Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by jxramos » Fri, Aug 26, 2022, 12:51 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #581

lr4444lr wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not yet found a single planned 3rd child among my colleagues and associates in situations where both husband and wife work full time (without live in help, or at least someone who comes to the house full time to watch the kids before and even a little after the parents come home). Not saying it won't happen that I will eventually find one, but I find it to be the single biggest predictor of having more than 2…

Don’t forget grandparents. That’s how my wife and I had three while both working as corporate lawyers. This is quite common among people I know.

I’ve been curious how Amy Coney Barret and her husband pulled it off. She definitely has it all, staggering.

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

#602

Post by homeland221 » Fri, Aug 26, 2022, 1:38 AM UTC

TwoFerMaggie wrote: post #496

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…

> you have tired and jaded people without a fun childhood Man this hits really hard because I spent my first 20 years growing up in China... Good thing is that now I'm in a much less authoritarian place with a job that has decent work-life balance. Have been trying to cultivate some hobbies in the past few years, feels like I've been trying to reclaim the childhood I never had.

Good for you. Hope if your children will have a better childhood!

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

#603

Post by creakingstairs » Fri, Aug 26, 2022, 1:45 AM UTC

memcg wrote: post #555

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…

Could you please describe the impact on retirement and caring for aging parents. Are children expected to take care of their parents?

Well that's a bit complicated. Traditionally, yes. Korea has been a Confucian society, which meant that the eldest son gets the parent's house, lives with them and takes care of them. Incidentally, being a wife of the eldest son is also very hard, because you are supposed to take care of your in-laws (boy do I have some horror stories).

With modernisation, this has changed.

1. Most women no longer wants to be servants for the in-laws (rightfully so) and wants to live separately

2. With less children, you won't necessarily have a son.

So now, parents live separately, until they are unable to do so anymore. When this happens, the children might take them into their house and care for them or admit them into hospice or retirement home.

You might ask, what happens if your children don't take care of you and you don't have money? Well you are kinda f-ed, as seen with the high elderly poverty rate.

> [Korea has] the highest elderly poverty rate among OECD countries

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8871725/#:~:tex....

Oh, Korean national pension is also set to run out within 10 years or so, which will make the issue worse and/or make the future generation pay disproportionate amount of tax :)))

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

#604

Post by homeland221 » Fri, Aug 26, 2022, 1:49 AM UTC

piaste wrote: post #537

konart wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are not hobbies in this case though. I've been attending music school (violin) for 7 years (7-14 y.o.) and only by the time I hit 30 I reasised the problem with the whole system. Teachers (and to some point parents) expect you to invest as much in this music school as you invest (at least expected to) in your regular school. And I never though about it this way. For me this was always a place to escape most of…

This is one of those problems that goes away when you're an adult. I studied piano as a boy and there was always some friction with my Polish teacher for whom piano was her life's work, and try as she might she couldn't quite get her head around a student who didn't want much more than play Bohemian Rhapsody at parties. Tried to get me to love Chopin as much as she genuinely loved him, but it never caught up and I to…

I can tell that you will play your violin with life gusto while your Polish teacher do it with life burden. Music should be like that. So many students I saw for the past decades having achive diploma level in piano or violin or sometime both before they attend University ended up throwing away their musical gift. So sad.

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

#605

Post by zamfi » Fri, Aug 26, 2022, 2:22 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #595

zamfi wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, Bairoch's Belgian, though. By your earlier logic, he shouldn't be trusted with this claim any more than Wikipedia or Britannica should be trusted with the claim of British origins. Seems like we'd need a non-British, non-Belgian source to make any definitive claim, right? /s

You are totally right, why should we trust him more than any other single author ? There’s no reason to trust blindly and anyone who cares should totally get as many other sources and evidences that they can afford to.

That’s a different argument, my friend, a different argument.

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

#606

Post by midoridensha » Fri, Aug 26, 2022, 2:24 AM UTC

Wolfenstein98k wrote: post #444

cpursley wrote: post #419

I 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.

That's probably mostly due to terrible childhood nutrition. The same thing happened to humans when they switched from being hunter-gatherers to using agriculture: they dropped a foot in height.

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

#607

Post by midoridensha » Fri, Aug 26, 2022, 2:25 AM UTC

seszett wrote: post #468

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.

No, it's not. It's their closest neighbor, somewhat similar culturally, and while the birthrate is still low, 1.3 is still much higher than 0.8. It's a big improvement.

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

#608

Post by midoridensha » Fri, Aug 26, 2022, 2:26 AM UTC

dsq wrote: post #441

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.

"Brave New World" shows what the future is going to look like. Honestly, it looks like a better society than the ones we have now.

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

#609

Post by tptacek » Fri, Aug 26, 2022, 2:50 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #596

tptacek wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't even wrong. Is the number of human toes genetic? How heritable is the number of toes on a human being? Is wearing a dress genetic? How heritable is whether or not you wear a dress?

I don’t really understand your argument. Wearing dresses isn’t heritable, we know that because most women’s grandmothers wore dresses and most women wear jeans or casual wear. Heritability isn’t proof that a trait is genetic, but it’s strong evidence once you start addressing confounding factors. As I recall, the IQ heritability research was done with twin studies. This is like shocking to me we’re even debating this…

Wearing dresses is heritable! Heritability is simply the ratio of genetically-caused variation to total variation for some trait across a population. Bad driving is heritable. So is risk aversion. So is musical taste. So is how much TV you watch. All of these: studied.

Traits can trivially be minimally heritable and totally genetically determined. The number of fingers on your hands is genetically determined by your Hox genes. But the variation in the number of fingers on your hand (more precisely: across the population) is overwhelmingly not genetically determined. Genetically determined, low heritability.

Traits can trivially be maximally heritable and not at all genetically determined. Whether or not you wear lipstick is largely decided by XY vs. XX. But there's no gene for wearing lipstick; if the cultural ball had broken a different way, we might all be wearing lipstick, or none of us. Genetically unencumbered, high heritability.

So: you haven't said anything. You're not even wrong. All you pointed out was that you can do a study and determine that population variations in intelligence (or bad driving, or social trust, or fear of dentists) are traceable to genetic variance. That doesn't mean that genes literally encode the outcome.

Heritability isn't "strong evidence". It's barely evidence at all. It's literally just a framing of the question, which your argument simply begs. Irresponsibly, at that. None of this should be news to you.

I don't even have to take a position on the blighted question of whether intelligence is genetically determined (or whether we can measure it meaningfully at all, or whether it's fixed at birth or fluid, or whether outcomes in intellectual performance are epigenetic). And I'm not. I'm just pointing out that your argument, the one I replied to, was literally vacuous.

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

#610

Post by tptacek » Fri, Aug 26, 2022, 2:55 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #527

imtringued wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay but that just implies that having a wide distribution of IQ is well adapted to our natural environment.

In the same sense as humans having a range of strength and speed is well adapted, sure. But athletics also tends to run in families.

We have relatively strong evidence for a significant degree of genetic determinism in athletic ability (at least for some sports). We do not for intelligence.