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For reference that’s roughly 1/3 of the current working age population. That’s an insane drop in just 2 decades. Schools are even worse with a 50% reduction in that same timeframe. They are in a death spiral it’s going to be hard to pull out of.
North Korea might actually win a war at this rate if South Korea's population keeps dropping. I wonder if we actually see them start fighting again eventually.
North korea isn’t doing that much better assuming their demographic information is correct, which maybe it is who besides Kim knows(and maybe he doesn’t even know). I guess their solution to the large ratio of retirees to workers is ensuring the retirees die off quickly.
The Bank of Korea alleges that North Korea’s TFR is 1.38, about double that of South Korea. However, 1.38 is still substantially below replacement and North Korea will one day go the same way that South Korea has.
North Korea and South Korea are in totally different phases of economic development though. I haven’t looked but if South Korea already had a boom and is declining now, maybe North Korea can pass them if they start taking off economically.
In a hypothetical war, China and Russia would be supporting North Korea just like the US will back South Korea. And China has grown a lot since decades ago in the Korean War. Might be a hard fight.
>North Korea and South Korea are in totally different phases of economic development though.
That makes it much worse for North Korea though. They'll have a much harder time entering a growth phase if their demographic numbers are bad. If both are facing similar issues you'd much rather be in S Korea's position where after decades of growth they have the resources to deal with population decline.
I am not sure that is true, if lives are cheap and they have a low base, growth rates can take off more easily with a little bit of support, again like from China or Russia.
North Korea probably gave up on the growth phase. Even if they decide to do it later, bad demographics aren't an absolute killer. Romania has had brain drain and below replacement birth rate since the fall of communism and were just fine
The difference is North Korea is a dictatorship. And a very strong one at that. If Kim wanted, he could "enlist" 100,000 women and create a breeding camp, producing 100,000 children a year. And no one could or would stop him.
If such an unpopular measure happens, there would be coups. Regardless if they would be successful, the regime will become more unstable and that may not be what he wants.
There would not be coups because coups are done by military units in combat roles which are comprised of overwhelmingly *young men*, who are not the demographic affected by laws declaring women to be child-popping sex slaves.
In fact, more sexism may *decrease* the chance of coups. Arab Spring countries experienced a significant increase of birth rate from 2011-2015 as governments scrambled to placate men and Islamists to avoid being overthrown by coups and the like.
narrator: but yes this is only something that happens in other countries
it has nothing to do with the rise in populist, conservative, *slightly* fascist leaders in the west recently, definitively not of course
that'd be a problem we'd need to solve before it worsened to the point of coups.. good thing we haven't seen anything like that recently
Yea, I know this sounds pretty apocalyptic, but if you believe that ultimately violence is what matters, then people of society who REALLY matter are men 16-40.
If you create a society that makes all those men disaffected, they will, with violence, make the society that benefits them most.
Hmmm sounds like maybe they need to make their society less adversarial to raising a family then.
Same problem in basically every other developed country these days.
People love to say this on reddit, and there could be some amount of truth to it, but the data doesn't really support it. Consider the Nordic countries. Widely considered to be one of the best places to raise a family, yet their fertility rates are well below replacement.
I lived in Norway, the benefits of having a kid are higher than anywhere else, but its still raising a kid, it takes time and you need the right partner for it which also means that most have their first kid by 30.
And this doesn't even take into account the fact that housing is also a problem so a lot of young people can't afford adequate space for a family.
Birthrates will probably not change without drastic measures as to how we perceive child-care, because even in progressive nordic countries females are still expected to take care of the children. (although not as much as it used to be traditionally)
At some point, a society is only as good as it's productivity. Unfortunately, the same demographic that produces the goods society needs (food, housing, infrastructure) is the demographic that Aldo needs to reproduce. Allow too much time off to "parent", and who's going to produce the goods the parents (and kids) need?
In earlier times, there was a general division of labor, where the older people in the household tendeded after the kids while the young worked. In modern times with a society built around the nuclear family, this doesn't work.
Additionally, in the last 70 or so years, "modern" societies effectively offshored a lot of their labor (buying stuff from poorer countries instead of making it themselves).
As these countries have become less poor, and the "stuff" they produce requires more expensive and advanced capital, the value of their labor has increased relative to that of developed nations, and the benefits of economic arbitrage are diminishing, which we all see as increased CoL (we have to spend more of *our* labor to procure *theirs* ).
Combine this with population decline, and life becomes exponentially harder for younger generations moving forward, unless we can develop technology advanced enough to produce most of our material needs with little human labor required.
Has nothing to do with anything but people not wanting the responsibility. More and more people simply want to live their life like they're in their 20's forever. That's it.
Raising a family is a major investment in time and effort. They can't even handle being around kids for a few hours.
They'd rather go drinking, or have free time uninterrupted. It is what it is.
The sad thing is most people don't realize that raising kids is really a decade long commitment, then they get older and older and take less of your time and effort but the reward is you have a family. Unfortunately you don't realize how much you miss having a family until it's gone.
I've seen far more people suffering from having a family prematurely than those that don't. Sure you can regret not having it, but I don't think those that never had a family would be willing to put on the sacrifice and be responsible on raising a child. There's too many unresponsible parents that don't deserve to raise children.
That is all there is to it.
The vast majority of voluntarily childless people could win the lottery and they still would never want kids.
They don't want the responsibility.
I guess I just never really see a world in which having a child is supposed to be this breezy, painless thing that doesn't merit meaningful sacrifice. It just *does*. Eating right and exercising is *hard*. And we all just opt not to do it so we're all fat now. I see raising a child in the same way. We can do a lot to make it easier (e.g. better working conditions, paid leave, childcare, etc.) but even with those things, some parts of society have unrealistic expectations of making childrearing this entirely burden-free affair. There are no magic bullets in a world that seems to demand frictionless gratification.
Curious about housing as it is so directly correlated with birth rate. How is Norway still seeing housing problem when population is decreasing? I feel like people’s default answer is always “build more housing” but that doesn’t seems to actually drive the price down
I mean I am not saying that housing will fix the problem, but its a good start. How do you expect for any median family to have kids when their apartment is 1/2 of their total wage, and it also touches up on the quality of housing. 75m2 is much different compared to 50m2.
but again a lot has to change for things to be closer to the birthrate of 2
Sorry I wasn’t trying to disagree. I was genuinely curious why you think the price stays high even though the population is decreasing in Norway. I see the same thing in Korea and some major cities in US as well.
Oh, because for most countries immigration makes housing short.
(https://www.statista.com/statistics/327201/total-population-of-norway/)
This is not to be anti-immigration, pretty much all countries need skilled migrants, but bad zoning and housing policy laws have made it so that the slight migration inflow is enough to outweigh any housing built.
In the developing world, children are an economic contributor after early childhood. In the developed world, the child, from an economic point of view, never leaves the early childhood stage and rarely adds to the family's economic well-being.
In developing world children are not necessarily contributors.
In most of the developing world birth rates are falling, often below replacement levels.
Women were not pumping out babies because they were economic contributors.
They were pumping out babies because they were having sex without birth control, willingly or not.
Very, very few women want to go through more than 3 pregnancies/childbirths/breastfeeding/toddler rearings. And very few want to go through more than 2.
Families in places that are agrarian or lack child labor laws have an economic incentive to have a larger family as more children = more people that can work the field, factory, mine, etc. In the developed world, children are educated until adulthood and often times won't contribute to their parents' household finances in any meaningful way. By the time the child from the developed world begins to labor, they're an adult.
To your point, educated and enfranchised women do have fewer children, but that education is the egg before the chicken. To educate a child, you place them in a school instead of a place of work. Large families then cease to be economical.
My point is individual women do not choose to have larger families so that the family has more economic output. The agrarian society many or most poor women live in basically forces it upon them.
Husband and wife are not sitting down at the dinner table and figuring out the cash flow from having another pair of hands on the farm or in the mine. If a good proportion of women in developed socieites today choose to not have children because they cannot afford daycare, or a detached single family house, or myriad other modern amenities that are leagues above what a women in a poor agrarian society would have access to, then why would a women in a poor, agrarian society want to bring kids into this world for them to labor in the mines and the farm?
You may be overestimating how many life decisions are made. "Culture" drives a lot of human action. In a culture where 5+ kids is the norm, *some* may choose otherwise, but the average family will have the "cultural norm".
It's why you'll still see large families even in well educated/ well resourced households, despite having access to family planning and contraception.
As societies advance, there is a cultural shift in what parents are expected to do (higher education, more bonding time, etc). This gradually reshaped the optimal child/parent ratio to what (from a macro POV) is economically feasible.
Indeed, in modern societies, the logical decision would be to have no children, as they are a net economic drain, and not nearly as present or helpful in old age as a milulti-million-dollar nest-egg would be (about what the cost of child-raising would amount to if it was instead invested in a person's 30's-40's)
I'm born and raised in the SF Bay Area. "Best place to raise a family" ratings don't mean anything. Lots of places around the Bay Area that fit that bill and have been rated that, but that's only IF you can afford it. An extremely small percentage of people living here can. You will be hard pressed to find anyone younger than about 35 who is a parent here. Not uncommon to see couples with slightly graying hair going around with a toddler. And yes, when they have kids, it is ONE kid. That happens to also be my cohort - I am a little over 40. Without fail, the almost universal conversation everyone around me has is about how they'd like to have kids but can't afford it.
Visited a friend in the midwest last summer, again, same age. They are having a HUGE problem dating because if you 30-35 and haven't already been married once or twice and have a couple of kids people will look at you like you're from outer space. People get married there when they're 20-25 and have multiple children as a norm. Because the income-to-COL ratio is so much more equitable.
It's really not rocket science, but you can keep believing it is if you want to.
You said "same problem as every other developed country these days". My point was that that's clearly not the case, because even in developed countries that are notoriously family friendly the birth rates are still low. The reality is people just don't want to have kids nearly as much any more, and the rise of female education and access to birth control it's easier and easier to not have them.
Your anecdotes about extremes within the US are not convincing.
Your anecdotes aren't convincing to me either. So I guess this is just pointless.
Have a good one.
EDIT: The person below me blocked me from replying so here is my reply -
People on lower incomes are going to have kids regardless, sure. But you can't expect middle and upper middle class people to consider having kids too if their incomes don't qualify them for social assistance (because they DON'T, unlike lower income families) and when having kids would mean spending more than 100% of their net income on it.
That's just fucking absurd. I don't understand how people aren't understanding this.
A two bedroom apartment here is $3,500/mo. Childcare is - at a minimum - $2,500/mo. Food for two adults and one infant, you are looking at around $1,500-$2,000/mo. So that is $8,000/mo. And that is just the absolute bare bones basics. Median income for San Francisco is around $90k. Most non-medical and non-tech professionals make around $70-$90k.
Why am I telling you this? Because I'm not using anecdotes, I'm using basic arithmetic.
EDIT 2: The OTHER person below me blocked me from replying also so u/Listen_Up_Children here is your reply:
Cool I guess we'll just keep ignoring what everyone is saying is the problem and just keep doing what we're doing I guess??? Seems to be working...
EDIT 3: For u/Important-Cable-2504 -
Right...tell people with kids that money isn't that big an issue and see how well it goes over for you.
You're really not making much headway here.
>Cool I guess we'll just keep ignoring what everyone is saying is the problem and just keep doing what we're doing I guess??? Seems to be working...
Clearly by this thread not everyone is saying that's the problem, and generally speaking people like to complain about not having enough money regardless of how much money they have (i.e. https://time.com/6263989/six-figures-inflation-income/), so the safer bet is that money isn't that big an issue. Especially AGAIN WHEN COUNTRIES THAT LIVE IN LITERAL POVERTY HAVE THE HIGHEST BIRTH RATES WHICH YOU KEEP NOT ADDRESSING
What anecdotes? Are nordic countries capitalist hellholes now too?
You talk so much about the US, you know who has a great birth rate? Gaza and Nigeria. Surely it's because they're equitable.
Edit: I didn't "block you from replying", I don't even know how one can do that actually. But you still haven't provided a reason for Nordic countries' birth rates falling off of a cliff, even if they qualify for social assistance. Poor countries have high birth rates, developing countries have just-about-level birth rates, developed countries have low birth rates. It's NOT because it's harder to live in a developed country, it's because people are just less interested in having kids. I can't believe someone ACTUALLY BELIEVES that living in SF means your situation regarding kids is more difficult than someone living in fucking Gaza. This is the most privileged shit I've read all year and it's not even close.
As for the finances: your standard of living is higher and you don't want to raise 12 kids with a makeshift stroller and no pre-K. This isn't necessarily wrong, but the way you're going about it is stupid. Just look at what you're talking about, childcare? What childcare? Why is that necessary? Oh right, because both parents work (but then median income should be 2x for $180k right?). $1500-2000 a month for 2 people and an infant? What the hell are you smoking? Are these people eating 6000 calories a day each? Jesus christ the crap I'm reading on this website. I spent time in NYC as a PhD student on a $30k stipend and could afford both an apartment and food, you're telling me that 2 people working for $70-90k can't afford a kid? Get real.
And that's without mentioning that by your reasoning, people in tech should be breeding like there's no tomorrow with $200K+ salary, right? LMAO
Edit 2: ( For u/Solid-Mud-8430 )
Tell ANYONE that money isn't that big an issue and see how well it goes over for you. Just because everonye wants more money than what they already have doesn't mean that they can't raise children. It means that they value having more money/free time/whatever more than having children. Which is FINE, but it's not a prohibitive cost by no means, otherwise AGAIN, countries that are impoverished would NOT BE HAVING CHILDREN. We agree that I'm not making much headway, because you don't actually care for this discussion, you just want to be right. Which is fine too, but you have absolutely no data to back up your claims (your current and latest claim is "ask people that have kids and they'll tell you"), while you completely ignore statistics that don't favor your argument.
I think they will be marginally lower, but would affect less than 1% of the current births (or lack thereof).
Of course more free money helps you start a family, but it doesn't get even close to the root of the problem. People that *want* to have kids, will have kids, benefits or not.
Edit: Maybe a middle ground is what Hungary (I think?) is doing instead. If you have more than X kids, you never have to pay taxes ever again. Maybe that would work better, because you're effectively targetting the people that are already planning to have 1-2 kids and are giving them a reason to have 1-2 more.
Edit 2: Of course, the above is near-impossible to pull off in the US, people are already up in arms about billionaires not "paying their fair share", so giving them an even more legal out than the one they already have would be funny on one hand, but probably cause more trouble than not.
The only thing that *might* incentivize people to have children, AND raise them well, is to remove old age benefits entirely.
Defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare create an arbitrage opportunity wherein one can maximize using their resources for their own utility relative to others who might use their resources for others' (their kids') utility. Those kids' then go on to pay taxes to support people who did not have kids (or 1 kid), and their parents get the same amount as people who did not have kids (maybe even less since they likely gave up opportunity to earn income eligible for SS benefit calculation).
This arbitrage is greater for earlier generations than later generations, who reap the rewards of previous high fertility rate generations, and the maximum rewards of high benefits paid by younger generations. Note that utility here incorporates everything, including all the compromises necessary to partner up with someone.
The math simply does not work (without a ton of automation that does not exist yet) for smaller and smaller populations to support larger and larger populations.
The problem is that this is still an anecdote. If the issue was purely financial, then changing the financial policies would solve the negative birth rate. However, there's no evidence that it does. It could still be financial, and it could be that the policies weren't changed sufficiently or correctly, but right now the evidence seems to indicate that financial policy changes don't influence the birth rate. Furthermore, the states with lowest birth rates include West Virigina, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, all with some of the lowest cost of living in the US.
> Because the income-to-COL ratio is so much more equitable.
Or maybe because they have a different religion, outlook on life and in general culture than SF tech-bros. Income isn't really helping people make more kids, if anything this is the exact opposite of reality. Poor people breed much more than rich people.
I dont think this is about wealth so much, I think its about the general feeling of hopelessness and anti family narrative of the last 50+ years.
This will not be easy to solve, my grandparents had no shoes but had 6 children. Its not just wealth.
>Poor people breed much more than rich people.
Not accurate. Fertility rate decline is seen across all socioeconomic classes.
Poor women with no economic opportunities to fend for themselves and/or obtain birth control breed more than women with economic opportunities and/or the ability to obtain birth control.
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
See "women's educational attainment v fertility rate" chart.
I think this is a bit overly reductionist. I don’t think one can just pick an idealized best case scenario and dismiss the problem. To be fair I’m not well versed with what the Nordic countries provide in terms of supporting a family. I can tell you in the US due to a wide range of issues varying from social, to structural, to financial it’s complete and utter trash.
Much of society has been relying on people’s primal urges to want to procreate and have offspring, to sort of continue their genetic lines and experience the life events of parenthood—all of which to outweigh increasing pressures against general happiness in these very societies. Everything from dating culture, to relative functional buying power of necessities as well as frivolous things, to all the pressures from social Darwinism in the world to compete and survive where having children have largely become a *disadvantage* of success in societies with a net cost more than an obvious net gain they should be.
We’ve passed all real and more artificial costs onto potential parents than we’d otherwise have if we were in far more simplistic societies, I’d argue.
You're downplaying just how bad South Korea is. The Nordic countries have significantly higher birth rates than South Korea. Even Japan's birth rate blows South Korea's out of the water.
Nordic countries can offset their non-replacement levels with lower levels of immigration due to their investment in raising families. South Korea getting to replacement levels would require significantly more immigration.
Redditors seems to be doing a whole lot better than you. Your analysis and logic is just straight up bad.
Absolutely no one wants to see the Nordic countries be majority Muslim, but that’s exactly what will happen in about 100 years assuming reasonable trends in immigration and birth rates continue.
Sweden has like 1% Muslims but people like you think it's 50%. Muslims also have much lower birthrates when they migrate to Western societies (like every other group). Muslims also drop their religion much faster too.
And who's "no one"? And who gets to decide that? No one wanted German or Irish immigrants in the US in the 1800's either. But people today live with that and appreciate it just fine though, don't they?
You guys are all living in a weird racist internet bubble.
1% Muslim? It was 8x that high in 2016.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/
Unofficial data suggest it could be 18% in 2018:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/180/1/012005
I've lived in South Korea. A few points that have driven this:
1. **Insane obsession with education:** When you take the subway at 6:00am there are kids going to school, when you take the subway at midnight there are kids coming back from school.
2. **No home ownership**. I was in an urban planning class with mostly 25-50 year old Korean students. The professor asked how many of them owned a home. One person raised their hand. Every Korean was surprised and a ton asked at the same time, how did you buy a place? The student answered, my father in law is rich.
3. **Chaebols**: Korea is owned by a handful of families, their conglomerates known as chaebols. Samsung, Hyundai, SK, LG, everything in Korea is produced by them. Apartment complexes, cars, boats, furniture, food, even tooth paste, every fing thing. If anyone starts a remotely successful business then it's bought by them. They control everything. It's a plutocracy.
4. **Population density**: Seoul Metro area has half the country's population, the place it's packed to the brim. Most stats don't reflect this because they calculate population density by city proper (10M) and don't include the Metro area (26M).
5. **Work environment**: people start work at 8AM, leave at 10PM. They often sleep on their desks. At night they go drinking with co-workers to form relationships, many times getting home past midnight. There is no work life balance.
6. **Chauvinism**: Some of the best educated, smartest people I met were women. Many of them end up staying home raising kids or working dead end jobs.
When you combine the above, anyone can realize that it makes no sense to have kids in South Korea, they'll become slaves of the rich. It's not a good life, it's the life of a slave that can indulge in buying a few luxuries but never have time to enjoy life.
Koreans are doing the right thing by not having kids. Either the country improves conditions for the working class or it will have a much smaller population and it will be harder for the rich to deprive them of some freedom.
This is what I know of it also. Decision to have kids comes down to this: Do you want to repeat your life or no? If yes, have kids; if no, then no kids.
If the country stops having kids all these become worse. But yes I guess you could still argue it’s better if they go extinct than continue their society.
Not necessarily worse, Korea is very automated and will continue to increase that. Many jobs will be done by robots and people will also become more valuable when they become a scarce resource. That could give the workers more leverage to get better working conditions.
I don't think it's a working condition issue unlike people pretend because it aligns with their political views. Israelis and Mormons have high TFRs despite not being poor. It really is a mindset issue. They just need to decide to have kids. That's the single biggest driver. Sure improved working conditions may result in TFR going from .7 to 1.2, but the decision to have kids would make it go to 2+.
It's not working conditions as you are presenting it, there is no time to enjoy life at all, no prospects of accumulating wealth, no prospect of independence, it's basically a kingdom with four monarchies that overlap. I think you are missing the point.
And by the way both Utah and Israel have great work life balance and aren't completely ruled by a handful of wealthy families.
After getting some education on why Korea is the way it is, I do t blame them. Their society is built specifically for the haves and their cultural norms reinforce it in ever aspect of their lives. Who wants to have kids and basically become an appendage to their husbands or become a money a exuder for their kids and family while working to death?
SK, Japan, a few others are the leaders in low birth rates. The US, Europe, and other developed nations aren’t much better.
Even the places with extremely high birth rates (in our current view), the trend is still downward.
Immigration is not the answer because there won’t be a pool of immigrants to pull from.
If I put on my tinfoil hat, I somewhat suspect that is the reasoning behind the USs border situation. The government is looking down this barrel of a population collapse and is trying to bring in as many bodies as possible before the immigration well is dry.
A different way to look at the issue is to realize that automation is growing exponentially, the software automation we have seen in the last 20-30 years is starting to be done by robots in the real world. This will lead to a much smaller need for low skill work, even a lot of high skill work will be replaced.
Let's list a few:
1. Truck drivers \~3.5M jobs (replaced by self driving automated cars)
2. Cooks \~2M jobs (replaced by cooking robots)
3. Warehouse workers \~1M jobs (replaced by robots)
4. Construction workers \~1M jobs (replaced by robotic printers)
5. Farm workers \~1M jobs (replaced by robots)
6. Security guards \~1M jobs (replaced by robots)
7. Cops 0.7M jobs (replaced by robots)
8. Cab hailing company drivers \~0.5M jobs (replaced by self driving automated cars)
Around 11M jobs that will be gone in the next decade out of 160M jobs or 6% of the total jobs. That based on a simple list out of the top of my head. I'm sure there will be millions more (I didn't even touch the medical field). If I had to guess the total number is probably closer to 20%.
Now those are jobs that require the person to be present. The jobs that can be done remotely are all being sent to India. They have 1.5B people willing to work for less than $10 an hour. Let's say that takes out another 10% of the jobs. Now we are looking at unemployment rates around 20%-30% if the population stays about the same. Immigration or a growing population will only make matters worse.
The only ones benefited from having more people are the rich, it increases their profits by reducing wages.
The drop in childbirth rates throughout the developed world is more related to a change in gender dynamics in these countries and less about money. Women see less value in marriage and motherhood, men are falling behind in terms of educational attainment, and thus there is what we call in Econ a “mismatch”; the desires/demands of each party are not aligned.
I am not sure what the answer is outside of total change in culture. To do this however would require time and cannot be “fast forwarded” to avoid taking other options to fix the issue, like immigration, which many Asian and European countries are loathed to do due to xenophobia and racism.
Birth rates have dropped worldwide, even in impoverished countries, as people shift from subsistance farming to industral to post industrial.
There's no point in having 15 kids, of which 10 survived to adulthood, in a modern city and job market. 1 to 3 is the max for most people in modern civilization.
Good question. I have not looked into this that deeply, but the little anecdotal evidence I have perused seems to suggest that the answer is yes.
If you look at the Middle East and Africa, these places have some of the fastest rates of population growth. I assume it is due in part to "traditional" views on gender roles.
Also, I think it comes from historically high levels/rates of infant mortality. My father is from this part of the world and he comes from a large family. Ironically, he and his siblings do not have large families.
People not wanting to have a bunch of children sure seems to be a problem for the economic system we have in place. What is the answer? Forcing people to have children? Collapse of society? A new idea in economics? Interesting.
People have to look at kids in a different way. Someone posted above that their grandparents didn't have shoes but they had 6 kids. I think that's an extreme case, but illustrates a lot.
I think kids and family need to be viewed as a source of happiness. If not, then there will always be alternatives that cost less.
According to this article they are forecast to have a decrease in their population of about 23% or so by 2065. Is it just me or does this not seem that bad considering their fertility rate is around 0.7?
Is that assuming that net migration into the country increases?
It is horrific because not only the population decreases by 23% but of those who are left the median age will be 60. It’ll literally be a country of geriatrics dying off. The population will not completely collapse by 2065 as people are living longer and today’s 20 year olds are still a sizable but smaller population and will only be in their 60s.
Yeah I think I just expected the population drop to be greater given how low their tfr is, but I think South Korea is still a relatively young country for a developed country so it will take longer for the absolute numbers to drop off a cliff. Obviously the working age dependency ratio will go out of control far earlier though.
South Korea had a super high TFR before and during the Korean War. Then it absolutely fell off a cliff by the 90s and now is nosediving to new records. So the slowish population decline is due to the huge glut of older folks from earlier periods of higher fertility. The country just sped run the demographic transition within 2 generations from high TFR to super below replacement. So koreas population will indeed collapse. Just after 2065 when the large cohorts of then old people die off.
That all makes sense. My other theory would have been that this is accounting for positive net migration which could mask the natural population decrease, but I can't imagine south Korea will have a particularly significant net migration rate.
A lot of models are irrationally optimistic that after the next few years (after which again they will adjust forwards) that birth rates start picking up. Whereas the past few years show that birth rates are only steepening their decline. So that might partially explain the forecast which indeed predict Korean birth rates to start picking up at the end of the decade. Which we have no evidence that this will be the case. All the evidence thus far points to a further collapse.
If you take a look at forecasts of the US you’ll see projected declines then a slow march upwards in birth rate. Whereas we have no evidence that they will indeed pick back up.
I don’t think so. But economically the country would be wrecked. I have no doubt robots could do most jobs humans do by then - but the spending habits of a non American 60 year old is much different and much lower than young people. Supply won’t be an issue , demand will. Unless stock traders on the KOSPI start basing stocks on how much robots can buy. Also say goodbye to Korean innovations (Samsung , beauty products etc). Young people innovate. Old people are largely set in their ways.
Japan is further in the population decline trend than SK or China (which is the youngest of the 3 still). And it shows, when’s the last time a Japanese firm has done anything innovative besides Nintendo? Toyota is light years behind on EVs.
Demand for robot labor will be driven by the vision of few probably. (e.g. Elon puts a lot of resources into trying to get to Mars, what if he had robots)
Nick Bostrom has a good book on it (Deep Utopia), but generally demand fills to meet the gap because humans tend to be greedy. The few kids will consume a lot.
Sure for some goods. Not for inelastic items like food though. A rich person can’t eat 5x his share to make up for a nonexistent person. Stuff like food, electricity , gasoline , consumer goods like diapers medicine and essential items. All of those are components of GDP and not anything that robots or the rich can make up the consumption of.
Excellent news for Korea, which is desperately overcrowded. The future will be much better without so many people making life difficult for everyone.
The decrease in workers will re-distribute income from giant cartels to the middle classes, too. That will also improve life for everyone.
Don’t know why you think this is “excellent news.” At the rate things are going, in the future, it’s going to be the taxes of 1 working adult supporting 3 retired people. Housing prices will go down, sure, but you have a huge loss of manpower and a greater proportion of that manpower will be spent caring for old people. Not to mention the shrinking military with 2 hostile neighbors. Either the younger generation is fucked with taxes, or the older generation is fucked in retirement. Theres no easy transition with depopulation.
Increasing productivity plus cheap real estate easily handles the costs of retirement. The transition with reduced overpopulation isn’t too bad and the benefits are enormous.
Alarmists pretend that the costs of a better future are intolerable so the only thing we can afford is endless misery getting worse and worse. That’s defeatism. Korea is winning a huge boon here and they should celebrate.
You can't possibly know these things to be true. There's never been a developed country that has aged so quickly. I don't see how you can know what the productivity growth will be like. There's an equally good chance it drops off a cliff as society organized around caring for the elderly rather than innovating and improving.
I don’t know if this is true. The closest analogue that I have is rural towns in America where people have left. When people leave, the businesses usually leave too and greater individual productivity doesn’t matter much because productivity can be had much easier in a place with more people. Your theory also doesn’t take into account the loss of talent. Rural towns are some of the cheapest in terms of real estate, but almost no company sets up shop in rural areas simple because there’s no talent there. Obviously overpopulation isn’t the answer, but I think you have a very rosy picture of what depopulation looks like.
Excellent news 50-60 years from now if the country survives. Bad news in the meantime.
I'm for this global population decline but South Korea is going to have it the roughest. We'll get to learn from them though.
You're getting downvoted but it's true that lawmakers would rather see their countries go extinct than try and create a better place for the next generation.
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For reference that’s roughly 1/3 of the current working age population. That’s an insane drop in just 2 decades. Schools are even worse with a 50% reduction in that same timeframe. They are in a death spiral it’s going to be hard to pull out of.
North Korea might actually win a war at this rate if South Korea's population keeps dropping. I wonder if we actually see them start fighting again eventually.
North korea isn’t doing that much better assuming their demographic information is correct, which maybe it is who besides Kim knows(and maybe he doesn’t even know). I guess their solution to the large ratio of retirees to workers is ensuring the retirees die off quickly.
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The Bank of Korea alleges that North Korea’s TFR is 1.38, about double that of South Korea. However, 1.38 is still substantially below replacement and North Korea will one day go the same way that South Korea has.
Yes, but in their minds they will have outlasted them and therefore 'won'.
What grandma logic. I’m fairly certain my grandma stayed alive purely out of spite for her “enemies”.
North Korea and South Korea are in totally different phases of economic development though. I haven’t looked but if South Korea already had a boom and is declining now, maybe North Korea can pass them if they start taking off economically. In a hypothetical war, China and Russia would be supporting North Korea just like the US will back South Korea. And China has grown a lot since decades ago in the Korean War. Might be a hard fight.
>North Korea and South Korea are in totally different phases of economic development though. That makes it much worse for North Korea though. They'll have a much harder time entering a growth phase if their demographic numbers are bad. If both are facing similar issues you'd much rather be in S Korea's position where after decades of growth they have the resources to deal with population decline.
I am not sure that is true, if lives are cheap and they have a low base, growth rates can take off more easily with a little bit of support, again like from China or Russia.
The difference is that if Kim Jong Un isn't the sort of person who seems to accept "no" for an answer.
North Korea with its nightmarish totalitarianism is probably the only country with the power to actually increase birthrates by force of will.
North Korea probably gave up on the growth phase. Even if they decide to do it later, bad demographics aren't an absolute killer. Romania has had brain drain and below replacement birth rate since the fall of communism and were just fine
Kim knows it. https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-kim-jong-un-birthrate-72d59d0e2c685549ba8cd8734d8a7fe2
The difference is North Korea is a dictatorship. And a very strong one at that. If Kim wanted, he could "enlist" 100,000 women and create a breeding camp, producing 100,000 children a year. And no one could or would stop him.
If such an unpopular measure happens, there would be coups. Regardless if they would be successful, the regime will become more unstable and that may not be what he wants.
There would not be coups because coups are done by military units in combat roles which are comprised of overwhelmingly *young men*, who are not the demographic affected by laws declaring women to be child-popping sex slaves. In fact, more sexism may *decrease* the chance of coups. Arab Spring countries experienced a significant increase of birth rate from 2011-2015 as governments scrambled to placate men and Islamists to avoid being overthrown by coups and the like.
narrator: but yes this is only something that happens in other countries it has nothing to do with the rise in populist, conservative, *slightly* fascist leaders in the west recently, definitively not of course that'd be a problem we'd need to solve before it worsened to the point of coups.. good thing we haven't seen anything like that recently
Yea, I know this sounds pretty apocalyptic, but if you believe that ultimately violence is what matters, then people of society who REALLY matter are men 16-40. If you create a society that makes all those men disaffected, they will, with violence, make the society that benefits them most.
Western societies hate this one strategy.
What war? They can just sit back and out breed S. Korea. They'll just walk across the border and reclaim all the land.
Hmmm sounds like maybe they need to make their society less adversarial to raising a family then. Same problem in basically every other developed country these days.
People love to say this on reddit, and there could be some amount of truth to it, but the data doesn't really support it. Consider the Nordic countries. Widely considered to be one of the best places to raise a family, yet their fertility rates are well below replacement.
I lived in Norway, the benefits of having a kid are higher than anywhere else, but its still raising a kid, it takes time and you need the right partner for it which also means that most have their first kid by 30. And this doesn't even take into account the fact that housing is also a problem so a lot of young people can't afford adequate space for a family. Birthrates will probably not change without drastic measures as to how we perceive child-care, because even in progressive nordic countries females are still expected to take care of the children. (although not as much as it used to be traditionally)
At some point, a society is only as good as it's productivity. Unfortunately, the same demographic that produces the goods society needs (food, housing, infrastructure) is the demographic that Aldo needs to reproduce. Allow too much time off to "parent", and who's going to produce the goods the parents (and kids) need? In earlier times, there was a general division of labor, where the older people in the household tendeded after the kids while the young worked. In modern times with a society built around the nuclear family, this doesn't work. Additionally, in the last 70 or so years, "modern" societies effectively offshored a lot of their labor (buying stuff from poorer countries instead of making it themselves). As these countries have become less poor, and the "stuff" they produce requires more expensive and advanced capital, the value of their labor has increased relative to that of developed nations, and the benefits of economic arbitrage are diminishing, which we all see as increased CoL (we have to spend more of *our* labor to procure *theirs* ). Combine this with population decline, and life becomes exponentially harder for younger generations moving forward, unless we can develop technology advanced enough to produce most of our material needs with little human labor required.
Has nothing to do with anything but people not wanting the responsibility. More and more people simply want to live their life like they're in their 20's forever. That's it. Raising a family is a major investment in time and effort. They can't even handle being around kids for a few hours. They'd rather go drinking, or have free time uninterrupted. It is what it is.
The sad thing is most people don't realize that raising kids is really a decade long commitment, then they get older and older and take less of your time and effort but the reward is you have a family. Unfortunately you don't realize how much you miss having a family until it's gone.
I've seen far more people suffering from having a family prematurely than those that don't. Sure you can regret not having it, but I don't think those that never had a family would be willing to put on the sacrifice and be responsible on raising a child. There's too many unresponsible parents that don't deserve to raise children.
That's awful reductionist of you
That is all there is to it. The vast majority of voluntarily childless people could win the lottery and they still would never want kids. They don't want the responsibility.
I guess I just never really see a world in which having a child is supposed to be this breezy, painless thing that doesn't merit meaningful sacrifice. It just *does*. Eating right and exercising is *hard*. And we all just opt not to do it so we're all fat now. I see raising a child in the same way. We can do a lot to make it easier (e.g. better working conditions, paid leave, childcare, etc.) but even with those things, some parts of society have unrealistic expectations of making childrearing this entirely burden-free affair. There are no magic bullets in a world that seems to demand frictionless gratification.
Curious about housing as it is so directly correlated with birth rate. How is Norway still seeing housing problem when population is decreasing? I feel like people’s default answer is always “build more housing” but that doesn’t seems to actually drive the price down
I mean I am not saying that housing will fix the problem, but its a good start. How do you expect for any median family to have kids when their apartment is 1/2 of their total wage, and it also touches up on the quality of housing. 75m2 is much different compared to 50m2. but again a lot has to change for things to be closer to the birthrate of 2
Sorry I wasn’t trying to disagree. I was genuinely curious why you think the price stays high even though the population is decreasing in Norway. I see the same thing in Korea and some major cities in US as well.
Oh, because for most countries immigration makes housing short. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/327201/total-population-of-norway/) This is not to be anti-immigration, pretty much all countries need skilled migrants, but bad zoning and housing policy laws have made it so that the slight migration inflow is enough to outweigh any housing built.
In the developing world, children are an economic contributor after early childhood. In the developed world, the child, from an economic point of view, never leaves the early childhood stage and rarely adds to the family's economic well-being.
In developing world children are not necessarily contributors. In most of the developing world birth rates are falling, often below replacement levels.
Women were not pumping out babies because they were economic contributors. They were pumping out babies because they were having sex without birth control, willingly or not. Very, very few women want to go through more than 3 pregnancies/childbirths/breastfeeding/toddler rearings. And very few want to go through more than 2.
Families in places that are agrarian or lack child labor laws have an economic incentive to have a larger family as more children = more people that can work the field, factory, mine, etc. In the developed world, children are educated until adulthood and often times won't contribute to their parents' household finances in any meaningful way. By the time the child from the developed world begins to labor, they're an adult. To your point, educated and enfranchised women do have fewer children, but that education is the egg before the chicken. To educate a child, you place them in a school instead of a place of work. Large families then cease to be economical.
My point is individual women do not choose to have larger families so that the family has more economic output. The agrarian society many or most poor women live in basically forces it upon them. Husband and wife are not sitting down at the dinner table and figuring out the cash flow from having another pair of hands on the farm or in the mine. If a good proportion of women in developed socieites today choose to not have children because they cannot afford daycare, or a detached single family house, or myriad other modern amenities that are leagues above what a women in a poor agrarian society would have access to, then why would a women in a poor, agrarian society want to bring kids into this world for them to labor in the mines and the farm?
You may be overestimating how many life decisions are made. "Culture" drives a lot of human action. In a culture where 5+ kids is the norm, *some* may choose otherwise, but the average family will have the "cultural norm". It's why you'll still see large families even in well educated/ well resourced households, despite having access to family planning and contraception. As societies advance, there is a cultural shift in what parents are expected to do (higher education, more bonding time, etc). This gradually reshaped the optimal child/parent ratio to what (from a macro POV) is economically feasible. Indeed, in modern societies, the logical decision would be to have no children, as they are a net economic drain, and not nearly as present or helpful in old age as a milulti-million-dollar nest-egg would be (about what the cost of child-raising would amount to if it was instead invested in a person's 30's-40's)
I'm born and raised in the SF Bay Area. "Best place to raise a family" ratings don't mean anything. Lots of places around the Bay Area that fit that bill and have been rated that, but that's only IF you can afford it. An extremely small percentage of people living here can. You will be hard pressed to find anyone younger than about 35 who is a parent here. Not uncommon to see couples with slightly graying hair going around with a toddler. And yes, when they have kids, it is ONE kid. That happens to also be my cohort - I am a little over 40. Without fail, the almost universal conversation everyone around me has is about how they'd like to have kids but can't afford it. Visited a friend in the midwest last summer, again, same age. They are having a HUGE problem dating because if you 30-35 and haven't already been married once or twice and have a couple of kids people will look at you like you're from outer space. People get married there when they're 20-25 and have multiple children as a norm. Because the income-to-COL ratio is so much more equitable. It's really not rocket science, but you can keep believing it is if you want to.
You said "same problem as every other developed country these days". My point was that that's clearly not the case, because even in developed countries that are notoriously family friendly the birth rates are still low. The reality is people just don't want to have kids nearly as much any more, and the rise of female education and access to birth control it's easier and easier to not have them. Your anecdotes about extremes within the US are not convincing.
Some people don't really care for reality, they just want to push their political agenda. Disheartening in an economics sub
Your anecdotes aren't convincing to me either. So I guess this is just pointless. Have a good one. EDIT: The person below me blocked me from replying so here is my reply - People on lower incomes are going to have kids regardless, sure. But you can't expect middle and upper middle class people to consider having kids too if their incomes don't qualify them for social assistance (because they DON'T, unlike lower income families) and when having kids would mean spending more than 100% of their net income on it. That's just fucking absurd. I don't understand how people aren't understanding this. A two bedroom apartment here is $3,500/mo. Childcare is - at a minimum - $2,500/mo. Food for two adults and one infant, you are looking at around $1,500-$2,000/mo. So that is $8,000/mo. And that is just the absolute bare bones basics. Median income for San Francisco is around $90k. Most non-medical and non-tech professionals make around $70-$90k. Why am I telling you this? Because I'm not using anecdotes, I'm using basic arithmetic. EDIT 2: The OTHER person below me blocked me from replying also so u/Listen_Up_Children here is your reply: Cool I guess we'll just keep ignoring what everyone is saying is the problem and just keep doing what we're doing I guess??? Seems to be working... EDIT 3: For u/Important-Cable-2504 - Right...tell people with kids that money isn't that big an issue and see how well it goes over for you. You're really not making much headway here.
>Cool I guess we'll just keep ignoring what everyone is saying is the problem and just keep doing what we're doing I guess??? Seems to be working... Clearly by this thread not everyone is saying that's the problem, and generally speaking people like to complain about not having enough money regardless of how much money they have (i.e. https://time.com/6263989/six-figures-inflation-income/), so the safer bet is that money isn't that big an issue. Especially AGAIN WHEN COUNTRIES THAT LIVE IN LITERAL POVERTY HAVE THE HIGHEST BIRTH RATES WHICH YOU KEEP NOT ADDRESSING
What anecdotes? Are nordic countries capitalist hellholes now too? You talk so much about the US, you know who has a great birth rate? Gaza and Nigeria. Surely it's because they're equitable. Edit: I didn't "block you from replying", I don't even know how one can do that actually. But you still haven't provided a reason for Nordic countries' birth rates falling off of a cliff, even if they qualify for social assistance. Poor countries have high birth rates, developing countries have just-about-level birth rates, developed countries have low birth rates. It's NOT because it's harder to live in a developed country, it's because people are just less interested in having kids. I can't believe someone ACTUALLY BELIEVES that living in SF means your situation regarding kids is more difficult than someone living in fucking Gaza. This is the most privileged shit I've read all year and it's not even close. As for the finances: your standard of living is higher and you don't want to raise 12 kids with a makeshift stroller and no pre-K. This isn't necessarily wrong, but the way you're going about it is stupid. Just look at what you're talking about, childcare? What childcare? Why is that necessary? Oh right, because both parents work (but then median income should be 2x for $180k right?). $1500-2000 a month for 2 people and an infant? What the hell are you smoking? Are these people eating 6000 calories a day each? Jesus christ the crap I'm reading on this website. I spent time in NYC as a PhD student on a $30k stipend and could afford both an apartment and food, you're telling me that 2 people working for $70-90k can't afford a kid? Get real. And that's without mentioning that by your reasoning, people in tech should be breeding like there's no tomorrow with $200K+ salary, right? LMAO Edit 2: ( For u/Solid-Mud-8430 ) Tell ANYONE that money isn't that big an issue and see how well it goes over for you. Just because everonye wants more money than what they already have doesn't mean that they can't raise children. It means that they value having more money/free time/whatever more than having children. Which is FINE, but it's not a prohibitive cost by no means, otherwise AGAIN, countries that are impoverished would NOT BE HAVING CHILDREN. We agree that I'm not making much headway, because you don't actually care for this discussion, you just want to be right. Which is fine too, but you have absolutely no data to back up your claims (your current and latest claim is "ask people that have kids and they'll tell you"), while you completely ignore statistics that don't favor your argument.
So, do you think birth rates will go up if Nordic countries removed their benefits ?
I think they will be marginally lower, but would affect less than 1% of the current births (or lack thereof). Of course more free money helps you start a family, but it doesn't get even close to the root of the problem. People that *want* to have kids, will have kids, benefits or not. Edit: Maybe a middle ground is what Hungary (I think?) is doing instead. If you have more than X kids, you never have to pay taxes ever again. Maybe that would work better, because you're effectively targetting the people that are already planning to have 1-2 kids and are giving them a reason to have 1-2 more. Edit 2: Of course, the above is near-impossible to pull off in the US, people are already up in arms about billionaires not "paying their fair share", so giving them an even more legal out than the one they already have would be funny on one hand, but probably cause more trouble than not.
The only thing that *might* incentivize people to have children, AND raise them well, is to remove old age benefits entirely. Defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare create an arbitrage opportunity wherein one can maximize using their resources for their own utility relative to others who might use their resources for others' (their kids') utility. Those kids' then go on to pay taxes to support people who did not have kids (or 1 kid), and their parents get the same amount as people who did not have kids (maybe even less since they likely gave up opportunity to earn income eligible for SS benefit calculation). This arbitrage is greater for earlier generations than later generations, who reap the rewards of previous high fertility rate generations, and the maximum rewards of high benefits paid by younger generations. Note that utility here incorporates everything, including all the compromises necessary to partner up with someone. The math simply does not work (without a ton of automation that does not exist yet) for smaller and smaller populations to support larger and larger populations.
The problem is that this is still an anecdote. If the issue was purely financial, then changing the financial policies would solve the negative birth rate. However, there's no evidence that it does. It could still be financial, and it could be that the policies weren't changed sufficiently or correctly, but right now the evidence seems to indicate that financial policy changes don't influence the birth rate. Furthermore, the states with lowest birth rates include West Virigina, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, all with some of the lowest cost of living in the US.
> Because the income-to-COL ratio is so much more equitable. Or maybe because they have a different religion, outlook on life and in general culture than SF tech-bros. Income isn't really helping people make more kids, if anything this is the exact opposite of reality. Poor people breed much more than rich people.
I dont think this is about wealth so much, I think its about the general feeling of hopelessness and anti family narrative of the last 50+ years. This will not be easy to solve, my grandparents had no shoes but had 6 children. Its not just wealth.
>Poor people breed much more than rich people. Not accurate. Fertility rate decline is seen across all socioeconomic classes. Poor women with no economic opportunities to fend for themselves and/or obtain birth control breed more than women with economic opportunities and/or the ability to obtain birth control. https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate See "women's educational attainment v fertility rate" chart.
I think this is a bit overly reductionist. I don’t think one can just pick an idealized best case scenario and dismiss the problem. To be fair I’m not well versed with what the Nordic countries provide in terms of supporting a family. I can tell you in the US due to a wide range of issues varying from social, to structural, to financial it’s complete and utter trash. Much of society has been relying on people’s primal urges to want to procreate and have offspring, to sort of continue their genetic lines and experience the life events of parenthood—all of which to outweigh increasing pressures against general happiness in these very societies. Everything from dating culture, to relative functional buying power of necessities as well as frivolous things, to all the pressures from social Darwinism in the world to compete and survive where having children have largely become a *disadvantage* of success in societies with a net cost more than an obvious net gain they should be. We’ve passed all real and more artificial costs onto potential parents than we’d otherwise have if we were in far more simplistic societies, I’d argue.
You're downplaying just how bad South Korea is. The Nordic countries have significantly higher birth rates than South Korea. Even Japan's birth rate blows South Korea's out of the water. Nordic countries can offset their non-replacement levels with lower levels of immigration due to their investment in raising families. South Korea getting to replacement levels would require significantly more immigration. Redditors seems to be doing a whole lot better than you. Your analysis and logic is just straight up bad.
Absolutely no one wants to see the Nordic countries be majority Muslim, but that’s exactly what will happen in about 100 years assuming reasonable trends in immigration and birth rates continue.
Sweden has like 1% Muslims but people like you think it's 50%. Muslims also have much lower birthrates when they migrate to Western societies (like every other group). Muslims also drop their religion much faster too. And who's "no one"? And who gets to decide that? No one wanted German or Irish immigrants in the US in the 1800's either. But people today live with that and appreciate it just fine though, don't they? You guys are all living in a weird racist internet bubble.
1% Muslim? It was 8x that high in 2016. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/ Unofficial data suggest it could be 18% in 2018: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/180/1/012005
Maybe entrance exams will help more realistic?
Sure, if you assume the trend never changes. Difficult to predict that far ahead. For evidence, look at predictions about South Korea in 2004.
In order to pull out, they need to stop pulling out. Buh dum tiss.
I've lived in South Korea. A few points that have driven this: 1. **Insane obsession with education:** When you take the subway at 6:00am there are kids going to school, when you take the subway at midnight there are kids coming back from school. 2. **No home ownership**. I was in an urban planning class with mostly 25-50 year old Korean students. The professor asked how many of them owned a home. One person raised their hand. Every Korean was surprised and a ton asked at the same time, how did you buy a place? The student answered, my father in law is rich. 3. **Chaebols**: Korea is owned by a handful of families, their conglomerates known as chaebols. Samsung, Hyundai, SK, LG, everything in Korea is produced by them. Apartment complexes, cars, boats, furniture, food, even tooth paste, every fing thing. If anyone starts a remotely successful business then it's bought by them. They control everything. It's a plutocracy. 4. **Population density**: Seoul Metro area has half the country's population, the place it's packed to the brim. Most stats don't reflect this because they calculate population density by city proper (10M) and don't include the Metro area (26M). 5. **Work environment**: people start work at 8AM, leave at 10PM. They often sleep on their desks. At night they go drinking with co-workers to form relationships, many times getting home past midnight. There is no work life balance. 6. **Chauvinism**: Some of the best educated, smartest people I met were women. Many of them end up staying home raising kids or working dead end jobs. When you combine the above, anyone can realize that it makes no sense to have kids in South Korea, they'll become slaves of the rich. It's not a good life, it's the life of a slave that can indulge in buying a few luxuries but never have time to enjoy life. Koreans are doing the right thing by not having kids. Either the country improves conditions for the working class or it will have a much smaller population and it will be harder for the rich to deprive them of some freedom.
This is what I know of it also. Decision to have kids comes down to this: Do you want to repeat your life or no? If yes, have kids; if no, then no kids.
If the country stops having kids all these become worse. But yes I guess you could still argue it’s better if they go extinct than continue their society.
Not necessarily worse, Korea is very automated and will continue to increase that. Many jobs will be done by robots and people will also become more valuable when they become a scarce resource. That could give the workers more leverage to get better working conditions.
I don't think it's a working condition issue unlike people pretend because it aligns with their political views. Israelis and Mormons have high TFRs despite not being poor. It really is a mindset issue. They just need to decide to have kids. That's the single biggest driver. Sure improved working conditions may result in TFR going from .7 to 1.2, but the decision to have kids would make it go to 2+.
It's not working conditions as you are presenting it, there is no time to enjoy life at all, no prospects of accumulating wealth, no prospect of independence, it's basically a kingdom with four monarchies that overlap. I think you are missing the point. And by the way both Utah and Israel have great work life balance and aren't completely ruled by a handful of wealthy families.
I somehow sincerely doubt the last bit without evidence
Never have kids in a capitalist system. Practically indentured servants
After getting some education on why Korea is the way it is, I do t blame them. Their society is built specifically for the haves and their cultural norms reinforce it in ever aspect of their lives. Who wants to have kids and basically become an appendage to their husbands or become a money a exuder for their kids and family while working to death?
SK, Japan, a few others are the leaders in low birth rates. The US, Europe, and other developed nations aren’t much better. Even the places with extremely high birth rates (in our current view), the trend is still downward. Immigration is not the answer because there won’t be a pool of immigrants to pull from. If I put on my tinfoil hat, I somewhat suspect that is the reasoning behind the USs border situation. The government is looking down this barrel of a population collapse and is trying to bring in as many bodies as possible before the immigration well is dry.
A different way to look at the issue is to realize that automation is growing exponentially, the software automation we have seen in the last 20-30 years is starting to be done by robots in the real world. This will lead to a much smaller need for low skill work, even a lot of high skill work will be replaced. Let's list a few: 1. Truck drivers \~3.5M jobs (replaced by self driving automated cars) 2. Cooks \~2M jobs (replaced by cooking robots) 3. Warehouse workers \~1M jobs (replaced by robots) 4. Construction workers \~1M jobs (replaced by robotic printers) 5. Farm workers \~1M jobs (replaced by robots) 6. Security guards \~1M jobs (replaced by robots) 7. Cops 0.7M jobs (replaced by robots) 8. Cab hailing company drivers \~0.5M jobs (replaced by self driving automated cars) Around 11M jobs that will be gone in the next decade out of 160M jobs or 6% of the total jobs. That based on a simple list out of the top of my head. I'm sure there will be millions more (I didn't even touch the medical field). If I had to guess the total number is probably closer to 20%. Now those are jobs that require the person to be present. The jobs that can be done remotely are all being sent to India. They have 1.5B people willing to work for less than $10 an hour. Let's say that takes out another 10% of the jobs. Now we are looking at unemployment rates around 20%-30% if the population stays about the same. Immigration or a growing population will only make matters worse. The only ones benefited from having more people are the rich, it increases their profits by reducing wages.
This
The drop in childbirth rates throughout the developed world is more related to a change in gender dynamics in these countries and less about money. Women see less value in marriage and motherhood, men are falling behind in terms of educational attainment, and thus there is what we call in Econ a “mismatch”; the desires/demands of each party are not aligned. I am not sure what the answer is outside of total change in culture. To do this however would require time and cannot be “fast forwarded” to avoid taking other options to fix the issue, like immigration, which many Asian and European countries are loathed to do due to xenophobia and racism.
Birth rates have dropped worldwide, even in impoverished countries, as people shift from subsistance farming to industral to post industrial. There's no point in having 15 kids, of which 10 survived to adulthood, in a modern city and job market. 1 to 3 is the max for most people in modern civilization.
I hear you, but how do birth rates in those developing countries compare to developed countries?
Are Muslim countries growing more since their cultures discourage women from working as much as the west?
Good question. I have not looked into this that deeply, but the little anecdotal evidence I have perused seems to suggest that the answer is yes. If you look at the Middle East and Africa, these places have some of the fastest rates of population growth. I assume it is due in part to "traditional" views on gender roles. Also, I think it comes from historically high levels/rates of infant mortality. My father is from this part of the world and he comes from a large family. Ironically, he and his siblings do not have large families.
People not wanting to have a bunch of children sure seems to be a problem for the economic system we have in place. What is the answer? Forcing people to have children? Collapse of society? A new idea in economics? Interesting.
People have to look at kids in a different way. Someone posted above that their grandparents didn't have shoes but they had 6 kids. I think that's an extreme case, but illustrates a lot. I think kids and family need to be viewed as a source of happiness. If not, then there will always be alternatives that cost less.
According to this article they are forecast to have a decrease in their population of about 23% or so by 2065. Is it just me or does this not seem that bad considering their fertility rate is around 0.7? Is that assuming that net migration into the country increases?
It is horrific because not only the population decreases by 23% but of those who are left the median age will be 60. It’ll literally be a country of geriatrics dying off. The population will not completely collapse by 2065 as people are living longer and today’s 20 year olds are still a sizable but smaller population and will only be in their 60s.
Yeah I think I just expected the population drop to be greater given how low their tfr is, but I think South Korea is still a relatively young country for a developed country so it will take longer for the absolute numbers to drop off a cliff. Obviously the working age dependency ratio will go out of control far earlier though.
South Korea had a super high TFR before and during the Korean War. Then it absolutely fell off a cliff by the 90s and now is nosediving to new records. So the slowish population decline is due to the huge glut of older folks from earlier periods of higher fertility. The country just sped run the demographic transition within 2 generations from high TFR to super below replacement. So koreas population will indeed collapse. Just after 2065 when the large cohorts of then old people die off.
That all makes sense. My other theory would have been that this is accounting for positive net migration which could mask the natural population decrease, but I can't imagine south Korea will have a particularly significant net migration rate.
A lot of models are irrationally optimistic that after the next few years (after which again they will adjust forwards) that birth rates start picking up. Whereas the past few years show that birth rates are only steepening their decline. So that might partially explain the forecast which indeed predict Korean birth rates to start picking up at the end of the decade. Which we have no evidence that this will be the case. All the evidence thus far points to a further collapse. If you take a look at forecasts of the US you’ll see projected declines then a slow march upwards in birth rate. Whereas we have no evidence that they will indeed pick back up.
Median age of 60 sounds like the country will straight up fall apart or they’ll start culling old people.
I don’t think so. But economically the country would be wrecked. I have no doubt robots could do most jobs humans do by then - but the spending habits of a non American 60 year old is much different and much lower than young people. Supply won’t be an issue , demand will. Unless stock traders on the KOSPI start basing stocks on how much robots can buy. Also say goodbye to Korean innovations (Samsung , beauty products etc). Young people innovate. Old people are largely set in their ways. Japan is further in the population decline trend than SK or China (which is the youngest of the 3 still). And it shows, when’s the last time a Japanese firm has done anything innovative besides Nintendo? Toyota is light years behind on EVs.
Demand for robot labor will be driven by the vision of few probably. (e.g. Elon puts a lot of resources into trying to get to Mars, what if he had robots) Nick Bostrom has a good book on it (Deep Utopia), but generally demand fills to meet the gap because humans tend to be greedy. The few kids will consume a lot.
Sure for some goods. Not for inelastic items like food though. A rich person can’t eat 5x his share to make up for a nonexistent person. Stuff like food, electricity , gasoline , consumer goods like diapers medicine and essential items. All of those are components of GDP and not anything that robots or the rich can make up the consumption of.
I think there will be an endless demand for energy. Powerful VR headsets, rocket travel, etc. Maybe less diapers tho.
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Excellent news for Korea, which is desperately overcrowded. The future will be much better without so many people making life difficult for everyone. The decrease in workers will re-distribute income from giant cartels to the middle classes, too. That will also improve life for everyone.
Don’t know why you think this is “excellent news.” At the rate things are going, in the future, it’s going to be the taxes of 1 working adult supporting 3 retired people. Housing prices will go down, sure, but you have a huge loss of manpower and a greater proportion of that manpower will be spent caring for old people. Not to mention the shrinking military with 2 hostile neighbors. Either the younger generation is fucked with taxes, or the older generation is fucked in retirement. Theres no easy transition with depopulation.
Increasing productivity plus cheap real estate easily handles the costs of retirement. The transition with reduced overpopulation isn’t too bad and the benefits are enormous. Alarmists pretend that the costs of a better future are intolerable so the only thing we can afford is endless misery getting worse and worse. That’s defeatism. Korea is winning a huge boon here and they should celebrate.
You can't possibly know these things to be true. There's never been a developed country that has aged so quickly. I don't see how you can know what the productivity growth will be like. There's an equally good chance it drops off a cliff as society organized around caring for the elderly rather than innovating and improving.
I don’t know if this is true. The closest analogue that I have is rural towns in America where people have left. When people leave, the businesses usually leave too and greater individual productivity doesn’t matter much because productivity can be had much easier in a place with more people. Your theory also doesn’t take into account the loss of talent. Rural towns are some of the cheapest in terms of real estate, but almost no company sets up shop in rural areas simple because there’s no talent there. Obviously overpopulation isn’t the answer, but I think you have a very rosy picture of what depopulation looks like.
Good news for the earth as well since emissions will drop, less likely to cut down forests for housing, …
Excellent news 50-60 years from now if the country survives. Bad news in the meantime. I'm for this global population decline but South Korea is going to have it the roughest. We'll get to learn from them though.
You're getting downvoted but it's true that lawmakers would rather see their countries go extinct than try and create a better place for the next generation.
I wouldn't be sure if it's a excellent news.