Korea Shatters Its Own Record for World's Lowest Fertility Rate 248
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: South Korea has once again shattered its own record for the world's lowest fertility rate as it faces the prospect of its population of 51 million people more than halving by the end of this century. Korean women were estimated, based on 2021 data, to have an average of just 0.81 children over their lifetimes, down from 0.84 a year earlier, the statistics office said Wednesday. The number of newborns declined last year to 260,600, which equates to about 0.5% of the population.
The number of women of child-bearing age fell 2% to 11,620,000 last year, signaling the fertility rate is only likely to deteriorate further. A typical Korean woman gave birth to her first child at age 32.6, up from 30.2 a decade earlier, according to the stats office. Her partner on average would be 35.1, compared with 33 a decade earlier. By region, the capital Seoul showed the lowest fertility rate at 0.63, while Sejong, home to government headquarters, had the highest at 1.28, according to the stats office. The most populous province, Gyeonggi, recorded 0.85, closer to the average. In the decades following the 1950-53 Korean War, the population at least doubled and in an effort to curb the baby boom in the early years of economic development, the government encouraged couples to have only one child. That policy was scrapped around the turn of the century as births started to sharply fall, prompting the government to spend tens of billion of dollars each year to encourage more children, but with little success so far. "Korea is the world's fastest-aging nation among economies with per capita GDP of at least $30,000," notes Bloomberg, citing United Nations global population projections and World Bank data. "By 2100, its population will fall by 53% to 24 million, up from a 43% decline forecast in 2019."
"The forecast is a sobering reminder of the demographic threat and associated economic challenges confronting Bank of Korea Governor Rhee Chang-yong and President Yoon Suk Yeol, who both took office earlier this year."
The number of women of child-bearing age fell 2% to 11,620,000 last year, signaling the fertility rate is only likely to deteriorate further. A typical Korean woman gave birth to her first child at age 32.6, up from 30.2 a decade earlier, according to the stats office. Her partner on average would be 35.1, compared with 33 a decade earlier. By region, the capital Seoul showed the lowest fertility rate at 0.63, while Sejong, home to government headquarters, had the highest at 1.28, according to the stats office. The most populous province, Gyeonggi, recorded 0.85, closer to the average. In the decades following the 1950-53 Korean War, the population at least doubled and in an effort to curb the baby boom in the early years of economic development, the government encouraged couples to have only one child. That policy was scrapped around the turn of the century as births started to sharply fall, prompting the government to spend tens of billion of dollars each year to encourage more children, but with little success so far. "Korea is the world's fastest-aging nation among economies with per capita GDP of at least $30,000," notes Bloomberg, citing United Nations global population projections and World Bank data. "By 2100, its population will fall by 53% to 24 million, up from a 43% decline forecast in 2019."
"The forecast is a sobering reminder of the demographic threat and associated economic challenges confronting Bank of Korea Governor Rhee Chang-yong and President Yoon Suk Yeol, who both took office earlier this year."
It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Interesting)
It's possible that we'll see a handful of religious extremists Force the kind of poverty on the people and lack of access to birth control that can lead to increased birth rates but the problem with that is what tends to happen is our society collapses and then War and famine prevent the population from growing any further. So either way we're not likely to get much above the 8 billion that we're at now. Heck even China and India are having trouble growing their populations. In Africa won't be growing much longer if at all since they're rapidly modernizing.
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Behavioral sink" is a term invented by ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe a collapse in behavior which can result from overcrowding. The term and concept derive from a series of over-population experiments Calhoun conducted on Norway rats between 1958 and 1962.[1] In the experiments, Calhoun and his researchers created a series of "rat utopias" – enclosed spaces in which rats were given unlimited access to food and water, enabling unfettered population growth. Calhoun coined the term "behavioral sink" in his February 1, 1962 report in an article titled "Population Density and Social Pathology" in Scientific American[2] on the rat experiment.[3] He would later perform similar experiments on mice, from 1968 to 1972.
Calhoun's work became used as an animal model of societal collapse, and his study has become a touchstone of urban sociology and psychology in general.[4]
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Insightful)
Human beings aren't rats though. In the case of SK it's the cost of raising children that is the main issue, and to a lesser extent women having greater expectations from relationships and their careers.
Same thing is happening in Japan and in parts of Europe. People are realizing that they can have a lot more money and a fulfilling life with one or zero children. Effective and widely available birth control makes it practical.
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Informative)
Who's going to care for their 3 month old babies when they go back to work? Who wants to go back to work when they're still recovering from pregnancy, childbirth, sleep deprivation, & exhaustion? Korea's also infamous for the typical numbers of hours people put into their jobs, & therefore what's expected of them. When are parents going to have time to spend with their children?
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Interesting)
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It doesn't have to be perfect and mitigate all down sides to having children. Especially if men share the same burdens as much as possible.
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Even with all of those things, as the OP pointed out, having zero or one child does remains the most desirable choice in developed countries.
My wife can't have children due to some health issues, so when we got married, we decided to try an experiment (and also irritate her siblings with kids, because that's what siblings do...). We opened a separate bank account as the "No Kids Fund." We calculate everything we *would* have spent on kids (diapers, school supplies, doctors, extra mileage to get them to activities, everything), and put it into that account instead.
It's basically our vacation fund, but we both work, so we can't actually take that
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In most East Asian cultures, grandparents have raised children and parents took care of work, because those cultures were far more competitive in terms of time needed from parents for far longer.
This has been true for Chinese for example, since communists banned foot binding for women, and they could be put to work next to men. It is even more common in Koreas and Japan.
In Scandinavian cultures, it's even worse. The things you mentioned "What worked well was statutory, paid maternity leave, affordable or st
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In Scandinavian cultures, it's even worse. The things you mentioned "What worked well was statutory, paid maternity leave, affordable or state-funded childcare, & laws against workplace discrimination." didn't not just work. They did the opposite. They took birth rate off the cliff.
Telling us things that seem true in your head without checking any data?
Sweden has a higher fertility rate than the U.S. 1.7 vs 1.6. It was 1.5 in 2000. So they actually seem to have had some success in boosting the fertility rate (or possibly you were thinking of an anti-gravity cliff). Perhaps they can up the rate more, with more of those policies which you imagine are a disaster.
Denmark also recovered from a fertility low of 1.38 in 1983 to the 1.7-1.9 range were it has fluctuated now for over 30 years.
S
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The same thing is pretty much happening throughout the industrialized world, and in countries that are industrializing. Even China is seeing a population decline (and no, the irony is not lost). Some of it is cost of living, a lot of it is simply a long understood demographic effect of wealthier populations tending to have less children. Demographers have observed it even in population estimates from Early Modern England, where a growing middle class began to have smaller families, whereas the lower classes
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:4, Interesting)
In case of SK...the real problem is the same as everywhere else. Urbanisation, extreme culture of comfort and safety driven by female preferences and massive propaganda apparatus having shifted to telling women that they don't need men, they need careers.
You don't know South Korea very well. It has one of the most misogynistic, traditionalist [economist.com] cultures in all of advanced Western economies.
Given that fact, South Korea is a better demonstration of how poor societal treatment of women can reduce birthrates, at least in societies where they are given enough freedom to select their own mates and use birth control without male permission.
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The problem is not a temporary population decline. But if the decline does not stop, the human species will die out - that's just a simple fact.
So far, it looks like the decline is accelerating. With the numbers from South Korea, we'd be down to around 1 million people on the whole earth in 300 years.
But this is a cultural problem - with reference to the survival of fittest, I think you'd predict a baby-happy subculture to end up dominating.
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:4, Interesting)
But if the decline does not stop, the human species will die out - that's just a simple fact.
Incredibly unlikely. It's quite likely we'll be able to grow people in artificial wombs sometime in the next few decades. If we were ever even remotely close to humans going extinct we'd have governments stepping in to do the baby making and raising. A tad dystopian to be sure but a hell of a lot more realistic then humans sitting idlily by while they go extinct.
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It's quite unlikely that people grown in such "wombs", even if it is possible in time frame you're thinking of, will be sufficiently healthy to be fully functional. As we have discovered with attempts at duplicating organs that have far less complex interactions than womb and fetus, this is a very hard thing to get just right, and if you don't get it just right, patients have severe health complications.
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It's quite unlikely that people grown in such "wombs", even if it is possible in time frame you're thinking of, will be sufficiently healthy to be fully functional. As we have discovered with attempts at duplicating organs that have far less complex interactions than womb and fetus, this is a very hard thing to get just right, and if you don't get it just right, patients have severe health complications.
The human race isnt going to be in any danger of going extinct from low birth rates for hundreds of years. Given how close we are to growing individual organs now it's an awfully safe bet that even 100 hundred years from now we'll be able to grow a human outside of a women's body. There's nothing far fetched about the concept.
Re: It seems kind of weird (Score:3)
Countries where government provides significant child care services are facing the same demographic issues
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I think you replied to the wrong post.
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Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Informative)
How long before that starts to be a real problem? We were hardly suffering from under population when the world had 4 billion people.
If there is any decrease in population growth, it is very slow.
So when does it start to be a problem? Decades from now? Centuries from now?
If this is a problem, it is hardly urgent.
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you sit down and think for a minute?
Sure, suddenly no one will have children, and we'll die out. Riiiiight. And I've got a bridge for sale.
Instead, how about the population drop, oh, the way it did in the Avengers movie, by half, then level off?
Oh, that's right, by half... that would be when the world's population hit 3B.
In 1965.
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Most retirement goverment programs (SS in the USA) are designed to be sustainable by having a greater working population then retired. When that flips, you have countries in trouble.
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Immigration is about the only way to solve the problem, unless they can build robots that can fulfill a significant number of human roles.
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Insightful)
Koreans are clearly not too bothered, in much the same way that the Japanese got rich and decided to stop having children too.
One of my offspring has decided he has no interest in breeding, and most of his friends seem to feel the same way.
To be really honest, if I was 20 again and know what I know now I would not have any children either.
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The Bank of Korea Governor seems to think its a problem, mostly because his remit will revolve around endless economic growth
It's not a problem for him, he'll be dead.
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Koreans aren't bothered because they're stuck in a nightmare rat race and don't have time, energy or money to for dating and family. Same with Japan.
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Tell that to a tribesman walking around hunting for dinner or a medieval serf just barely managing to feed themselves. Life throughout most of history has been SIGNIFICANTLY harder than it is now, yet people still were reproducing in great numbers.
Most people who claim to not have the time, energy, or money to have children are just lying to themselves. They simply now have the option to not have children if/when they don't want them. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but culturally its an option that's
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Insightful)
if you want to lower birth rates. make sure women in your society are educated and your highly industrialized economy means a couple both have to work full time careers in order to afford a house. keeps people from having more than one or two kids once they realize how much it costs to raise them and send them to college.
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And keep the religious nuts from gaining political power.
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if you want to lower birth rates. make sure women in your society are educated
Thank you. Came here to say the same thing. It's a known fact that societies where women are educated have lower birth rates than those where they're not. You can look at any country and compare education levels and see this.
I remember reading years ago that when immigrants migrate to this country (the U.S.) who come from locations where women spit out babies left and right, the birth rate of their offspring declines to about 1 o
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The less educated the more kids.
That is starting to change - and going back to the traditional pattern of "the richer the more kids" - as childcare is becoming more affordable for professional women. Not only are highly educated women more likely to have children these days, they are also having bigger families than in the past. [pewresearch.org]
Or, to put it another way, as inequality is increasing to the point where upper-middle-class women are gaining enough power, and poor women are losing enough power, that poor women can be economically convinced/
Re: It seems kind of weird (Score:2)
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:4)
You've never had kids, I see. When mine were young, the start of school was a financial nightmare; new clothes, shoes, school materials, and it really hit us when the youngest started going to school, and suddenly the bill doubled. I love my kids, and if I had to do it again, I would, but I'm under no illusion that I would have had a lot more disposal income had I had no children. And even now, with both of them in their late 20s, I've had to do a couple of bailouts so they could keep the lights on, because, at the end of the day, whether 3 or 30, they're still your kids.
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Just remember, if you had to do it again, literally everything would be different.
I chose not to have kids because I knew I couldn't do a good job on multiple levels. But in the pertinent equation, it's become a lot harder to do a good job since I was in my twenties. If you tried just as hard as you did the first time, you'd probably wind up with little shitheels this time (I'm generously assuming you didn't the first time. ;)
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All the entitlement programs you guys have created for yourselves over the past century require an ever-growing population of taxpayers to pay for them. Underpopulation wouldn't be a problem if you'd stop stealing money from people who haven't even been born yet.
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess we could probably live without a few of these aircraft carriers, save a trillion or so. Maybe skip a few oil wars, save a few more trillion. Makes Biden's 10k debt forgiveness seem like a drop in the bucket.
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Informative)
Aircraft carriers cost around $13 billion dollars. Biden's "10k debt forgiveness" is going to cost somewhere in the vicinity of $300 billion, or about two dozen carriers (which is more than twice as many as we actually plan to build).
We have smaller carriers too, but the math gets worse for this comparison when you aren't looking at the brand new fleet carriers.
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Much like how you can build a nuclear missile silo for like $1M. It only really costs anything when you want it to be capable of the thing you actually built it for and include the cost of the rocket and warhead. But don't that that stop you from 4-digit-UID whining about spending what amounts to a rounding error on helping people.
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:5, Insightful)
A carrier might cost 13 Billion. ...
The planes on it cost 100 Billion more.
A year of operation is probably 25 billion
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess we could probably live without a few of these aircraft carriers, save a trillion or so. Maybe skip a few oil wars, save a few more trillion. Makes Biden's 10k debt forgiveness seem like a drop in the bucket.
The war in Ukraine has made me much more forgiving of the US defence budget than I would have been a year ago.
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:4, Informative)
The boomers assumed that things would carry on as they did for them, forever. Gave themselves really great pensions and hoarded all that wealth.
Now it's all falling apart they feel entitled to it, because they "worked hard all their lives". Meanwhile the younger generations are locked out of much of that prosperity by house prices, and all the really good pension schemes are closed.
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Indeed. Baby boomers are the wealthiest generation in human history. They literally had the world handed to them by their parents; who fought a world war, worked their asses off to build a massive economic engine. The Boomers took it, bought themselves cheap educations, life-long careers, voted like-minded individuals into power who could keep the whole thing rolling, and now that they're dropping off, the rest of us have to figure how to clean up the financial and environmental mess they left.
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Even Neanderthals looked after their elderly and cripples. And "survival of the fittest" goes hand in hand with a ton of genetic variation. That's the fuel of evolution, which social darwinists like yourself have never actually understood. A healthy population is a population with a large number of alleles. If you want to see what controlled breeding does, look at your average farm animal or pet and realize that the traits that generations of farmers and breeders have bred for in many cases actually make th
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That after growing up on decades of science fiction telling me how the world was going to be massively overpopulated finding out that under population is likely to be a problem.
Underpopulation is not a problem. Growth economics is. Wealthy nations relying on the fact that the young support the ever older and pushing debt down the generations. Don't let Korea fool you. Type "population of the world" into google and have a look at the trend, you could never get a straighter and more linear line, South Korea doesn't even register on it. We are still adding a billion people to the planet every 12 years.
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This seems entirely possible as the cost of energy, at some point, will plummet. With less people, the cost of materials will go down. And we are getting better and better at production with less labor.
Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:4, Informative)
There is no economic system in which a lower ratio of workers to total population will not cause economic pain.
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There is no economic system in which a lower ratio of workers to total population will not cause economic pain.
I guess you could look at this two ways: Either we're making a mistake now by producing less children, or we've been making a mistake for the past two centuries by producing so many children that a crash was inevitable.
A weirder thing about what you're saying is that if you look at it industry-by-industry, what you're saying is theoretically correct but empirically wrong. As the ratio of agricultural workers to total population has gone down, for instance, the amount of surplus food has kept going up.
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Re:It seems kind of weird (Score:4, Informative)
Although those workers might feel annoyed
One thing that jumped out at me during the pandemic was how many essential workers were poorly-paid. It got me thinking that we've organized our economy around having the most desperate people do the most important work as a way of ensuring that it gets done. A trust-fund kid probably won't show up for their second day shoveling out the hog barn or checking out a thousand people at the grocery store, but somebody who has barely enough money to get through the week probably will.
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So either way we're not likely to get much above the 8 billion that we're at now. Heck even China and India are having trouble growing their populations. In Africa won't be growing much longer if at all since they're rapidly modernizing.
The most recent UN projections do not show a decline in World population in the coming 50 years but rather an increase to around 10.5 billion with the population in Africa having by far the highest population growth rate of any continent. In 2022 the population of Africa is around 1.4 billion (17.7% of World population) while it is projected to reach 3.4 billion (32.2% of World population) in fifty years.
So what we will be seeing in the next 50 years will be rapid population growth in Africa (increase of ar
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That after growing up on decades of science fiction telling me how the world was going to be massively overpopulated finding out that under population is likely to be a problem. It turns out that people don't just want to keep spitting out kids as fast as they can when they don't need them to tend to farm. And in fact many of them don't want any of them at all.
It's possible that we'll see a handful of religious extremists Force the kind of poverty on the people and lack of access to birth control that can lead to increased birth rates but the problem with that is what tends to happen is our society collapses and then War and famine prevent the population from growing any further. So either way we're not likely to get much above the 8 billion that we're at now. Heck even China and India are having trouble growing their populations. In Africa won't be growing much longer if at all since they're rapidly modernizing.
This is incorrect. Most of the Baby Boomers were not born to farming families. Most of them were born in the newly-built suburbs to families created from soldiers returning from World War II.
That causes of decreased children are numerous:
- People delaying having children until much older in life. This is right in TFS. If women start having children in their mid-thirties, they are already well past their peak fertility and only a few years away from the fertility cliff.
- This goes hand-in-hand with people re
not all suburban [Re:It seems kind of weird] (Score:2)
This is incorrect. Most of the Baby Boomers were not born to farming families. Most of them were born in the newly-built suburbs to families created from soldiers returning from World War II.
True, but just barely. By 1945 the suburbs hadn't yet grown the way they have now, and nearly half of America were indeed living in rural areas (*). But rural families, even then, tended to have more children than urban (or suburban) families, so a large fraction of baby boomers were born in rural areas.
They tend to be ignored in popular culture because "listen to country music and drive a beat-up pickup truck" doesn't fit the stereotype "baby boomer."
...
That causes of decreased children are numerous:
1. Women can have fewer children, due to the advent o
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Cultural evolution will take place.
The cultures and societies that place importance and value on having children will remain and those that opt to not have children (or not enough of them) will wither and die.
The only thing evolution cares about is producing offspring. Whether its your genes, your culture, or your attitude that prevents that, its irrelevant - those who do not reproduce are dead-ends.
Actually, no, it's not (Score:2)
You are flat wrong--- the graph he linked was exponential before the 1960s, but not now. Which makes sense, because the world is not currently experiencing exponential population growth.
We are past peak baby. Babies are the only new people.
The population headline number will continue to increase, for a while, as people age--- and you can call that growth, but it's not exponential.
Korea had peak baby in the late 70s and the population has only just stopped growing.
With fewer than half as many new babies a
Population implosion (Score:2)
Decreasing the human population a bit will be helpful to the environment. But doing it too abruptly will create havoc.
This may be a little too fast.
The next few decades may be interesting. Economies have not been designed for shrinking populations.
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Re: Population implosion (Score:2)
National debt is just "paper", or to be more accurate digits. Will the US have potentially high enough productivity and natural resources to maintain a high median standard of living? Obviously yes, it's "just" a question of resource assignment. The paper can be printed.
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Debt has two sides - the borrower and the lender.
Printing paper impoverishes the people who were counting on an honest repayment of that debt - pension funds, individual retirement accounts, etc. If the plan is to default or soft-default on that debt, those people (just about everyone, I think) are going to need to rethink their retirement plans.
Re: Population implosion (Score:2)
They'll have to retire with a little less luxury perhaps, as I said "just" a question of resource assignment.
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The US has effective monetary policy and the "debt" is just Treasury bonds. That is easy to manage in all reasonable scenarios. If the dollar needs to be a little weaker to shrink the "debt," we can dictate that.
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As long as the US is a draw for immigrants this wont happen here unless we let it by not letting at least some in.
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Incentivize women to have children, and ... (Score:2)
Make it clear that the world they're being brought into should be better than the one the mother was brought into, and I'd expect this situation to straighten out in short order.
A child that can expect to be appreciated as a contributor to society, and who'll live in a less crowded world with a recovering environment? That's the ticket!
Re: Incentivize women to have children, and ... (Score:5, Insightful)
So far, there is an inverse relationship between wealth and reproduction. In fact poor people more financial insecurity have the most kids.
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So far, there is an inverse relationship between wealth and reproduction. In fact poor people more financial insecurity have the most kids.
This is mainly because in poorer countries where good, high paying jobs aren't plentiful and no social security safety net, kids are the retirement plan. In developing countries kids aren't as expensive as they are in developed nations and can be put to work earlier.
In countries like Australia and the UK, this kind of thing can be put down to poor impulse control, but when looking at why the UK has an average of less than 2 children per woman and Colombia has an average in excess of 4, this is less of an
There is a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because there's nothing like racial tensions in the US, allright...
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But but but brownpeople, they must be kept out! Also on a related note why can no one get staff right now!
It always sickens me to hear people say that immigrants are "stealing" jobs that they themselves don't actually want to do.
Re: There is a solution (Score:2)
There is a lack of staff in the same way as McDonalds have a lack of food for sale. If you go to McDonalds and are only willing to pay 10 cents for a burger, they won't sell you one.
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Why "Sobering" and "Ominous?" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Why "Sobering" and "Ominous?" (Score:2)
Globalised society is fragile, if it collapses the number of eaters it could sustain would collapse too and the number of useless eaters even faster. That would be a bit of a shit show. Malthus ahoy.
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Why is it "Sobering" that South Korea is reducing its carbon footprint by half?
South Korea much like the west has built a society based on pushing the needs of old onto the young in an unsustainable way. The sobering part is not the carbon footprint, or the resources of the planet. The sobering part is the very real risk of economical / societal collapse when the bill comes due and there's no one to pay it. The issue isn't low birth rate, it's aging population.
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Lack of resources is caused by too few people, not too many.
The days when "resources" were just lying around waiting to be picked up are, for the most part, long gone. Resources are the result of human action - we build and develop farms, we build and develop mines, we build and develop factories. These are the places where our resources come from.
I can only think of one resources off the top of my head that is still gathered: (ocean) seafood. I'm sure there are others, but the list isn't long.
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Then I guess the solution is to reduce the number of American people?
In vitro gametogenesis (Score:2, Funny)
The only solution for Korea is in-vitro gametogenesis. There is no other way. In fact that is the solution for humanity as well. We need to decouple reproduction and sex. Sex is for pleasure. Replication is for propagation. Why should the two be connected? Evolution had to trick us into replicating by coupling pleasure with it.
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Break out the Axolotl Tanks!
Re: In vitro gametogenesis (Score:2)
Just create AGI and call the androids our kids. Why stick with messy biology? Family gives emotional attachment to bio kids, but without I fail to see much difference.
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That would be fine until all the human 'parents' die and there's only androids left. It's a cool plot for a SF novel but I'm not sure how I'd feel about that IRL
Besides, current AI is nothing like AGI. At the rate things are going climate change and/or nuclear war will take care of us long before we get anywhere near to having AGI.
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Besides, AGI may be cool but SCI is much better and supports higher resolution, sound cards, etc.
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North Korea just has to survive (Score:2)
If north korea waits for long enough they'll win, because there won't be anyone in south korea.
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Well, North Koreans aren't exactly breeding like rabbits either, and there's also that thing with famine and a lack of healthcare.
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as opposed to 0.81 in South Korea
and the last famine happened in the 1990s
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and the last famine happened in the 1990s
You should get internet access, you'd be able to access news even with your busy schedule!
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Because it beats actually trying to go to North Korea to check things out for yourself?
Economic threat ... (Score:2)
....but not a threat to people who will all have better lives with less children and less people
If your economy is built around population growth, then it fails when the population shrinks - but the people themselves are individually richer
Order of magnitude too many people. (Score:2)
Having 1 child averages 58.6 tonnes of CO2e per parent per year [iop.org], 23.7 in poor countries, and 117.7 in rich countries like the USA (2050 vs life expectancy).
58.6 > 2.1.
We need to have a fertility rate of about 0.01 per person for several decades, or we'll turn the Anthropocene extinction into
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I don't think any scientist is talking about end of human life. Just more droughts, storms, plagues etc. Areas now suitable for farming can turn into deserts and some other areas become more suitable. It is just kinda problematic for countries and populations to move to these new places. And same for animals etc, some will die, some will adapt. We just hope the ones that die aren't part of our food chain. And many of the problems can be mitigated with money and technology, by those who have enough resources
When South Koreans have an erection... (Score:2)
Adult caregiving (Score:2)
More you calculate the less you multiply (Score:3)
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I just read the summary, Not sure if they actually said why but it seems that in most developer countries birth rate is down [worldpopul...review.com]
Could be environmental, microplastic in food and drink, air pollution, poor quality food... and there are some studies about testosterone level in males going down due to exposure to certain chemicals [umich.edu]
Low T levels are associated with low fertility and significantly reduced desire to have sex, and if we keep it up like this, we might all disappear sooner than we think we will.
I think it's largely behavioural.
1) I don't think being pregnant is very fun, and even with more equality child rearing responsibilities still fall mostly on the mothers. So female empowerment means women tend to want smaller families (certainly less than the 5-10 from a couple generations ago) and the ones who don't want any children at all are better able to make that decision.
2) Marriage typically follows settling down into your career. That traditionally happened after high school or undergrad. Now it h
Re: Environmental or social or both (Score:2)
Genes will win over memes and pollution, we're pretty well adapted to be top predators in any environment. It just seems unlikely it will be very comfortable or progressive.
Korea has the Moon cult (Score:2)
Believe in them and they will find you a bride in one of their mass-wedding ceremonies.
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Who could have imagined that we would be able to find wisdom in a multi-millennium track record of success?
Re:Human societies need a cult ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, people arent doing what you'd like them to with their free will so they must be controlled and manipulated.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Great, people arent doing what you'd like them to with their free will so they must be controlled and manipulated.
Do humans really have free will?
Or are they largely making barely conscious decisions and taking actions based on the myths that they are taught as "sacred" before the age of reason?
Our modern societies are spending a huge amount of resources collecting data on individuals on what buttons need to be pushed to get those individuals to think and act in ways that benefit the data collectors.
Re: (Score:2)