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Comment by gottorf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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As impressive as it sounds to say South Korea developed successfully on its own, did it? Did the US play any hand in its development? I mean obviously South Korea would not exist had it not been for the US' help in the war. But even afterwards, is there an sort of advantage South Korea had by having the US (the leading super power at the time) help?

Sure, but the US also tried to help other countries such as the Philippines and Iraq which haven't done nearly as well. US aid doesn't seem to be the decisive factor.

It seems like post war japan and south korea saw a lot of investment into their manufacturing. Why didn’t the philippines see a similar level of investment at the time considering it was also destroyed and in need for rebuilding? Not destroyed enough relative to the firebombings of the japan home islands perhaps?

The Philippines saw a massive amount of American investment after WWII. I don’t have exact figures but it is comparable to South Korea. There are lots of differences. One Marcos was the most corrupt politician in history (in terms of total money looted). Two, Korea benefited from cultural and geographic proximity to Japan. As a former colony it was able to sell low cost products on the Japanese market and secure manufacturing contracts from Japanese firms. Three you might also make a point about the influence of Confucianism and Protestantism on Korea. To this day Korea is a very Christian country by East Asian standards (~30%) and the Chaebols are more Protestant than the overall population. Contrast with the Catholic Philippines and you can make a classic Weberian case of work ethic.

Japan colonized, invaded, and stole Korea for about 35 years under the guise of imperialism. Japan's colonial policy was the most tyrannical, unauthorized, and vicious in that it aimed not only at socio-economic theft but also at ethnic extermination. The Japanese did not hesitate to revise the mental culture through history, suppress the use of the Korean language, and destroy national cultural heritage. The anti-Japanese independence struggle was so stubborn and steadfast that it became a model for minority peoples around the world and led to liberation. The detrimental effects of Japanese power on Korean history were so severe that they led to the division of Korea into North and South Korea.

On some level the success of South Korea is the success of Samsung. It is not clear how much you could separate the two.

Why discount LG, Huyndai-Kia and even Daewoo?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

Samsung has been, at times, almost 20% of South Korean GDP. The others are big, but Samsung is enormous. Between them they are ridiculous.

I didn't mean to imply that South Korea developed all on its own. (A good example of a country that tried to do that, with closed borders, is its northern neighbor.) Certainly, having the foremost superpower in its corner helped tremendously, much like the Marshall Plan did for post-WW2 Western Europe. It's a fascinating history that I can in no way do justice in a HN comment, save to say that one can't simply throw money at a country and come out with a result like South Korea. :-)

To put the "Marshall Plan" into a modern perspective, it was equivalent to $173 billion in 2023 dollars, over a period of four years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

The US provided a lot of support, which South Korea used well. But, several other countries got similar levels of support and achieved nothing...the corrupt leaders sold the country on the cheap.

South Korea could have very well been used as the US's beachhead especially during a time when China and Japan were becoming growing empires. Several businesses also benefited from the prosperity of neighboring countries. The Korean news to this day reports on export trends because of it being an exports-based economy.

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 could have very well been used as the US's beachhead

South Korea was and is used as "the US's beachhead". There is still a significant US military presence in the country even now.

It's arguable that Japan helped South Korea industrialize by offloading industries it could no longer afford due to rising wages.

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...

Awesome article - thank you

Yes, a military force present that helped them relax and spend more on growth versus negative growth defense spending.

This isn't enough of an explanation. South Korea is denser than India, but only by ~20%, and India's fertility rate is more than double South Korea's. Taiwan is denser than South Korea, but its fertility rate is more than 50% higher. South Korea really is an outlier.

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).

Indeed. Infinite growth as demanded by capitalism is not physically possible. If they wouldn't hit "the wall" now, they would hit it anyway in the near future.

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.

The wall manifests as prices. When you barely make ends meet in spite of being a skilled worker, something is off.

"The wall" is already manifesting in Europe as well, in terms of CoL and real estate prices[1] where even skilled workers can't afford a decent home anymore or build any wealth after paying the inflated rents from their stagnating wages. You either inherit something from your parents or are screwed if you don't get a top FAANG/F500 job out of university. Working for small or average companies doesn't cut it anymore.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mavRpBC2dA8

> It feels like the society collectively decided "no more new building"

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.

[0]: https://www.freedominthe50states.org/land

In the EU in particular, there's the nZEB standard, which became a requirement for new buildings. This makes the initial costs higher, but the ongoing ones lower.

You seem to be conflating economic growth with population growth. Also the concern is not that Korea's population is failing to grow, it's that it's failing to stabilize and will soon shrink significantly.

In my search to provide find examples of economic and population growth correlations, I came across two papers[1][2] which find no correlation. Thank you for changing my mind.

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

>Infinite growth as demanded by capitalism

Capitalism does not demand this. You can have a capitalist system with no growth.

True. However bullwhip effects are real as well. An undamped population explosion/collapse cycle is natural and stable, however it is far from ideal.

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.

To my knowledge there's no historic precedent for what's happening. Times of regrowth in the past after catastrophic decline (such as major war) was generally already in the context of extremely high fertility rates. What we do have is increasing evidence, across multiple nations such as Iran and China, that it's relatively easy to lower fertility rates and extremely difficult to bring them back up.

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.

Not only that, but there would be high fertility subcultures inside the general population that would be highly overrepresented.

It’s only possible to happen now due to birth control, so it is the first time. In the past after great deaths the mostly young population had a bunch of kids.

That’s impossible now, because the people left behind after the collapse are mostly old.

Birth control is probably a great filter.

In John Calhoun's mouse utopia universe 25 experiments, overpopulation inevitably leads to implosion characterized by asocial, juvenile behavior and inability to bond, and there was never any rebound.

There is a huge leap from "Infinite growth is not possible" to we're about to hit a wall.

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.

There are only three options possible. Growth, stability, and shrinking. The fertility numbers are in the shrinking range.

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.

Yes and what people don't realise is that exponential effects start to take place as a smaller population is than having fewer children and is this continues, the Korean people will effectively disappear in 100 years or so. Those fewer people must also support an aging population. It's a death spiral both for the people and the economy. If North Korea keeps fertility rate at its current level, they will exist into the future and the South will disappear.

> 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.

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 ?

They can always Anschluss North Korea, which last time I've checked had 2.1 rate.

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