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How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

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Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#301

Post by googlryas »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #239
neom wrote: post #202

My wife and I have opted not to have children for reasons* and it's really sad how the conversation with the in-laws has moved from "you should have children because children" to "you need to have children because korea needs you to have children", and it's not just a passing comment here and there, the campaign to get us to single handedly re-populate SK is intense and sustained. I wonder if other couples are experi…

In Spain there's no institutional pressure, but peer pressure. I'm expected to have children and pay +1/2 of my income in rent, have little savings, etc. I'm pretty much an average spaniard in financial terms. Climate change frightens me too. I mean, If I had children I would have fear for their future and I would be completely ruined financially. But it seems this is completely incomprehensible to older generations…

How exactly does that expectation work? What happens if you only pay 30% of your income to rent? Will you get passed over for a promotion if your boss sees you live slightly below what he is paying you, or something?

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#302

Post by dougmwne »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #271
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in SK but in the US. I decided long ago to not have children (I'm a man) along with my wife. Maybe we'll change our mind one day, but more than likely it won't. I honestly just don't think its my responsibility to contribute to some "greater good" of continuing to populate the earth. Humans survived just fine when the population of the Earth was half the size of now. This is extremely selfish and probably not…

Just as long as you recognize that if the worker/retiree ratio gets significantly out of whack, the demand for services needed by retirees is going to massively outstrip supply supply so inflation is going to kill any retirement savings you're planning on. If you're directly or indirectly working on that problem somehow, you're probably doing far more good for future humans than you would just by having kids.

Rich countries will just keep importing labor. The large aged population will throw out any government that threatens their quality of life in retirement.

Middle income and poor countries with low birth rates may suffer greatly from having their working aged populations poached.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#303

Post by waveBidder »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #246
Daishiman wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are seriously underestimating the impacts that worldwide crop failures in the next 20 years are going to have as far as global human catastrophes go.

Significant crop failures will cause prices to rise, which will enable the wider use of refrigerated storage, fertilizer, new crop varietals, desalinated water, greenhouses, etc. This will bring supply and demand back into balance at a higher price. The higher price for food will cause millions of deaths, an impact comparable to COVID or to the Ukraine and Ethiopian wars combined. It will pale in comparison to the im…

it's difficult to articulate the (IMO correct) position that climate change is horrible but still totally solvable. somehow people hear "we can solve this" as " there's no reason to be concerned"

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#304

Post by bryanlarsen »

dougmwne wrote: post #302
bryanlarsen wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as long as you recognize that if the worker/retiree ratio gets significantly out of whack, the demand for services needed by retirees is going to massively outstrip supply supply so inflation is going to kill any retirement savings you're planning on. If you're directly or indirectly working on that problem somehow, you're probably doing far more good for future humans than you would just by having kids.

Rich countries will just keep importing labor. The large aged population will throw out any government that threatens their quality of life in retirement. Middle income and poor countries with low birth rates may suffer greatly from having their working aged populations poached.

This is an article about Korea, a country which is not doing so, and is quite likely incapable of doing so in the quantities needed to offset a 0.7 TFR.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#305

Post by avisser »

intrasight wrote: post #260
1-6 wrote: post #199

South Korea is hostile for new families. Unless you were born to rich parents, have a decent education with a good job (that's with a Multi-national or a Chaebol), own property in Seoul, find a partner, and survive the probability of divorce, having a child is impossible--let alone having two to meet the population replacement rate. What's the solution?

The solution is fewer people - which is the direction they are headed. S.Korea has twice the population density of Germany for instance. So cutting in to half the current number seems about right. Honest question: who benefits from population growth besides developers?

Old people. Any socialized support system is predicated on growth.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#306

Post by nradov »

biohax2015 wrote: post #276
nradov wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of people who have children even though they can't afford it. Most of them muddle through somehow.

Nobody has any desire to muddle through life

Mostly life is what happens to us regardless of what we desire.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#307

Post by yobbo »

1-6 wrote: post #199

South Korea is hostile for new families. Unless you were born to rich parents, have a decent education with a good job (that's with a Multi-national or a Chaebol), own property in Seoul, find a partner, and survive the probability of divorce, having a child is impossible--let alone having two to meet the population replacement rate. What's the solution?

Guessing ... because of appreciating real estate and concentration of jobs, living in certain cities/areas became culturally synonymous with "being a winner" while staying in rural/industrial towns meant "being a loser". So the big cities became the bottle neck through which all young people need to funnel before they deem each other worthy of starting families. And that's a bottle neck on population growth.

The same mechanism exists elsewhere but the contrasts between "stagnant vs vital" would be more pronounced in SK, probably because of the rate and scale of the economy over the last 40-50 years. Maybe?

The government needs to stop fuelling the bubble. Instead, raise mortgage rates (so that "time in market" stops being a factor) and force industry to spread out offices and jobs (of all ranks) evenly throughout the country.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#308

Post by tippytippytango »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #231
neom wrote: post #202

My wife and I have opted not to have children for reasons* and it's really sad how the conversation with the in-laws has moved from "you should have children because children" to "you need to have children because korea needs you to have children", and it's not just a passing comment here and there, the campaign to get us to single handedly re-populate SK is intense and sustained. I wonder if other couples are experi…

I'm not arguing your decision to not have children. I've made the same decision myself, but the 'can't afford to have children' has always confused me. Even after the point where contraception became readily available, people were having children with far fewer resources than anyone alive today. What I hear when people say 'We can't afford to have children' is an additional '...and maintain our current standard of li…

Back then children were viewed as a source of cheap labor that could contribute to the household. Developed countries have changed their expectations as you have noted. You can't produce a farm hand that can contribute cheap labor directly to the household at an early age. Now we have to produce skilled workers that can contribute to the society. Skilled workers that may not even do their own laundry before 18.

As a result, the household just sees children as a large expense, where the benefits go to the society. There's a significant incentive to defect from this arrangement.

Not to say the experience of raising a child isn't intrinsically valuable. But, the value of that experience is only enough to incentivize some people to have 1-2 children, and as we are learning now, not enough of an incentive to keep birth rates above replacement in advanced economies.

We probably don't need to make children a net economic positive again, as the intrinsic rewards of the experience are enough of an incentive, it could be net neutral or slightly net negative and still get us above replacement. But, advanced economies will need to change the math if they want to fix this.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#309

Post by mrangle »

Expensive societies with the always concomitant class stratification will always run into reproduction issues.

In short, unsubsidized poor and even middle class people begin to rationalize that, even if they could somehow manage the financial stress of reproduction, their lives are too miserable to justify damning their kids to the same fate.

That said: climate doomerism, as an excuse for not having kids, is for intellectual children.

Climate arguments aside, such views ironically ignore that man is subsumed under nature. If and when the climate is actually a problem in regard to reproduction, the human population will decline directly due to climate pressure. Then the climate and else will recover, and the population will again recover. In other words, the climate's ecosystem with humans is self limiting and correcting if it is an issue at all. Refusing to have kids due to climate is the exact same as saying that someone else deserves children more than you do. And that's it.

Re: How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

#310

Post by somenameforme »

gizmo686 wrote: post #247
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Infinite growth as demanded by capitalism is not physically possible. If they wouldn't hit "the wall" now, they would hit it anyway in the near future. Maybe South Korea's situation should give all ageing rich developed nations something to reflect on and start making preparations for the upcoming demographic plateau/collapse and reform stuff like welfare/pension systems, instead of blindly kicking the can do…

True. However bullwhip effects are real as well. An undamped population explosion/collapse cycle is natural and stable, however it is far from ideal. A 0.7 fertility rate is tiny. Keep in mind that fertility rate is measured per-female. So the per-capita rate is .35. If this holds, it means that the next generation will be 65% smaller than the current. This will inevitably lead to an overcorrection followed by a peri…

To my knowledge there's no historic precedent for what's happening. Times of regrowth in the past after catastrophic decline (such as major war) was generally already in the context of extremely high fertility rates. What we do have is increasing evidence, across multiple nations such as Iran and China, that it's relatively easy to lower fertility rates and extremely difficult to bring them back up.

So I don't think there's any reason to expect a bullwhip type effect. It could simply be that we've created a system which does remarkably well up front, and then catastrophically collapses in the tail-end. If one wants to be especially fatalistic, we could even be looking at the Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox, but I think that's improbable - there still remain many high fertility cultures and they will simply inherit the world as low fertility cultures die off.

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