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Countries need to get serious about raising their birth rates. Korea is expected to have a 94% decline in the Korean population in 3 generations.

nashashmi 3y ago
I dont think there is any solution that govts can put forward. It is far from their purpose. There needs to be a change in social approach. And treating men and women like they are the same is the first problem.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  This is absolutely a governmental issue- S Korea and the US are similar in that people are having fewer children in these places because having children is prohibitively expensive. Having children is prohibitively expensive because income inequality is at an all time high - a smaller and smaller portion of people are able to capture more and more of the resources. Income inequality is a direct result of government policy and can be mediated with changes to those policies. It's happened before, and it can happen again.
  - nashashmi 3y ago
    Are the birth rates higher among rich people? My impression is that they have fewer children. Historically, More materials and wealth means less children. Can govt really cause people to have more children? Or can they just remove roadblocks? I would go with the latter. The former is a social problem.
    - polski-g 3y ago
      The very rich and very poor have a lot of children. The middle have little.
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      In the US it depends entirely on whether you're married. Household income goes up? You get more likely to have kids if you're married. Hard to tease out but here's a start https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertility/time-series/household-income/t7.xlsx https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertili...
  - polski-g 3y ago
    This is a pretend cope. People had more children during the Great Depression than they do now. Ethiopians during a 10 year famine had more children than Westerners do now. Its not related to money.
    - sneed_chucker 3y ago
      Yup. Germany pays people 200€ per month per kid. They still have lower TFR than the United States.
      - abudabi123 3y ago
        Charities asking for money use images of desperate and needy women and children in there advertising campaigns kind of discourages the will to bring more into this world. Having two handfuls of children used to get gov. handouts equal to an exec's pay but I don't know if times have changed and those social programs are gone.
    - tukantje 3y ago
      Life is expensive. Kids are even more expensive. With both partners working, having a kid is one hell of a pandora's box regarding costs, care etc. People have a high expectation of what is a reasonable standard of living for their kids, which pushes the age when they try (if ever) further and further as well. It sure as hell is a money issue. Just not a cheap one.
    - sfmike 3y ago
      Agreed it's culture. some cultures have ten kids and they work the farm. Kids are quite cheap if you don't have the attitude of each kid needs new clothes, car, and college. In fact they can sort of become free and cheap labor if you're ever been to certain family restaurants and their child waited on you who was around 13 yelling back to the cook your order.
  - nullsense 3y ago
    Work culture and family life probably have a lot to do with it in addition to cost.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    While it expensive and I’m sure that discourages some, richer people seem to have even less kids than poorer people.
- theprincess 3y ago
  > treating men and women like they are the same is the first problem Russia is rather socially conservative and their birth rates are low as well. It's quite a stretch to blame low birth rates on gender equality given the scope of cultures and societies where low birth rates have been a problem. Some other common factor would seem much more likely. Maybe economic incentives. Unless you also think Russia is too progressive for you tastes. If so, what does your ideal social system look like with respect to the enforcement of gender roles, where women are expected to bear 3 or more children? What would enforcement of these roles look like in the society you're envisaging? If you could honestly and clearly answer those questions I'd be very impressed. Then, I would follow it up with: and do you think many people would enjoy living in the society you've just dreamed up? If yes, is there a status quo ante that was similar to what you're describing (seems likely given that women's emancipation is fairly recent and lots of different patriarchal structures have been tried out over the millennia)? Can you try to trace out why that status quo was left behind in favor of where we are now? If no, how do you plan to persuade people to live less comfortably so that birth rates are as high as you'd like to see them? Persuasion is your only tool, because you've already said that you don't think government is the answer, and, without persuasion, you'd need to use force. To use force you'd need the government to act in some capacity, or at least _not_ act in a way that's complicit e.g. by not prosecuting honor killings carried out against anti-natalist daughters and sisters or at least condoning discrimination against childless women.
  - nashashmi 3y ago
    I think you have assumed the worst from my comment. A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences. You asked me to quote birth rates so I looked up birth rates of Russian minorities. I could not find any but I did find this: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/26/world/mother-russia-makes-a-comeback-on-births.html https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/26/world/mother-russia-makes...
    - theprincess 3y ago
      > I think you have assumed the worst from my comment. I assumed that you are against gender equality. Gender equality meaning that men and women are given the freedom to do as they wish without being sanctioned. I think you'll find that men and women tend to gravitate toward very different lifestyles in the most egalitarian societies - look at gender ratios in various job fields in Norway or Sweden - but life is much easier for those men and women who are not typical. It seems rather wasteful to organize society around the needs of 80% while forcing 20% into a box that doesn't fit them. Better to let people self sort. If you think gender equality means that women are being sanctioned for doing traditionally womanly things like home making or mothering I'd have to ask where you got the information that led you to that conclusion because it doesn't fit with my own experiences growing up in the United States. > A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences. This comment is just a roundabout way of saying that you believe gender equality is bad. > You asked me to quote birth rates so I looked up birth rates of Russian minorities. Why minorities? What makes them substantially different from, say, an Orthodox white Russian who lives in St. Petersburg, or one who lives in Yakutia for that matter?
- Serenacula 3y ago
  Funny, many of the places with the lowest birth rates are actually very socially conservative, with poor track records on gender equality. Japan, Korea, Russia, etc. I've heard people argue the exact opposite - intense work cultures tire out the male working class. That combined with a gender culture that discourages women being forward with their intentions, and no way to meet people of other genders socially, means it becomes difficult to actually meet or date people. There is a lack of free time, a lack of opportunity, and a lack of motivation. Frankly, it sounds to me like the issue would be solved by bringing in better working conditions.
  - nashashmi 3y ago
    Working culture (not conditions) are a factor indeed. We are driven to have more and therefore work more. This also means having less room for children. But family institutions are less stable now then they have been before. I blame overwork for this, and also commercialism that has taken away needs of a nurtured family. This is not a govt problem.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      I blame people's expectations, and also women's rights. People point to poor nations, or the Great Depression, as times or places when people had/have more kids. But peoples' expectations are different there. People during the Depression didn't expect to send their kids to college, for instance; usually, they just put them to work on the farm, or in factories. These days, we don't allow child labor, and want kids to get an education for some strange reason, and that all costs money. Women's rights and contraception are also a big issue. A century ago, women didn't have any rights. Their husbands could beat them if they got drunk and mad, and it was OK. Women couldn't have real jobs. Basically they were slaves. They could (usually) choose whom to marry, but it was a crapshoot, and divorce was usually unobtainable, plus women couldn't survive on their own very well. Plus contraception wasn't very good. These days, for some strange reason, this has changed and women now have rights, and aren't stuck being slaves to their husbands, so they have the ability to choose whether to marry at all (!), and how many kids to have, if any. If we want people to have lots of kids again, we need to make women 2nd-class citizens without the ability to have gainful employment, we have to ban good contraception and divorce, we have to allow spousal abuse, and we have to allow children to be forced to work in dangerous and dirty factories.
floxy 3y ago
I wonder when the population of South Korea (55 million) will fall to the level of North Korea (25 million).
- justrealist 3y ago
  The "effective" population will equalize much faster. SK has extremely high longevity, which is a success, but it means that 9 million of those are already de-facto out of the workforce and are a liability, not an (economic or military) asset. North Korea has really low longevity, which is bad, but it means that more of those 25 million are young.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  SK only has some 3 million fighting age men. And every year more age out than age in. That's all that matters to the border in the end. Doomed nation without changing course.
  - kwere 3y ago
    time to enlist women to make korean feminists happy
treeman79 3y ago
Funny. Have certain politicians and groups demand we depopulate the planet. While others want higher birthdates.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  That’s not new: Religious fanatics preaching the end of the world versus those building up progress is as old as recorded history. Removing the religious trappings doesn’t change the behavior.
- asquabventured 3y ago
  [flagged]
diversionfactor 3y ago
In a developed country low birth rates are the norm. The exception is certain religious subgroups within these countries. Notably Mormons with 50% higher fertility rates than average in most counties surveyed: https://rsc.byu.edu/latter-day-saint-social-life/religious-influences-mormon-fertility https://rsc.byu.edu/latter-day-saint-social-life/religious-i... And Orthodox Jews with over triple the birth rate of secular Jewish women: https://en.idi.org.il/haredi/2020/?chapter=34272 https://en.idi.org.il/haredi/2020/?chapter=34272 These two groups also have high defection rates of around 50%, but if current trends continue (always a big if in demographic studies) most people in the future developed world will either belong to strongly religious groups or be former members of such groups. I myself am secular, strongly so. My wife is just as strongly religious and her fertility rate is over three times our national average at her insistence which I voluntarily agreed to. I’m concerned that us secularists have no good answer to why anyone should have children and as I result I can see secularism dying out long term, which I consider a philosophical tragedy. If anyone has any answers I’d love to hear them, unless the only answer is, oddly enough Augustine’s religious and Schopenhauer’s secular retort that the voluntary extinction of humanity would be the most supreme achievement of the will: https://theconversation.com/amp/solve-suffering-by-blowing-up-the-universe-the-dubious-philosophy-of-human-extinction-149331 https://theconversation.com/amp/solve-suffering-by-blowing-u... Regardless of the validity of such arguments, in my mind they fail the Darwinian test and will be eliminated by the ruthless and indifferent force of biological evolution.
- bigthymer 3y ago
  > as I result I can see secularism dying out long term It won't die out for the same reason homosexuality doesn't. Recruits will be poached from the other team.
  - Dig1t 3y ago
    Well, this generation is basically the first where being gay is socially acceptable. Presumably a lot of gay people in the past mostly were forced to remain closeted and end up marrying/reproducing with the opposite sex. Now that being gay is socially acceptable, it remains an open question of whether gay people will ultimately select themselves out of the gene pool or not. In my opinion, it seems likely that it will happen for the same reason that OP thinks it will happen for secular people.
ytch 3y ago
Meanwhile some employers complain that paid parental leave costs too much. Don't they know that young engineer need to be raised by parents from baby?
- iinnPP 3y ago
  That's the next person's problem. I hear the next person's name is tomorrow.
majikaja 3y ago
Lots of people just don't want to have children that much. It doesn't matter what incentives they are given. They'd rather hang out with their friends until old age. Lots of people don't consider their opposite-sex equal to be attractive enough to want to marry them that much either.
- kwere 3y ago
  one big incentive would be to shut down social security or old age pensions, as to make people more self-reliant for their own sustainment instead of an abstract system of relying on other future abiding citizens, a system that in most countries is near bankruptcy bcs people lost one drive to create the next generation. tragedy of the commons?
  - majikaja 3y ago
    People nowadays expect others to foot the bill for their life choices
oska 3y ago
While demographics can be a slow turning ship, it is ridiculous to project 3 generations ahead. As is demonstrated by your 'expected figure' of a 94% decline.

nashashmi 3y ago

I dont think there is any solution that govts can put forward. It is far from their purpose. There needs to be a change in social approach. And treating men and women like they are the same is the first problem.

idiotsecant 3y ago
This is absolutely a governmental issue- S Korea and the US are similar in that people are having fewer children in these places because having children is prohibitively expensive. Having children is prohibitively expensive because income inequality is at an all time high - a smaller and smaller portion of people are able to capture more and more of the resources. Income inequality is a direct result of government policy and can be mediated with changes to those policies. It's happened before, and it can happen again.
- nashashmi 3y ago
  Are the birth rates higher among rich people? My impression is that they have fewer children. Historically, More materials and wealth means less children. Can govt really cause people to have more children? Or can they just remove roadblocks? I would go with the latter. The former is a social problem.
  - polski-g 3y ago
    The very rich and very poor have a lot of children. The middle have little.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    In the US it depends entirely on whether you're married. Household income goes up? You get more likely to have kids if you're married. Hard to tease out but here's a start https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertility/time-series/household-income/t7.xlsx https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertili...
- polski-g 3y ago
  This is a pretend cope. People had more children during the Great Depression than they do now. Ethiopians during a 10 year famine had more children than Westerners do now. Its not related to money.
  - sneed_chucker 3y ago
    Yup. Germany pays people 200€ per month per kid. They still have lower TFR than the United States.
    - abudabi123 3y ago
      Charities asking for money use images of desperate and needy women and children in there advertising campaigns kind of discourages the will to bring more into this world. Having two handfuls of children used to get gov. handouts equal to an exec's pay but I don't know if times have changed and those social programs are gone.
  - tukantje 3y ago
    Life is expensive. Kids are even more expensive. With both partners working, having a kid is one hell of a pandora's box regarding costs, care etc. People have a high expectation of what is a reasonable standard of living for their kids, which pushes the age when they try (if ever) further and further as well. It sure as hell is a money issue. Just not a cheap one.
  - sfmike 3y ago
    Agreed it's culture. some cultures have ten kids and they work the farm. Kids are quite cheap if you don't have the attitude of each kid needs new clothes, car, and college. In fact they can sort of become free and cheap labor if you're ever been to certain family restaurants and their child waited on you who was around 13 yelling back to the cook your order.
- nullsense 3y ago
  Work culture and family life probably have a lot to do with it in addition to cost.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  While it expensive and I’m sure that discourages some, richer people seem to have even less kids than poorer people.
theprincess 3y ago
> treating men and women like they are the same is the first problem Russia is rather socially conservative and their birth rates are low as well. It's quite a stretch to blame low birth rates on gender equality given the scope of cultures and societies where low birth rates have been a problem. Some other common factor would seem much more likely. Maybe economic incentives. Unless you also think Russia is too progressive for you tastes. If so, what does your ideal social system look like with respect to the enforcement of gender roles, where women are expected to bear 3 or more children? What would enforcement of these roles look like in the society you're envisaging? If you could honestly and clearly answer those questions I'd be very impressed. Then, I would follow it up with: and do you think many people would enjoy living in the society you've just dreamed up? If yes, is there a status quo ante that was similar to what you're describing (seems likely given that women's emancipation is fairly recent and lots of different patriarchal structures have been tried out over the millennia)? Can you try to trace out why that status quo was left behind in favor of where we are now? If no, how do you plan to persuade people to live less comfortably so that birth rates are as high as you'd like to see them? Persuasion is your only tool, because you've already said that you don't think government is the answer, and, without persuasion, you'd need to use force. To use force you'd need the government to act in some capacity, or at least _not_ act in a way that's complicit e.g. by not prosecuting honor killings carried out against anti-natalist daughters and sisters or at least condoning discrimination against childless women.
- nashashmi 3y ago
  I think you have assumed the worst from my comment. A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences. You asked me to quote birth rates so I looked up birth rates of Russian minorities. I could not find any but I did find this: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/26/world/mother-russia-makes-a-comeback-on-births.html https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/26/world/mother-russia-makes...
  - theprincess 3y ago
    > I think you have assumed the worst from my comment. I assumed that you are against gender equality. Gender equality meaning that men and women are given the freedom to do as they wish without being sanctioned. I think you'll find that men and women tend to gravitate toward very different lifestyles in the most egalitarian societies - look at gender ratios in various job fields in Norway or Sweden - but life is much easier for those men and women who are not typical. It seems rather wasteful to organize society around the needs of 80% while forcing 20% into a box that doesn't fit them. Better to let people self sort. If you think gender equality means that women are being sanctioned for doing traditionally womanly things like home making or mothering I'd have to ask where you got the information that led you to that conclusion because it doesn't fit with my own experiences growing up in the United States. > A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences. This comment is just a roundabout way of saying that you believe gender equality is bad. > You asked me to quote birth rates so I looked up birth rates of Russian minorities. Why minorities? What makes them substantially different from, say, an Orthodox white Russian who lives in St. Petersburg, or one who lives in Yakutia for that matter?
Serenacula 3y ago
Funny, many of the places with the lowest birth rates are actually very socially conservative, with poor track records on gender equality. Japan, Korea, Russia, etc. I've heard people argue the exact opposite - intense work cultures tire out the male working class. That combined with a gender culture that discourages women being forward with their intentions, and no way to meet people of other genders socially, means it becomes difficult to actually meet or date people. There is a lack of free time, a lack of opportunity, and a lack of motivation. Frankly, it sounds to me like the issue would be solved by bringing in better working conditions.
- nashashmi 3y ago
  Working culture (not conditions) are a factor indeed. We are driven to have more and therefore work more. This also means having less room for children. But family institutions are less stable now then they have been before. I blame overwork for this, and also commercialism that has taken away needs of a nurtured family. This is not a govt problem.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    I blame people's expectations, and also women's rights. People point to poor nations, or the Great Depression, as times or places when people had/have more kids. But peoples' expectations are different there. People during the Depression didn't expect to send their kids to college, for instance; usually, they just put them to work on the farm, or in factories. These days, we don't allow child labor, and want kids to get an education for some strange reason, and that all costs money. Women's rights and contraception are also a big issue. A century ago, women didn't have any rights. Their husbands could beat them if they got drunk and mad, and it was OK. Women couldn't have real jobs. Basically they were slaves. They could (usually) choose whom to marry, but it was a crapshoot, and divorce was usually unobtainable, plus women couldn't survive on their own very well. Plus contraception wasn't very good. These days, for some strange reason, this has changed and women now have rights, and aren't stuck being slaves to their husbands, so they have the ability to choose whether to marry at all (!), and how many kids to have, if any. If we want people to have lots of kids again, we need to make women 2nd-class citizens without the ability to have gainful employment, we have to ban good contraception and divorce, we have to allow spousal abuse, and we have to allow children to be forced to work in dangerous and dirty factories.

floxy 3y ago

I wonder when the population of South Korea (55 million) will fall to the level of North Korea (25 million).

justrealist 3y ago
The "effective" population will equalize much faster. SK has extremely high longevity, which is a success, but it means that 9 million of those are already de-facto out of the workforce and are a liability, not an (economic or military) asset. North Korea has really low longevity, which is bad, but it means that more of those 25 million are young.
renewiltord 3y ago
SK only has some 3 million fighting age men. And every year more age out than age in. That's all that matters to the border in the end. Doomed nation without changing course.
- kwere 3y ago
  time to enlist women to make korean feminists happy

treeman79 3y ago

Funny. Have certain politicians and groups demand we depopulate the planet. While others want higher birthdates.

zmgsabst 3y ago
That’s not new: Religious fanatics preaching the end of the world versus those building up progress is as old as recorded history. Removing the religious trappings doesn’t change the behavior.
asquabventured 3y ago
[flagged]

diversionfactor 3y ago

In a developed country low birth rates are the norm. The exception is certain religious subgroups within these countries. Notably Mormons with 50% higher fertility rates than average in most counties surveyed: https://rsc.byu.edu/latter-day-saint-social-life/religious-influences-mormon-fertility https://rsc.byu.edu/latter-day-saint-social-life/religious-i... And Orthodox Jews with over triple the birth rate of secular Jewish women: https://en.idi.org.il/haredi/2020/?chapter=34272 https://en.idi.org.il/haredi/2020/?chapter=34272 These two groups also have high defection rates of around 50%, but if current trends continue (always a big if in demographic studies) most people in the future developed world will either belong to strongly religious groups or be former members of such groups. I myself am secular, strongly so. My wife is just as strongly religious and her fertility rate is over three times our national average at her insistence which I voluntarily agreed to. I’m concerned that us secularists have no good answer to why anyone should have children and as I result I can see secularism dying out long term, which I consider a philosophical tragedy. If anyone has any answers I’d love to hear them, unless the only answer is, oddly enough Augustine’s religious and Schopenhauer’s secular retort that the voluntary extinction of humanity would be the most supreme achievement of the will: https://theconversation.com/amp/solve-suffering-by-blowing-up-the-universe-the-dubious-philosophy-of-human-extinction-149331 https://theconversation.com/amp/solve-suffering-by-blowing-u... Regardless of the validity of such arguments, in my mind they fail the Darwinian test and will be eliminated by the ruthless and indifferent force of biological evolution.

bigthymer 3y ago
> as I result I can see secularism dying out long term It won't die out for the same reason homosexuality doesn't. Recruits will be poached from the other team.
- Dig1t 3y ago
  Well, this generation is basically the first where being gay is socially acceptable. Presumably a lot of gay people in the past mostly were forced to remain closeted and end up marrying/reproducing with the opposite sex. Now that being gay is socially acceptable, it remains an open question of whether gay people will ultimately select themselves out of the gene pool or not. In my opinion, it seems likely that it will happen for the same reason that OP thinks it will happen for secular people.

ytch 3y ago

Meanwhile some employers complain that paid parental leave costs too much. Don't they know that young engineer need to be raised by parents from baby?

iinnPP 3y ago
That's the next person's problem. I hear the next person's name is tomorrow.

majikaja 3y ago

Lots of people just don't want to have children that much. It doesn't matter what incentives they are given. They'd rather hang out with their friends until old age. Lots of people don't consider their opposite-sex equal to be attractive enough to want to marry them that much either.

kwere 3y ago
one big incentive would be to shut down social security or old age pensions, as to make people more self-reliant for their own sustainment instead of an abstract system of relying on other future abiding citizens, a system that in most countries is near bankruptcy bcs people lost one drive to create the next generation. tragedy of the commons?
- majikaja 3y ago
  People nowadays expect others to foot the bill for their life choices

oska 3y ago

While demographics can be a slow turning ship, it is ridiculous to project 3 generations ahead. As is demonstrated by your 'expected figure' of a 94% decline.