South Korea – A cautionary tale for the rest of humanity
worksinprogress.co
worksinprogress.co
I think small scale entrepreneurship might be a solution to the current corp craziness. Also, need to ensure lifestyle creep doesn't occur. Easier said then done.
It always seemed crazy to me that there still are societies and countries out there not offering more support to new parents, and even existing parents. It's literally what makes the country survive long-term, and without new children, you'll obviously end up in stagnation. So why not make it really easy and worry-free?
Since the fertility rate in the US is significantly higher than the rate in the Western Europe, I conclude that this works pretty well.
I was gonna check how it looks like right now in the US, but seems the government been unable to publish official reports about employment for some reason, so hard to know exactly, but suddenly avoiding to release official reports usually isn't a signal that things are going great.
3rd parties seems to indicate the progress of "producing high-paying jobs" isn't going all so well:
> Wednesday’s decision was justified primarily by weakening conditions in the job market. Hiring has slowed markedly since the summer, while unemployment has ticked up and businesses across industries have begun signaling greater caution
> Private-sector signals have flashed more urgency. ADP’s November report showed employers shedding a net 32,000 jobs, the sharpest decline in more than two years
> hiring remained stuck at 3.2%, consistent with what economists and Powell himself have called a “low hire, low fire” labor market. Companies aren’t slashing staff outright—but they aren’t expanding either. That’s enough to worry economists.
https://fortune.com/2025/12/10/fed-cuts-rate-december-hawkis...
It seems like $300k+ is where households feel comfortable having kids.
Also note that poor people have more kids than the middle, which makes sense. Every study has shown the same thing.
It is without doubt beneficial for children to have their mother with them in early childhood. This work over all else society is harming the next generation and ripping new mothers away from their babies a few weeks/months after birth.
In a few generations, most everyone alive will be the progeny of people who really wanted children. This is probably heritable and will probably stabilize birth rates.
what we need is better protection for employees, and especially for parents.
in my vision childcare times are counted towards pension times. stay at home times are required to be taken by both parents equally, so that their careers are affected equally and there is no question on who has to throttle their career because it's both.
that still leaves a career difference between those who have children and those who don't. not sure what to do about that other than serious tax benefits for every child. in germany you get 250euro per month per child in cash until the child is grown up. unconditionally. that's a start, but may not be enough. somehow the income difference needs to be made up. not having children should simply not have benefits in terms of income and career.
just throwing out ideas here: how about preferential hiring for parents? but that's difficult to enforce. same goes for promotion.
actually, with automation taking over jobs maybe the simplest solution to equalize career chances is to reduce everyones working hours. if working time is limited to 20 or at the most 30 hours per week, then childless people get more free time, but parents get more time for their children without having to throttle their careers.
That would mean breaking up big tech and prohibiting firms above a certain size from buying competitors.
Otherwise, there're huge swaths of the economy that used to be accessible to entrepreneurs that now aren't economically viable (without an attached unrelated business pumping in cash).
- How much does the state spend for a pre-k child? <10k/year/child
- An incarcerated inmate? >100k/year/inmate
- Drug-use rehab? >50k/year/user-seeking-rehab
- How much does that leave parents to pay? >30k/year/child (again average, any place where there's a job it's closer to 50k pre-tax)
We don't prioritize children and our societies are actively hostile towards them in terms of dollars spent. As simple as that.
This is actually a good thing for personal autonomy. Instead of accidentally having kids you can't afford, due to modern science, it's completely optional.
The article alludes to this, but the government previously promoted smaller families. Just a few generation ago the birthrate was considered too high. Realistically to have a growing population you probably want to have around an average of 3 children per couple.
This is economically impossible for most people though. No one has a stable job anymore. We're all temps and gig workers.
If you just do it anyway, and find it's a struggle... Society blames you and calls you careless.
The path of least resistance is to just skip having a family.
Using foreigners to fill a demographic shortfall is unsustainable/shortsighted.
That said, I'm in New Zealand and too many young adults emigrate because (A) our economy sucks and (B) richer economies like to employ NZ citizens (NZers love international travel/work).
Am I crazy for thinking this?
Our generation might be the generation where resources can't sustain the population. Hence, people naturally have fewer kids. Zoom out to the macro level and it just seems like humanity is adjusting to the amount of available resources per capita.
We already have an abundance of natural resources (at least... for the developed countries)
You can blame the billionaires who own the vast majority of the wealth but that's mostly due to the stock market giving them that value on paper. Physical resources stay finite.
Wealth inequality has nothing to do with it; some of the countries with the lowest wealth inequality like Northern Europe have the lowest birthrates. A hundred years ago wealth equality in most countries was much higher than now and people were much poorer, yet they were still having many more children than people today.
This has been my assumption, but now I question it. See
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1644264/
In this experiment, a mouse population grew quickly, then at high population density started falling quickly. But rather than recovering when the population decreased, it continued to fall until it was wiped out, in the presence of plentiful resources.
This keeps me up at night. Please someone tell me why it doesn't apply to us.
Sorry I don't have a great answer to that. I don't think human population will drop to 0. That's a bit crazy and unlikely (gut feeling).
But it might be a few more generations longer than we think before population will grow again in developed countries.
You'd need to look at more than just the population numbers, the issues were around high infant mortality and bad parenting, those are the things you should look out for over low birth rates.
Fertility used to be higher because women used not to have that choice. At this point, if we want to grow or sustain populations, the only possibilities seem to be
1. Take that choice away from women. Not only would this be abhorrent, I'm not sure it's even possible without some sort of mass violence or horrific war.
2. Bribe women to have children, above and beyond the (economic) cost of having them. This seems difficult, and I genuinely don't know how high you'd have to go to get to replacement fertility. If you're not a woman, genuinely imagine how much you'd have to be paid to give birth to two babies you don't want. Then add the economic opportunity costs to that. Do we really have the resources to give that to half the population (because how do you know who wouldn't give birth without it)? Plus, a lot of men would be very mad.
3. Massive government investment into obstetrics to make pregnancy and childbirth dramatically easier on your body. This, to me, seems the most plausible, though there're obviously still major social barriers.
4. Develop sci-fi tech that removes or reduces the obligation for only women to bear children - either by inventing make pregnancy (halves the necessary average fertility, plus it's much easier to convince people who haven't done it before to have a baby) or artificial wombs. This is pretty far out, but I'm not aware of any actual hard limits on the possibilities. From my perspective, it's probably easier than stopping aging, which looks to have some genuine enthropic challenges.
Everyone (including me) is inclined to blame lower birthrates on their pet social cause (economic inequality, cost of housing, "The LGBT agenda", cars, cities, foreigners, the job market, social media, feminism, Marxism, conservatism, obesity, vaccines) but just as an example, the reduction US birthrates has largely been driven by a precipitous drop in teen pregnancy. As hormonal birth control and sex education has become more available, it's been easier and easier for women to prevent unwanted pregnancies without the cooperation or involvement of men, and birthrates have, predictably, dropped.
And I think it's probably going to be pretty hard to put that genie back in the bottle, unless you can get women to vote against their own right to vote and weather the inevitable storm caused by telling 50% of everyone they're not really people anymore and should just do what they're told. Women tend to be less violent and less physically imposing then men, but I don't think they're actually much less capable of causing destruction with, like, a petrol bomb, and I think we would probably find the line that overcomes that tendency pretty fast if we went down that path.
The positive news (if it can be called that), is that this level of growth cannot continue, so something will have to change.
Then there is dating apps that essentially made it near impossible for men that fall below the median: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01361/
I'm sure economics plays some role here but I personally wouldn't emphasise it.
Dating apps are also mostly about photos.
And the vast majority of those 106 IQ men can't move somewhere else where their IQ advantage comes into play. Passport bros are a thing but they're a very small (but growing) part of the male population.
And income from work is stagnating.
What sort of world did a child born in Europe in 1900 or 1930 inherit? What about a black child born in the US in 1950, or South Africa in 1960? What about a child born in China in 1950 or (what is now) Bangladesh in 1960 or Sri Lanka in 1970? Their children and grand children will have a much better life.
Like, I certainly cannot afford a family of 12 children. Nor can I afford to buy the amount of land that they acquired, and certainly not by working the same kind of jobs they did.
But usually the "requirements" that get parents to spend too much money are entirely optional things, of which a few are college tuition, a car for the child, camps, tutors, music lessons, vacations abroad, innumerable toys, iPads, etc etc
The median household income is under $80k, while median yearly housing cost is around $25k, food expenses for a family of 4 are $12k-$19k, median utility costs around $4k, health insurance $27k (about to go up), and median cost of vehicle ownership is $12k. Yearly figures. That’s sharing one car between both working parents and we’re using median numbers here, and the median person doesn’t live in a place with great public transit options. Already that leaves almost nothing to deal with emergencies, saving in case a parent loses their job, and miscellaneous expenses like school books/supplies and clothing. And perhaps contributing to elder care for 1-4 grandparents.
Also, this is just the median; people in the lower 50% are much worse off, except for those poor enough to receive substantial aid. And don’t forget that young people typically have lower incomes.
You really don’t want half of your society to decide that pets are cheaper, unless you want to end up with an inverted population pyramid and eventual collapse, or unlimited migration to replace lost workers (which creates its own problems).
This is not the 1940s:
Cheap homes are unavailable. Even single family homes are becoming unaffordable except in isolated areas without jobs. Housing costs, even apartments, have gone up enormously as a percentage of income and building/health codes don’t allow you to live in shanties.
You need a phone now for most jobs. People aren’t hiring you if you can’t be contacted except for bottom of the barrel work. You likely need internet if your job requires remote work and kids probably need it for homework.
People in the mid 1900s had single earner households and households or neighborhoods with extended family. That means more time for cooking, sewing and repairing clothes, and other housework. Work often wasn’t as far away, especially in working class neighborhoods, so you might not even need a car.
Besides all this, literally nobody is going to have kids if it requires going back to a 1940s standard of living. That’s society’s problem, if as an aggregate entity it cares about perpetuating itself. If nobody cares, fine, let it fall apart.
Median people in the USA eat extremely lavishly. Your series of comments, to me, boils down to a complaint that you can't maintain this extreme luxury while having children. Yeah, nobody ever could. The time frame in which people were "able" to have a lot of children was the time when they weren't living such extravagant lives of consumption. So yeah if the complaint is "Why can't I afford a lifestyle that would make my grandparents blush with shame at its luxury, and have as many kids as them, wtf?!" then I'm not very sympathetic to it.
If everything goes alright for them. The thing is that we don't know about knock-on effects and monkey paw results - we can switch this gene on, your child has IQ 190, but later parents will figure out that it has social intelligence of a rock. Or we can switch this gene on, your child is now able to compete with marathon runners, whoops heart attack at 32 years.
Edit NB: paying people more than the cost of the children would cause a lot of poor or dumb people to have kids just for money, so you'd ideally have some standard to meet before you get this money, which is where the eugenics comment applies
The TLDR is I think state demographic planning cannot positively incentiivize >2 kids. Unless cohort is extremely trad/religion pilled to have as many kids as possible.
At some point need to negative incentivize, i.e. taxes, limits on wealth transfer or additional burdens for not hitting family quota. Probably even more unsavory demographic programs, i.e. birth increased by 2% after roe vs wade overturned. But forcing people to start families is harder than forcing them abort.
The world's economic output and productivity are at all time highs.
Natural resources are at tipping points of extreme exploitation, and toxic output is causing other massive tipping points of natural destruction.
And somehow, the population going down is a big problem?
To put it bluntly, this is total bullshit!
If you take the world's most hateful pricks out of the picture, there is no shortage of anything.
The problem is not an availability of resources, it in who gets to keep them.
The best thing that could happen to ease the impact of our human footprint, would be for the population to go down.
Then we wouldn't have to tolerate some of the stupidest ideas in the modern world, like flying people to mars!
Fix where the fucking money goes! Then we can accept the population reduction for what it is, the greatest trend to emerge in recent decades...
Now the birth rate actually slows down to correct itself and we’re not all breeding like rabbits, that’s a bad thing?
This feels like a capitalist concern, “we won’t have enough workers to produce goods and then consume them!”
Elderly care is basically going to wipe generational savings from the 20th century off the map and all that wealth will be reallocated to PE.
Probably for the best.
Currently most of that wealth is being hoarded by the top 0.1%, at the expense of 8 billion people having to deal with global warming for the foreseeable future (e.g. - centuries).
If that's the best humanity can do with wealth, then burn it all down. As long as we keep some advances from medicine (vaccines, dentistry) and technology which aren't as energy intensive, it should all work itself out in the end.
And no, you can't completely solve this by immigration (because the demographic crisis is global).
They might still stay billionaires in absolute terms, but a lot of their wealth will be wiped out as companies struggle to sell their goods to a population with reduced purchasing power (since we're too busy taking care of elderly folks)
The reaction to overpopulation concerns probably discouraged people from having kids but it's unlikely to be the main cause.
Capitalism needs constant growth
Productivity isn’t our problem, distribution is.
On a macro scale you want to see country wide economic statistic numbers go up, regardless of who the money gets to in the end. When your population's age isn't evenly distributed it causes spikes in productivity and costs associated with the elderly which makes the metrics go down. Combined with short term politics that are not incentivized to prepare for it, but rather to play hot potato with it, it makes for interesting situations. If, in the worst case, the country is functioning paycheck to paycheck, you have every member of the workforce supporting multiple elderly and children via taxes, since their taxes were already spent on X or stolen long ago during the productivity boom.
The latest UNEP report includes it - see page 37 from https://www.unep.org/resources/global-environment-outlook-7 -> https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/902187bf-ea...
"Among the major global environmental crises – climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation, and pollution and waste – population growth is most evidently a key factor in biodiversity decline. This is largely due to increased demand for food production, which leads to agricultural expansion and land degradation (Cafaro, Hansson and Götmark 2022). As the population grows and consumption rises, fewer resources and less habitat are available for non-human species (Crist 2019). Overpopulation occurs when the total human population multiplied by per capita consumption surpasses the capacity of sustainable ecosystems and resources. Although the global human population continues to grow, per capita consumption is increasing at a faster rate. To the extent that people are disrupting natural habitats and degrading ecosystem services for future generations, despite regional heterogeneity, some research suggests that most of the world’s nations may be considered overpopulated (Lianos and Pseiridis 2016; Tucker 2019)"
Specifically going back to 70s overpopulation concerns, thing shifted with the Green Revolution / Norman Borlaug but it came at the cost of reducing groundwater supply and reducing agricultural diversity. See 'The Globalization of Wheat' and https://climatewaterproject.substack.com/p/groundwater-and-c...
All of society and industrial functions require young people.
Capitalist concern is human concern.
People in these comments are considering to enslave women like The Handmaid's Tale before even asking if it’s a problem.
> This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a particularly extreme form. The only factor that has little parallel in Western societies is the legacy of highly successful antinatalist campaigns by the South Korean government in previous decades.
- no replacement brought from outside to combat the decline - no obligation for the "society" to take care of non-ancestral elderly
Anyone tried to move away from this model where there is two people of opposite gender, living together as a family, working, and raising child(ren) at the same time? Why not have dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?
Incentives matter far more than education; parents have a built-in biological incentive to care for their children, so on average they put in more effort, that's why children at orphanages do so poorly, and homeschooled children do better on standardised testing than public schooled children.
Viz: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/19/kibbutz...
The theorized reason is these children all grew together and therefore had sexual aversion similar to siblings
It's called the Westermarck Effect, but with anything in Psychology you can take it with a grain of salt
Why not have dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?
Who pays for it? How often can the parents see the kids? How much influence can the parents have on the kids? How does this differ from schools?
As a single dad in the UK its obvious to me that a lot of people still do not expect men to be raising kids or for a man to be the primary parent (which I was even before I divorced).
It would be simply better (probably harder) to improve society so one could have a great work-life balance.
As another commenter pointed out, I don’t have children, and don’t plan to ever have children, so I may not have the full picture here.
But spending time with their children seems to be just a selfish want of parents, and not something that is beneficial to children themselves. I think people need to think of their children first, and not only of themselves.
Homeschooled children, also, have higher educational attainments on average, by a lot. I think you'll find that if you come up with your own proxy measurement for this question it will also point towards more parent time being better.
Two distinct groups of people who for different reasons show kids do better with parents. The point is parents are better at raising kids an people who are trained but not family.
> Then, homeschooling is probably only better because it is 1 on 1, and not 1 on dozens as it is in public schools.
Its not all one to one though. Even when it is one to one it is almost always far fewer hours than at school. A lot of school kids get one to one attention of top of classes (tuition for teenagers has really taken off here in the UK in recent years).
My kids did classes and online courses and taught themselves for some subjects and still did a lot better in those subjects than school kids do. There are advantages to being outside a system individualisation, efficient use or time, learning study skills and self-discipline, etc.
> if you assume that the professional educators are actually motivated and care
Most do, some do not care (they should not be in the profession, but they exist) or are demotivated by the system them work in.
They are also often constrained by the school system. They are pressured to hit metrics which are often not in the best interest of children (especially in the long term). It tends to lead to a lot of studying the exam rather than the subject, for example.
I can understand people with really fascinating jobs that they care about deeply making that decision, but very few people have such great jobs or hobbies. Yes, if you are an academic, or a monk/nun, or something else you deeply believe in, but for most people there is very little that is more rewarding than having children.
However, there are not going to be factors specific to some countries. As it is so widespread its most likely its a common factor or factors. The underlying reasons are probably not that different from those in South Korea.
"By the time a child turns ten, their mother will have seen her earnings fall by an average of 66 percent, considerably higher than the earnings penalty in countries including the US (31 percent), UK (44 percent), and Sweden (32 percent)"
So Sweden is not as bad as SK, but slightly worse than the US on that particular economic factor.
"But South Korea is even worse. Almost 80 percent of children attend a hagwon, a type of private cram school operating in the evenings and on weekends"
I think that sort of thing is a factor too, and, again, in many countries.
PS: POS and FDJ are not really daycare but school and youth org, but they provided services exceeding what we connect with those ideas.
One wonders how much of this viewpoint was itself indoctrinated.
If you are a child living under parents, your parents also have ample opportunity to indoctrinate. There is zero viewpoint diversity.
Because to even contemplate that means dismissing the entire notion of a parent child bond. Of course socialism, with it's inherent disdain of existing social structures have tried collective living, famously some kibbutzim in israel tried it, but most sensible people are horrified by such an idea.
I want to let it go but i can't. The suggestion that trained professionals would somehow do a better job of raising a child then parents would is terrible. It's one of the worst ideas i've ever seen here.
Otherwise you would realize what dystopian hellscape of an idea you are suggesting.
>I currently think the opposite—that humanity is inherently flawed, and that the vast majority of humans will always live miserably.
His user name has a korean vibe to it. If my suspicions are correct then they could be exhibit a of the problem SK is facing.
What makes you say that? To me it's clearly Japanese (the "-chan" by itself is a dead giveaway) and there's way too many open syllables to feel Korean.
People in general have a built-in biological incentive to treat their own biological children well. People child-rearing just as a job generally treat children worse than biological parents, and the empirical evidence supports this (e.g. the earlier children enter paid childcare, the worse their outcomes on average). Only a small minority of extremely moral people treat other people's kids as well as their own biological children.
Even in some dystopian future where there are dedicated facilities that raise people, I can only think of labour and military being raised.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s%E2%80%931990s_Romanian_o...
I feel really lucky I worked from home and home educated my kids, and feel most people already miss a significant amount of the joy of having kids because of work and school. Your idea would make a significant part of it into all of it.
We have far more problems caused by governments doing a bad job than parents doing a bad job. In general parents do a far better job than government employees do.
You may not have the incentive, but the country population will decline if you don't. If you are a government, I'm sure there is a number of ways to make people have children, for example https://nhentai.net/g/609087/. If you are something like Russia or Ukraine, you can force women to have children, just like you force men to go to war.
> We have far more problems caused by governments doing a bad job than parents doing a bad job. In general parents do a far better job than government employees do.
But yes, if there is no way to make education workers do good job, then I guess this system will not work.
For those who might be at work, or are otherwise sensible, this links to a hentai manga called "Vacation in a room you can't leave until you have sex", the cover of which has a picture of a naked lady with implausible anatomy; the tags include but are not limited to "rape" and "incest".
One wonders the reasons behind the choice of this particular example.
> Next, we'll talk about the "room you can't leave until you have sex"
> which as introduced as a measure to address the declining marriage rate and birthrate
I don't see why I wouldn't use this as an example.
> I don't know why it is tagged as "rape" and "incest" as it has neither
Incest: The dramatis personae (https://nhentai.net/g/609087/4/, mostly SFW if your boss doesn't mind fully-clothed underboobs) introduces the characters as step-siblings. (And page 11 the male character refers to the female character as "family".
Rape: The premise is inherently rapey as one is not allowed to withdraw consent after entering the room. Also the bottom of page 15 the male does not look like he had consented to the events of that page and the previous.
It's not "incest" if they are not blood-related.
> Rape: The premise is inherently rapey as one is not allowed to withdraw consent after entering the room.
As I understand it, entering the room does not constitute giving consent, and one can withdraw their consent any time, which the protagonist chose not to do.
> Also the bottom of page 15 the male does not look like he had consented to the events of that page and the previous.
The way I read it, especially with previous two pages in mind, it appears to me that he does not mind.
Don't flag me for this, i'm just playing devils advocate here. One of the main arguments i've heard against the narrative that the feminist movement freed women to do whatever they want is that instead they are now expected to work for a living. Many women want to have a career and don't want a family, so fine. But many that do find themselves unable to do so. The fact is that once only one member of the family had to go out to work now it's both. I know you can poke holes in that argument, but i feel it has some substance. Of course one comment can't cover any nuance, you would need a book for that. The article even touches onto this effect i described but fails to investigate it at all.
If you want women to raise families you can't also want them to have careers. You can probably draw a venn diagram of how those 2 things can overlap.
Numerous studies and several meta analyses found no significant differences between children raised by 1 man and 1 woman, 2 men, or 2 women. Studies or interpretations which found differences made errors such as not controlling for divorce.[1]
[1] https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equali...
Men are less "motherly" because we are discouraged by society from being that. Even your choice of words shows your prejudice.
I was my kids primary parent when married and a single dad after divorce. I am MUCH better suited to raising kids than my ex-wife was. That is largely a result of how I was raised to have empathy and care about people.
My implication that being motherly is good for a primary child raiser shows my prejudice? It's actually just a random phenomenon detached from fitness?
What's your opinion of apple pie?
Most men are worse parents than most women.
Do you think that is a good representation of what you are saying? Do you think it's true? Are men inherently worse at parenting, or is there something else at play?
And I would also like to know what your evidence is for that.
Worded like this it sounds stupid but it's just one of those things..
https://news.sky.com/story/kim-jong-un-wipes-away-tears-as-h...