Its always amazing to me that South Korea is economically and politically much more successful and in that result it "won" the cold war of the last 50 years with its Northern counterpart. But its population is going to disappear so not much of a victory.
Even a birth rate as South Korea's does not mean the population will disappear over night. It will shrink. It will mean things will change. Infrastructure will be overprovisioned and housing will be cheap. It will mean other things will be prioritized by politics (such as kindergardens and work life balance).
In any case it won't be a catastrophy as life in North Korea.
A good analogy might be the Black Death: it didn’t destroy Europe, it changed priorities, freed the serfs, started valuing labor more, and ultimately led to a stronger Europe in the future.
If we consider that the world had 1bn people a bit over 100 years ago, it puts many things in perspective. We have generations of time to turn things around if we think it is necessary.
No, the Black Death is not a good analogy, because it killed all ages indiscriminately.
Our "plague" "kills" the young and productive - by their never being born in the first place. We are headed for something we have never seen, ever: a society dominated by old people in pure numbers terms.
The worry is that it is a design for stagnation and decay rather than greater strength. (There won't be money or people to maintain infrastructure because the elders will demand healthcare.)
I don't know what will happen and nor does anyone else really.
It killed all but made people more valuable and, more importantly, valued in general. If kids become more rare, we will probably start treating and nurturing them better. We complain about childcare costs now but if kids are few enough society might just happily take up the bill.
If only it were that easy. Austria and Switzerland have nerly identical birth rates, but in one, childcare is almost free and in the other, it is very expensive.
South Korea and Hungary (among many others) have tried paying people to have children, without success. It pulls a few births forward in time, but then the birth rate declines again.
Same thing is happening to most counties in Europe but they’re “fixing it” with immigrants. But the Germany filled with Germans will be disappearing just as South Korea is.
All countries will eventually experience population decline, it’s just the speed of each that is different [1]. Global fertility rate already appears to be below replacement rate. Even China appears to be below 1 at this time [2]. India and Africa will arrive there likely in the next ~5-10 years, depending on rate of empowerment of women.
People attribute it to empowerment of women, but I wonder if it's more correlation than causation. Women empowerment happened in the same time frame there was a large shift towards urbanization. The situation across the world before was like ~80% of people living in rural areas, and ~20% living in cities. Now those proportions are approximately flipped in many places. IIRC cities appear to be a net population sink for most of history, counting on an steady stream of people moving from the countryside each generation to replenish sub-replacement numbers. Raising children "free-ranging" is more straightforward in the countryside. In cities they demand a lot of micromanagement and resources from parents, because car-infested, cramped urban landscape is expensive and hostile to children. So perhaps the causation arrow flows from accelerated urbanization to both women empowerment and sub-replacement fertility rates, not necessarily from women empowerment to sub-replacement rates.
> Most demographers now say the population bomb has largely fizzled, and some predict that the long-term trend toward a smaller global population, with fewer consumers and a smaller human footprint on the planet, could benefit the environment.
> There appear to be other upsides to declining fertility. Along with growing individual freedom and economic empowerment of women, the U.N. study also found a rapid drop in the number of girls and teenagers giving birth.
> "The decline of the adolescent birth rates has been, I would say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the past three decades," said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.'s chief population scientist.
(scholar of the global demographic system; urbanization is certainly a component in a declining fertility rate, but the primary driver is women choosing to have less children, delay having them, or not having them at all, while having the means to assert those choices)
> smaller human footprint on the planet, could benefit the environment.
This i highly doubt. Humans are able to increase per capita (resource) consumption at a far faster rate! Old age care/consumption can also grow to infinity
Remains to be seen, good longitudinal study over the next 100 years imho. Old age care/consumption isn’t infinite; it’s bounded by what will be provided via social systems or personal resources. If there’s nothing to give (or no personal resources on hand), it’s homelessness or poverty until death. Can’t spend what isn’t there.
> People attribute it to empowerment of women, but I wonder if it's more correlation than causation.
Before going to far down the rabbit hole, have a look at the fertility rate of TSMC employees. TSMC employees make up 0.3% of Taiwan’s population, they are responsible for 1.8% of all babies born in Taiwan. [0]
The average TSMC woman is highly educated and highly paid, which eliminates most of the usual reasons touted for low the fertility rates in OECD nations. "All" TSMC does is make it possible for their female employees to have a career and raise a family, mostly by providing child care in-house and flexible working hours.
To pull that off TSMC must have a culture than prioritizes families and child raising over profit. In most industries with not be possible. Either their higher costs would lead to them being eaten alive by their competitors, or bought out by PE because their employees could be squeezed to pay out more profit to their owners. There isn't going to be a rash of companies with TSMC style family policies breaking out any time soon.
But a government policy could made it happen, which is another way of saying if a society or country decided they didn't want to wither away to nothing because of low birth rates, it could be done. They could mandate every company adopts TSMC style policies, or they could raise taxes and provide free child care (like they do for education), or more likely some mix that has the same effect. Everyone would have to be willing to be a bit poorer of course, because you are forcing people to spend less on fast cars and big houses, and more of child care.
But does seem like it could be done, so if South Korea (or any of the OECD) had the will, there is a way.
> To pull that off TSMC must have a culture than prioritizes families and child raising over profit. In most industries with not be possible. Either their higher costs would lead to them being eaten alive by their competitors, or bought out by PE because their employees could be squeezed to pay out more profit to their owners. There isn't going to be a rash of companies with TSMC style family policies breaking out any time soon.
Israel has a fertility rate of 3 and is very advanced so not all countries. It’s a cultural thing. We’ve given up religion and values for doomscrolling and dopamine hits.
> In 2020, the total fertility rate among ultra-Orthodox women in Israel was 6.6, while the rate among Arab women was 3.0, and among secular women, it was 2.0— still well above the OECD average— according to a report from the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research.
(dopamine and doomscrolling are just as bad as religion and traditional values, for different reasons, imho)
Maybe because from a strictly evolutionary point of view, that’s a failure: they won’t pass on their genes (maybe also culture, values etc.), and other gene pools will take over the resources their lineage worked to secure.
"Always" is overstated. Populations have been reshaped before (e.g. farmers absorbing foragers in Europe, steppe migrations, Arabization of North Africa, the Americas after 1492 etc). So turnover isn’t new, but this mechanism is different. This pattern stems more from our system and choices (schooling, careers, costs, contraception, culture etc) than from violence/war, disease, forced moves, so in that sense it’s self driven, and historically unusual.
> Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.
You quoted the number but skipped the part where MacKellar says the whole premise relies on treating 3rd- and 4th-generation citizens as “not French.”
> While the ethnic demography of France has shifted as a result of post-WWII immigration, scholars have generally dismissed the claims of a "great replacement" as being rooted in an exaggeration of immigration statistics and unscientific, racially prejudiced views.[12] Geographer Landis MacKellar criticized Camus's thesis for assuming "that third- and fourth- generation 'immigrants' are somehow not French."[63] Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.[63]
Feels weird to call them ethnically French, especially when the context being presented is religion.
The assumption being made is that they’ll ditch the religion after four generations? I don’t see data for that assumption, maybe it is not 100%, but its certainly not as low as 20% apostacy.
Thus I would take serious issue with that statement, it is evidence of an ethnic or religious replacement.
Religion isn’t ethnicity. Did England become less British after Catholics fell from a vast majority to ~10% post-Reformation?
And the actual numbers still don’t show a majority shift. Even if every Muslim in France kept their religion, they’d be ~10% of the population — far from "replacement".
Also, you missed the point entirely if the topic is “the population of x has gone from 1% to an estimated upper of 12.5% in 20 years” and your answer is “its below 10% right now”.
Not only are you potentially immediately wrong, since the number today could exceed 10%, it also doesn’t speak to how those demographics might be shaped by disparities in birthrates or continued migration.
But, you know that, you’re just trying to argue for some reason.
Germans mostly assimilated and culturally were similar to existing Americans, sharing the same religion and similar values. Can’t say the same for Muslim immigrants at all.
What about the Irish in America then? Culturally, they were not Protestant and were regarded as very different for a long time. How come we don't hear about this as an issue in the US today?
They had a tough time integrating but ultimately they were Christian and European and had western values. Muslims don’t have any of that and their ideals of freedom amd rights aren’t compatible with western values.
No but nazis have a way of presenting facts that are only relevant if you are concerned primarily with racial purity. Is Germany’s population growing because of immigrants, or is germanys “heritage” disappearing because of white replacement?
If a man is hospitalized because he is having paranoid delusions about his wife cheating on him, he is still sick even if his suspicions are true.
This is the opposite of what you probably wanted to say, but if the man's wife is cheating on him then he's not experiencing paranoid delusions, so hospitalizing him and calling him sick would be a form of abusive crazy-making behavior in and of itself.
“A culture evaporating cannot be discussed and addressed because genocidal dictator multiple generations ago had adjacent motivations when he killed a bunch of people”
The problem with Hitler wasn’t that he wanted German people to be successful, it was his proposed solution that involved mass murder between genocide and global war.
This is a problem that requires thinking beyond lazy pattern matching
Well if you being your sentence like this, then you already made it clear that you aren't serious about discussing, because that is not what is happening.
Any discussion that lazyly tries to skirt what Germans have done 80 years ago and tries to move into similar directions is just plain ignorant.
We must get back to the real issues: 10m Ukrainian refugees because we let Putin murder in Ukraine. 10m Syrians being displaced due to the world's inaction to stop a civil war. The list could go on.
It's a statement of fact, which is neutral on its own.
Where it becomes a right wing talking point (or a discussion about the socio-economic future of a country) broadly comes down to how you present the causes, implications, and necessary actions.
The fact that many more-developed countries having shrinking native populations is a fact that governments must reckon with in some way, and salting the earth on discussing because one faction is trying to exploit it cedes the ultimate policy decisions to them.
It's neither neutral nor a statement of fact. Look at the grandparent comment:
But the Germany filled with Germans will be disappearing...
This makes a lot of deeply political assumptions about what a "german" is and whether an immigrant can be (or become) one. I'm not here to comment on whether these assumptions are correct and they're certainly common ones, but embedded political assumptions simply aren't neutral or factual.
for what it's worth, I strongly disagree with the various right wing theories about the _cause_ and specifically the idea that there is intentional exploitation of the demographic shift, but it's not controversial that falling birthrates are leading to demographic change.
I'm not German and won't presume to say who is or isn't (or should be) "German", but this is absolutely something that needs to be grappled with by governments. A shift in population being "supplied" by birth vs. migration is recognised in many Western/more economically developed countries, and that also includes naturalised immigrants (and their descendants).
My personal belief is that the modern school of business thought is a form of tragedy of the commons: with every business optimising their extraction of wealth from people in isolation, individuals in the whole find the cost of living unsustainable and are increasingly living hand to mouth and feel they cannot afford or have the time to raise children. In this way, falling birthrates are an externality of modern economic doctrine. This is also true for immigrants, who are exploited for cheaper work, and as they naturalise fall into the same trap as being exploited for extracted wealth.
In my eyes, the resolution to falling birthrates is that governments need to reach for social and economic levers to reduce the predation of companies on individuals, as well as to increase the amount of flexible wealth that individuals have so they can choose to raise kids if they want.
I think that the idea that this is actually some kind of coordinated "great replacement" is deeply untrue and instead is a fulcrum to further distract, divide, and exploit people. If my belief on the root causes is true, however, governments must have the guts to reign in business, which does not prove to be popular in political circles. Instead, it is easy for governments to allow the political fringes to continue this narrative to "immigrant wash" discontent with life - rather than address the root of the problem (optimising for growth), they can announce "tough on immigration" measures that demonise marginalised groups who are politically inert themselves (immigrants, legal or otherwise, being much more restricted in their ability to vote and influence politics than established capital).
They'll do anything but pay their workers, and not overwork them. Almost like when you need to use 80% of your paycheck to pay rent that people can't think much farther than next month.
"We" being the actual decision-makers, the owners. The class who wants GDP to go up, but doesn't care about GDP per capita.
Edit: I'm undecided if it's capitalist ownership class, or a "late stage socialism running out of other people's money". Still undecided. It's probably both, which is why we're doomed.
The liberal order(consensus between both sides) of the past 50 years have decided that GDP is the only thing that matters and we should trade everything for it.
If you follow much of the USSR, you’d be aware that the nations surrounding Russia were the most heavily invested in, at least those that were front facing.
Estonia for example had quite a lot of investment, you’d be surprised what a regime will invest in to ensure that the optics are positive.
Not saying that happened here, but it is something that has happened.
Estonia was part of the USSR, and the USSR put a lot of money into Estonia to make communism look like it was working. At the expense of other parts of the USSR.
South Korean politics is an absolute disaster, there's a non-zero possibility that 30 years from now, long after the Kims, people will be fleeing to the North.
Japan's population was 44 million in 1900, it is 123 million now.
South Korea's population was 25 million in 1960, it is 54 million now.
We need to stop going over the top with claims of "population collapse". The 20th century to this day was abnormal at historical scale in that human population exploded like never before, and perhaps like never again and probably for the best considering how we have brought the planet to its knees.
South Korea's birth rate is 0.7, which means for every 100 grandparents there will be only 12 grandchildren if things don't change. At the current pace, the South Korean population will be 32 million in 2075 and 11 million in 2125, and most of the people alive will be old. That's nearly as massive a change in the opposite direction as the drop in childhood mortality in the 20th century.
Extrapolations over a century into the future are worthless.
We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population because the explosion that has happened is unsustainable and so are current global population levels. That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
This does not mean that population should or will collapse to extra low levels...
>> Extrapolations over a century into the future are worthless.
Its just math showing the trend and it's not worthless as it should give you something to think about.
>> We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population
Of course, but it will be painful.
>> That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
That simple math, which you deem worthless also tells you this is impossible. There will be a small number of young active people having to support a big group of elderly. They will not have the time to solve world problems. In fact a lot of knowledge will be lost as economy will contract and there will be less people available for specialization.
I don't know what point are trying to make, beside being sarcastic. Knowing that each succeeding generation will be a 1/3 of the previous one has huge influence on how to prepare a society to function when population pyramid will be so inverted.
If they don't change something drastically this is exactly what will happen according to science. It's like there is a comet on course with Earth, but you are saying, knowing it would be meaningless because something might change it's path. I still don't know what your point is.
According to science, the only thing that can change the second derivative of population is public policy? What has caused changes in this number throughout history?
The debate would go much nicer if you could just explain your point of view, which I kindly asked you twice now. Instead you are asking me what I assume are rhetorical questions from your perspective.
My point of view is that it is not useful at all to carry out predictions assuming that the second derivative of population will stay constant for a long time and that it is even sillier to propose public policy based on this.
By that logic we should not act upon anything. E.g. if a car is accelerating towards you while you are crossing the road it would be prudent to speed up or delay your crossing and not to ignore it and say they will surely decelerate at any moment now.
It is not impossible. It is going to happen and it is unavoidable. Even with a constant population this will happen if people live long.
We need to embrace this and use existing and new technologies to cope. We have AI, automation, robots progressing fast, this is exactly what we need in addition to investing in education.
The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
>> It is not impossible. It is going to happen and it is unavoidable.
Based on history it hasn't happened. How do you know it's going to?
>>The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
That is absolutely not the only alternative. One would be to have a stable population at the current size. Another on would be decreasing population slowly and not as drastically as it will happen in Korea. A third one would be growing it slowly. The fourth one would be oscillating around the current size, etc.
Yeah it is baffling to me that people are already on the "we are doomed" phase for this.
50 years ago people were saying "we are doomed" because of overpopulation. We had people saying that the optimal number of humans on the planet was just one billion and that we had to engage in extreme measures of international oppression to force as much of the unavoidable starvation on certain populations and not others. Now we are seeing "the world is doomed" because of underpopulation (despite the fact that the world population is still growing) and we are starting to see the proposed extreme measures of rolling back women's rights in order to address this.
Well the problem is people in retirement, caring only about size of their pension outnumbering working age people and effectively creating positive feedback for populist parties to constantly increase pensions despite the constantly shrinking working population and tax revenue.
This system can't work. This system is going to collapse. Just matter of time.
You miss the point - a larger population isn't necessarily good if most of them are not economically productive (i.e. don't have skilled working class). Are people supposed to work even in their old age, till they die?
Personally I think the culture has changed. It's got little to do with costs or insentives or support and everything to do with changing wants/desires. Rather than devote 20+ years of a person's life to kids, most people would rather socialize, party, dance, netflix-and-chill, youtube, tiktok, travel, game, raise a pet, hobbies, etc....
Many countries have tried giving every incentive possible. Cash bonuses, tax breaks, a year+ of mandatory child leave for both men and women, cheap child care, mandatory flexible hours, housing subsidies, cultural campaigns.
Some of them have a short term effect but none of them get the numbers up to replacement levels and the numbers keep going down.
It's hard to blame it on any one thing. Some might say "suburban car centric culture" but that doesn't explain Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc....
I can't personally imagine the numbers going back up.
>> Many countries have tried giving every incentive possible. Cash bonuses, tax breaks, a year+ of mandatory child leave for both men and women, cheap child care, mandatory flexible hours, housing subsidies, cultural campaigns.
Those incentives are usually meaningless. Like 100€ monthly cash bonus. Could cover food, but nothing more. A year of child leave is good, but what to do during next 5 years untill you can put kids into the school system?
And don't forget massive opportunity costs. Instead of having a single kid, woman can have few more years of advancing in career. Instead of putting all time into one kid, woman can upskill, get a degree, etc.
And with second child it's three times harder.
Also turns out, many baby boomers are not eager to be present in life of their grandkids. If you pregnant - you are screwed. You and the father-to-be will take a massive hit in every aspect of life.
Do you have sources of such countries? I know at least one case - russia (before the war) - where they gave out cash and really cheap mortgages and it caused a little baby boom so it worked. I have not heard of any such programs in the developed world…
In France, the policies are measurably motivating having more children according to some studies (can't link them right now). The effect size is on the order of +0.3 to the TFR rate or something like that.
The are many programs like this all over the world; the issue with them is they don't give out enough money/resources to have a measurable positive effect - they should be much much more funded. Incidentally the biggest baby boom in my country (Slovakia) was during the largest buildout of cheap accomodation for young families in the history, also the maternity leave was increased to 3 years and there were various subsidies. So I think policies like that work if they are properly funded.
I think the failure in extrapolation is that the numbers will absolutely go back up, eventually. Subcultures that incentivize high birth rates culturally will have more kids, and eventually come to dominate society.
If you want to see what culture will look like in a few hundred years, try and figure out what’s common between Mormons, Amish, and Muslims.
Shortterm, SKR probably the only country with culture of civil service, loathing for immigration, and enough gender drama for misandrist men to eventually roll out coercive family planning system onto females (that hate them) to force family formation.
TBH need someone to attempt very illiberal effort to make babies because every pro maternity policy has failed to bring TFR > replacement. At this point it should be abundantly clear that short of religion, carrot policies cannot reward their way to 2.1+ TFR. Or I guess embrace immigration.
Russia has been putting a lot of government effort into increasing the fertility rate for years now and it's still below replacement. Granted, the modern Russian government is incompetent in many ways so maybe that is not a good example, but are there any modern examples of specifically authoritarian but not full-on totalitarian policies significantly raising fertility rate? By specifically authoritarian, I mean policies that would not be possible in a liberal system. It seems that fertility rate laughs at mere authoritarianism. Now, full-on totalitarianism could clearly raise fertility rate through draconian measures, but at what cost? It would be horrible to live through.
> It seems that fertility rate laughs at mere authoritarianism
IMO the problem is fertility rate also laughs at everything "liberalism" and wealth has thrown and true authoritarian measures have not been taken. As in every liberal / pro natal policies (Nordics) have failed to raise TFR >2.1, usually settle at 1.7. I think more illustrative is wealthy MENA countries where culture, religion, resources align but those countries are either <2.1 TFR or declining to <2.1 TFR, i.e. if you have all the government subsidies and families regularly hire maids/nannies from ample cheap migrant workforce (something even most wealthy liberal societies don't have ubiquitous access too) then the carrot solution itself is not enough.
Stick policies, which only authoritarians or societies in extreme fertility stress can even start to contemplate, would be increased taxation / limited wealth transfers, i.e. if you want to inherit anything from your parents or grandparents (including real estate) you better have at least 2 kids. And in case of east asian societies, ban pets / AI relationships that's been eating at relationship formation. Peak authoritarian methods would be civil service that requires women to start making babies (in conjunction with massive support), state orphanage programs to basically raise new bodies and engineer/manage demographics (i.e. women don't have to keep kids but my spend 1-2 years doing state surrogacy). There's also increasing lifespan, i.e. workforce participation duration, but still hits ultimate limits of needing to replacement TFR.
Or again... engineer society to accept immigration.
>> every pro maternity policy has failed to bring TFR
Because that policies are bluff to say politicians support family without actually spending much of the budget.
Like give a 100€ rebate for a childcare while it costs 1000€ per month. And also it is closed for a month in summer, so you should care about the baby by yourself.
Real pro-maternity policies will be like this:
1. Free childcare.
2. Free healthcare, including all medicine and vaccination.
3. Free public transport for kids and adults with them.
4. Subsidized shops with items for kids: from nappies to clothes.
4. Subsidized costs of housing for families with kids.
5. Subsidized costs of sport activities.
6. Fully paid maternity leave untill children can be full day in daycare.
Even with generous European policies, having one kid is a huge hit to the lifestyle and savings. But we need to have 2-3 kids to keep the population.
Yes, I think even "real pro-maternity" policies not enough. I written more in comment below, but my gut feeling is to get enough family formation that has 2-3 kids rather than 1-2, you need... basically UBI + slave labour tier support. Think UAE/Qatar, 20% locals doing 30hr/week make shift jobs, access to cheap labour, i.e. living in maid. Their TFR still declining fast, 4->3 in last 10 years but there's a chance they'll settle above 2.1 / replacement. Short of that level of "abundance" I think most will choose less than 2 kids and societies stuck with backfilling with immigration.
Ubi will make no difference, as it will just hike prices for everyone. Free child-related services could make a difference, together with heavily subsidized housing, healthcare and transportation for people with kids
Unless that gets extended to household level, i.e. maids/nannies at home, I don't think it's enough. Hence UBI + "slave" labour tier support. Can't UBI way to hiring fellow nationals to be economical due to price hikes, so need economic subclass willing to work labour roles for peanuts with different economic structure subservient to local UBI purchase power.
> TBH need someone to attempt very illiberal effort to make babies because every pro maternity policy has failed to bring TFR > replacement. At this point it should be abundantly clear that short of religion, carrot policies cannot reward their way to 2.1+ TFR. Or I guess embrace immigration.
Frankly this is a wrong take.
For one the TFR of religious countries is also trending downward and below replacement.
Immigration is a zero-sum game that won't help for long term.
And the issue is carrot policies just don't give out enough carrots (do the math and you'll see that easily). A really generous family support that makes having children wortwhile compared to the alternatives will have the desired result.
IMO take so far data is showing no amount of generous policies will convince people to have more than 1-2 kids (hit replacement TFR) long term unless they're living life of leisure + ample subsidies AND help. At some point stress/obligation of child rearing is going to eat away at other commitments (i.e. work). Hence highlighting MENA countries where religion+resource coordinate but TFR still collapsing and trending below 2.1 TFR.
The statistic exception being being REALLY GENEROUS, Fully Automated Luxury Communism leisure tier support i.e. living in maids, nannies, drivers -> UAE Emiratis and Qataris where locals ex migrant worker pop still has declining TFR that _may_ settle beyond replacement (currently around 3.1, still down from 3.7 10 years ago). But that requires functionally UBI, optional work i.e. state setups 30hr per week "public sector" for locals while expat / cheap / slave labour handles everything else. The latter being key, need UBI tier to be able to cover hiring other humans to do domestic work, maid, nanny, cook, driver etc.
Maybe a do-able level of "abundance" if we look other way on exploitation, already lots of migrant labours in west, but we tend to keep them in factories or fields, not civic/domestic realm. PRC trying to build their army of care taking robots. But IMO that's the minimum, if you can't ensure that level of support (not just money but labour), positive policies won't get past replacement TFR. If Emrati/Qatari TFR stabilize below replacement in 10-20 years, then it's sign to ceiling on human willingness to have multiple kids, i.e. can't subsidize way for locals to reach replacement TFR.
> IMO take so far data is showing no amount of generous policies will convince people to have more than 1-2 kids (hit replacement TFR) long term unless they're living life of leisure + ample subsidies AND help.
How long is the long-term data we have? Is the generous support at the start of the policy still generous relative to the changed conditions much later?
> If Emrati/Qatari TFR stabilize below replacement in 10-20 years
My guess is they will collapse too; their lifestyle is financed by oil buyers. This will not go on forever and more importantly they have more and more people to feed and pamper but not more oil to sell. And now that we have technologies that can broadly replace oil, they can't raise the prices too much either.
My rough understanding is we have 20-50 years of efforts in the Nordics. Long enough to form "Nordic Paradox" for situation where pro-natal policies still lead to below replacement rates. There's also weird dual cultural shift - Nordic countries women labour participation rate stagnated or even decreased - more wanted to become full time moms/homemakers - so there is desire for family formation. But second culture shift is the desire is still sub replacement level, i.e. people want 1-2 kids. Not enough people want 2 kids to replace themselves. Not enough people want 2+ kids to make up the people that want 1.
> go on forever
Yeah it's more to illustrate the levels of abundance in terms of pro social policies that could sustain culturally acceptable >2 TFR. Be religious. Have UBI. Ensure people work little if they don't want to. Ensure they have access to cheap labour that does all the work for them. Then maybe TFR could settle between 2-3. Right now the few exception are a few million people sustained by disproportionate fossil exports. That model can't scale without another source of abundance.
> Long enough to form "Nordic Paradox" for situation where pro-natal policies still lead to below replacement rates.
Having just read [0], this confirms my earlier suspicion the support is not generous enough there.
(Also a huge political issue in probably all countries getting older - the political power skews to the older generation making increasing support for young families harder to finance with budget constraints. Welfare for grandparents and poverty for single parents.)
> That model can't scale without another source of abundance.
Yes of course it can't, it's the whole planet financing it for them. But maybe we don't need that level of abundance - previous generations certainly didn't, even some of them already liberal and educated. And I think we are still missing some fundamental cause here. Maybe modern life is not only too expensive, but also too complex and complicated to navigate into parenthood at the right time and place in life and then it's too late?
The conventional reason is # of kids is depressed relative to female education levels, but my unsubstantiated pet theory is elimination of boredom - mobile penetration also seems to map well with TFR declines. I think the opportunity cost / effort if >1 kid is too much, and from what I hear about friends with 2 kids that overlap by a few years, having 2 kids is >2 times harder, and they're not shy about sharing it. Modern life has too many comforts/distractions, hence imo positive policies will have hard time making 2+ kids desirable vs also adding punitive making not having 2+ kids undesirable.
Hyper-capitalist societies need some counterbalance with social safety programs, e.g., as seen in the Nordic states and the blue states in the U.S., otherwise people choose not to reproduce if their children won't get anything out of society like they did.
Besides that, at a cultural level personal worth and dignity and safety need to be divorced from monetary net worth as that makes it easier for someone to decide where is a comfortable place for them in their society, and then adjust their time between working and child-rearing.
That said, it's also hard to motivate some people to reproduce if there's no greater point to it than some basic primal instinct, which may not be that high in such people. It follows, I guess, that the more educated a populace gets, the less its participants are likely to thoughtlessly reproduce. Tax credits are helpful (said sarcastically).
> Hyper-capitalist societies need some counterbalance with social safety programs, e.g., as seen in the Nordic states and the blue states in the U.S., otherwise people choose not to reproduce if their children won't get anything out of society like they did.
Total fertility rates in Scandinavian countries (known for their very generous welfare) are falling as well -- not as catastrophic as South Korea's, but way below replacement rate nonetheless. E.g., Denmark's total fertility rate fell yet again in 2024 to 1.466. (Source: https://www.dst.dk/da/Statistik/emner/borgere/befolkning/fer...)
Yes, that's what I was alluding to in my last para. The blue states in the U.S. have relatively lower fertility rates than the red states. The second para is what I think would actually help with falling reproductive rates in such situations, but those conditions need to be met by social safety programs.
Ironically, poverty levels are correlated with birth rates. The states with the highest birth rates are concentrated in the South and Midwest; wealthier states with high birth rates, like Texas, Utah, are also more religious.
We see this trend internationally too, i.e., Africa vs Europe.
I think they do? They’re currently in decline due to both local and global pressures, so I guess that change in behavior is a response which leads to their fertility rate being a “sustainable” one.
That said, social safety programs aren’t just about money per se, but about freeing up parents from working and investing time in child-rearing. If life is expensive and requires at least two incomes to sustain a household, who has the time to get pregnant, give birth and raise a child? Maybe this is a problem that gets resolved if children can be safely incubated outside a womb, but that still doesn’t solve the problem of who’s going to do all the work that needs to get done on a daily basis to run a household with kids.
Russia had 3 times more people than Ukraine but cannot win the war, only grind few hundred meters per day and thousands of KIA+WIA daily. They have people to continue do it for the next 10 years, but economy will likely collapse sooner(3-5 years).
Not only does South Korea have a huge technology advantage over North Korea, but South Korea could also easily build nuclear weapons if it wanted to. It would probably not be at risk of losing a war to North Korea even if its population dropped to 10 million.
It sounds like you're suggesting woman's rights caused South Korea's military to shrink 20%, and thus it is desirable to not give woman rights, lest it cause men to choose not to join the army, and thus it is desirable to roll back woman having rights, as it could cause men to not join the army and its no biggie anyway, its not in their constitution that woman have rights.
You're not reading it right.
Women not having kids because they are making Excels/working in assorted minwage jobs directly translates into less kids being born which then translates into less potential soldiers. It's not difficult.
It was difficult enough that you were downvoted to gray, and rather than just shrugging and moving on, I assumed the best.
I also was perfectly polite in my post.
It wouldn't have been difficult for you to do the same.
To be clear, you are claiming it is time to roll back woman's rights (the right to work) so they maintain the same army size.
May I be bold, and make a conjecture?
You are aware this argument is unjustifiable and people react as such, otherwise, you wouldn't be rolling out your 9 year old anon account to do it.
You do not understand why it is unjustifiable, so, you blame some sort of conspiracy or ill in civil society for your inability to back your free-association with your name.
I mean, I personally find the idea of rolling back women's rights to be repellent, but arguments should not be judged based on whether or not the author feels compelled to make them anonymously. In history, there have been plenty of true and justifiable things said anonymously because the people saying them were worried about being persecuted for their opinions.
You are ensuring that we do not invert the causal order: i.e. keep the order that it is a bad argument, then, conjecture about why one would offer one. The community appreciates that.
I wasn't being impolite, maybe you are inferring impoliteness into it where there is none?
Unjustifiable? Not at all.
I am fully aware of how much of a third rail my point was, and you guessed right about why I used this account to make it. Shouldn't that say something to you? I don't think I am saying something necessarily bad, but it's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about this because neither side is really willing to give any ground. I'm also glad the backdrop of this discussion was the fucking South Korean army's size as you can't really get more high stakes (for South Korea at least) than that. Yet still, we're somehow not allowed to discuss it, it's too taboo.
And why are you framing it as a conspiracy? Prima facie, is my point really that incoherent? Inflammatory, sure. But is there really no link between births in a country and that country's female population being largely in the workforce? C'mon. Please do stop this inane shouting down of taboo subjects, do not brow beat people for using anonymous accounts when it's clear why they are doing so. Discuss the issue rather than brush it under the carpet until the hump gets too large to ignore and absolute trash like Tate and friends make use of it to increase their platform. Be smart, maybe learn lessons from the last few years in politics.
Ah yes the epic downboot. That will definitely stop this issue metastasizing into something that will get hijacked by the Andrew Tates of the world. Let's just pretend until we can't!
You called it the elephant in the room, but then you chose to speak mysteriously about it, and became belligerent when asked to clarify. I still don't understand what you were saying in the original post regarding women's rights, even after reading this reply.
Perhaps not women’s rights, per se, but allowing the culture to portray every possible lifestyle except motherhood as honorable and rewarding definitely caused it.
My experience has been that women have kids when their lives feel stable and secure like when they have house, and they and their partner are out of school and a couple years into a well-paying, stable job. The longer that stability alludes a woman and/or couple the longer it takes to have children which means fewer or no children.
Fair argument but easily shot down by the high birth rates in poverty-stricken countries such as India, Pakistan, most states in Africa. Yes it does play a part in birthrates in developed countries and I don't doubt it is a factor in many people not starting families. But the deeper issue isn't economic otherwise it would apply evenly across the board and it simply doesn't.
That kind of begs the question, doesn’t it? Why are these women choosing more schooling and more years of employment prior to motherhood?
It’s almost like the culture is telling them that getting a degree, starting a career, and getting a nice house are goals more worthy than motherhood.
And what do the moms that “make it” and do have a kid or two do once they get there? Dump them in daycare because being a stay at home mom just isn’t socially acceptable.
Stability is an inherently subjective concept. Ask any third world mother if they’d trade places with a first world mother and the answer would be a resounding yes. Between food stamps, rent assistance, and tax subsidies, there has never been a more stable time to raise a family. But it isnt cool so they don’t do it.
This is 100% a culture problem. Women are trained from a young age that becoming an independent working woman is higher status than being a stay at home mom.
That's a hell of a motte to a bailey. We're not really saying anything anymore other than making a claim its not-honorable to be a mother in the culture (trivially false)
It really is women's rights per se. I wrote that fully realising I will get downvoted to oblivion for questioning the status quo/consensus but it's so mind-boggling that I can't stay quiet and it helps that this time they're finally connecting the most vital of dots, military capability.
There are a few ways to address declining birth rates and removing women's professional opportunities beyond motherhood is a heavy-handed one with heaps of negative trade-offs / externalities of its own.
Please feel free to discuss any such approach that hasn't been tried and failed (such as tax incentives). AFAIK they actually did try various financial incentives in SK (and Japan) with very little to show for it.
I’d point to cultural issues that persist even now making motherhood unenviable, such as the norm of men taking little to no part in child rearing and house duties.
Being expected to raise the children, keep the house clean, keep up with laundry, do the grocery shopping, and keep the family fed among other things all on your own while your partner’s day ends after coming home from his 9-to-5 doesn’t sound very pleasant, and a lot of young adult women (especially in East Asia) saw exactly this play out with their parents so it’s only natural if it’s led them to become avoidant.
Women not being housewives is almost entirely responsible for this. I’d rather have the government make having children mandatory than rolling back women’s rights though.
Married for 5 years and no children? Taxes go up by 20% or something similarly brutal. Have children? They go down by 20%.
This might make people not get married I guess so you would need an extra benefit to being married like no free healthcare if you’re not married by 35 or something.
As you know, Korea has compulsory military service for men, but not for women. This would be a fantastic place for gender equality activists to make their voice heard and rally for greater gender equality, it's strange that they seem to be unconcerned with this sort of thing.
Hmmm...I'm not sure if gender equality advocacy is when you always advocate for complete equality in all things always.
There's a side component of the mens right advocacy movement that tries introducing the idea that there's some flaw in woman's rights movements because they're not true gender equality movements: inter alia, famously, lawsuits over ladies nights at bars
I think the reason that doesn't carry much attention is because it's intuitive, even without the concept involved, to understand why someone might advocate for equal pay but not for equal conscription. We are but sentient meat.
Isn't it about equal responsibilities? No one is talking about women should be serving in the assault infantry together with men. But there are many different jobs to be filled within army which are equally suitable men and women: pretty much anything tech related: aircraft, drones, tanks.
> There's a side component of the mens right advocacy movement that tries introducing the idea that there's some flaw in woman's rights movements because they're not true gender equality movements: inter alia, famously, lawsuits over ladies nights at bars
It's not just men's rights. There is a massive part of the West who believes that to acknowledge that women are physically different than men is the real sexism. Erasing female as a distinct category entirely is supposed to be the anti-sexist option. Females are just weak men, too lazy to get taller and stronger. Or men are just big, sterile, extremely strong women. Now that I type it, I guess it is a men's rights movement.
Turning "woman-hating" into "misogynist" into "sexist" was as men's rights as turning Women's Studies into Gender Studies.
edit: always remember that the history of "sexism" is not a history of people hurting people, it's a history of men hurting women. Sexism is a euphemism. The reason only males are required to do military service in Korea is because men decided that's how it should be. If men decided otherwise, it would be changed.
Idk what either of you are on about, if it makes you feel better.
Seems like he's trying to complain...everyone? blue team? women? women and betas? women and lib cucks? women and misled men?...lie and say women are as strong as men and saying otherwise is censored as sexism.
You misread it as complaining about people who say there's a difference in mens and womens strength, and start complaining about how this is adjacent to blaming male voters for conscription given woman vote too, and all feminists won't read statistics.
Both of you need to grow up, in that, these are silly strawmen and not even wrong, in the Pauli sense. There's nothing to engage with.
You're making up obviously false stuff, and you've found a safe way to not have to engage with reality by claiming if you tried, you'd have to deal with all feminists ignoring statistics because all feminists believe men are as strong as women.
Why bother to be on a discussion forum if you're so pressed for time that you're lashing out at people agreeing with you and consider any interlocution a waste of time?
From the outside, it looks like all you get out of this is feeling upset, and it makes us wonder how you misread so wildly.
I didn't misread anything. refulgentis edited his comment after I replied, and the issue seems to stem from his failure to understand the comment I replied to. Without that context, my reply obviously won't make sense either.
The comment I replied to is pretty standard feminist dreck, and if you can't understand it, maybe interlocute them first? Debate is one thing, spoon-feeding you explanations of someone else's comment is another.
Still, I'll give you a hint: both pessimizer and I agree that men and women are physically different - again, I did not misread them in that regard. The difference is that I take that to a logical conclusion, while they are bound by ideology to stop short.
Here's the second sentence of this post you've claimed twice now believes men and women are no different: "There is a massive part of the West who believes that to acknowledge that women are physically different than men is the real sexism."
Here's the second sentence of this post you've claimed twice now believes men and women are no different: "There is a massive part of the West who believes that to acknowledge that women are physically different than men is the real sexism."
> Korea has compulsory military service for men, but not for women
If they make it compulsory for women it probably will just crash fertility further. Unless they couple it with the possibility of exemption for mothers.
What makes you think that conscription for women isn't being discussed in Korea?
1. Do you have evidence that it isn't?
2. You do realize that Korea is not actually a society with a lot of gender equality (or equality in general, as I'll note in point #4) as-is, right?
3. Which 'gender equality champions' exactly do you expect to be shouting about this so that you will hear about it? Americans and Europeans posting on Reddit and Hacker News?
4. Do you think that the existing problems regarding equality in conscription (with every connected person's sons actively dodging the draft) may be poisoning the well for anyone advocating - or considering advocating - throwing more bodies into that machine?
I'm not so sure. If you're shot or suffer other injury that affects mobility, it's really helpful to have some comrades around with enough upper-body strength to carry you somewhere where you can get help, or at least cover while waiting for it. Being able to carry a lot of equipment is also useful.
That's very progressive of you and all, but the vast majority of South Korea's military is men doing their mandatory service when they come of age, so it is very much relevant to call out the gender
After reaching peak prosperity, both Korea and Japan have decided to evaporate into oblivion. Japan grudgingly allows in a few Filipino and Vietnamese, so there is that.
That "peak prosperity" thing is actually capitalism gone awry in my opinion. I'd include India too here - a common pattern that can be seen in all these three Asian countries is the unhealthy work-life balance. Couple that with the world-wide trend that two incomes are now necessary to raise kids in many of these "fast" growing or economically "prosperous" countries, most people are just choosing to have only 1 (or at most 2 kids), and there are some who are also opting not to have any kids. In India, the opposition leader has also lamented that we have already lost advantage of having a younger population because of poor economic planning and policies (by 2030, India will have the world’s largest youth population). Trump won, in large part, because many Americans are now struggling to feel secure with the wages that they earn - they can't afford to buy a house, which many feel is required to start a family. A course correction is required in the world economy, as, while capitalism-consumerism does seem to provide prosperity, it also seems to be consuming societies that adopts it.
