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I saw a thread om twitter explaining that low fertility in South Korea is due to parental investment competion:
https://x.com/anarchyinblack/status/1817684593908080960
I know this is indeed the root of the problem, but if this is indeed the social reality, it's baffling how a society can end up with norms such as this.
This sort of norm can only be sustained when there is plenty of human potential to waste in the first place. So it causing low fertility is probably a feature, not a bug: if success above the very lowest level is a high-cost tournament, there's probably too many people.
I'm not sure that really explains the phenomenon. Singapore has much higher population density than Korea, but parental investment seems much smaller. It's also not clear why there should be so much human potential to waste, especially in the era of globalization.
Perhaps Singapore's economic system can just use more people (proportionally) at those higher levels of achievement.
South Korea is very prosperous, though. The competitiveness doesn’t seem to match other developed countries with similar income rates, it’s not like in Britain or Germany people have to win an insane rat race or be Amazon warehouse workers.
All the OK-paying middle class jobs that pay just fine in every developed country exist in South Korea, and wealth inequality is average. It’s not India where life outside the top 5% sucks. The focus on the elite rat race is bizarre. The US has niche credentialist PMC status games for medicine or finance or big law or academia, but they are way outside of the life experience of most Americans.
Not compared to Singapore, Britain, or Germany. My thought about Korea (and Japan, which has a somewhat similar system) is it just isn't dynamic enough to accept more people at higher levels. If Samsung/LG/Daewoo/Hyundai can only use N such people each year, persons N+1 on through infinity are going to be sweeping floors.
Uh, isn’t South Korea at basically-western-European levels of prosperity? Like there’s no reason life can’t be perfectly decent for people who aren’t 90th percentile.
They have the same GDP per capita as Spain, or 66% of the UK.
In PPP terms they're about equal to the UK though, so I guess it depends on what you think about nominal GDP Vs PPP, as well as maybe GDP per capita per hours worked.
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