Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 643 posts

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

#461

Post by adrianN »

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…

Well if competitiveness is the reason for low birth rates, this should fix itself once the older generations age out of their posts and the companies need to look for replacements among a much smaller workforce.

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

#463

Post by noneeeed »

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…

I have friends who spent a couple of years in Korea and they get quite sad when they talk about the kids they saw. They just seemed to have no life outside of an endless stream of classes and tutors.

I'm trying to strike a balance with my kids. We encourage them to do things like learn music, take up sports etc, but not let that just consume all their free time. I want them to have time to just play freely, read comics, or just be a bit bored sometimes.

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

#464

Post by seydor »

12907835202 wrote: post #383

I imagine booming populations in Africa will likely offset much of the working population in these countries with low birth rates. As a European I can imagine what impact having high immigration from Africa mixed with all the property being unaffordable and owned by older white generations will have i.e. huge disparity in wealth between black and white, quick growth of black population and decline in white population…

> booming populations in Africa will likely offset much of the working population

Not really , as they don't do today, because they are not educated , and there is not enough time to wait for second-generation immigrants. Also, africans have no obligation to become subservient again to the developed world via immigration.

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

#465

Post by sumedh »

sendfoods wrote: post #456
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?

Probably population growth, less resources more people.

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

#466

Post by tfigment »

nunb wrote: post #263
nxm wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much respect to those who adopt, but bloodlines matter

I heard the most bizarre & unexpected opinion first-hand from an obgyn. Prior to this I was firmly in the nurture camp of nature/nurture, but this obgyn's opinion on adoptions shocked me out of my complacency. I am hoping Sapolsky's latest book may shed some light on the subject without the Wade/Murray "bell curve" implications.

I can only speak from personal experience but that is what happened to my family. My brother is a sociopath who caused our family a lifetime of difficulty. The biological mother was drug addict and abusive before adoption and he became an addict. My sister also adopted from different family was less of a problem but also had some issues. My dad was very kind and not abusive and spent way too much trying to help. Who knows maybe it was environment and early abuse or something but nature stacked the deck I think in my family. The other issue with adoption is limited access to family medical history.

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

#467

Post by pas »

thinkingemote wrote: post #290
FBISurveillance wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies for ranting but this topic resonates too much. Housing prices are 9x salary vs 4.5x salary in the 70s and it takes a while to save up. Personal data point: it took me winning an IPO lottery to start thinking about having kids for real. Having kids while earning minimal wage? Terrifying, especially in the US where getting yourself or your kid sick could bankrupt you in the blink of an eye - and if you want m…

If we look back at say mortality rates and poverty and health, the people in the past had it much worse off. They didn't wait to have babies.

Tradition and ideological homogeneity was much stronger back then.

The world was simply much simpler.

The number of practically available paths forward were less. So why wait? Nowadays people are in an analysis paralysis, so they just wait. (Or try to find better mates, better jobs, better social groups/communities, move around more.)

And due to less homogeneity it's seems harder to find someone. (And probably is harder.)

Also the acceptable mortality was higher. Wars were more common, losing people due to illness was also more common, etc.

And nowadays we have endless alternatives to getting married. Single life is very enjoyable. (see Netflix et al :))

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

#468

Post by seszett »

nofollow wrote: post #423

if the kdramas are indicative of their society, they believe kissing will make you pregnant ;-) seriously, they should take a page out of japan's playbook- legalize pornography and establish a contest to encourage economic and population growth :-)

Japan is probably the second rich country with the lowest fertility rate after Korea.

It's really the worst country to look at if Korea wants to improve their fertility rate.

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

#469

Post by enaaem »

moomoo11 wrote: post #267
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…

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…

In poor countries, kids are free labor and your future source of pension. In rich countries kids are expensive pets that don’t fit in your small apartment.
Post reply on HN