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Comment by yhavr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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