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Comment by oska | Hacker News Reader

I do not at all like the early established conceit of this article: that a country with a currently low birth rate is 'committing suicide'.

Yes, social conditions in South Korea are dreadful in many ways and yes, these conditions are definitely influencing South Koreans' decisions on whether to have children, or marry. But not marrying and not having children is not suicide, neither for the individual nor the society.

The Black Death is estimated to have reduced the size of Europe's population by 30% to 60% in the 14th century. After that extreme population shrinkage life improved dramatically for the ordinary people. People were more valued than they had been before. Shrinkage of a population can be healthy and, as it improves conditions for those who come after, will go into reverse at a certain point.

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Having grown up in South Korea in the 70s and 80s, I would not describe the social conditions of modern South Korea dreadful. Yes there are issues, but it is heaven compared to the times of 70s and 80s.

And let's not forget that S Korea is one of the most densely populated country.

Thanks for your comment. Yes, I should have used some word other than 'dreadful'.

How would you contrast your experience as a young adult to that of young adults in South Korea today?

Sounds like the plot line for Avengers vs Thanos... Life would just be so much better if there was less of it.

There is never less of life, just fewer humans. When humans disappear other life takes their place. Also the economics of Black Death shows that if you live in a country with a declining population the rich are forced to pay the middle class more, unlike a country with an increasing population whether through birth or through immigration.

The Economic Impact of the Black Death of 1347–1352

http://msh.councilforeconed.org/documents/978-1-56183-758-8-...

The problem, of course, is that modern technological base NEEDS a certain amount of consumers for mass production to makes sense.

We aren't living in an agricultural-trade system anymore.

Besides, we need fresh bodies to populate heavenly colonies.

1/2 the world lives in extreme poverty, we have no shortage of consumers.

despite not living in an agricultural-trade system nothing has changed. if the economy is growing but the population is shrinking than either the working class should have more money or the rich and their corporations should. you should be able to get the same amount of tax out of either than you lost through the shrinking population. the rich and the corporations have shifted the tax burden to the growing population which helps them make more money in multiple ways... by paying less to workers because of more competition and then passing on the entire tax burden to the wage earners.

we have no heavenly colonies and when we do they will support very very small populations, say at most a million people probably 10,000 years in the future... in the meantime we'd be lucky to get 100 people to create a self-sustaining colony.

>>1/2 the world lives in extreme poverty, we have no shortage of consumers.

More like 10%: https://howmuch.net/articles/people-living-in-extreme-povert...

That's exactly what I thought! Call Thanos and he will solve it... More to the point, this is typical elitist nonsense: saying that the back death was good for future generations is just psychopathy in disguise. There is nothing preventing our society to improve life conditions for everyone, except that some elitist groups don't want to lose the privilege of having more than others.

"saying that the back death was good for future generations is just psychopathy in disguise"

I seem to recall reading somewhere that genes selected for among European survivors of the Black Death improved resistance to HIV.

I’ll do you one better. With 23andMe pull the raw data and look for the CCR7 gene. You can see if you have enhanced viral resistance! The future is now

Thanos’ problem was that he never read a book on urban planning. Maybe he would have gotten around to it in his garden time had he not been interrupted.

But I would be totally down to watch a series about economic development during the blip (and after the blip!). If half of all people disappeared, you would probably see a massive surge in wages. But it might not be enough to keep society alive. Assuming they did solve for it, the post blip period would almost certainly result in massive global crises as countries which experienced heavy immigration are now overpopulated and countries which experienced mass emigration now have a lot of people with basically no societal infrastructure anymore.

God save disputes over property rights

Spoiler alert, perhaps too late. The critical difference is that we're talking about the societal choice between allowing people to choose not to have children versus nudging them to various degrees to do have children. Compare to the movie's choice between letting people live versus killing them.

Modern life puts a strain on people, mentally, responsibility-wise as well.

There are a number of places on earth with much greater problems and yet have high birth rates. It’s clear “dreadful” isn’t what slows pop growth. It’s rather the converse. When a society achieves a certain comfort level (material, economic, political, social, etc.) people typically have fewer children.

Well said. I always bristle when I read an articles drawing such conclusions.

Also, scanning Wikipedia, North Korea's suicide rate in the top ten of nations but only about 1.5 times that of the US (where despair is also reputed to reside).

Greece and Venezuela, countries mostly in the news for misery and starvation, rank quite low on the suicide list.

I'm not sure how one can parse the situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

This isn't very scientific, and people living in those countries might disagree, but my sense of the messes in Greece and Venezuela is that they are acute crises, which have to come to and end sooner or later. It might not be a good ending, but one way or the other the situation will have to be resolved. People aren't as likely to kill themselves over a temporary emergency, without aggravating factors like pre-existing mental illness. In addition, Venezuelans can still find a sense of community and purpose (even if that's just "opposition to Maduro" or "opposition to opposition to Maduro"), and community belonging and purpose are strong deterrents to suicide.

By contrast, the "suicides of despair" reported in the US and elsewhere seem to be a response to chronic, secular (as in long-term trends, not irreligious) hopelessness of their situation ever improving, aggravated by loneliness and isolation. It doesn't surprise me, then, that suicides can be more common even in a region where conditions are strictly better.

The Black Death effected nearly all border countries. If South Korea was 'suiciding' via the same phenomena every country around it was experiencing, the difference between itself and external threats would not be so significant.

South Korea's near neighbours (China, Japan, Eastern Russia) have below replacement total fertility rates. I just looked up North Korea's - apparently it was 2.05 in 2005-2010 which is also (just) below replacement level. [1] Not sure how trustworthy NK's statistics are but anyway, with it having had famines in recent living memory (the 90s) I doubt it's about to overwhelm South Korea by population growth. The statistics I looked at had the crude death rate almost doubling since 1980 while the crude birth rate declined.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_North_Korea#Vi...

>But not marrying and not having children is not suicide, neither for the individual nor the society.

Isn't it?

Take away the moral connotations for a second. If a country's population does not reproduce, tautologically, it will die off.

Sure, not reproducing is not suicide in the same way that a shotgun in the mouth is. But isn't it, in the same way that refusing food is?

After WWII, the UN adopted a definition of genocide that included "(d)imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group." If China were doing it to SK, we'd call it genocide. If SK is doing it to SK...?

I'm not trying to assign blame here. But that's the point: whether you die in your bed surrounded by family, in your garage with the car exhaust on, or in a totalitarian purge---you are still dead.

So, I don't know---neglect? decline? twilight? Sustainable (non-) growth? Call it whatever you want, <2.0 TFR reduces the population however anyone feels about it.

Obviously there are still children being born in South Korea, just less of them than in recent times.

> Take away the moral connotations for a second. If a country's population does not reproduce, tautologically, it will die off.

Technically, yes. At anything less than 2 births per woman (actually a bit more than that due to deaths before reproduction) a country will experience exponential decay, which approaches zero as time goes to infinity.

An exponential decay in population is a lot less disruptive than exponential rise. The former introduces difficulties like an inverted population pyramid, and countries that experience it will have to make tough choices around restructuring social security and pensions. But exponential population increases create shortages of basic necessities like water and space. I don't think it's coincidence that educated wealthy countries tend to have dropping population growth.

> Take away the moral connotations for a second. If a country's population does not reproduce, tautologically, it will die off.

Countries are not defined exclusively by biological descent, so this is not tautologically true, nor is it even practically true, since negative natural growth with positive population growth had been observed in countries.

>Countries are not defined exclusively by biological descent,

Perhaps not exclusively, but in the main? If you are in the U.S., do you count yourself as a member of whichever indigenous people lived where you are before you? Would they? Would this change if you adopted their customs?

>Countries are not defined exclusively by biological descent

This has become "true" in just the last ~50 years, and only marginally so.

>...nor is it even practically true, since negative natural growth with positive population growth had been observed in countries.

Only with substantial immigration is this the case, which brings with it a whole host of other potential problems.

> This has become "true" in just the last ~50 years

No, it's been true that nations are memetic rather than genetic constructs as long as nations have existed, and migration and assimilation have existed and been factors for a much longer time than 50 years. Non-transitory sub-replacement levels of natural population growth may be a recent phenomenon, but the nature of nations being such that such does not tautologically spell doom has been true much longer.

Ehh, this is just factually wrong and discounts the histories of Europe and e.g. Africa in such a grand way that it's hard to even know where to start. If you wanted to restrict your claim to something like "nations have memetic characteristics that often follow from genetic lineage that don't make membership in that nation strictly genetic" then I'd be inclined to agree. But back to the point, sup-replacement levels of natural population growth is a recent phenomenon and it's hard to say what comes next - since we don't have any perfectly analogous historical parallels.

>If a country's population does not reproduce, tautologically, it will die off.

No, its population will shrink. It's implausible that this will continue to the death of the country.

Suicide is a one-and-done deal. Population decline is gradual and reversible.

If a country's population does not reproduce, tautologically, it will die off.

This is true in a sense, if you think of a country being defined genetically instead of culturally. But assimilating immigrants into a culture is often considered racist too these days. So in a practical sense you are correct even if your basic premise is wrong.

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