South Korea Again Smashes Own Record for World’s Lowest Fertility Rate in 2022

Having kids is one of those things. For example, in the US a woman who is considered religious based on frequency of services attendance has on average almost one child more than a woman considered nonreligious. ([0] presents one such chart for the United States.)

Except for Buddhism. For some reason, Buddhist women have lower fertility than even atheists [1] I find this surprising and don't really understand the reason.

So anyways, Korea seems to be doubly affected - it has one of the world's highest rates of non religiosity [2], and out of those few who are religious, most are Buddhist.

It seems like if you want to encourage population growth in your country, you want to encourage adherence to an Abrahamic religion or Hinduism.

[0] https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secula...

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.worldatlas.com/amp/feature/...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_irrelig....

Essentially its conservative/collectivist culture is counter productive to those who wish to establish themselves and have a family (enforcement of gender norms, restrictive demands towards the individuals of said family, attitudes towards minority families such as lgbt and general view stomping down a liberal individualism).

On the the liberal/individualistic side of things, the issue is that the work towards equaility is such low hanging fruit, any change is seen as unfair and threatening by the male population, but also liberal ideals do only tend to want to focus on female issues, in fact it's said it's one reason the current president of South Korea won thanks to the previous government work with feminism while ignoring the male side of issues.

And individual expression in this case is essentially only in practice seen as a means to get an edge in the rat race that is get more money or status (social or romantic), which at some point causes young people to see relationship more as a burden (as stated before) and debilitating (essentially the low hanging fruit of dating is gone, thus it fuels a feeling of doubt of how you can date and actually be together).

Mind you this is a cultural phenomenon in much of Asia.

- Urban births are much lower than rural births. If it were not for rural women, the births would trickle down much lower

- There are many couples who want to have children but can't because of fertility issues

- Becoming a parent and maintaining parenthood is difficult if these things drive you to poverty, especially in a class driven society like S. Korea.

In societies where the women were staying home, they weren't doing nothing. They were providing child care, maintaining the social networks that bind society together, doing all the at home work that makes it possible for the other partner to work a full time job.

40+ hours a week really requires a second person to do all the other stuff to be sustainable. It was never supposed to be the case that you have two people both working full time and then trying to do all the other stuff on weekends and evenings. That's insane! Especially since men seem to not be doing their fair share of that other work- why would any woman want to take on a full time job and do all the rest?

If you want to have gender equality- and you absolutely should want that- then as a society, you need to reduce work weeks to 20 hours. Otherwise you are just running the whole thing into the ground.

I see a lot of people pointing towards religious beliefs as the proximate cause here- but have you considered that the places that are the most religious are also the places where there is a single breadwinner? Are you sure it's the religion and not the extra social slack that is responsible? Because there is a clear and plausible mechanism for the extra slack of a single breadwinner being relevant, but for religion by itself, it's a much more tenuous connection.

You could probably make things work with a somewhat longer work week- say, 30 hours- if you also supplied families of young children with 100% free child care and subsidized housing.

Otherwise, your civilization is eating its young.

I just felt like there is this clear cognitive dissonance here, either a growing population is good or it is bad. I do get the sense that "certain groups" growing is "bad" for some people whereas "other groups" (often their own) growing is good and them stagnating is bad...so there clearly are a lot of discussions around this happening in bad faith. Still, even the good faith discussion seems to have this contradiction here that I haven't really seen anyone resolve.

I suppose one argument is "no, we really will grow forever and it will be okay." And while we are probably nowhere near the growth limit yet, I'm not sure I have seen an argument that convinces me of this either.

1. Some demographers say that for the first time in recorded history the total fertility rate of the world will be just under replacement this year (2022 TFR=2.24, world replacement level being 2.23, as opposed to ~2.1 for first world countries).

2. Middle income countries are en-masse entering a stage of low fertility, a phenomenon that 50 years ago was only observed in few high-income countries. Even some poor countries have a rapidly declining fertility with few of them under replacement, and a bit more poor countries are expected to join this under-replacement stage. This means that immigration as we know it will change in demographics and magnitude, since the source countries will have their own problems as well.

3. Aging developed countries will perhaps have to change their approach to immigration: Canada is the poster child on what not to do and is being observed by several researchers around the world to have a glimpse of what's to come. A vicious cycle is born: Their native youth has not a broad margin by which to start families, so to compensate they take in high levels of immigrants relative to their population (Century initiative, as called by their government), little jobs or housing is added (for a variety of reasons, not all of them political) and home prices go up while wages in several professions are depressed, back to square one. This is particularly pernicious in Canada given their welfare system for elderly citizens, their immigrants aren't having enough children to compensate and in some regions their TFR is actually lower than that of the native population. The bane of a generous pension system is an inverted population pyramid, this is only exacerbating the problem. To ensure non-collapse either migrants have to put a lot more than they give or they take increasingly more immigration. It seems Canada already choose, and has a window of a couple decades given what I just said in point 2.

4. How will other developed countries react? Will they become high-tax gerontocracies like future Italy where the youth has to escape from for professional and entreprenurial aspirations? Or will they battle for high-quality immigration instead and make their economies more competitive and dynamic? Will they rely on their diaspora in Latin-America to compensate (such as german, spanish, japanese, croatian, italian, portuguese) like Spain and Italy are already doing, in the style of a great recalling? Will they, like Canada, start recalling mennonite communities from Mexico? In the US, will the amish carry the bulk of births in rural counties and Hasidic jews offset the birth crisis in urban areas (they both have a falling TFR, but still greatly above replacement)? Israel's TFR is solid and their population pyramid is actually a pyramid, do we look at them on what to do? Many african cities are on the brink of having sub-replacement TFR, will they have internal migration within the same continent instead of external movements?