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.
To add some color: South Korea is somewhere between the size of Kentucky and Indiana (the 37th and 38th largest states), yet has over 51 million people, almost 15 million more than California, the most populous state. It has very few natural resources to speak of, and is roughly two-thirds mountainous, meaning most of the population is condensed in the few flat areas. In some ways, it's natural that the fertility rate would be so low, purely out of density, if nothing else.
It's honestly miraculous how far it's come. Within one lifetime, it went from a primarily agricultural economy to one of the world's largest and most industrialized. It builds (at times) half of the world's ships in tonnage, and its engineers and contractors are responsible for many of the world's tallest buildings.
As impressive as it sounds to say South Korea developed successfully on its own, did it? Did the US play any hand in its development? I mean obviously South Korea would not exist had it not been for the US' help in the war. But even afterwards, is there an sort of advantage South Korea had by having the US (the leading super power at the time) help?
The US provided a lot of support, which South Korea used well. But, several other countries got similar levels of support and achieved nothing...the corrupt leaders sold the country on the cheap.
South Korea could have very well been used as the US's beachhead especially during a time when China and Japan were becoming growing empires. Several businesses also benefited from the prosperity of neighboring countries. The Korean news to this day reports on export trends because of it being an exports-based economy.
A period of rapid easy growth has put Won into the pockets of Seoulites who merely became rich from just owning property. Unfortunately, this wealth did not propagate evenly throughout and the younger demographics are suffering today as a result.
It's arguable that Japan helped South Korea industrialize by offloading industries it could no longer afford due to rising wages.
This article is about analyzing the comparison raised between South Korea and Ukraine, but it is largely about analyzing how South Korea industrialized from Japan's assistance.
I didn't mean to imply that South Korea developed all on its own. (A good example of a country that tried to do that, with closed borders, is its northern neighbor.) Certainly, having the foremost superpower in its corner helped tremendously, much like the Marshall Plan did for post-WW2 Western Europe. It's a fascinating history that I can in no way do justice in a HN comment, save to say that one can't simply throw money at a country and come out with a result like South Korea. :-)
Sure, but the US also tried to help other countries such as the Philippines and Iraq which haven't done nearly as well. US aid doesn't seem to be the decisive factor.
It seems like post war japan and south korea saw a lot of investment into their manufacturing. Why didn’t the philippines see a similar level of investment at the time considering it was also destroyed and in need for rebuilding? Not destroyed enough relative to the firebombings of the japan home islands perhaps?
The Philippines saw a massive amount of American investment after WWII. I don’t have exact figures but it is comparable to South Korea. There are lots of differences. One Marcos was the most corrupt politician in history (in terms of total money looted). Two, Korea benefited from cultural and geographic proximity to Japan. As a former colony it was able to sell low cost products on the Japanese market and secure manufacturing contracts from Japanese firms. Three you might also make a point about the influence of Confucianism and Protestantism on Korea. To this day Korea is a very Christian country by East Asian standards (~30%) and the Chaebols are more Protestant than the overall population. Contrast with the Catholic Philippines and you can make a classic Weberian case of work ethic.
Japan colonized, invaded, and stole Korea for about 35 years under the guise of imperialism. Japan's colonial policy was the most tyrannical, unauthorized, and vicious in that it aimed not only at socio-economic theft but also at ethnic extermination. The Japanese did not hesitate to revise the mental culture through history, suppress the use of the Korean language, and destroy national cultural heritage. The anti-Japanese independence struggle was so stubborn and steadfast that it became a model for minority peoples around the world and led to liberation. The detrimental effects of Japanese power on Korean history were so severe that they led to the division of Korea into North and South Korea.
This isn't enough of an explanation. South Korea is denser than India, but only by ~20%, and India's fertility rate is more than double South Korea's. Taiwan is denser than South Korea, but its fertility rate is more than 50% higher. South Korea really is an outlier.
You might also compare the United States to its peers in Europe--fertility isn't that much higher in the US (and is lower compared to a few European countries that are much denser).
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 down the road thinking growth is never ending.
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 period of unsustainable population growth again.
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.
It’s only possible to happen now due to birth control, so it is the first time. In the past after great deaths the mostly young population had a bunch of kids.
That’s impossible now, because the people left behind after the collapse are mostly old.
In John Calhoun's mouse utopia universe 25 experiments, overpopulation inevitably leads to implosion characterized by asocial, juvenile behavior and inability to bond, and there was never any rebound.
You seem to be conflating economic growth with population growth. Also the concern is not that Korea's population is failing to grow, it's that it's failing to stabilize and will soon shrink significantly.
In my search to provide find examples of economic and population growth correlations, I came across two papers[1][2] which find no correlation. Thank you for changing my mind.
"The wall" is already manifesting in Europe as well, in terms of CoL and real estate prices[1] where even skilled workers can't afford a decent home anymore or build any wealth after paying the inflated rents from their stagnating wages. You either inherit something from your parents or are screwed if you don't get a top FAANG/F500 job out of university. Working for small or average companies doesn't cut it anymore.
It feels like the society collectively decided "no more new building" to make housing scarce and inflate up property prices of existing owners at the expense of the newcomers.
Seems like a common theme among the developed world from the Americas all the way to AU-NZ.
> It feels like the society collectively decided "no more new building"
This, more than anything else, seems to be the problem in the developed West, at least when it comes to real estate prices and related cost of living issues. At least in the US, there's a pretty strong correlation between land-use freedom[0] (that is, the ability for landowners to develop that land into more productive use, including higher-density housing) and median home/rent prices.
In the EU in particular, there's the nZEB standard, which became a requirement for new buildings. This makes the initial costs higher, but the ongoing ones lower.
There are only three options possible. Growth, stability, and shrinking. The fertility numbers are in the shrinking range.
And the worst part is that when shrinking, economies contract and things get worse. If they can't afford to have children now, then people in South Korea in 20 years will certainly not have it any better. It's an extinction death spiral.
Yes and what people don't realise is that exponential effects start to take place as a smaller population is than having fewer children and is this continues, the Korean people will effectively disappear in 100 years or so. Those fewer people must also support an aging population. It's a death spiral both for the people and the economy. If North Korea keeps fertility rate at its current level, they will exist into the future and the South will disappear.
There is a huge leap from "Infinite growth is not possible" to we're about to hit a wall.
And I don't know how capitalism demands more growth, it just provides more growth which is why capitalism is successful at things like reducing poverty.
> It's honestly miraculous how far it's come. Within one lifetime, it went from a primarily agricultural economy to one of the world's largest and most industrialized.
Is it miraculous if it's not sustainable, as we are clearly seeing? They had a massive, far-beyond-replacement-rate boom of the population, based on the 1970s and 1980s levels of fossil fuel consumption, fueled also by rapid globalization.
If the trends for energy and globalization are reversed, what are they going to do with a massively aged population around 2040-2050?
It seems like their demographic crisis is going to be one of the worst in the world, perhaps worse even than Japan's ?
One issue is that there are many who are not willing to live normal lives and there's this constant battle of trying to outdo one another. People are trying to please even mere strangers standing next to them at the crosswalk. Living mediocre is bad and there's a negative stigma associated to being middle to lower class.
If your apartment isn't a Prugio or Lotte Castle and live in Bangbae;
If your car isn't a AMG, BMW M, or at least a Genesis;
If your bag isn't a Hermes or a LV;
If your morning routine doesn't include an Ah-Ah (Ice Americano);
If your baby stroller isn't a Yoyo;
If your watch isn't an Apple Watch or Omega;
If your shoes aren't won through a Nike Raffle and have high resale;
If your road bike riding through Hangang isn't a Pinarello;
You'll be forever mediocre.
My solution? Spread the population apart such that people will stop comparing themselves with one another. There are plenty of places outside of Seoul where there's fiber internet, good schools that are empty (better teacher to student ratio), and cheap land. People should be more willing to embrace the countryside (shigol) and stop thinking it's bad or without opportunity. I hope there will be more remote jobs that pay well to incentivise new families to go outward. Seoul needs some rest!
> My solution? Spread the population apart such that people will stop comparing themselves with one another.
Small villages where everyone knows each other can be just as bad regarding bullying and talking behind one's backs, although I do agree - especially as some here in Western countries keep advocating for megacities and accelerating rural flight because of resource usage efficiency - that too dense populations are a hotbed of all kinds of social issues.
Having spent some time recently in Seoul, the amount of materialism and status oneupsmanship was striking compared to the USA. One hypothesis I have is that it's because of the genetic homogeneity of everyone there, meaning the main way to differentiate between others is through your things.
Interesting idea. You see this sort of thing throughout the westernized world, perhaps not as extreme as SK, but I've never been so I can't compare.
This is a completely busted system of values though... Almost everything you mention is the luxury version of things that all have functionally very similar alternatives at a much lower cost. The main value is signaling and maybe satisfying some mimetic desire. As signaling, it's a zero sum game, and is mostly just consuming all excess resources.
The question is why do people feel that this is the best use of their resources? Do they not have any purpose for their lives beyond consumption? Why are people being judged largely based on the consumer products they can afford instead of whether they're a kind person or whether they have a a lot of friends or whether they're proud of their children or any number of other positive things they could be doing?
> Do they not have any purpose for their lives beyond consumption?
A lot of people have no purpose in their life beyond consumption. Truly, this is it.
If people put the tiniest fraction of work into their fitness, their personality, their intelligence or any other character-building activity or experience instead of working away to buy trinkets and tokens of vapid displays of wealth, we may actually get somewhere as a species.
Exercising is hard, as is resisting junk food, as is reading a book compared to watching TV, or throwing yourself into a new situation. It's so much easier to not do that stuff, sit in an office and collect a paycheck and redirect that money towards things we think make us better than each other.
Personally, I'm way more impressed with the people I know who run 100km+ a week, workout hard and study hard, than people who walk around wearing designer clothes or showing off the things they've bought. The latter sounds sort of pathetic.
This is an old thread, but I just saw your response. I think fitness is a fine goal instrumentally, and way better than just buying crap you don't need, but ultimately your six pack abs are still another trinket or token. The question is what your purpose is. For some people, their main purpose is bringing up the next generation. Others try to build big things. Others try to discover something new. Others want to help create or perpetuate useful organizations. Others want to glorify God.
Now all of that said, if you want your six pack abs so that you can attract a wife so that you can start a family, great. If you want to be fit so that you'll live longer and with more energy so that you can accomplish other things, also great.
My general feeling though is that due to a bunch of changes in the modern world, people have lost outlets for a sense of purpose in their lives, and this is leading to major psychological problems.
> My solution? Spread the population apart such that people will stop comparing themselves with one another.
That would fix the problem, but it's not a solution, because there's no practical way to implement it. It's hard to imagine that even five people would willingly move out of Seoul.
Not really, the degree of flaunting just changes. People with a little bit of money have Nikes, people with a bit more have designer clothing, people with a lot more have lavish houses and yachts, and the people with the most have "foundations".
The real rich, the capital owners, are not the ones flaunting wealth for status...that's the upper class people with high-paying jobs; rich but not wealthy.
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.
Lot's of sticks. No real estate / wealth transfers unless to couples with 2 kids. New nuclear families either have potential windfall of 4x estates/wealth/housing from multiple older generations or they have to work the uphill childless grind. Combine with subsidies for home ownership in desirable areas for those with kids. BAN PET OWNERSHIP for those without kids. IMO This one huge. Increasing trend of emotional surrogate pets filling emotional void in east asia. Need to drive down cost of people settling for medicore relationships.
It's not enough to make economics of having kids easier, you have to make not having kids harder.
As someone who's lived in both areas, California still had opportunities for advancement during my career if one was willing to work hard. In SK, you can work hard all your life but as opportunities are limited, you'll get stuck in toil.
When tourists look at S. Korea and say, "Hey, it's real nice here!" They don't see the hundreds of low-paid workers who are working behinds the scenes. There are plenty of low paying jobs but nothing that can help one build generational wealth.
It's exactly the same in western Europe. American tourists visit here on vacation and think "wow it's really nice here, it's walkable and full of culture" but they don't see there's no opportunities for building generational wealth, as all of it has already been captured by the previous generations so the new generation is stuck in serfdom.
The vast majority of Americans aren’t building generational wealth anyway.
Plus is wealth really all that valuable when you don’t have to worry about crime, funding your child’s education, losing your job, or having a major health scare? When living in a walkable area full of culture is an option everywhere, rather than a select few areas?
As someone that lived there with a kid a while back, I agree, and it's only gotten tougher since I left.
> What's the solution?
Let's start by identifying the problem. The problem is that everyone wants to live in Seoul, or even in particular parts of Seoul. Is there a solution to that? Hard to see what it might be.
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?
> Honest question: who benefits from population growth besides developers?
Honest answer: next generation of retirees / older people. They need young people in multiple ways - 1. to sustain welfare (which is pay-as-you-go universally), 2. production of food / entertainment / stuff, 3. services
If you think automation is going to solve that, just look at who were "essential service workers"[1] in Covid where governments had to make exceptions even in the early days of pandemic when things were at their scariest. All those are essential functions for the society. Who is going to handle all of that when each next generation is only 35% of the previous generation's size (with a TFR of 0.7)?
Question was - "who benefits from population growth"
You know that immigrants don't grow on trees or in labs, right? They are also part of "population growth", just somewhere else. And bringing too many of them en mass is already destabilizing infertile societies (see: European ones).
everyone. more humans = more geniuses = more technology = more everything. The modern world would not have existed with a global population capped at 100k humans or something
Rapid changes are always problematic, no matter the direction. Society and environments can accommodate slow changes much easier than they can accommodate quick ones.
Well, we probably can’t support the semiconductor supply chain with half the workers due to the statistics involved of the percentage of humans interested/capable in stem.
Have the Gov subsidized the young with generous programs, perhaps a monthly fee for each child where at some level (2-3 children), one parent could stay home to raise them and collect a modest salary. Otherwise most young folks can't afford it.
The government is already subsidizing families with children. 700,000 won ($528) per month up to age of one, and 350,000 won ($264) per month up to the age of two. It's certainly a nice to have but not enough.
Agree, it sounds like peanuts. Probably still better than nothing on net but substantially raising this subsidy is the first thing to do if making a serious attempt to improve things for families.
This seems to be the problem with all the developing countries. Economic growth requires, men and women both prioritising jobs over marriage and family stability. Divorces happen because there is immense incentive for women to look for better partners even after 1, or many marriages. The incentives are life long, premium monthly pensions with annual raises and child support payments. All you have to do is marry some one, and divorce them. They now owe you life long monthly pensions.
There is not a job on earth where you can work two years, and then be entitled to life long pensions. Not even in the extreme politics of communism was this even imagined, to the scale marriage has been reduced to now.
Given all, marriage and even having kids is heavily disincentivised. You have to be an idiot beyond belief to walk into something like this.
Apart from this, even with a perfect marriage. Most men have to deal with never ending disappointed feelings from women for working to death and still coming short of their expectations. Given all this I don't think there is a easy solution for this birth rate problem.
Social engineering on the scale of countries is needed. The overall social and cultural trend world wide are no where near whats needed to bring about these birth rate increases.
What's the solution?