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Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

bloomberg.com

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Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#61

Post by onepointsixC »

RedditKon wrote: post #48
iammjm wrote: post #17

Peter Zeihan wrote a really interesting book about this topic recently - "The End of the World is Just the Begining". He sees population decline as one of the gravest dangers facing civilisation. Implication being in the title of the book.

I love Peter Zeihan and recommend him to everyone. His commentary on the intersection of population decline and Russia's geopolitical goals from The Accidental Superpower in 2014 also turned out to be on point.

To give context to those who are unfamiliar, he basically predicted the Ukraine invasion before the Crimean Annexation and was proven correct again with Russias further attempt to invade the entirety of Ukraine this year.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#63

Post by ctoth »

throwaway_4ever wrote: post #12

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 fertili…

> 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].

[0]: https://theconversation.com/male-fertility-is-declining-stud...

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#64

Post by parkingrift »

exhilaration wrote: post #24
gumby wrote: post #19

What's the harm? By the end of the century robots will be doing most of the work anyway. People can concentrate on the things that matter to them instead.

By the end of the century robots will be doing most of the work anyway 1) What if they don't? 2) The end of the century is 78 years away, somebody's going need to turn you on your side every few hours when you're in that old folks home - what happens if there aren't enough people to do those jobs?

I mean this sincerely. I will kill myself before I become such a massive burden on society. I will not needlessly cling to life at the expense of others.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#65

Post by sfvegandude »

dougmwne wrote: post #5

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…

It is a bad thing if you like “more” and a manageable thing if you live in the US and don’t mind less.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#66

Post by onepointsixC »

gumby wrote: post #19

What's the harm? By the end of the century robots will be doing most of the work anyway. People can concentrate on the things that matter to them instead.

Robots don't buy products or services, meaning your revenues are shrinking. Meanwhile growing numbers of elderly citizens who require care are going to be supported by an ever smaller pool of young workers who will be overworked instead of starting families of their own. You have a spiral of death which is likely unavoidable.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#67

Post by wil421 »

brnt wrote: post #31
rowanajmarshall wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sta…

Nitpick: industrialisation started in Belgium.

Pretty much everything I can find says it started in Britain with textiles. Everything from Wikipedia, National Geographic, to Encyclopedia Britannica all say the same thing.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#68

Post by remarkEon »

brnt wrote: post #30
throwaway_4ever wrote: post #12

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 fertili…

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 t…

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.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#69

Post by eric4smith »

My first kid just reached 18. Now I'm seriously thinking of having another one.

Remember when we were younger and the world's population hit 7 billion, everyone was really, really concerned about overpopulation??? I even did not want to have any kids because of this.

Now, Korea is seriously going to be worse than even Japan. And faster too.

Back in Jamaica one of my grandma had 7 children, the other one had 8 (with 2 stillborn). Now most women there have 1 child.

Here in Thailand today, we see much of the same thing. Talking to people they report their grandparents having 4-8 kids. Now most Thai women are lucky to have even one child. Same in Vietnam and Indonesia, which I frequent regularly too.

An outlier is when I was in Qatar recently, it was very common to see large (3-7 kids) families everywhere from all over the Middle East.

It is what it is.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#70

Post by adverbly »

pengaru wrote: post #22
throwaway_4ever wrote: post #12

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 fertili…

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 h…

> 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...

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