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Kurzgesagt had last week a video about population collapse because of low fertility rate:
It has the charming title: "SOUTH KOREA IS OVER". All caps, which is not normal for kurzgesagt titles, so you know DOOM is coming.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
It is a short video with 14 minutes but it explains at breakneck speed the topic succinctly and in depth. The depressing conclusion is that South Korea can't really do anything, the low fertility is an unstoppable freight train and it will hit (end) the country. Even if a wonder happens and the fertility will rise to replacement level next week, the country would still have massive problems in 30 years. And because this wonder is not happening … the country is over
It is barely comforting that the West (and other countries too) are heading in a similar direction. Maybe accelerationism is the solution here: The faster South Korea is imploding the sooner other countries will wake up and do something.
I just had a conversation with someone last week about this video. I wondered at the time why they were focusing on South Korea and not Japan. It does seem strange the video says it's unprecedented and only make the most passing mention that Japan is arguably ahead on the demographic curve.
From the population pyramids, seems like if you align babyboomlet generations, 2025 Korea is roughly at the same place as 2007 Japan. Perhaps the remarkable thing is Japan managed to stabilize the base of the pyramid for a few cohorts. Seems like now Korea is facing a demographic cliff while Japan is only facing a demographic decline. With 1.2% vs 1.6% of population in the most recent cohorts. Does anyone have some color on why Japans population decline slowed and Koreas did not? Is anyone more familiar with the cultures willing to confirm or deny my impression that the South Koreans seem to be more willing to embrace automation. Maybe that can help fend of declines in raw GDP for a few more years?
Japan is a larger nation, with more economic opportunity, and it industrialized at a time when industrialization wasn't quite so automated- the percentage of the population that process enriched was larger.
South Korea is small, has one major city, and it industrialized at a time when automation was already a relatively solved problem- the percentage of the population that process enriched was smaller.
Both nations, as well as all Western ones (importantly, the US is the least affected), are overpopulated to varying degrees relative to their level of economic opportunity- that's why TFR is below 2 there. It's not "the young aren't doing their duty", it's that the positions that the young would grow into no longer exist and their very existence has been, for a variety of reasons, simply priced out of the market (you can also see this effect in gender relations, where women instinctively expect men to make more than them- which means that the carrying capacity of society is not equal, and furthermore that men are in surplus).
When populations shrink, capital pays more for labor- that's why, historically, massive economic booms occur after significant die-offs. What you're seeing is a slower, gentler version of that process.
The North Koreans are not capable of winning a war on South Korea and still remaining North Korea through domestic production alone- if they had enough domestic production to sustain a war they would have industrialized to the point the socioeconomic forces that hold the country together would be destroyed- too many people getting rich for the Kim regime to be able to delete.
China could do it, of course- just dump more materiel onto the NK army than they're able to carry- but then, apart from no longer being a base from which the United States could attack the Chinese mainland, what grand benefit would they get from reducing the country to rubble? Certainly not a trading partner, that's for sure, since NK has no industry and their people are poorer than China's own in the first place. It's not like Ukraine where the Russians can somewhat credibly claim they're making the territory safe for ethnic Russians; Koreans aren't Han Chinese and the two hate each other on that basis alone.
If so, why there are large immigration streams and even many goverments subsidizing that immigration?
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