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South Korea went through an astounding period of economic growth. In 1961 its per-capita income was US$93 (inflation-adjusted). Ghana, one of the poorest nations in Africa, had more than double that (US$190). In 2024, Korea's had grown to US$36,624. That is almost 40,000% growth in a single lifetime. It is hard to conceive of in most places where GDP growth averages 1...2% per year. The difference between working hard to get ahead and trying to sit out and keep doing what you were always doing was literally the choice between affluence and destitution. So no wonder you have a population hyper-focused on their careers who pushes what children they have as hard as they can, so that none of them have any time for family now. The opportunity cost of anything else was enormous.

The positive news (if it can be called that), is that this level of growth cannot continue, so something will have to change.

This is trivially fixed by paying people to have and raise children (edit: pay them more than the cost of the children). That no government does this implies to me that it's not really a huge emergency. That this idea doesn't even enter the public forum implies to me that people are still more terrified of maybe-eugenics than they are of falling birth rates, so again it's not that pressing.

Edit NB: paying people more than the cost of the children would cause a lot of poor or dumb people to have kids just for money, so you'd ideally have some standard to meet before you get this money, which is where the eugenics comment applies

I fear SK is a harbinger of what's to come in other developed western countries. Companies seem to follow each other in getting more out of workers. When jobs and career become the most important thing (for survival, professional satisfaction or lifestyle), then family life suffers. Even with superb (albeit costly) child care that I avail, my wife has to throttle down her career to put taking care of the kids first, while I prioritize income generation. I have to put considerable thought into how I spend quality time with my kids (including taking a risk that a delayed email response will have professional costs for me). But I feel far more fortunate than my wife (who has to pay a heavy toll forgoing her professional aspirations). Society needs to evolve to do better to support working parents and caregivers.

I think small scale entrepreneurship might be a solution to the current corp craziness. Also, need to ensure lifestyle creep doesn't occur. Easier said then done.

Just in my lifetime, the world population, an simultaneously the US population, has tripled.

The world's economic output and productivity are at all time highs.

Natural resources are at tipping points of extreme exploitation, and toxic output is causing other massive tipping points of natural destruction.

And somehow, the population going down is a big problem?

To put it bluntly, this is total bullshit!

If you take the world's most hateful pricks out of the picture, there is no shortage of anything.

The problem is not an availability of resources, it in who gets to keep them.

The best thing that could happen to ease the impact of our human footprint, would be for the population to go down.

Then we wouldn't have to tolerate some of the stupidest ideas in the modern world, like flying people to mars!

Fix where the fucking money goes! Then we can accept the population reduction for what it is, the greatest trend to emerge in recent decades...

Maybe I don't know enough about human biology or sociology but it seems like at some point, the population will drop low enough that natural resources is high per person and people will start having many more kids again.

Am I crazy for thinking this?

Our generation might be the generation where resources can't sustain the population. Hence, people naturally have fewer kids. Zoom out to the macro level and it just seems like humanity is adjusting to the amount of available resources per capita.

Raising kids is expensive, and today young people can't afford their own home - how can they have children? Sure, other things may also be affecting this, but IMO raising inequality correlates very well with lower birth rates (at national level); anecdotally, all my friends with high income are having at least two kids.

The problem is the same everywhere - The masses rely on income from their occupation, while the ruling elite rely on capital typically amassed by their forefathers, olden day aristocrats.

And income from work is stagnating.

Let's take the beautiful state of Massachusetts where I live. For foreigners: it's a liberal mecca, a pocket of Americans with a yearning for european lifestyle. Let's look at the government from a systems perspective and say that we prioritize individuals based on dollars spent on them, shall we?

- How much does the state spend for a pre-k child? <10k/year/child

- An incarcerated inmate? >100k/year/inmate

- Drug-use rehab? >50k/year/user-seeking-rehab

- How much does that leave parents to pay? >30k/year/child (again average, any place where there's a job it's closer to 50k pre-tax)

We don't prioritize children and our societies are actively hostile towards them in terms of dollars spent. As simple as that.

Maybe I'm weird, but does anyone else have worries about what future their prospective children would inherit? In particular things that worry me: 1. the growing geopolitcal turmoil which is likely to eventually descend into a great war of sorts, the footage coming out of Ukraine is horrifying, 2. climate change isn't going to be dealt with and again, lots of violence will ensure because of that, almost certainly, 3. not sure what to think about AGI, but I'm not entirely dismissive and at best it seems like a dual use technology, 4. a GATTACA-type future where the super rich figure out a way to birth super humans with perfect genetics and top 0.001% IQs. All of those make the future look so unappealing.

Less social cohesion: https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12...

Then there is dating apps that essentially made it near impossible for men that fall below the median: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01361/

I'm sure economics plays some role here but I personally wouldn't emphasise it.

They say no childbirth means no children. But must children be such an inconvenience? Even if Korea ceases to produce human infants, AI children may be born in their stead. Or, through reverse-aging, the elderly could become the new children.

The old addage is true. It takes a village to raise a child. It is therefore no surprise that our contemporary unnatural way of life and organization of society is not conductive to the continuation of the species.

Growing up (born in late 70s), all I heard was “OMG OVER POPULATION” and how the planet can’t support the projected N billion people who will be living on it.

Now the birth rate actually slows down to correct itself and we’re not all breeding like rabbits, that’s a bad thing?

This feels like a capitalist concern, “we won’t have enough workers to produce goods and then consume them!”

> South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. Its population is (optimistically) projected to shrink by over two thirds over the next 100 years. If current fertility rates persist, every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them.

> This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a particularly extreme form. The only factor that has little parallel in Western societies is the legacy of highly successful antinatalist campaigns by the South Korean government in previous decades.

A bunch of things are at play here.

This is actually a good thing for personal autonomy. Instead of accidentally having kids you can't afford, due to modern science, it's completely optional.

The article alludes to this, but the government previously promoted smaller families. Just a few generation ago the birthrate was considered too high. Realistically to have a growing population you probably want to have around an average of 3 children per couple.

This is economically impossible for most people though. No one has a stable job anymore. We're all temps and gig workers.

If you just do it anyway, and find it's a struggle... Society blames you and calls you careless.

The path of least resistance is to just skip having a family.

> Career-motherhood conflict

Anyone tried to move away from this model where there is two people of opposite gender, living together as a family, working, and raising child(ren) at the same time? Why not have dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?

North Korea may well win by simply waiting.

Don't flag me for this, i'm just playing devils advocate here. One of the main arguments i've heard against the narrative that the feminist movement freed women to do whatever they want is that instead they are now expected to work for a living. Many women want to have a career and don't want a family, so fine. But many that do find themselves unable to do so. The fact is that once only one member of the family had to go out to work now it's both. I know you can poke holes in that argument, but i feel it has some substance. Of course one comment can't cover any nuance, you would need a book for that. The article even touches onto this effect i described but fails to investigate it at all.

If you want women to raise families you can't also want them to have careers. You can probably draw a venn diagram of how those 2 things can overlap.

More misogynist posts?

So basically, to save the world countries need to help mothers that work or woman that might want to have kids. because looks like the biggest factor is a sexist and extreme work culture.