Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
In my father's generation, people could relax after getting into university. They could party around, barely pass and still get decent jobs. Nowadays, that's definitely not the case. Getting a good job is insanely hard. You need to take care of your GPA. English certs like TOFLE/TOEIC are pretty much mandatory and you'd probably want other cert/ extra curricular experience.
Okay. So you've went through all that and you've got yourself a good job. Now that's all done, can you finally start to relax and enjoy life? Haha, no. 52-hour weekly working limit has only recently been introduced, and the current president wants to get rid of that. Even if you work your ass off, it is _very_ unlikely that you can ever afford an apartment in Seoul.
In the end, you have tired and jaded people without a fun childhood, who can't even buy their own house. I certainly would not choose to have children in these circumstances.
I've "escaped" and live a decent life outside of Korea now. But I have many friends in Korea who have "given up" (in various ways) in light of all this . There are some friends who are married and have kids, but they all have rich parents or studied/hustled really hard. In spite of all this, I miss Korea so much. But I don't think I'll be going back.
This is only one reason in declining fertility rate. There are many more (some mentioned in other comments) but this comment is already getting too ranty.
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EDIT: This comment got much more attention than I thought it would and I'd like to add some positive stuff too. There are certainly people who enjoy life in Korea by refusing to participate in the rat race and by prioitising building meaningful communities in their lives. Some things are getting better, albeit slowly, with each generation.
I do want to also mention though, a unique Korean system called "Jeonse", which is a large deposit that is 50-80% of the property value. After putting in the deposit, you can live there on yearly basis without paying rent. This system has been and is being used as property ladder for young families (as they don't have to "lose" money on rent) but as "Jeonse" is pegged to property value, they've been rapidly rising as well AND frauds around Jeonse has been on rise, in which case you can lose the whole deposit or be tied up in court battle for years.
Why do you need a house to raise kids? In many advanced countries there are some systems which will keep your kids feed and clothed even if you have no money at all.
This is one of the reasons you often see economically unsuccessful people have way more children and thus a larger influence on humanity's future.
I always hated the idea of homework in school (outside of college/university) because I have never understood being at "home" but still required to do "work" for a place I just spent 7-8 hours at and most days 2-3 more hours for sports or band.
As for show and prestige, that’s usually what the parents want, so that’s squarely in the "something is wrong" category.
Very much so. It's a thing even here in my tiny caribbean island for some fields of study.
all these can be fun but as a kid you are not doing them to have fun, there is constant pressure to win awards and be the best at these. and the list is picked more from appearance on a college application than enjoyment for a child.
this is most american kids now with any ambition of getting into a prestigious school. it will not get you scholarships though.
it is also not mentioning that "academic excellence" in high school has moved from straight As to 6-8 AP exams in a single year, i shit you not.
Same in India.
There is 0.1 to 0.6% chance of getting into any prestigious university depending on the demographic factors of student. This is after extensive filtering in high school.
99% of students spend 6-8 hours in coaching daily for years to get rejected since we follow stack ranking with limited seats.
What's sobering is government tried to increase elite universities but people don't perceive them as such even if they have better infrastructure, faculty, and education without the same low acceptance rate.
That is because even when I attended high school 15 to 20 years ago, letter grades/points were extremely inflated. AP exam scores (and SAT/ACT) are the only objective academic measures.
As an example, I am pretty sure a C was the lowest grade possible to get (translated to a 2 on the point scale). Then a B was a 3, and A was 4. For a class, there was a final numerical score (arbitrarily determined), and an A was something like 93 to 100, B was 85 to 92, and so on.
But that was for the “regular classes”. If you were in an honors class, you got +5 added to your final number grade for the course. And AP class added +10. So if you ended up with 93, you actually got 103 in the class. And so you had an A, but the grade point average was calculated from 103/100*4 = 4.12. And then this grade point average was used to rank you relative to others in the grade for purposes of determining valedictorian.
In any case, as you can see, the whole thing was a joke and anyone who attended class got a C, and anyone who put in half an ounce of effort got an A, and the higher achievers had GPAs higher than 4 on a 4 point scale.
Obviously, colleges are not dumb, so they know the whole grade inflation ruse, and it also continues in many classes. After all, at many colleges, their customers are paying them $30k to $70k per year for that grade.
Blind unthinking mimicry drives the educational system. I was in early elementary school when analogies were removed from the SATs. They went from "very important" to disappearing off the face of the earth, only occassionally showing up in two questions at most per standardized test.
Teachers (and to some point parents) expect you to invest as much in this music school as you invest (at least expected to) in your regular school.
And I never though about it this way. For me this was always a place to escape most of my classmates and have fun if possible. Or just relax. "Why are all those people are shoutin at me? Can't we all just have a good time?"
I studied piano as a boy and there was always some friction with my Polish teacher for whom piano was her life's work, and try as she might she couldn't quite get her head around a student who didn't want much more than play Bohemian Rhapsody at parties. Tried to get me to love Chopin as much as she genuinely loved him, but it never caught up and I took university as an excuse to quit.
After Covid I picked up the violin, I made it clear to both the school and to my teacher that it's strictly a hobby for me, and we got along wonderfully. On our first meeting she remarked that I never asked the one question that new students always ask, i.e. "how long will it take me to be able to play <insert piece of music>" - I had had that thought, but intentionally withheld it because I didn't want anything like expectations or timetables in my brain-clearing hobby.
True, I'm still grateful to my teachers and mother who persueded me to finish the school. I bought a violin at 24 and a guitar around 30 and now can practice both at my own pace whenever I have time.
Reminds me of the opening scene of Idiocracy: https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA
because the latter suggests that people really just don't want kids, and possibly never really did
its hard for me to think that all of society uniformly is successfully planning for children now, instead of many children being a bunch of accidents that the parents just go along with
> where is the party, hookup, pregnancy and carry-to-term scene? is that not happening
Did that ever really happen in Korea? Even in the West having a "hookup scene" in the first place was a product of having effective contraception available, and a whole set of controversial cultural changes.
evidence: 7% got to tertiary education in 1975, and recently peaked at above 100% (not sure how that works to be honest, but the trend is clear)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.TER.ENRR?locations=K...
More evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality_in_South_K...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_the_Han_River#/medi...
I'm trying to strike a balance with my kids. We encourage them to do things like learn music, take up sports etc, but not let that just consume all their free time. I want them to have time to just play freely, read comics, or just be a bit bored sometimes.
Of course the decorations are nicer and there are some who are kept around to work as "worser off" examples. But all in all, i guess most would cheer for the fall of this.
It’s not worth it. We’re luckily to have the choice of moving home to Europe and raising our kids in a way that they get to play a lot (I’m writing this while on a bench in a playground with them bouncing around in the sunshine) and also have school, art and sports.
Korea is actively discouraging Koreans from raising their kids there, especially if they have any other option
Man this hits really hard because I spent my first 20 years growing up in China... Good thing is that now I'm in a much less authoritarian place with a job that has decent work-life balance. Have been trying to cultivate some hobbies in the past few years, feels like I've been trying to reclaim the childhood I never had.
With modernisation, this has changed.
1. Most women no longer wants to be servants for the in-laws (rightfully so) and wants to live separately
2. With less children, you won't necessarily have a son.
So now, parents live separately, until they are unable to do so anymore. When this happens, the children might take them into their house and care for them or admit them into hospice or retirement home.
You might ask, what happens if your children don't take care of you and you don't have money? Well you are kinda f-ed, as seen with the high elderly poverty rate.
> [Korea has] the highest elderly poverty rate among OECD countries
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8871725/#:~:tex....
Oh, Korean national pension is also set to run out within 10 years or so, which will make the issue worse and/or make the future generation pay disproportionate amount of tax :)))
Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources.
Has it occurred to people that, maybe, modern fertility is a tragedy of the commons? If everyone chooses to act in their own interest, society is worse off than collectively pressuring to have more kids? Ideally, that would look like major subsidies and benefits to parents to account for the extra work they are doing for society.
I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off the planet, and the traditionally oppressive-to-women societies will evolutionarily outlast us.
At this rate, there will only be 3m South Koreans in 3 generations. I don't see how you expect a country to survive that decline. In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
If Pakistan, and other countries like India and China, continues to modernize, eventually the population should stable out and historically that comes with better rights for all.
I'm not convinced you don't have those two reversed. Intuitively, to me, population stability comes after better rights for all.
Versus other developed countries? South Korea has its pros and cons just like any other.
I don't agree with that statement, but let's follow the logic.
Most countries are not developed. Therefore, by your own definition, South Korea is one of the best places to live on Earth.
Obviously, the greatest thing that changed over those last 60 years is they're no longer recovering from a war that killed a pretty hefty amount of their population. While I'm sure it didn't need to decline quite so much, fertility rate was never going to stay what it was in the late 50s. You can see a pretty obvious recovery spike here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m.... It was only in the past 20 years that they declined below 1920s level.
It's also worth remembering that being oppressive to women is (definitely at least probably) not a genetically tranmissible trait. If the 22nd Century really does end up being dominated by Pakistanis, you can't just automatically assume they'll stay culturally identical to what they are today. Presumably, the Korea of the 19 century was a lot more oppressive to women than the Korea of today.
After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
Wanna guess what happens in that welcoming environment? My guess is people feel inclined to make some babies.
I don't understand why people tend to treat these low fertility rates as some kind of invariable biological dysfunction. These aren't infertile masses of people; they're perfectly capable of multiplying like rabbits.
The planet has shitloads of people, maybe we're finally reeling things in from an overshoot and are on the inevitably pendulum-like path towards population stability. There's no reason to panic unless you've got substantial evidence these people are physically incapable of having children.
Edit:
How about some DATA: go to https://population.io, select Rep. of Korea, plug in some age/gender b.s. and scroll down to "Age Distribution" at the left column. Now look to the left of ~20yo (younger than 20), it's a nearly horizontal line. What does that tell you? There's a uniform rate of Korean babies per year under 20 years old. To the right of this, there's a massive lump of elderly people with a slightly smaller lump of middle-aged people. There's no reason to believe this horizontal line left of 20yo won't just continue into the future; it looks quite stable for the last ~20 years.
Well look at the bright side of your unrealistic South Korea extinction scenario; no more DMZ and North Koreans will spread southward!
Of course this will never happen, there is no likely scenario for South Korea to have zero inhabitants. Y'all are High-larious.
Grossly, south korean couples each makes 1 child. So its population is going 1/2. To correct that and return to previous level, every couple formed among those children would have to bear 4 children.
I think they won't and it looks grim.
Calculating the carrying capacity of the world before agriculture would have given you a much different number than after it.
By that logic we shouldn't be applying arguments like "It is quite normal in ecology to see crashes and recovery in the event of overpopulation".
It is not blind faith to say that we should expect that the different dynamics could be different when the rules of the game are different.
Again, if the foxes see the rabbit population declining and can start producing rabbit substitute before they start starving, of course we would expect a different dynamic to be possible.
“Carrying capacity” is a technical term that implies, among other things, that no further population growth can occur.
It doesn’t just mean “too many” or “more than we’d prefer”.
Choose your country, chooose Probabilistic Projections, Fertility, then Births.[1]
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/Birt...
It will take 90 years for this lump to pass, and another 20 years for the newborns to grow up... you're talking about a recovery that will take a century...
A century of decline seems like a pretty good reason to panic to me...
More like ~53 years for all the current lumps to pass given a life expectancy of ~86.
I would assume the exact opposite given that this will probably probably crank up pressure on working-aged people as more and more old people need to be supported by fewer and fewer young. I would also assume a significant exodus of the young to places with actual opportunities rather than a country sized retirement home where no one wants to invest in the future because anything built to fit the needs of the population at any given moment will be massively overbuilt in the near future.
1. young people leave for better states
2. young people outvote old people (not likely)
3. young people refuse to pay and force the government to raise the social security age to 83.
i hope it's 3. in 1935 the average life expectancy was 60 to a social security age of 65, so 1.08 times the life expectancy. the life expectancy now is 77, so keep the same 1.08 times and we have a minimum age of about 83.
it really baffles me how the same generation that talks about how "millennials and gen z wont work hard" literally wants to force us to pay for their retirement. they had 65 years to save up money, they can pay for it themselves.
How they would be able to "refuse to pay" if payment will come as form of taxes for goods and services? And moreover they won't be able to "force" government to anything since government will be representing and working for the majority of people who voted for them: older generations
Many provinces are barely scraping by, young workers are not only effectively directly supporting pensioners, they are now delaying young workers retirement age, and you better not believe the old folks will willing to eat into their own money.
> lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
Yeah, something is definitely wrong with the site because actual population pyramid data looks much more alarming:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2019%EB%85%84_%ED%95...
Or https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Pyr... as mentioned by a sibling comment.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/South_Ko...
Also it matches up with the article, which says 261k babies were born last year. wikimedia show about that, with ~130k male and ~130k female. population.io says 454k which is way off.
Which looks pretty divergent for the last 5 years specifically, judging from
https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Pyr...
That the data must be wrong, there should be some small variation and it doesn't pass the sanity check of declining birth rates.
> After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
I like your optimism, but do we see anything like that in the real word after depopulation? There are many shrinking cities or areas, eg Detroit in the US or East Germany (people moving to the west), and the results are hugely negative and a downward spiral. Instead of people enjoying lack of traffic congestion, shrinking cities can't afford their oversized infrastructure anymore, which begins to deteriorate from lack of upkeep.
... millions of Pakistanis, Egyptians and Nigerians moving there to escape their overheated, overcrowded countries.
Industrialisation.
The UK began industrialising in the mid-to-late 1700s. Western Europe and North America got going in the early 1800s. Central Europe and Japan followed along, while Russia didn't really industrialise until the Soviet Union. China and Korea, by contrast, just started in the 1950s-70s, easily within a human life time. Their societies made the leap from subsistence farming to CPU design _so_ much faster than most of the developed world, it's unreal.
I'd wager we need a bit more geographically/culturally varied sources to have a fair guess at the truth.
On the one hand, yes of course: sources matter and you need to consider whether anyone has a motive to mislead, or even merely a motive to not dig too deeply into a claim they might wish to believe.
But on the other hand, a company merely merely being founded decades ago by a someone of a particular nationality does not on its own constitute strong evidence that any claims about that country are tainted or self-motivated. That connection is just too weak — you need to bring other evidence!
Different or opposing opinions are neither dangerous or violent.
Unpopular opinion, I guess.
Some other put the "start" of industrialization way before, at the end of the Renaissance.
As I understand it, there was a progressive flow of industrialization that was clearly visible in Belgium/Netherland, and also started brewing in the other surrounding countries, but the "Industrial Revolution" term was coined by a British author for a specific point happening first in England, then in Belgium/France/the US etc. afterwards.
It kinda comes down to where you set the stake of what is meant by "industriailzed", a bit like where you set the beginning of the "space conquest" and thus decide who was first to reach the critical milestone.
“industrialization” is another thing, and was a more progressive thing that was already prominent earlier than that. That book I cited is widely studied and reviewed…but you’ll have guessed, you’d need to step a bit away from caring about only the (First) Industrial Revolution. And it also mattered mostly to french/duch speaking regions, so again fewer english results is the norm.
Think of it like the ‘Space Race’, it’s a term that is bound to a specific stream of events that was started by the US. Another country starting to “race” to reach “space” won’t be about that specific stream of event.
By your earlier logic, he shouldn't be trusted with this claim any more than Wikipedia or Britannica should be trusted with the claim of British origins.
Seems like we'd need a non-British, non-Belgian source to make any definitive claim, right? /s
Timeline seems to be on your side though.
That phrase the meek shall inherit the earth, I wonder about lately. The meek, the non power searching types who don’t busy themselves with all the variety of non regenerative endeavors that consume all those who chart courses out into deep space and all its loneliness perhaps avoid these population traps and mentalities that lead to the end of a people. The salt of the earth, those who preserve humanity effectively. What a startling pack of implications seem to be packed into that statement so pregnant with meaning.
Also, if someone actively desires and seeks out the end of humanity maybe they have a reason for that and are fully aware of what they are doing rather than being ignorant about the wonders of poorly planned procreation.
I’ve often pondered seeing in my own children the echoes and higher order harmonics of combinations of traits and proclivities of their living ancestors which show up in their unique combinations of their being. I daydream about perhaps catching glimpses of non-living ancestors whom I never met and what things we inherit from them. That thought translates to other family lines and I wonder about that vast set of traits and peculiarities I will never experience once they’ve departed this life.
Societies with more investment per child have less children. You are getting everything backwards.
While developed nations are below replacement rate, many developing nations are having over half a dozen children per family. The aging population of developed countries is not conducive to production and a healthy economy. This will lead to immigration. If this trend continues, people from the developing nations will eventually inherit the developed world. Until they too fall below replacement rate.
The global average is now 2.5 children per women.
The age of huge population growth is effectively over.
There a tenancy to forget that 60 years ago one working person would have to support a wife and several children.
There are plenty of free activities.
What you call "chasing the joneses" is perfectly expected human behavior. People compare themselves to their current metaphorical neighborhood in time and space (not to their grandparents or to hunter-gatherers) and they make their life decisions based on that: college, career, having children. It's just nonsense to dismiss it as "hey, that's jealousy" at a population level.
Women gained financial freedom and the ability to choose when they get pregnant. Societies will now find out the market price for birthing children (as well as women finding out the price for not birthing children).
One can also frame it as society’s fault for not providing both women and men with sufficient incentive to procreate. Note that the word “fault” typically has a negative connotation, but I am not intending to use it with positive or negative connotation, but simply as a causative factor.
The comment I replied to stated something changed, to which I wanted to clarify what I think the biggest variable that changed. Of course, men also may not want to have as many kids as in previous years, but I would still bet this is a much smaller factor than women saying no.
You could shelve that as "society not providing enough incentives", but to me it looks like a more complex issue than what's covered by carrot/stick mechanisms.
Not all issues leading to forgoing procreating are that complex, but putting any of them as "women chose to xxxx" is I think only useful at a micro level, and kinda misses the reasons why they chose to do so, which are usually not in any individual's hand.
Would you see a reward system counteract a psychological perception of their current situation ?
Now that women have freedom, society is imploding in a way, at least in terms of population.
So to get back to replacement levels of fertility, we either need to 1) turn women into slaves again, or 2) look at some other way of running the society. #1 doesn't sound very good if you value human rights.
It’s not an issue of financial struggle since the trend is most pronounced in wealthy countries, especially in those with small wealth divisions.
Women basically saying in order for me to risk what I have to risk to have a child(ren), I need <x> security first. Which can manifest as working to save and achieve higher income levels instead of having kids.
But I suppose there could be a huge environmental or whatever biological factor causing reduced pregnancies. Marriage rates might help tease this out.
Edit: from 2019
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/til-death-do-i-s...
> A decade ago, almost 47 per cent of single and never-married Korean women said they thought marriage was necessary.
>Last year, that fell to 22.4 per cent, while the number of couples getting hitched slumped to 257,600 - down from 434,900 in 1996.
H.G. Wells pointed out that we cannot have population control in one nation of the world, but not another. It must be worldwide, or it'd result in severe unrest.
Julian Huxley, H.G. Wells, Charles Pincus (and many more) made this one of the defining issues of the 20th century. The Pill and IVF were long in the works and heavily funded as a means to avoid the "Population Bomb."
They envisioned a new world without war or environmental destruction. Their solution was to reduce the birth rate, through various means. The reduction of family formation being one of them.
It's interesting to read through these older works and realize the world they'd envisioned has to some extent come to fruition.
So you think women in poorer countries are willing to "pre-sell" their children? That's insanely absurd, and an absolute human rights violation if forced. No. This will not happen.
Hmmm... Well, we know different women.
Thanks, I am familiar with the meaning.
It doesn’t matter if someone provided the fertilized egg. Woman A has a child and then it becomes part of Family B, sometimes with money changing hands and/or the threat of lawsuits or jail if Woman A has a change of heart.
The only way this can possibly be morally acceptable is in very carefully vetted on-off situations AND no penalty or pressure for a changed mind.
There is no morally-defensible way to do this “at scale”. Please do more research if you have even the slightest doubt.
For most couples, the first 9 months for a child isn’t the problem, it is the costs of the following 2 decades.
You could make child-rearing unaffordable enough to require government assistance. Then that assistance could be limited by quota. There's a lot of things that could happen in the future. We don't really know. It's just a guess.
Another thing that In vitro fertilization solves is allowing for women to focus on their careers from age 20 - 50. If people in the future are going to live longer and be healthier, then it'd be feasible to have children (through surrogate) at the age of 50. If you'd already amassed enough wealth (or had privy to subsidies), I couldn't see why not...
Direct costs for the elderly are currently ~40% of government expenditures in New Zealand and growing.
My guesstimate 23G$ ($==NZD in this comment) for superannuation/pension[1] and 16G$ healthcare costs[2] of 110G$ total expenditure for ~16% of population (789k of 5M in 2020, projected to 20% in 2030, and 25%+ eventually[3]).
That is ~60k$ per person. 50% of people retiring now can expect[4] to live 2 decades i.e. cost ~1M$ (totally ignoring discount value!).
Disclaimer: tongue in cheek: I am middle aged.
[1] https://www.interest.co.nz/news/100033/budget-2019-social-we...
[2] https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/125200191/hey-big-sp...
[3] https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/national-popu...
[4] https://www.stats.govt.nz/tools/how-long-will-i-live
Edit:
> feasible to have children (through surrogate) at the age of 50
If you think it is okay to orphan 1 in 20 children, and that children don't have live grand parents, although maybe benefits of help with elderly care and passing on inheritance? 65 year old helping 90 year old is challenging and very common).
That would definitely reduce population (2 children per 2 adults reproducing at 50 has maybe 40% less total population count, compared against population count if reproducing at 25).
It's so strange having parents in our neighborhood two or three decades older than we were. It must be really hard.
I'm looking forward to my fifties where my eldest children are past college, hopefully giving me grandchildren to play with. I highly encourage young parenthood. It gets increasingly harder. The money part which so many get hung up on is easy. Babies are incredibly cheap, and your income has 18 years to grow.
It might, but its still not going to change the population decline pattern.
No one is going to have three kids with surrogacy. At most, people will have one or two. Stabilization at best. Not growth.
As the standard of living rises, birth rates are dropping precipitously even in those countries that are relatively more oppressive.
Absent socioeconomic reasons, there are still females that naturally desire having plenty of children, despite there not being any societal pressure in favor (or even against) that. They will be genetically selected for.
Does the change necessarily have to be societal?
> In 1992, a study found a global 50% decline in sperm counts in men over the previous 60 years. Multiple studies over subsequent years confirmed that initial finding, including a 2017 paper showing a 50% to 60% decline in sperm concentration between 1973 and 2011 in men from around the world. These studies, though important, focused on sperm concentration or total sperm count. So in 2019, a team of researchers decided to focus on the more powerful total motile sperm count. They found that the proportion of men with a normal total motile sperm count had declined by approximately 10% over the previous 16 years. The science is consistent: Men today produce fewer sperm than in the past, and the sperm are less healthy. The question, then, is what could be causing this decline in fertility[0].
[0]: https://theconversation.com/male-fertility-is-declining-stud...
Anyway, sperm counts are not outside the normal range. It was just that certain groups had higher than needed levels.
This has everything to do with monogamous relationships and marriages in most of the developed human world.
In the natural world, there are many factors at play that help ensure only the "healthiest" males conceive with females. Most factors are indirect, such as males physically fighting each other for a mate wherein the "fittest" male would more likely come out superior and successfully mate.
One direct factor that has been practically eradicated from humanity, however, is direct competition between sperm. Some animals and many plants are polygamous, wherein a female receives sperm (or other forms of genetic material as applicable) from multiple males. The sperm have to compete with each other to reach the egg first and conceive, this encourages males with the "healthiest" sperm to pass their genetic material onto the next generation.
Monogamous relationships and marriages as seen in humans remove this factor completely, the "fitness" of a given male human's sperm is irrelevant to conception because competition between sperm has ceased to exist. Both unfit and fit sperm alike can conceive, assuming other indirect factors at play allow for it. Indirect factors that care not for the "fitness" of sperm.
But in an environment where that doesn't matter anymore, it's only natural that sperm "health" will consequently deterioriate. Natural selection doesn't select for "the best", it only selects for "good enough". And if "unhealthy" sperm that can't move sufficently is "good enough", well so be it. Especially if we take factors like in-vitro and artificial insemination into account, those really remove the "health" of sperm from the equation of pregnancy.
I agree that in-vitro and artificial insemination could remove an important feedback mechanism for sperm evolution, and that would be a cause for worry.
Which by itself is fine, really. Sperm that fails to reach an egg means the genes that made that sperm do not "deserve" to reproduce. However, if people want to make a fuss over low birth rates, and this is one factor behind it, it's going to get attention.
What doesn't make sense to me is the people that are concerned about society "changing", the native population not having enough kids, we are being "overrun" with immigrants etc. Are the same people that refuse to vote for politicians advocating higher minimum wages, more benefits and fairer taxes.
It can't work both ways, either you want to crush the average person with low wages and taxes, or you want the native population to thrive.
No one is going to subject themselves to poverty to help balance the demographics for the privileged.
I think the point was the opposite: countries with limited respect and opportunities for women have higher birth rates because women have less control over whether they have children and if good careers aren’t an option anyway there’s less opportunity cost to staying home with a child.
Just implement a repartition retirement system and small incentive per child which diminish after the third, boom, 2.1 fertility rate for most of the 21rst century.
At least for now, the destruction of our retirement system and our current trend towards capitalization is already killing our fertility rate, and the idiots pushing this will once again realize this too late, because this is what they do.
This has nothing to do with the policies you mention. It has everything to do with the fact that the most popular name for newly born boys is now "Muhammed" (or some other spelling variant of it).
https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-population-and-societies-...
The adversarial framing here is a poor way to express the same point. Raising children is hard and has significant risks for the mother. If that cost is primarily paid by the mother many women will choose to have fewer children, space them further apart, etc. unless they aren't given as much control of their own lives. That's the oppressiveness we're talking about and it's not a simple “do women have basic rights?” boolean parameter — for example, Japanese women have many rights but there's a strong social expectation that women have to pick an entire package where getting married means they're expected to stop working as soon as they have a child and will stay home taking care of the child and their husband's parents, which extends to things like whether an employer will give them a job.
France is a good illustration of that point (along with Scandinavia) — there are less rigid expectations around family structures (children don't force you to stay in a bad relationship), women aren't considered bad mothers if they keep working, and especially having state-funded childcare and financial support. I've never lived in the EU but have friends from a number of countries and the contrast is pretty stark — the Germans talked about how much better the U.S. is at not shaming mothers for not giving up their professional careers, the French/Danish/Dutch parents talked about how much you have to pay out of pocket for things which are provided by their taxes. (Everyone talked about how much more healthcare costs & how frustrating the billing is, of course.)
Is declining fertility really such a societal and evolutionary danger when we’re talking 1.4-1.5? If you think of us all as one race, the human race, the fact that a few corners of the world are declining in fertility is arguably an environmental victory that could soften some crises’s in the future. We are like 99.9% genetically similar, why risk gutting the carrying capacity of the planet to preserve the 0.001% of genes that give us sparkling blue eyes?
The whole contention that it’s terrible that high birthrate countries are so much more feminist than low birthrate ones, well I mean just because the genetics of feminist counties might wane, that doesn’t mean their cultures will. Memetics is just as powerful as genetics, do rich countries really have to be the world’s stud? Can’t we see the poorer countries investing in people and the wealthier countries investing in things as teamwork?
It is not a few corners of the world. It is currently "developed countries", but we have no reason to believe that the non-"developed countries" will do any better.
> is arguably an environmental victory that could soften some crises’s in the future. We are like 99.9% genetically similar, why risk gutting the carrying capacity of the planet to preserve the 0.001% of genes that give us sparkling blue eyes?
Putting to a side for now the blase attitude to several societies slowly disappearing due to lack of births:
1. Much of society is built around the implicit assumption of there being more people in the future.
2. The carrying capacity of the world is only of interest to us as long as we are around for it. All of humanity suddenly disappearing tomorrow would also do wonders for the world's carrying capacity.
Regarding argument 1, I will say there is no problem with the supply of people, global population is growing. It doesn’t need to grow everywhere simultaniously, insisting that it must will inevitably lead to a bias towards population growth. The population HAS to shrink somewhere for things to stay stable, since it will invariably grow in a few places, and at this point the growing countries outweigh the shrinking ones sharply.
With 2, I’ll expand on this argument. Unrestrained pollution will lead to a future where the earth warms which can rapidly leading to famine and population decline after an era of sharp population growth. You are worried about a decline in children in a set of countries, but that problem is a lot less of a problem when it’s happening in a few countries, than when it’s happening in every country at the same time. Then things go worse for every individual country involved, as immigration is not an option.
Perhaps my use of "society" overemphasized the culture aspect that you pick up on. "perserving culture" is of a secondary importance to me, what's more important is the people themselves. As you say, the memes will be able to fend for themselves and survive even if the people in the society do not. People are not merely the transmission vectors of DNA and memes.
> there is no problem with the supply of people, global population is growing. > and at this point the growing countries outweigh the shrinking ones sharply.
Global population may be growing (for now) but the rate at which its growing is decreasing [0].
Further, (and I wish I had a source at hand) the problem with relying on immigration to sustain population levels in a country is that many countries do too good of a job at assimilation. The fertility rate of immigrants rapidly converges to the local level over the course of 2-3 generations.
> You are worried about a decline in children in a set of countries. I’m worried a decline in children, immigrants, population, in every country in the world simultaneously.
I don't think that's true. You and I are worried about the same thing. I look at Japan and Korean as habringer of what's to come for the rest of the countries in the world (and thus the world as a whole), i.e. an aging population without enough children to maintain any semblence of the current way of life working, much less to replenish the population.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/2019-Revision-–-W...
I would love to save western cultures and the genetics are part of the culture. They just are. The regional adaptions people's bodies have to their climate and geography and local food sources really does influence their interests and their cultures to a degree. Peoples bodies are different and that makes them do different things, that's one example I can think of genetics influencing culture. If all the whites die off for instance there will probably be less people doing extreme snowboarding while chugging milk.
Yet the concerns I've raised I believe we should at the very least be wary of.
One of the key points he made that seemed fairly intuitive is that as your population declines you eventually wind up with significantly fewer long term experts in various fields of science and engineering. This means that the people who train up the next generation of scientists and engineers are spread thinner, and therefore less depth of expertise in those fields as the decline continues.
I'm not sure how much that idea is backed up by evidence, but it at least makes some sense.
Population decline had never really registered as a problem to me until I heard that episode - I always kinda figured that less people around would be a net good. Definitely worth a listen if you're interested in the topic.
> I think it's less about preserving sparkling blue eyes and more about the negative effects of a declining population on a country's economy.
Good thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration is a thing
> One of the key points he made that seemed fairly intuitive is that as your population declines you eventually wind up with significantly fewer long term experts in various fields of science and engineering.
Good thing we have books, the Internet, billions of video recordings, et al.
As for immigration, no arguments there. But that point leads back to the question of why a society hits population decline in the first place. Presumably the same things that cause your "native" population to stop reproducing eventually affects your immigrants after a generation or so, so while it can definitely slow the population decline, it's not a full solution.
To your point about the loss of deep expertise - I think the problem is still worth thinking about. Yes, we can make new experts. And those experts might even be more productive than the last generation of experts. But at the end of the day, it takes longer to make them, and you still have less.
I'm not sure how much I agree with Zeihan, but he makes some interesting points which I hadn't previously considered.
I think it could be a full solution. In theory there could be 2 populations, a slow population and a fast population, and the fast population continually donates people to the slow population via immigration to sustain it. The worry would be if some idea from the slow population infects the fast population and causes it to slow down.
If there is a risk, your risk isn't that you have too few experts to offer training, it's that the young learners are spread too thin. There aren't enough people looking to learn for all the people who have knowledge to pass down and so you lose knowledge in that transition.
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With that said, I find the general premise that we would be looking at some kind of dark age with the level of population decline any of us are likely to see in our lifetimes, nearly comical.
The global population now is around 8 billion. It was around 3 billion in 1960 (4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999). It doesn't seem to me that the pace of change or technological advancement was particularly slow in any of those time periods, and the substantial productivity gains since then would alone suggest that we'd be more efficient for those population levels than things were at that time.
Every corner of the world is declining in fertility, from South Korea to Niger.
So no, I don't think it is a victory unless human rights and progress don't mean anything. I'm from one of these places where birth rates are high but the quality of life is awful and government corruption is astronomical. Most people there will probably shun you if not actually harm you for doing something that nobody cares about in the US or some western countries. Recently I saw a post about how the Norwegian health ministry released some images of people doing various sexual poses as part of some sex-ed. I thought it was quite neat, and it features multiple sexualities. I will bet my life savings you try doing that where I'm from that it won't go so well and the number of fundamentalist minded people is rising.
I think there's a typo there.
Yes. If modern (western dominated) society is not self-sustaining, this should be a big hint, that there is something deeply wrong with our culture.
> If you think of us all as one race, the human race
But that doesn't mean populations are interchangeable?
"since all traits influenced by genetics are expected to differ across populations (because the frequencies of genetic variations are rarely exactly the same across populations), the genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations, too. You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century."
David Reich in the NYTimes (archive https://archive.ph/Zfhc3)
Also you should specify whether you mean West or East (presumably West) Pakistan’s population numbers. The western half had 51m people in 1960.
There's a scary implication. If having to support more elderly causes one to produce less offspring, we have a positive feedback loop resulting in population collapse.
I think a lot of people in developed countries voluntarily or involuntarily adopt a psychological willingness to not have kids and let their culture collapse because the emotional distress of a life in a post-growth world. A world where your freedoms, privacy, and economic opportunities are shrinking, to extract temporary value and stability for the upper class, out of you and your labour/compliance. The only worldly way out of it is to basically step on the others while going up to implement these changes, which feels horrible to a naturally empathic creature like man. It's a cursed state of being.
Housing prices are 9x salary vs 4.5x salary in the 70s and it takes a while to save up. Personal data point: it took me winning an IPO lottery to start thinking about having kids for real. Having kids while earning minimal wage? Terrifying, especially in the US where getting yourself or your kid sick could bankrupt you in the blink of an eye - and if you want multiple kids you increase the risk.
So we think we have to have it all before we start trying having kids and have no sense of community whatsoever. Societal focus on hedonism and career leaves little to no time to raise kids. And at the end of the day you end up having no support from the society that slowly but surely ages.
This nuance is important; it emphasizes the real issue is not economics, but culture! We've created a society that values the pursuit of wealth and comfort more than family, and it's likely this system is not sustainable. Not everybody can be wealthy, because wealth is relative and mediated by what exists. If 30% of people want something and there's only enough for 3%, then it doesn't matter what the relative wealth is among these people: 90% of people won't be able to "afford" it, and that will never change. A post-scarcity society will never exist alongside consumerism; we'll simply take what we can have for granted and lust over the new scarcities.
Unfortunately many people who are not properly equipped to raise children (financially, temperamentally or otherwise) have lots of children and don't make it work. The result is a permanent underclass and a serious crime problem in many of our major cities.
I'm not saying people shouldn't take the risk, but it does seem that more people are either not willing to, or the risk profile changed since 70s, or both.
The data for the past few decades (near universal fall in birthrates and increasing mother's age at birth) clearly indicates otherwise.
They didn't wait to have babies.
The world was simply much simpler.
The number of practically available paths forward were less. So why wait? Nowadays people are in an analysis paralysis, so they just wait. (Or try to find better mates, better jobs, better social groups/communities, move around more.)
And due to less homogeneity it's seems harder to find someone. (And probably is harder.)
Also the acceptable mortality was higher. Wars were more common, losing people due to illness was also more common, etc.
And nowadays we have endless alternatives to getting married. Single life is very enjoyable. (see Netflix et al :))
Not really sure what I'm going to be learning from them about raising children in the 21st century.
1. Inverse relationship between household income and fertility rate?
2. Enhanced child tax credit (US), child benefit (UK), Medicaid (kid gets sick?)
3. Insanely progressive taxes on income?
If anything the Korean system is even more intense; at least with American SATs or ACTs it's only three hours, you can retake them as many times as you want, multiple times a year, and getting into a mid-tier university for undergrad is still okay. South Korea has a university test that is eight hours long, only held once a year (so you wait a whole year to retake results) and the chaebols (the South Korean conglomerates that control the economy, like Samsung or LG) only really hire from top tier universities. South Korea has a university graduate unemployment rate of 25%, compared to the US at 4%.
One thing I think gets really overlooked is that college and job searches tear apart extended families, which in more traditional societies are a huge part of the child care strategy.
Monthly mortgage payments are the same though. (Lower interest rates, etc.)
Also building costs gone up. (The plague of single family homes, stricter building codes, higher quality requirements from buyers, while buildings are still produced using the old labor intensive methods.) And due to fucked up zoning building low-cost housing is just not happening :/
So folks are basically forced to buy expensive houses.
Of course. Malthusianism, eugenics.
Healthcare costs are ongoing, and obscene. Routine newborn vaccines are around $900 per visit even with partial insurance coverage. Not to mention any unforeseen hospital visits that will force you to hit your deductible in the first two quarters of the year ($10k per child in our case).
In most tier 2/3 cities in the US you can expect daycare to cost $1,000-$1,800 per child per month.
In any tier 1 city, especially west coast cities like Seattle and SF, expect to pay at least $2,000/child per month.
On top of that, you’ll have a mortgage. With median housing prices around $1.2-$1.6m and rates in the mid 5% you’re looking at anywhere from $6,500-$8,000/month for a mortgage depending on taxes.
So right out of the gate, you’re at $10k of post tax income just going to daycare costs and a mortgage. You likely have other costs that equal at least $1,000/month. And that’s for 1 kid. Add another kid and you’re easily approaching $15k per month.
If you do the math, you’ll need to make at least $250k if you have one kid considering at least 40% is going straight to taxes (aka military funds since we get nothing in this country for the insane amount of taxes we pay).
Per ACA, all routine newborn care (including vaccines and routine blood draw) is 100% paid by insurance company. The specifics are all listed in the links below.
https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-children/
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...
>Not to mention any unforeseen hospital visits that will force you to hit your deductible in the first two quarters of the year ($10k per child in our case).
This is not true for the US. The maximum out of pocket legal limit for 2022 is $17.4k for a family. If you have a half decent employer, deductibles are far lower (in the $3k to $5k range), and so are out of pocket maximums (in the $5k to $10k range at most).
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
https://www.healthcare.gov/high-deductible-health-plan/
I would budget at least 2 years of out of pocket maximums to have on hand. In our case, we hit out of pocket maximums of ~$5k and ~$7k during the year of birth, otherwise it costs $150 to $250 for a regular pink eye/ear infection consult and $400 to $500 for a specialist consult. This is in a very high cost of living area.
The link you shared says this.
“All Marketplace health plans and many other plans must cover the following list of preventive services for children without charging you a copayment or coinsurance. This is true even if you haven’t met your yearly deductible.”
Maximum out of pocket only kicks in once you’ve hit the deductible on 2+ family members, at least for our plan. So for us, the max is $20k.
>Maximum out of pocket only kicks in once you’ve hit the deductible on 2+ family members, at least for our plan. So for us, the max is $20k.
Out of pocket maximum has nothing to do with deductible. Copays/coinsurance “kick in” after deductibles are reached.
If you had purchased ACA complaint health insurance, then OOP max is simply OOP max, a single number that once you reach, you do not pay further for in network services (and now for out of network emergency services also).
Edit: note that a “Marketplace” (or ACA complaint) plan explicitly transfers wealth from young and/or healthy to old and/or unhealthy, where healthy and unhealthy mean “does not need healthcare” and “needs healthcare”. So by choosing to go with a non Marketplace plan, they are placing their bets on not needing healthcare…which is probably not a winning bet for people birthing and raising young children.
The unfortunate reality is that paying $2000/month to an employer managed health plan is cheaper than going through the federal government ($5,000/month for a family of 4 the last I checked). If marketplace plans had lower premiums and lower deductibles that would be the ideal option.
Here is NJ’s prices, which is a relatively high cost state:
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
For a silver level Horizon BCBS plan (Omnia Silver HSA, pretty broad coverage, never seen a provider not in network), you would be looking at $300 to $700 per person, calculated using the age rating factors at the bottom. And I know from experience the max OOP was $10k or a little less.
Even if you were older parents, the total would come in under $3k per month for a plan that covered 70% of expected healthcare expense, which is what qualifies it to be labeled silver.
I know priced in California were not too much more than NJ. There is a Kaiser pdf showing a detailed breakdown of premiums nationwide, but pretty much everywhere scales from $300 to $1k per month from age 20 to 65 for a silver level plan.
And this is all for buying via healthcare.gov. I would bet all big employers provide far more subsidized ACA compliant health insurance, so if you are employed, I would budget for employers to pay 70% of the premium, so individuals would pay 30% of $2k for family coverage = $700 per month and be subject to $5k per year deductible, and $10k oop max per year.
Basically, you can expect to insure your whole family for unlimited (in network and out of network emergency) healthcare expense for $20k per year if you work for a big company, and $40k per year if you are paying yourself, maybe $45k if you’re over 50 years old.
Social factors are not considered enough. As societies get more materialistic, and socio-economically advanced, there seems to be more individualistic, privacy[in the wrong way, escalating to extreme isolationism], lack of social interaction and bonding etc.
I myself felt odd during the time I stayed in the US, the whole concept of individualism and privacy was taken too far, and everybody felt lonely in their own way. People moved around in fixed schedules and paths, almost like an open air prison. Given limited social interaction outside work[where you can't even sneeze without offending some one]. This really felt like passion and purpose in life was slowly fading away. I can imagine how a society with this sort of a lifestyle could fare on the longer run. People would want lesser and lesser people around them, and interact with them even lesser as time would proceed.
Countries like India and Pakistan definitely have third world infrastructure, but the social infrastructure is very strong and likely to remain, this is due to socio-religious reasons. For this reason, people get married and have 2+ kids.
One of the reasons we moved to a country like the US is to be away from a backwards minded, theocratic af, corrupt society. To see that these types of countries are actually booming while highly progressed ones are depressing is super depressing.
Bribes implies quid pro quo. Someone who can "fix" some implies an exclusive network of favors traded with no record.
I had never met, spoken with, or donated to my congressman before this took place.
The only process should be the official process as laid out by the Department of State.
>Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources.
and the proposition is to Shangai people into being, with no say in it, to meet this onerous workload, how is that defensible? You could say they aren't going to be forced to labor, but they are because otherwise they will starve and suffer.
Or maybe the tragedy of the commons was having 6 children per family within living memory? Maybe now by dropping our population we are doing much better for the world society as a whole. It all depends on your perspective I guess. I fail to see the problem with a drop in world population.
> At this rate, there will only be 3m South Koreans in 3 generations. I don't see how you expect a country to survive that decline. In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.
Maybe South Korea won't survive in its current form. The world will keep revolving the sun nonetheless.
For the population to actually grow, some people will need to make three kids. I just don't see that happening at scale at all. Most won't even make two kids, forget about three.
The resources of korea and their technology will not go away, they will now be at the hands of fewer people, so more wealth / person. Historically it was small states that dominated the world, the populous ones were ravaged by poverty and famine.
People are calculating (correctly) that our future technology does not need a lot of hands, and that is true. Look at the tech sector , which employs a tiny percentage of the population but has enormous output.
As for the egoist act of genetic heritage/perpetuation, well let's be honest, in 10 years people will be modifying their genes and removing our clunky and faulty dna so there goes our glory.
As for wars/security, those are already fought with drones
> I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off
The trend will not continue forever
To me , this all highlights that we need to ramp up anti-aging technology fast and hard. It s much higher priority than sending humans to mars
Something I've noticed is that many couples that do want a child have a very difficult time conceiving. People are having kids at a later age on average, but even younger couples seem to have a hard time.
Various gynecological disorders seem to be very common too - fibroids, endometriosis, adenomyosis, amongst others, all of which affect a woman's fertility.
My wife and I have been trying for a kid but have been unsuccessful. Many of our friends are experiencing the same, and are resorting to clinical fertility procedures like in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination.
I don't know how true it is, but one of my friends outright said that the majority of women in Korea are conceiving through some kind of fertility procedure, and that if we really wanted a baby, not to waste our time and just go ahead and do the same.
One thing that makes me believe him is that there are a ton of twins amongst the couples in our social circle. My understanding is that naturally twins are a rare phenomenon, but much more likely if doing something like in vitro or artificial insemination?
Us, we've already decided that push comes to shove, we'll most likely adopt.
We do know some friends that were though, and did do exactly that.
Also IVF is significantly cheaper in Korea? We know some friends who are low income that had the procedure done there.
Add to that, the usual HN phenomenon that we're observing how the world and our countries (USA & Korea) seem be going down the toilet, and that makes us feel hesitant to bring a new human being into the world, especially when there are kids already here that could use a loving family.
That is, one kid per woman halves the population. If the axiom is at least maintaining, ideally growing the population, every woman needs to give birth to at least two and ideally three or more kids.
Of course, this isn't to say I'm telling other people what to do regarding offspring, because I hate that kind of intrusive attitude. I've already decided I'm having no kids, because fuck the human world; and anyone who comes bitching at me about it one way or another can take a hike and pound sand. So I'm not going to be hypocritical and turn around and tell other people what to do in the bedroom.
But if the purpose for all the noise behind childbearing is to take population count trends out of the negatives, advising "one kid" not only doesn't help solve the problem but actively makes it worse.
As for what decafninja (or any individual for that matter) decides upon in the bedroom, that's for him to decide and his business alone. I'm not going to comment because it's none of my business.
I'm just pointing out that in a wider discussion of "oh noes population decline oh noes low birth rates", it's not constructive to be talking about having 1 kid when there's a hard minimum of having 2 kids and ideally more.
If people voluntarily self limit the size of the population that is a good thing because it means we won't need to shoot each other if it turns out we are straining the earth too much.
My point was that there is no “we” when we speak of humanity as a broad aggregate this way. There are specific constituencies—for instance, Bolsenaro and his supporters in Brazil—who are blocking the policies that most of us want to implement to stop climate change. It’s not “we” who are the problem, it’s “them”.
If you blame humanity in the aggregate you misdirect your energies and misidentify the solution.
The thing to do is to apply the appropriate political levers to weaken and oppose the constituencies who prioritize status-quo fossil-fuel energy policies over civilizational stability and the well-being of life on Earth. Blaming all of humanity is the equivalent of giving up and doing nothing, and makes the problem worse.
Thankfully, in our case, our parents don't care, and neither do we.
I'm also an only child, as is my wife, so this means both our branches of our families' genetic bloodlines are effectively ending (albeit the onus for this is on the male side). But again - we don't care.
The true reason for valuing lineages is more about social rank/class protectionism.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distinctive-habsbu...
"no value" here is probably in tens, maybe hundreds of trillions of dollars in the present time PPP basis.
I am hoping Sapolsky's latest book may shed some light on the subject without the Wade/Murray "bell curve" implications.
The thought has occurred to me. I would describe both my wife and I as being stable mannered and not prone to rash decisions. Odds are a biological child of ours might resemble that personality.
I also acknowledge a child we adopt may have had biological parents with very different personalities than us, and therefore the child may be very different from us in personality.
At the same time, I don't believe that just because the child's biological parents might have been wild and crazy, the child is doomed to the same fate even with our care.
Tell me you haven't read many behavioral genetics papers without telling me you haven't read many behavioral genetics papers :).
But I do believe nurture can help to prevent or exacerbate those issues
However the main risk factor for trying and then abusing opioids, for example, is trauma, typically but not only in childhood. Basically, it’s both nature and nurture, as most things are. Where the percentages lie for both, I don’t think we know yet.
For instance parents who have genes that increase impulsivity are more likely to e beat their kids exposing them to trauma, the kids are more likely to do dumb things that expose themselves to trauma, and the kids are more likely to do impulsive things like try drugs.
So it's hard to disentangle what portion of the effects of trauma are direct and which are confounds.
Is the number of human toes genetic? How heritable is the number of toes on a human being?
Is wearing a dress genetic? How heritable is whether or not you wear a dress?
Heritability isn’t proof that a trait is genetic, but it’s strong evidence once you start addressing confounding factors. As I recall, the IQ heritability research was done with twin studies.
This is like shocking to me we’re even debating this. I would have assumed it’s conventional wisdom.
Traits can trivially be minimally heritable and totally genetically determined. The number of fingers on your hands is genetically determined by your Hox genes. But the variation in the number of fingers on your hand (more precisely: across the population) is overwhelmingly not genetically determined. Genetically determined, low heritability.
Traits can trivially be maximally heritable and not at all genetically determined. Whether or not you wear lipstick is largely decided by XY vs. XX. But there's no gene for wearing lipstick; if the cultural ball had broken a different way, we might all be wearing lipstick, or none of us. Genetically unencumbered, high heritability.
So: you haven't said anything. You're not even wrong. All you pointed out was that you can do a study and determine that population variations in intelligence (or bad driving, or social trust, or fear of dentists) are traceable to genetic variance. That doesn't mean that genes literally encode the outcome.
Heritability isn't "strong evidence". It's barely evidence at all. It's literally just a framing of the question, which your argument simply begs. Irresponsibly, at that. None of this should be news to you.
I don't even have to take a position on the blighted question of whether intelligence is genetically determined (or whether we can measure it meaningfully at all, or whether it's fixed at birth or fluid, or whether outcomes in intellectual performance are epigenetic). And I'm not. I'm just pointing out that your argument, the one I replied to, was literally vacuous.
No, it wasn't. Such a set up is impossible because of lack of samples and sampling bias.
All that "IQ is X% heritable" means is that they ran a linear regression on a large data set and saw that the variance error in the regression reduced by X% when they plugged in parental IQ as a covariate in the regression.
This is a correlational study as causal studies are impossible. Correlational studies are inherently spurious and ignore lots of confounding factors. Nevertheless, we can say that what we routinely observe in real life - smart parents having smart kids, has been grounded in real data.
For getting effect of race on IQ you plug in race as a covariate. Typically, most of the race based IQ research remove parental IQ as a covariate. All of these regression based studies are dubious and there is no real way to correct it. A large data set of twins who were separated at birth could help, but there are caveats there as well.
As an aside, Jordan Peterson seems to love these race IQ regression models and likes to call them hard undeniable science. He immediately switched sides when talking about climate models and how these models can't be trusted, because the simple choice of covariate included creates absolutely unreliable and biased models.
For eg, if you take Einstein's kid and let wolves raise him, we can expect the kids IQ to be somewhat lower.
I would guess IQ is primarily genetic, but these heritability studies don't show that.
https://www.newsweek.com/identical-twins-raised-apart-differ...
There was a 16 point IQ difference between twins. Nurture had a strong impact on IQ in this case.
Not that we don't change as we age obviously, but it's definitely not a blank slate by a mile.
I know for a fact that at least some of our friends here in the US have gone to Korea to have the procedure done, not in the US, due to cost reasons. And obviously our friends still in Korea would have had it done in Korea.
That could also explain why I don't notice the prevalence of twins amongst our friends of other nationalities here.
Source: I'm a dad of 8yo fraternal twins.
On the other hand, even one IVF embryo has much more likelihood of splitting and creating twins than natural. I saw the science at 10X chance but a quick Google search shows slightly lower.
But it does seem to affect Korean-Americans that have been here longer too.
Even amongst our close family, my cousin is affected, two of her cousins are affected. All three were born and raised in Korea to adulthood and came here within the past 10 years. My cousin has an American (Caucasian) husband, her two cousins have born-in-the-USA Korean-American husbands.
Interestingly enough, our friends of other nationalities don't seem to be as affected - or maybe they just don't talk about this subject as openly? Either way, I have not noticed the twins phenomenon there.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is intentional. That said, all I have is the constant drum of “the world is over populated” by leaders around the world to back up my reasoning for potentially being intentional.
Plenty of non-intentional possibilities as well.
Those fertility procedures are not the desired way to go about having a baby. The vast majority of the time it's a procedure of last resort (i.e. can't get pregnant another way). These procedures are expensive and often don't work.
It could be intentional that a government, organization or pharmaceutical / chemical company is knowingly sterilizing / making it more difficult to conceive. This could either be through a willingness to look the other way (i.e. a side effect) or intentional (North Korea for instance may do some sabotage or government is intentionally pushing population reduction)
For instance, the US government gives funding to Planned Parenthood which provides birth control, abortions, and other drugs to support people looking to not have children. This organization advertises and gives a lot of birth control out for free or low fees. That's an overt intentional act of reducing population growth.
Similarly, a concern I have is purposefully downplaying the risks of long-term birth control via "the pill". Then having policies that make that pill easy to acquire (without being knowledgeable of said side effects) AND with the ability for minors to obtain them without parental awareness. Those are intentional policies intended to reduces fertility.
Depo-provera - the monthly injection of medroxyprogesterone - was temporally associated with my friend's first psychotic break. Medroxyprogesterone causes cortisol deficiency; psychosis is associated with an inability to produce cortisol...
"The pill" uses fake hormones to shut down ovulation. But the doctors are trained to tell women their hormonal cycles are being 'regulated' with 'hormones, so that's what women get told. Tragic.
For others reading, remember that no evidence is being provided for this hypothesis.
> For instance, the US government gives funding to Planned Parenthood which provides birth control, abortions, and other drugs to support people looking to not have children. This organization advertises and gives a lot of birth control out for free or low fees. That's an overt intentional act of reducing population growth.
You've provided no basis for this claim that Planned Parenthood provides birth control, abortions, or other drugs as part of a US program to intentionally reduce population growth.
Any funding of birth control or abortions by definition will slow population growth.
Further and specifically in regard to planned parenthood
> Sanger was so intent on her mission to advocate for birth control that she chose to align herself with ideas and organizations that were ableist and white supremacist. In 1926, she spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) at a rally in New Jersey to promote birth control methods. Sanger endorsed the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that states could forcibly sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge. The acceptance of this decision by Sanger and other thought leaders laid the foundation for tens of thousands of people to be sterilized, often against their will.
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-hi...
It would be naive to assume that a group who’s specific goal was slowing population growth is no longer still doing it (albeit more “equitably”)
I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing; just pointing out the realities.
You can certainly suggest that a result of family planning activities such as birth control, condoms, abortion, or abstinence result in slower or no population growth, but I do not see this as the primary purpose of these tools/activities, which is to enable people to decide when they are ready to have children.
This is the important point from your link, which naturally you took out a single quote out of context either out of malice and bad intentions, or because you simply didn't read further. I'll assume the latter.
> Planned Parenthood believes that all people — of every race, religion, gender identity, ability, immigration status, and geography — are full human beings with the right to determine their own future and decide, without coercion or judgement, whether and when to have children.
> Margaret Sanger’s racism and belief in eugenics are in direct opposition to Planned Parenthood’s mission. Planned Parenthood denounces Margaret Sanger’s belief in eugenics. Further, Planned Parenthood denounces the history and legacy of anti-Blackness in gynecology and the reproductive rights movement, and the mistreatment that continues against Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in this country.
The fact that they call out their history (which somehow still lacks being a US program) and are explicit about what they stand for and what they don't stand for is admirable and honest. You cherry-picking a quote isn't.
I think you have to not read what I’m writing to make that argument.
The US government is funding an organization which has the explicit goal of reducing the number of children women have. By definition that is reducing population growth.
I pointed out it was founded with that purpose. But even if you look at what it does today: provide birth control and abortions (among other services). Again, by definition that will reduce population growth.
Might be for a good reason or a reason you agree with. Might be admirable, I personally don’t have any moral position. I’m just stating as a fact by funding that organization the US is funding the reduction in population growth through birth control and abortion services
You might want to consult with a professional, that’s paranoid thinking.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_Amer...
I’m not even saying that nefarious.
Have you heard of planned parenthood? The government gives them money to aid in reducing fertility. Particularly in populations that would find children “burdensome”.
It’s not a stretch to consider the idea the government, organization or company might knowingly hide side effects of something detrimental. Alternative the government could say, urge it’s medical staff to hand out “the pill”. Schools already urge students to use condoms and give them out in some cases.
Just as an example: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oregon-school-district-oks-teac...
You’d have to be a different kind of crazy to think it’s not possible lol
If China wanted to reduce population in 2022, would it announce a mandatory one-child-policy? Or would it use any number of other more subtle techniques to reduce fertility?
So OPs remark doesn't sound very paranoid to me. It sounds unjustified--I can think of a million innocent reasons fertility is decreasing.
While you might find individuals in governments some places that still worry about overpopulation, most places outside of sub-Saharan Africa, the concern now is a growing demographic timebomb as populations age and birth rates are falling below replacement almost everywhere. (Sub-Saharan Africa is also seeing sharp declines, but is not there yet)
For the record I actually agree with this. I think it’s most likely not intentional. That said I wouldn’t be surprised if it was intentional [as there is precedent] (which is what I initially said).
How long have you been seeing this trend?
There’s a lot of experts who have been arguing that everything from pesticides to vaccines will slowly degrade our ability to produce [healthy] offspring. The general reasoning is fairly straight forward - if one thing damages your DNA or what have you, then it might be anywhere from 0 to 3 generations for issues to crop up.
There’s also social factors - fear, stress, isolation, etc will all impact willingness to reproduce (imo that’s not it).
Finally, there’s general stagnation. Ie if your not eating well, working in a field, etc you’re not going to be healthy.
Reality is probably a combination of everything, BUT women should also seriously research side effects of birth control. I have a sneaking suspicion birth control mediating hormones will have many long-term effects. I know women who were impacted by this.
Basically anything that can kill bacteria, mosquitoes or rats, can also kill tissues in your body. Nobody knows what tissues because body is a complicated structure of pathways. Most of the things we take in have an entry through mouth and nose, but no real exit path. They could kill things in your body.
Now many times that's tissues in your pancreas, or thyroid glands. Which perfectly explains diabetes and thyroid epidemics in countries like India.
Add to this the micro plastic pollution.
The "exponential increase" is still very low in absolute terms
Either a toddler or around kindergarten age seems realistic, based on what I’ve seen with other couples who’ve adopted in our social circle.
Edit: Some Artificial hormones are found in plastic, rates go up when it's recycled plastics.
yeah I heard of the plastic theory and I think the air pollution in Korea is an overlooked factor. The fine dust particulates must have some impact on the reproduction system.
maybe even Ramen? Koreans consume a ton of instant ramen. High rate of alcohol?
I am interested to hear more about the impact of plastic. It is unavoidable and its widely used in Asia.
...what I really think is contraceptives is having an impact and that we are politically blocked from discussing it. What happened in Korea since 2010s? Huge amount of contraceptive pills were sold as society adopted a more laissez faire attitude towards sex. 10 years later those women are not trying to have babies and cannot. Is this too far fetched?
We are seeing the same issue in most western countries that correlate with high contraceptive usage. There is just less children being born but not an issue where contraception is tough.
- carbohydrate (especially fructose) vs animal-protein/-fat consumption
- types of fat (our bodies only contain certain kinds)
- xenœstrogen & hormones of all types not just phyto-œstrogens
- Vitamin D, Magnesium, ferritin, pre-eclampsia, anæmia (lack of hæme iron consumption)
- more recently the whole statin-cholesterol debacle, Goodhart's law in action
I do know that some chemicals, possibly also found in some plastics (soft plastic probably) function a bit like estrogen, potentially reducing male fertility.
In almost all South-east Asian countries in particular, I have noticed high levels of sucrose consumption so I am curious if Korea is the similar to SEA, or if either of these factors apply to either of you?
Koreans have famously long working hours, but as you are not there, those stress factors should likely not apply to you.
Another point to note is that I have heard adoption is at least as difficult as IVF, emotionally & financially speaking, although there's less physical pain. At least IVF can point you to where the problem lies (the knowledge of that can be disconcerting) providing you perhaps avenues to mitigate/ameliorate those factors, which could improve your overall QoL and also lead to better health-outcomes.
I'm Korean born, but spent most of my life in the US. My wife is a much more recent immigrant so she is a product of the Korean education system as well as the Korean corporate world and all that entails.
We have some friends that have adopted, so are aware of the potential issues. Most of them seem perfectly fine, but one had some initial problems with the child adjusting to his new life. These were all toddlers (3-5 years old).
And almost every single person I know personally with difficulty conceiving (various races, various countries, various diagnoses including ectopic/fibroids/undiagnosed) had some obvious-to-me metabolic-syndrome/cholecalciferol/ferritin issues going on, particularly Asian-sub-continentals in northern sun-starved climates who were not supplementing cholecalciferol.
Aside: How does one tell downvotes? I suppose I should look in the FAQ. IIRC only established members can downvote. Despite my account being from HN's 2007 inception, I do not have enough established-karma to have my own downvote button. So I generally don't bother about it, as it's a bit of a circular dead-end karma-spiral which I had thought the HN mechanics were supposed to avoid.
However, as to HN culture, typically anyone complaining about downvotes will be further downvoted. It usually does not matter what the rest of the comment says, if you complain about downvotes, HN will give you a lot more of them. I like to think that it is a way for the community to remind individuals that these are all imaginary points anyway and to not be attached to one's karma number anymore than one is attached to the number of the nearest speed limit sign.
Also, I appreciate your use of the singular "they" :-)
Even without evidence of contraceptions impact on fertility, when you repeatedly disrupt a natural process such as through abortion, is it any surprise that most development countries have dwindling birth rates? Is it a surprise that a country like South Korea with high abortion rate have the lowest birth rate?
Correlation may not mean causation but the probability is high. What doesn't help is that we censor/cancel people for even mentioning that abortion/contraception have unknown impact on fertility and we are left guessing what else it could be: plastic? air pollution? marijuana? All of these have been without previous generation but what was absent then compared to today was the ready availability of contraceptives/abortion.
Women have more power and independence than anytime in history, they can have a career, they can be sexually active, they can abort their fetus or put in their body all sorts of ways to prevent pregnancy. Is it any surprise that they are now finding it difficult to conceive?
When Progesterone USP (bio-identical) is applied to the skin, it gets into circulation and avoids first pass metabolization by liver. When the appropriate solvent is used to dissolve the Progesterone USP powder, the progesterone is transported through the liver.
Steroidogenesis refers to the process whereby the body makes steroids for itself. The key jump - from cholesterol to pregnenolone - is facilitated with Vitamin A and thyroid (T3).
Know a couple who were trying to conceive, after suppressing her fertility with fake hormones (and an IUD) for maybe 8+ years. Lots of miscarriages. They eventually went for IVF, which didn't work either. They gave up and started getting their house ready for adoption. Then they got surprised. I don't think she used topical Progesterone, just the megadoses in Prometrium (liver can't destroy it all on the first pass).
Best wishes to you & your wife.
SK has the oldest first time mums in the world: https://photius.com/rankings/2020/population/mothers_mean_ag...
If you are not wasteful (constant new things, fancy vacations etc), young children are not expensive. It really only gets expensive when you have to pay tuition.
There are more factors nowadays that convince people (rationally or not) that bringing a child into this world would be to give someone the gift of a lifetime of misery.
My irrational argument for having a child? To combat the stupidity of the next generation. If the good people (And who doesn't think they themselves are the good guys?) don't procreate then the evil/stupid win by default.
"Default? The two sweetest words in the English language! De-FAULT! De-FAULT! De-FAULT!" - Homer
There are various factors that increase the chances of having fraternal (non-identical) twins. Genetics (a women who is a twin herself is more likely to have twins), age (older women are more likely to have twins), and, of course, fertility drugs which stimulate ovulation can result in more eggs being released and thus more likely to produce twins.
Identical twins, on the other hand, are a natural phenomenon that occurs in about 1 in 250 pregnancies. There are no known factors that increase the chances of identical twins.
---
Year 0: 100 newborns
Year 20: 100 twenties, 50 newborns
Year 40: 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns
Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns
Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns
Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns
Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn
---
In spite of having an extinction level fertility rate, the population nearly doubled in the first 60 years, going from 100 to 187. And it took 80 years to even see the population begin to decline. But then suddenly over the second 60 years, the population exponentially declined going from 187 to 22. This is very akin to the scenario in Korea, because they went from a fertility rate of 6+ to < 1. So they're starting with a large "newborn" population.
Because of the fact that we live much longer than we are fertile, it really damages any idea of "Well we'll just solve this when it becomes a problem." When it starts to become obvious there's a problem, the decline is already coming at an exponential rate. And it's entirely possible that such a small youth population supporting a suddenly massive elderly population will drive fertility rates even lower.
It increasingly seems that the future of our planet will not be decided by politics, ideology, or anything of the sort. It will simply be decided by whichever groups have children at healthy rates.
So here is what the table looks like if we assume that Year 0 was the final year of 6 fertility:
(148) Year 0: 4 sixties, 11 forties, 33 twenties, 100 newborns,
(194) Year 20: 11 sixties, 33 forties, 100 twenties, 50 newborns
(208) Year 40: 33 sixties, 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns
(187) Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns
(93) Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns
(46) Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns
(23) Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn
In a shrinking population, are individual people worse off, or does it just look like a decline when you look at the country in aggregate? There is no shortage of squandered talent in the world. So many people work below their capability because there are just more people than opportunities. It seems like it’s not a problem to keep running the modern world, even with a fraction of the current world population.
And besides, many smart folks think we are deep into overshoot, not just on carbon emissions, but on almost every resource we use to run the global economy. If we are beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, then we either need to become massively more efficient or just have massively fewer people on the planet. And given that there is no current hope of sustainable living on any other planet, seems like lowering birth rates can only be a good thing that will give us some chance of surviving our ecological bottleneck.
Environmentalists say that fewer people will be good for the environment. But what about investments and research into green energy and carbon removal? Those will simply not happen unless the economy is still growing.
I don't think it is as binary as you suggest. There will be lower total saving after a delay. There will certainly be less investment more immediately.
What will happen is this.
If you borrow money to make and sell (say) shoes, and the population is doubling every 35 years (2% growth), then your market doubles in 35 years also. (You need money because your buildings and equipment wear out, if not for materials.)
Your lenders have it relatively easy in this situation, because fewer of their borrowers go bust, so interest rates (which are partly compensation for risk) are lower.
With negative population growth, your market is shrinking, so your lenders' risk of loss increases.
Anyone who still has excess savings demands higher return on investment. Fewer potential investments can jump the higher hurdle. Total investment decreases, total income decreases and everything spirals down.
So does the number of your potential competitors.
It’s not clear to me it would necessarily play out as people stopping all non critical work to take care of old people. Maybe it would, on a family level - People would spend more time taking care of their parents, and then maybe conclude they should have more kids to take care of them when they are older like they do in the developing world. But the modern pyramid-shaped pension program is a recent invention and not necessarily one I think would be so durable as to destroy other industries?
>Without excess savings there will be no tech industry, improvements in science, infrastructure investments or much of anything interesting.
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. Governments borrow more and more money to artificially turn excess savings into regular savings by increasing the investment rate, any benefits you think come from excess savings actually come from turning excess savings into regular savings aka savings = investment.
If savings are above investment it means aggregate demand is below aggregate supply and we are failing millions of people.
Edit: The other issue is tribal. The global tribe has lots of sufficient labor and young people to offset decreasing numbers of young South Koreans, but humans are not fungible. There will be many types of conflict due to cultural differences, as well as shifting power dynamics and the resulting lack of acceptance of newcomers on the same level as native tribe members, etc.
It's debatable. Population declines are good for the environment. But rapid drops has cultural, political, economic and geopolitical consequences. e.g. South Korea doesn't really trust NK or China or that they can't really be a manufacturing economy without young workers.
That being said: Capital of a few old people becomes pretty meaningless when your economy is collapsing. See any country that went through capital collapse in the last 100 years or so.
Combine this with the fact that yes, our overshoot is horrific, I really do not see why declining birth rates in this era are a bad thing.
Just about every society has dependents who can no longer work and younger workers who support them through tax revenue. With fewer and fewer young workers and more and more dependents you have no good options. Cutting services would be bad for the elderly and likely impossible to pass in a democratic society as they would make up the majority of the voting population. Not cutting services would accelerate flight of workers and worse birth rates as overwork youth don't have time to start their own families.
Yes.
A shrinking population means an ever-smaller number of workers need to support increasing numbers of retirees.
If you can work that out, then you've still got a small pool of workers producing goods for a large, mostly economically-inactive population, which means inflation and plenty of it.
A smaller world population in the longrun is a defacto nonstarter. Many places in the world continue to have extremely high birth rates. And the wealth/education correlation that claims to predict the change of this seems, at best, extremely weak when put under scrutiny. Billionaires have high wealth, high education, and high fertility. Places like Thailand have extremely low education/wealth levels, yet their fertility rate is lower than even the US. Israel is the third most educated country in the world, has an advanced economy, and a fertility rate that is even competitive against some African nations at 3.0.
The issue is one of prioritizing wealth more than family, which also explains why the trend collapses at billionaires (for whom family has effectively 0 impact on their wealth), even though the correlation would expect them to be having effectively 0 children. And this pursuit of wealth over family holds true in the West, but there's no reason to expect such ideology to spread. So the question is not one of a smaller world population, but of a smaller population of the groups that are not reproducing vs those that are. In other words should the West simply accept its own extinction, likely alongside those of its values? And to me, the answer to that question is no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
There are 102 countries having fertility rate above 2.1, a lot of these countries are in Africa or Near East. Still in a lot of these countries, fertility rate is dropping year by year
I feel like for people living in big cities, where things are expensive simply because too many people want to live there, things might start to get easier.
1. Husband and wife both now work, not just in jobs, but in careers they are heavily invested in.
2. Getting and prospering in a career is really tough. I heard something like among current college graduates, only 20% are expected to ever find a full-time permanent position.
3. The education system is so competitive that doing well requires effort to the limits of physical endurance. It is not just the financial cost. Supporting a child to adulthood is draining on the parents in other ways. The families I know are in the top 10% for educational attainment, so I don't know how well this applies to working class families.
4. This is relatively minor, but there is a perpetual housing crunch and this affects prices.
One compounding factor could be the extension of childhood, which has been a very successful strategy for humans, and is more prevalent in the developed world.
this type of stability is an important factor for family planning
Edit: Don't mean to come down hard, it's just that in the kinds of topics I often see people casually assume certain things are "obviously" important for starting families, which it turns out other first-world countries do without just fine.
Since your following sentence agrees that renting isn’t universally cheaper, then you need to actually bring some relevant information on that point to have a substantive, non-confused comment.
What do you think your comment was accomplishing beyond calling confused? This discussion still lacks any evidence whatsoever that renting in Korea implies frequent relocation.
On the other hand, bachelor studio is rather cheap even in the downtown Seoul(like 1k USD per month at most)
Jeonse system is unique in Korea and it really weird. It took me a few years to understand it and it shouldn't really work anymore because the housing price has stabilized in last 4 decades or so.
The point being, any of these commentors here who haven't heard of Jeonse, they don't know anything about housing in South Korea.
It's state-owned condo cartel, naturally, prices just keep skyrocketing, hence the "6 wallets for a down payment (the couple and their parents)" meme, but they'll just blame the greedy capitalist developers like Evergrande.
So combining the two factors, buying at least one condo is a prerequisite for marriage now.
Remember when we were younger and the world's population hit 7 billion, everyone was really, really concerned about overpopulation??? I even did not want to have any kids because of this.
Now, Korea is seriously going to be worse than even Japan. And faster too.
Back in Jamaica one of my grandma had 7 children, the other one had 8 (with 2 stillborn). Now most women there have 1 child.
Here in Thailand today, we see much of the same thing. Talking to people they report their grandparents having 4-8 kids. Now most Thai women are lucky to have even one child. Same in Vietnam and Indonesia, which I frequent regularly too.
An outlier is when I was in Qatar recently, it was very common to see large (3-7 kids) families everywhere from all over the Middle East.
It is what it is.
(It's now even lower than in both 2005/1955)
Emirati and Qatari women have almost 50% more children than Saudi women despite cultural similarities because their government offers crazy good benefits.
Saudi Arabia has less money per citizen so families bear more of the cost and opt for smaller families.
Culture plays a huge role but so do government incentives.
This is a reflection of their culture and religion. Governance and law proceed from culture and religion, not vice versa.
Would middle eastern women want just as many kids if they had the same freedom and opportunities as women in developed countries?
Women in the highest alcohol consumption group (14 units or more per week) had 37 pregnancies in 307 cycles, and those who did not drink had 1,381 pregnancies in 8,054 cycles. These figures equate to an 18 percent decrease in the probability that the women would conceive. [b]
South Korea handily dominates the list of countries, drinking more than twice as much liquor per capita as any other country. [c] --
a) https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/9/e005462 b) https://www.bmj.com/content/354/bmj.i4540.full c) https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-drink-most-liquor-...
It's possible there's something unique to South Korea that causes it. Perhaps it's mandatory 2 years of military service for males. Or maybe their famously judgmental culture. I don't know.
> Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...
I’m starting to become more convince that economies which fundamentally squander this peak fertility moment will shoulder a burden that will lead to their demise. How long can we get the fertility timing wrong before we are no more? I guess we’re about to find out.
it's all fine and dandy to think people should be parents in their early 20s, but think about where you were at 20. did you stay with the same person? I think if you ran surveys in the west, you'd find a disproportionate amount who either didn't have anyone, or who broke up not long after. I like to think I'm a much kinder, calmer, and more self-aware person than I was at 18, or even 25.
at 30 you might be a more tired but hopefully at that point you've:
(1) dated enough to know what to look for in a partner; (2) have found that partner who is a good match; (3) have progressed enough in your work that you're less at risk at big economic suffering
I think people who try and save up in advance of kids are a little nutty - focus on your retirement, and emergency fund, they can borrow money. it's almost never an advantageous position for it to be paid off.
3 can definitely be solved by good policy. But I think it's just foolishness to suggest that people can start having kids whenever. At least in my experience and my peers' experience, finding the person who likes you enough to consider that is the blocker by a long shot. Everything else can be solved with money.
by the way, comments earlier about Israeli military service were interesting -- it makes sense to me as an accelerant in bonding, same as some university experiences. That was however not my experience in university undergrad...
Maybe our newfound prologued lifespan gave the illusion we could shift fertility out into the suboptimal band of years indefinitely. But if our economy is structured in a way that demands this shift I have to think it comes at a long term cost where we become too top heavy so to speak and have increasingly diminished returns on how much reproduction we can sustain at those biologically suboptimal band of years with whatever guarantees that may come from deferring reproduction to that better time that may never actually come.
Stuff like brushing teeth and bath take relatively little extra time, so does cooking for 4 instead of 1 kid.
Events with all the kids are lovely and many of the adults who grew up in this church know the other adults because they all used to be kids here once.
Great community and a lovely life.
Bonus is we live in Japan and get to enjoy the surplus of an aging/retiring society. Cars are cheap, houses are cheap. We got a mortgage for a new build house as two newly weds at 25 years old, no down payment as is common in this bank-deposit-surplus country. Society is pretty broken in lots of ways, but with family you can side step the foolishness. The important skill is to say no when society suggests a silly idea.
Sometimes I day dream about our kids perceptions of things in the future never having been exposed to the constant barrage of advertising conditioning them to buy buy buy and find satisfaction in material crap. I’m excited to see the sort of people they will become, there’s already great excitement at their growing virtues and strengths. Amazing stuff.
You don't have to engage with everything society tells you you need. You can just... ignore it. In my experience, many people speak highly of freedom, yet don't behave freely themselves.
It's not exactly the incredible expense some folks imagine it to be; it's certainly not worth not having children over.
Unless of course you're dead-set on sending your children to Oberlin or Harvard or something and coming out of it with no debt, I don't think it's a reasonable objection. And even if you were dead-set on it, shouldn't you be making enough to be able to afford to let your wife stay at home if she wanted to anyway?
We won't be using contraception after we are married, only NFP (or abstain) and if she gets pregnant, then it's a cause for celebration by both the community and our families. We have average jobs and no one in our extended family is rich either, yet they all had many kids.
The truth is that having children requires a lot of sacrifice and not many people are up for it. Who could blame them? outside of strong cultural / religious boundaries, you will spend the majority of your time climbing a corporate ladder, going for a bigger degree, constantly thinking about retirement and finances,.. etc.
However, I personally think that no matter which one of those summits you climb, it will fade away. So for us, unless we will literally be out on the street due to financial stress, we are looking forward to having kids, who could deny such grace?
Anyway, just wanted to throw out a different point of view into the mix here.
I am not sure what this tells me but probably that there must have been a marginalized fraction of the population that I never noticed (and living in a relatively young university town probably helped at that). Then again, obviously, our fertility rate was only that low for a couple of years and 'rebounded' to 1.3-1.5 soon after.
It really comes down to these three problems. The government is aware and making efforts but it's not enough to convince young married couples to have kids.
Its a huge contrast to other branches in my family where there are like dozens and dozens of cousins all living close to each other and always hanging out.
In many countries that is a situation that was common until fairly recently and in some countries this is still the status quo. E.g. my parents are from Dutch catholic families and they have countless relatives. My mother had a couple of dozen aunts and uncles. Their generation was a lot less productive. I only have one sibling and neither of us has had any children. We're both middle aged and I doubt it will happen. I know many people my age that have made similar choices.
Korea is an example of a conservative society where women are empowered to say no both technically (birth control) and legally (they don't end up being forcibly married by their families anymore). That's pretty much the case around the world with some notable exceptions of very conservative and/or poor countries; typically with a distinct lack of democracy and other freedoms.
Economical circumstances make having kids a really expensive choice in Korea. So, people are no longer being forced to marry and have kids, they can practice birth control, and can't afford to have kids. So, they don't unless they really want to and are able to secure the funding. You see the same patterns in other places in the world where housing is expensive and people are literate. They have kids later or not at all. Even countries that are notoriously very egalitarian with extensive child support programs (e.g. Sweden) have rather low birth rates these days.
Of course women have all sorts of other reasons for not having kids, which they'll be using to actually have fewer kids, but imagining that they'll suffer from the bad world doesn't sound like a real reason and more of a political statement to make it look like they're very concerned about the popular worries about the world.
first feminism in korea is toxic. they are female version of incel culture. very few things translate well to western audiences who unfortunately do not read past headlines on reddit. one example is this left/right equating to US left/right wing. this Korean feminist is also similar, it is not an counterpart to the US feminist movement. there are very few moderate feminists in the mainstream. it is of the radical variety calling for violence against men. for example, they caused controversy for instance streaming sexually assaulting underaged boys and poisoning patrons at a restaurant and uploading it in their community groups. In fact many Japanese feminists point out how toxic the feminist in Korea are, they are not about equality, they are about usurping. Most just live with their parents.
now thats out of the way, sex crimes are treated differently in korea due to the complex judicial system that is the result of multiple period of colonialism. its not as rampant as reddit has you believe but the punishment is also too lenient and should be stronger.
more women are entering the workforce and they are afraid to lose their careers. the same is true in advanced economies, women in these part of the world have far more choice and power than in third world countries. of course they are not going to give up their comforts. the redpill take you are subscribing to is NOT what Korean Koreans subscribe to. After all there is a record number of cohabiting men and women in Korea, they just simply choose not to have kids or get married anymore.
also if you think you have game in korea just because of your skin color, trust me, they know exactly why you are here and they dont care. the "white sexpat" have ruined it for rest of us here. most international marriage in korea is between neighboring countries. this is true for Japan and China as well. People who look like each other but are from different cultures.
this doesn't excuse or condone the toxicity, but this brand of feminism didn't just rise up out of nowhere.
agree w/ everything else u said, and part of it (part of, not all) here is women realized they can just live as a single or have their careers and not worry about the bullshit in-law drama and what have you.
you mean like japan? what about US where women have unfair advantages?
so your solution is for those women to marry you right?
where do you get this idea that a culture "treats women like shit"? if anything telling women to whore themselves to rich men inject drugs and kill their fetuses seem to me like that definition if we are gonna play stereotypes.
i honestly have no idea what point you're trying to make lol. none of it addresses what i said.
As a European I can imagine what impact having high immigration from Africa mixed with all the property being unaffordable and owned by older white generations will have i.e. huge disparity in wealth between black and white, quick growth of black population and decline in white population, rise in racial tensions, rise of far right and claims of being assimilated.
I'm pretty ignorant about places like Korea and Japan though. Is there any hope they won't suffer the same difficulties?
Here's an article about predicted population changes: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jun/13/n...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/world/asia/south-korea-di...
There's also an even weirder anti-feminist backlash happening as well.
Not really , as they don't do today, because they are not educated , and there is not enough time to wait for second-generation immigrants. Also, africans have no obligation to become subservient again to the developed world via immigration.
Especially when, as you say, they will be uneducated and that education will likely be available in those nations.
I'm a bit confused by your choice of words "subservient" and "obligation", it seems you're trying to imply more but not caring to say it.
Look at the "Rich but Shrinking" graph in the article. I'll report the numbers here for simplicity:
Country / number of babies per woman
Israel: 2.9
Mexico: 2.1
France: 1.8
US: 1.6
Australia: 1.6
UK: 1.6
Germany: 1.5
Canada: 1.5
Spain: 1.4
Japan: 1.3
Korea: 0.8
(all numbers as of 2020 except Korea)
Now, there are a few things happening with this.
1) Numbers are wrong. Based on World Data [0], Spain is 1.2, not 1.4.
2) Notable countries are missing from the list: Hong Kong (0.9), Singapore (0.9), Italy (1.2).
3) "Korea is the world’s fastest-aging nation among economies with per capita GDP of at least $30,000," conflicts with the fact that you include Mexico in your list of countries (Mexico's GDP is below $30,000), just to make Korea's problem look worse.
[0]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...
1) What if they don't? 2) The end of the century is 78 years away, somebody's going need to turn you on your side every few hours when you're in that old folks home - what happens if there aren't enough people to do those jobs?
Obviously we will have robots doing that job! Elder care is already a major area of robotics effort in Japan.
And if the robots don't get there? Well, it's not terrible. A smaller population doesn't need as many buildings erected, or crops grown etc. Some people can move in from other countries. I'm confident it will all work out.
You might look how elderly patients and other end-of-life patients are treated by their (almost all quite low-paid) carers. It's pretty shocking, but the experience of being the person providing that care is also pretty shocking.
I think you underestimate the emotional and physical labour involved in looking after a dying person, and in particular a relative. I saw (mostly remotely) my mother in law die and her two younger daughters restructured their lives to help her -- and this despite the twice daily visits from the Diakonie to change dressings, attend to medication etc. And, because that was in Germany there was no meaningful financial burden for this process.
There's another factor: my mid-80s mother (herself a physician) doesn't want human caregivers for privacy and prodding sake. She doesn't mind human physiotherapist or actually talking to another doctor about her complaints. But she doesn't want people fussing over her. And her mother in law (my grandmother), from a completely different culture from a completely different continent, also hated the consequences of losing her autonomy. She was still delivering meals on wheels at 89, and when she finally needed assistance in her 90s, just couldn't stand it.
IMHO machines that support more autonomy for people are an unalloyed good.
You’re describing modern Japan, FYI.
But I might feel different in a few decades if my physical body starts breaking down while my mind still works. Maybe I'll become afraid of death, or I'll suddenly want to stay alive watch my kids/grandkids grow up.
We don't have the parts that we need now to build new cars and tractors. Can we really afford to be building robots?
Growing and processing food should be highly automated, and soon. If we have "infinite" (renewable) energy we can cut down on the chemical input and have robots plucking each weed and carefully metering out the water. The price of "organic" should drop close to or even below "conventional".
> We don't have the parts that we need now to build new cars and tractors. Can we really afford to be building robots?
half a billion people have food insecurity, and with climate change that is growing. Can we really afford to build more meat puppets?
More to the point, the article talked about the population of SK dropping by a half by the end of the century. A transient parts problem today is irrelevant, especially given we have to design better robots over the next 78 years.
I don't share your blithe optimism that we can automate the millions of tasks that humans do so quickly and easily.
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/20-69...
Poor people in other countries, just like it is now.
This is only a problem because we gained the ability to keep people alive much longer given extreme resources. If we just cap the resources dedicated here we would have no issue.
you re not wrong, but people are always looking for meaning in life. If kids are not there, they will look for meaning elsewhere. But maybe kids are too demanding and have repetitive needs, which is off-putting for meaning-driven uberhumans. Well then maybe we should automate the raising of kids , but wait, daily school already exists and now we have tablets too. OK so how did the adults find meaning now that their hands are untied? Oh, they are in social media all day
Hate to say it, but inviting women into the workforce will likely lower the rate even more.
The decline in fertility has a palpable effect on society. Despite being raised in the US, this country, at least the places where I've lived in coastal metros, feels so lonely to me. I've felt that especially acutely since we had kids. We had our first at 27, and for the better part of a decade we were the odd-one-out among most of our friends showing up to places with a kid. There is a numeric basis for this feeling. In 1960, when the U.S. fertility rate was 3.5, fully 35% of the population was children. Today, it's 22%. You can see that difference just around your neighborhood.
1. Financial security, I can barely afford putting food in my own mouth let alone a wife and baby.
2. Community support, having a kid would mean no more working on my startup in spare time, which also means less money.
I don’t feel like I have a village to raise a child with, I’m a rootless cosmopolitan floating about the planet from one yuppie opportunity to the next. It’s not really satisfying and I’ll likely pull the trigger soon anyway.
E.g. about a million workers are required to build and maintain aircraft. How many for nuclear power (counting everyone from teachers to healthcare etc.)
A "self replicating factory" - capable of producing a copy of itself but also anything else - could be enough to bootstrap economy anywhere. Colonising Mars is probably going to contribute research in this direction.
Child care will never fully remove this effect for three simple reasons: Child care workers are scarce (as they are, traditionally, mostly women), children can only deal with child care for a certain amount of time (it is really exhausting for smaller kids), and getting the kids to and from child care acts like extra hours of unpaid work for the family.
So if a state wants to have a more stable local population, I think it will be inevitable to subsidize families more directly: Reduce working hours for parents (equally, of course) and fully pay the difference (would be really interesting to do a cost/benefit calculation here). Give out other perks (cheaper mortgages, maybe parking space or other permits, first choice when it comes to vacation, maybe the parents get a vote for their children and so on). Finally, the state might even turn to penalizing child-less adults or "nudge" people into having babies (e.g., by taxing contraceptives).
If you don't agree with such an active role of the state, consider the alternative: active control of migration. This in turn brings its own set of problems that all nudge the state to take authoritarian measures (for instance border control ala US-Mexico).
Consequently, any industrialized state has to take an active role regarding demographics and I think it will look somewhat dystopian in our eyes.
It seems intuitive to me: a major way per-capita economic productivity goes up is by working more hours, both at school, and in the workplace. Since you're competing with other max-hours workers for stuff like housing, the price rises to match. Soon, you're in a situation where there's no space in the average budget/apartment for kids.
Widespread misallocation of human resources (i.e. unemployment, part-employment, etc) would presumably drive in the opposite direction.
If you're in the market for doom porn, there will always be someone willing to sell it to you.
https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/39/44-39....
In the West, it was historically (1900-2000) the opposite.
In fact, the fertility of the rich is similar between regions. The difference is that in Korea, the less advantaged have many fewer children.
Understanding this goes a long way toward understanding "Why don't they fix this?" For some, there is no problem.
At the same time, the only real solution that is population decline, is 'spontaniously' happening without any policies like one child per couple, and so.
If the economics of an older population are much easier to solve than our progressive destruction of the environment... Why not incentivice policies to keep people childless?
immigration is going to happen regardless of koreans want it or not and I finally understand why the Korean governments has been pushing soft power for so long, they were planning for this scenario.
I don't think the outcome is going to be as bad as some nationalists make it out to be, for sure most immigrants are going to come from other Asian countries but I do not see it say reaching the dysfunctional state of Western Europe with mostly muslim/african migrants. This is not to say that Southeast Asians won't be pushed to the fringes and experience discrimination that puts them on the same anti-host country culture like in France for example.
Why sacrifice personal rights for other people (aka children)?
We shifted from huge social-religous pressure to procreate to zero (or negative) pressure to do so.
It's really the worst country to look at if Korea wants to improve their fertility rate.
Of all the places to draw conclusions about societal concerns from, mass-market consumer pop culture in a culture known for relative strictness on what is acceptable/taboo is the last place you should be looking.
Higher efficiency, higher wages especially in social security jobs, and of course a universal social security system
How do you plan to solve the problems of a growing population? The consequences of things climate change will hit harder.
efficiency has its limits. And we are reaching it, I would argue we reached it already. Without full automation there's not much room for "efficiency". There's no growing population on the west, it is declining sharply if you exclude immigration. There's not enough people to work with elderly. Germany desperately tries to import people for elderly care for years. Also, from what I read and researched the LARGEST single polluter on entire planet is the US military complex. Even if entire world switched to electric cars, eat less meat, it wouldn't make a dent in a greenhouse gas emissions. Not to mention that 50% of all produced food in the west is a waste. There's place for 20b people on this world, no shortages of land, resources. We just need to change our habits and drop consumerism (as we know it). If everyone bought only what they need, and consumed 99% of food they bought, that would result in less pollution than 3b people buying 200-300% more that they need.
Greater social security benefits and higher wages in social security jobs means raising taxes a lot, because there's far more old people than there are younger working people to support them. This will drive all the workers out of the country to other countries with lower taxes, creating a feedback loop and collapse.