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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

>Infinite growth as demanded by capitalism

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

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