SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea How does the developed world pull out of this ty…
According to China, one solution is to kill after school for-profit education, which is crippling families due to unbounded competition.
The trains running in the subways are much newer, cleaner, and wider than the ones in NYC or Tokyo or Paris or London (based on my own observation). They also continually build out entirely new rapid lines like the Bundang express line which takes you from a suburb of Seoul to the center of Gangnam (a major district) in 15 minutes. Their buildings are also mostly new. It seems like every decade or two Koreans demolis…
So most of those things amount to being “mostly new” and made recently, an advantage which will be lost until they keep replacing and rebuilding them.
Au contraire, it's the _ability_ to make changes and build new things in an existing society that is so impressive. The US (let's say NYC specifically) cannot build a lot of new core infrastructure like fast subways because it's expensive and difficult to get the home owners and community on board.
Seoul the city and metro area are both more populous than NYC. And yet you see them rapidly pivoting to fast new lines like this Bundang line. You see them demolishing old buildings and building new ones. You see them switching their entire payment system to digital-first.
On reflection I think this is mostly enabled because 50M is still a small-ish population and the country is fairly culturally homogenous. Combine that with a desire to compete with their bigger neighbors (Japan, China, the US, etc.).
I think Korea (like smaller countries in Europe) has a pretty unique ability to pivot existing society into new technology.
SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea How does the developed world pull out of this ty…
It's going to be hard to convince couples living in 1 bedroom apartments to cram in 2 kids just so that the country can hit replacement level fertility rates. Large urban cities just don't seem built for families, especially with the way that larger spaces are priced.
So urban cities are anti-child? Thus we will see cites change or depopulate? Does low fertility correlate with dense urban dwelling and sky high real-estate prices? I suspect it probably does, but I haven't seen any proof. Maybe this shift to remote-first work that happened over the last 18 months will help....
I am not a professional in this field at all, but my personal experience suggests that we need more smaller cities, more densely connected, or perhaps more and smaller "downtown" areas within a single city. Then people could have a bit more personal space (less geographic concentration reduces demand and price pressure in specific areas), while keeping density and interconnectedness high to support mass transit, walking/cycling, and socially connected communities.
I think this would make cities a bit more "pro-child" than they are currently.
It's going to be hard to convince couples living in 1 bedroom apartments to cram in 2 kids just so that the country can hit replacement level fertility rates. Large urban cities just don't seem built for families, especially with the way that larger spaces are priced.
So urban cities are anti-child? Thus we will see cites change or depopulate? Does low fertility correlate with dense urban dwelling and sky high real-estate prices? I suspect it probably does, but I haven't seen any proof. Maybe this shift to remote-first work that happened over the last 18 months will help....
It will if it is embraced. I also hope countries take the opportunity to build new remote-first cities conducive to family life.
Otherwise, maybe the ‘modern city’ is where cultures go to die.
> stagnating That's a nice way to put it, it's been actually decreasing clearly over time since 1989, with ups and downs on the way: https://mebfaber.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/japan.jpg
What is the y axis?
That chart is a crude snapshot of the Nikkei 225 from 1990 to 2009. Since then it's rebounded by quite a bit although it's still quite a bit under its Dec 1989 peak. But of course a stock market index isn't the full economy, so I would disagree that this chart by itself constitutes proof that Japan is stagnating.
SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea How does the developed world pull out of this ty…
> going to be one of the grand challenges of the 50 years I’m sceptical of this claim. Demand per capita grows unabated. Working lives are lengthening. A smaller population living well is economically indistinguishable, in the aggregate, from a large one living poorly. Maybe post-industrial civilisations settle into a lower-population steady state than ones requiring lots of unrefined labor. Yes, dependency ratios wi…
it really is a great challenge, because for example america will have to rethink its habit of paying for today's excesses by harvesting the labor of future generations. it's a completely different inter-generational relation than we have now.
SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea How does the developed world pull out of this ty…
Invent/make artificial womb. It's already feasible I think. Probably tons of money to be made. Why it's not a thing yet?
Women have many options/entertainment now and don't want to go through pregnancy especially multiple times. This coupled with fact that you have only 10 years for childbearing (before 40) and you drastically cut carrier advancement when it just started explains a lot IMO. Requiring two people to support family in XXI century feels like a scam and race to the bottom. It's mostly due to scarcity of land that you have to bid on housing (that owned by too rich people in many cases, so they literaly can manipulate market to extract rent) and all profitable activity moved to cities so you also want bw there.
Make housing cheaper => I think will happen with decentralisation of energy sources and cheaper transport (tesla). Also some family friendly social policies (china?).
I think remote work made a lot of people choose to live in houses instead and this might lead to some positive change in demography.
But the cheapest way IMO is to just make families trendy via Hollywood (instead of this homo propaganda on Netflix)
SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea How does the developed world pull out of this ty…
This is very true as a Korean living outside of the country, It's happening slowly but the cultural resistance and all kind of shitstorm related low-birthrate/immigration is about to happen. It's pretty ugly situation inside right now it seems like. Koreans still have the idea that it is a homogenous country and majority of korean is pretty extremely conservative about this new policy obviously, you could easily imag…
My wife is from Busan and her parents don't speak English nor are they educated, and I would consider them extremely "Korea Conservative", nevertheless, they're aware of the issue and it is discussed openly, how to continue to emerge Korea, and I think it is this issue that primarily made them comfortable with their daughter marrying a foreigner, of the options, marry a foreigner or destroy the country, I suspect Koreans will take the latter. If I had to guess, your countrymen will fair a lot better than expected, likely through policy of controlled "acceptable foreigners", strong demand of cultural adoption of said "acceptable foreigners", and through Automation/Robotics/AI. I was very surprised to see a lot of conversation among the young people in Korea about the future of the society surrounding the themes of what a hybrid socialist/capitalist robotics AI utopia would look like, if I was to bet on anyone getting there, it would be SK.
SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world. This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea How does the developed world pull out of this ty…
Pay people to be stay at home parents so they don't face an enormous opportunity cost / survival threat to having a kid.