How South Korea’s birth rate dropped below Japan’s

Not sure where you are but it feels that this is exactly what it's like in America. I am not sure why nobody really cares and I suspect by the time people try to do something about it, it won't be too late, but it's going to take a Herculean effort to fix. Mindset and structural support.

Women being expected to stop their own careers and stay home as a housewife used to be quite normal and even expected in South Korea, but this has been changing quite quickly. Nowadays, many women return to work after giving birth - even quite quickly in many cases, and not by choice. Because the couples can't afford the kids otherwise.

Anecdotally: Most of my wife's circle of friends are in their early 30s to mid-30s with first children (and we're on the way to fitting this description as well) and back to work, while their mothers stopped working once they had children.

This is to say, the previous system was bad, but the new reality is in some sense worse: No, women bearing the brunt of child-bearing alone is not great, but now both parents work very hard in family-hostile work conditions to even make ends meet. Both parents working full-time is very difficult if neither employer is flexible enough not to handle "I have to pick my kid up today" or "my kid is sick".

How did we end up at a point where creating life (literally) is a „not good enough reason“?

>and most importantly a path for women (and men - but its mostly women) who drop out of the workforce and want to get back in once the children are older and more independent.

I don't think this is quite right, and your second paragraph is kind of alluding to the underlying issue. I think it's more that there isn't a pathway for women to drop out of the workforce permanently and revert to a single-income household. A lot of women in my wife's peer group want to do this, but can't make the finances work. Of course, they end up having to pay for child care anyway and maybe it comes out in the wash. Regardless, maybe some kind of UBI can be help here for women with children who simply don't want to go back to work.

Aside: you might be commenting specifically on Asian work culture, not sure, but the "give up freedom" thing I don't believe to be unique in that regard.

I hope we one day see a radical new form of raising children. Historically it was truly a village that raised a child. I never understood how my parents raised 5 children. But looking into it more, there was always a community of people that raised me. Community and mutual aid was huge in the small town in Ethiopia where my parents came from. Coming to Canada, that didn't change. Uncles, aunts, older cousins, long time family friends. Communes have a similar structure but usually get a bad rep. Good podcast episode on the topic

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/opinion/ezra-klein-kriste...?

"We could be raising our children cooperatively in dwellings designed to enhance rather than inhibit social connection. We could be more sustainably sharing our resources and teaching our children to value collaboration over competition. We could be living in wider lateral networks of love, care, and support; fighting the scourges of loneliness, anxiety, precarity and the many stresses associated with modern life. Most of us are not.”

> they just don't provide any concrete solutions

Childcare subsidies.

Agreed completely, but I’ll add another point. About 50% of my friends are university+ educated women of different ethnicities, but all living in first world countries. We’re also all in our late 20s or 30s, so it’s becoming a “now or never” kind of dilemma for some of them.

We used to make “oh it’s expensive!” excuse until we started making decent money. Now that excuse doesn’t work, but there has been a significant precedence showing you can have a fulfilling life without having a child. You can have even a better one unless you have psychological attachment to it. I’ve heard my friends getting baby fever here and there, but then quick reality check of how much work it would be reminds them it’s not worth it.

And I completely agree, what’s the point? If you have some sort of spiritual or religious beliefs about life, maybe you can excuse it. But my circles don’t buy into those. We’ve also discussed global depopulation issues on different occasions, and consensus was “well, we didn’t cause this awful environment, so it’s not our problem”. Some sort of game theory problem where if you participate you’re more likely to be screwed unless majority participates. But if you don’t participate, you’re definitely on the winning side.

And another note, my friends in their late 30s/40s who always wanted to have a child have exactly one child for myriad of reasons. And obviously that’s not enough.

Sorry for the rant, but maybe the older generations were a bit more conscious rather than kicking the can down the road.

There is an inconvenient truth about women leaving the house and entering the workforce.

> I see no reason why women would ever want children. What's society providing them that they need to make this sacrifice?

What do you think your future holds? If we are entirely realistic, I think in 50-60 years, and perhaps much sooner, we'll almost certainly be dead. On our way out everyone and everything we've ever known will also be dying. Best friends we'd thought would last to the end will fade and disappear long before.

And that's just the start. Because well before the end our bodies will begin to fail, with our minds often enough not far behind. And, without family, a very likely scenario is that we simply end up alone. In Japan there are so many people dying completely alone, often unnoticed until a neighbor or service worker smells the rot, that they have a term for it: kodokushi - lonely deaths. [1] South Korea has followed suit with godoksa. By raising a family we not only get to fulfill our ultimate responsibility in the continuance of the species, but also you in many ways provide some continuance of ourselves. And as you age we will always have family, such that we will never truly be alone in this world.

It seems to me that the masses of people not having children today is vaguely familiar to the masses of people taking out 6 figure loans to pursue random degrees, unlikely to benefit their ability to provide a living for themselves. They certainly know what everybody is saying about such decisions, but somehow think it won't apply to them. And in any case the consequences are so far removed from the present that it can sometimes be difficult to take them seriously, but that doesn't mean those consequences don't exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi

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Edit: As some odd coincidence, this just popped up on the frontpage of HN. It feels relevant enough to link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327432

Singapore solved most of those problems decades ago. Essentially: 1. Force children to take care their aged parents. 2. Entice children to buy housing close to their parents. 3. Ensure priority of children living within close of a school to get into that school. 4. Massive subsidies for childcare. Bigger subsidies for working parents and little for those stay home mum dad. This is to avoid situation in the west where you get free money the more unemployed and children you have. 5. Baby bonus tied to the more children you have. Bonus is locked in a special account with very special and limited use for children needs (hospitals, childcare, school fees). Unlike the western countries baby bonus which parents can redirect to buy TV for themselves. 6. Build clusters of community close to each others with facilities to promote society integration. 7. Allowing low cost domestic helpers from neighboring countries with low wages or unemployed. Unlike western countries asking for equal living minimum wages to wrongly think on citizen would rather be domestic helpers or laborer. Use market force to ensure workers able to change jobs as they like to force employers to increase salary to retain workers. 8. Improve low cost healthcare access (though Korean doing this better). 9. Tightly control property market which dont contribute to national productivity. Ensuring everyone has a home and not hoarding homes to bid up prices (one of the downfall of Japan in 80s because allowing overinflated property....Korean and China seems to following Japanese route which can tie up monthly child support money for servicing debts). 10. Superb public transport and highly subsidies transports to ensure the poor can be as mobile as those rich within country. 11. Encouraging more willing to give-birth-foreigners as citizens to damp down arrogant locals of just want to enjoy being singles. 12. Actively tie subsidies with willingness to start family and having more babies throughout every facet of available subsidies. For example subsidies depends on number of households in a home rather than per individual citizen.

This is largely governance issue and not corporate. Korean officials largely undereducated and lack integrity as those in Singapore where they sack officials if even involved in marital affairs NATIONALLY.

correct?

It's easy to illustrate the impact of fertility rates by model, and it's far more rapid/severe than I think most realize. A fertility rate of "N" means that the next younger generation will be N/2 times as large. So, a fertility rate of 2 means no change, while a fertility rate of 4 would result in an exponential doubling. How about 0.7? We can create a population distribution of this easily enough because we know how big each generation will be relative to the one after it. Assume each generation is 20 years (if its longer - things look even worse). We end up with, for instance:

===

1000 eighty year olds, 350 sixty year olds, 122 forty year olds, 42 twenty year olds, 15 newborns.

===

So you have a working age population of ~300 people working to support a population of 1529. You have a median age of 80, and an average age of 70. Think about the pressure on hospital, healthcare, and any sort of pension or other programs. Those 300 people need to not only man all of these jobs, but also somehow keep the entire economy from collapsing. I mean it's just not going to work.

And then of course your population will be declining catastrophically quickly. The ~20 years during which those 1000 eighty year olds die will result in a population decline of 65%. Yet that's no salvation because the ratio of age distributions won't change at all, unless fertility rates do. You'll end up in the exact same position, continuing to lose 65% of your population each 20 years to come.

> it’s worth noting what they’ve accomplished in getting to a place where they can afford to worry about that as one of their primary concerns

It's probably also worth noting the long history of military dictatorships, murderous suppression of worker rights, massive ongoing corruption (including a literal cult controlling the government until 2016) and the highest suicide rate in the world. Reducing the story to just economies is truly narrow minded.

It's in the middle of the article:

> Another economic factor in the falling birthrate is the rising price of real estate and a resulting increase in unmarried or late-marrying people. The tradition in Korea is for men to prepare a family home before marrying, and the rising cost of housing in recent years has thereby triggered a decline in marriage rates. The Bank of Korea recently enacted emergency interest rate hikes that brought down the price of condominiums, but the interest rate on mortgages has risen, keeping home ownership a distant dream for many.

It's there. Relevant fragment:

> Another economic factor in the falling birthrate is the rising price of real estate and a resulting increase in unmarried or late-marrying people. The tradition in Korea is for men to prepare a family home before marrying, and the rising cost of housing in recent years has thereby triggered a decline in marriage rates.

ctrl+f "real estate"

"Another economic factor in the falling birthrate is the rising price of real estate and a resulting increase in unmarried or late-marrying people. The tradition in Korea is for men to prepare a family home before marrying, and the rising cost of housing in recent years has thereby triggered a decline in marriage rates."

Yes, housing is a pretty big factor.

The textbook life you're supposed to lead in South Korea (and while South Korea is a very dynamic country that is always changing fast, for the moment, the expectation to adhere to norms and aspire to what your folks did is still a bit higher than you're perhaps used to) is to get married, move into a marriage home you bought - more on this in a moment - a couple of months to weeks before the ceremony to start co-habitation, and get busy having children.

"Buying a home" in South Korea means either outright buying, or very commonly, living rent-free for the duration of a one- or multi-year contract after putting down a deposit that is usually 75% or more of the property value. This system is considered good and desirable, called Jeonse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeonse

For numerous reasons, the Jeonse system is slowly getting dismantled. Monthly rent schemes are slowly becoming more and more prevalent. This is causing a big squeeze/run on the now-fewer good Jeonse apartments available, and giving many South Koreans the feeling that it's harder than ever to find a home to have, which is so intrinsically linked to this life milestone that for some, it puts getting married out of question.

In addition to the above issue, which is meant as perceptual, it's also actually become economically more difficult to afford good housing. Some of this is very real and beyond the control of individuals, others is peer pressure to allocate money to e.g. luxury goods. Overall it's become tough on couples to afford housing and kids without both parents working very hard, which in turns makes child-rearing difficult to pull off; Korean employers and co-workers are still very hostile to workers with children (don't bring private issues to work, etc.).

(I'm not Korean, but I've lived there for some years, can communicate in the language and read the news, and am married to a South Korean citizen with a child on the way; the latter is one of the reasons we moved away.)

There are two modes of renting in Korea, one of them involves you paying Full market value to renter as a deposit! In theory you will get all of your money back at the end of lease. Renter invests this money into something, hopefully not another rental property seeing as they just had a mini real-estate crash. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/why-south-koreas-housing...

Sounds more like SK is hostile just to middle and lower class families. No that that makes it right but that's the correct interpretation.

To add some color: South Korea is somewhere between the size of Kentucky and Indiana (the 37th and 38th largest states), yet has over 51 million people, almost 15 million more than California, the most populous state. It has very few natural resources to speak of, and is roughly two-thirds mountainous, meaning most of the population is condensed in the few flat areas. In some ways, it's natural that the fertility rate would be so low, purely out of density, if nothing else.

It's honestly miraculous how far it's come. Within one lifetime, it went from a primarily agricultural economy to one of the world's largest and most industrialized. It builds (at times) half of the world's ships in tonnage, and its engineers and contractors are responsible for many of the world's tallest buildings.

One issue is that there are many who are not willing to live normal lives and there's this constant battle of trying to outdo one another. People are trying to please even mere strangers standing next to them at the crosswalk. Living mediocre is bad and there's a negative stigma associated to being middle to lower class.

If your apartment isn't a Prugio or Lotte Castle and live in Bangbae; If your car isn't a AMG, BMW M, or at least a Genesis; If your bag isn't a Hermes or a LV; If your morning routine doesn't include an Ah-Ah (Ice Americano); If your baby stroller isn't a Yoyo; If your watch isn't an Apple Watch or Omega; If your shoes aren't won through a Nike Raffle and have high resale; If your road bike riding through Hangang isn't a Pinarello; You'll be forever mediocre.

My solution? Spread the population apart such that people will stop comparing themselves with one another. There are plenty of places outside of Seoul where there's fiber internet, good schools that are empty (better teacher to student ratio), and cheap land. People should be more willing to embrace the countryside (shigol) and stop thinking it's bad or without opportunity. I hope there will be more remote jobs that pay well to incentivise new families to go outward. Seoul needs some rest!

As someone that lived there with a kid a while back, I agree, and it's only gotten tougher since I left.

> What's the solution?

Let's start by identifying the problem. The problem is that everyone wants to live in Seoul, or even in particular parts of Seoul. Is there a solution to that? Hard to see what it might be.

Have the Gov subsidized the young with generous programs, perhaps a monthly fee for each child where at some level (2-3 children), one parent could stay home to raise them and collect a modest salary. Otherwise most young folks can't afford it.

The solution is fewer people - which is the direction they are headed. S.Korea has twice the population density of Germany for instance. So cutting in to half the current number seems about right.

Honest question: who benefits from population growth besides developers?

Guessing ... because of appreciating real estate and concentration of jobs, living in certain cities/areas became culturally synonymous with "being a winner" while staying in rural/industrial towns meant "being a loser". So the big cities became the bottle neck through which all young people need to funnel before they deem each other worthy of starting families. And that's a bottle neck on population growth.

The same mechanism exists elsewhere but the contrasts between "stagnant vs vital" would be more pronounced in SK, probably because of the rate and scale of the economy over the last 40-50 years. Maybe?

The government needs to stop fuelling the bubble. Instead, raise mortgage rates (so that "time in market" stops being a factor) and force industry to spread out offices and jobs (of all ranks) evenly throughout the country.

Lot's of sticks. No real estate / wealth transfers unless to couples with 2 kids. New nuclear families either have potential windfall of 4x estates/wealth/housing from multiple older generations or they have to work the uphill childless grind. Combine with subsidies for home ownership in desirable areas for those with kids. BAN PET OWNERSHIP for those without kids. IMO This one huge. Increasing trend of emotional surrogate pets filling emotional void in east asia. Need to drive down cost of people settling for medicore relationships.

It's not enough to make economics of having kids easier, you have to make not having kids harder.

This seems to be the problem with all the developing countries. Economic growth requires, men and women both prioritising jobs over marriage and family stability. Divorces happen because there is immense incentive for women to look for better partners even after 1, or many marriages. The incentives are life long, premium monthly pensions with annual raises and child support payments. All you have to do is marry some one, and divorce them. They now owe you life long monthly pensions.

There is not a job on earth where you can work two years, and then be entitled to life long pensions. Not even in the extreme politics of communism was this even imagined, to the scale marriage has been reduced to now.

Given all, marriage and even having kids is heavily disincentivised. You have to be an idiot beyond belief to walk into something like this.

Apart from this, even with a perfect marriage. Most men have to deal with never ending disappointed feelings from women for working to death and still coming short of their expectations. Given all this I don't think there is a easy solution for this birth rate problem.

Social engineering on the scale of countries is needed. The overall social and cultural trend world wide are no where near whats needed to bring about these birth rate increases.

My outlook is that the world certainly isn't getting better any time soon. It'll get a lot worse first. And who knows how long that will take. And I want to be young enough to enjoy time with my kids when they're adults. The complications and difficulties are worth it, I figure.

I say this as an American glossing through this comment thread though, so I don't know your circumstances.

I wouldn't worry to much about climate change, humanity overcame bigger problems. And if your in-laws want children so much, just tell them your concerns, they might be willing to chip in financially.

My wife and I have definitely noticed a trend of “you’re not doing your civic duty” and we don’t even live in SK.

If you really want to have children but are worried about climate change and cost - may I suggest you look moving to norhern europe. The region will survive most predicted outcomes and childcare is heavily state subsidized. That is if you would love to have a family but can’t for the stated reasons. It’s totally fine not to want children as personal choice without any rationalization as well!

There are a lot of people who have children even though they can't afford it. Most of them muddle through somehow.

Is there an fertility rates published by income/wealth levels? Does the U-shaped fertility graph show up in SK? As in, poorest people have more kids, middle class have fewest kids, and richest have more kids.

I'm not arguing your decision to not have children. I've made the same decision myself, but the 'can't afford to have children' has always confused me.

Even after the point where contraception became readily available, people were having children with far fewer resources than anyone alive today. What I hear when people say 'We can't afford to have children' is an additional '...and maintain our current standard of living'.

It seems there's a lot of expectations that we heap on parents. My kids must have their own room. Must go to a prestigous private school. Must participate in expensive sports. Must travel. Must attend a top university, on and on.

Kids don't have to have any of that (ok, own room is pretty important after a certain age). The truth is parents need to chill out of this evolutionary arms race to make sure little timmy has every possible advantage even if they run themselves ragged getting there.

You write that you have "opted" and then that you can't afford having children. That sounds more like childlessness was forced upon you - unless you've explicitly decided to be poor (such as for example monks do).

Many cultures value independence, so when people are forced to things, they tend to twist it around by saying it was their decision. That's why important issues get swept under the rug.

I dunno about SK but in the USA the road to kids was: partner up, get a stable income, find a home, start a family. The second and third links in that chain are broken for most people. The older generation wants to work into their 70s and own a bunch of rental properties so… no grandkids.

In Spain there's no institutional pressure, but peer pressure. I'm expected to have children and pay +1/2 of my income in rent, have little savings, etc.

I'm pretty much an average spaniard in financial terms.

Climate change frightens me too.

I mean, If I had children I would have fear for their future and I would be completely ruined financially.

But it seems this is completely incomprehensible to older generations that wonder why youngster complain about getting hands in their pocket trough rent, pensions, debt, etc.

I'm not in SK but in the US. I decided long ago to not have children (I'm a man) along with my wife. Maybe we'll change our mind one day, but more than likely it won't.

I honestly just don't think its my responsibility to contribute to some "greater good" of continuing to populate the earth. Humans survived just fine when the population of the Earth was half the size of now.

This is extremely selfish and probably not seen in a good light, but since I don't have children nor do I plan to, I honestly don't really care that much what happens after I pass when it comes to the population, etc. Not to be mistaken though, while I live I won't try to actively make things worse for anybody.

I don't think shaming young people into having children will work (for SK or any other country). Eventually they will have to adjust their culture and immigration policies to be more welcoming to outsiders.

Maybe you’d change your mind about affordability if you actually had to pay the externalities of your childlessness and didn’t hope to be subsidised by others

There's only one reason, and it's that you don't really want children.

I wonder why your in-laws won't provide you with means to have children if they want you to have children.

In Russia it is customary to provide children with some kind of housing ("granny's flat") either for living or for renting out, even without any expectations.

They should append "From a White American Journalist's Perspective" to the title, would make the whole thing a little more honest

TIL SK babies are needier than babies in rest of the world.

Perhaps we need a cultural change in parenting, a more relaxed parenting style or more of a village experience where parents can trust teachers, neighbors, bus drivers etc. to reinforce values, expectations, etc. so it isn't all on the parents (or parent).

That's entirely to be expected when your plan hinges around having one kid. They're called little emperors for a reason. If you have more than one kid, Korean or not, you treat them less preciously.

Weird to be wondering if men are to blame here when women are typically the ones who have the final say as to when and with whom they decide to settle down and have kids with. Personally I think it is a combination of couples not wanting to have kids for a variety of reasons (not wanting to sacrifice their quality of life, lack of economic security, anxieties about the future), women delaying childbirth for longer to focus on education and career (and possibly waiting too long and not being able to have children by the time they are ready), women becoming pickier with who they choose to date and marry with the reality of hypergamy (women with higher educational and career attainment typically want to date men who are at least as successful as they are, and women are increasingly outperforming men in education and career these days). I'm sure men have some blame in this too, but most single men I know would prefer to not be single, but can't seem to find anyone interested.

It's a simplistic thought, but I often have this optimistic impulse that dealing with stabilizing the birth rate is easier than escaping the Malthusian trap would be, especially with energy use/person generally trending up.

No.

But there are places where it isn't nearly as stark as SK or HK (the two big ones under 1.0, let alone replacement of ~2.1).

Most of Western Europe is under 1.5, which is still way under replacement rate. Sweden, France, and Iceland are at like 1.8, which is still under replacement rate but not incredibly low.

Unless you count tiny places like the Faroe Islands maybe.

Or we could opt to care for our elderly and encourage compassion and empathy instead of shaming and stigma.

Israel comes to mind.

China also had, and still has, a child limit policy that violates human rights.

Not to mention the genocide currently in progress. Genocides don’t help fertility, I’m guessing.

I really think it's a mistake to say quality of life is lower in China right now than at any point in the past. Yes, housing is expensive, but 60 years ago literally tens of millions of people starved to death. Housing in rural china is still cheap, but no one wants to live there. It's capitalism that allowed people to escape rural subsistence farming that realistically meant starvation level quality of life. I do think people work more, but that's largely because the alternative is being a subsistence farmer on the verge of starvation like they would've been before capitalism.

I'll note that this isn't intended to start a political argument, but I'm confused when people blame capitalism, even in countries that are themselves communist. What does this even mean? Are we blaming the global market economy? What would the solution be then, severely limit trade between countries?

It's okay. You can complain to your union (which is run by your company) or work for a competitor (which is also owned by the same conglomerate as your company).

At least your leader is no longer brainwashed by a shaman who channels her dead father while taking bribes from those conglomerates [1]. That father who was also your former military dictator who followed the great tradition of torturing and murdering socialists and worker leaders with the CIAs help.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Korean_political_sc...

I would imagine integrating North Koreans into the South would be far more difficult than the reunification of Germany. The technological and health gap alone is huge and even their language has started to drift apart.

Is that what you mean, or do you mean that building a society where both parents need to work in order to survive has distracted us from important parts of life that result in a healthier society?

Perhaps one parent working and one at home with plenty of time for both parents to relax and spend time with their family is the key, but that doesn't mean that the man should work and the woman should stay home (or that both parents need to be different genders).

No. I want kids but I don't want them until I can afford stable housing. And if that's hard for me as an overpaid tech worker, then I understand why most people are delaying kids or not having them at all. If most young people are still living with parents or roommates well into their 30's, then it's not a mystery why my generation isn't having kids. Nothing to do with 'life is so good kids aren't desirable anymore'.

As you can see clearly from the sibling comments to mine, the problem is not that people don't have the means to have and support children. The problem is that they have a very specific vision for what it's supposed to look like, and that specific vision is extremely unaffordable right now. Various demographic, technological, and financial phenomenon have forced us to a point where the big suburban house, yard, fence, dog, etc. is simply not financially feasible for the bottom 80% of the population.

Instead of realizing you can do more with less, many of these people are delaying or rejecting the family phase of life. There's a certain echo chamber that makes this seem like an inevitable outcome in the developed world, which is of course clearly proven wrong by the fact that people in third world countries are having families and prospering on fractions of the income that these "first world victims" are struggling with.

It's more of an "expectations problem" than any hard and fast financial barrier. People in developed countries simply can't afford to have the life they were expecting to have. Meanwhile, the other half of the world continues putting one foot in front of the other because they never expected it any other way.

Your last paragraph tries to use population arguments to prove that individual decisions are illogical. That doesn't look great after calling people who hold a certain position "intellectual children".

This explanation may make sense if people were complaining about an inability to have kids despite wanting them. But physical infertility is not alleged here.

Is there some evidence that these chemicals are more present in countries with lower birthrates?

Plastic, plastic byproducts, etc. are some of the cheapest and most readily available materials in the world, including in developing countries. The much stronger predictor here seems to be HDI and industrial maturity.