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Anyone who looked at demographic trends 10+ years ago knew that this was coming. As far back as the late 90s, it was clear that universities were overinvesting

by timr 1y ago

Anyone who looked at demographic trends 10+ years ago knew that this was coming. As far back as the late 90s, it was clear that universities were overinvesting into the one of the last echos of the baby boom.

somenameforme 1y ago
A lot of people are, in general, in denial of what reduced fertility will bring. Consequences lag effect by decades so it's not exactly a secret what the future will hold. For instance most don't realize that Japan is still in the 'good ole days', relative to what awaits them in the future, even as places like Tokyo start to shrink today. I also think people don't realize how fast things start happening once they do start happening. For another example there you can approximate the change in population due to fertility (once a fertility rate is shared among a population) as being a scalar on population of fertility_rate/2 every 20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 means each and every woman has 1 child on average, yet nonetheless that means your population ends up declining by 50% every 20 years, exponentially, until you start having a healthy number of children again, or go extinct. So for a bemusing one one, North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war. And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. South Korea with their fertility rate of 0.75 will not only see catastrophic population decline, but their entire economy will collapse alongside it. Going from 0.75 to a healthy fertility rate is probably not going to happen, so the North needs to merely wait, and keep having children.
- nyokodo 1y ago
  > And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. Except their fertility is below replacement also and as a poverty stricken repressive regime that relies on food aid from South Korea, China, and probably Russia lately the latter having their own terminal demographic crises… they might not out-survive the south for long. 1. https://www.newsweek.com/how-north-korea-news-births-compare-south-1955156 https://www.newsweek.com/how-north-korea-news-births-compare...
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    Your article gives North Korea a fertility rate of 1.78, which is substantially higher than even the US at 1.62. South Korea is an entirely different world at 0.75. So you're looking at a population change per 20 years of -11% in North Korea, -19% in the US, and -62% in South Korea!! None of these are good of course, but the timeline of decline and collapse are quite different. All numbers from here, which is just a cleaner representation of UN numbers: https://www.worldometers.info/population/world/ https://www.worldometers.info/population/world/ In the end I think the future will become much like the past in that fertility is essentially the point of a nation. What is a few generations of fading prosperity when the longterm cost is the very survival of said civilization? It's just a nonsense deal that nobody would ever agree to on a macro scale, but that most of all Western civilization is trending towards.
- 999900000999 1y ago
  South Korea probably already has immigration reform ready to go. They’ll just do everything else before letting people meaningfully immigrate. A “Korean” in 2100 might have Filipino, Indian, African ancestry. In fact the way things are going Africa will probably end up as the nursery of the world for a few decades. Then birth rates will collapse there too. The robots should be ready then
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    Think about the implications of what you're suggesting in practice. You're not going to attract tens of millions of desirable migrants. They literally don't exist. And this is even more true as South Korea is but an extreme example of a trend happening through most of all Western bloc nations. So you're going to end up having to import people with relatively little education, skills or experience, who don't speak, read, or write the language, have no knowledge of the culture, dramatically different working/cultural values, and so on. Europe was, in many ways, a trial run for this sort of scenario on a far smaller scale than what you're talking about, and the results have not been good. Immigration is not really a sustainable solution.
    - 999900000999 1y ago
      When you’re 90 and need someone to give you a sponge bath, cultural differences don’t matter much. You do get weird stories like Filipino nurses treating elderly WW2 era Japanese soldiers. I’m sure it’s only awkward for a moment. You could have said the same thing about any new immigrants anywhere. How will the Irish fit in Boston? How will Ukrainians make it in Chicago?
      - somenameforme 1y ago
        I think the Irish are a great example. We often think it was some huge migration because they had a really tough time integrating in spite of being near to completely culturally compatible. But the interesting thing is that that migration was negligible in size. The largest impact probably came after the Great Hunger in Ireland after which about a million migrants came to the US. [1] So that's a million migrants in a population of 31 million - 3.2%. In fact for all the talk about the US being a nation of migrants we never had a foreign born population exceeding 14.8%. [1] And that was in 1890 after which a large number of anti-migration bills began being passed, culminating in a low of 4.7% in 1970. It's now up to 14.3% and once again issues are emerging at almost the exact same threshold. Go figure. --- So now let's consider your idea. South Korea is trending towards a scenario where they will eventually be losing 62% of their population every 20 years. And obviously that is exponential - it's not like it slows down, not unless they start having babies again. To maintain this decline with immigration would require literally just replacing just about the entire former population of South Korea with migrants. You're talking about migration on a scale unimaginably larger than anything before, with what by necessity would be an extremely low quality of migrant, simply owing the massive numbers needed. So the idea of using immigration to "solve" this is essentially just proposing populating an 'abandoned' land with whoever wants to come. And of course that's possible, but obviously this is not a solution to anything by any reasonable meaning of the word 'solution.' [1] - https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Collections/Folklife-Collections-List-%281%29/Other/Emigration/Irish-Emigration-to-America https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Co... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States#Extent_and_destinations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...
insane_dreamer 1y ago
And the crack down on immigration is making the problem worse.

by timr 1y ago

somenameforme 1y ago

A lot of people are, in general, in denial of what reduced fertility will bring. Consequences lag effect by decades so it's not exactly a secret what the future will hold. For instance most don't realize that Japan is still in the 'good ole days', relative to what awaits them in the future, even as places like Tokyo start to shrink today. I also think people don't realize how fast things start happening once they do start happening. For another example there you can approximate the change in population due to fertility (once a fertility rate is shared among a population) as being a scalar on population of fertility_rate/2 every 20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 means each and every woman has 1 child on average, yet nonetheless that means your population ends up declining by 50% every 20 years, exponentially, until you start having a healthy number of children again, or go extinct. So for a bemusing one one, North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war. And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. South Korea with their fertility rate of 0.75 will not only see catastrophic population decline, but their entire economy will collapse alongside it. Going from 0.75 to a healthy fertility rate is probably not going to happen, so the North needs to merely wait, and keep having children.

nyokodo 1y ago
> And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. Except their fertility is below replacement also and as a poverty stricken repressive regime that relies on food aid from South Korea, China, and probably Russia lately the latter having their own terminal demographic crises… they might not out-survive the south for long. 1. https://www.newsweek.com/how-north-korea-news-births-compare-south-1955156 https://www.newsweek.com/how-north-korea-news-births-compare...
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Your article gives North Korea a fertility rate of 1.78, which is substantially higher than even the US at 1.62. South Korea is an entirely different world at 0.75. So you're looking at a population change per 20 years of -11% in North Korea, -19% in the US, and -62% in South Korea!! None of these are good of course, but the timeline of decline and collapse are quite different. All numbers from here, which is just a cleaner representation of UN numbers: https://www.worldometers.info/population/world/ https://www.worldometers.info/population/world/ In the end I think the future will become much like the past in that fertility is essentially the point of a nation. What is a few generations of fading prosperity when the longterm cost is the very survival of said civilization? It's just a nonsense deal that nobody would ever agree to on a macro scale, but that most of all Western civilization is trending towards.
999900000999 1y ago
South Korea probably already has immigration reform ready to go. They’ll just do everything else before letting people meaningfully immigrate. A “Korean” in 2100 might have Filipino, Indian, African ancestry. In fact the way things are going Africa will probably end up as the nursery of the world for a few decades. Then birth rates will collapse there too. The robots should be ready then
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Think about the implications of what you're suggesting in practice. You're not going to attract tens of millions of desirable migrants. They literally don't exist. And this is even more true as South Korea is but an extreme example of a trend happening through most of all Western bloc nations. So you're going to end up having to import people with relatively little education, skills or experience, who don't speak, read, or write the language, have no knowledge of the culture, dramatically different working/cultural values, and so on. Europe was, in many ways, a trial run for this sort of scenario on a far smaller scale than what you're talking about, and the results have not been good. Immigration is not really a sustainable solution.
  - 999900000999 1y ago
    When you’re 90 and need someone to give you a sponge bath, cultural differences don’t matter much. You do get weird stories like Filipino nurses treating elderly WW2 era Japanese soldiers. I’m sure it’s only awkward for a moment. You could have said the same thing about any new immigrants anywhere. How will the Irish fit in Boston? How will Ukrainians make it in Chicago?
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      I think the Irish are a great example. We often think it was some huge migration because they had a really tough time integrating in spite of being near to completely culturally compatible. But the interesting thing is that that migration was negligible in size. The largest impact probably came after the Great Hunger in Ireland after which about a million migrants came to the US. [1] So that's a million migrants in a population of 31 million - 3.2%. In fact for all the talk about the US being a nation of migrants we never had a foreign born population exceeding 14.8%. [1] And that was in 1890 after which a large number of anti-migration bills began being passed, culminating in a low of 4.7% in 1970. It's now up to 14.3% and once again issues are emerging at almost the exact same threshold. Go figure. --- So now let's consider your idea. South Korea is trending towards a scenario where they will eventually be losing 62% of their population every 20 years. And obviously that is exponential - it's not like it slows down, not unless they start having babies again. To maintain this decline with immigration would require literally just replacing just about the entire former population of South Korea with migrants. You're talking about migration on a scale unimaginably larger than anything before, with what by necessity would be an extremely low quality of migrant, simply owing the massive numbers needed. So the idea of using immigration to "solve" this is essentially just proposing populating an 'abandoned' land with whoever wants to come. And of course that's possible, but obviously this is not a solution to anything by any reasonable meaning of the word 'solution.' [1] - https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Collections/Folklife-Collections-List-%281%29/Other/Emigration/Irish-Emigration-to-America https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Co... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States#Extent_and_destinations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat...

insane_dreamer 1y ago

And the crack down on immigration is making the problem worse.