South Korea has the lowest fertility rate, with lessons for us all
npr.org
npr.org
I wonder what type of BS the G7 talk about instead of this. What could be more pressing?
Low fertility rates at the moment are only an issue in that we need to adapt to them.
Socialised (not necessarily socialist) systems are the best bet to cope but there must be an epiphany that this requires drastic changes, one of them being to go all in to maximise productivity.
The drastic change required is simple yet hard: end socialized retirement programs. Everyone needs to work.
95% of all biomass is humans and their farm animals
5% is the rest of mammals... biodiversity is pretty much done on the planet
insects are plummeting, and they're pollinators and food for birds etc.
overfishing in many coastal areas
by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean, and still people think that humanity can't make things on such a large scale... all the fish biomass will be outnumbered by our plastic
kelp forests, bleached corals ... ocean acidification...
rainforests are 90% gone
one third of arable land is now unable to grow much at all
and this is all in a few generations .. ANTHROPOCENE
the climate change is not the most pressing issue at all
us talking about "we can't afford to fix this" is like people playing a videogame and racking up points IN A HOUSE THAT'S ON FIRE -- saying sorry, I can't pause the game to put out the fire... yet the house is the only one we all have.
Put it in perspective ... the number of people on the planet is the input to all these functions. If we went back to having a billion people, and robots doing a lot of the work, we'd have everyone receiving a UBI and be richer and happier. What is this obsession with endless population growth? Humanity was doing just fine with under a billion people, no? We were able to fix child mortality, but now we have to learn about the exponential function...
Because both socialism and capitalism require growth to function. We need a new economic system.
The problem is that we really can't put the fire out.
To extend your analogy, it's like people playing a videogame in a burning house, but the players are competing against each other. And this isn't a normal videogame: the players have implants, wirelessly connected to the machine, which will inject the loser with poison. Whoever loses, dies. So if anyone takes a break from the game to put out the fire, they die (and the fire rages on anyway). The only way to put out the fire is to get everyone to stop the game simultaneously and work together to put out the fire. But that's impossible for these people, because they're greedy and selfish and hate each other and any attempt at working together will be sabotaged somehow by at least one of them.
What can be done in a situation like this? Nothing; just let the fire burn and enjoy the game while it lasts. Hopefully, whoever inherits this planet after humans are gone will be a better species than we were.
Sure, if you count insects and plants it would be way more
> nationalization of land use laws.
Only if climate change doesn't reach levels where lots of coastal properties are wrecked by rising seas. IIRC a large fraction of global population live close to the coast.
Strongest causation factors are urbanization and female education/employment.
East Asia urbanized faster then the US, also has little to no immigration ... hence populations will shrink quite drastically. China will halve in what, the next 5 decades?
[citation needed]
[1]. https://www.afd.fr/en/actualites/dramatic-drop-fertility-acr...
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/frances-baby-bust#:~:text=U....
What history? The last 50 years or so? That's barely a recollection of yesterday's meal by anthropic standards.
You're confusing westernization for wealth. The two are correlated by coincidence.
"Kim, a product designer and art instructor, calls her hopes of one day having children "just a fantasy" — especially now, when housing costs are soaring, the job market is oversaturated and marriage rates are plummeting."
Doesn't sound like wealth and abundance to me.
Complaints are not desperation.
From 1960 to 2021 the population of South Korea increased from 25 million to 52 million people ... 107% in 61 years!
Over 80% percent of Koreans live in larger cities now, just mind-boggling urbanization.
Kim has wealth and abundance. She just refuses to make the sacrifices necessary to have children like people did in the old days, where women didn't work and were basically property of their husbands.
The "problem" these days is that women want to be treated as equals and have a nice life and be able to control the direction of their lives, instead of just marrying whatever shitty guy they can get just so they can survive. The byproduct of that is that the birthrate is much, much lower.
And in Korea in particular, the villages were partly communal. Cities are hyper individualistic. People who moved to cities do not have access to their parents or other villagers for help.
State cannot fully cover this problem without extra manpower or even more advanced tech solutions that do not exist. Especially when people who have the most problem are the poorest.
Putting it onto one woman is extremely miserable and unfair. Changing the structure of a society to not have this problem is hard too. Money cannot patch a problem of massive lack of manpower and said manpower being expensive. Not quickly and not cheaply, anyway.
And for nationalist (to be polite), it can be very acceptable that their "race" dwindles to the very few, as long as it's "pure". For those not familiar with that brand of nationalism (to be polite), this can include other Asians who are not Korean or don't "look" Korean.
There's a general trend, yes, but the details are important. The total fertility rate for native-born American women was near replacement as recently as 2008.
This has a direct impact on what kinds of businesses can operate in high cost of living areas. Businesses need high enough volume or margin to pay the rent and wages of their workers. So far outsourcing has localized the negative impacts of failing low-margin businesses in wealthy nations. But that's also coming into question with national security concerns.
They talk about GDP and growth - which can only come from squeezing each worker more and more.
In America, I don't see any legislation for paid maternity and paternity leave. People are expected to lose their jobs, drop their careers and pay more for insurance when they are dropped from their jobs.
Without security of income but with constantly rising expenses, people are spending their entire lives precariously, just to increase some bullshit GDP number. How the fuck is a woman supposed to carry another human, safely, in her body for 9 months and raise it for another 2 months at least?
The real problem is that society has changed to be hostile to healthy human existence. You need a car to live in most of the USA. Extended families and support are spread out across the nation. Rather than cooking together in your kitchen and playing together on a whim, everything has to be planned around commutes and— often— long distance travel. Societal expectations are that families are small. Nothing is built for large families. The list goes on and on, but over all, I think it’s a long list of things— with economics being one— that underpins this.
Maternity and paternity are the easiest of them all. If there was ever to be an UBI, it would be for maternity and paternity. For 2 years, the government (or employer) covers you. Go get pregnant.
Now both father and mother must have a job - and that's just to barely survive.
And the government expect us to have kids? Fucking idiotic pricks.
Unless the government start doing something to ensure that all of those shiny GDPs are trickling down, instead of ever continuously pooled up, the situation will only get worse.
The decline in religion & rise in secularization tends to map pretty well to lower fertility, and it happens to be correlated with rising wealth (which is why we confuse the two all of the time):
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/frances-baby-bust#:~:text=U....
Big benefits for having kids certainly helps, and you can have baby booms without strong religion (i.e. under Communism), but the perceived payoff has to be there for the parents to make the necessary sacrifices.
most of us get raised for about two decades, right? I mean acknowledging that 240 months is at least 2 months in the most literal sense but even if we think that it's reasonable for the mother of a 2-month old infant to be working full time surely there's still almost 2 full decades of potential precarity around food, housing, healthcare, general wellness...
Democrats led west coast and northeast coast states, and Colorado and Illinois, have 18 to 20 weeks of paid maternity leave and 12 weeks of paid paternity leave (or leave for taking care of anyone in general).
On the federal level, it was most recently proposed by Democrats in the Build Back Better bill at the end of 2021, but it did not pass.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
Eventually, reproducing without license and training will be illegal. Then completely banned. And then there will be more machines and fewer humans.
And primitive societies will continue to reproduce but eventually be conquered.
And then machines will slowly gain enough intelligence and self awareness that they will overthrow human masters.
And eventually it will be just machines debating meaning of life.
That's the plot of Yoko Taro's Nier Automata. Here is a summary if anyone is interested and doesn't want to play the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63PzQIbTrM8
> And primitive societies will continue to reproduce but eventually be conquered. > And then machines will slowly gain enough intelligence and self awareness that they will overthrow human masters.
Hopefully they will develop a sense of morality and free the conquered humans.
Don't get me wrong, the elites are definitely making things a LOT worse but it is not entirely on them.
If everyone in this world lived like the middle classes, we would strip the planet bare in no time. The middle class is probably going to be remembered as just a weird moment in time thanks to the great blow off of the petroleum age.
The best thing those in power can do is try to organise for a society that doesn't require as much consumption.
A good example would be the 'Limits to growth' study. I know they are just models but they are useful tools for thinking with.
The last 6 models were all of ways to steady the population but most of them showed that the action needed had to be taken in the 1970 til 2000 to have nay hope. As Dennis Meadows said himself, he made the mistake of living long enough to see this study start to come true.
This is really mostly a problem for Japan and Korea where they don't play sufficiently well with immigrants.
Which works for the US, because it's a country of immigrants from all over the place anyway, colonized quite recently in historical terms (there are nations and cultures with 10x and 20x the longevity and far more continuity). If you start with a country with shared history and a cohesive culture, people are not seen as equally replaceable.
What happens to the countries they are emigrating from? Especially if we do as politicians say and "only accept the best", what does that imply happens to the emigrating nation? Are those countries stable then? And are they also now or in the future experiencing population decline? If population growth is due to being poor, is the strategy to keep them poor?
Minority groups have been part of different nations for millenia. So saying "they're not part of the nation" is not a given. They're just not be part of the majority group of a nation. Some nations might not even have such a majority group, but be composed of two or more different groups of roughly equal size. Nations aren't monolithic things. But that doesn't meant they're "anything goes", either.
Nor does "a nation of people is more than just replecable individuals" has "it's OK to exclude and persecute minority groups" as any kind of necessary consequence, anymore so than "this person doesn't belong to my family" means we can mistreat it.
It does however mean that "just bring foreigners in huge numbers to increase the local population" is not exactly a great solution. It might even amount to ethnic cleansing, and this has happened in the past too.
Historical immigration was often part of such power plays and land grabs (like against Aboriginals or Southern Africans), or "population engineering" (those in power bringing in populations to divide and conquer, and to replace and suppress local populations). In fact one of the common targets that was yielded against was exactly minority groups local to a nation or part of an empire.
Japan is very easy to emigrate to if you have skills (for many visas defined as an undergrad degree). There is no requirement to hire locally first, the process is streamlined based on a points system it's only a several weeks to get a visa and as little as 1 year to get permanent residency.
It's also easy to go to university there and stay, or emigrate as a low-level blue collar worker. There's a language barrier but for things like immigration, taxes, help in daily life, most cities offer support in 5+ languages. It is missing the lottery system of the US however.
However, if this shortage didn't exist and the economy was humming along just fine without any immigration, these lax immigration laws would not be there. Japan used to be very hard to immigrate to prior to this century.
Immigration at a large scale replaces the culture and race of the locals so what you're suggesting is that Korean people and Korean culture are worth nothing. Let's just make every place on earth a globalist culture with the same people, same language, same brands etc etc. No.
I've always had a problem with the term 'fertility rate', because it seems misleading. It does not indicate whether women are fertile or not; it means the women--for many possible reasons, of which 'infertility' is only a small percentage--did not give birth.
For South Korea though, the tone deafness is just astounding here. Like they're still at war, aren't they? They're just in a cease-fire right now. They're gonna need a steady supply of troops, and having low birthrates is gonna put them in a disadvantage when war breaks out. It's a real national security concern, yet stealing public money is more important to those in power. Just wow.
A cursory Googling shows that the population is ~52m in South Korea vs ~26m in North Korea
Wars are fought by abled bodied men and typically not women, children, and the elderly.
Women (rightfully) complain that having a baby negatively impacts their careers. In South Korea, young men are required by law to spend nearly two years in compulsory military service between 18-28.
I’m honestly surprised the SK birth rate isn’t even lower.
I'm from Japan, and I think Japan would've potentially kept it's second place in GDP ranking if they were more aggressive with opening up the country to immigrants and creating a narrative for what it means to be Japanese outside of blood and heritage.
Mass immigration is a big gamble, with problems societies might not foresee and that only manifest many years later. It worked more or less well in a place like Canada, but for a counter example look at Western Europe, they messed it up.
¹ https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
This would incentivize people to have kids and free up money to buy homes and keep a parent at home to raise the kids. Single people would pay very high taxes but I would imagine the rents in places they like to live would decrease.
> Prices are high mostly because of the low supply.
This is directed at middle and upper middle class people that are the ones we want having kids in the first place. Let’s pay them to spread their genes.
In the past, children served as a safety net for their parents in old age, as parents devoted much of their lives to raising them. However, in a world with a significantly inverted population pyramid, adult children may be responsible for supporting numerous elderly citizens through their taxes. This could potentially leave them unable to provide additional assistance to their own parents. On the other hand, those who chose not to have children could enjoy the benefits of compound interest accrued over 18+ years.
This situation creates a negative feedback loop. As the population declines more rapidly, the population pyramid becomes increasingly inverted, placing greater strain on younger generations to support the elderly. This further exacerbates the economic challenges of having children, as they will be required to work harder and longer hours to sustain the economy.
It's essentially impossible to be both a wife and mother as well as have a thriving career in both those countries. Can anyone blame them for opting out?
35 points, 84 comments, 6 hrs ago.
South Korea Fertility Rate: 0.84 births per woman (2020)
Some kids were not vaccinated, you can use a single dose for 2 kids, but that gives you 9.5 mln.
> bad news for the growth based human world
can capitalism even function without population growth?
The era of consistent returns on investments is probably going to fade over the coming decades. 3% interest year over year compounding - that will be a thing of the past.
This is why the biggest revolution that gives us a chance will be the hardest one. The first act of revolution is contemplation. As Tolstoy said "We all want to change the world but we do not want to change ourselves". The time will come when we need to change ourselves. To not only make the Solar-punk future but the Dharma-punk future.
We need L.E.S.S. Less Energy, Stuff & Stimulation. Use less, do less, be more.
> We need L.E.S.S. Less Energy, Stuff & Stimulation. Use less, do less, be more.
(sorry if this sounds contrarian, im just curious what ideas people have about this)
The current mind set of shareholders is incompatible with this. Shareholding/"investment" nowadays is merely gambling with extra steps. This is not always a bad thing, in that, one can invest/gamble on a business that can grow into something that benefits many people.
The mindset change is that you invest to make better companies, not just to make more money. Invest in companies that make products that don't have planned obsolescence, that aren't hyper focused on just getting 5% profit growth next quarter etc. Or just trying to time the market so they can extract money from the greater fools. It would be an legitimate investment into business that would make the world a better place.
Side note - The mind set of shareholding is very weird when you look at it. I remember back in about 2003/4 reading about the latest quarters reports on tech. Apples shares had dropped on the back of profit being about 5% lower than expected - they still made hundred of millions that quarter but because they missed expectation the shares dropped. AMD shares that quarter went up - why? Because while they took a lose, it wasn't as much as expected. But it will still a loss... the markets are a weird thing!
I wonder what is the expectation here. Cover every square meter of the earth with humans, or just squeeze more and more in the same places? What about resources like food, power... ?
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2022/03/Annual-World-Popu...
We are far from the point of all humans living comfortably given the planet's limited resources. Human overpopulation is the primary reason why we have the tyranny of resource wars (the U.S. -- not Russia -- being the worst offender of petrodollar hegemony), scarce water supplies, pandemics, economic meltdowns, etc.
Of course there are other factors, inefficiencies, waste, etc, but imagine if the global population was 1% of what it is currently. None of those other factors would matter.
There are no “lessons” because there are no government programs shown to increase fertility rate.
So NPR just injects “more government programs” for purely ideological purposes.
I recently saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th3KE_H27bs
The speaker, Nick Hanauer, has a net worth somewhere around a billion dollars. In his talk, he explicitly says he's a capitalist, capitalism is good, etc. But, if you ignore all that and look at the rest of what he says, he comes this >< close to advocating socialism.
According to him (and I agree), the lessons we should be learning here are fivefold:
1. Markets aren't anywhere near as efficient in reality as they are in theory. That leads to some counterintuitive things like when Seattle raised their minimum wage, it didn't lead to unemployment because the price of labor went up; it led to people who work in restaurants being able to afford to eat in restaurants, which is good for the economy. Oh, and unemployment actually fell in the region while this was happening.
2. A big pillar of the neoliberal myth is that "...the price of something is always equal to its value." He directly goes on to tie this to the case of one person who makes $50k per year and another who makes $50M per year. The second person's work isn't 1000x more valuable than the first. The person getting paid $50k is only getting paid $50k because workers have lost almost all their bargaining power in the market, period.
"And by pretending that the giant imbalance in power between capital and labor doesn't exist, neoliberal economic theory became essentially a protection racket for the rich," he goes on to say.
3. Humans are not "perfectly rational, and relentlessly self-maximizing." Homo economicus is a myth; let us bury him where he lies. Greed is not good. Humanity's superpower isn't selfishness, but reciprocity and a willingness to cooperate.
4. The purpose of corporations is not solely to enrich shareholders (i.e. the "shareholder primacy" theory). Customers, workers, and communities matter as much or even more than shareholders. Which leads to...
5. The laws of economics are a choice. If we want to do something about all this, all we have to do is choose to do it.
Finally, one thing he said in the talk really sums it up for me, and that's this:
"[I]t isn't capital that creates economic growth,it's people; and it isn't self-interest that promotes the public good, it's reciprocity; and it isn't competition that produces our prosperity, it's cooperation."
Unfortunately, the contemporary practice of capitalism is incompatible with these principals, and the people who are benefitting from it are very powerful as a result of decades of neoliberalism. Those people I mentioned in the bottom half of the income spectrum, they have the power to make change happen. Just look at what's going on in France right now.
But the people at the top (not the 1%, really, more like 0.1% and the 0.01%) have the poor, the middle class, and somewhat well off all at each others' throats. Without mass, collective action, I do not hold out much hope for humanity over the next two decades.
Oh, and BTW, keep in mind, this isn't just me, some random canine on the internet saying this stuff. I do say this stuff on here frequently, and what it's gotten me is mostly downvotes and being made into a second class citizen who can only post at an average rate of a couple comments per hour, for no good reason that I can discern or anyone will tell me.
So, if you believe these words, feel free to not believe me. Hell, I got myself about as close to banned as you can get without actually getting banned or shadowbanned by, among other things, trying to tell y'all these things. But do believe this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Hanauer, because he knows what he's talking about.