I read so many comments here trying to make having zero kids into some kind of FU to the system.
While what will eventually happen is professional families birthing and raising as many children as the state and corporations need, making the regular nuclear family obsolete. It will also make the family superfluous, enabling govt to completely disregard it.
Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
441–450 of 643 posts
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#442I'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.
I've complained about that my whole life. Going from high school to college was wonderful because I had so much time time my first semester in college. (I ended up blowing that by overloading myself in subsequent semesters, but that's another story.)
I always hated the idea of homework in school (outside of college/university) because I have never understood being at "home" but still required to do "work" for a place I just spent 7-8 hours at and most days 2-3 more hours for sports or band.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#443As someone born in a situation like this (east Germany also had a fertility rate of 0.8 in the mid nineties, albeit under different circumstances), I now find it interesting how unimportant that is to you as a child. Sure, in retro-perspective it is clear that all those schools closing or down-sizing was an extreme trend but that aside, I cannot say that I ever felt like we were few kids. I mean, I had all my friends at school and many of those had siblings, neighbors had usually kids, most of my parents friends eventually had kids. And when we were starting university, we thought we were too many as mandatory military draft was abolished and hence more students were starting that year.
I am not sure what this tells me but probably that there must have been a marginalized fraction of the population that I never noticed (and living in a relatively young university town probably helped at that). Then again, obviously, our fertility rate was only that low for a couple of years and 'rebounded' to 1.3-1.5 soon after.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#444I wonder how this compares to North Korean rates? Same people genetically but vastly different culture and system at this point.
Different people genetically. North Koreans were noticeably shorter on average by the year 2000, less than two generations after the split.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I think they mean feminization in the biological sense: It's the reason fat men usually have visible breasts: the body has a pathway for converting cholesterol into estradiol[0], excessive cholesterol causes some feminization due to that.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically population drops were bad. When you lose population, you lose the labor required to support as many specializations, and civilization regresses. Now, though, fertilizers and modern medicine support excess human population, fossil fuels are an energy wellspring that helps reduce the need for physical labor, and AI can free people from repetitive mental work. Combine this with the fact that yes, our oversh…
You're missing the demand side and the dependents problem. AI, Automation, etc. may replace factory workers but those workers also consumed products. With less consumers you have less demand thus your revenues are doomed to shrink year on year. Just about every society has dependents who can no longer work and younger workers who support them through tax revenue. With fewer and fewer young workers and more and more d…
It would seem common sense that growth cannot continue on a finite planet forever without catastrophe, hence our current situation. The overarching problem is that no system has been able to replace the one we have currently in order to prevent or mitigate the consequences of loss of population or growth on society, but that was never an easy problem to solve.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#447No post body was provided.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#448I wonder how this compares to North Korean rates? Same people genetically but vastly different culture and system at this point.
Different people genetically. North Koreans were noticeably shorter on average by the year 2000, less than two generations after the split.
Interesting, didn't know that!
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#449It 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…
I think there are many strong arguments against this, but most are debatable. So I'm going to focus on one of the arguments that I do not feel especially strongly about, but one that I think is simply undeniable. A smaller world population in the longrun is a defacto nonstarter. Many places in the world continue to have extremely high birth rates. And the wealth/education correlation that claims to predict the change…
> Many places in the world continue to have extremely high birth rates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
There are 102 countries having fertility rate above 2.1, a lot of these countries are in Africa or Near East. Still in a lot of these countries, fertility rate is dropping year by year
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#450I have 3 kids with one due at the end of the year. All are from the same woman and we’ve known each other since being teenagers. We are planning to have 5-7 total. They really add a richness to life. It’s fun to see people stare when we go out.
Serious question: How on earth can you afford this?