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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

#421

Post by legutierr »

adrianN wrote: post #209
legutierr wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world has always been going down the toilet. The only difference now is that we have higher visibility of and lower tolerance for the bullshit. You shouldn’t be so pessimistic.

The other difference now is that we're pretty close to wiping out crucial ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest and show no signs of taking climate change as seriously as we should.

I was downvoted in my other comment, so I think I should explain what I meant.

My point was that there is no “we” when we speak of humanity as a broad aggregate this way. There are specific constituencies—for instance, Bolsenaro and his supporters in Brazil—who are blocking the policies that most of us want to implement to stop climate change. It’s not “we” who are the problem, it’s “them”.

If you blame humanity in the aggregate you misdirect your energies and misidentify the solution.

The thing to do is to apply the appropriate political levers to weaken and oppose the constituencies who prioritize status-quo fossil-fuel energy policies over civilizational stability and the well-being of life on Earth. Blaming all of humanity is the equivalent of giving up and doing nothing, and makes the problem worse.

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

#422

Post by DocTomoe »

Ekaros wrote: post #43
bagacrap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's name the elephant in the room: No government is going to make a significant part of the workforce work in (unproductive) elderly care. Societies will eventually start to just get rid of their old, first encouraging life-ending treatment, and eventually enforcing it if there are not enough takers.

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

#424

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

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

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

#425

Post by ralfd »

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…

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_city

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

#426

Post by tsss »

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…

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.

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

#427

Post by bigDinosaur »

makeitdouble wrote: post #413
bigDinosaur wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I can find says that it (industrial revolution) spread from the UK to continental Europe, which a massively oversized chunk of industrial tech coming from the UK. I'm happy to have my mind changed but the general consensus is that it did start in the UK. The book you cite is in French and appears to have very little in the way of reviews or anything? One book against the consensus of the field is certainly…

The “industrial revolution” term was spread from Engels’s book about England (“The Condition of the Working Class in England“). So basically, the definition of “Industrial Revolution” is bound to the phenomenon that started in England. “industrialization” is another thing, and was a more progressive thing that was already prominent earlier than that. That book I cited is widely studied and reviewed…but you’ll have gu…

That's probably fair, I wouldn't make the claim that industrialisation itself was unique to the UK. You've piqued my interest though so I might attempt to read some more about that stuff in French with my rusty B1.5 level :-)

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

#428

Post by vidarh »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #324
jdkoeck wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, all I have is the constant drum of “the world is over populated” by leaders around the world to back up my reasoning for potentially being intentional. You might want to consult with a professional, that’s paranoid thinking.

A quick google search leads me to an NYT article: "In the last several days, the British government’s environmental adviser declared it “irresponsible” to have more than two children. And Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, asserted that including contraception in the stimulus package could reduce government spending." If China wanted to reduce population in 2022, would it announce a mandatory one-child-policy? O…

China has not just repealed the one-child policy, but are pushing for more children, because they, like a lot of governments, are now more concerned about falling birth rates than about overpopulation. China is set to start seeing population decline within a decade or two at current rates.

While you might find individuals in governments some places that still worry about overpopulation, most places outside of sub-Saharan Africa, the concern now is a growing demographic timebomb as populations age and birth rates are falling below replacement almost everywhere. (Sub-Saharan Africa is also seeing sharp declines, but is not there yet)

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

#429

Post by russdill »

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…

The population didn't double over the first 60 years unless your 100 newborns were created ex nihilo.

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

#430

Post by pnut »

creakingstairs wrote: post #417
missedthecue wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

Keeping up with the Jeonses, that's how they get you.
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