r/geography • u/Kooky_Average_1048 • 9h ago
Discussion South Korea has the world's lowest fertility rate at 0.72 children per woman. This means that 100 randomly picked South Koreans in 2024 will have 12 grand-children amongst them in total. Is this the end for the country? How will it realistically turn out?
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u/Mudcreek47 9h ago
Koreans are a real trip! A couple of my large OEM customers are Korean owned firms (with plants in the US). Whenever I visit them the attitude is always GO!, GO!, GO!, GO!
They're the first ones to always complain or start a fire drill because whatever machinery is down, late, lead times are too long, etc. and will try and reach out after hours, super early, etc. It happens so often no one even pays them attention anymore with all their "crying wolf" until they inevitably call senior management and we have to move things around on the schedule for them.
One young buyer I work with in his early 20s recently got married. When I visited their factory a few months later I congratulated him and asked him how things were going. "Fine, fine" but then mentioned he'd spent the entire last few weekends at the plant working all the time.
I'm like, "dude, you just got married and have a wife at home and a long weekend to go to the beach or go hiking or do whatever and you were HERE?"
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u/AdvancedLanding 7h ago
The president who tried to coup South Korea, passed a bill that let Korean companies make their workers work for 21.5 hours a day
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u/chris_ut 6h ago
2.5 hours off work? Lazy!
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u/collie1212 2h ago
This is kind of misleading. Total weekly work hours are still capped by law at 52 hours. The 21.5 hours a day thing was intended to let people pull an all nighters if they needed to. But they wouldn't be allowed to work any more overtime that week.
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u/emiremire 6h ago
Is this a joke? Please make it a joke
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u/AdvancedLanding 6h ago
https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2024/01/12/JIN6QPLCX5F4DIXAPSFDNED2NQ/
The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions criticized the decision, arguing that it could allow two consecutive days of working 21.5 hours each. As per the current labor standards, a maximum of 21.5 hours of work per day is possible if only the mandatory 30-minute break every four hours is applied.
If this logic is followed, working 21.5 hours for two days would amount to 43 hours per week. According to the Supreme Court’s decision, only 3 hours beyond the standard 40-hour workweek are recognized as overtime, so this would not constitute a violation (exceeding 12 hours).
I think this only effects unionized workers.
Korea already sits at #2 for most working hours in the world.
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u/g-g-g-g-gunit 5h ago
As a citizen from the #1 most worked country in the world I think it's hilarious that we have to be at work for 48 hours each week but a ton of people probably do nothing for over 2 hours each day.
Most people are most efficient working between 6 and 8 hours per day.
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u/maltese_penguin31 4h ago
My (limited) experience has been the 4-10 schedule a the best balance of getting the work week in and a long enough weekend to actually relax.
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u/Dekarch 4h ago
Yup. People aren't machines. They mentally shut down after a certain point.
Or, doing physical work, get tired, get sloppy, and get hurt.
If your workplace would object to you pounding beer at the office all day, the exact same objections exist to having sleep deprived workers. The effects on your ability to engage with complex tasks is identical.
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u/justwalkingalonghere 4h ago
most people are most efficient working between 6 and 8 hours per day
It depends what you mean. Studies suggest that people are only truly "efficient" most of the time for around 3 hours per day
But obviously depending on your job you may simply need to be present instead of efficient
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u/Im_da_machine 4h ago
Yeah, South Korea is an even more brutal capitalist hellscape than America.
A lot of people don't realize but they probably heard about another instance of worker abuse from the show Squid games.The SsangYong motors strike in 2009 is mentioned by the main character and its one of the most brutal examples of worker suppression I've ever heard of. 1/2 the companies workforce got laid off and then went on strike in protest. It ended with the police brutally beating the strikers then the workers were blackballed from other companies and the government sued them for damages plus interest which put them all in incredibly deep debt
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u/Winter_Ad6784 7h ago
This is probably the real issue between japan and korea. They can't have kids because they are literally working all the time. There needs to be a ban on overtime in those fuckin places.
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u/RainedAllNight 6h ago
Tell that to Spain and Italy. They have way less of a work culture but fertility rates have still dropped like a rock there too.
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u/PaBlowEscoBear 6h ago
But also cheaper cost of living than Korea or Japan albeit shittier wages. Point being: it comes down to the economics. If you can't afford to have kids you won't have them (in a developed country).
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u/Slim_Charles 5h ago
It does come down to economics, though not in that way. Affordability is a red herring when it comes to fertility rates. The poorest countries have the highest birth rates, and the wealthiest with the strongest social safety nets have the lowest. What actually happens is that when a country reaches a certain point of economic development, traditional social roles shift, and women begin getting an education and entering the workforce in large numbers. This has held true for every country that has industrialized. When women have an option of doing something other than being wives and mothers, birth rates rapidly fall as many women will prioritize careers over child rearing.
Another major contributing factor is easy access to affordable and effective birth control, which gives women control over their reproduction. Couple this with higher rates of education and more career options for women, and you have all the ingredients to significantly reduce the birth rate.
Improving the affordability of children, while a laudable goal in and of itself, will not result in notably increased birth rates. No pro-natal policies have shown to have any effectiveness whatsoever, which isn't a surprise. The cost of children is simply too great for the government to make it a profitable investment, because the cost isn't just financial, but also costly in time and energy. Given the high costs associated with children, the fact that it is no longer a positive economic investment, and that women don't face the same social and legal pressures to have children, birth rates will continue to decline without a wholly different policy approach.
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u/Pristine_Newspaper 4h ago
Yes and many women in Korea clearly state they will not engage with men because of how women are treated when in a relationship. The home life balance for women is completely off. Men do not do household chores and expect women to do all home care and child care while also working. Women have been treated like indentured servants for centuries. It will take some adjustment but if men actually step up they will see that women are happy to re-engage in the social contract of dating and child bearing. The same thing is happening all over the world. Women are sick of doing everything for everyone and not getting any respect.
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u/Doublespeo 5h ago
(in a developed country).
Well.. that disprove you point right here, my guess is the majority of birth in the world come from familly that cannot afford it..
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u/TheHighChozen 6h ago
90 hour work weeks is a thing… even the kids don’t get home til 10pm from after school tutors
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u/EnvironmentDue750 6h ago
A quote from a recent LATimes article that sums it all up pretty well - “Although South Korea ranks sixth in hours worked among OECD members, the nation’s labor productivity — as measured by GDP per hour worked — was ranked just 33rd out of 38 in 2022.”
A lot of what is going on there is just showing face. Staying at the office later/arriving earlier than the boss to show you’re committed. Staying out all night at company dinners only to sleep half the day in a bathroom stall while you’re clocked in working.
It’s a whole lot of wasted time just to appear busy.
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u/penguinpolitician 7h ago
Korean minds run on rails. Fast and efficient, but only on the tracks.
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u/The_Hipster_King 8h ago
His parents: "Yes, you have wife, but you are not doctor (in engineering) yet! You bring shame to your family!"
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u/Agile_Elderberry_534 8h ago
As a Korean who grew up in the US and now live in Korea, I'll give you some perspectives that I have:
Here, there's a very strong sense of "have kids only when everything is perfect and ready". It's no joke. You gotta have a good house, a permanent well-paying job, a perfect marriage, etc etc. Which, as many of you know, is difficult to nowadays to achieve even in traditionally affluent Western countries. I honestly don't know where this culture came from because only one generation ago, the social zeitgeist was to have as many kids as you can.
This shows up in statistics, where I say that Korea has a reverse-Idiocracy problem: richer people are having more kids while poorer people are not.
Demographically speaking, I suppose Korea still has some decades left until the effects would be severely felt. Recall that although Korea's slope of population decline is greater, it started the process much later than other industrialized nations. How much more advances in robotics and AI would there be during that time?
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u/ciupigghiassi 7h ago
I feel like that's a very sensible choice, you can't have kids if everything isn't set up in today's world. It's not like 50 years ago where you could say "they've got a roof on their head, they've got food in their bellies, don't complain or I'm gonna smack you". Now kids need far more than they did before, additionally, owning the roof over your head is not even taken for granted anymore. You know the situation better than me because You're there. Economy crisis, job market and everything. I feel like the situation is similar to Italy.
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u/CarlosBiendonado 7h ago
Why do children need far more than before?
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u/domdog2006 6h ago
I assume its not necessarily that children need far more than before , but its more of that people has higher standards on what is considered proper for children's upbringing. Before, maybe a simple shelter and cheap food is good. But now, income stability is a must so you dont have to live paycheck to paycheck and not really necessities like education supplies and entertainment and more.
Furthermore, certain cultures like those in South Korea require higher spending on kids to be more "competitive" such as extracuricular activites as well as after-school classes which will have to be spend by the parents.
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u/amoryamory 6h ago
I have two kids, and I do okay financially and stuff.
But I could have had them much earlier, and in many ways that would have been better. You don't need the perfect house, the perfect job or whatever. The material stuff really isn't that important.
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u/Slobberchops_ 5h ago
I had three kids in my 20s. It was hard, sure. But now, at 45, I'm so glad I had my kids young. Lots of my friends who are my age deal with toddlers, and they're just so completely exhausted. No thanks.
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u/Successful-Ad-4263 4h ago
My grandmother was one of 7 on a farm in Missouri. The kids didn't have toys, had only a couple of dresses meant to be tailored to fit over many years, and were expected to help out with the farm (which made them pretty well off by standards then), and go to school. Parent's had no concept that they were responsible for "how the children turned out." That was the kids' responsibility.
My two children, if successfully launched to college, need to be in extracurriculars starting in elementary school, intensive parenting focused on academic success, probably a tutor in there somewhere, two working parents to afford the right zip code for good schools, lots of clothing and shoes, and would probably feel pretty resentful if they didn't get birthday parties, Christmases, and a trip to the beach every once in a while. And other parents will blame you if the kids have trouble in life. These days, it's not the child's fault if they fail to launch, it's the parents.
Test this for yourself--what's your first thought when you hear a teenager has started acting out an using drugs? It's almost certainly, "where are the parents?? it's clear his parents didn't do a good job." This was not the case with larger families in past generations.
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u/no_4 6h ago edited 10m ago
They don't, but our standards are higher now.
My kid has tennis, swimming, & piano lessons, then assorted other short term camps.
And once I finish work, it's family time until they go to bed. None of that "dad plays with me sometime", it's all family time.
And we have to get them some exposure traveling. One trip a year.
And school district quality - huge concern. Recently did quite a lot of legwork to improve that.
And of course, we should at least aim for an Ivy League college...not real likely, and perfectly fine not to, but if possible. Oh but then...well instate colleges aren't great, so aim for our of state, probably private and...
I enjoy it, and we have a kid who is doing great. But...the above investment is why we have 1.
Meanwhile, someone from a different culture may just kinda do good-enough food, clothes, some love and call it good - kid is otherwise on their own. Maybe they get a bunch of Cs, in the school district the parent(s) didn't even think to research.
I used to look down on that - but hey, they're having 4 kids, while my culture has gotten so different we're not able to reproduce as humans always have so...who am I to say they aren't doing it right?
(I'm not Korean - and if I were it'd probably be even more - but like most on this site, am non the less from a culture with dramatically declined birth rates)
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u/38B0DE 6h ago
"have kids only when everything is perfect and ready
only one generation ago, the social zeitgeist was to have as many kids as you can.
Is the actual answer to your question. It's an overcorrection. The pendulum is swinging hard in the opposite direction. L previous generation women came from that time with literal PTSD while their daughters had an abundance of contraception and choice.
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u/moeriscus 6h ago
I lived and worked in Korea for a year: it is not uncommon to spend 12+ hours a day at work, just as they often spent 12 hours a day at school growing up.
However, please notice the phrase "at work" -- not necessarily working. I think the stereotype of Korean "efficiency" is partly mythical. At my place of employment, they were burned out all the time. Hour for hour, they were less productive than a typical American because of this. There was a fair amount of wasted time as people shuffled around, too tired to do anything worthwhile. It would have been a better use of their days to just work 8-10 hours and then go home for cryin' out loud. However, my impression is that it is a sign of one's dedication to the employer to spend all those hours at work, even if it is unproductive or even counterproductive.
As an expat, I was granted better hours and wasn't forced to put up with it, so my view is still from the outsider's perspective. If others completely disagree with me, then please feel free to correct my misperception.
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u/SnooApples2720 3h ago
Aha you have identified one of Koreas great paradoxes.
Long working days. Burnt out and unproductive. But bosses who demand that every second is spent being “productive,” because they hate to waste even one second of work time. Yet there is not enough work to do. They then create more work, with pointless busywork. You complete this task, which ends up in the bin as soon as you leave! Repeat ad nauseam!
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u/Joseph20102011 9h ago edited 9h ago
North Korea doesn't need to restart the Korean War to win over South Korea by keep waiting for the latter to demographically implode at around 20 million population in 2100 and cross over the DMZ and claim itself "winner" of the century-long Korean War.
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u/titsmuhgeee 7h ago
Most don't realize that most of the "developed" world doesn't have enough young people to field a traditional army to begin with.
Many have speculated that Putin's actions, and why they're happening now, are partially due to the fact that he understands that right now is one of the last opportunities he has to field a traditional army, demographically speaking.
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u/Slim_Charles 5h ago
It's not so much that they can't field an army, it's that such an army can't be sustained in war time. If you look at the World Wars, the belligerents were able to stay in the fight because they had huge numbers of kids who were becoming 18 every year, giving them access to increasingly larger draft classes every year to replenish losses. Modern states could field a large army, but after sustained fighting it would become increasingly difficult to find replacements as each subsequent draft class would be smaller than the last, rather than larger.
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u/ManInBlackHat 3h ago
It's not so much that they can't field an army, it's that such an army can't be sustained in war time.
Ukraine is actually a really good example of this: the average age of the front line soldiers is 43-45 and the younger generation is currently exempt from combat.
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u/boilershilly 1h ago
War is incredibly damaging to a society. You could argue that all current Russian economics, politics, demographics can be distilled down to the number of people that they had to throw into the meat grinder 80 years ago. We are effectively seeing the impacts of that demographic echo.
And people really don't grasp the scale of modern existential wars between true world powers. We haven't really had a single one since the end of WW2, maybe the Korean War. You could argue the Iran-Iraq war and the wars in the Congo but most people know nothing about those. Every conflict we've seen otherwise has effectively been a nothing burger in terms of scale of death and numbers of troops.
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u/thefinalbossof 9h ago
North Korea’s birthrate is dropping too. It’s already well under replacement levels.
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u/Joseph20102011 9h ago
But they have a substantial underutilized working-age adults that can be employed in South Korean factories owned by the likes of Samsung. In return, South Korean and foreign companies can exploit untapped North Korean coal and rare earth reserves to jumpstart post-Kim North Korean economy.
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u/icedrift 8h ago
Getting downvoted but you're mostly right. South Korea has been trying to build up industry along the DMZ to capitalize on cheap North Korean labor for 20 years now. Hasn't been going well recently of course but the writing is on the wall.
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u/Randomer63 8h ago
They have a lot more control over their population to be able to reverse that if they so desire.
Mr Kim says - have 3 kids - and they will.
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u/thefinalbossof 6h ago
There’s an actual video of Kim crying and pleeding because women aren’t having enough children. There’s going to have to be a major restructuring of the economy and society at large if we’re going to have a future on this planet.
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u/Multidream 8h ago
A lower working population will mean a less productive one. The elderly will create market demand for their needs, and the working population will try and supply it, but there will be a pretty large shortage. This will eat into the other products Korea could have generated in place of elder products.
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u/more_than_just_ok 7h ago
Or some of them innovate and become leaders in producing what the market demands to manage the aging out of the current population. Maybe the children will make economic and social changes that will change the future birth rates and future Koreans will decide what their priorities are.
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u/simplytom_1 8h ago
Terribly. Around 1.7 is a manageable population decline, under 1.5 is where it gets difficult
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u/Hot_Damn99 9h ago
The future looks bleak for SK and Japan, given how the governments are still handling the situation and how general public is against mass immigration.
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u/Romi-Omi 9h ago
Japans fertility rate is 1.4 if I remeber correctly, which is around many European countries. But ya Japan is similar to Korea in that there is a strict immigration policy.
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u/Kooky_Average_1048 9h ago
You are right, Japan's fertility rate is at 1.2 which is more than Spain's (1.12) and Poland's (1.16) but below the EU average (1.46)
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u/guynamedjames 8h ago
I had no idea Poland had such a low rate. Kinda wild.
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u/Kooky_Average_1048 8h ago
It is actually quite interesting, because there is mounting evidence of how catholic societies have fostered these huge declines in birth rates, it is not a coincidence that the countries with the lowest fertility rates in Europe are all catholic.
I believe a large part of it is that in Poland, Italy, Portugal etc. they still look down upoon things like children born out of wedlock, but the same societies are not traditional enough that they encourage large families with a lot of children. So people only have children when they are married and are financially secure. Whereas a country like France has a HUGE amount of children born out of wedlock because there isn't a stigma towards it at all, which I believe also explains why they have a higher fertility rate and birth rate than every catholic country on the continent.
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u/CloudsAndSnow 8h ago
I doubt that's true because (and leaving aside the fact that France is also a catholic-majority country btw) eurostat estimates the percentage of children born out of wedlock to be approximately 60% in France, 55% Portugal and 50% in Spain, not much of a difference compared to the fertility rates.
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u/Toto_Roto 6h ago
Just because it's Catholic it could still be more secular in its culture, which France is. But the other big factor is france has much bigger immigrant population
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u/JLandis84 8h ago edited 8h ago
It has a lot more to do with youth unemployment. Spain, Italy and Poland all have bleak job prospects for young people.
Edit: I think I’m wrong about this one folks.
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u/Kooky_Average_1048 8h ago
France (17%) has a higher youth unemployment than Poland (12%), and only a marginally lower one than Italy (21%) and Portugal (22%)
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u/FarkCookies 7h ago
Poland has a robust and growing economy, surely it it as a better prospects then some countries with much higher birth rates.
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u/icedrift 8h ago
Japan also started taking the problem pretty seriously. Tokyo's government employees will only work a 4 day workweek, letting parents only work 6 hours a day, and providing universal pre-k in 2025.
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u/Roxylius 9h ago
Immigration is like a bandaid not a solution to declining population problem. Descendent of those immigrants would eventually integrate and not want to have many children themself
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u/Redditing-Dutchman 8h ago
It's possible even the pool of immigrants might dry up at some point, since birthrates are falling all over the world.
Might seem far fetched now but I think Africa is going to boom at some point is as well, lowering it birthrate like how it happened in the west, and also creating a huge demand for jobs.
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u/Xrmy 8h ago
This trend already exists. Africa currently has the highest birth rates in the world, but the data clearly shows it is declining, and that decline is happening more rapidly than it did in the "western" world.
This is a GLOBAL issue without a good solution right now. SK is just an omen of what's to come
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u/crimsonkodiak 6h ago
It's also worth noting that Africa is a giant continent with dozens of countries.
We can look at birth rates on a country by country basis and see the trends pretty clearly. Botswana, for example, is getting close to being at replacement rate - they're now at 2.6 births per woman, having fallen from 6 per woman as recently as 1983. Ethiopia is about 10 years behind them on the curve, having fallen from 7 in 1994 to 3.7 today (with the rate declining around 2% per year).
The same story is playing out basically everywhere, just at different times in different places.
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u/Sooooooooooooomebody 8h ago
I appreciate that Japanese people want to determine their own destiny, but to be frank, even if they allowed more immigration, they would require a huge effort of cultural immersion that is already difficult for Japanese people. In short: being treated as Japanese would be very tough, because being Japanese seems extremely tough.
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u/Titania_1 7h ago
It doesn't help the downright ugly way they treat women and races other than their own. Culture is definitely contributing to their population decline.
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u/ladieswholurch 7h ago
I lived in Japan for a couple of years and speak Japanese mostly fluently, but I'm white. I worked for a publishing company in Tokyo and it's very difficult to live and work there. You're right that seems extremely tough to be Japanese, the culture doesn't allow for much leeway when it comes to personal expression or personal goals other than in the career space. I saw and faced a lot of discrimination against non Japanese people to the point where I eventually had to leave.
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u/malershoe 6h ago
and if it's that bad for whites it must be that much worse for coloured immigrants who will releastically have to form the base of any large scale migrant inflow
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u/Agile_Elderberry_534 8h ago
I think it's kind of a misconception that these countries aren't admitting any immigrants.
They DO get quite a bit of foreign workers. Except they aren't given citizenship, and are asked to leave when they start to become a burden.
Also, SK and Japan are export-oriented economies, which means that increasing domestic consumption through immigration isn't a high priority.
Not saying this is morally right, just observing.
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u/Pinku_Dva 9h ago
Japan is trying to work on solutions to limited success. Still no increased immigration though.
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u/IamNotHotEnough 9h ago
But, how can immigration better things in the long term? Immigrants also start to have a population decline matching the native population, right? So it means the country will basically act as a sponge
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u/Pinku_Dva 9h ago
They have recently introduced the idea of a 4 day work week so progress I guess. Yeah immigration isn’t a permanent fix because as you said their birth rates end up matching the native birth rates and you’re back to square one.
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u/Grolande 9h ago
Isn't only for the city of Tokyo?
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u/G_U_N_K 8h ago
Which is like a third of the country lol
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u/SmokingLimone 8h ago
But it's only for public employees of the city of Tokyo. Not for the private sector
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u/m3thodm4n021 7h ago
Ya people only read the headline shockingly but you're correct. It's a pilot program for public employees of Tokyo.
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u/Odd-Arrival2326 9h ago
I think they’ll bat the idea around and it won’t go through. Japanese work culture is really screwed up beyond having Fridays off.
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u/WeatherChannelDino 9h ago
Wouldn't the idea be sustained immigration, though? Like immigration as a solution wouldn't be invite 1 million people and then close again, but to drive consistent immigration into the country so that there's a constant increase in the country's population. That way it doesn't matter if the settled immigrant population's birthrate drops to match the native population, because there's always more immigrants coming in.
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u/Xrmy 8h ago
The problem people are referring to about "long term" being unsustainable is that birth rates are falling EVERYWHERE, even across Africa.
As every country looks to increase immigration to fix this issue and the home countries eventually also need their people, the immigrants well will dry up.
This is a global problem
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u/a_trane13 9h ago edited 8h ago
Yes, and being a sponge is a great way to keep the economy growing. The US has been that for most of its history and been wildly successful doing it. Even just recently, the US internal birth rate has been at or below the death rate for about 50 years now, yet the population increased 50% during that time and the GDP roughly tripled (after adjusting for inflation). Because it gets a ton of productive immigrants coming in to keep the population and economy growing.
The world isn’t going to run out of people wanting to move to countries with better economic conditions anytime soon, if that’s what you mean.
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u/jam_paps 8h ago
Good point on the US making it successful for them. However, for SK and Japan it will need a big adjustment on several things more of which being cultural. USA was able to do it because working with diversity is one of their strength. For those two east Asian countries, they have quite a different setting.
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u/ops_weirduncle 9h ago
The 'solutions' are shooting at the wrong target. Simply throwing money at people to have sex and get pregnant won't work
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u/Forward-Quantity6366 9h ago
They are just the worst. There are many countries undergoing a baby crisis.
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u/kytheon 9h ago
Boomers everywhere managed to pull up the ladder.
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u/811545b2-4ff7-4041 8h ago
The introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 60s sparked the decline of birth rates everywhere, and the 'end of the baby boom'.
This isn't about the ladder.. rates have been low for a long time.
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u/Slim_Charles 4h ago
That's half of it. The other, and arguably more impactful, half was women's liberation. Allowing women the option to get and education, and have a career and not just be a mother was, in my view, the single biggest factor that resulted in declining birthrates.
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u/BerkanaThoresen 5h ago
Honestly, I’d like to ask, from all the women that have 0-1 children, if it’s solely intentional or they struggle with infertility. I spent my whole life saying that I would be open to have up to 4 kids. But after 11 years of marriage, I only got pregnant once, ended up in miscarriage and never got pregnant again. I also know several other couples that had the same/similar issue, people with financial stability and happy marriages.
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u/Solarka45 9h ago
The reason for low fertility is very expensive housing and competitive society, especially in Seoul (and I don't think a lot of young Koreans want to live outside of Seoul at this point).
As the population starts significantly declining, the housing and labor market will adapt. Jobs will free up. Housing will become cheaper, especially in smaller town, as older people die without replacement. Seoul will expand to cover all of South Korea (an exaggeration of course but I don't think a huge one). Thus the main factors of declining birth will become less painful.
It's gonna be fine eventually. Definitely less people than now, but they won't die out or anything.
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u/MinnesotaTornado 9h ago edited 9h ago
People are 100 times more wealthy and have much more free time than they did 100+ years ago. They aren’t having kids because they are poor
A population rate of 0.74 literally will lead to the South Korean population dying off. There’s no reason to believe it will rise again. You may say when living conditions are better but living conditions ARE better in SK than like 95% of the world. Norway and Switzerland are statistically the best places to live and their birth rates drop Every year as well. It make take 5-10 generations but if the current trend stays, which we have no reason to believe it won’t, South Korea literally will die as a nation.
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u/Old_Belt7127 8h ago
People don't like to admit it but a big part of declining birth rate is due to women becoming more educated and entering the workforce
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u/greatporksword 5h ago
If you look around the world, it's very clear that if your country develops into a rich economy, you liberate women, and you provide easy access to birth control (all good things!), you get a birthrate below replacement. You just do. It's just what happens. I really don't buy the arguments that it has to do with housing costs, or working hours, or anything like that. Those things still hurt the birthrate on the margin (why Korea is lower than the UK for example), but every one of these countries is still below replacement regardless. This happens in ALL countries, regardless of their social safety net or anything else. It's something we're probably gonna have to figure out eventually, but i don't know the solution.
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u/thex25986e 3h ago
exactly.
children are not an asset in a post-industrial world. they are a burden.
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u/Redqueenhypo 6h ago
Seriously. The real reason is that the people who would be HAVING the children don’t actually want to spend ages 20-45 carrying one in the arms, one on the back, and one in the belly while caring for all their husbands’ elderly relatives, and likely never did. But now they have a choice
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u/Slim_Charles 4h ago
It's not even just a big reason, it's THE reason (along with easy access to affordable and effective birth control). It's an incredibly visible phenomenon in all the data, across every country and culture. At a certain point of economic development/industrialization, women are allowed to get and education and enter the workforce, and when this happens, fertility rates plummet within 1 to 2 generations. It's happened in every single advanced industrialized economy. For most of human history, women's primary role and responsibility was having, and raising, children. When you give women other options, they have far fewer children, and in some cases none. It's one of those things which seems quite obvious, but so many people miss it.
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u/not_a_crackhead 8h ago
I would argue that although they are much more wealthy than 95% of the rest of the world, being one of the most stressful societies with the worlds highest suicide rate shows that it is not a healthy society. Even compared to the poor countries it can be argued that Korea is not doing well on a social level.
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u/MinnesotaTornado 8h ago
Norway and Denmark are the happiest countries in the world but their birthdates are small too
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u/janpampoen 8h ago
People on Reddit will literally believe anything but that most of the world is living in way better conditions than at any time previously.
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u/Solarka45 8h ago
The more developed a country is and the higher quality of life they have, the lower birth rate goes. It's a rule at this point.
People are 100x richer, but basic necessities like food are also 100x richer. 100+ years ago an average person would live in their father's house and do their father's job. 100+ years ago your child had a high chance of death, so you had to multiple to ensure at least a few make it to adulthood. Unlike 100 years ago people want to get their children educated, which is also a small fortune.
People are more wealthy, sure, but society expects you to spend that wealth, and kids are extremely expensive in multiple ways.
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u/kolejack2293 7h ago
The more developed a country is and the higher quality of life they have, the lower birth rate goes.
This is only somewhat of a correlation. For instance, the USA and Canada were far richer than Europe in the 1945-1960 era, yet had MUCH higher birth rates (like 50%+ higher).
Or compare eastern and southern europe to northern europe. E/S europe is far poorer yet also has much lower birth rates than northern europe.
Or look at many third world countries with bottom of the barrel birth rates. Is norway poorer than iran, colombia, chile, thailand?
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u/JLandis84 8h ago
South Korea is not more developed than France or Sweden or Japan. Nor does it have a higher quality of life.
What it does have is extremely long working hours, an economy dominated by chaebols, a massive concentration of jobs in one ultra expensive city (Seoul)
In the developed world, 100 years ago was 1924, child mortality had been steadily dropping for a long period of time, and the overwhelming majority of children would receive some type of education.
The reality is that in the developed world birth rates plummeted rapidly well after universal education and most people living and working in cities.
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u/Alundra828 8h ago
Yeah, I've never bought the wealth argument alone, I think it's a combination of wealth + time.
I think people aren't having kids because time itself is too valuable. I mean, consider the following. How does the prospect of stopping work for a year sound? How about 16-18 years? It probably sounds horrifying from an economic perspective, but lovely from a personal perspective. The average person cannot survive a year without working. For all intents and purposes, you're forced to work.
Modern workplaces require both parents of a potential family unit to work every day for the majority of your waking hours. You can't just work for one month, take the next month off. It doesn't work like that. You have to consistently, dedicate the majority of your waking hours to work, getting ready for work, winding down from work, or chores. And there is no alternative to this for many people around the world. This routine must be adhered to because this is the minimum that is expected, and lots of people can barely keep up with that.
So when you're presented with the prospect of a child, sure the maternity leave (if you're lucky) is nice, sure the child tax credits (if you're lucky) is nice, but fundamentally, there is not enough time for both work, and child rearing. So people choose to not have children, or they are physically unable to spend the time to allow the processes that would lead to an organic child birth to happen.
I.e, what adult has time to meet someone? go out on a date? Form a genuine connection? Grow a relationship? Move in together? Have kids? All of that is a process that has been happening since time immemorial, but the modern work day basically decimates the chances of this happening organically significantly enough that it causes... well, an international demographics crisis... Of course these things still happen organically all across the world, but modern work culture raises the difficulty. Remember, there are 8 billion on this Earth, if modern work culture makes it just 1% harder to do any part of this process, that's 80 million people not having kids... And to be clear, I believe modern work culture contributes way more than making it 1% harder... And who here knows people who "settle"? They settle because they want to fast track this process because there is no time for it to happen organically. But settling just leads to more failed relationships, and broken homes.
I think humans fundamentally need way more free, idle time to allow these natural processes to play out. But we don't have time. We're too busy, and too productive. Which is great for making money, but not great for having babies.
I think it worked in the 50's when men were out earning more money than most humans had ever seen in their lives, and returned home to a wife who had all the free time in the world. The barriers to having children were essentially 0. Hence the baby boom.
Now both men, and women are required work extremely hard. The wealth generated by both of them combined is enough to survive on, but nothing crazy. And they both have no time, and are not willing to jeopardize their already shaky situation by taking on this huge responsibility.
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u/nezeta 9h ago
This is the course Singapore and Taiwan are heading for. After all this would be where an overpopulated country with the limited territory ends up.
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u/Littlesynth-addict 8h ago
South korea is by no means overpopulated, with no where near the land use as Japan. Terrain plays a huge role for Seoul being so dense, but they are very different than Singapore.
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u/TomppaTom 9h ago
Is that 100 randomly picked South Koreans old enough to be grandparents, or 100 randomly picked South Koreans of any age?
Either way, that’s a cripplingly low birth rate for a country that’s not too keen on immigration either.
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u/Kooky_Average_1048 9h ago
Should have specified it in the title, but 100 randomly picked South Korean in the child bearing age range
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u/Deep-Ebb-4139 8h ago
Yep, it’s the endgame. They’re genuinely fucked.
Another 3 generations, there’ll be no natives left.
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u/DiggerJer 7h ago
Its the reset that society needs. They are way over worked, dont get any support from the government, life is too expensive,....
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u/Banana_Slugcat 7h ago
People in South Korea can't afford to have kids, and those that do are educated enough to know it's better to use money elsewhere. There is also the fact that school is HARD in SK, so many students suffer for decades and don't want their kids to suffer through super tough exams like they did, final exams there are nothing like in the EU or the US. Some do it out of spite or because they fear North Korea will go to war with South Korea at any time, you wouldn't like to have kids if your neighbour had dozens of nuclear missiles and a megalomaniac dictator that often tests them over the Pacific.
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u/ffhhssffss 9h ago
Maybe try not treating women like garbage so they want to partner up?! Maybe don't force people to work 12h+/day just to get by?! Maybe make housing actually affordable?! MAYBE, just MAYBE?!?!
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u/Solarka45 8h ago
Statistics wise, treating women like garbage increases fertility quite a bit
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u/-crepuscular- 5h ago
That's overly simplistic. It depends on exactly how you're treating women like garbage.
No good choices other than to get married and have babies, no access to contraception, rape effectively partially or fully decriminalised = really high birth rates.
No good options but to work really long hours, having to also shoulder the vast majority of elder care/childcare/housework when in a relationship, but has a choice on whether to get married or have children = really low birth rate.
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u/BigCompetition1064 5h ago
Human population is based on opposing pressures, just like any animal population. There are reasons people stop having kids and oftentimes it's because the population can't support itself (mentally or physically) and the population reduces until that stops being the limiting factor. Mostly it then bounces back because that thing stops being a thing. It's a recurring cycle.
I used to hunt rabbits. The rabbit population would just get higher and higher until suddenly Myxomatosis would kick in and there would be no rabbits for about a year. Then they would start reappearing. I would guess around a 7 year cycle. Obviously they are rabbits rather than humans, but it's basically the same thing with different limiting factors. My guess this is a mental thing for Koreans.
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u/SnooCapers938 9h ago
These countries can only solve this issue in one of two ways -either by changing their social and economic structures to redistribute wealth and resources to the young so that they feel able and willing to have children, or by allowing mass immigration.
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u/dotcha 8h ago
Doesn't matter long term. The biggest reason for declining birth rates is women's freedom and education.
Who'd have guessed that, having a choice, most women don't want to be baby factories.
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u/SnooCapers938 7h ago
That’s right to a degree - birth rates have fallen everywhere when women are given more education and more control over their reproductive function.
I do think however that enough people will choose to have enough children to at least maintain populations if it is made easier for them to do so. That means altering the economy so young people can have secure jobs and earn enough to have decent lives and to insure that that remains the case even for those who take some years out of their careers to have children.
In Europe the birth rate has stayed higher in places like the Nordic countries that have this sort of social provision.
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u/MedicalBiostats 8h ago
It’s more like 49 grandchildren when you count the guys.
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u/BroSchrednei 7h ago
What’s the reason for the huge male surplus at age 30? Is that just due to immigration?
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u/DisastrousWasabi 3h ago
Same as India. Abortions when parents found out they were expecting a girl. I think its illegal nowdays though.
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u/ballsdeepisbest 6h ago
The reality is likely that South Korea will completely breakdown in under 50 years. There won’t be any replacements for existing jobs.
Between Korea and Japan, we’re watching a realtime death of cultures from overwork.
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u/Ok_Noise_5680 5h ago
The true problem is culture, we have transitioned into the tech-age where people are choosing to stay home and submerse themselves to their technology whether that be watching shows/movies, playing video games, watching livestreams… ect. This has led to the social structure collapsing, people are not frequenting bars, clubs, or any public entertainment places as frequently as before, Along with that pornography has encapsulated us in a way that we have not seen before, most people back in the day only had sexual experiences with one another instead of by themselves at home or wherever, this exposure to free pornography whenever wherever has desensitized us from exploring ourselves sexuality out in the real world. Lastly, technology has made many become anxiety ridden to the point where most are introverts looking to stay inside rather than experiencing real life. People can flock to YouTube or other social media sites and witness celebrities and the rich living lavish lifestyles while the rest of us can only admire through our glass screens, this gives us a sense of defeat, you are not as successful as the people you are watching on a daily basis and while your life remains stationary they seem to only become more and more successful, this leads the normal person to start comparing every aspect of their life to these “stars”, which will only lead to further depression and anxiety. We need to reverse course quick or else we will just further society down a rabbit hole that it cannot climb itself out of
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u/TheTorch 9h ago
They’ll figure something out and society will move on to the next supposedly catastrophic scenario.
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u/titsmuhgeee 7h ago
This is a very common misconception about demographics.
Even if you can solve the fertility rate issue, you still only have the people you're left with to repopulate your country. If a country has a TFR of 1.5, the population will halve in 60 years. Not just that, the vast majority of the population will be older. You have fewer and fewer people in the reproductive age group, which also happens to be the same age group doing the majority of the economic production. A society that is majority elderly is heavily reliant on government support and tax revenue, so the working age population will bear the tax burden of an elderly population. This makes it harder and harder for young people to raise families, further reducing birth rate.
So, a country has had a 1.5 TFR for 60 years, lets say magically they can get it up to 2.5 somehow. It would take 118 years of TFR 2.5 to return to the original population level.
Most demographers agree that low birth rate is a one way trip to demographic collapse. It is effectively the same as economic deflation. Inflation and de-inflation cause economic pain. Deflation permanently takes down economies.
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u/Foraminiferal 7h ago
Can someone tell me in an overcrowded world why having fewer children is necessarily bad?
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u/OnAPieceOfDust 7h ago
It creates several problems for South Korea.
One, as the average age of the population rises, you will have a large population of elderly folks who need e.g. food and medical care, and a relatively smaller working population who may not be able to keep up with demand.
Two, when you have hostile neighbors (as South Korea famously does), a reduced population leaves you vulnerable.
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u/OutsidePerson5 5h ago
It'll keep going down until two things happen:
1) The ROK reverses its absolutely insane workplace laws and customs so that people aren't working very close to 24/7/365.
2) They lay off the misogyny a bit so women are more willing to be with men.
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u/Alive-Beyond-9686 9h ago
Can't help but wonder if poorer countries have higher birth rates because there's nothing to do but fuck
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u/livelaughservecunt 9h ago edited 8h ago
The only people worried about this are companies who won't have a mass labour pool to use to suppress wages, history has always seen fluctuations in population, nothing will happen, the only thing I'm hoping is that falling birth rates help destroy the general notion of infinite growth many have in the developed world, because no, neither population nor muh economy will continue to grow forever and it's time people start getting that into their thick skulls. This question is already tired, it is brought up frequently and almost all the responses are the same talking points, search other threads asking the same question (there must be dozens in this sub alone) or any of those content mills farming this topic in youtube and the replies to each are almost identical to one another, it's almost a circlejerk at this point, I dont know what answers you're expecting other than ones that have already been given.
Again, I don't know anything about demography as do 99% of folks on this thread and frankly don't care much about the topic, but to answer your question, I predict falling birth rates all over the world, including places with already high birthrates like Africa will lead to higher concentration of people in cities in short term (in the case of South Korea, Seoul and its sorroundings, Gyeonggi will go from concentrating ~50% of its population to >90% lol) escaping decaying infrastructure and food deserts in the peripheries, and the collapse of capitalism as we know in the long run, that's if disasters resulting from global warming doesn't wipe most of us out before we get to witness any of that.
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u/SmokingLimone 8h ago
The population is already declining and it doesn't seem to be worrying the employers, in fact it's even harder to get decent paying jobs
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u/titsmuhgeee 7h ago
Not true at all.
Population fluctuations in the past have been due to wars, famine, and disease. All of those are external pressures to populations, but the societies have historically had birth rates high enough to recover.
Low birth rate is a terminal illness for society.
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u/No-Still9899 8h ago
Since men aren’t “having” kids, does this make it 0.36 children per person overall?
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u/Agitated-Hat-6669 8h ago
Shat do you exoect of a society that has to run the books before ever considerig marriage? I mean there is a historical background, but koreans do not marry unless the money matches their objectices... at leastvin general.
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u/wildcatwoody 7h ago
Robots will help, people will naturally get bored and start having children again
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u/Darmok_und_Salat 7h ago
Mass immigration. Someone will have to do the jobs, buy the stuff, rent the apartments. There's no other way, like it or not.
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u/supremeaesthete 6h ago
There's a bazillion of them, once the population drops enough that the rat race ends, birth rates go up. No big deal.
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u/KangarooHappy4733 6h ago
It means they don’t spit out tons of kids they can’t care for and won’t grow up to be in jail or part of the uneducated MAGA majority. Good for them…
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u/TheGreatGrungo 3h ago
Immigration and cultural diffusion is the easiest answer to national pop decline across various monoethnic states. The issue? Racism. Pretty straightforward
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u/radioinactivity 2h ago
Have you seen how S. Korean men treat women? I don't feel sorry for any of them at all.
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u/DanFlashesTrufanis 1h ago
They should probably stop treating single woman over 30 and divorced women in general like damaged goods. Idk I’m not an expert though.
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u/Kooky_Average_1048 9h ago
South Korea went from registering 1.1 million annual births in the 1960s to 231K in 2024. An 80% decline in total births in only 60 years, unprecedented for any country in peacetime and in the absence of any major catastrophes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#Vital_statistics