That sure will help with the Korean demographic crisis, they'll be fucking like rabbits after those long days. And they can't wait to give the same future to their children...
Total population has inertia, but anything more than +/- 2% out 10 years is pushing it and that uncertainty just grows with time.
Long term, the people born each year are children of people who decided to have kids which is counter to the overall trend in the country. There’s huge selective pressure around deciding to have kids in modern societies.
Immigration is a very dificult topic in both Japan and South Korea societies. The fact that EU is becoming increasingly anti-immigration won't help to advocate for this.
If there's far fewer parents because this cohort of potential parents is much smaller, then you have necessarily fewer children going forward. Even if you double the number of people that want kids, it becomes very hard to reverse the demographic decline, let alone grow your society. Even if you could, there's still a giant demographic hole in your population that will cause big issues over time.
Outside of immigration (which is a big discussion on its own) PLUS a healthy birth rate among these immigrants, I'm unsure where your optimism comes from for them reversing their demographics and growing.
(In practice, you'd probably expect NK's birth rate to keep dropping, too, and SK's will eventually reach equilibrium if it hasn't already.)
Gen1: 100 people: 50 men + 50 women; 50 women have 25 babies
Gen2: 26 people: 13 men + 12 women (for math); 12 women have 6 babies
Gen3: 6 people
So 100 people end up having 6 total grandkids between all of them.
In the US, you hear about Boomer grandparents who have at least 10 grandchildren.
Even if they kept the 0.81 rate that they are on, then you'd get:
Gen1: 100 people: 50 men + 50 women; 50 women have 40 babies (40.5, but lest round to just 40)
Gen2: 40 people: 20 men + 20 women; 20 women have 16 babies
Gen3: 16 people
Given that the current average age of a woman at the time of her first birth in SK is 33 years old (!?!?!), you'd expect the 100 people of SK to be just 16 people somewhere near 2090. Meaning that it's current population of ~52M goes to ~8M in ~70 years. An 84% reduction in 66 years, or 1.28% per year.
And it looks only like it'll get worse for them.
I can't think of any war or plague or natural disaster or famine that has ever done such a number to a population of that size over that long of a time. Granted, that hasn't happened yet.
Still, whatever the hell is happening to them is something to be avoided like a war or a famine or a plague.
The reasons cited for the crisis are "demanding work cultures, stagnating wages, rising costs of living, changing attitudes toward marriage and gender equality, and rising disillusionment among younger generations."
This rhymes a lot with scarce resources: people lack the time and money to raise kids.
So maybe 1 more day off helps alleviate lack of time, but lack of money might persist if wages scale with hours worked.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/women-children-study-1.711984...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity...
Most of my data and observations are US centric; if you have data from outside the US, and I would love to review any citations you can provide simply out of curiosity from a sociological perspective.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/09/20/americans...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-gr...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41053582 (citations)
> marriages where the husband is the primary or sole breadwinner has fallen steadily in recent decades, driven mainly by the declining share of marriages where the husband is the sole provider – this was the arrangement in 49% of marriages in 1972, while today that share is _23%_.
> share of marriages where the wife is the sole or primary breadwinner has increased from 5% in 1972 to _16%_ today
Well I would've expected that to be a bit higher, but that's still only a 7% difference which is extremely minimal given that it's not been that long historically since it's even been, you know... legal.
The rise of both having to be equal providers probably has more to do with the rising cost of living and flat wages than anything else. Some of that caused by suddenly having twice the workforce of course.
IIRC, the article I read about Korea said that the difference in Korea was much more stark, that men were twice as likely to want children as women.