I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but this does not surprise me in the least. The life in Korea is way too competitive and stressful. The hellscape begins in pre-school and primary school where parents make kids go to private school AFTER school, often till late evenings. This progressively gets worse and worse until university.
In my father's generation, people could relax after getting into university. They could party around, barely pass and still get decent jobs. Nowadays, that's definitely not the case. Getting a good job is insanely hard. You need to take care of your GPA. English certs like TOFLE/TOEIC are pretty much mandatory and you'd probably want other cert/ extra curricular experience.
Okay. So you've went through all that and you've got yourself a good job. Now that's all done, can you finally start to relax and enjoy life? Haha, no. 52-hour weekly working limit has only recently been introduced, and the current president wants to get rid of that. Even if you work your ass off, it is _very_ unlikely that you can ever afford an apartment in Seoul.
In the end, you have tired and jaded people without a fun childhood, who can't even buy their own house. I certainly would not choose to have children in these circumstances.
I've "escaped" and live a decent life outside of Korea now. But I have many friends in Korea who have "given up" (in various ways) in light of all this . There are some friends who are married and have kids, but they all have rich parents or studied/hustled really hard. In spite of all this, I miss Korea so much. But I don't think I'll be going back.
This is only one reason in declining fertility rate. There are many more (some mentioned in other comments) but this comment is already getting too ranty.
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EDIT: This comment got much more attention than I thought it would and I'd like to add some positive stuff too. There are certainly people who enjoy life in Korea by refusing to participate in the rat race and by prioitising building meaningful communities in their lives. Some things are getting better, albeit slowly, with each generation.
> you have tired and jaded people without a fun childhood
Man this hits really hard because I spent my first 20 years growing up in China... Good thing is that now I'm in a much less authoritarian place with a job that has decent work-life balance. Have been trying to cultivate some hobbies in the past few years, feels like I've been trying to reclaim the childhood I never had.
We're talking about 4 days work week for adults, but no one is talking about 40 hours work week for kids. 7 hours of school, 3 hours of homework, then karate, piano, swimming and football on weekends.
I've complained about that my whole life. Going from high school to college was wonderful because I had so much time time my first semester in college. (I ended up blowing that by overloading myself in subsequent semesters, but that's another story.)
I always hated the idea of homework in school (outside of college/university) because I have never understood being at "home" but still required to do "work" for a place I just spent 7-8 hours at and most days 2-3 more hours for sports or band.
If those karate, piano, swimming and football are intense enough to be counted as "work" rather than leisure, then something is wrong. Are hobbies not a thing anymore?
Just finished "Stolen Focus" and it has a whole chapter on how lack of free play and helicopter parenting completely destroys a child's ability to thrive and focus. What we are doing to kids is criminal, and it's getting worse. Solution? Just give them some pills. We are destroying a whole generation, and their brains are already mush from social media.
I have friends who spent a couple of years in Korea and they get quite sad when they talk about the kids they saw. They just seemed to have no life outside of an endless stream of classes and tutors.
I'm trying to strike a balance with my kids. We encourage them to do things like learn music, take up sports etc, but not let that just consume all their free time. I want them to have time to just play freely, read comics, or just be a bit bored sometimes.
As other people have mentioned, its about not being able to afford to buy a house to raise kids in.
I do want to also mention though, a unique Korean system called "Jeonse", which is a large deposit that is 50-80% of the property value. After putting in the deposit, you can live there on yearly basis without paying rent. This system has been and is being used as property ladder for young families (as they don't have to "lose" money on rent) but as "Jeonse" is pegged to property value, they've been rapidly rising as well AND frauds around Jeonse has been on rise, in which case you can lose the whole deposit or be tied up in court battle for years.
I think OP is talking about _buying_ an apartment.
The property may simply be owned by who bought it a while ago and are now sucking up the majority of wages of the younger generation.
Speculation but: apartments might have less supply than there is demand from those people. And to "us" 52 workweek and perfect GPA might sound like being upper of the uppest but in Korea, as GP frames it, it sounds median.
This is very accurate. I’m Irish, and when my Korean wife and I were leaving the US with our two young kids, Korea wasn’t even considered as a place to raise them. She had such a needlessly tough time as a kid, and her siblings are having to put their young kids through exactly the same exhausting upbringing.
It’s not worth it. We’re luckily to have the choice of moving home to Europe and raising our kids in a way that they get to play a lot (I’m writing this while on a bench in a playground with them bouncing around in the sunshine) and also have school, art and sports.
Korea is actively discouraging Koreans from raising their kids there, especially if they have any other option
> by refusing to participate in the rat race
That does indeed sounds like a rat race! I have just came across this art which visually resembles what you described https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dZQelULDk&t=7s
This whole experience sounds very labour camp like. Minus the electric fence. The way out is no longer that easy.
Of course the decorations are nicer and there are some who are kept around to work as "worser off" examples. But all in all, i guess most would cheer for the fall of this.
Well if competitiveness is the reason for low birth rates, this should fix itself once the older generations age out of their posts and the companies need to look for replacements among a much smaller workforce.
Ah but the younger generations will need to support the older non longer working people who also happens to have more votes. Korean national pension is going to run out in 10 years or so, and there is already talk of raising the mandatory contribution from 9% to 18%.
Well that's a bit complicated. Traditionally, yes. Korea has been a Confucian society, which meant that the eldest son gets the parent's house, lives with them and takes care of them. Incidentally, being a wife of the eldest son is also very hard, because you are supposed to take care of your in-laws (boy do I have some horror stories).
With modernisation, this has changed.
1. Most women no longer wants to be servants for the in-laws (rightfully so) and wants to live separately
2. With less children, you won't necessarily have a son.
So now, parents live separately, until they are unable to do so anymore. When this happens, the children might take them into their house and care for them or admit them into hospice or retirement home.
You might ask, what happens if your children don't take care of you and you don't have money? Well you are kinda f-ed, as seen with the high elderly poverty rate.
> [Korea has] the highest elderly poverty rate among OECD countries
Oh, Korean national pension is also set to run out within 10 years or so, which will make the issue worse and/or make the future generation pay disproportionate amount of tax :)))
Probably they used to be able to keep the poor, poor via something brutally effective and simple, like only a tiny minority even getting the chance to go to decent schools or universities. Now they need a lot of wasted effort to convince people that the people at the top are working really hard and deserve it to maintain the same elite dynamic.
evidence: 7% got to tertiary education in 1975, and recently peaked at above 100% (not sure how that works to be honest, but the trend is clear)
Might a contributing factor be the older generation saw in their lifetime the change from extreme poverty to relative wealth brought about by the industriousness of the population?
the difference also is that your father generation (if he is 50 or more) did not really have a lot of good job. most of the jobs were blue collar. now it changed a lot as most of the jobs are really for the highly educated and its very competitive
Is nobody really doing anything irresponsible anymore, en masse? where is the party, hookup, pregnancy and carry-to-term scene? is that not happening, or is the party, hookup scene all just that risk-free right now - even when pregnancy occurs
because the latter suggests that people really just don't want kids, and possibly never really did
its hard for me to think that all of society uniformly is successfully planning for children now, instead of many children being a bunch of accidents that the parents just go along with
"Failure to plan is planning to fail": given the potentially life ruining costs of pregnancy and raising a child, there's a lot of incentive to not make that mistake.
> where is the party, hookup, pregnancy and carry-to-term scene? is that not happening
Did that ever really happen in Korea? Even in the West having a "hookup scene" in the first place was a product of having effective contraception available, and a whole set of controversial cultural changes.
This kind of planning implicitly happens when women are expected to have a career instead of finding their identity in successful motherhood. I don't know much anything at all about Korean women's professional labor, but I'd be very surprised if it did not play a role. Country fertility rates correlate extremely well with female full time non domestic labor participation.
Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years, the living memory of a single life.
Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources.
Has it occurred to people that, maybe, modern fertility is a tragedy of the commons? If everyone chooses to act in their own interest, society is worse off than collectively pressuring to have more kids? Ideally, that would look like major subsidies and benefits to parents to account for the extra work they are doing for society.
I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off the planet, and the traditionally oppressive-to-women societies will evolutionarily outlast us.
At this rate, there will only be 3m South Koreans in 3 generations. I don't see how you expect a country to survive that decline. In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
There's just a lump in the population vs. age graph and you're fixating on the back side of the lump as if it's inevitably going towards zero.
After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
Wanna guess what happens in that welcoming environment? My guess is people feel inclined to make some babies.
I don't understand why people tend to treat these low fertility rates as some kind of invariable biological dysfunction. These aren't infertile masses of people; they're perfectlycapable of multiplying like rabbits.
The planet has shitloads of people, maybe we're finally reeling things in from an overshoot and are on the inevitably pendulum-like path towards population stability. There's no reason to panic unless you've got substantial evidence these people are physically incapable of having children.
Edit:
How about some DATA: go to https://population.io, select Rep. of Korea, plug in some age/gender b.s. and scroll down to "Age Distribution" at the left column. Now look to the left of ~20yo (younger than 20), it's a nearly horizontal line. What does that tell you? There's a uniform rate of Korean babies per year under 20 years old. To the right of this, there's a massive lump of elderly people with a slightly smaller lump of middle-aged people. There's no reason to believe this horizontal line left of 20yo won't just continue into the future; it looks quite stable for the last ~20 years.
>Wanna guess what happens in that welcoming environment? My guess is people feel inclined to make some babies.
I would assume the exact opposite given that this will probably probably crank up pressure on working-aged people as more and more old people need to be supported by fewer and fewer young. I would also assume a significant exodus of the young to places with actual opportunities rather than a country sized retirement home where no one wants to invest in the future because anything built to fit the needs of the population at any given moment will be massively overbuilt in the near future.
> After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
It will take 90 years for this lump to pass, and another 20 years for the newborns to grow up... you're talking about a recovery that will take a century...
A century of decline seems like a pretty good reason to panic to me...
> How about some DATA: go to https://population.io, select Rep. of Korea, plug in some age/gender b.s. and scroll down to "Age Distribution" at the left column. Now look to the left of ~20yo (younger than 20), it's a nearly horizontal line. What does that tell you?
Yeah, something is definitely wrong with the site because actual population pyramid data looks much more alarming:
> it's a nearly horizontal line. What does that tell you?
That the data must be wrong, there should be some small variation and it doesn't pass the sanity check of declining birth rates.
> After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
I like your optimism, but do we see anything like that in the real word after depopulation? There are many shrinking cities or areas, eg Detroit in the US or East Germany (people moving to the west), and the results are hugely negative and a downward spiral. Instead of people enjoying lack of traffic congestion, shrinking cities can't afford their oversized infrastructure anymore, which begins to deteriorate from lack of upkeep.
After that lump passes through, you may have suffered a huge drain of adults expected squeezed so hard for child and elder care that they've since taken their productivity elsewhere.
Apologies for ranting but this topic resonates too much.
Housing prices are 9x salary vs 4.5x salary in the 70s and it takes a while to save up. Personal data point: it took me winning an IPO lottery to start thinking about having kids for real. Having kids while earning minimal wage? Terrifying, especially in the US where getting yourself or your kid sick could bankrupt you in the blink of an eye - and if you want multiple kids you increase the risk.
So we think we have to have it all before we start trying having kids and have no sense of community whatsoever. Societal focus on hedonism and career leaves little to no time to raise kids. And at the end of the day you end up having no support from the society that slowly but surely ages.
I agree with you on the latter point, but I want to also point something out on the former. Many people who are of no "proper" means to do so continue to have children. And they make it work, even if it may be uncomfortable and require sacrifice. So the issue is not one of finances, but priorities. Winning an IPO lottery being the baseline where you feel comfortable for having children doesn't mean that such is the inherent baseline, but that you simply prioritize comfort and wealth over raising a family. And that is okay.
This nuance is important; it emphasizes the real issue is not economics, but culture! We've created a society that values the pursuit of wealth and comfort more than family, and it's likely this system is not sustainable. Not everybody can be wealthy, because wealth is relative and mediated by what exists. If 30% of people want something and there's only enough for 3%, then it doesn't matter what the relative wealth is among these people: 90% of people won't be able to "afford" it, and that will never change. A post-scarcity society will never exist alongside consumerism; we'll simply take what we can have for granted and lust over the new scarcities.
But the people having kids are the ones with less money. The parents in my neighborhood are middle class (I mean like cops and admin assistants) and there’s three families with three kids just within 8 houses. Meanwhile among my law school friends, 0 kids is far more common than 2, and while I’m sure someone else besides me in my class (200 people, late 30s) has 3, I don’t know them.
One thing I think gets really overlooked is that college and job searches tear apart extended families, which in more traditional societies are a huge part of the child care strategy.
Monthly mortgage payments are the same though. (Lower interest rates, etc.)
Also building costs gone up. (The plague of single family homes, stricter building codes, higher quality requirements from buyers, while buildings are still produced using the old labor intensive methods.) And due to fucked up zoning building low-cost housing is just not happening :/
So folks are basically forced to buy expensive houses.
> Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years
Does the change necessarily have to be societal?
> In 1992, a study found a global 50% decline in sperm counts in men over the previous 60 years. Multiple studies over subsequent years confirmed that initial finding, including a 2017 paper showing a 50% to 60% decline in sperm concentration between 1973 and 2011 in men from around the world.
These studies, though important, focused on sperm concentration or total sperm count. So in 2019, a team of researchers decided to focus on the more powerful total motile sperm count. They found that the proportion of men with a normal total motile sperm count had declined by approximately 10% over the previous 16 years.
The science is consistent: Men today produce fewer sperm than in the past, and the sperm are less healthy. The question, then, is what could be causing this decline in fertility[0].
Infertility is not the leading issue when people are asked, 'why are you not having children?'. Until it is, I don't see how it can be more important than societal barriers.
The same things that cause a higher average life expectation? Maybe the microplastics floating through the atmosphere everywhere? The constant stress about what is happening with the whole world instead of just your neighbor?
When you can't afford to have children due to low pay, sperm count is out of the equation.
What doesn't make sense to me is the people that are concerned about society "changing", the native population not having enough kids, we are being "overrun" with immigrants etc. Are the same people that refuse to vote for politicians advocating higher minimum wages, more benefits and fairer taxes.
It can't work both ways, either you want to crush the average person with low wages and taxes, or you want the native population to thrive.
No one is going to subject themselves to poverty to help balance the demographics for the privileged.
>Men today produce fewer sperm than in the past, and the sperm are less healthy. The question, then, is what could be causing this decline in fertility[0].
This has everything to do with monogamous relationships and marriages in most of the developed human world.
In the natural world, there are many factors at play that help ensure only the "healthiest" males conceive with females. Most factors are indirect, such as males physically fighting each other for a mate wherein the "fittest" male would more likely come out superior and successfully mate.
One direct factor that has been practically eradicated from humanity, however, is direct competition between sperm. Some animals and many plants are polygamous, wherein a female receives sperm (or other forms of genetic material as applicable) from multiple males. The sperm have to compete with each other to reach the egg first and conceive, this encourages males with the "healthiest" sperm to pass their genetic material onto the next generation.
Monogamous relationships and marriages as seen in humans remove this factor completely, the "fitness" of a given male human's sperm is irrelevant to conception because competition between sperm has ceased to exist. Both unfit and fit sperm alike can conceive, assuming other indirect factors at play allow for it. Indirect factors that care not for the "fitness" of sperm.
> Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years, the living memory of a single life.
Women gained financial freedom and the ability to choose when they get pregnant. Societies will now find out the market price for birthing children (as well as women finding out the price for not birthing children).
Talking about “developed countries” here, not SK specifically.
Is declining fertility really such a societal and evolutionary danger when we’re talking 1.4-1.5? If you think of us all as one race, the human race, the fact that a few corners of the world are declining in fertility is arguably an environmental victory that could soften some crises’s in the future. We are like 99.9% genetically similar, why risk gutting the carrying capacity of the planet to preserve the 0.001% of genes that give us sparkling blue eyes?
The whole contention that it’s terrible that high birthrate countries are so much more
feminist than low birthrate ones, well I mean just because the genetics of feminist counties might wane, that doesn’t mean their cultures will. Memetics is just as powerful as genetics, do rich countries really have to be the world’s stud? Can’t we see the poorer countries investing in people and the wealthier countries investing in things as teamwork?
> If you think of us all as one race, the human race, the fact that a few corners of the world are declining in fertility
It is not a few corners of the world. It is currently "developed countries", but we have no reason to believe that the non-"developed countries" will do any better.
> is arguably an environmental victory that could soften some crises’s in the future. We are like 99.9% genetically similar, why risk gutting the carrying capacity of the planet to preserve the 0.001% of genes that give us sparkling blue eyes?
Putting to a side for now the blase attitude to several societies slowly disappearing due to lack of births:
1. Much of society is built around the implicit assumption of there being more people in the future.
2. The carrying capacity of the world is only of interest to us as long as we are around for it. All of humanity suddenly disappearing tomorrow would also do wonders for the world's carrying capacity.
We may be genetically similar but there are literally millions/maybe billions of people in the world who do not agree with LGBT or women's rights. Some of these places execute people for expressing their authentic selves. Some of these places do not believe in science and progress, and are extremely insular and religiously conservative.
So no, I don't think it is a victory unless human rights and progress don't mean anything. I'm from one of these places where birth rates are high but the quality of life is awful and government corruption is astronomical. Most people there will probably shun you if not actually harm you for doing something that nobody cares about in the US or some western countries. Recently I saw a post about how the Norwegian health ministry released some images of people doing various sexual poses as part of some sex-ed. I thought it was quite neat, and it features multiple sexualities. I will bet my life savings you try doing that where I'm from that it won't go so well and the number of fundamentalist minded people is rising.
I think it's less about preserving sparkling blue eyes and more about the negative effects of a declining population on a country's economy. Sam Harris had a guest (Peter Zeihan) a few episodes ago who talked about the downsides of population decline, and he was pretty interesting.
One of the key points he made that seemed fairly intuitive is that as your population declines you eventually wind up with significantly fewer long term experts in various fields of science and engineering. This means that the people who train up the next generation of scientists and engineers are spread thinner, and therefore less depth of expertise in those fields as the decline continues.
I'm not sure how much that idea is backed up by evidence, but it at least makes some sense.
Population decline had never really registered as a problem to me until I heard that episode - I always kinda figured that less people around would be a net good. Definitely worth a listen if you're interested in the topic.
> Is declining fertility really such a societal and evolutionary danger
Yes. If modern (western dominated) society is not self-sustaining, this should be a big hint, that there is something deeply wrong with our culture.
> If you think of us all as one race, the human race
But that doesn't mean populations are interchangeable?
"since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too.
You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century."
> Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years, the living memory of a single life.
Industrialisation.
The UK began industrialising in the mid-to-late 1700s. Western Europe and North America got going in the early 1800s. Central Europe and Japan followed along, while Russia didn't really industrialise until the Soviet Union. China and Korea, by contrast, just started in the 1950s-70s, easily within a human life time. Their societies made the leap from subsistence farming to CPU design _so_ much faster than most of the developed world, it's unreal.
> Has it occurred to people that, maybe, modern fertility is a tragedy of the commons? If everyone chooses to act in their own interest, society is worse off than collectively pressuring to have more kids? Ideally, that would look like major subsidies and benefits to parents to account for the extra work they are doing for society.
Or maybe the tragedy of the commons was having 6 children per family within living memory? Maybe now by dropping our population we are doing much better for the world society as a whole. It all depends on your perspective I guess. I fail to see the problem with a drop in world population.
> At this rate, there will only be 3m South Koreans in 3 generations. I don't see how you expect a country to survive that decline. In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
Maybe South Korea won't survive in its current form. The world will keep revolving the sun nonetheless.
Surrogacy will be the next big thing. Women in poorer countries will birth the children for wealthier nations. This will aid in the reduction of family formation in poorer countries and serve as population control. While ensuring no one country becomes too populated.
H.G. Wells pointed out that we cannot have population control in one nation of the world, but not another. It must be worldwide, or it'd result in severe unrest.
Julian Huxley, H.G. Wells, Charles Pincus (and many more) made this one of the defining issues of the 20th century. The Pill and IVF were long in the works and heavily funded as a means to avoid the "Population Bomb."
They envisioned a new world without war or environmental destruction. Their solution was to reduce the birth rate, through various means. The reduction of family formation being one of them.
It's interesting to read through these older works and realize the world they'd envisioned has to some extent come to fruition.
> Surrogacy will be the next big thing. Women in poorer countries will birth the children for wealthier nations.
So you think women in poorer countries are willing to "pre-sell" their children? That's insanely absurd, and an absolute human rights violation if forced. No. This will not happen.
No it won't. Poor countries arent that stupid. Many don't allow surrogacy for ethical reasons. What they want is for current rich countries to impoverish themselves so there's room for more competition.
That comparison rings backwards to me? Pakistan is a deeply troubled, dangerous, and poorly run country. Korea is one of the best places to live on Earth.
I'm pretty sure Korea has pretty shit work/life balance. And if you lose your job you're also SoL. There's still a substantial amount of instability and psychic stressors that could lead to someone not wanting kids, on top of constantly fearing war with NK
>>In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
Social factors are not considered enough. As societies get more materialistic, and socio-economically advanced, there seems to be more individualistic, privacy[in the wrong way, escalating to extreme isolationism], lack of social interaction and bonding etc.
I myself felt odd during the time I stayed in the US, the whole concept of individualism and privacy was taken too far, and everybody felt lonely in their own way. People moved around in fixed schedules and paths, almost like an open air prison. Given limited social interaction outside work[where you can't even sneeze without offending some one]. This really felt like passion and purpose in life was slowly fading away. I can imagine how a society with this sort of a lifestyle could fare on the longer run. People would want lesser and lesser people around them, and interact with them even lesser as time would proceed.
Countries like India and Pakistan definitely have third world infrastructure, but the social infrastructure is very strong and likely to remain, this is due to socio-religious reasons. For this reason, people get married and have 2+ kids.
> Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources.
There's a scary implication. If having to support more elderly causes one to produce less offspring, we have a positive feedback loop resulting in population collapse.
Yes, and immigration almost always brings tension because of cultural clash.
I think a lot of people in developed countries voluntarily or involuntarily adopt a psychological willingness to not have kids and let their culture collapse because the emotional distress of a life in a post-growth world. A world where your freedoms, privacy, and economic opportunities are shrinking, to extract temporary value and stability for the upper class, out of you and your labour/compliance. The only worldly way out of it is to basically step on the others while going up to implement these changes, which feels horrible to a naturally empathic creature like man. It's a cursed state of being.
As usual, society is not preparing itself for new economic realities (many I speak to do not understand this particular one at all), but, has it occurred to you that this is very good news in terms of livability on planet earth and our continued existence? Sure, humans will adapt but only when it's too late, as usual, but at least this is a change in positive direction. Forever growth is nonsensical, and this isn't the worst way it could end.
The only way your hypothesis is plausible (ignoring everything else that’s weird and troubling about it) is if everyone on the planet decides to go along with it. Not every society has this problem of low fertility, and those who own the future are the ones who show up.
While developed nations are below replacement rate, many developing nations are having over half a dozen children per family. The aging population of developed countries is not conducive to production and a healthy economy. This will lead to immigration. If this trend continues, people from the developing nations will eventually inherit the developed world. Until they too fall below replacement rate.
As an American (immigrant) I'm honestly really alarmed by seeing the high birth rates in countries that are well, to put it bluntly, kinda backwards (I'm from one of them btw).
One of the reasons we moved to a country like the US is to be away from a backwards minded, theocratic af, corrupt society. To see that these types of countries are actually booming while highly progressed ones are depressing is super depressing.
In poor countries, kids are free labor and your future source of pension. In rich countries kids are expensive pets that don’t fit in your small apartment.
Genetic Koreans are not necessarily staying in Korea, so a low birth-rate in country doesn't mean their genes will be wiped off the planet. Korea is a pretty serious exporter of people.
Obviously, the greatest thing that changed over those last 60 years is they're no longer recovering from a war that killed a pretty hefty amount of their population. While I'm sure it didn't need to decline quite so much, fertility rate was never going to stay what it was in the late 50s. You can see a pretty obvious recovery spike here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m.... It was only in the past 20 years that they declined below 1920s level.
It's also worth remembering that being oppressive to women is (definitely at least probably) not a genetically tranmissible trait. If the 22nd Century really does end up being dominated by Pakistanis, you can't just automatically assume they'll stay culturally identical to what they are today. Presumably, the Korea of the 19 century was a lot more oppressive to women than the Korea of today.
The resources of korea and their technology will not go away, they will now be at the hands of fewer people, so more wealth / person. Historically it was small states that dominated the world, the populous ones were ravaged by poverty and famine.
People are calculating (correctly) that our future technology does not need a lot of hands, and that is true. Look at the tech sector , which employs a tiny percentage of the population but has enormous output.
As for the egoist act of genetic heritage/perpetuation, well let's be honest, in 10 years people will be modifying their genes and removing our clunky and faulty dna so there goes our glory.
As for wars/security, those are already fought with drones
> I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off
The trend will not continue forever
To me , this all highlights that we need to ramp up anti-aging technology fast and hard. It s much higher priority than sending humans to mars
> Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources.
There a tenancy to forget that 60 years ago one working person would have to support a wife and several children.
It kinda amazing how we could probably point a point where productivity peaked that is how many people single working person can support. As before that depending on location pretty much everyone worked on one level or an other...
OR we could say "you had 65 years to save up, no way in hell are we going to keep crippling the economic prospects of our youth to fund your retirement"
I really see no way out of this unless our economic models change drastically.
For the population to actually grow, some people will need to make three kids. I just don't see that happening at scale at all. Most won't even make two kids, forget about three.
"our future", last time I check, Pakistan wasn't invading any foreign territory, aside from some normal border disputes it's problems are usually within it's own borders. This seems like paranoia that the "others" will come and ruin our civilization.
If Pakistan, and other countries like India and China, continues to modernize, eventually the population should stable out and historically that comes with better rights for all.
> I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off the planet, and the traditionally oppressive-to-women societies will evolutionarily outlast us.
As the standard of living rises, birth rates are dropping precipitously even in those countries that are relatively more oppressive.
Absent socioeconomic reasons, there are still females that naturally desire having plenty of children, despite there not being any societal pressure in favor (or even against) that. They will be genetically selected for.
We’re lucky enough to afford childcare and healthcare, but I can’t imagine how anyone making significantly less can do it.
Healthcare costs are ongoing, and obscene. Routine newborn vaccines are around $900 per visit even with partial insurance coverage. Not to mention any unforeseen hospital visits that will force you to hit your deductible in the first two quarters of the year ($10k per child in our case).
In most tier 2/3 cities in the US you can expect daycare to cost $1,000-$1,800 per child per month.
In any tier 1 city, especially west coast cities like Seattle and SF, expect to pay at least $2,000/child per month.
On top of that, you’ll have a mortgage. With median housing prices around $1.2-$1.6m and rates in the mid 5% you’re looking at anywhere from $6,500-$8,000/month for a mortgage depending on taxes.
So right out of the gate, you’re at $10k of post tax income just going to daycare costs and a mortgage. You likely have other costs that equal at least $1,000/month. And that’s for 1 kid. Add another kid and you’re easily approaching $15k per month.
If you do the math, you’ll need to make at least $250k if you have one kid considering at least 40% is going straight to taxes (aka military funds since we get nothing in this country for the insane amount of taxes we pay).
>Routine newborn vaccines are around $900 per visit even with partial insurance coverage.
Per ACA, all routine newborn care (including vaccines and routine blood draw) is 100% paid by insurance company. The specifics are all listed in the links below.
>Not to mention any unforeseen hospital visits that will force you to hit your deductible in the first two quarters of the year ($10k per child in our case).
This is not true for the US. The maximum out of pocket legal limit for 2022 is $17.4k for a family. If you have a half decent employer, deductibles are far lower (in the $3k to $5k range), and so are out of pocket maximums (in the $5k to $10k range at most).
I would budget at least 2 years of out of pocket maximums to have on hand. In our case, we hit out of pocket maximums of ~$5k and ~$7k during the year of birth, otherwise it costs $150 to $250 for a regular pink eye/ear infection consult and $400 to $500 for a specialist consult. This is in a very high cost of living area.
> Has it occurred to people that, maybe, modern fertility is a tragedy of the commons? If everyone chooses to act in their own interest, society is worse off than collectively pressuring to have more kids?
Before we start talking about tragedy of the commons with fertility, how about we fix the surrounding factors that cause people to have babies later in life or only one (subsidies are a good start, but they need to be massive if the surrounding systems and culture don't change)? And if we are worried about "dysgenically wiping ourselves of the earth" (a phrasing which I observe, with no implications intended, to jvery close to those used in the great replacement and white genocide conspiracy theories), how about we start massive immigration-and-integration programs? And stop doing business with the most oppressive ones...personally know a Qatari woman trying to escape that country but she can't leave without a male guardian signing off on it.
What? Declining birth rates have nothing to do with oppressing women. Worker exploitation, poor social safety net, and wealth disparity are squarely to blame.
> Declining birth rates have nothing to do with oppressing women.
I think the point was the opposite: countries with limited respect and opportunities for women have higher birth rates because women have less control over whether they have children and if good careers aren’t an option anyway there’s less opportunity cost to staying home with a child.
If anything, it is the parents who destroy the commons by conceiving more polluters. You postulate that "fertility" is a good thing but that's far from indisputable. The earth is already vastly overpopulated. It's high time that other people follow the Korean example and give nature some respite.
I suspect having children is similar to keeping slaves, in the sense that we realized that slavery is unethical even though it was "just what we do" since time immemorial, and was necessary for our lifestyle levels. People will realize that it's unethical to create beings, burdening them with the struggle to maintain the life they've been attached to, in order to (explicitly, in your case) 'benefit society'.
Society is made up of people but those people, ever more, should each suffer for society's sake? come on
My wife and I are Korean-American, albeit with many ties to our country of origin.
Something I've noticed is that many couples that do want a child have a very difficult time conceiving. People are having kids at a later age on average, but even younger couples seem to have a hard time.
Various gynecological disorders seem to be very common too - fibroids, endometriosis, adenomyosis, amongst others, all of which affect a woman's fertility.
My wife and I have been trying for a kid but have been unsuccessful. Many of our friends are experiencing the same, and are resorting to clinical fertility procedures like in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination.
I don't know how true it is, but one of my friends outright said that the majority of women in Korea are conceiving through some kind of fertility procedure, and that if we really wanted a baby, not to waste our time and just go ahead and do the same.
One thing that makes me believe him is that there are a ton of twins amongst the couples in our social circle. My understanding is that naturally twins are a rare phenomenon, but much more likely if doing something like in vitro or artificial insemination?
Us, we've already decided that push comes to shove, we'll most likely adopt.
One problem of modern medicine is the use of fake-hormones.
When Progesterone USP (bio-identical) is applied to the skin, it gets into circulation and avoids first pass metabolization by liver. When the appropriate solvent is used to dissolve the Progesterone USP powder, the progesterone is transported through the liver.
Steroidogenesis refers to the process whereby the body makes steroids for itself. The key jump - from cholesterol to pregnenolone - is facilitated with Vitamin A and thyroid (T3).
Know a couple who were trying to conceive, after suppressing her fertility with fake hormones (and an IUD) for maybe 8+ years. Lots of miscarriages. They eventually went for IVF, which didn't work either. They gave up and started getting their house ready for adoption. Then they got surprised. I don't think she used topical Progesterone, just the megadoses in Prometrium (liver can't destroy it all on the first pass).
I find this topic very interesting. My observation (anecdata-lly, but I would love to see RCTs or perhaps a cleanly designed ANOVA study) is that these symptoms of infertility are particularly (world-wide) prevalent in people who have (usually undiagnosed) metabolic syndrome & low cholecalciferol.
In almost all South-east Asian countries in particular, I have noticed high levels of sucrose consumption so I am curious if Korea is the similar to SEA, or if either of these factors apply to either of you?
Koreans have famously long working hours, but as you are not there, those stress factors should likely not apply to you.
Another point to note is that I have heard adoption is at least as difficult as IVF, emotionally & financially speaking, although there's less physical pain. At least IVF can point you to where the problem lies (the knowledge of that can be disconcerting) providing you perhaps avenues to mitigate/ameliorate those factors, which could improve your overall QoL and also lead to better health-outcomes.
I'm Korean born, but spent most of my life in the US. My wife is a much more recent immigrant so she is a product of the Korean education system as well as the Korean corporate world and all that entails.
We have some friends that have adopted, so are aware of the potential issues. Most of them seem perfectly fine, but one had some initial problems with the child adjusting to his new life. These were all toddlers (3-5 years old).
I know of this problem in Korea and even know one couple affected. I've thought that it may be caused by the stressful nature of Korean life. Is this difficulty in conceiving also prevalent among persons of Korean ancestry raised in America?
A big part of our social circle consists of recent immigrants from Korea (< 10 years) - my wife included (I've been here 30+ years).
But it does seem to affect Korean-Americans that have been here longer too.
Even amongst our close family, my cousin is affected, two of her cousins are affected. All three were born and raised in Korea to adulthood and came here within the past 10 years. My cousin has an American (Caucasian) husband, her two cousins have born-in-the-USA Korean-American husbands.
Interestingly enough, our friends of other nationalities don't seem to be as affected - or maybe they just don't talk about this subject as openly? Either way, I have not noticed the twins phenomenon there.
I can confirm what another commenter wrote - what I was told by my doctor is that this is very uncommon now, at least in California, where the guidance is to only do it in very limited circumstances.
On the other hand, even one IVF embryo has much more likelihood of splitting and creating twins than natural. I saw the science at 10X chance but a quick Google search shows slightly lower.
> "My understanding is that naturally twins are a rare phenomenon, but much more likely if doing something like in vitro or artificial insemination?"
There are various factors that increase the chances of having fraternal (non-identical) twins. Genetics (a women who is a twin herself is more likely to have twins), age (older women are more likely to have twins), and, of course, fertility drugs which stimulate ovulation can result in more eggs being released and thus more likely to produce twins.
Identical twins, on the other hand, are a natural phenomenon that occurs in about 1 in 250 pregnancies. There are no known factors that increase the chances of identical twins.
father of twins (10 Y/O) via medical help here. 10 years ago our doctor said, "30 years ago the natural rate of twins was 3 sets per 1000 births. Now it's 3 sets per 100 births". After a quick search I couldn't find any data supporting a 10x increase in twins over the past 40 years but plenty of articles showing something closer to a 2x increase in the rate of twin births. I suspect the rate of twins amongst our peer group is skewed though since we're upper middle class surrounded by similar peers who can all afford fertility treatments so it appears that there are way more twins then ever...
I know personally 20+ families with twins. Of my close personal friends, ie. those that I see regularly and chat with regularly, 7 of them have twins. My neighbors on both sides of my house have twins. There are so many families with twins these days, it's nuts!
As soon as you hit 30-32 the rate of issues conceiving and issues with the baby grow exponentially.
How long have you been seeing this trend?
There’s a lot of experts who have been arguing that everything from pesticides to vaccines will slowly degrade our ability to produce [healthy] offspring. The general reasoning is fairly straight forward - if one thing damages your DNA or what have you, then it might be anywhere from 0 to 3 generations for issues to crop up.
There’s also social factors - fear, stress, isolation, etc will all impact willingness to reproduce (imo that’s not it).
Finally, there’s general stagnation. Ie if your not eating well, working in a field, etc you’re not going to be healthy.
Reality is probably a combination of everything, BUT women should also seriously research side effects of birth control. I have a sneaking suspicion birth control mediating hormones will have many long-term effects. I know women who were impacted by this.
>>There’s a lot of experts who have been arguing that everything from pesticides to vaccines will slowly degrade our ability to produce [healthy] offspring.
Basically anything that can kill bacteria, mosquitoes or rats, can also kill tissues in your body. Nobody knows what tissues because body is a complicated structure of pathways. Most of the things we take in have an entry through mouth and nose, but no real exit path. They could kill things in your body.
Now many times that's tissues in your pancreas, or thyroid glands. Which perfectly explains diabetes and thyroid epidemics in countries like India.
if you're eating a lot of plants, look into phyto-hormones, those might be preventing fertility.
There are a few anecdotal stories from the carnivore/keto forums, that fertility came back after cutting out carbs.
Edit: Some Artificial hormones are found in plastic, rates go up when it's recycled plastics.
Disclaimer: I am quite firmly in that camp now, although at first I considered them all nutters. Some thing has been driving global ill-health in our post-disease world (excluding viruses) from 1920 onwards... imho there's clearly a complex ætiology with factors such as:
- carbohydrate (especially fructose) vs animal-protein/-fat consumption
- types of fat (our bodies only contain certain kinds)
- xenœstrogen & hormones of all types not just phyto-œstrogens
- Vitamin D, Magnesium, ferritin, pre-eclampsia, anæmia (lack of hæme iron consumption)
- more recently the whole statin-cholesterol debacle, Goodhart's law in action
so soy protein, dried or boiled soybeans, tofu, tempeh, and meatless soy products....but Koreans have been eating it forever. perhaps the processing in mass industrial scale has impact?
yeah I heard of the plastic theory and I think the air pollution in Korea is an overlooked factor. The fine dust particulates must have some impact on the reproduction system.
maybe even Ramen? Koreans consume a ton of instant ramen. High rate of alcohol?
I am interested to hear more about the impact of plastic. It is unavoidable and its widely used in Asia.
...what I really think is contraceptives is having an impact and that we are politically blocked from discussing it. What happened in Korea since 2010s? Huge amount of contraceptive pills were sold as society adopted a more laissez faire attitude towards sex. 10 years later those women are not trying to have babies and cannot. Is this too far fetched?
We are seeing the same issue in most western countries that correlate with high contraceptive usage. There is just less children being born but not an issue where contraception is tough.
> Some Artificial hormones are found in plastic, rates go up when it's recycled plastics.
I do know that some chemicals, possibly also found in some plastics (soft plastic probably) function a bit like estrogen, potentially reducing male fertility.
Watching her friends and my friends' wives go through it, we've been scared off.
Add to that, the usual HN phenomenon that we're observing how the world and our countries (USA & Korea) seem be going down the toilet, and that makes us feel hesitant to bring a new human being into the world, especially when there are kids already here that could use a loving family.
It's always interesting to look at what these numbers exactly mean because it's deeply counter-intuitive. For the sake of simple modeling, imagine we have a society with 100 people with a fertility rate of 1, that give birth at 20 and die at 80. Here is how that looks:
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Year 0: 100 newborns
Year 20: 100 twenties, 50 newborns
Year 40: 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns
Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns
Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns
Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns
Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn
---
In spite of having an extinction level fertility rate, the population nearly doubled in the first 60 years, going from 100 to 187. And it took 80 years to even see the population begin to decline. But then suddenly over the second 60 years, the population exponentially declined going from 187 to 22. This is very akin to the scenario in Korea, because they went from a fertility rate of 6+ to < 1. So they're starting with a large "newborn" population.
Because of the fact that we live much longer than we are fertile, it really damages any idea of "Well we'll just solve this when it becomes a problem." When it starts to become obvious there's a problem, the decline is already coming at an exponential rate. And it's entirely possible that such a small youth population supporting a suddenly massive elderly population will drive fertility rates even lower.
It increasingly seems that the future of our planet will not be decided by politics, ideology, or anything of the sort. It will simply be decided by whichever groups have children at healthy rates.
It is always unclear to me if this is a bad thing.
In a shrinking population, are individual people worse off, or does it just look like a decline when you look at the country in aggregate? There is no shortage of squandered talent in the world. So many people work below their capability because there are just more people than opportunities. It seems like it’s not a problem to keep running the modern world, even with a fraction of the current world population.
And besides, many smart folks think we are deep into overshoot, not just on carbon emissions, but on almost every resource we use to run the global economy. If we are beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, then we either need to become massively more efficient or just have massively fewer people on the planet. And given that there is no current hope of sustainable living on any other planet, seems like lowering birth rates can only be a good thing that will give us some chance of surviving our ecological bottleneck.
Everything is fine if reality and expectations are in line. But many societies are projecting economic growth at levels that have historically been underpinned by the increase in demand from sheer population growth, as well as the increase in supply of labor.
Edit: The other issue is tribal. The global tribe has lots of sufficient labor and young people to offset decreasing numbers of young South Koreans, but humans are not fungible. There will be many types of conflict due to cultural differences, as well as shifting power dynamics and the resulting lack of acceptance of newcomers on the same level as native tribe members, etc.
Historically population drops were bad. When you lose population, you lose the labor required to support as many specializations, and civilization regresses. Now, though, fertilizers and modern medicine support excess human population, fossil fuels are an energy wellspring that helps reduce the need for physical labor, and AI can free people from repetitive mental work.
Combine this with the fact that yes, our overshoot is horrific, I really do not see why declining birth rates in this era are a bad thing.
You're missing the demand side and the dependents problem. AI, Automation, etc. may replace factory workers but those workers also consumed products. With less consumers you have less demand thus your revenues are doomed to shrink year on year.
Just about every society has dependents who can no longer work and younger workers who support them through tax revenue. With fewer and fewer young workers and more and more dependents you have no good options. Cutting services would be bad for the elderly and likely impossible to pass in a democratic society as they would make up the majority of the voting population. Not cutting services would accelerate flight of workers and worse birth rates as overwork youth don't have time to start their own families.
Most of the past century's gains in quality of life were tightly correlated with rising labor. If the population crashes, then who will do all the specialized work? Another thing to think about is excess capital and investment. With a large population, excess savings become investments into new companies, technologies, etc. Without excess savings there will be no tech industry, improvements in science, infrastructure investments or much of anything interesting.
Environmentalists say that fewer people will be good for the environment. But what about investments and research into green energy and carbon removal? Those will simply not happen unless the economy is still growing.
It’s complicated, my understanding is that the current idea of the western state and middle class traces itself back to the period right after the Black Death created one of the largest population shocks in history, which effectively ended serfdom and loosened the grip of the Catholic Church. Basically the effects of population dips are not cut and dry.
It’s not clear to me it would necessarily play out as people stopping all non critical work to take care of old people. Maybe it would, on a family level - People would spend more time taking care of their parents, and then maybe conclude they should have more kids to take care of them when they are older like they do in the developing world. But the modern pyramid-shaped pension program is a recent invention and not necessarily one I think would be so durable as to destroy other industries?
This is a joke. Excess savings are economically pointless, they serve no purpose, excess savings mean people are saving more than they invest, leading to economic decline.
>Without excess savings there will be no tech industry, improvements in science, infrastructure investments or much of anything interesting.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. Governments borrow more and more money to artificially turn excess savings into regular savings by increasing the investment rate, any benefits you think come from excess savings actually come from turning excess savings into regular savings aka savings = investment.
If savings are above investment it means aggregate demand is below aggregate supply and we are failing millions of people.
TL;DR: it's more about demand than labor supply. Same result.
I don't think it is as binary as you suggest. There will be lower total saving after a delay. There will certainly be less investment more immediately.
What will happen is this.
If you borrow money to make and sell (say) shoes, and the population is doubling every 35 years (2% growth), then your market doubles in 35 years also. (You need money because your buildings and equipment wear out, if not for materials.)
Your lenders have it relatively easy in this situation, because fewer of their borrowers go bust, so interest rates (which are partly compensation for risk) are lower.
With negative population growth, your market is shrinking, so your lenders' risk of loss increases.
Anyone who still has excess savings demands higher return on investment. Fewer potential investments can jump the higher hurdle. Total investment decreases, total income decreases and everything spirals down.
There is no advantage to excess savings with fractional-reserve banking; and there is even less need for any savings with MMT. We are in an MMT world now, your savings have no bearings on the economy.
I think it's a problem because most societies rely on working age folks to support retirees. As birth rates fall off, the ratio of young to old reduces and too few people in the society are working for it to function well.
And the other issue is that the productivity in care work is still rather low. So we have to put quite large part of work force to something that is for general economy unproductive.
I think there are many strong arguments against this, but most are debatable. So I'm going to focus on one of the arguments that I do not feel especially strongly about, but one that I think is simply undeniable.
A smaller world population in the longrun is a defacto nonstarter. Many places in the world continue to have extremely high birth rates. And the wealth/education correlation that claims to predict the change of this seems, at best, extremely weak when put under scrutiny. Billionaires have high wealth, high education, and high fertility. Places like Thailand have extremely low education/wealth levels, yet their fertility rate is lower than even the US. Israel is the third most educated country in the world, has an advanced economy, and a fertility rate that is even competitive against some African nations at 3.0.
The issue is one of prioritizing wealth more than family, which also explains why the trend collapses at billionaires (for whom family has effectively 0 impact on their wealth), even though the correlation would expect them to be having effectively 0 children. And this pursuit of wealth over family holds true in the West, but there's no reason to expect such ideology to spread. So the question is not one of a smaller world population, but of a smaller population of the groups that are not reproducing vs those that are. In other words should the West simply accept its own extinction, likely alongside those of its values? And to me, the answer to that question is no.
There are 102 countries having fertility rate above 2.1, a lot of these countries are in Africa or Near East. Still in a lot of these countries, fertility rate is dropping year by year
> It is always unclear to me if this is a bad thing.
In a shrinking population, are individual people worse off, or does it just look like a decline when you look at the country in aggregate? There is no shortage of squandered talent in the world. So many people work below their capability because there are just more people than opportunities. It seems like it’s not a problem to keep running the modern world, even with a fraction of the current world population.
It's debatable. Population declines are good for the environment. But rapid drops has cultural, political, economic and geopolitical consequences. e.g. South Korea doesn't really trust NK or China or that they can't really be a manufacturing economy without young workers.
There is nothing wrong with it as long as people are prepared for the effects: higher taxes combined with reduced social benefits (as fewer workers support more retired). A stagnant or declining standard of living. A house that goes down in value not up over time. More challenging education for children as schools are closed and consolidated.
> In a shrinking population, are individual people worse off
Yes.
A shrinking population means an ever-smaller number of workers need to support increasing numbers of retirees.
If you can work that out, then you've still got a small pool of workers producing goods for a large, mostly economically-inactive population, which means inflation and plenty of it.
The supply and demand for a good may go up or down as population decreases, depending on if a good was artificially constrained, etc...
I feel like for people living in big cities, where things are expensive simply because too many people want to live there, things might start to get easier.
It's simple, in commerce terms it directly implies lower future consumption, lower future labour supply and consequently lower value to investors. Losing economic strength will be a very large concern for any country.
I have been in and out of Korea for many years and know several families where the norm went from several children to one within two generations. The main factors that I think caused this trend are:
1. Husband and wife both now work, not just in jobs, but in careers they are heavily invested in.
2. Getting and prospering in a career is really tough. I heard something like among current college graduates, only 20% are expected to ever find a full-time permanent position.
3. The education system is so competitive that doing well requires effort to the limits of physical endurance. It is not just the financial cost. Supporting a child to adulthood is draining on the parents in other ways. The families I know are in the top 10% for educational attainment, so I don't know how well this applies to working class families.
4. This is relatively minor, but there is a perpetual housing crunch and this affects prices.
I have no evidence for this beyond my own anecdotal experience but my guess is the biggest factor is lack of affordable housing. The average price of an apartment in Soul is 1.18 billion won (883k usd). It’s very difficult to buy a home and live off a single income as a young Korean, this is forcing people to start families later or not at all.
One compounding factor could be the extension of childhood, which has been a very successful strategy for humans, and is more prevalent in the developed world.
If "buying a home" just means buying a shoebox apartment, why is it important in the first place for starting a family? Doesn't that mean you're just as well off renting?
buying your own place gives you permanence you can plan around. you know where you will live, you know where your kids will go to school, you know your neighbors and neighborhood your kids will grow up in, and probably most important, you know how much it will cost each month, and you won't get thrown out on your butt because land lord wants to liquidate or have nephew Timmy live there next year.
this type of stability is an important factor for family planning
Ah I see your confusion. You’ve missed that renting is more expensive than buying a home and gets more expensive each year, possibly forcing you to move away from your local area and hence your child’s school. There are some places where rent controls and renters rights can mean renting can work for families. But few places are like Berlin.
In China it's directly tied to you eligibility to nearly all local civil services, since something like 60% of the condo price goes to local government in the form of land sales (70 years rental actually) plus taxes, not to mention the mortgage rate from predominantly state-owned banks doubles that price again.
It's state-owned condo cartel, naturally, prices just keep skyrocketing, hence the "6 wallets for a down payment (the couple and their parents)" meme, but they'll just blame the greedy capitalist developers like Evergrande.
So combining the two factors, buying at least one condo is a prerequisite for marriage now.
Readit News
In my father's generation, people could relax after getting into university. They could party around, barely pass and still get decent jobs. Nowadays, that's definitely not the case. Getting a good job is insanely hard. You need to take care of your GPA. English certs like TOFLE/TOEIC are pretty much mandatory and you'd probably want other cert/ extra curricular experience.
Okay. So you've went through all that and you've got yourself a good job. Now that's all done, can you finally start to relax and enjoy life? Haha, no. 52-hour weekly working limit has only recently been introduced, and the current president wants to get rid of that. Even if you work your ass off, it is _very_ unlikely that you can ever afford an apartment in Seoul.
In the end, you have tired and jaded people without a fun childhood, who can't even buy their own house. I certainly would not choose to have children in these circumstances.
I've "escaped" and live a decent life outside of Korea now. But I have many friends in Korea who have "given up" (in various ways) in light of all this . There are some friends who are married and have kids, but they all have rich parents or studied/hustled really hard. In spite of all this, I miss Korea so much. But I don't think I'll be going back.
This is only one reason in declining fertility rate. There are many more (some mentioned in other comments) but this comment is already getting too ranty.
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EDIT: This comment got much more attention than I thought it would and I'd like to add some positive stuff too. There are certainly people who enjoy life in Korea by refusing to participate in the rat race and by prioitising building meaningful communities in their lives. Some things are getting better, albeit slowly, with each generation.
Man this hits really hard because I spent my first 20 years growing up in China... Good thing is that now I'm in a much less authoritarian place with a job that has decent work-life balance. Have been trying to cultivate some hobbies in the past few years, feels like I've been trying to reclaim the childhood I never had.
Dead Comment
I always hated the idea of homework in school (outside of college/university) because I have never understood being at "home" but still required to do "work" for a place I just spent 7-8 hours at and most days 2-3 more hours for sports or band.
I'm trying to strike a balance with my kids. We encourage them to do things like learn music, take up sports etc, but not let that just consume all their free time. I want them to have time to just play freely, read comics, or just be a bit bored sometimes.
I do want to also mention though, a unique Korean system called "Jeonse", which is a large deposit that is 50-80% of the property value. After putting in the deposit, you can live there on yearly basis without paying rent. This system has been and is being used as property ladder for young families (as they don't have to "lose" money on rent) but as "Jeonse" is pegged to property value, they've been rapidly rising as well AND frauds around Jeonse has been on rise, in which case you can lose the whole deposit or be tied up in court battle for years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeonse
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It’s not worth it. We’re luckily to have the choice of moving home to Europe and raising our kids in a way that they get to play a lot (I’m writing this while on a bench in a playground with them bouncing around in the sunshine) and also have school, art and sports.
Korea is actively discouraging Koreans from raising their kids there, especially if they have any other option
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Of course the decorations are nicer and there are some who are kept around to work as "worser off" examples. But all in all, i guess most would cheer for the fall of this.
With modernisation, this has changed.
1. Most women no longer wants to be servants for the in-laws (rightfully so) and wants to live separately
2. With less children, you won't necessarily have a son.
So now, parents live separately, until they are unable to do so anymore. When this happens, the children might take them into their house and care for them or admit them into hospice or retirement home.
You might ask, what happens if your children don't take care of you and you don't have money? Well you are kinda f-ed, as seen with the high elderly poverty rate.
> [Korea has] the highest elderly poverty rate among OECD countries
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8871725/#:~:tex....
Oh, Korean national pension is also set to run out within 10 years or so, which will make the issue worse and/or make the future generation pay disproportionate amount of tax :)))
evidence: 7% got to tertiary education in 1975, and recently peaked at above 100% (not sure how that works to be honest, but the trend is clear)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR?locations=K...
More evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality_in_South_K...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_the_Han_River#/medi...
because the latter suggests that people really just don't want kids, and possibly never really did
its hard for me to think that all of society uniformly is successfully planning for children now, instead of many children being a bunch of accidents that the parents just go along with
> where is the party, hookup, pregnancy and carry-to-term scene? is that not happening
Did that ever really happen in Korea? Even in the West having a "hookup scene" in the first place was a product of having effective contraception available, and a whole set of controversial cultural changes.
Dead Comment
Reminds me of the opening scene of Idiocracy: https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA
Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources.
Has it occurred to people that, maybe, modern fertility is a tragedy of the commons? If everyone chooses to act in their own interest, society is worse off than collectively pressuring to have more kids? Ideally, that would look like major subsidies and benefits to parents to account for the extra work they are doing for society.
I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off the planet, and the traditionally oppressive-to-women societies will evolutionarily outlast us.
At this rate, there will only be 3m South Koreans in 3 generations. I don't see how you expect a country to survive that decline. In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
Wanna guess what happens in that welcoming environment? My guess is people feel inclined to make some babies.
I don't understand why people tend to treat these low fertility rates as some kind of invariable biological dysfunction. These aren't infertile masses of people; they're perfectly capable of multiplying like rabbits.
The planet has shitloads of people, maybe we're finally reeling things in from an overshoot and are on the inevitably pendulum-like path towards population stability. There's no reason to panic unless you've got substantial evidence these people are physically incapable of having children.
Edit:
How about some DATA: go to https://population.io, select Rep. of Korea, plug in some age/gender b.s. and scroll down to "Age Distribution" at the left column. Now look to the left of ~20yo (younger than 20), it's a nearly horizontal line. What does that tell you? There's a uniform rate of Korean babies per year under 20 years old. To the right of this, there's a massive lump of elderly people with a slightly smaller lump of middle-aged people. There's no reason to believe this horizontal line left of 20yo won't just continue into the future; it looks quite stable for the last ~20 years.
I would assume the exact opposite given that this will probably probably crank up pressure on working-aged people as more and more old people need to be supported by fewer and fewer young. I would also assume a significant exodus of the young to places with actual opportunities rather than a country sized retirement home where no one wants to invest in the future because anything built to fit the needs of the population at any given moment will be massively overbuilt in the near future.
It will take 90 years for this lump to pass, and another 20 years for the newborns to grow up... you're talking about a recovery that will take a century...
A century of decline seems like a pretty good reason to panic to me...
Yeah, something is definitely wrong with the site because actual population pyramid data looks much more alarming:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2019%EB%85%84_%ED%95...
Or https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Pyr... as mentioned by a sibling comment.
Choose your country, chooose Probabilistic Projections, Fertility, then Births.[1]
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/Birt...
That the data must be wrong, there should be some small variation and it doesn't pass the sanity check of declining birth rates.
> After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
I like your optimism, but do we see anything like that in the real word after depopulation? There are many shrinking cities or areas, eg Detroit in the US or East Germany (people moving to the west), and the results are hugely negative and a downward spiral. Instead of people enjoying lack of traffic congestion, shrinking cities can't afford their oversized infrastructure anymore, which begins to deteriorate from lack of upkeep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_city
... millions of Pakistanis, Egyptians and Nigerians moving there to escape their overheated, overcrowded countries.
Housing prices are 9x salary vs 4.5x salary in the 70s and it takes a while to save up. Personal data point: it took me winning an IPO lottery to start thinking about having kids for real. Having kids while earning minimal wage? Terrifying, especially in the US where getting yourself or your kid sick could bankrupt you in the blink of an eye - and if you want multiple kids you increase the risk.
So we think we have to have it all before we start trying having kids and have no sense of community whatsoever. Societal focus on hedonism and career leaves little to no time to raise kids. And at the end of the day you end up having no support from the society that slowly but surely ages.
This nuance is important; it emphasizes the real issue is not economics, but culture! We've created a society that values the pursuit of wealth and comfort more than family, and it's likely this system is not sustainable. Not everybody can be wealthy, because wealth is relative and mediated by what exists. If 30% of people want something and there's only enough for 3%, then it doesn't matter what the relative wealth is among these people: 90% of people won't be able to "afford" it, and that will never change. A post-scarcity society will never exist alongside consumerism; we'll simply take what we can have for granted and lust over the new scarcities.
One thing I think gets really overlooked is that college and job searches tear apart extended families, which in more traditional societies are a huge part of the child care strategy.
Monthly mortgage payments are the same though. (Lower interest rates, etc.)
Also building costs gone up. (The plague of single family homes, stricter building codes, higher quality requirements from buyers, while buildings are still produced using the old labor intensive methods.) And due to fucked up zoning building low-cost housing is just not happening :/
So folks are basically forced to buy expensive houses.
They didn't wait to have babies.
1. Inverse relationship between household income and fertility rate?
2. Enhanced child tax credit (US), child benefit (UK), Medicaid (kid gets sick?)
3. Insanely progressive taxes on income?
Does the change necessarily have to be societal?
> In 1992, a study found a global 50% decline in sperm counts in men over the previous 60 years. Multiple studies over subsequent years confirmed that initial finding, including a 2017 paper showing a 50% to 60% decline in sperm concentration between 1973 and 2011 in men from around the world. These studies, though important, focused on sperm concentration or total sperm count. So in 2019, a team of researchers decided to focus on the more powerful total motile sperm count. They found that the proportion of men with a normal total motile sperm count had declined by approximately 10% over the previous 16 years. The science is consistent: Men today produce fewer sperm than in the past, and the sperm are less healthy. The question, then, is what could be causing this decline in fertility[0].
[0]: https://theconversation.com/male-fertility-is-declining-stud...
What doesn't make sense to me is the people that are concerned about society "changing", the native population not having enough kids, we are being "overrun" with immigrants etc. Are the same people that refuse to vote for politicians advocating higher minimum wages, more benefits and fairer taxes.
It can't work both ways, either you want to crush the average person with low wages and taxes, or you want the native population to thrive.
No one is going to subject themselves to poverty to help balance the demographics for the privileged.
This has everything to do with monogamous relationships and marriages in most of the developed human world.
In the natural world, there are many factors at play that help ensure only the "healthiest" males conceive with females. Most factors are indirect, such as males physically fighting each other for a mate wherein the "fittest" male would more likely come out superior and successfully mate.
One direct factor that has been practically eradicated from humanity, however, is direct competition between sperm. Some animals and many plants are polygamous, wherein a female receives sperm (or other forms of genetic material as applicable) from multiple males. The sperm have to compete with each other to reach the egg first and conceive, this encourages males with the "healthiest" sperm to pass their genetic material onto the next generation.
Monogamous relationships and marriages as seen in humans remove this factor completely, the "fitness" of a given male human's sperm is irrelevant to conception because competition between sperm has ceased to exist. Both unfit and fit sperm alike can conceive, assuming other indirect factors at play allow for it. Indirect factors that care not for the "fitness" of sperm.
Women gained financial freedom and the ability to choose when they get pregnant. Societies will now find out the market price for birthing children (as well as women finding out the price for not birthing children).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580631#32588473
Is declining fertility really such a societal and evolutionary danger when we’re talking 1.4-1.5? If you think of us all as one race, the human race, the fact that a few corners of the world are declining in fertility is arguably an environmental victory that could soften some crises’s in the future. We are like 99.9% genetically similar, why risk gutting the carrying capacity of the planet to preserve the 0.001% of genes that give us sparkling blue eyes?
The whole contention that it’s terrible that high birthrate countries are so much more feminist than low birthrate ones, well I mean just because the genetics of feminist counties might wane, that doesn’t mean their cultures will. Memetics is just as powerful as genetics, do rich countries really have to be the world’s stud? Can’t we see the poorer countries investing in people and the wealthier countries investing in things as teamwork?
It is not a few corners of the world. It is currently "developed countries", but we have no reason to believe that the non-"developed countries" will do any better.
> is arguably an environmental victory that could soften some crises’s in the future. We are like 99.9% genetically similar, why risk gutting the carrying capacity of the planet to preserve the 0.001% of genes that give us sparkling blue eyes?
Putting to a side for now the blase attitude to several societies slowly disappearing due to lack of births:
1. Much of society is built around the implicit assumption of there being more people in the future.
2. The carrying capacity of the world is only of interest to us as long as we are around for it. All of humanity suddenly disappearing tomorrow would also do wonders for the world's carrying capacity.
So no, I don't think it is a victory unless human rights and progress don't mean anything. I'm from one of these places where birth rates are high but the quality of life is awful and government corruption is astronomical. Most people there will probably shun you if not actually harm you for doing something that nobody cares about in the US or some western countries. Recently I saw a post about how the Norwegian health ministry released some images of people doing various sexual poses as part of some sex-ed. I thought it was quite neat, and it features multiple sexualities. I will bet my life savings you try doing that where I'm from that it won't go so well and the number of fundamentalist minded people is rising.
One of the key points he made that seemed fairly intuitive is that as your population declines you eventually wind up with significantly fewer long term experts in various fields of science and engineering. This means that the people who train up the next generation of scientists and engineers are spread thinner, and therefore less depth of expertise in those fields as the decline continues.
I'm not sure how much that idea is backed up by evidence, but it at least makes some sense.
Population decline had never really registered as a problem to me until I heard that episode - I always kinda figured that less people around would be a net good. Definitely worth a listen if you're interested in the topic.
Yes. If modern (western dominated) society is not self-sustaining, this should be a big hint, that there is something deeply wrong with our culture.
> If you think of us all as one race, the human race
But that doesn't mean populations are interchangeable?
"since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too. You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century."
David Reich in the NYTimes (archive https://archive.ph/Zfhc3)
I think there's a typo there.
Every corner of the world is declining in fertility, from South Korea to Niger.
Industrialisation.
The UK began industrialising in the mid-to-late 1700s. Western Europe and North America got going in the early 1800s. Central Europe and Japan followed along, while Russia didn't really industrialise until the Soviet Union. China and Korea, by contrast, just started in the 1950s-70s, easily within a human life time. Their societies made the leap from subsistence farming to CPU design _so_ much faster than most of the developed world, it's unreal.
Or maybe the tragedy of the commons was having 6 children per family within living memory? Maybe now by dropping our population we are doing much better for the world society as a whole. It all depends on your perspective I guess. I fail to see the problem with a drop in world population.
> At this rate, there will only be 3m South Koreans in 3 generations. I don't see how you expect a country to survive that decline. In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
Maybe South Korea won't survive in its current form. The world will keep revolving the sun nonetheless.
H.G. Wells pointed out that we cannot have population control in one nation of the world, but not another. It must be worldwide, or it'd result in severe unrest.
Julian Huxley, H.G. Wells, Charles Pincus (and many more) made this one of the defining issues of the 20th century. The Pill and IVF were long in the works and heavily funded as a means to avoid the "Population Bomb."
They envisioned a new world without war or environmental destruction. Their solution was to reduce the birth rate, through various means. The reduction of family formation being one of them.
It's interesting to read through these older works and realize the world they'd envisioned has to some extent come to fruition.
For most couples, the first 9 months for a child isn’t the problem, it is the costs of the following 2 decades.
So you think women in poorer countries are willing to "pre-sell" their children? That's insanely absurd, and an absolute human rights violation if forced. No. This will not happen.
It might, but its still not going to change the population decline pattern.
No one is going to have three kids with surrogacy. At most, people will have one or two. Stabilization at best. Not growth.
Dead Comment
Social factors are not considered enough. As societies get more materialistic, and socio-economically advanced, there seems to be more individualistic, privacy[in the wrong way, escalating to extreme isolationism], lack of social interaction and bonding etc.
I myself felt odd during the time I stayed in the US, the whole concept of individualism and privacy was taken too far, and everybody felt lonely in their own way. People moved around in fixed schedules and paths, almost like an open air prison. Given limited social interaction outside work[where you can't even sneeze without offending some one]. This really felt like passion and purpose in life was slowly fading away. I can imagine how a society with this sort of a lifestyle could fare on the longer run. People would want lesser and lesser people around them, and interact with them even lesser as time would proceed.
Countries like India and Pakistan definitely have third world infrastructure, but the social infrastructure is very strong and likely to remain, this is due to socio-religious reasons. For this reason, people get married and have 2+ kids.
There's a scary implication. If having to support more elderly causes one to produce less offspring, we have a positive feedback loop resulting in population collapse.
I think a lot of people in developed countries voluntarily or involuntarily adopt a psychological willingness to not have kids and let their culture collapse because the emotional distress of a life in a post-growth world. A world where your freedoms, privacy, and economic opportunities are shrinking, to extract temporary value and stability for the upper class, out of you and your labour/compliance. The only worldly way out of it is to basically step on the others while going up to implement these changes, which feels horrible to a naturally empathic creature like man. It's a cursed state of being.
While developed nations are below replacement rate, many developing nations are having over half a dozen children per family. The aging population of developed countries is not conducive to production and a healthy economy. This will lead to immigration. If this trend continues, people from the developing nations will eventually inherit the developed world. Until they too fall below replacement rate.
One of the reasons we moved to a country like the US is to be away from a backwards minded, theocratic af, corrupt society. To see that these types of countries are actually booming while highly progressed ones are depressing is super depressing.
Obviously, the greatest thing that changed over those last 60 years is they're no longer recovering from a war that killed a pretty hefty amount of their population. While I'm sure it didn't need to decline quite so much, fertility rate was never going to stay what it was in the late 50s. You can see a pretty obvious recovery spike here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m.... It was only in the past 20 years that they declined below 1920s level.
It's also worth remembering that being oppressive to women is (definitely at least probably) not a genetically tranmissible trait. If the 22nd Century really does end up being dominated by Pakistanis, you can't just automatically assume they'll stay culturally identical to what they are today. Presumably, the Korea of the 19 century was a lot more oppressive to women than the Korea of today.
The resources of korea and their technology will not go away, they will now be at the hands of fewer people, so more wealth / person. Historically it was small states that dominated the world, the populous ones were ravaged by poverty and famine.
People are calculating (correctly) that our future technology does not need a lot of hands, and that is true. Look at the tech sector , which employs a tiny percentage of the population but has enormous output.
As for the egoist act of genetic heritage/perpetuation, well let's be honest, in 10 years people will be modifying their genes and removing our clunky and faulty dna so there goes our glory.
As for wars/security, those are already fought with drones
> I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off
The trend will not continue forever
To me , this all highlights that we need to ramp up anti-aging technology fast and hard. It s much higher priority than sending humans to mars
There a tenancy to forget that 60 years ago one working person would have to support a wife and several children.
Dead Comment
For the population to actually grow, some people will need to make three kids. I just don't see that happening at scale at all. Most won't even make two kids, forget about three.
If Pakistan, and other countries like India and China, continues to modernize, eventually the population should stable out and historically that comes with better rights for all.
I'm not convinced you don't have those two reversed. Intuitively, to me, population stability comes after better rights for all.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
As the standard of living rises, birth rates are dropping precipitously even in those countries that are relatively more oppressive.
Absent socioeconomic reasons, there are still females that naturally desire having plenty of children, despite there not being any societal pressure in favor (or even against) that. They will be genetically selected for.
Healthcare costs are ongoing, and obscene. Routine newborn vaccines are around $900 per visit even with partial insurance coverage. Not to mention any unforeseen hospital visits that will force you to hit your deductible in the first two quarters of the year ($10k per child in our case).
In most tier 2/3 cities in the US you can expect daycare to cost $1,000-$1,800 per child per month.
In any tier 1 city, especially west coast cities like Seattle and SF, expect to pay at least $2,000/child per month.
On top of that, you’ll have a mortgage. With median housing prices around $1.2-$1.6m and rates in the mid 5% you’re looking at anywhere from $6,500-$8,000/month for a mortgage depending on taxes.
So right out of the gate, you’re at $10k of post tax income just going to daycare costs and a mortgage. You likely have other costs that equal at least $1,000/month. And that’s for 1 kid. Add another kid and you’re easily approaching $15k per month.
If you do the math, you’ll need to make at least $250k if you have one kid considering at least 40% is going straight to taxes (aka military funds since we get nothing in this country for the insane amount of taxes we pay).
Per ACA, all routine newborn care (including vaccines and routine blood draw) is 100% paid by insurance company. The specifics are all listed in the links below.
https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-children/
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...
>Not to mention any unforeseen hospital visits that will force you to hit your deductible in the first two quarters of the year ($10k per child in our case).
This is not true for the US. The maximum out of pocket legal limit for 2022 is $17.4k for a family. If you have a half decent employer, deductibles are far lower (in the $3k to $5k range), and so are out of pocket maximums (in the $5k to $10k range at most).
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
https://www.healthcare.gov/high-deductible-health-plan/
I would budget at least 2 years of out of pocket maximums to have on hand. In our case, we hit out of pocket maximums of ~$5k and ~$7k during the year of birth, otherwise it costs $150 to $250 for a regular pink eye/ear infection consult and $400 to $500 for a specialist consult. This is in a very high cost of living area.
Also you should specify whether you mean West or East (presumably West) Pakistan’s population numbers. The western half had 51m people in 1960.
Of course. Malthusianism, eugenics.
I think the point was the opposite: countries with limited respect and opportunities for women have higher birth rates because women have less control over whether they have children and if good careers aren’t an option anyway there’s less opportunity cost to staying home with a child.
Something I've noticed is that many couples that do want a child have a very difficult time conceiving. People are having kids at a later age on average, but even younger couples seem to have a hard time.
Various gynecological disorders seem to be very common too - fibroids, endometriosis, adenomyosis, amongst others, all of which affect a woman's fertility.
My wife and I have been trying for a kid but have been unsuccessful. Many of our friends are experiencing the same, and are resorting to clinical fertility procedures like in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination.
I don't know how true it is, but one of my friends outright said that the majority of women in Korea are conceiving through some kind of fertility procedure, and that if we really wanted a baby, not to waste our time and just go ahead and do the same.
One thing that makes me believe him is that there are a ton of twins amongst the couples in our social circle. My understanding is that naturally twins are a rare phenomenon, but much more likely if doing something like in vitro or artificial insemination?
Us, we've already decided that push comes to shove, we'll most likely adopt.
When Progesterone USP (bio-identical) is applied to the skin, it gets into circulation and avoids first pass metabolization by liver. When the appropriate solvent is used to dissolve the Progesterone USP powder, the progesterone is transported through the liver.
Steroidogenesis refers to the process whereby the body makes steroids for itself. The key jump - from cholesterol to pregnenolone - is facilitated with Vitamin A and thyroid (T3).
Know a couple who were trying to conceive, after suppressing her fertility with fake hormones (and an IUD) for maybe 8+ years. Lots of miscarriages. They eventually went for IVF, which didn't work either. They gave up and started getting their house ready for adoption. Then they got surprised. I don't think she used topical Progesterone, just the megadoses in Prometrium (liver can't destroy it all on the first pass).
Best wishes to you & your wife.
Dead Comment
In almost all South-east Asian countries in particular, I have noticed high levels of sucrose consumption so I am curious if Korea is the similar to SEA, or if either of these factors apply to either of you?
Koreans have famously long working hours, but as you are not there, those stress factors should likely not apply to you.
Another point to note is that I have heard adoption is at least as difficult as IVF, emotionally & financially speaking, although there's less physical pain. At least IVF can point you to where the problem lies (the knowledge of that can be disconcerting) providing you perhaps avenues to mitigate/ameliorate those factors, which could improve your overall QoL and also lead to better health-outcomes.
I'm Korean born, but spent most of my life in the US. My wife is a much more recent immigrant so she is a product of the Korean education system as well as the Korean corporate world and all that entails.
We have some friends that have adopted, so are aware of the potential issues. Most of them seem perfectly fine, but one had some initial problems with the child adjusting to his new life. These were all toddlers (3-5 years old).
SK has the oldest first time mums in the world: https://photius.com/rankings/2020/population/mothers_mean_ag...
But it does seem to affect Korean-Americans that have been here longer too.
Even amongst our close family, my cousin is affected, two of her cousins are affected. All three were born and raised in Korea to adulthood and came here within the past 10 years. My cousin has an American (Caucasian) husband, her two cousins have born-in-the-USA Korean-American husbands.
Interestingly enough, our friends of other nationalities don't seem to be as affected - or maybe they just don't talk about this subject as openly? Either way, I have not noticed the twins phenomenon there.
On the other hand, even one IVF embryo has much more likelihood of splitting and creating twins than natural. I saw the science at 10X chance but a quick Google search shows slightly lower.
Either a toddler or around kindergarten age seems realistic, based on what I’ve seen with other couples who’ve adopted in our social circle.
There are various factors that increase the chances of having fraternal (non-identical) twins. Genetics (a women who is a twin herself is more likely to have twins), age (older women are more likely to have twins), and, of course, fertility drugs which stimulate ovulation can result in more eggs being released and thus more likely to produce twins.
Identical twins, on the other hand, are a natural phenomenon that occurs in about 1 in 250 pregnancies. There are no known factors that increase the chances of identical twins.
How long have you been seeing this trend?
There’s a lot of experts who have been arguing that everything from pesticides to vaccines will slowly degrade our ability to produce [healthy] offspring. The general reasoning is fairly straight forward - if one thing damages your DNA or what have you, then it might be anywhere from 0 to 3 generations for issues to crop up.
There’s also social factors - fear, stress, isolation, etc will all impact willingness to reproduce (imo that’s not it).
Finally, there’s general stagnation. Ie if your not eating well, working in a field, etc you’re not going to be healthy.
Reality is probably a combination of everything, BUT women should also seriously research side effects of birth control. I have a sneaking suspicion birth control mediating hormones will have many long-term effects. I know women who were impacted by this.
The "exponential increase" is still very low in absolute terms
Basically anything that can kill bacteria, mosquitoes or rats, can also kill tissues in your body. Nobody knows what tissues because body is a complicated structure of pathways. Most of the things we take in have an entry through mouth and nose, but no real exit path. They could kill things in your body.
Now many times that's tissues in your pancreas, or thyroid glands. Which perfectly explains diabetes and thyroid epidemics in countries like India.
Add to this the micro plastic pollution.
Edit: Some Artificial hormones are found in plastic, rates go up when it's recycled plastics.
- carbohydrate (especially fructose) vs animal-protein/-fat consumption
- types of fat (our bodies only contain certain kinds)
- xenœstrogen & hormones of all types not just phyto-œstrogens
- Vitamin D, Magnesium, ferritin, pre-eclampsia, anæmia (lack of hæme iron consumption)
- more recently the whole statin-cholesterol debacle, Goodhart's law in action
yeah I heard of the plastic theory and I think the air pollution in Korea is an overlooked factor. The fine dust particulates must have some impact on the reproduction system.
maybe even Ramen? Koreans consume a ton of instant ramen. High rate of alcohol?
I am interested to hear more about the impact of plastic. It is unavoidable and its widely used in Asia.
...what I really think is contraceptives is having an impact and that we are politically blocked from discussing it. What happened in Korea since 2010s? Huge amount of contraceptive pills were sold as society adopted a more laissez faire attitude towards sex. 10 years later those women are not trying to have babies and cannot. Is this too far fetched?
We are seeing the same issue in most western countries that correlate with high contraceptive usage. There is just less children being born but not an issue where contraception is tough.
I do know that some chemicals, possibly also found in some plastics (soft plastic probably) function a bit like estrogen, potentially reducing male fertility.
Add to that, the usual HN phenomenon that we're observing how the world and our countries (USA & Korea) seem be going down the toilet, and that makes us feel hesitant to bring a new human being into the world, especially when there are kids already here that could use a loving family.
---
Year 0: 100 newborns
Year 20: 100 twenties, 50 newborns
Year 40: 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns
Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns
Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns
Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns
Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn
---
In spite of having an extinction level fertility rate, the population nearly doubled in the first 60 years, going from 100 to 187. And it took 80 years to even see the population begin to decline. But then suddenly over the second 60 years, the population exponentially declined going from 187 to 22. This is very akin to the scenario in Korea, because they went from a fertility rate of 6+ to < 1. So they're starting with a large "newborn" population.
Because of the fact that we live much longer than we are fertile, it really damages any idea of "Well we'll just solve this when it becomes a problem." When it starts to become obvious there's a problem, the decline is already coming at an exponential rate. And it's entirely possible that such a small youth population supporting a suddenly massive elderly population will drive fertility rates even lower.
It increasingly seems that the future of our planet will not be decided by politics, ideology, or anything of the sort. It will simply be decided by whichever groups have children at healthy rates.
In a shrinking population, are individual people worse off, or does it just look like a decline when you look at the country in aggregate? There is no shortage of squandered talent in the world. So many people work below their capability because there are just more people than opportunities. It seems like it’s not a problem to keep running the modern world, even with a fraction of the current world population.
And besides, many smart folks think we are deep into overshoot, not just on carbon emissions, but on almost every resource we use to run the global economy. If we are beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, then we either need to become massively more efficient or just have massively fewer people on the planet. And given that there is no current hope of sustainable living on any other planet, seems like lowering birth rates can only be a good thing that will give us some chance of surviving our ecological bottleneck.
Edit: The other issue is tribal. The global tribe has lots of sufficient labor and young people to offset decreasing numbers of young South Koreans, but humans are not fungible. There will be many types of conflict due to cultural differences, as well as shifting power dynamics and the resulting lack of acceptance of newcomers on the same level as native tribe members, etc.
Combine this with the fact that yes, our overshoot is horrific, I really do not see why declining birth rates in this era are a bad thing.
Just about every society has dependents who can no longer work and younger workers who support them through tax revenue. With fewer and fewer young workers and more and more dependents you have no good options. Cutting services would be bad for the elderly and likely impossible to pass in a democratic society as they would make up the majority of the voting population. Not cutting services would accelerate flight of workers and worse birth rates as overwork youth don't have time to start their own families.
Environmentalists say that fewer people will be good for the environment. But what about investments and research into green energy and carbon removal? Those will simply not happen unless the economy is still growing.
It’s not clear to me it would necessarily play out as people stopping all non critical work to take care of old people. Maybe it would, on a family level - People would spend more time taking care of their parents, and then maybe conclude they should have more kids to take care of them when they are older like they do in the developing world. But the modern pyramid-shaped pension program is a recent invention and not necessarily one I think would be so durable as to destroy other industries?
>Without excess savings there will be no tech industry, improvements in science, infrastructure investments or much of anything interesting.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. Governments borrow more and more money to artificially turn excess savings into regular savings by increasing the investment rate, any benefits you think come from excess savings actually come from turning excess savings into regular savings aka savings = investment.
If savings are above investment it means aggregate demand is below aggregate supply and we are failing millions of people.
I don't think it is as binary as you suggest. There will be lower total saving after a delay. There will certainly be less investment more immediately.
What will happen is this.
If you borrow money to make and sell (say) shoes, and the population is doubling every 35 years (2% growth), then your market doubles in 35 years also. (You need money because your buildings and equipment wear out, if not for materials.)
Your lenders have it relatively easy in this situation, because fewer of their borrowers go bust, so interest rates (which are partly compensation for risk) are lower.
With negative population growth, your market is shrinking, so your lenders' risk of loss increases.
Anyone who still has excess savings demands higher return on investment. Fewer potential investments can jump the higher hurdle. Total investment decreases, total income decreases and everything spirals down.
A smaller world population in the longrun is a defacto nonstarter. Many places in the world continue to have extremely high birth rates. And the wealth/education correlation that claims to predict the change of this seems, at best, extremely weak when put under scrutiny. Billionaires have high wealth, high education, and high fertility. Places like Thailand have extremely low education/wealth levels, yet their fertility rate is lower than even the US. Israel is the third most educated country in the world, has an advanced economy, and a fertility rate that is even competitive against some African nations at 3.0.
The issue is one of prioritizing wealth more than family, which also explains why the trend collapses at billionaires (for whom family has effectively 0 impact on their wealth), even though the correlation would expect them to be having effectively 0 children. And this pursuit of wealth over family holds true in the West, but there's no reason to expect such ideology to spread. So the question is not one of a smaller world population, but of a smaller population of the groups that are not reproducing vs those that are. In other words should the West simply accept its own extinction, likely alongside those of its values? And to me, the answer to that question is no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
There are 102 countries having fertility rate above 2.1, a lot of these countries are in Africa or Near East. Still in a lot of these countries, fertility rate is dropping year by year
It's debatable. Population declines are good for the environment. But rapid drops has cultural, political, economic and geopolitical consequences. e.g. South Korea doesn't really trust NK or China or that they can't really be a manufacturing economy without young workers.
Yes.
A shrinking population means an ever-smaller number of workers need to support increasing numbers of retirees.
If you can work that out, then you've still got a small pool of workers producing goods for a large, mostly economically-inactive population, which means inflation and plenty of it.
I feel like for people living in big cities, where things are expensive simply because too many people want to live there, things might start to get easier.
1. Husband and wife both now work, not just in jobs, but in careers they are heavily invested in.
2. Getting and prospering in a career is really tough. I heard something like among current college graduates, only 20% are expected to ever find a full-time permanent position.
3. The education system is so competitive that doing well requires effort to the limits of physical endurance. It is not just the financial cost. Supporting a child to adulthood is draining on the parents in other ways. The families I know are in the top 10% for educational attainment, so I don't know how well this applies to working class families.
4. This is relatively minor, but there is a perpetual housing crunch and this affects prices.
One compounding factor could be the extension of childhood, which has been a very successful strategy for humans, and is more prevalent in the developed world.
this type of stability is an important factor for family planning
It's state-owned condo cartel, naturally, prices just keep skyrocketing, hence the "6 wallets for a down payment (the couple and their parents)" meme, but they'll just blame the greedy capitalist developers like Evergrande.
So combining the two factors, buying at least one condo is a prerequisite for marriage now.