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Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
- rysertio 4y agoI don't think low birth rates will be an end of the world. Birth rates and death rates naturally fluctuate. Just because the fertility rate is .8 doesn't mean it'll stay this way. When there'll be a need for people birth rates will go up. Automation, AI have reduced the number of people we need. So low birth rates aren't out of blue. It's just a normal reaction for a reduced demand for workers.
- 1sembiyan 4y agoGoing by just their pop culture it’s not apparent to me that this is concern to them.
- chownie 4y agoCan you substantiate this point? What do you mean?
- 1sembiyan 4y agoI mean I don’t see concerns about fertility rate reflected in the Korean movies/shows I consume. Just a glib observation.
- creakingstairs 4y agoIt's absolutely on Korean people's mind. This has been on the news quite a few times now.
- russdill 4y agoThere's been quite a few and they are quite popular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_My_Baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_My_Baby
- quartesixte 4y agoPop culture references != broader societal concerns. Of all the places to draw conclusions about societal concerns from, mass-market consumer pop culture in a culture known for relative strictness on what is acceptable/taboo is the last place you should be looking.
- dougmwne 4y agoIt is always unclear to me if this is a bad thing. In a shrinking population, are individual people worse off, or does it just look like a decline when you look at the country in aggregate? There is no shortage of squandered talent in the world. So many people work below their capability because there are just more people than opportunities. It seems like it’s not a problem to keep running the modern world, even with a fraction of the current world population. And besides, many smart folks think we are deep into overshoot, not just on carbon emissions, but on almost every resource we use to run the global economy. If we are beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, then we either need to become massively more efficient or just have massively fewer people on the planet. And given that there is no current hope of sustainable living on any other planet, seems like lowering birth rates can only be a good thing that will give us some chance of surviving our ecological bottleneck.
- rdlecler1 4y agoAs population size decreases there will be less viable niche markets and less opportunity.
- dron57 4y agoMost of the past century's gains in quality of life were tightly correlated with rising labor. If the population crashes, then who will do all the specialized work? Another thing to think about is excess capital and investment. With a large population, excess savings become investments into new companies, technologies, etc. Without excess savings there will be no tech industry, improvements in science, infrastructure investments or much of anything interesting. Environmentalists say that fewer people will be good for the environment. But what about investments and research into green energy and carbon removal? Those will simply not happen unless the economy is still growing.
- tuatoru 4y agoTL;DR: it's more about demand than labor supply. Same result. I don't think it is as binary as you suggest. There will be lower total saving after a delay. There will certainly be less investment more immediately. What will happen is this. If you borrow money to make and sell (say) shoes, and the population is doubling every 35 years (2% growth), then your market doubles in 35 years also. (You need money because your buildings and equipment wear out, if not for materials.) Your lenders have it relatively easy in this situation, because fewer of their borrowers go bust, so interest rates (which are partly compensation for risk) are lower. With negative population growth, your market is shrinking, so your lenders' risk of loss increases. Anyone who still has excess savings demands higher return on investment. Fewer potential investments can jump the higher hurdle. Total investment decreases, total income decreases and everything spirals down.
- throwaway_4ever 4y agoSomething has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years, the living memory of a single life. Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources. Has it occurred to people that, maybe, modern fertility is a tragedy of the commons? If everyone chooses to act in their own interest, society is worse off than collectively pressuring to have more kids? Ideally, that would look like major subsidies and benefits to parents to account for the extra work they are doing for society. I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off the planet, and the traditionally oppressive-to-women societies will evolutionarily outlast us. At this rate, there will only be 3m South Koreans in 3 generations. I don't see how you expect a country to survive that decline. In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
- jackling 4y ago"our future", last time I check, Pakistan wasn't invading any foreign territory, aside from some normal border disputes it's problems are usually within it's own borders. This seems like paranoia that the "others" will come and ruin our civilization. If Pakistan, and other countries like India and China, continues to modernize, eventually the population should stable out and historically that comes with better rights for all.
- iammjm 4y agoPeter Zeihan wrote a really interesting book about this topic recently - "The End of the World is Just the Begining". He sees population decline as one of the gravest dangers facing civilisation. Implication being in the title of the book.
- RedditKon 4y agoI love Peter Zeihan and recommend him to everyone. His commentary on the intersection of population decline and Russia's geopolitical goals from The Accidental Superpower in 2014 also turned out to be on point.
- onepointsixC 4y agoTo give context to those who are unfamiliar, he basically predicted the Ukraine invasion before the Crimean Annexation and was proven correct again with Russias further attempt to invade the entirety of Ukraine this year.
- CatWChainsaw 4y agoI'm reading that book now and finding it fascinating.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoI'm old enough to remember when population increase was said to be one of the gravest dangers facing civilization. If you're in the market for doom porn, there will always be someone willing to sell it to you.
- timbit42 4y agoPopulation decline is a danger to the world's economies but it will be good for the planet.
- gumby 4y agoWhat's the harm? By the end of the century robots will be doing most of the work anyway. People can concentrate on the things that matter to them instead.
- exhilaration 4y agoBy the end of the century robots will be doing most of the work anyway 1) What if they don't? 2) The end of the century is 78 years away, somebody's going need to turn you on your side every few hours when you're in that old folks home - what happens if there aren't enough people to do those jobs?
- gumby 4y ago> somebody's going need to turn you on your side every few hours when you're in that old folks home - what happens if there aren't enough people to do those jobs? Obviously we will have robots doing that job! Elder care is already a major area of robotics effort in Japan. And if the robots don't get there? Well, it's not terrible. A smaller population doesn't need as many buildings erected, or crops grown etc. Some people can move in from other countries. I'm confident it will all work out.
- Ekaros 4y agoOr more callous take is that we let people either die or choose euthanasia... We might be in for serious societal changes.
- remarkEon 4y agoThe notion of retirees dying alone surrounded by robots doesn’t strike you, at all, as kinda weird and dystopic?
- gumby 4y agoWhat do you mean? Hopefully they will be surrounded by family members and friends, none of whom were burnt out or financially ruined by looking after an elderly relative but instead are receiving and providing love and support while robots do the "dirty work" as it were. You might look how elderly patients and other end-of-life patients are treated by their (almost all quite low-paid) carers. It's pretty shocking, but the experience of being the person providing that care is also pretty shocking. I think you underestimate the emotional and physical labour involved in looking after a dying person, and in particular a relative. I saw (mostly remotely) my mother in law die and her two younger daughters restructured their lives to help her -- and this despite the twice daily visits from the Diakonie to change dressings, attend to medication etc. And, because that was in Germany there was no meaningful financial burden for this process. There's another factor: my mid-80s mother (herself a physician) doesn't want human caregivers for privacy and prodding sake. She doesn't mind human physiotherapist or actually talking to another doctor about her complaints. But she doesn't want people fussing over her. And her mother in law (my grandmother), from a completely different culture from a completely different continent, also hated the consequences of losing her autonomy. She was still delivering meals on wheels at 89, and when she finally needed assistance in her 90s, just couldn't stand it. IMHO machines that support more autonomy for people are an unalloyed good.
- pasabagi 4y agoIs there a direct, inverse relationship between per-capita economic productivity, and fertility rate? It seems intuitive to me: a major way per-capita economic productivity goes up is by working more hours, both at school, and in the workplace. Since you're competing with other max-hours workers for stuff like housing, the price rises to match. Soon, you're in a situation where there's no space in the average budget/apartment for kids. Widespread misallocation of human resources (i.e. unemployment, part-employment, etc) would presumably drive in the opposite direction.
- gbronner 4y agoLots of highly opinionated clickwarriors in this comments section. Free time brought to you, almost certainly, by having relatively few kids.
- Aeolun 4y agoI do not think more kids translates into less time. If anything it’s the opposite. If there’s many of them they’ll do stuff together and you are free. Stuff like brushing teeth and bath take relatively little extra time, so does cooking for 4 instead of 1 kid.
- noisy_boy 4y agoI don't know how people can say that - it definitely takes extra time. Ferrying them to different extra-curricular activities (all of them don't have to like the same thing), teaching at home/different homework, the constant fights. Cooking for 4 instead of 1 may not make a big difference but the extra dishes don't wash themselves. I'm not even getting into additional parent teacher meetings, doctor's appointments and so on.
- yomkippur 4y agoon reddit they seem to be fixated on the "korean women needs to be liberated by chivalrous white male no wonder korean women dont want to marry korean men"
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThe ripple effect of technology (birth control). Maybe it is the great filter ;)
- Ekaros 4y agoMaybe advanced races tend to die out and not actually aim to spread around the universe.
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/njgzy https://archive.ph/njgzy
- faeriechangling 4y agoIt’s eerie to think of how hard South Korea is going to crash in the future. These past years may have been it’s peak.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoThe closest thing we have to a crystal ball is Japan, which is a few decades ahead in demographics, and it's been much more prolonged slump than sudden crash there.
- yomkippur 4y agobut japan has largely been successful at flattening the curve while Korea is in a serious crisis here. if I have to guess, when there are more older people than young, the society destabilizes. immigration is going to happen regardless of koreans want it or not and I finally understand why the Korean governments has been pushing soft power for so long, they were planning for this scenario. I don't think the outcome is going to be as bad as some nationalists make it out to be, for sure most immigrants are going to come from other Asian countries but I do not see it say reaching the dysfunctional state of Western Europe with mostly muslim/african migrants. This is not to say that Southeast Asians won't be pushed to the fringes and experience discrimination that puts them on the same anti-host country culture like in France for example.
- midoridensha 4y agoJapan has a much higher birthrate at 1.3 (still low worldwide, but way ahead of SK, and not that far from other places), so it's not nearly as bad. More recently, Japan has been encouraging increased immigration to make up for the decline.
- eric4smith 4y agoMy first kid just reached 18. Now I'm seriously thinking of having another one. Remember when we were younger and the world's population hit 7 billion, everyone was really, really concerned about overpopulation??? I even did not want to have any kids because of this. Now, Korea is seriously going to be worse than even Japan. And faster too. Back in Jamaica one of my grandma had 7 children, the other one had 8 (with 2 stillborn). Now most women there have 1 child. Here in Thailand today, we see much of the same thing. Talking to people they report their grandparents having 4-8 kids. Now most Thai women are lucky to have even one child. Same in Vietnam and Indonesia, which I frequent regularly too. An outlier is when I was in Qatar recently, it was very common to see large (3-7 kids) families everywhere from all over the Middle East. It is what it is.
- tonmoy 4y agoNote that child death rates were considerably higher even 50 years ago in all of those countries.
- eric4smith 4y agoYes. Duh. That's why I even mentioned my grandma.
- nashashmi 4y agoPeople keep saying high child death rates mean people have more children. But i have yet to find any proofs or research paper for this. What I really find is that as people's expectations of better living go up (not living expenses per se), then people have less children.
- tstrimple 4y agoAt first I disagreed, but after reconsidering I think absence of other evidence the increased child death rate and child birth rate are coincidental. I haven't seen data actually supporting the evidence that more children were born because more children died. I think it's plausible that the increased rights and health of people within our society both lead to decreases in child births and child deaths, but I've seen nothing to suggest that the death rate is causal to the birth rate.
- rr808 4y agoI have just one child. I thought it was kinda sad that they're an only child but I didn't think about that its more than that. They wont have any nieces or nephews, if they have one child with a partner who is an only child my grandchild wont have any uncles, aunts or cousins either. Its a huge contrast to other branches in my family where there are like dozens and dozens of cousins all living close to each other and always hanging out.
- greaterthan3 4y agoBirth rates are low pretty much everywhere in the developed world, but South Korea is an outlier in how low they are. For example, Japan's fertility rate is 1.3, compared to Korea's 0.84. That's a huge difference. It's possible there's something unique to South Korea that causes it. Perhaps it's mandatory 2 years of military service for males. Or maybe their famously judgmental culture. I don't know.
- eliben 4y agoAs an opposite data point: in Israel, military service of 3 years is mandatory for males, 2 years for females. Israel has BY FAR the highest fertility in the OECD. So military service probably isn't a strong correlation here.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoThe highest fertility rates in Israel, by far, are in groups exempted from mandatory military service.
- barry-cotter 4y ago> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then. > Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries. https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptional-fertility/ https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
- greaterthan3 4y agoThe fact that it's both men and women in Israel could be significant. I heard stories about people meeting their romantic partners in the army during the mandatory service.
- TbobbyZ 4y agoI have 3 kids with one due at the end of the year. All are from the same woman and we’ve known each other since being teenagers. We are planning to have 5-7 total. They really add a richness to life. It’s fun to see people stare when we go out.
- pram 4y agoI have 2 kids and I wouldn't mind more, but where do you put them? Our house has 3 rooms. If we have bunk beds they're probably going to be annoyed as teenagers. Maybe I'm thinking about this too hard lol
- anon291 4y agoYeah at our church the average is probably 4-5. There are dozens of families like this. Were planning 5-6 like you. Events with all the kids are lovely and many of the adults who grew up in this church know the other adults because they all used to be kids here once. Great community and a lovely life.
- TbobbyZ 4y agoWhat church?
- anon291 4y agoThis is a Catholic parish that leans traditional, but not sedevacantist or anything like that.
- Danieru 4y agoWe're at 3 kids, planning for 4. I agree on the important of fellow kids at church. The older kids have an incredible time playing with our younger kids. Its such a joy to watch. Bonus is we live in Japan and get to enjoy the surplus of an aging/retiring society. Cars are cheap, houses are cheap. We got a mortgage for a new build house as two newly weds at 25 years old, no down payment as is common in this bank-deposit-surplus country. Society is pretty broken in lots of ways, but with family you can side step the foolishness. The important skill is to say no when society suggests a silly idea.
- wkdneidbwf 4y agoso, uh, in other words there's going to be a glut of affordable housing?
- rr808 4y agoIn Korea maybe, the world's population is going to continue rising though. And those climate refugees are starting to come from the fullest countries.
- wkdneidbwf 4y agoyeah, that's the joke :)
- cryptonector 4y agoEmpty housing tends to get bulldozed because it becomes dangerous when unmaintained. So, no.
- creakingstairs 4y agoYes but the house price in Seoul will remain the same-ish while all the other regions crash first. Korea already has a 50.4% of the population living in/ around Seoul and this is going to get worse as population drops off. This would mean the demand to live near Seoul might stay constant even with the absolute number of population in Korea dropping. Later though, the house price of Seoul will drop as well.
- wrp 4y agoI have been in and out of Korea for many years and know several families where the norm went from several children to one within two generations. The main factors that I think caused this trend are: 1. Husband and wife both now work, not just in jobs, but in careers they are heavily invested in. 2. Getting and prospering in a career is really tough. I heard something like among current college graduates, only 20% are expected to ever find a full-time permanent position. 3. The education system is so competitive that doing well requires effort to the limits of physical endurance. It is not just the financial cost. Supporting a child to adulthood is draining on the parents in other ways. The families I know are in the top 10% for educational attainment, so I don't know how well this applies to working class families. 4. This is relatively minor, but there is a perpetual housing crunch and this affects prices.
- steve76 4y ago
- httpz 4y agoKids are too expensive to raise, housing in major cities with jobs are unaffordable, and women are having a hard time continuing their career after giving birth. It really comes down to these three problems. The government is aware and making efforts but it's not enough to convince young married couples to have kids.
- decafninja 4y agoMy wife and I are Korean-American, albeit with many ties to our country of origin. Something I've noticed is that many couples that do want a child have a very difficult time conceiving. People are having kids at a later age on average, but even younger couples seem to have a hard time. Various gynecological disorders seem to be very common too - fibroids, endometriosis, adenomyosis, amongst others, all of which affect a woman's fertility. My wife and I have been trying for a kid but have been unsuccessful. Many of our friends are experiencing the same, and are resorting to clinical fertility procedures like in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination. I don't know how true it is, but one of my friends outright said that the majority of women in Korea are conceiving through some kind of fertility procedure, and that if we really wanted a baby, not to waste our time and just go ahead and do the same. One thing that makes me believe him is that there are a ton of twins amongst the couples in our social circle. My understanding is that naturally twins are a rare phenomenon, but much more likely if doing something like in vitro or artificial insemination? Us, we've already decided that push comes to shove, we'll most likely adopt.
- internet_user 4y agowhy adoption instead of IVF?
- mrcartmeneses 4y agoIt gives a child a normal childhood and saves them from a system of foster care that can never fully meet the needs of a child?
- nxm 4y agoMuch respect to those who adopt, but bloodlines matter
- decafninja 4y agoYeah, this is not to be underestimated in the context of Korea and Korean culture. Thankfully, in our case, our parents don't care, and neither do we. I'm also an only child, as is my wife, so this means both our branches of our families' genetic bloodlines are effectively ending (albeit the onus for this is on the male side). But again - we don't care.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoMy interest lies in how many zeros of population are required to support certain technology strata. E.g. about a million workers are required to build and maintain aircraft. How many for nuclear power (counting everyone from teachers to healthcare etc.)
- selimthegrim 4y agoMy all time favorite combining the two - how many workers would USSR have needed to fully support Admiral Kuznetsov class ships?
- visarga 4y agoI'm wondering if we can build an open source repository of "how to build anything" - schematics, materials, step by step instructions. Combined with generic tech like computers and 3D-printers it would make a universal factory. A "self replicating factory" - capable of producing a copy of itself but also anything else - could be enough to bootstrap economy anywhere. Colonising Mars is probably going to contribute research in this direction.
- sidewndr46 4y agoAt this point you can probably just ask China about what it takes to support the Liaoning
- dirtyid 4y agoFraction of labour force that is has STEM degrees and relevant vocational fields. My guestimate is much less than most would think. Like Samsung has ~300k employees and has vertical in almost every SKR strategic industry.
- mrcartmeneses 4y agoI have no evidence for this beyond my own anecdotal experience but my guess is the biggest factor is lack of affordable housing. The average price of an apartment in Soul is 1.18 billion won (883k usd). It’s very difficult to buy a home and live off a single income as a young Korean, this is forcing people to start families later or not at all. One compounding factor could be the extension of childhood, which has been a very successful strategy for humans, and is more prevalent in the developed world.
- SilasX 4y agoIf "buying a home" just means buying a shoebox apartment, why is it important in the first place for starting a family? Doesn't that mean you're just as well off renting?
- Beached 4y agobuying your own place gives you permanence you can plan around. you know where you will live, you know where your kids will go to school, you know your neighbors and neighborhood your kids will grow up in, and probably most important, you know how much it will cost each month, and you won't get thrown out on your butt because land lord wants to liquidate or have nephew Timmy live there next year. this type of stability is an important factor for family planning
- SilasX 4y agoSo renters in Korea actually have to move a lot, and the awareness of this dynamic actually matters in practice, or you're just assuming that much because that's how America works? Edit: Don't mean to come down hard, it's just that in the kinds of topics I often see people casually assume certain things are "obviously" important for starting families, which it turns out other first-world countries do without just fine.
- mrcartmeneses 4y agoAh I see your confusion. You’ve missed that renting is more expensive than buying a home and gets more expensive each year, possibly forcing you to move away from your local area and hence your child’s school. There are some places where rent controls and renters rights can mean renting can work for families. But few places are like Berlin.
- Inocez 4y agoThe situation in Taiwan is quite similar. Rising house prices but low wage.
- ckylee 4y agoKorean politics is blaming feminism for this phenomenon, but it's really a mix of all the issues in the comments, as well as sexual crime injustices (bare minimal sentencing for sex crimes) and women afraid of bringing a child into such society. It's just a natural evolutionary reaction.
- sacrosancty 4y agoHas there ever been a society in history that was so bad that "women afraid of bringing a child into such society." was a thing? In the very short term, sure, but forever?
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- jillesvangurp 4y agoHistorically, many societies treated women as property whose opinion simply did not matter and having kids was a numbers game that was part of your retirement plan. Have ten kids and maybe a few will survive long enough to take care of you when you are old and needy. In many countries that is a situation that was common until fairly recently and in some countries this is still the status quo. E.g. my parents are from Dutch catholic families and they have countless relatives. My mother had a couple of dozen aunts and uncles. Their generation was a lot less productive. I only have one sibling and neither of us has had any children. We're both middle aged and I doubt it will happen. I know many people my age that have made similar choices. Korea is an example of a conservative society where women are empowered to say no both technically (birth control) and legally (they don't end up being forcibly married by their families anymore). That's pretty much the case around the world with some notable exceptions of very conservative and/or poor countries; typically with a distinct lack of democracy and other freedoms. Economical circumstances make having kids a really expensive choice in Korea. So, people are no longer being forced to marry and have kids, they can practice birth control, and can't afford to have kids. So, they don't unless they really want to and are able to secure the funding. You see the same patterns in other places in the world where housing is expensive and people are literate. They have kids later or not at all. Even countries that are notoriously very egalitarian with extensive child support programs (e.g. Sweden) have rather low birth rates these days.
- sacrosancty 4y agoBeating a record of 0.84 with 0.81 is "shattering" in journalist-speak but certainly not in normal-speak. The graph shows it's actually plateauing!
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- ipnon 4y agoWhat would convince me to have kids now? 1. Financial security, I can barely afford putting food in my own mouth let alone a wife and baby. 2. Community support, having a kid would mean no more working on my startup in spare time, which also means less money. I don’t feel like I have a village to raise a child with, I’m a rootless cosmopolitan floating about the planet from one yuppie opportunity to the next. It’s not really satisfying and I’ll likely pull the trigger soon anyway.
- somenameforme 4y agoIt's always interesting to look at what these numbers exactly mean because it's deeply counter-intuitive. For the sake of simple modeling, imagine we have a society with 100 people with a fertility rate of 1, that give birth at 20 and die at 80. Here is how that looks: --- Year 0: 100 newborns Year 20: 100 twenties, 50 newborns Year 40: 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn --- In spite of having an extinction level fertility rate, the population nearly doubled in the first 60 years, going from 100 to 187. And it took 80 years to even see the population begin to decline. But then suddenly over the second 60 years, the population exponentially declined going from 187 to 22. This is very akin to the scenario in Korea, because they went from a fertility rate of 6+ to < 1. So they're starting with a large "newborn" population. Because of the fact that we live much longer than we are fertile, it really damages any idea of "Well we'll just solve this when it becomes a problem." When it starts to become obvious there's a problem, the decline is already coming at an exponential rate. And it's entirely possible that such a small youth population supporting a suddenly massive elderly population will drive fertility rates even lower. It increasingly seems that the future of our planet will not be decided by politics, ideology, or anything of the sort. It will simply be decided by whichever groups have children at healthy rates.
- sjducb 4y agoI had never appreciated this. I intuitively thought that the decline would be gradual.
- russdill 4y agoThe population didn't double over the first 60 years unless your 100 newborns were created ex nihilo.
- mcv 4y agoTrue, but if Korea used to have a birth rate over over 5, those 100 newborns could have been born from 40 twenties.
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- pigtailgirl 4y ago-- Our study suggests that even modest habitual alcohol consumption of more than 5 units per week had adverse effects on semen quality although most pronounced associations were seen in men who consumed more than 25 units per week. Alcohol consumption was also linked to changes in testosterone and SHBG levels. [a] Women in the highest alcohol consumption group (14 units or more per week) had 37 pregnancies in 307 cycles, and those who did not drink had 1,381 pregnancies in 8,054 cycles. These figures equate to an 18 percent decrease in the probability that the women would conceive. [b] South Korea handily dominates the list of countries, drinking more than twice as much liquor per capita as any other country. [c] -- a) https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/9/e005462 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/9/e005462 b) https://www.bmj.com/content/354/bmj.i4540.full https://www.bmj.com/content/354/bmj.i4540.full c) https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-drink-most-liquor-map-2014-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-drink-most-liquor-...
- insaider 4y agoI predict a future in which a much greater proportion of the child-rearing responsibility is taken over by governments. A futuristic boarding school kinda thing
- rayiner 4y agoSo my dad spent his career working on US family planning efforts abroad. (We came here from Bangladesh because of my dad's work at a US public health company.) And the results have been positive in many ways: the fertility is down from 7 when my dad was born to 2 today. At the same time, the whole shtick was kind of "there's too many Asians!" I can't help but think that these efforts condemned these countries to long term decline. There was a generation who had it ingrained in them that having kids is bad. We have three kids (about average in my American wife's family) but my parents definitely gave us the side-eye when we got pregnant with the third. I wonder if Korea is Bangladesh's future? Maybe Islam will help avoid a sub-1.0 fertility rate, who knows. The decline in fertility has a palpable effect on society. Despite being raised in the US, this country, at least the places where I've lived in coastal metros, feels so lonely to me. I've felt that especially acutely since we had kids. We had our first at 27, and for the better part of a decade we were the odd-one-out among most of our friends showing up to places with a kid. There is a numeric basis for this feeling. In 1960, when the U.S. fertility rate was 3.5, fully 35% of the population was children. Today, it's 22%. You can see that difference just around your neighborhood.
- jxramos 4y agoThat odd one out deal I picked up on too in my experience. It really awoke in me a perception of the whole sense of family friendly vs adult oriented. I realized I had been on an adult only train for decades never contemplating the absence of children as being anything abnormal. I just assumed for the most part they were around just not in the venues or circles I mingled with. Eventually I realized they’re mostly absent never having been born. That was a pretty stark realization I think that hit me when Kaiser released some document about “Children, California’s Most Precious Resource”. The adult oriented world I realized was a diversion into all sorts of endeavors unrelated to continuing the species. There’s a saying I heard like in the last 2 years let’s say—-a place that isn’t crying is dying. Ie no cries of children being heard that group of individuals will be no more in say 60 years.
- rayiner 4y agoIt’s a stark stark difference. Going into a restaurant in DC versus say a heavily Hispanic suburb of Texas. Nearly everything’s family friendly by default in the latter place. Just because you’d have no customers if you weren’t.
- creakingstairs 4y agoI've been meaning to write about this for a while, but this does not surprise me in the least. The life in Korea is way too competitive and stressful. The hellscape begins in pre-school and primary school where parents make kids go to private school AFTER school, often till late evenings. This progressively gets worse and worse until university. In my father's generation, people could relax after getting into university. They could party around, barely pass and still get decent jobs. Nowadays, that's definitely not the case. Getting a good job is insanely hard. You need to take care of your GPA. English certs like TOFLE/TOEIC are pretty much mandatory and you'd probably want other cert/ extra curricular experience. Okay. So you've went through all that and you've got yourself a good job. Now that's all done, can you finally start to relax and enjoy life? Haha, no. 52-hour weekly working limit has only recently been introduced, and the current president wants to get rid of that. Even if you work your ass off, it is _very_ unlikely that you can ever afford an apartment in Seoul. In the end, you have tired and jaded people without a fun childhood, who can't even buy their own house. I certainly would not choose to have children in these circumstances. I've "escaped" and live a decent life outside of Korea now. But I have many friends in Korea who have "given up" (in various ways) in light of all this . There are some friends who are married and have kids, but they all have rich parents or studied/hustled really hard. In spite of all this, I miss Korea so much. But I don't think I'll be going back. This is only one reason in declining fertility rate. There are many more (some mentioned in other comments) but this comment is already getting too ranty. --- EDIT: This comment got much more attention than I thought it would and I'd like to add some positive stuff too. There are certainly people who enjoy life in Korea by refusing to participate in the rat race and by prioitising building meaningful communities in their lives. Some things are getting better, albeit slowly, with each generation.
- meitham 4y ago> by refusing to participate in the rat race That does indeed sounds like a rat race! I have just came across this art which visually resembles what you described https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDk&t=7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDk&t=7s
- missedthecue 4y agoWho is renting all the apartments in Seoul if every smart person with a perfect GPA and 52 hour a week job can't afford it?
- mangecoeur 4y agoA bit absurd to roll out all these fertility stats but never even mention social issues behind these trends, like a patriarchal culture, excessive over work, poor conditions for retirees…
- celtain 4y agoHow does a patriarchal culture contribute to lower fertility rates? If anything I would expect the opposite effect.
- mirzap 4y agoPeople are worried that over-population is problem, some idiots even decide not to have children. But real problem is the opposite - population collapse. How do you plan to retire if there's not enough young people to sustain ever growing older population. Rough times are ahead of us, something we haven't yet experienced.
- croes 4y ago>How do you plan to retire if there's not enough young people to sustain ever growing older population. Higher efficiency, higher wages especially in social security jobs, and of course a universal social security system How do you plan to solve the problems of a growing population? The consequences of things climate change will hit harder.
- mirzap 4y ago> Higher efficiency, higher wages especially in social security jobs, and of course a universal social security system efficiency has its limits. And we are reaching it, I would argue we reached it already. Without full automation there's not much room for "efficiency". There's no growing population on the west, it is declining sharply if you exclude immigration. There's not enough people to work with elderly. Germany desperately tries to import people for elderly care for years. Also, from what I read and researched the LARGEST single polluter on entire planet is the US military complex. Even if entire world switched to electric cars, eat less meat, it wouldn't make a dent in a greenhouse gas emissions. Not to mention that 50% of all produced food in the west is a waste. There's place for 20b people on this world, no shortages of land, resources. We just need to change our habits and drop consumerism (as we know it). If everyone bought only what they need, and consumed 99% of food they bought, that would result in less pollution than 3b people buying 200-300% more that they need.
- croes 4y agoAnd we are far away from reaching efficiency peak. If you look closely there is an incredible amount of useless workforce
- _zamorano_ 4y agoTo me, goverments 'green' measures are just patches that won't work, but are very likely to ruin the lifestyle of the middle class, while the affluent keep theirs untouched. At the same time, the only real solution that is population decline, is 'spontaniously' happening without any policies like one child per couple, and so. If the economics of an older population are much easier to solve than our progressive destruction of the environment... Why not incentivice policies to keep people childless?
- choeger 4y agoI think that this trend is self-reinforcing: When you have fewer children, you need to activate a larger part of your young population for work. A big pool (the largest?) is women who traditionally don't work or work less than men. Working makes it difficult to raise children (and might make the decision to have them difficult, too). In consequence, you end up with less children this year and run short of workers 20 years later. Child care will never fully remove this effect for three simple reasons: Child care workers are scarce (as they are, traditionally, mostly women), children can only deal with child care for a certain amount of time (it is really exhausting for smaller kids), and getting the kids to and from child care acts like extra hours of unpaid work for the family. So if a state wants to have a more stable local population, I think it will be inevitable to subsidize families more directly: Reduce working hours for parents (equally, of course) and fully pay the difference (would be really interesting to do a cost/benefit calculation here). Give out other perks (cheaper mortgages, maybe parking space or other permits, first choice when it comes to vacation, maybe the parents get a vote for their children and so on). Finally, the state might even turn to penalizing child-less adults or "nudge" people into having babies (e.g., by taxing contraceptives). If you don't agree with such an active role of the state, consider the alternative: active control of migration. This in turn brings its own set of problems that all nudge the state to take authoritarian measures (for instance border control ala US-Mexico). Consequently, any industrialized state has to take an active role regarding demographics and I think it will look somewhat dystopian in our eyes.
- bruce343434 4y agoFrom what I've heard South Korea is very capitalist and people are overworked. Suicide rates are crazy. It's all pointing back to Maslow's hierarchy again; perhaps people just don't have the energy to start a family amidst all that pressure and stress.
- imtringued 4y agoYouth unemployment is incredibly high in the EU. The reason for that is pretty obvious. The old people don't want to stop working.
- 627467 4y agoI see lots of references to difficult economic situation as justification for low fertility rate in advanced economies, which obviously is a huge external factor but another one IMHO is the cultural shift towards individualism. Why sacrifice personal rights for other people (aka children)? We shifted from huge social-religous pressure to procreate to zero (or negative) pressure to do so.
- 12907835202 4y agoI imagine booming populations in Africa will likely offset much of the working population in these countries with low birth rates. As a European I can imagine what impact having high immigration from Africa mixed with all the property being unaffordable and owned by older white generations will have i.e. huge disparity in wealth between black and white, quick growth of black population and decline in white population, rise in racial tensions, rise of far right and claims of being assimilated. I'm pretty ignorant about places like Korea and Japan though. Is there any hope they won't suffer the same difficulties? Here's an article about predicted population changes: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jun/13/nigeria-larger-population-us-2050 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jun/13/n...
- thematrixturtle 4y agoKorea and Japan are very much against mass immigration. Koreans in particular are notoriously xenophobic: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/world/asia/south-korea-diversity-muslims.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/world/asia/south-korea-di... There's also an even weirder anti-feminist backlash happening as well.
- mcv 4y agoThose are unhealthy attitudes. It would be good if they addressed this, but sadly societies and cultures are rarely rational about how they develop. Much of modern life is determined by culture, but despite culture being entirely man-made, we don't seem to be able to control it.
- seydor 4y ago> booming populations in Africa will likely offset much of the working population Not really , as they don't do today, because they are not educated , and there is not enough time to wait for second-generation immigrants. Also, africans have no obligation to become subservient again to the developed world via immigration.
- 12907835202 4y ago
- simonebrunozzi 4y agoI hate when journalists use nasty tricks to make their point stronger. This is not good journalism. Look at the "Rich but Shrinking" graph in the article. I'll report the numbers here for simplicity: Country / number of babies per woman Israel: 2.9 Mexico: 2.1 France: 1.8 US: 1.6 Australia: 1.6 UK: 1.6 Germany: 1.5 Canada: 1.5 Spain: 1.4 Japan: 1.3 Korea: 0.8 (all numbers as of 2020 except Korea) Now, there are a few things happening with this. 1) Numbers are wrong. Based on World Data [0], Spain is 1.2, not 1.4. 2) Notable countries are missing from the list: Hong Kong (0.9), Singapore (0.9), Italy (1.2). 3) "Korea is the world’s fastest-aging nation among economies with per capita GDP of at least $30,000," conflicts with the fact that you include Mexico in your list of countries (Mexico's GDP is below $30,000), just to make Korea's problem look worse. [0]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_recent_value_desc=false https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...
- thematrixturtle 4y agoSingapore is small and an educational pressure cooker like Korea, but makes up for its low birthrate with huge amounts of both permanent skilled immigration and temporary unskilled foreign labor. This is an unusual combo, but it's unlikely to face a demographic crunch anytime soon.
- ralfd 4y ago> Inviting more women, elderly people and foreigners into the workforce is another goal. Hate to say it, but inviting women into the workforce will likely lower the rate even more.
- cpursley 4y agoI wonder how this compares to North Korean rates? Same people genetically but vastly different culture and system at this point.
- Wolfenstein98k 4y agoDifferent people genetically. North Koreans were noticeably shorter on average by the year 2000, less than two generations after the split.
- cpursley 4y agoInteresting, didn't know that!
- midoridensha 4y agoThat's probably mostly due to terrible childhood nutrition. The same thing happened to humans when they switched from being hunter-gatherers to using agriculture: they dropped a foot in height.
- nofollow 4y agoif the kdramas are indicative of their society, they believe kissing will make you pregnant ;-) seriously, they should take a page out of japan's playbook- legalize pornography and establish a contest to encourage economic and population growth :-)
- seszett 4y agoJapan is probably the second rich country with the lowest fertility rate after Korea. It's really the worst country to look at if Korea wants to improve their fertility rate.
- midoridensha 4y agoNo, it's not. It's their closest neighbor, somewhat similar culturally, and while the birthrate is still low, 1.3 is still much higher than 0.8. It's a big improvement.
- dsq 4y agoI read so many comments here trying to make having zero kids into some kind of FU to the system. While what will eventually happen is professional families birthing and raising as many children as the state and corporations need, making the regular nuclear family obsolete. It will also make the family superfluous, enabling govt to completely disregard it.
- midoridensha 4y ago"Brave New World" shows what the future is going to look like. Honestly, it looks like a better society than the ones we have now.
- dsq 4y agoIt sounds dystopian until one recognizes that things seems pretty much so already.
- patall 4y agoAs someone born in a situation like this (east Germany also had a fertility rate of 0.8 in the mid nineties, albeit under different circumstances), I now find it interesting how unimportant that is to you as a child. Sure, in retro-perspective it is clear that all those schools closing or down-sizing was an extreme trend but that aside, I cannot say that I ever felt like we were few kids. I mean, I had all my friends at school and many of those had siblings, neighbors had usually kids, most of my parents friends eventually had kids. And when we were starting university, we thought we were too many as mandatory military draft was abolished and hence more students were starting that year. I am not sure what this tells me but probably that there must have been a marginalized fraction of the population that I never noticed (and living in a relatively young university town probably helped at that). Then again, obviously, our fertility rate was only that low for a couple of years and 'rebounded' to 1.3-1.5 soon after.
- bongoman37 4y ago
- mrjin 4y agoWhen animals are stressed, they stop breeding. So why we are surprised to see exact the same behavior on ourselves?
- mupuff1234 4y agoExpecting to see Musk's jet land in Seoul any day now.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- flerovium 4y agoIn Korea, income is positively correlated with fertility. https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/39/44-39.pdf https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/39/44-39.... In the West, it was historically (1900-2000) the opposite. In fact, the fertility of the rich is similar between regions. The difference is that in Korea, the less advantaged have many fewer children. Understanding this goes a long way toward understanding "Why don't they fix this?" For some, there is no problem.