Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

501–510 of 643 posts

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

#501
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, but if you thought the US fit the criteria you’ve just described, you’re sorely mistaken…

Try to bribe a police officer in the US next time you get pulled over at a traffic stop. Try to bribe the immigration officer at any US airport. My congressman's office didn't even let me give him a small non-cash thank you gift basket when he resolved a very sensitive and urgent administrative matter with my visa.

I'm more concerned that a congressman was able to "fix" an issue with a visa than I am with someone taking bribes.

Bribes implies quid pro quo. Someone who can "fix" some implies an exclusive network of favors traded with no record.

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

#502

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.

Ah but the younger generations will need to support the older non longer working people who also happens to have more votes. Korean national pension is going to run out in 10 years or so, and there is already talk of raising the mandatory contribution from 9% to 18%.

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

#503

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…

This kind of planning implicitly happens when women are expected to have a career instead of finding their identity in successful motherhood. I don't know much anything at all about Korean women's professional labor, but I'd be very surprised if it did not play a role. Country fertility rates correlate extremely well with female full time non domestic labor participation.

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

#504

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…

This is because you think too much. Most people just have kids and figure it out, same as it has been since the beginning of time.

>This is because you think too much. Most people just have kids and figure it out, same as it has been since the beginning of time.

The data for the past few decades (near universal fall in birthrates and increasing mother's age at birth) clearly indicates otherwise.

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

#505
post #219
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Declining birth rates have nothing to do with oppressing women. I think the point was the opposite: countries with limited respect and opportunities for women have higher birth rates because women have less control over whether they have children and if good careers aren’t an option anyway there’s less opportunity cost to staying home with a child.

You mean countries like France ? Just implement a repartition retirement system and small incentive per child which diminish after the third, boom, 2.1 fertility rate for most of the 21rst century. At least for now, the destruction of our retirement system and our current trend towards capitalization is already killing our fertility rate, and the idiots pushing this will once again realize this too late, because this…

> You mean countries like France ?

The adversarial framing here is a poor way to express the same point. Raising children is hard and has significant risks for the mother. If that cost is primarily paid by the mother many women will choose to have fewer children, space them further apart, etc. unless they aren't given as much control of their own lives. That's the oppressiveness we're talking about and it's not a simple “do women have basic rights?” boolean parameter — for example, Japanese women have many rights but there's a strong social expectation that women have to pick an entire package where getting married means they're expected to stop working as soon as they have a child and will stay home taking care of the child and their husband's parents, which extends to things like whether an employer will give them a job.

France is a good illustration of that point (along with Scandinavia) — there are less rigid expectations around family structures (children don't force you to stay in a bad relationship), women aren't considered bad mothers if they keep working, and especially having state-funded childcare and financial support. I've never lived in the EU but have friends from a number of countries and the contrast is pretty stark — the Germans talked about how much better the U.S. is at not shaming mothers for not giving up their professional careers, the French/Danish/Dutch parents talked about how much you have to pay out of pocket for things which are provided by their taxes. (Everyone talked about how much more healthcare costs & how frustrating the billing is, of course.)

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

#506

My interest lies in how many zeros of population are required to support certain technology strata. E.g. about a million workers are required to build and maintain aircraft. How many for nuclear power (counting everyone from teachers to healthcare etc.)

My all time favorite combining the two - how many workers would USSR have needed to fully support Admiral Kuznetsov class ships?

At this point you can probably just ask China about what it takes to support the Liaoning

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

#507
post #63

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…

> Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years Does the change necessarily have to be societal? > In 1992, a study found a global 50% decline in sperm counts in men over the previous 60 years. Multiple studies over subsequent years confirmed that initial finding, including a 2017 paper showing a 50% to 60% decline in sperm concentration between 1973 and 2011 in m…

When you can't afford to have children due to low pay, sperm count is out of the equation.

What doesn't make sense to me is the people that are concerned about society "changing", the native population not having enough kids, we are being "overrun" with immigrants etc. Are the same people that refuse to vote for politicians advocating higher minimum wages, more benefits and fairer taxes.

It can't work both ways, either you want to crush the average person with low wages and taxes, or you want the native population to thrive.

No one is going to subject themselves to poverty to help balance the demographics for the privileged.

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

#508
post #464

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.

You can't really compare today to the future if the population is meant to increase exponentially... By 2050 it could be the most populated country in the world, the idea that, that population wouldn't immigrate especially when other countries will be in desperate need of workers seems absurd.

Especially when, as you say, they will be uneducated and that education will likely be available in those nations.

I'm a bit confused by your choice of words "subservient" and "obligation", it seems you're trying to imply more but not caring to say it.

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

#509
post #22

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…

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…

After that lump passes through, you may have suffered a huge drain of adults expected squeezed so hard for child and elder care that they've since taken their productivity elsewhere.

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

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why adoption instead of IVF?

IVF is incredibly expensive and certainly not guaranteed to be successful. Might have something to do with it.

The same is true of adoption unfortunately.
Post reply on HN