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Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
481–490 of 643 posts
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah I see your confusion. You’ve missed that renting is more expensive than buying a home and gets more expensive each year, possibly forcing you to move away from your local area and hence your child’s school. There are some places where rent controls and renters rights can mean renting can work for families. But few places are like Berlin.
That depends entirely on the rent/buy ratio and other factors like transaction costs and frequency of moving. It’s not a “confusion”, especially in places with competitive housing markets like Japan. Since your following sentence agrees that renting isn’t universally cheaper, then you need to actually bring some relevant information on that point to have a substantive, non-confused comment. What do you think your com…
4-member family house rent/buy ratio in Korea is really high because of its unique Jeonse system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeonse Nobody rents 4 member family house because rent is more than mortgage.
On the other hand, bachelor studio is rather cheap even in the downtown Seoul(like 1k USD per month at most)
Jeonse system is unique in Korea and it really weird. It took me a few years to understand it and it shouldn't really work anymore because the housing price has stabilized in last 4 decades or so.
The point being, any of these commentors here who haven't heard of Jeonse, they don't know anything about housing in South Korea.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#483I'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.
Just finished "Stolen Focus" and it has a whole chapter on how lack of free play and helicopter parenting completely destroys a child's ability to thrive and focus. What we are doing to kids is criminal, and it's getting worse. Solution? Just give them some pills. We are destroying a whole generation, and their brains are already mush from social media.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
North Koreans are likely shorter due to malnourishment, not genetic differences.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#485I'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…
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Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#486I'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 they used to be able to keep the poor, poor via something brutally effective and simple, like only a tiny minority even getting the chance to go to decent schools or universities. Now they need a lot of wasted effort to convince people that the people at the top are working really hard and deserve it to maintain the same elite dynamic.
evidence: 7% got to tertiary education in 1975, and recently peaked at above 100% (not sure how that works to be honest, but the trend is clear)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR?locations=K...
More evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality_in_South_K...
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#487I'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…
This is very accurate. I’m Irish, and when my Korean wife and I were leaving the US with our two young kids, Korea wasn’t even considered as a place to raise them. She had such a needlessly tough time as a kid, and her siblings are having to put their young kids through exactly the same exhausting upbringing.
It’s not worth it. We’re luckily to have the choice of moving home to Europe and raising our kids in a way that they get to play a lot (I’m writing this while on a bench in a playground with them bouncing around in the sunshine) and also have school, art and sports.
Korea is actively discouraging Koreans from raising their kids there, especially if they have any other option
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the people having kids are the ones with less money. The parents in my neighborhood are middle class (I mean like cops and admin assistants) and there’s three families with three kids just within 8 houses. Meanwhile among my law school friends, 0 kids is far more common than 2, and while I’m sure someone else besides me in my class (200 people, late 30s) has 3, I don’t know them. One thing I think gets really ove…
Yes this is what I've noticed too. My friend who installs HVAC systems for a living just had his third kid before 30 and they're doing fine. Other friends who are DINK attorneys are watching the biological clock run out and they feel they "can't afford" a kid.
I think your HVAC friend may actually be earning more than your attorneys. Unless you're in a prestigious law firm, they don't make all that much. And HVAC is so high in demand these days that they can raise prices to the moon and still be booked for months in advance.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you assume the current population is the correct one? There’s a reasonable argument to be made that humans are over the Earth’s carrying capacity nearly everywhere, and are causing environmental and social damage to maintain the current size. It is quite normal in ecology to see crashes and recovery in the event of overpopulation. If we assume humans are biological organisms, it all seems pretty normal.
Except unlike the foxes which eat their rabbits to near extinction, and therefore soon join them, humans can change the rules of the system they're in. Calculating the carrying capacity of the world before agriculture would have given you a much different number than after it.
Humanity can't just unilaterally decide to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
#490I'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…
Spent a year there 20 years ago. Even then I was horrified by the lifestyle.