I don’t see mention of the real reason. Women are refusing. Because life in Korea sucks. Huge pressures to perform, low wages, high prices. It’s hard to start a family when there’s no hope for a better life for you or those you love. Theres even a name for the movement and catchy slogans. What was it? seventy percent of women agreed with the statement “Korea is hellish?” Why would you bring a child into hell?
This appears to all be the natural conclusion (in the ‘they did because they could, without thinking if they should’) of population wide use of birth control in an unmanaged/unregulated way.
It completely removes a widespread counterbalance to inter-population competition for the same jobs/roles, and removes the disincentives to short term pleasure seeking for both genders (unwanted babies with associated costs).
Kids are really hard. Anyone who has seen someone raise them/had to be involved in raising them, is going to know that.
If you can have sex (aka fun), also part of relationships (also necessary for social health), without the costs (raising kids) - a lot of people are of course going to do that. The more people do that, the more competitive pressure there is to do that. A ‘race to the bottom’ in economic costs, essentially.
‘Steady state’ in economies is also that everyone has to compete at their jobs as hard as they can to do well. Though really it cycles between easier times and harder times.
Being pregnant is hard. And a healthy woman having sex regularly with a healthy man is going to be pregnant most of the time without outside intervention/birth control.
Raising kids is hard. And a woman who has had kids is going to be having to deal with/raise them, unless she can find someone else to do it.
But that is also expensive, because either the one person in the couple who doesn’t bear the direct physical costs of pregnancy (the man) is now bearing the indirect costs of it (childcare) which hurts his competitiveness economically against other men who are not, or there is a third person who is being paid, so the mother can work.
Impossible? Not necessarily. Depending on economic circumstances. But it can make things, to quote ‘hellish’ly hard.
Requires a very narrow definition of “country.” Quite a few countries have disappeared in my lifetime. South Korea comprises half of a former country that disappeared in the 20th century. On India’s border the former sovereign country of Tibet ceased to exist as an independent state in 1951.
There are more interesting ways to talk about fertility than extrapolating it out to infinity.
South Korea isn't going to "disappear". Not unless its northern neighbor decides to nuke it.
But it is going to have to figure out what to do with a population that consists of many old people and few young people. Maybe it'll be just fine, if it has sufficient automation to support its elderly and produce enough wealth. Or maybe it'll have a crisis where there just aren't enough people around to do the work.
That seems considerably more worth talking about than talking about a curve that asymptotically approaches zero.
