Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by grapeskin » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:51 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #80

lotsofpulp wrote: post #34

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. 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).

So to you it can be summed up to "it's all women's fault" ?

What are men morally supposed to do when women simply do not want kids?

It’s not an issue of financial struggle since the trend is most pronounced in wealthy countries, especially in those with small wealth divisions.

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

#432

Post by int_19h » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:52 AM UTC

wizwit999 wrote: post #376

moomoo11 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 depressi…

This is is such a comically eugenicist racist comment.

OP's commment doesn't actually imply eugenics - it doesn't assert that people in other countries are somehow fundamentally inferior, you're just reading this into "corrupt and backwards minded society". But that is a matter of culture, not genetics.

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

#433

Post by Taurenking » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:52 AM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #125

makeitdouble wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to you it can be summed up to "it's all women's fault" ?

I read it more as "men have traditionally undervalued the societal contributions of women".

No post body was provided.

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

#434

Post by Silverback_VII » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:52 AM UTC

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…

>As other people have mentioned, its about not being able to afford to buy a house to raise kids in.

Why do you need a house to raise kids? In many advanced countries there are some systems which will keep your kids feed and clothed even if you have no money at all.

This is one of the reasons you often see economically unsuccessful people have way more children and thus a larger influence on humanity's future.

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

#435

Post by russdill » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:56 AM UTC

1sembiyan wrote: post #4

chownie wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you substantiate this point? What do you mean?

I mean I don’t see concerns about fertility rate reflected in the Korean movies/shows I consume. Just a glib observation.

There's been quite a few and they are quite popular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_My_Baby

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

#436

Post by ralfd » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:56 AM UTC

faeriechangling wrote: post #76

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…

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…

> 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."

David Reich in the NYTimes (archive https://archive.ph/Zfhc3)

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

#437

Post by croes » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:57 AM UTC

mirzap wrote: post #408

croes wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How do you plan to retire if there's not enough young people to sustain ever growing older population. Higher efficiency, higher wages especially in social security jobs, and of course a universal social security system How do you plan to solve the problems of a growing population? The consequences of things climate change will hit harder.

> Higher efficiency, higher wages especially in social security jobs, and of course a universal social security system efficiency has its limits. And we are reaching it, I would argue we reached it already. Without full automation there's not much room for "efficiency". There's no growing population on the west, it is declining sharply if you exclude immigration. There's not enough people to work with elderly. German…

There are enough people to work with elderly, they just don't get paid well enough. That's the main reason germany imports workforce from poorer countries.

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

#438

Post by croes » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:58 AM UTC

mirzap wrote: post #408

croes wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How do you plan to retire if there's not enough young people to sustain ever growing older population. Higher efficiency, higher wages especially in social security jobs, and of course a universal social security system How do you plan to solve the problems of a growing population? The consequences of things climate change will hit harder.

> Higher efficiency, higher wages especially in social security jobs, and of course a universal social security system efficiency has its limits. And we are reaching it, I would argue we reached it already. Without full automation there's not much room for "efficiency". There's no growing population on the west, it is declining sharply if you exclude immigration. There's not enough people to work with elderly. German…

And we are far away from reaching efficiency peak. If you look closely there is an incredible amount of useless workforce

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

#439

Post by berdario » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 8:59 AM UTC

thunderbird120 wrote: post #71

pengaru wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 re…

You completely misunderstood the parent comment. They explicitly called out:

> lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.

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

#440

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 9:02 AM UTC

yieldcrv wrote: post #424

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 planni…

"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.