Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

Man this hits really hard because I spent my first 20 years growing up in China... Good thing is that now I'm in a much less authoritarian place with a job that has decent work-life balance. Have been trying to cultivate some hobbies in the past few years, feels like I've been trying to reclaim the childhood I never had.

I'm trying to strike a balance with my kids. We encourage them to do things like learn music, take up sports etc, but not let that just consume all their free time. I want them to have time to just play freely, read comics, or just be a bit bored sometimes.

It’s not worth it. We’re luckily to have the choice of moving home to Europe and raising our kids in a way that they get to play a lot (I’m writing this while on a bench in a playground with them bouncing around in the sunshine) and also have school, art and sports.

Korea is actively discouraging Koreans from raising their kids there, especially if they have any other option

Of course the decorations are nicer and there are some who are kept around to work as "worser off" examples. But all in all, i guess most would cheer for the fall of this.

because the latter suggests that people really just don't want kids, and possibly never really did

its hard for me to think that all of society uniformly is successfully planning for children now, instead of many children being a bunch of accidents that the parents just go along with

Reminds me of the opening scene of Idiocracy: https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA

After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.

Wanna guess what happens in that welcoming environment? My guess is people feel inclined to make some babies.

I don't understand why people tend to treat these low fertility rates as some kind of invariable biological dysfunction. These aren't infertile masses of people; they're perfectly capable of multiplying like rabbits.

The planet has shitloads of people, maybe we're finally reeling things in from an overshoot and are on the inevitably pendulum-like path towards population stability. There's no reason to panic unless you've got substantial evidence these people are physically incapable of having children.

Edit:

How about some DATA: go to https://population.io, select Rep. of Korea, plug in some age/gender b.s. and scroll down to "Age Distribution" at the left column. Now look to the left of ~20yo (younger than 20), it's a nearly horizontal line. What does that tell you? There's a uniform rate of Korean babies per year under 20 years old. To the right of this, there's a massive lump of elderly people with a slightly smaller lump of middle-aged people. There's no reason to believe this horizontal line left of 20yo won't just continue into the future; it looks quite stable for the last ~20 years.

Housing prices are 9x salary vs 4.5x salary in the 70s and it takes a while to save up. Personal data point: it took me winning an IPO lottery to start thinking about having kids for real. Having kids while earning minimal wage? Terrifying, especially in the US where getting yourself or your kid sick could bankrupt you in the blink of an eye - and if you want multiple kids you increase the risk.

So we think we have to have it all before we start trying having kids and have no sense of community whatsoever. Societal focus on hedonism and career leaves little to no time to raise kids. And at the end of the day you end up having no support from the society that slowly but surely ages.

Does the change necessarily have to be societal?

> In 1992, a study found a global 50% decline in sperm counts in men over the previous 60 years. Multiple studies over subsequent years confirmed that initial finding, including a 2017 paper showing a 50% to 60% decline in sperm concentration between 1973 and 2011 in men from around the world. These studies, though important, focused on sperm concentration or total sperm count. So in 2019, a team of researchers decided to focus on the more powerful total motile sperm count. They found that the proportion of men with a normal total motile sperm count had declined by approximately 10% over the previous 16 years. The science is consistent: Men today produce fewer sperm than in the past, and the sperm are less healthy. The question, then, is what could be causing this decline in fertility[0].

[0]: https://theconversation.com/male-fertility-is-declining-stud...

Women gained financial freedom and the ability to choose when they get pregnant. Societies will now find out the market price for birthing children (as well as women finding out the price for not birthing children).

Is declining fertility really such a societal and evolutionary danger when we’re talking 1.4-1.5? If you think of us all as one race, the human race, the fact that a few corners of the world are declining in fertility is arguably an environmental victory that could soften some crises’s in the future. We are like 99.9% genetically similar, why risk gutting the carrying capacity of the planet to preserve the 0.001% of genes that give us sparkling blue eyes?

The whole contention that it’s terrible that high birthrate countries are so much more feminist than low birthrate ones, well I mean just because the genetics of feminist counties might wane, that doesn’t mean their cultures will. Memetics is just as powerful as genetics, do rich countries really have to be the world’s stud? Can’t we see the poorer countries investing in people and the wealthier countries investing in things as teamwork?

Industrialisation.

The UK began industrialising in the mid-to-late 1700s. Western Europe and North America got going in the early 1800s. Central Europe and Japan followed along, while Russia didn't really industrialise until the Soviet Union. China and Korea, by contrast, just started in the 1950s-70s, easily within a human life time. Their societies made the leap from subsistence farming to CPU design _so_ much faster than most of the developed world, it's unreal.

Or maybe the tragedy of the commons was having 6 children per family within living memory? Maybe now by dropping our population we are doing much better for the world society as a whole. It all depends on your perspective I guess. I fail to see the problem with a drop in world population.

> At this rate, there will only be 3m South Koreans in 3 generations. I don't see how you expect a country to survive that decline. In 1960, Pakistan had 45m people compared to South Korea's 25m. Now, Pakistan is forecasted to reach 450m in our lifetime as South Korea implodes. That looks like our future.

Maybe South Korea won't survive in its current form. The world will keep revolving the sun nonetheless.

H.G. Wells pointed out that we cannot have population control in one nation of the world, but not another. It must be worldwide, or it'd result in severe unrest.

Julian Huxley, H.G. Wells, Charles Pincus (and many more) made this one of the defining issues of the 20th century. The Pill and IVF were long in the works and heavily funded as a means to avoid the "Population Bomb."

They envisioned a new world without war or environmental destruction. Their solution was to reduce the birth rate, through various means. The reduction of family formation being one of them.

It's interesting to read through these older works and realize the world they'd envisioned has to some extent come to fruition.

Social factors are not considered enough. As societies get more materialistic, and socio-economically advanced, there seems to be more individualistic, privacy[in the wrong way, escalating to extreme isolationism], lack of social interaction and bonding etc.

I myself felt odd during the time I stayed in the US, the whole concept of individualism and privacy was taken too far, and everybody felt lonely in their own way. People moved around in fixed schedules and paths, almost like an open air prison. Given limited social interaction outside work[where you can't even sneeze without offending some one]. This really felt like passion and purpose in life was slowly fading away. I can imagine how a society with this sort of a lifestyle could fare on the longer run. People would want lesser and lesser people around them, and interact with them even lesser as time would proceed.

Countries like India and Pakistan definitely have third world infrastructure, but the social infrastructure is very strong and likely to remain, this is due to socio-religious reasons. For this reason, people get married and have 2+ kids.

There's a scary implication. If having to support more elderly causes one to produce less offspring, we have a positive feedback loop resulting in population collapse.

One of the reasons we moved to a country like the US is to be away from a backwards minded, theocratic af, corrupt society. To see that these types of countries are actually booming while highly progressed ones are depressing is super depressing.

Obviously, the greatest thing that changed over those last 60 years is they're no longer recovering from a war that killed a pretty hefty amount of their population. While I'm sure it didn't need to decline quite so much, fertility rate was never going to stay what it was in the late 50s. You can see a pretty obvious recovery spike here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m.... It was only in the past 20 years that they declined below 1920s level.

It's also worth remembering that being oppressive to women is (definitely at least probably) not a genetically tranmissible trait. If the 22nd Century really does end up being dominated by Pakistanis, you can't just automatically assume they'll stay culturally identical to what they are today. Presumably, the Korea of the 19 century was a lot more oppressive to women than the Korea of today.

The resources of korea and their technology will not go away, they will now be at the hands of fewer people, so more wealth / person. Historically it was small states that dominated the world, the populous ones were ravaged by poverty and famine.

People are calculating (correctly) that our future technology does not need a lot of hands, and that is true. Look at the tech sector , which employs a tiny percentage of the population but has enormous output.

As for the egoist act of genetic heritage/perpetuation, well let's be honest, in 10 years people will be modifying their genes and removing our clunky and faulty dna so there goes our glory.

As for wars/security, those are already fought with drones

> I fear if nothing else changes, developed countries are dysgenically wiping themselves off

The trend will not continue forever

To me , this all highlights that we need to ramp up anti-aging technology fast and hard. It s much higher priority than sending humans to mars

There a tenancy to forget that 60 years ago one working person would have to support a wife and several children.

For the population to actually grow, some people will need to make three kids. I just don't see that happening at scale at all. Most won't even make two kids, forget about three.

If Pakistan, and other countries like India and China, continues to modernize, eventually the population should stable out and historically that comes with better rights for all.

As the standard of living rises, birth rates are dropping precipitously even in those countries that are relatively more oppressive.

Absent socioeconomic reasons, there are still females that naturally desire having plenty of children, despite there not being any societal pressure in favor (or even against) that. They will be genetically selected for.

Healthcare costs are ongoing, and obscene. Routine newborn vaccines are around $900 per visit even with partial insurance coverage. Not to mention any unforeseen hospital visits that will force you to hit your deductible in the first two quarters of the year ($10k per child in our case).

In most tier 2/3 cities in the US you can expect daycare to cost $1,000-$1,800 per child per month.

In any tier 1 city, especially west coast cities like Seattle and SF, expect to pay at least $2,000/child per month.

On top of that, you’ll have a mortgage. With median housing prices around $1.2-$1.6m and rates in the mid 5% you’re looking at anywhere from $6,500-$8,000/month for a mortgage depending on taxes.

So right out of the gate, you’re at $10k of post tax income just going to daycare costs and a mortgage. You likely have other costs that equal at least $1,000/month. And that’s for 1 kid. Add another kid and you’re easily approaching $15k per month.

If you do the math, you’ll need to make at least $250k if you have one kid considering at least 40% is going straight to taxes (aka military funds since we get nothing in this country for the insane amount of taxes we pay).

Also you should specify whether you mean West or East (presumably West) Pakistan’s population numbers. The western half had 51m people in 1960.

Of course. Malthusianism, eugenics.

When Progesterone USP (bio-identical) is applied to the skin, it gets into circulation and avoids first pass metabolization by liver. When the appropriate solvent is used to dissolve the Progesterone USP powder, the progesterone is transported through the liver.

Steroidogenesis refers to the process whereby the body makes steroids for itself. The key jump - from cholesterol to pregnenolone - is facilitated with Vitamin A and thyroid (T3).

Know a couple who were trying to conceive, after suppressing her fertility with fake hormones (and an IUD) for maybe 8+ years. Lots of miscarriages. They eventually went for IVF, which didn't work either. They gave up and started getting their house ready for adoption. Then they got surprised. I don't think she used topical Progesterone, just the megadoses in Prometrium (liver can't destroy it all on the first pass).

Best wishes to you & your wife.

In almost all South-east Asian countries in particular, I have noticed high levels of sucrose consumption so I am curious if Korea is the similar to SEA, or if either of these factors apply to either of you?

Koreans have famously long working hours, but as you are not there, those stress factors should likely not apply to you.

Another point to note is that I have heard adoption is at least as difficult as IVF, emotionally & financially speaking, although there's less physical pain. At least IVF can point you to where the problem lies (the knowledge of that can be disconcerting) providing you perhaps avenues to mitigate/ameliorate those factors, which could improve your overall QoL and also lead to better health-outcomes.

SK has the oldest first time mums in the world: https://photius.com/rankings/2020/population/mothers_mean_ag...

There are various factors that increase the chances of having fraternal (non-identical) twins. Genetics (a women who is a twin herself is more likely to have twins), age (older women are more likely to have twins), and, of course, fertility drugs which stimulate ovulation can result in more eggs being released and thus more likely to produce twins.

Identical twins, on the other hand, are a natural phenomenon that occurs in about 1 in 250 pregnancies. There are no known factors that increase the chances of identical twins.

How long have you been seeing this trend?

There’s a lot of experts who have been arguing that everything from pesticides to vaccines will slowly degrade our ability to produce [healthy] offspring. The general reasoning is fairly straight forward - if one thing damages your DNA or what have you, then it might be anywhere from 0 to 3 generations for issues to crop up.

There’s also social factors - fear, stress, isolation, etc will all impact willingness to reproduce (imo that’s not it).

Finally, there’s general stagnation. Ie if your not eating well, working in a field, etc you’re not going to be healthy.

Reality is probably a combination of everything, BUT women should also seriously research side effects of birth control. I have a sneaking suspicion birth control mediating hormones will have many long-term effects. I know women who were impacted by this.

Edit: Some Artificial hormones are found in plastic, rates go up when it's recycled plastics.

Edit: The other issue is tribal. The global tribe has lots of sufficient labor and young people to offset decreasing numbers of young South Koreans, but humans are not fungible. There will be many types of conflict due to cultural differences, as well as shifting power dynamics and the resulting lack of acceptance of newcomers on the same level as native tribe members, etc.

Combine this with the fact that yes, our overshoot is horrific, I really do not see why declining birth rates in this era are a bad thing.

Environmentalists say that fewer people will be good for the environment. But what about investments and research into green energy and carbon removal? Those will simply not happen unless the economy is still growing.

A smaller world population in the longrun is a defacto nonstarter. Many places in the world continue to have extremely high birth rates. And the wealth/education correlation that claims to predict the change of this seems, at best, extremely weak when put under scrutiny. Billionaires have high wealth, high education, and high fertility. Places like Thailand have extremely low education/wealth levels, yet their fertility rate is lower than even the US. Israel is the third most educated country in the world, has an advanced economy, and a fertility rate that is even competitive against some African nations at 3.0.

The issue is one of prioritizing wealth more than family, which also explains why the trend collapses at billionaires (for whom family has effectively 0 impact on their wealth), even though the correlation would expect them to be having effectively 0 children. And this pursuit of wealth over family holds true in the West, but there's no reason to expect such ideology to spread. So the question is not one of a smaller world population, but of a smaller population of the groups that are not reproducing vs those that are. In other words should the West simply accept its own extinction, likely alongside those of its values? And to me, the answer to that question is no.

It's debatable. Population declines are good for the environment. But rapid drops has cultural, political, economic and geopolitical consequences. e.g. South Korea doesn't really trust NK or China or that they can't really be a manufacturing economy without young workers.

Yes.

A shrinking population means an ever-smaller number of workers need to support increasing numbers of retirees.

If you can work that out, then you've still got a small pool of workers producing goods for a large, mostly economically-inactive population, which means inflation and plenty of it.

I feel like for people living in big cities, where things are expensive simply because too many people want to live there, things might start to get easier.

Stuff like brushing teeth and bath take relatively little extra time, so does cooking for 4 instead of 1 kid.

Events with all the kids are lovely and many of the adults who grew up in this church know the other adults because they all used to be kids here once.

Great community and a lovely life.

We won't be using contraception after we are married, only NFP (or abstain) and if she gets pregnant, then it's a cause for celebration by both the community and our families. We have average jobs and no one in our extended family is rich either, yet they all had many kids.

The truth is that having children requires a lot of sacrifice and not many people are up for it. Who could blame them? outside of strong cultural / religious boundaries, you will spend the majority of your time climbing a corporate ladder, going for a bigger degree, constantly thinking about retirement and finances,.. etc.

However, I personally think that no matter which one of those summits you climb, it will fade away. So for us, unless we will literally be out on the street due to financial stress, we are looking forward to having kids, who could deny such grace?

Anyway, just wanted to throw out a different point of view into the mix here.

first feminism in korea is toxic. they are female version of incel culture. very few things translate well to western audiences who unfortunately do not read past headlines on reddit. one example is this left/right equating to US left/right wing. this Korean feminist is also similar, it is not an counterpart to the US feminist movement. there are very few moderate feminists in the mainstream. it is of the radical variety calling for violence against men. for example, they caused controversy for instance streaming sexually assaulting underaged boys and poisoning patrons at a restaurant and uploading it in their community groups. In fact many Japanese feminists point out how toxic the feminist in Korea are, they are not about equality, they are about usurping. Most just live with their parents.

now thats out of the way, sex crimes are treated differently in korea due to the complex judicial system that is the result of multiple period of colonialism. its not as rampant as reddit has you believe but the punishment is also too lenient and should be stronger.

more women are entering the workforce and they are afraid to lose their careers. the same is true in advanced economies, women in these part of the world have far more choice and power than in third world countries. of course they are not going to give up their comforts. the redpill take you are subscribing to is NOT what Korean Koreans subscribe to. After all there is a record number of cohabiting men and women in Korea, they just simply choose not to have kids or get married anymore.

also if you think you have game in korea just because of your skin color, trust me, they know exactly why you are here and they dont care. the "white sexpat" have ruined it for rest of us here. most international marriage in korea is between neighboring countries. this is true for Japan and China as well. People who look like each other but are from different cultures.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/world/asia/south-korea-di...

There's also an even weirder anti-feminist backlash happening as well.

Not really , as they don't do today, because they are not educated , and there is not enough time to wait for second-generation immigrants. Also, africans have no obligation to become subservient again to the developed world via immigration.

We don't have the parts that we need now to build new cars and tractors. Can we really afford to be building robots?

1) What if they don't? 2) The end of the century is 78 years away, somebody's going need to turn you on your side every few hours when you're in that old folks home - what happens if there aren't enough people to do those jobs?

you re not wrong, but people are always looking for meaning in life. If kids are not there, they will look for meaning elsewhere. But maybe kids are too demanding and have repetitive needs, which is off-putting for meaning-driven uberhumans. Well then maybe we should automate the raising of kids , but wait, daily school already exists and now we have tablets too. OK so how did the adults find meaning now that their hands are untied? Oh, they are in social media all day

If you're in the market for doom porn, there will always be someone willing to sell it to you.

It's really the worst country to look at if Korea wants to improve their fertility rate.

Of all the places to draw conclusions about societal concerns from, mass-market consumer pop culture in a culture known for relative strictness on what is acceptable/taboo is the last place you should be looking.

Higher efficiency, higher wages especially in social security jobs, and of course a universal social security system

How do you plan to solve the problems of a growing population? The consequences of things climate change will hit harder.