What's the solution?
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.
Maybe South Korea's situation should give all ageing rich developed nations something to reflect on and start making preparations for the upcoming demographic plateau/collapse and reform stuff like welfare/pension systems, instead of blindly kicking the can down the road thinking growth is never ending.
It feels like the society collectively decided "no more new building" to make housing scarce and inflate up property prices of existing owners at the expense of the newcomers.
Seems like a common theme among the developed world from the Americas all the way to AU-NZ.
This, more than anything else, seems to be the problem in the developed West, at least when it comes to real estate prices and related cost of living issues. At least in the US, there's a pretty strong correlation between land-use freedom[0] (that is, the ability for landowners to develop that land into more productive use, including higher-density housing) and median home/rent prices.
1. Barlow, R. (1986). Correlations Between Population Growth and Economic Growth https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/100865
2. Barlow, R. (1994). Population Growth and Economic Growth: Some More Correlations doi:10.2307/2137634
Capitalism does not demand this. You can have a capitalist system with no growth.
A 0.7 fertility rate is tiny. Keep in mind that fertility rate is measured per-female. So the per-capita rate is .35. If this holds, it means that the next generation will be 65% smaller than the current. This will inevitably lead to an overcorrection followed by a period of unsustainable population growth again.
So I don't think there's any reason to expect a bullwhip type effect. It could simply be that we've created a system which does remarkably well up front, and then catastrophically collapses in the tail-end. If one wants to be especially fatalistic, we could even be looking at the Great Filter of the Fermi Paradox, but I think that's improbable - there still remain many high fertility cultures and they will simply inherit the world as low fertility cultures die off.
That’s impossible now, because the people left behind after the collapse are mostly old.
Birth control is probably a great filter.
And I don't know how capitalism demands more growth, it just provides more growth which is why capitalism is successful at things like reducing poverty.
And the worst part is that when shrinking, economies contract and things get worse. If they can't afford to have children now, then people in South Korea in 20 years will certainly not have it any better. It's an extinction death spiral.
A period of rapid easy growth has put Won into the pockets of Seoulites who merely became rich from just owning property. Unfortunately, this wealth did not propagate evenly throughout and the younger demographics are suffering today as a result.
South Korea was and is used as "the US's beachhead". There is still a significant US military presence in the country even now.
This article is about analyzing the comparison raised between South Korea and Ukraine, but it is largely about analyzing how South Korea industrialized from Japan's assistance.
https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/the-ukraine-south-kor...
Is it miraculous if it's not sustainable, as we are clearly seeing? They had a massive, far-beyond-replacement-rate boom of the population, based on the 1970s and 1980s levels of fossil fuel consumption, fueled also by rapid globalization.
If the trends for energy and globalization are reversed, what are they going to do with a massively aged population around 2040-2050?
It seems like their demographic crisis is going to be one of the worst in the world, perhaps worse even than Japan's ?
You might also compare the United States to its peers in Europe--fertility isn't that much higher in the US (and is lower compared to a few European countries that are much denser).
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!
Small villages where everyone knows each other can be just as bad regarding bullying and talking behind one's backs, although I do agree - especially as some here in Western countries keep advocating for megacities and accelerating rural flight because of resource usage efficiency - that too dense populations are a hotbed of all kinds of social issues.
Crabs in a bucket.
That would fix the problem, but it's not a solution, because there's no practical way to implement it. It's hard to imagine that even five people would willingly move out of Seoul.
This is a completely busted system of values though... Almost everything you mention is the luxury version of things that all have functionally very similar alternatives at a much lower cost. The main value is signaling and maybe satisfying some mimetic desire. As signaling, it's a zero sum game, and is mostly just consuming all excess resources.
The question is why do people feel that this is the best use of their resources? Do they not have any purpose for their lives beyond consumption? Why are people being judged largely based on the consumer products they can afford instead of whether they're a kind person or whether they have a a lot of friends or whether they're proud of their children or any number of other positive things they could be doing?
A lot of people have no purpose in their life beyond consumption. Truly, this is it.
If people put the tiniest fraction of work into their fitness, their personality, their intelligence or any other character-building activity or experience instead of working away to buy trinkets and tokens of vapid displays of wealth, we may actually get somewhere as a species.
Exercising is hard, as is resisting junk food, as is reading a book compared to watching TV, or throwing yourself into a new situation. It's so much easier to not do that stuff, sit in an office and collect a paycheck and redirect that money towards things we think make us better than each other.
Personally, I'm way more impressed with the people I know who run 100km+ a week, workout hard and study hard, than people who walk around wearing designer clothes or showing off the things they've bought. The latter sounds sort of pathetic.
Now all of that said, if you want your six pack abs so that you can attract a wife so that you can start a family, great. If you want to be fit so that you'll live longer and with more energy so that you can accomplish other things, also great.
My general feeling though is that due to a bunch of changes in the modern world, people have lost outlets for a sense of purpose in their lives, and this is leading to major psychological problems.
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.
It's not enough to make economics of having kids easier, you have to make not having kids harder.
When tourists look at S. Korea and say, "Hey, it's real nice here!" They don't see the hundreds of low-paid workers who are working behinds the scenes. There are plenty of low paying jobs but nothing that can help one build generational wealth.
Plus is wealth really all that valuable when you don’t have to worry about crime, funding your child’s education, losing your job, or having a major health scare? When living in a walkable area full of culture is an option everywhere, rather than a select few areas?
The American Dream is just that, a dream.
> 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.
Honest question: who benefits from population growth besides developers?
Honest answer: next generation of retirees / older people. They need young people in multiple ways - 1. to sustain welfare (which is pay-as-you-go universally), 2. production of food / entertainment / stuff, 3. services
If you think automation is going to solve that, just look at who were "essential service workers"[1] in Covid where governments had to make exceptions even in the early days of pandemic when things were at their scariest. All those are essential functions for the society. Who is going to handle all of that when each next generation is only 35% of the previous generation's size (with a TFR of 0.7)?
[1] One example: https://covid19.ca.gov/essential-workforce/
You know that immigrants don't grow on trees or in labs, right? They are also part of "population growth", just somewhere else. And bringing too many of them en mass is already destabilizing infertile societies (see: European ones).
Agree, it sounds like peanuts. Probably still better than nothing on net but substantially raising this subsidy is the first thing to do if making a serious attempt to improve things for families.
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.