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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

#391

Post by agilob »

creakingstairs wrote: post #311

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 univers…

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.

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

#392

Post by ck425 »

nunb wrote: post #298
decafninja wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. 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…

Probably because it comes through as tall claims based on anecdata? But I've lived in Europe, America, Asia, ME & Australia (also visited every SEA country) and the prevalence of male feminization & rich-people obesity (esp central adiposity) in certain regions is quite staggering. And almost every single person I know personally with difficulty conceiving (various races, various countries, various diagnoses includin…

What do you mean by male feminisation? I get the impression from context that you're referring to biological differences but that could easily be interpreted as "man aren't real men these days and that's why they can't conceive".

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

#393

Post by refurb »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #327
lettergram wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anywher…

> As soon as you hit 30-32 the rate of issues conceiving and issues with the baby grow exponentially. The "exponential increase" is still very low in absolute terms

Average fertility rate for women at 35 years old is half of what it is in their 20's. It basically goes from it's maximum to near zero during the 30's, that's a very rapid and significant decrease.

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

#394

Post by carrolldunham »

jxramos wrote: post #330
carrolldunham wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Love multiplies

I read around, I can't find any explanation of what that means. It seems irrelevant. Sure, life can be enjoyable, and people love each other - but when you read

>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.

and the proposition is to Shangai people into being, with no say in it, to meet this onerous workload, how is that defensible? You could say they aren't going to be forced to labor, but they are because otherwise they will starve and suffer.

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

#395

Post by bruce343434 »

choeger wrote: post #370

I think that this trend is self-reinforcing: When you have fewer children, you need to activate a larger part of your young population for work. A big pool (the largest?) is women who traditionally don't work or work less than men. Working makes it difficult to raise children (and might make the decision to have them difficult, too). In consequence, you end up with less children this year and run short of workers 20…

From what I've heard South Korea is very capitalist and people are overworked. Suicide rates are crazy. It's all pointing back to Maslow's hierarchy again; perhaps people just don't have the energy to start a family amidst all that pressure and stress.

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

#396

Post by imtringued »

choeger wrote: post #370

I think that this trend is self-reinforcing: When you have fewer children, you need to activate a larger part of your young population for work. A big pool (the largest?) is women who traditionally don't work or work less than men. Working makes it difficult to raise children (and might make the decision to have them difficult, too). In consequence, you end up with less children this year and run short of workers 20…

Youth unemployment is incredibly high in the EU. The reason for that is pretty obvious. The old people don't want to stop working.

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

#397

Post by thomasahle »

missedthecue wrote: post #386
creakingstairs wrote: post #311

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 univers…

Who is renting all the apartments in Seoul if every smart person with a perfect GPA and 52 hour a week job can't afford it?

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.

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

#398

Post by Joakal »

missedthecue wrote: post #386
creakingstairs wrote: post #311

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 univers…

Who is renting all the apartments in Seoul if every smart person with a perfect GPA and 52 hour a week job can't afford it?

That's assuming it's being rented out. It could be investor or developer sitting and waiting to sell or get a high rent tenant.

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

#399

Post by NhanH »

missedthecue wrote: post #386
creakingstairs wrote: post #311

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 univers…

Who is renting all the apartments in Seoul if every smart person with a perfect GPA and 52 hour a week job can't afford it?

Afford in this context means buy. You can rent it but can’t buy it.

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

#400

Post by sjducb »

somenameforme wrote: post #228

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: --- 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 twenti…

I had never appreciated this. I intuitively thought that the decline would be gradual.
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