next 30-40 years With all respects, I always seen a family as a man's responsibility, and a failure at creating/maintaining one to coming from man's deficiencies first. In virtually every human culture in the world, even matriarchal societies, it is by default that a man needs to put more effort than a woman to score a marriage. It is very deeply ingrained into human culture. A man can always always find another woman if one does not want a family with him up until mid-thirties. A lot of time. And yes, I really want to have a family, and I really want to work hard to have one. It really sucks for bachelors. Unmarried people in most of Asia effectively lost 2 years of their reproductive life, and probably will lose at least 1 more year. It's completely incorrect to think that China had any much of normal life after quarantine succeeded. Last 12 months was a life in constant paranoia, extreme social unease, and daily life disruptions from periodic Covid breakthroughs.

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
A man can always always find another woman if one does not want a family with him up until mid-thirties. A lot of time. If you filter out the overweight, tattoo-covered ones, having kids by another man etc. you are left with just a few percent though.
- baybal2 5y ago
  In comparison to Russia, or China, America is a paradise for late marriage. The higher up you are on the social ladder, the quicker are the spouses taken from the marriage market. I was fortunate to go into somewhat prestigious highschool back in Russia. The last 3 bachelors from my class are all the people who managed to get it abroad. Everybody else was gone by mid-twenties, anybody with higher education by 23 at most. Seeing an unmarried woman with PhD level education, job, own roof over her head, and no skeletons in the closet over 30 in Russia is likely a hallucination. In Canada, I met new such almost monthly, and I grew rather rather complacent.
iammisc 5y ago
You should not be downvoted. Historically, this was the view. A traditional 'family' was mainly seen as a man's responsibility. The word 'husband' itself literally means a man bound to a house (i.e., a family or a lineage). Best of luck in your search for a wife. As a married man with kids, starting a family is the most wonderful thing. I feel terrible for young men and women during COVID, it's just a terrible human tragedy created by the government. IMO, dating should have been considered an essential activity. It would have been good for restaurants and the economy and young people. Tell the married people with kids to stay home while the young people can all go dance it up and get hitched. It's foundational to society.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. Its kind of amazing how often people make judgements based on extrapolating demographic trends over much longer terms than there is any reason to think that they will hold, and then as soon as they fail turn around and do the same thing based on the new demographic trend. Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its important. OTOH, most of the arguments I’ve seen for it actually being important (in the near term) are the kind where you scratch the surface and underneath is pure racism, so I’m not all that concerned.

tablespoon 5y ago
> OTOH, most of the arguments I’ve seen for it actually being important (in the near term) are the kind where you scratch the surface and underneath is pure racism, so I’m not all that concerned. Can you go into more detail on that? In some respects "demographic suicide" solved with immigration has many (but not all) of the characteristics of colonization, and I think it's a reasonable speculation that colonized and diminished cultures would be unhappy with more than just the coercive aspects of their colonization, and that a non-racist person could have reasonable anxieties about their culture becoming diminished and dying out in the future. Though I suppose racists probably see an opportunity to exploit those anxieties to spread their racist ideology.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Can you go into more detail on that? A typical example is a two-step argument equating race/biological heritage with culture and/or ethnic identity coupled with appeals to an imperative to preserve culture and/ot ethnic identity. Something like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28051854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28051854
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Something like this: Honestly that comment doesn't read "racist" to me. Maybe the disconnect is taking "culture" too literally, or using "culture" when one really means "people" (i.e. a combination of culture and ancestry/descent). Also even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption. Immigrant populations may tend to take on certain cultural characteristics (e.g. economic and political ones) of the population they get socialized into, but those characteristics may not actually be the ones particular individual cares the most about preserving (e.g. culture in a narrower non-anthropological sense, like religion and and attachment to certain literature). And even assuming a full memetic replication of a culture, I don't think the last member of a colonized people would be entirely happy that his people went extinct even if some of the colonizers fully took up his culture.

lvl100 5y ago

You’re assuming a lot here and utilizing an outdated view. Population growth is not necessary when you’re primarily an export-focused country such as South Korea. And more specifically when your biggest trading partner is none other than China.

tootie 5y ago

I think the solution lies not in more people but in more sustainability and shift away from competitive capitalism as an economic model. I genuinely think that it's inevitable. The great challenge of the next century will climate. We're on the fence right now between a climate-induced nightmare world and a post-scarcity economy where resource competition no longer drives global conflict.

jinseokim 5y ago

I live in SK, so I have a lot of things to talk about the birthrate. The reason why the birth rate strangely low, is quite interwoven. TL;DR: People (think they) are not capable enough to raise a child. First: Real estate prices is skyrocketing. This bizarre phenomenon began in the 2000s. The 17th administration completely reversed the situation, which became another problem, and the 18th administration made real estate prices to soar again. The 19th (present) administration tried to control real estate prices with complicated regulation, but it never worked so far. Second: An educational craze. 386(1960s) and X(1970s) generations believe that children should go to the prestige university to survive in this harsh world. So they let their children go to 'hagwon'[1], something like cram school but really competitive. E.g. (a) Almost students in SK go to hagwon. (b) Some 6th~9th grade students study 10AM~10PM everyday in hagwon during the vacation, to pass an enterance exam specialized high school(10th~12th grade). (c) Some kindergartens promotes themselves as "English Kindergarten"; where every teacher and student speaks English. The problem is -- because of these craze, a lot of childless family concern that they can't afford expenses for hagwon($300~400/mo in average. In the case of the above-mentioned entrance exam, It goes more than $1000/mo) so their child won't be happy because they'll fall behind when they grow up. Third: Saving for retirement. Because of these problem, rearing child in Korea costs an arm and a leg. In the past, education was not overheated like this, and Korean-specific mindset forced family to give birth. However, starting with military administration's birth control policy, people changed their mindset, and now a significant number of people are more interested in saving for retirement than give birth. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagwon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagwon

BurningFrog 5y ago

Extrapolating current trends to infinity always predicts some kind of disaster. But current trends never continue forever. In large part because we like to avoid disasters.

sandworm101 5y ago

Why is immigration the answer? All you need is workers, not immigrants. SK will probably do what the gulf states do. They will bring in foreign labor but with a clear separation between expat workers and potential "immigrants". These people will work finite contracts and then be literally sent home once the contract is over, mooting any concept of naturalization. Gulf states have done this relatively successfully for decades.

juskrey 5y ago
With complete degeneration of nearly everything else
fomine3 5y ago
Japan already do that, with some bad reputation. https://www.jitco.or.jp/en/skill/ https://www.jitco.or.jp/en/skill/

com2kid 5y ago

> How does the developed world pull out of this type of tailspin? Make childcare easier. Traditionally people lived in the same town as their parents and in-laws. Now days it is thousands of dollars a month in day care. Want your kids to go to college? In 18 years that is expected to cost well over 100k for a state school. Raising kids has gotten more stressful and more expensive, of course people aren't having kids! And those who do stop after one. Not that I have any good idea for childcare. Real estate prices in cities are so high that opening a day care is not the wisest financial decision. Home day cares are a solution, but licensing and compliance issues abound that can also destroy their ability to stay in business. Heck in America if I want a care that seats more than 4 (I'm ignoring the "5th" middle seat) I am stuck buying a bloody SUV or minivan. Can't even get a 3 row compact people mover because CAFE rules quite literally ban their existence. So 2 kids is basically has a "get a giant vehicle" tax attached to it. Live in a city? Have fun parking that SUV! And how about schools? In my city, a house that is zoned to good schools has a 200-300k price premium! Want to move to an area with really good schools? That can become a 500k premium. Japan has separate issues, if fathers are working 10-12 hours a day and are never home, and women are expected to just stop their careers after having kids, well of course women aren't jumping at the chance to start a family. Raise a kid with an absentee husband? No wonder that isn't going over well. tl;dr life is too expensive. We've created a society that does not promote having children or having a family. Everything down to our underlying infrastructure is anti-family.

BurningFrog 5y ago

Hungary and Poland are making serious efforts to boost their birth rates. Hungary gives life time tax exemption to mothers of 4 children, and may lower that to 3. It's too early to tell if it's working. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-fit-the-nationalist-agenda-but-do-they-work https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f...

iammisc 5y ago
Hungary and Poland also have incredibly interventionist governments who are happy to not only ecourage family formation through economic policy but also cultural policy. The former is fairly easy and many other developed countries are going down that road. The latter is the part that some countries in Western Europe and the USA do not want to touch with a ten foot pole, but it is the more important metric. You want more families? You need to unashamedly celebrate your nation and culture.
- afjl 5y ago
  No offense, but this seems like a very weak, and virtually un-falsifiable, theory. Is there rigorous data that suggests culture is a major factor in driving population growth? Economic policy, housing and family-planning policy, education and labor policy, are the only true factors that undeniably and reliably drive population growth.

pishpash 5y ago

Why is it a tailspin? People do not have children because of over-population, except instead of this being controlled by Malthus, it is now controlled by Adam Smith's invisible hand. The market is signaling resource constraints and desires fewer humans and more robots.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

SK doesn't have a large amount of land to grow into which means real estate is expensive which in turn limits population growth (people have less kids when real estate is expensive). SK has one of the highest population densities in the world [1] Having a stable population with that kind of constraint on land seems like a good thing. [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/south-korea-population https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/south-korea-popu...

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

> This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country. They'll have to unite with North Korea eventually. Make of that what you will.

skhr0680 5y ago
> They'll have to unite with North Korea eventually. Make of that what you will. I don't know. United Germany was still within living memory when reunification happened, and it cost a huge amount to integrate East Germany, even though they had a functional society and industry. For example, Zeiss Jena (East German) camera lenses were competitive with those from the west. That would be like North Korea making good phones in the modern day.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  I think consumers are more valuable for GDP than industry today. Also, there are non-economic factors at play, too. For example, South Korea could grandfather in North Korea's nuclear arms.

info781 5y ago

We have lots of people on earth, they just need to be able to move to where they want to go. Low birthrate issue is nonsense. Let a couple million people from the Philippines in to Korea problem solved.

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deeviant 5y ago

> The core issue is that in most of the developed world, people do not have enough children The carrying capacity of the planet earth would like to have a talk with you. Continuing exponential population growth is obviously not a sustainable path forward. At some point, The world's economies are going to have to realign to a flat population and will have to adapt to the demographics there of. And if humanity does not choose not to do so, at some point in the future, the choice will be made for us.

fomine3 5y ago
declining isn't flat.

pepperonipizza 5y ago

These countries must invest in ectogenesis. I really don't understand why this is never talked about when the low fertility rate in the developed world is discussed. South Korea has invested billions in trying to have its fertility rate increase by giving incentives to couples, it has only worsen. We must get to the idea that it will be almost impossible in the developed world to get back to a fertility rate above 2. Ectogenesis can be one of the solution.

hackeraccount 5y ago
You'd have to know the fundamental reason why people in SK (or anywhere) aren't having kids. Maybe it's women not wanting to be pregnant or give birth but maybe it's not - if it's for example, people aren't up for the investment that kids require then ectogenesis will get you nowhere.

mushbino 5y ago

Why is the issue low birthrates and not an economic system that relies on perpetual growth? Is there a more sustainable system?

throwaway4good 5y ago

One simple alternative to "massive immigration": Reunification with North Korea.

kapp_in_life 5y ago
Simple is doing a lot of legwork in this sentence I think.

Animats 5y ago

SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. Yes, by 2100, the population might be all the way down to where it was in 1980. Also, at some point, South Korea and North Korea may settle up, much as West Germany and East Germany did, and for much the same reasons.

jollybean 5y ago

Demographic decline is only a bad thing from a fairly singular, industrialist, globalist perspective. While it definitely means some reduction and prestige and power, and in some areas scale does provide advantage - in most ways, it's not decline in anything but the 'major shareholders of the economy'. It's a 'Investor Problem' for the most part. Japan never needed 180M people to maintain their standard living, so from the average person's perspective it looks different. Otherwise, it's a little bit of an economic Ponzi scheme. Of course, 'permanently fewer children' to the point where population goes to 0 - well that's a problem, but hopefully they will mitigate that and find a happy equilibrium.

Dig1t 5y ago

I recently had this thought and I'm wondering if any experts in biology/genetics can chime in and help me. Yes it seems to me that this will be a problem faced by the developed world for the short-medium term future. But does evolution also play a role here as well? By creating a shrinking population, does that not sort of "select" for people with a natural inclination to have more children? How strongly is the desire to have more children tied to genetics? I can imagine this problem solving itself on some timeline if that is the case e.g. people with a strong desire to have children have more kids, their genes are more prevalent while people inclined to have fewer kids sort of select themselves out of the gene pool by having 1 or 0 kids. This seems to me entirely possible, as I know genes can code for basically any arbitrary behavior, but I'm not an expert.

backprop1993 5y ago
Conservatives and the more religious tend to have more kids. Non-religious, liberals have the least kids. If there is any genetic contributions, then this will be under intense selection pressure. Maybe this is why religion has survived so long? It tends to our reproduce the non-religious?

Tsagadai 5y ago

Automation? You don't necessarily need infinite population growth, Japan and other nations with low immigration and population growth may be able to make things better than it seems. Look at corporate tax bases and number of employees in major companies. You could totally run a high income economy with fewer people and better outcomes. Population growth is not a requirement for economic growth, it is just one of the laziest ways to move the dial up.

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