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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

#451

Post by doliveira »

xeromal wrote: post #229
doliveira wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great illustration as to why inequality matters, not just poverty.

I'm not sure what inequality has to do with it. To me, it sounds more like chasing the joneses. There are plenty of free activities.

Good luck convincing people that they should be happy to raise children with the living standard of 60 years ago and they don't have to worry about money because there's free activities to do with your children.

What you call "chasing the joneses" is perfectly expected human behavior. People compare themselves to their current metaphorical neighborhood in time and space (not to their grandparents or to hunter-gatherers) and they make their life decisions based on that: college, career, having children. It's just nonsense to dismiss it as "hey, that's jealousy" at a population level.

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

#452

Post by seydor »

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…

urbanization

The resources of korea and their technology will not go away, they will now be at the hands of fewer people, so more wealth / person. Historically it was small states that dominated the world, the populous ones were ravaged by poverty and famine.

People are calculating (correctly) that our future technology does not need a lot of hands, and that is true. Look at the tech sector , which employs a tiny percentage of the population but has enormous output.

As for the egoist act of genetic heritage/perpetuation, well let's be honest, in 10 years people will be modifying their genes and removing our clunky and faulty dna so there goes our glory.

As for wars/security, those are already fought with drones

> I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off

The trend will not continue forever

To me , this all highlights that we need to ramp up anti-aging technology fast and hard. It s much higher priority than sending humans to mars

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

#453

Post by Sharlin »

agilob wrote: post #391
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.

If those karate, piano, swimming and football are intense enough to be counted as "work" rather than leisure, then something is wrong. Are hobbies not a thing anymore?

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

#454

Post by jacquesm »

Sharlin wrote: post #453
agilob wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If those karate, piano, swimming and football are intense enough to be counted as "work" rather than leisure, then something is wrong. Are hobbies not a thing anymore?

It depends on the intensity and the question of whether or not they are voluntary or mandatory.

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

#455

Post by searchableguy »

Sharlin wrote: post #453
agilob wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If those karate, piano, swimming and football are intense enough to be counted as "work" rather than leisure, then something is wrong. Are hobbies not a thing anymore?

Many kids are forced to do these activities to pad their application for colleges and sometimes it is for show and prestige.

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

#456

Post by sendfoods »

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…

What has changed since your grandparents generation? Where did this (need for?) competitiveness come from?

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

#457

Post by in_cahoots »

cloutchaser wrote: post #375
nunb wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this topic very interesting. My observation (anecdata-lly, but I would love to see RCTs or perhaps a cleanly designed ANOVA study) is that these symptoms of infertility are particularly (world-wide) prevalent in people who have (usually undiagnosed) metabolic syndrome & low cholecalciferol. In almost all South-east Asian countries in particular, I have noticed high levels of sucrose consumption so I am curious…

Has anyone ever studied whether long term contraception use has an effect on fertility later on? Seems like that could be a reason too.

It’s been studied, I don’t know any links off the top of my head but they’ve consistently found that fertility returns to normal within a couple of months / menstrual cycles. The hard part is knowing when you are fertile: since there are only a few days each menstrual cycle when the egg is available to be fertilized if you’re just coming off contraception and don’t know your natural cycle length it’s easy to miss those days.

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

#458

Post by Sharlin »

searchableguy wrote: post #455
Sharlin wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those karate, piano, swimming and football are intense enough to be counted as "work" rather than leisure, then something is wrong. Are hobbies not a thing anymore?

Many kids are forced to do these activities to pad their application for colleges and sometimes it is for show and prestige.

Oh. That’s batshit crazy (the college application thing). Why should non-academic achievements make any difference whatsoever when applying to college? Is that a thing anywhere except the US?

As for show and prestige, that’s usually what the parents want, so that’s squarely in the "something is wrong" category.

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

#459

Post by midoridensha »

sacrosancty wrote: post #197
ckylee wrote: post #188

Korean politics is blaming feminism for this phenomenon, but it's really a mix of all the issues in the comments, as well as sexual crime injustices (bare minimal sentencing for sex crimes) and women afraid of bringing a child into such society. It's just a natural evolutionary reaction.

Has there ever been a society in history that was so bad that "women afraid of bringing a child into such society." was a thing? In the very short term, sure, but forever?

Women have only had the ability to reliably avoid pregnancy for a little over 50 years now. You can't look at history for this one.

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

#460

Post by seydor »

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.

What matters to them?

you re not wrong, but people are always looking for meaning in life. If kids are not there, they will look for meaning elsewhere. But maybe kids are too demanding and have repetitive needs, which is off-putting for meaning-driven uberhumans. Well then maybe we should automate the raising of kids , but wait, daily school already exists and now we have tablets too. OK so how did the adults find meaning now that their hands are untied? Oh, they are in social media all day

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