For now. Over time, low fertility families will die, their genetic and cultural material will disappear, and the remaining human population will be dominated by high fertility families. There are extremely strong feedback mechanisms that play out pretty quick. Survivors survive!
It doesn't address what that time frame would be or what happens in the interim. When you say pretty quick is that 5 years or 500 years?
While I agree there are some strong feedback mechanisms that lead to population growth, stating that alone ignores the fact that there are even stronger forcing mechanisms in the present pushing population down. The outcome will depend on how those extremely strong feedback mechanisms on both sides interact moving forward.
The modern world has yet to see a population where growth rates have bounced back, and some countries like Japan have been declining for more than 50 years.
Maybe in the new generation the same % of people will decide to not have kids and populations in developed countries will continue shrinking geometrically maintaining the present trend.
This line of reasoning is very interesting to ponder though. The black plague in Europe made survivors materially richer as they were able to take possession of what was left behind from the deceased. As there's less and less people to compete for stuff, the existing younger populations will be richer, thus giving them an incentive to focus on leisure and reproduction. Then there would be a cycle were the sharp decline in population, plants the seeds for the next big rise.
Currently high fertility families are concentrated on the two extreme ends of the wealth spectrum, the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor. That's not a great sign for human society's already dreadful wealth inequality.
,,For Ryu, she said having children is not worth sacrificing her career.
"The reality is that one of the parents has to resign from work or take a long break, but the problem is, it's almost always the female or the mom who has to take a leave," she said
This was always like that, having a kid means very serious sacrifice in other parts of life (for example for women it's selecting a less attractive partner in exchange for higher stability, for men it's stopping changing partners and putting all resources into one family).
Maybe one thing that changed is the lie that we are all special and we can have it all (I thought the same in my 20s).
Contemporary expections for personal careers and the mode of modern work is fundamentally hostile to people/families having children. Legally mandating parental leaves aren't going to stop private sector businesses from subtly discriminating against new parents, and parents' work-life balance is tilted towards children for at least the first decade after childbirth.
Subtle discrimination is still discrimination and can be litigated against.
Furthermore, extending child leave to both parents has done a lot to help fight stigma in Scandinavian countries.
As has well funded, affordable child care for workers. Salaries in Montreal are garbage, but I'd consider working there because child care is heavily subsidized and very good. The break even tilts towards the rest of Canada at my pay-grade, but only just.
> This was always like that, having a kid means very serious sacrifice in other parts of life (for example for women it's selecting a less attractive partner in exchange for higher stability
What in the hell did I just read? Women selecting a financially stable, less attractive partner is a "sacrifice" these days?
Same thing for men, sticking to providing just for your family is "sacrifice"?
Jesus, did the neo-cultural values really did get shoved so far down people's throats that having a normal family is considered a sacrifice/abnormal?
Modern contraception made having children a choice from the 70s and now it's the default in the world.
Many people are just waking up to the disadvantages. I know many women who stopped it, but didn't realize how much the decision of using contraceptives from age 15 changes how they think about life and how much mental and physical side effects it has. For them it was just ,,normal'', because they never had an adult life without contraceptives.
But to get to the point: yes, the decision to have children definately sacrifices other things one can do in their lives, I see it on my sister how hard her life became with the 3 beautiful children she has with her husband.
Well, as a happy father of four, I can say that it is a sacrifice. Not in the way the OP suggested, but in that kids require— no question— a lot of sacrifice. Is it worth it? Hell yes. But it’s a sacrifice.
What exactly is the problem with a declining population anyways? It feels like if you have less people in your country, the resources within can be better distributed. What is the downside here - that if we have less children and less immigration, we are going to have cheaper food, cheaper housing, cheaper energy, and less poverty? Seems like a good thing to me.
If I'm not wrong, the issue is with funding government programs. Most government programs are funded by taxes and if the populations is dropping then naturally the tax base is shrinking.
Depends on the expense. For example with Social Security, part of the problem we have now is that there are less people paying into the program then in the past. I only see two options, increase taxes or push back retirement.
I strongly agree that in the long term it's better for everyone to have lower or even zero population growth, possibly with negative growth for a while. I love that more people are shedding the presumption that growth is a necessity for well-being in posterity
The problem is in the short term, as the current population starts to skew older, there will be fewer working-age people supporting the increasing numbers of elderly people who retire and eventually can't support themselves even if they want to. This is both a macroeconomic problem (not enough income/production to pay for everything) and a microeconomic problem (literally not enough qualified caregivers, limiting supply of care even as demand increases, and therefore making it much more expensive).
Thus we need to figure out a way to make it through the transition out of our current high-positive-growth without creating a crisis of poverty and suffering among the soon-to-be elderly.
The answer probably involves nation-state governments creating a shit ton of money to make it all happen. But in the USA at least, we are already very deep in unknown zone of debt-to-GDP ratio above unity, the cost of debt service itself beginning to grow (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S), and an uncertain future around our ability to control inflation with monetary policy. Not to mention the pesky habit of large corporations and wealthy individuals to funnel money out of public expenditure in the form of economic rent.
If we could actually stop being greedy for two seconds and try to plan ahead, I'm sure we could figure it out. But when has that ever happened before?
If we take the simplistic assumption that 2.1 children (either through natural birth or immigration) is the replacement rate, we can surmise that for zero growth we would need to hover around that number.
0.78 YoY is negative growth and fast and one wonders if a country is able to adapt its infrastructure sufficiently quickly to this new reality in the next few decades.
If you look at the projections, SK’s population will peak in 2024 and the drop after that looks quadratic, back to its 1960s population which is right after the Korean War.
Most economies are built on the assumption that there will be more young people than old. If that assumption ceases to hold true without some active planning to deal with an older population there will be too many retirees and too few workers.
This problem is almost certainly solvable with some planning, but humanity as a whole isn't always good at that.
The youngest generations are what keep the economy moving. They produce the goods and services, and are the primary buyers of products.
When the proportions of young to old get too skewed, each one ends up paying more and more to support the older generations - which means they can't buy as much either.
It's economically very bad to have an aging population.
Also: It seems in general most economies are centered around indefinite growth. That may sound absurd, but regardless a shrinking population reverses that assumption and causes problems.
> What exactly is the problem with a declining population anyways?
Federal social programs are all pyramids schemes.
They depend on having a large tax base entering the bottom, either immigrants or young people, to constantly keep them funded.
The less people at the bottom, the less funding, and now you have austerity programs that have to take effect to prevent the programs from running out of money.
There is a simple and obvious solution, rise the age of retirement.
When pension schemes were invented (or instiutionalised) at the end of the 19th century, the delta between retirement age (65) and expected age of death was small. This is different now, since people tend to retire before 65 and live to their mid to late 80s on average.
At a societal level, money & taxes are a measure of capacity. If you don't have enough nurses to care for the elderly, it doesn't matter how much taxes and funding you have. Money is a worthless piece of paper if you can't buy what you need with it.
This framing is important. People think we need austerity because social programs are running out of money. But austerity makes the problem worse. A big pile of money is useless if it can't buy what it needs. In the long run the best way to balance the books is to borrow money and spend it on childcare and child tax credits to encourage having children, spending it on nurse training, et cetera.
> In the long run the best way to balance the books is to borrow money and spend it on childcare and child tax credits to encourage having children, spending it on nurse training, et cetera.
I do not know that this is possible without sufficiently high taxes and policies such that a life without kids is seen as undesirable relative to a life with kids. And that is going to be very, very politically unpopular because it is a lot of pain in the short term for long term gains unattributable to the individual.
Quite an interesting problem, and I have no idea how this shakes out for my kids and their potential kids.
> life without kids is seen as undesirable relative to a life with kids
This is a hard one to solve. Some modern westerners see child free life as good and fill their lives with other time sinks that children would otherwise fill.
But I don't think you can lay the child free lifestyle blame all at the costs of having children.
Poor people, religious groups (Mormons, Muslims, etc.), and immigrants who come to western countries all seem to have no problems having children.
Even the Koreans mentioned in the article have huge families when moving overseas.
It is not exactly the nominal costs of having children, but the whole package. For example, now that it is completely within a couple's control to have or not have children the decision to have children might go like
1) will we be secure in our housing, at a certain minimum sq ft per person?
2) will we be secure in our access to healthcare (I guess this is a US concern)?
3) will we be living in an acceptable neighborhood with access to acceptable schools?
4) will we be living in an region experiencing economic growth, or at least not economic decline, so as to reduce the probability of becoming destitute due to job loss, etc?
5) will we have friends/family nearby to help with children in case of emergencies (a problem for many who move away from economically declining areas to economically growing areas)?
All of these are not a concern if you choose to not have children. At least you will be able to spend a coupe hours watching TV or browsing on your phone, but you will not be stressed out trying to make ends meet while also trying to meet the expected quality of life you want for your children.
>Poor people, religious groups (Mormons, Muslims, etc.), and immigrants who come to western countries all seem to have no problems having children.
There are a few tribes that have women who do not believe in (or have access to) birth control or do not worry as much about the future, or they have different expectations of quality of life for their kids. But outside these specific examples, my armchair analysis seems to indicate that most women with independence start thinking about various tradeoffs in life, which can make having children (or as many children) seem not worth it.
>Even the Koreans mentioned in the article have huge families when moving overseas.
I think the problem is during this transition from a bottom heavy to a top heavy population distribution. Suddenly, you don't have enough of a young and robust workforce to support your aging population. Labour shortage means you can't focus enough on growing and you have to focus more on maintaining the existing infra. You see signs of this happening in Japan already [1]. On the other hand, a situation like this may be ripe for deploying automation across sectors!
To be clear, this is a transient problem. But it will take several decades for things to balance out, which could be problematic in the intervening period.
> It is unclear how a country stabilizes birth rates once they start falling, because no modern country has successfully done it.
One possibility is that they are continuing to fall because they just haven't reached equilibrium population yet. East Asian countries also seem (from my limited understanding) to have particularly bad social problems that further suppress birth rates, which Western countries don't have.
That's my understanding as well. I bet the 996 culture, 69-hour max workweeks, and constant rat race definitely don't help with this. Add to this a younger generation that thinks that they don't want to make the "sacrifices" that their parents did and would rather maximize their own quality of life (though I don't think this latter is just an Asian problem).
> But it will take several decades for things to balance out, which could be problematic in the intervening period
Corporations require continued growth to drive stock prices. How do you have growth when then population is shrinking? There are literally less people to buy gas, food, cars, iPhones, etc. Large investments designed to scale and handle capacity are now losing money, not in use, etc.
You handwave this like it's a simple thing, but it will shock the system and lead to massive problems. Perhaps it's necessary, but in the same way amputating a limb might be necessary -- painful and complicated.
The public pension system will be unaffordable, as there will be too many retirees to workers. For highly xenophobic countries with minimal immigration, there is no obvious solution to replace the ‘missing’ workers.
The problem is thinking it’s as simple as resources divided by population, so shrinking the denominator means more per capita resources right?
But a country’s infrastructure is built for a certain population size assumption, and the numerator has a highly nonlinear relationship with the denominator, and the denominator is further broken down into subpopulations that affect the numerator non linearly. It’s not a simple ratio.
You have to manage population shrinkage almost as carefully as growth, if not more carefully. Shrinkage almost happens in an unpredictable way and instead of ending up like Japan you might end up like Bulgaria. Also a country is not isolated — it’s subject to competitive forces in the world so if the labor force becomes uncompetitive, your economy will tailspin in a way that exceeds your proportional savings from population shrinkage.
Improperly managed shrinkage in the extreme can lead to unemployment due to lack of growth, the rise of a disgruntled class which can in turn lead to lots of internal conflicts. There is a lot of system inertia in countries and lots of unpredictable effects.
Remember how prices exploded when we had supply chain problems last year? Labor is not exempt from supply and demand, and an individual's baked-in demand for labor doesn't decline just because they retire (in fact, in a lot of ways it increases).
With a slowly tapering demography, you can do a lot of neat tricks like using technology to improve productivity and make up the difference that way. When your demography falls off a cliff, there is no recourse - the cost of labor is going to massively increase. This is great for working-age people but retirees end up having to pay most of the cost (or rather - it comes out of their pensions both public and private). So a social problem is baked in with this and possibly an economic problem as well because at some point the working-age cohort is going to have to have its resources redistributed to the retiree class to support them.
In addition to the economic problems the other comments point out, a low fertility rate is indicative of large cultural problems. People are evolutionarily programmed to want kids, whatever the reason that people have stopped is, it probably isn't a happy one.
It's like that saying that it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. So, it's not declining population that endangers us, it's the sudden drop in fertility rates that threatens us with a world of elderly people outbidding each other into utter destitution to get basic care from the few working-age people remaining. If the replacement rates do not drop to levels too low (~< 2.1), a new equilibrium will be eventually reached, but with a lot of trouble meanwhile. It doesn't help all the productivity gains from the last decades were mostly pocketed by the super-rich, instead of shared with the workforce.
Well in South Korea's case in particular it's a problem if there are more NK babies born than SK babies when those NK babies are instilled all their life to have a hatred of their cousins to the south.
Doubly so when you also have several hundred million Chinese that view your continued existence as the result of Western hegemonic oppression.
In developed or advanced developing countries, social welfare programs, including pensions and healthcare, are based on tax contribution from the working population. These systems were mostly set up during a period of high fetility where population growth projection appeared to be perpetually increasing. With a declining working population and longer life expectancy, there will eventually be more withdrawals than contributions, causing the welfare systems to run dry without additional intervention.
Modern economy systems also function on the assumption of gradual inflation. A chronically deflationary society is one that's at the risk of spiralling into either stagnation or collapse. Post-1990 Japan is the only approximate example of a chronically deflationary society and they have been in almost perpetual QE since 2014 to no avail.
For a while, declining fertility rates were de facto considered a good sign in the demographic transition model. Usually experts would say "declining fertility is because people are chasing more fulfilling things! Our societies are so good that there is so much more to enjoy than children!". This always felt wrong. Why would the happiest society be the one that turns off it's natural processes? Is there any instance in nature where a declining birth rate is a sign of good things for a species?
Glad the tide is finally turning to recognize the obvious truth: declining birth rates is a sign of distress in a society.
And a corollary to that truth, traditional societies are actually far more reasonable in their values and "moral progress" is actually running in the opposite direction than commonly assumed, with society going backwards and committing suicide.
Declining fertility rates were considered good for multiple reasons:
* It's associated with lower infant/youth mortality rates (people have less children when they know each will survive)
* It's associated with higher per-person productivity and industrialization (it makes sense to have several children helping you on a farm, but with industrialization it makes more sense to send 1-2 to college)
Declining birth rates are not "a sign of distress". Assuming ideal conditions, fertility would float around the value we see in highly developed nations.
However, this is a problem economically, because our economy is built on indefinite growth and the idea that the younger generations financially support the elderly. With too few youth and too many elderly, the system collapses.
The economic problems will work out eventually, but it is going to suck financially for many until things stabilize.
> Why would the happiest society be the one that turns off it's natural processes?
The natural process is for women to not have a say in how many children they give birth to, and instead be subject to the whims of their male counterparts, who can obviously overpower them.
A decline from a certain fertility rate to a certain fertility rate can indicate that women are gaining agency.
Everyone is subject to the whims of society. Traditional societies were never about the goal of "oppressing women", but people fighting for survival. Of course women have the responsibility of bearing children, just as men have responsibilities of providing and going to war etc.
If women have gained more "agency" to reject their responsibilities to society, but men still have many traditional responsibilities, what does that say about the morals and ethics of your society? It's not positive, and you should examine it as a possible cause of this low fertility rate.
> Right, so presumably, a society where there is no expectation of war and needing to pump out bodies to go to war would be a happier society.
A society not prepared to fight for its existence will not survive. It's the men willing to go to war that keep it alive.
> Do women have a “responsibility” to birth x number of babies so people can have access to cheaper labor?
Women have a natural instinct to want and take care of children. By bringing this out in a healthy society, instead of convincing them they're "oppressed" and trying to make them go against their nature, the problem solves itself.
It's quite amazing that anyone could believe women were oppressed by men literally spending their lives protecting and providing for women. Responsibilities for thee but not for me
>A society not prepared to fight for its existence will not survive. It's the men willing to go to war that keep it alive.
Sure, but I was only responding to tjs8rj's claim about a "happy" society, not one which necessarily outlives all the others.
>Women have a natural instinct to want and take care of children.
>It's quite amazing that anyone could believe women were oppressed by men literally spending their lives protecting and providing for women.
These are enormous claims that require enormous evidence, not to mention that individuals were and are impacted very differently by different members of society.
> But when the lease on her apartment in Seoul, South Korea, became too much to afford
This is not complicated. If you want more people there has to be somewhere they can live. It is far better to not have people born than to hit the point where overpopulation starts killing people (usually via homelessness or violence).
It isn't that simple. You see the same phenomenon in Europe and Japan where there are entire villages of houses to be had if you are willing to take over the deed.
There are forces at work here besides just space. People are drawn not to places where they can have space and families, but to dense urban areas without space to live.
I think it is more complicated than that, Often tradeoffs of magnitude opposed to black and white.
There are jobs and education in rural areas, at least to some degree, but people prefer higher paying jobs and better education, which is more available in the cities.
I think that there is some level of thinking that the grass is always greener on the other side. I remember visiting my rural hometown after college and a few years working in SF to find that many acquaintances with only highschool degrees were now homeowners with 2.5 kids working at bars or auto shops. I'm sure they thought that I was rich, living in the city with 3X their salary.
I think that if you look at the National cost of living data for towns and cities he will find that there is something more going on then just jobs and education because many people flock to cities that don't have particularly good good relative cost of living
I'm convinced a lot of our issues is just our general lost of testosterone and ability to conceive kids. Our bodies are just becoming worse and worse and conceiving and bearing children.
Probably microplastics coupled with a sedentary lifestyle.
Despite the hormonal changes induced by microplastics/obesity (or whatever the culprit is), the current drop in fertility rates is not because people are incapable of conceiving, but rather because people cannot financially support the cost of having children. If governments want children, they need to start paying for it: guaranteed paid maternity and paternity leave, state-funded daycare, and reduced housing costs. People are simply concluding that it is better to not have children than to raise children in abject poverty.
How many of those eras did women have access to very effective birth control, or the ability to say no to sex (or simply opt out of entering into a relationship with a man for her future security)?
When you frame it this way, you're telling me that given the choice women would not want to have children which means there's nothing wrong with our declining fertility rates. People simply don't want children anymore.
It is not that simple. At any given time, there are probably numerous factors affecting a woman's decision of whether or not to want children. Maybe lots of women do, but they are unable to secure their requisite lifestyle. Maybe lots of women have an unreasonable requirement of their lifestyle after having kids.
All I know is having seen my wife give birth twice, I am not in a position to judge. It is an enormous risk and sacrifice, the likes of nothing that I (as a man living in a peaceful society) have come close to having to make.
More like the woman is expected to shoulder a burden that normally took a few people working and being paid not that long ago.
Even with modern technology helping, it's quite a bit.
Domestic service takes effort! Doing that and childcare 100% is hard too plus there's the small problem of not earning money which makes the "traditional" (actually imagined) family structure untenable.
And we cannot go back when villages don't exist and people do not have generationally recognized neighbors.
We could try to begin rebuilding that structure at high cost...
Back then it was poverty with children or poverty without children. Now it's a poor life with children or a rich one without.
I'd postulate that a big reason here is that children have been separated from labor in two ways. The first is that it used to be acceptable to do work while minding children. The second is that children would be used to help out from a fairly young age.
I'm confused. Fertility is one's ability to conceive children but this article seems to be about one's situational want to conceive children. Is fertility rate the rate at which women are getting pregnant or the rate of the ability of women getting pregnant?
It's the rate that women are getting pregnant. Circumstances and societal conditions can certainly curtail and slow the willingness of otherwise capable women to have families.
Do you just refer to fertility as 'South Korea's Fertility' when referencing the ability to conceive?
I mean, it's not incredibly shocking that a country half the size of Florida, essentially an island nation with a population of 50M, are deciding not to have children.
When I plug in population densities and fertility values of various countries from Wikipedia, the Spearman's correlation coefficient of the two variables is roughly 0.26.
From that, I gather that population density is a contributing factor (perhaps due to its relationship with cost of living) but not enough to explain the whole story behind what's going on in South Korea.
South Korea is not half the size of Florida — it’s the other way around. FL is less than half the size of SK. Also it’s not an island nation — it’s on the Korean Peninsula. If you mean it’s an island nation in terms of connectivity then most nations in the world are islands too. Brazil for instance is culturally disconnected from its neighbors due to language.
I don't understand why the governments just tax the elderly with vast real estate holding to fund their generations well being as they get older. Why tax the youth for these programs
I imagine some form of this will eventually take place but it's going to get ugly - retirees have far higher rates of political participation than young people and will fight tooth and nail to protect their wealth.
A large portion of elderly people don't have vast real estate holdings. Wealth inequality is solely divided along age lines.
Also, elderly people have lots of free time to pay attention to politics and show up to vote. In elective democracies they can become a strong voting bloc in order to prevent politicians campaigning on such platforms from gaining power.
The article mentions a number of systemic issues that would need to be overcome if the SK government wants to credibly claim they’re trying to do something about declining birth rates.
To poke at just one: South Korea already has an insanely long work week, and they tried to make it even longer (69 hours!). Honestly, where do you expect people to find the time and energy to produce and raise kids if they work a 5x12 +9 hours on the weekend (I don’t know how the actual work week is broken down tho)
Minor irrelevant detail, but most links in the article start with a space character. Looking into the source, it looks like they've misplaced the space:
92 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadAre there S. Koreans on this forum who can contribute their anecdotal experience with declining population?
That's because logistic map is a known source of chaos.
It doesn't address what that time frame would be or what happens in the interim. When you say pretty quick is that 5 years or 500 years?
While I agree there are some strong feedback mechanisms that lead to population growth, stating that alone ignores the fact that there are even stronger forcing mechanisms in the present pushing population down. The outcome will depend on how those extremely strong feedback mechanisms on both sides interact moving forward.
The modern world has yet to see a population where growth rates have bounced back, and some countries like Japan have been declining for more than 50 years.
This line of reasoning is very interesting to ponder though. The black plague in Europe made survivors materially richer as they were able to take possession of what was left behind from the deceased. As there's less and less people to compete for stuff, the existing younger populations will be richer, thus giving them an incentive to focus on leisure and reproduction. Then there would be a cycle were the sharp decline in population, plants the seeds for the next big rise.
"The reality is that one of the parents has to resign from work or take a long break, but the problem is, it's almost always the female or the mom who has to take a leave," she said
This was always like that, having a kid means very serious sacrifice in other parts of life (for example for women it's selecting a less attractive partner in exchange for higher stability, for men it's stopping changing partners and putting all resources into one family).
Maybe one thing that changed is the lie that we are all special and we can have it all (I thought the same in my 20s).
Furthermore, extending child leave to both parents has done a lot to help fight stigma in Scandinavian countries.
As has well funded, affordable child care for workers. Salaries in Montreal are garbage, but I'd consider working there because child care is heavily subsidized and very good. The break even tilts towards the rest of Canada at my pay-grade, but only just.
What in the hell did I just read? Women selecting a financially stable, less attractive partner is a "sacrifice" these days?
Same thing for men, sticking to providing just for your family is "sacrifice"?
Jesus, did the neo-cultural values really did get shoved so far down people's throats that having a normal family is considered a sacrifice/abnormal?
Many people are just waking up to the disadvantages. I know many women who stopped it, but didn't realize how much the decision of using contraceptives from age 15 changes how they think about life and how much mental and physical side effects it has. For them it was just ,,normal'', because they never had an adult life without contraceptives.
But to get to the point: yes, the decision to have children definately sacrifices other things one can do in their lives, I see it on my sister how hard her life became with the 3 beautiful children she has with her husband.
Which leads to violence and protests: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/world/europe/macron-franc...
More consuming than producing means there's less to give up top.
you still need to balance work needed with work done.
The problem is in the short term, as the current population starts to skew older, there will be fewer working-age people supporting the increasing numbers of elderly people who retire and eventually can't support themselves even if they want to. This is both a macroeconomic problem (not enough income/production to pay for everything) and a microeconomic problem (literally not enough qualified caregivers, limiting supply of care even as demand increases, and therefore making it much more expensive).
Thus we need to figure out a way to make it through the transition out of our current high-positive-growth without creating a crisis of poverty and suffering among the soon-to-be elderly.
The answer probably involves nation-state governments creating a shit ton of money to make it all happen. But in the USA at least, we are already very deep in unknown zone of debt-to-GDP ratio above unity, the cost of debt service itself beginning to grow (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S), and an uncertain future around our ability to control inflation with monetary policy. Not to mention the pesky habit of large corporations and wealthy individuals to funnel money out of public expenditure in the form of economic rent.
If we could actually stop being greedy for two seconds and try to plan ahead, I'm sure we could figure it out. But when has that ever happened before?
0.78 YoY is negative growth and fast and one wonders if a country is able to adapt its infrastructure sufficiently quickly to this new reality in the next few decades.
If you look at the projections, SK’s population will peak in 2024 and the drop after that looks quadratic, back to its 1960s population which is right after the Korean War.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/south-korea-popu...
This problem is almost certainly solvable with some planning, but humanity as a whole isn't always good at that.
When the proportions of young to old get too skewed, each one ends up paying more and more to support the older generations - which means they can't buy as much either.
It's economically very bad to have an aging population.
Also: It seems in general most economies are centered around indefinite growth. That may sound absurd, but regardless a shrinking population reverses that assumption and causes problems.
Federal social programs are all pyramids schemes.
They depend on having a large tax base entering the bottom, either immigrants or young people, to constantly keep them funded.
The less people at the bottom, the less funding, and now you have austerity programs that have to take effect to prevent the programs from running out of money.
When pension schemes were invented (or instiutionalised) at the end of the 19th century, the delta between retirement age (65) and expected age of death was small. This is different now, since people tend to retire before 65 and live to their mid to late 80s on average.
This framing is important. People think we need austerity because social programs are running out of money. But austerity makes the problem worse. A big pile of money is useless if it can't buy what it needs. In the long run the best way to balance the books is to borrow money and spend it on childcare and child tax credits to encourage having children, spending it on nurse training, et cetera.
I do not know that this is possible without sufficiently high taxes and policies such that a life without kids is seen as undesirable relative to a life with kids. And that is going to be very, very politically unpopular because it is a lot of pain in the short term for long term gains unattributable to the individual.
Quite an interesting problem, and I have no idea how this shakes out for my kids and their potential kids.
This is a hard one to solve. Some modern westerners see child free life as good and fill their lives with other time sinks that children would otherwise fill.
But I don't think you can lay the child free lifestyle blame all at the costs of having children.
Poor people, religious groups (Mormons, Muslims, etc.), and immigrants who come to western countries all seem to have no problems having children.
Even the Koreans mentioned in the article have huge families when moving overseas.
1) will we be secure in our housing, at a certain minimum sq ft per person?
2) will we be secure in our access to healthcare (I guess this is a US concern)?
3) will we be living in an acceptable neighborhood with access to acceptable schools?
4) will we be living in an region experiencing economic growth, or at least not economic decline, so as to reduce the probability of becoming destitute due to job loss, etc?
5) will we have friends/family nearby to help with children in case of emergencies (a problem for many who move away from economically declining areas to economically growing areas)?
All of these are not a concern if you choose to not have children. At least you will be able to spend a coupe hours watching TV or browsing on your phone, but you will not be stressed out trying to make ends meet while also trying to meet the expected quality of life you want for your children.
>Poor people, religious groups (Mormons, Muslims, etc.), and immigrants who come to western countries all seem to have no problems having children.
There are a few tribes that have women who do not believe in (or have access to) birth control or do not worry as much about the future, or they have different expectations of quality of life for their kids. But outside these specific examples, my armchair analysis seems to indicate that most women with independence start thinking about various tradeoffs in life, which can make having children (or as many children) seem not worth it.
>Even the Koreans mentioned in the article have huge families when moving overseas.
I do not see this mentioned in the article.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2001/03/muhleise....
It is unclear how a country stabilizes birth rates once they start falling, because no modern country has successfully done it.
Some countries supplement or offset their population losses with immigration, which comes with its own challenges.
> It is unclear how a country stabilizes birth rates once they start falling, because no modern country has successfully done it.
One possibility is that they are continuing to fall because they just haven't reached equilibrium population yet. East Asian countries also seem (from my limited understanding) to have particularly bad social problems that further suppress birth rates, which Western countries don't have.
Genuinely curious what you think these are? (not looking to argue, just wondering because I’m a closet sociologist)
Corporations require continued growth to drive stock prices. How do you have growth when then population is shrinking? There are literally less people to buy gas, food, cars, iPhones, etc. Large investments designed to scale and handle capacity are now losing money, not in use, etc.
You handwave this like it's a simple thing, but it will shock the system and lead to massive problems. Perhaps it's necessary, but in the same way amputating a limb might be necessary -- painful and complicated.
Plus, it is diminishing returns. More old people will be ill or otherwise unable to work.
But a country’s infrastructure is built for a certain population size assumption, and the numerator has a highly nonlinear relationship with the denominator, and the denominator is further broken down into subpopulations that affect the numerator non linearly. It’s not a simple ratio.
You have to manage population shrinkage almost as carefully as growth, if not more carefully. Shrinkage almost happens in an unpredictable way and instead of ending up like Japan you might end up like Bulgaria. Also a country is not isolated — it’s subject to competitive forces in the world so if the labor force becomes uncompetitive, your economy will tailspin in a way that exceeds your proportional savings from population shrinkage.
Improperly managed shrinkage in the extreme can lead to unemployment due to lack of growth, the rise of a disgruntled class which can in turn lead to lots of internal conflicts. There is a lot of system inertia in countries and lots of unpredictable effects.
With a slowly tapering demography, you can do a lot of neat tricks like using technology to improve productivity and make up the difference that way. When your demography falls off a cliff, there is no recourse - the cost of labor is going to massively increase. This is great for working-age people but retirees end up having to pay most of the cost (or rather - it comes out of their pensions both public and private). So a social problem is baked in with this and possibly an economic problem as well because at some point the working-age cohort is going to have to have its resources redistributed to the retiree class to support them.
Doubly so when you also have several hundred million Chinese that view your continued existence as the result of Western hegemonic oppression.
Modern economy systems also function on the assumption of gradual inflation. A chronically deflationary society is one that's at the risk of spiralling into either stagnation or collapse. Post-1990 Japan is the only approximate example of a chronically deflationary society and they have been in almost perpetual QE since 2014 to no avail.
Glad the tide is finally turning to recognize the obvious truth: declining birth rates is a sign of distress in a society.
* It's associated with lower infant/youth mortality rates (people have less children when they know each will survive)
* It's associated with higher per-person productivity and industrialization (it makes sense to have several children helping you on a farm, but with industrialization it makes more sense to send 1-2 to college)
Declining birth rates are not "a sign of distress". Assuming ideal conditions, fertility would float around the value we see in highly developed nations.
However, this is a problem economically, because our economy is built on indefinite growth and the idea that the younger generations financially support the elderly. With too few youth and too many elderly, the system collapses.
The economic problems will work out eventually, but it is going to suck financially for many until things stabilize.
The natural process is for women to not have a say in how many children they give birth to, and instead be subject to the whims of their male counterparts, who can obviously overpower them.
A decline from a certain fertility rate to a certain fertility rate can indicate that women are gaining agency.
If women have gained more "agency" to reject their responsibilities to society, but men still have many traditional responsibilities, what does that say about the morals and ethics of your society? It's not positive, and you should examine it as a possible cause of this low fertility rate.
Do women have a “responsibility” to birth x number of babies so people can have access to cheaper labor?
A society not prepared to fight for its existence will not survive. It's the men willing to go to war that keep it alive.
> Do women have a “responsibility” to birth x number of babies so people can have access to cheaper labor?
Women have a natural instinct to want and take care of children. By bringing this out in a healthy society, instead of convincing them they're "oppressed" and trying to make them go against their nature, the problem solves itself.
It's quite amazing that anyone could believe women were oppressed by men literally spending their lives protecting and providing for women. Responsibilities for thee but not for me
Sure, but I was only responding to tjs8rj's claim about a "happy" society, not one which necessarily outlives all the others.
>Women have a natural instinct to want and take care of children.
>It's quite amazing that anyone could believe women were oppressed by men literally spending their lives protecting and providing for women.
These are enormous claims that require enormous evidence, not to mention that individuals were and are impacted very differently by different members of society.
This is not complicated. If you want more people there has to be somewhere they can live. It is far better to not have people born than to hit the point where overpopulation starts killing people (usually via homelessness or violence).
There are forces at work here besides just space. People are drawn not to places where they can have space and families, but to dense urban areas without space to live.
It is a conflict of desires and objectives.
There are jobs and education in rural areas, at least to some degree, but people prefer higher paying jobs and better education, which is more available in the cities.
I think that there is some level of thinking that the grass is always greener on the other side. I remember visiting my rural hometown after college and a few years working in SF to find that many acquaintances with only highschool degrees were now homeowners with 2.5 kids working at bars or auto shops. I'm sure they thought that I was rich, living in the city with 3X their salary.
I think that if you look at the National cost of living data for towns and cities he will find that there is something more going on then just jobs and education because many people flock to cities that don't have particularly good good relative cost of living
Overcrowding is a huge issue in large metropolises despite low fertility rates and this happened in Seoul last year: https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/11/asia/seoul-flooding-banjiha-b...
The government lazily responded by banning such housing without announcing any initiatives to provide affordable housing.
EDIT: My god, it was a joke.
Probably microplastics coupled with a sedentary lifestyle.
All I know is having seen my wife give birth twice, I am not in a position to judge. It is an enormous risk and sacrifice, the likes of nothing that I (as a man living in a peaceful society) have come close to having to make.
Domestic service takes effort! Doing that and childcare 100% is hard too plus there's the small problem of not earning money which makes the "traditional" (actually imagined) family structure untenable.
And we cannot go back when villages don't exist and people do not have generationally recognized neighbors. We could try to begin rebuilding that structure at high cost...
I'd postulate that a big reason here is that children have been separated from labor in two ways. The first is that it used to be acceptable to do work while minding children. The second is that children would be used to help out from a fairly young age.
I mean, it's not incredibly shocking that a country half the size of Florida, essentially an island nation with a population of 50M, are deciding not to have children.
Big swings on the country level are all driven by behavior, and the influence biology is essentially negligible as it doesn't change much at all.
From that, I gather that population density is a contributing factor (perhaps due to its relationship with cost of living) but not enough to explain the whole story behind what's going on in South Korea.
SK is essentially an island nation. It's not like you can drive your car or train up north through the DMZ and wander up to China.
SK has great transportation connectivity so I’m not sure how being topographically disconnected has an effect in modern times.
Putting on my dystopia hat - this is where governments may step in and override women's choices
Also, elderly people have lots of free time to pay attention to politics and show up to vote. In elective democracies they can become a strong voting bloc in order to prevent politicians campaigning on such platforms from gaining power.
To poke at just one: South Korea already has an insanely long work week, and they tried to make it even longer (69 hours!). Honestly, where do you expect people to find the time and energy to produce and raise kids if they work a 5x12 +9 hours on the weekend (I don’t know how the actual work week is broken down tho)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/south-korea-tried-...
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