South Korea to see population plummet to 1970s levels, government says | Hacker News Reader

South Korea to see population plummet to 1970s levels, government says

cnn.com

36 pointseatonphil50 comments

Which still means 80% more than in 1950, so still an increase of about 80% over a century (1950-2050).

The takeaway for me is that South Korea's population really exploded after the Korean War.

I wonder how much of this was the result of food scraps from US bases? I've been told a number of Korean dishes use ingredients that were begged from American GIs during and after the war. Things like hotdogs and american cheese that then got used creatively. I know other species will see a huge birth spike from discovered food sources. But I don't know if human's are smart enough, or have expensive enough pregnancies and child rearing to avoid this potential trap.

It was the period of the most rapid population growth globally. And the period during which antibiotics became widely available.

A democratic nation with powerful economy and complex social rules. Parents push kids to study hard in school. Kids learn a lot, so they pass exams, create smarphones, robots, yet unable to create an environment where people would be motivated to bring their kids and wouldn't be as stressed or suicidal. South Koreans on HN, any ideas why? ;-)

For me personally, South Korea is a great example, how entire nations of homo sapiens can be unconsciously cognitively trapped, and in how technological progress, science and ability to solve differential equations !== wellbeing.

It is my thinking that successful religions are built on at least one tenant of "have kids and teach them the religion" otherwise as social complexity grows we tend to forget the have kids point and the society falters, and this has been an issue with humans for much more than the modern age.

I'm not saying religions are right or closer to some ground truth here, but evolution does hing on the point of requiring reproduction of some type.

From my knowledge, religious communities not only "brainwash into having kids", but they also provide a support network for them and their parents. "Atheists" in "modern age" try to achieve more individual freedom by replacing the local community by a state. However, there is a problem. The way religious community organised at least empirically somehow matches human biology. E.g. small tribes, support, shared ideals. However, it turns out, modern humans have around-zero practical knowledge how to build a "modern" successful state for millions of individualists that would adequately respond to all changes/challenges. Yes, there are countries that were lucky to get a ~d20 roll~ stable democratic govt at some point. But if you look closer, even in these "developed" countries feedback loops are often extremely slow and clumsy.

> religious communities not only "brainwash into having kids", but they also provide a support network for them and their parents

Really? Is daycare cheaper for Christians? Are Christian families (causally) less likely to have two parents working full-time? Because it seems to me that slogging your ass to church every Sunday to be told you're not Godly enough and should vote Republican just seems like Yet Another Fucking Thing that working parents have to do each week, on top of everything else. Do you have any, y'know, evidence at all, that religious parents have more of a support network around them than non-religious? (And that this difference is due to religion, not confounding factors like socioeconomics?)

> "Atheists" in "modern age" try to achieve more individual freedom by replacing the local community by a state.

Another hot take, eh? Any evidence for this one either? This is an unbelievably over-simplistic take. I guarantee whatever trend you think you're seeing here is just as prevalent among the highly religious. If you want to know why individual communities are breaking down, you'd be much better off looking at car dependence, the abundance of suburbs, and zoning laws than just deciding it must be the godlessness of those heathens causing all the problems.

It sounds like you'll never step into a church for a few months to learn this, understandably so. But the answer to all you're questions is obviously yes. Churches are generally tight-knit, welcoming, and very community oriented. They are a literal support network, that will often weekly hear out any concerns of people and try to help them. They often have more kids, so they help each other with the daycare of kids. They are more likely to prioritize single income households, and will move to places more accommodating to church support networks and single income households to live that lifestyle.

I'm an atheist and am very much anti-religion in that I think it's a net bad and imaginary in the worst ways, but I do think, just like any group of like-minded people, that it does support a social network. Religion provides a common ground and shared set of beliefs. It's the same way expats find each other in countries because there's some commonality, or how you go off to school and can find "your people".

As much as I'm not a fan of religion I can admit there are some good things about it and plenty of good people who practice it.

Religious people apriori have much better chances of building support networks than non-religious, just because they have tight trust-based community based on common faith. It's not slogging your ass to church, it's form of networking. Just a reminder, it's a frequent complaint in "modern age" about loneliness, especially on HN. And these people have their social time at least once per week.

Even more - if you come to a new country, you go to the local church, and voila, you got new friends. No need in stupid shallow "hi were are you from" meetups. Btw, I just realised that while expats in Estonia complained about loneliness, my jewish and muslim friends have zero problems with it, because they had their club by default.

There they could easily ask for advice, or get a recommendation for a trusted person to solve their problem. Cm'on, one of main ideas of religion is basically a form of psychotherapy, and the second big is helping each other. And imagine if the participating families are big. You'll have bigger chances of catching something rare like 5th son of your friend becoming a mayor and using this connection to promote your business.

Also, regarding help, I know a person who used a wonderful method of sending money. Just go to a sinagogue, give money and the recipient magically gets it at the other end.

> Is daycare cheaper for Christians?

It can easily be, and not only daycare. You know, like a discount for a good person from the ingroup. Also, daycare is a pretty modern concept made by "individualists". Usually people solve it by asking other members of family to help.

> you'd be much better off looking at car dependence, the abundance of suburbs, and zoning laws

In Korea? In Japan? Here in Europe? :-)

South Korea isn't special for having bad demographics, it's just farther along the curve.

Every single industrialized country is well below replacement rate TFR. The fact that modern society has this effect on fertility is something that every affected country is going to have to address sooner or later.

I don't think there's a monotonic curve where more development leads to lower fertility. Both Sweden and New Zealand have higher HDIs than SK, but their fertility rates are higher than many countries which are considered less developed

I mean, there's definitely a correlation globally speaking, but after a certain point of development (e.g countries with HDI 0.8 and above) it looks like the correlation isn't as strong

Edit: this Wikipedia page shows what I'm referring to, see section on Contrary Findings -> J-curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

You can see on the chart, for HDIs >= 0.8 there isn't a visible trend of decrease to the level where SK is currently

Swedish fertility rate could also be driven by immigration numbers. And considering a significant fraction of Swedish immigrants don't even know the language, that's definitely going to be a skewed number.

Nice to see an article that does't use words like "disaster" (though the word "timebomb" does occur up front.

> Countries like South Korea, Japan and China, however, have shied away from mass immigration to solve their working age population issues.

As Herb Stein famously said, "if it can’t go on forever it will stop". In fact, South Korea embraced foreign brides many years ago, at least by farmers who are particularly low status in the marriage market.

Kind of is a disaster. It’s not a lower, but stable, birth rate. It’s precipitously dropping.

I guess I don’t consider it disastrous. There is no shortage of babies being born.

The rate is 0.72. Every 20 years you lose 20% of your population or a percent a year. That would give South Korea 100 years of existence at this point. It’s dire.

Pretty sure your maths is off - even if it did steadily fall by 20% every 20 years, it'd still have a population of 16 to 17 million in 100 years' time. So no, not especially dire.

Curious how all these advanced economies will deal with structural deflation when there is decreasing customer demand and consumption for most types of goods.

Example - do house prices start falling?

Typically Japan is used as an example. Rural houses there are extremely cheap these days. Urban housing is still expensive.

To expand on this, housing in first-tier cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Fukuoka is quite expensive (although not bonkers like it's gotten in Canada/Australia/etc). Housing in smaller second- and third-tier cities is very affordable, while still maintaining access to good hospitals, public transit, jobs, and so on. Rural housing is practically free aside from the cost of renovation.

Housing everywhere in Japan is basically free aside from the cost of renovation + the cost of the land. Houses are considered to be disposable there, you're expected to tear it down and build a new one when you buy one, so they are priced accordingly.

The difference is that land in Tokyo etc is expensive.

But why would you? It seems like most young people with no money could just stay for free.

Because it’s the (outdated) law due to earthquakes. Building and materials have gotten much better since the original laws were passed.

Are you required by law to build a new house? What if the house was just built a year ago.

Old houses in rural areas often need a lot of care due to their age and condition. They may have sat empty for several years and suffered damage from a lack of maintenance.

Also if they're cheap postwar construction, they may not be very earthquake safe. If they're older traditional architecture, they're probably ok but still probably need a lot of TLC.

Makes sense - if I look at the overall Japan numbers, they look pretty flat (seems like foreign nationals are plugging some of the decline).

Curious what happens when there's a real demographic nosedive.

Urban housing is still expensive

Not compared to most countries: https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-..., https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-...

Deflation in goods and real estate, etc, but inflation in services, especially eldercare and healthcare.

The uk government has decided to import millions of people and hope that it creates good outcomes. So far it’s difficult to find a measure that has improved.

It’s because the UK is very new at it compared to say the US and Canada. IMO it’s still likely better than losing your adult working population though. We’ll see how the UK fares compared to Germany in the coming years

This makes me wonder: if the north goes to war with the south all of a sudden and enough people die, the corresponding demographic collapse could be enough to leave the south empty within a generation

Ten years ago I would’ve scoffed and said the rest of the world wouldn’t let it happen

Now, having seen what Russia and Israel are being allowed to get away with, I guess you can just invade and commit war crimes whenever you feel like it. Maybe some people will send you some arms, but otherwise, South Korea will be on their own.

Check out Peter Zeihan on YouTube for more info on this kind of stuff globally.

Did anyone else find the note regarding North Korean fertility extremely surprising? I guess I have no idea what daily life is like in NK - but I was under the impression under-educated women often had more children (not supporting this, just stating what I though was commonly understood).

Does NK have a better education system for women and better internet access than I thought?

North Korea is relatively poor but that does not mean they are a "third world country". School is compulsory and everyone attends school, and I expect good equality of schooling between genders (one good thing with socialist regimes).

And it has a strong (but relatively poor) middle class.

Please stop spreading this kind of information around the internet as if it’s anywhere remotely close to an ok place to live. I’ve actually stayed overnight there. I saw tons of what I initially thought were elementary or middle school kids but found out they were all tremendously malnourished high schoolers. When I tried passing out food and candy to one of them, another one yelled at him for acting like a beggar. All lights, even at my hotel, were shut off shortly after sunset. Paper was in huge shortage so when I asked for additional napkins at dinner, I got 1 single-ply square. It was a super depressing experience. Pyongyang is better but North Korea isn’t just that 1 city. I was exploring other areas in the northwest.

They allow you outside of Pyongyang? How did you manage to do that, were you under some kind of govt supervision?

It doesn't sound like you observed gender disparity in education... Did you? If so, you should say so, because that's what the GP was commenting on. Do you have other thoughts regarding their fertility rate?

“Stereotyped gender roles begin in childhood. Girls learn they are not equal to boys and cannot resist mistreatment and abuse, and that they should feel shame if they become targets of abuse by men, whether in the home or in public spaces”

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/21/submission-rights-women-...

My own time there was limited but I watched music and dance performances comprised almost entirely of young girls. In contrast, I saw tons of people in military uniform or in training, clearly of widely varying ages, but 100% male. If “gender disparity in education” is as shallow as, do girls and boys both learn algebra, then the answer is probably no. But I observed what looked like complete brainwashing of expected gender roles and your future contribution to society, starting at a very young age.

Regarding fertility rate there, I never trust any specific numbers they publish like the 1.8 mentioned. Literally 1 person there has control over what stats the rest of the world sees, balancing his imagination/vision with what the rest of the world will actually believe.

Thanks, that's a much more substantive response!

Who said it was an OK place to live? Is anything I wrote incorrect? (If it is please correct me)

I am just pointing out that there is an established and comprehensive education system that includes women.

You wrote “equality of schooling between genders”. I wrote a separate reply under your thread explaining it’s far from equal.

No you posted an anecdote that is tangential at best...

Boys and girls learn to read, write, count, etc in the same way.

The original poster expected girls/women to be uneducated/under-educated. This is an aspect that may hold true in countries like Afghanistan or some Africa countries but not in North Korea, which has a totally different culture and level of development.

I think it’s the opposite, NK food security is so dire that people don’t want to have children because it’s more mouths to feed.

North Korea has a higher fertility rate (1.82) than Cuba (1.50) though for what it's worth. It's close to Vietnam (1.96).

The economic situation of NK is far different than those two countries, and in NK’s situation you would often expect to see fertility rates above replacement.

Except it will be small and old instead of small and young.

Germany, China, Italy, Japan and really every country except for the ones in Central Africa are also affected by birth rates below replenishment levels.

What makes North America more resilient than other places is that we're accustomed to immigration and we're very good at assimilating immigrants. Immigrants to the US and Canada become (i.e. consider themselves) Americans and Canadians within a generation. To my knowledge, this doesn't happen anywhere else. As for Mexico, integration is easy given most of their immigration comes from Central and South America where the cultures are very similar with the same language. Of course, anti-immigration populists in both the US & Canada and consisting of both conservatives and liberals, could hamper or weaken this giant advantage

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