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Notes -
Ross Douthat on South Korea's abysmal fertility rates.
It's a direct warning to the United Sates; Douthat concludes with "So the current trend in South Korea is more than just a grim surprise. It’s a warning about what’s possible for us." I think it's worth separating and then reintegrating a few of the items that Douthat brings up in the context of some recent Motte threads on both immigration and the sexual revolution. I'll add some of my own new comments on religion.
First, on the sexual revolution specific to the South Korean context. South Korean women enjoyed the same kind of personal "liberation" that women did and the pill, as it did everywhere, removed the very real possibility of pregnancy from sex. The conservative traditions of the South Korean monoculture, however, remained mostly in place so there was no summer of love and significantly less tolerance, even today, for loud-and-proud promiscuity. As Douthat writes, pregnancy outside of wedlock in South Korea is extremely rare. Alright, so South Koreans aren't orgy-ing it up, but they still get married and start families?
No, they don't. (Note: this article goes into more depth on everything that Douthat's op-ed covers).
In short, being married in South Korea seems like it sucks. There's such an emphasis on child success (in the purely credentialist sense; grades, prestigious school attendance etc.) paired with a brutal "work hard for the sake of working hard" career culture that South Korea parents, apparently, never have time to have fun or relax. What's more, they aren't really raising their children in any sort of tailored or individual way - there's a signal success criteria, and the mission is push the kid as far as they can go within that criteria. Child are a prestige project. Even worse, the filial culture also means that children are expected to be utterly obedient to their parents without question. It would seem that a very likely scenario playing out in many South Korean homes is parents ordering their children to do homework that they (the children) have no interest in while the parents would rather do something fun with the kids, and neither party can actually admit to that mutual preference, so they both continue with the drudgery. It's a weird backwards Prisoners Dilemma where both prisoners admit to a crime they both didn't commit and explicitly ask for the maximum sentence.
All of this has lead, unsurprisingly, to a fertility crisis that could be demographically more damaging than the Black Death (caveat: with straight line projections and no intervention or policy shifts. See Douthat article). The obvious option of throwing open the floodgates to immigrants is an utter non-starter in the context of South Korean monoculture and, with the live fire exercise mass immigration into Europe, probably also unlikely to receive support from "pragmatic" policy makers.
As the linked articles describe, the Government is trying to match-make its own citizens and in the South Korean culture wars you have extremist MGTOW style groups for both women and men. Oh, and the North Koreans are still a credible invasion threat and the SK military may run out of men. Super.
Douthat's article gives it only one sentence of attention, but I think a big item of importance here is that South Korea isn't a "religious" society in the Western sense. Its social and cultural mores are most heavily influenced by filial devotion and family-ethno-cultural tradition in a secular context. I wonder if that is part of the root cause of the problem.
Raising children has always been difficult. When you exist with a personal belief that having children is an order from God for most (but not all) people, you can get through much of the difficulties of child rearing, perhaps multiple times. I'm reminded of a recent interview with Jensen Huang, co-founder of nVIDIA, where he stated that, knowing what he does now, he probably wouldn't start a start-up again. This is because it's just too damn taxing. He went on to say that one of the major advantages of first time founders is that they don't know how insanely hard it's all going to be and they often operate with an insanely highly level of personal belief in their success and a lack of knowledge of the difficulty reality. I think anyone who's been around first time parents (before birth) sees a similar hyper-optimism.
That South Korean's culturally lack a transcendental, faith based backing for having children seems, to me, to be a deeper and distinctive cause of the fertility crisis there. (Distinctive in that there are also conditions present in SK that obviously correlate to low fertility, but those conditions are present in other societies with low fertility as well, not least of which is rapid economic growth and very high levels of basic education and standard of living). If you don't have "Master of the Universe says so" pressure mixed with "but Master of the Universe will help me out!" optimism, I don't see gaggles of South Korea children streaming through the streets.
Phrased differently, it seems to me South Korean's may be too realist and grounded in their evaluations of things. Again, having children is hard. If you analyze all of the realities of child rearing, you are going to find thousands of reason not to do it. Without a faith-level "Yeah, but fuck it!" decision making mechanism, it makes sense that a highly educated and highly rational community would not see many kids.
I'll conclude by asking the Motte to chime in on anything about the above, of course. More specifically, however - To what extent are the Judeo-Christian roots of the United States responsible for cultural attitudes of "hyper optimistic belief" around things like child rearing, entrepreneurship, scientific frontier-ism (space travel, moon landing, AI). I worry that on the Right, Judeo-Christian ethics are mostly touted as ways to keep social order and cohesion and, on the Left, they're derided for a lack of acceptance and as an inhibitor to full self-expression. That's one axis, sure, but I don't think it's the entire problem space. Moreover, is much of the rising Western trouble with pervasive anxiety, sexlessness, poor family formation, etc. partially due to a loss of a quasi-faith belief structure.
Based on what I know about South Korea, which isn’t much, here’s what I imagine goes on: if you’re a middle-class or lower-middle-class couple (I can’t even tell if they actually use such terminology there) and have only one child, let’s say a boy, there’s a slim but still somewhat reasonable chance that he’ll get into one of the top universities and get some moderately cushy job at Samsung after all those cram school classes, private tutoring and other endless drudgery. However, if you have a second or even a third child, it’ll mean that you won’t have the resources to pay for their cram school classes, private tutors etc. as well, which will condemn them later to the existential horror of having to live outside Seoul, not attending one of the top 5 unis, not working for Samsung etc. In other words, having more than one child will result in you being ostracized from normie polite society as a careless, unconcerned prole. Am I right?
That just about matches with my mental model of the social dynamics, and although I would blame housing prices for the Covid-era drop in birthrates, it is likely that the longer-term drop is more about education prices.
The expressions they use would be literally translated as "gold spoon," "silver spoon," "bronze spoon," "iron spoon" for upper, middle-upper, and middle, and lower class, respectively, although this take on wealth has been memed to include diamond, wood, plastic, and dirt.
That sort of makes sense, although I don't quite understand why, say, entering vocational training and becoming a skilled worker is seemingly considered such a lowly lot in these societies. I thought they had a significant manufacturing sector, plus fisheries etc., and that the quality of vocational training available is pretty good.
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Sorry to hijack, but why not just "Christian?" This term has always just seemed to me a politician's hedge against being called a "Christian supremacist" or something. I don't think the ethics of Judaism had much impact on U.S. history.
Apologies if this gets pattern-matched to the incessant JQ-posting/trolling we get here. But I really don't know why people use this word outside of political speeches or discussions of 1st century religious history.
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Every society has their "golden path": study, employment, marry, have kids, retire, die. In Korea, the golden path is very well-established: study, get into a university, graduate, get a white-collar job, get engaged, buy a condo, marry, move into the condo upon returning from the honeymoon, and have kids 9 months later. Note two things: first, marriage is scheduled shortly after the couple buys a condo, and second, that most of the people who deviate from this golden path (traditionally) will have been low-status, low-class, or of lower impulse-control. Deviations from the path result in a loss of social status, a lot of awkward conversations with friends and relatives, and sometimes even the loss of legally-mandated benefits (which benefits are rather small to start out with).
So the failure to have kids is tied up in a cultural resistance to deviate from the path, as well as with inability to buy flats.
The average price of a flat in Seoul doubled from 2018 to 2021.
There isn't much more to be said. Any dual-income, median-wage-earning, responsible millenial couples (1) who were saving up to get married discovered mid-pandemic that the prices on flats were rising at roughly 5x the rate at which they could put away money. (2) Half the young professionals I know were hodling their savings into cryptocurrency and stonks, because nothing else had a high enough rate of return to keep up with housing (and then Tether blew up).
The government is unlikely to do anything about housing prices: popping the housing bubble would devastate the economy, stop a bunch of construction projects needed for increasing housing supply, devastate the wealth of the political class, and wipe out the wealth of retirees who were putting their money into housing funds and are very politically active. Much easier to shrug shoulders about subsidies for kids are not working and there is nothing that can be done.
(1) Young white collar couples will not earn median income in Korean society. Millenials in their 30s might, but in their 20s they are working overtime gratis for a chance at getting promoted.
(2) This oversimplifies, omitting the interest rates on jeonsae mortgages, which are a whole 'nother level of fucked up: the tenant takes out a mortgage to put down a deposit for a two-year housing lease, where the deposit is capped at 80~90% of the value of the property. The landlord keeps any interest made when investing the deposit, and when the two-year lease is over may renegotiate and increase the deposit amount. So the tenant needs to save up the money for an upcoming increase in the deposit while also paying back for the interest on the deposit to the bank. At some point around 2021 jeonsae increases of $100,000 were not uncommon.
Tether never blew up, are you thinking of Luna?
Yeah, I was thinking of Terra. Not really into crypto.
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UST & USDT easy to get mixed up. Terra, potentially?
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The “social expectations” pressure theory just doesn’t make sense. If South Koreans are such slaves to social pressure, how is it that they feel so easily able to shirk it all and avoid marriage and kids entirely (which is surely even more shameful)?
It’s socially easier to say ‘I haven’t found the right girl/guy’ than to have a bunch of kids and refuse to provide the expected massive parental investment.
Rushton’s pet peeve was to rank blacks > whites > asians on every scale, and r/K was a big one, it fits with the observed fertility.
But the fertility results have been decreasing for blacks, whites and Asians, especially in industrialized countries. In US the black fertility rate is only marginally higher than white fertility rate, and when compared to the 7-8 child families from over a century ago, the Asian rate is not that different, either. I've never understood how the "r/K fertility strategy" thing is supposed to fit with the current data.
Still fits (ok, hispanics should be lower, but they’ve had less time to be culturally acclimated). I don’t mean it’s strongly genetically predetermined, obviously culture plays a large role. r/K provides an explanation why supposedly pro-children cultural beliefs (that they should be supported) are effectively anti-children. The west is facing a tradeoff between a few supremely coddled and educated children, and enough of them.
The legal and cultural responsibilities of parenthood should be massively curtailed. Safe haven laws should be expanded to the first 18 years of the child’s life (obviously the other parent should get first dibs). I don’t mean people should walk away from their responsibilities, just that they should be free to. It would lessen the pressure on those who don’t, encouraging them to have more. Right now the decision to have a child is the equivalent of signing an irreversible, decades long legal servitude contract.
Given the apparently dire fertility situation (and attendant pension problems etc), it’s even doubtful that aborting/not having kids is worse for society than filling orphanages with the children of unfit mothers and cads. I would certainly prefer to grow up in an orphanage than not exist at all. Seen that way, the ‘best interest of the child’ doctrine works against the best interest of the child.
I resolutely agree with you that this is the case; it's offensive to human dignity of all people that a child's mother should be arrested for the crime of letting their nearly-biologically-adult-aged child walk down the street seemingly-unsupervised.
Yes, explicitly encouraging kids to exercise the freedom they used to have back before we went off the deep end is going to result in some chaos, but actually allowing them to grow for once might have positive consequences 30 years down the line when they start judging having kids as worthwhile now that the shadow of Karen (enforced by the State) isn't looming over them.
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I agree but probably from a different angle. This article (linked in the OP), is a must read. Something is seriously wrong in the water in SK, there just seems to be a much higher base rate of the (almost universal and new) gender animosity in SK. Hell they have a womens version of MGTOW that seems to be just as radical as the male version and they elected an "incel" president (says so on the article).
My gut feeling is that "to fix the birthrate, you must first fix the fuck rate". I would like to see some data on male-female attractiveness differentials and gender animosity and birth rates, broken down by country. I think the conversatives despite being the only ones to talk about the fuck-rate aspect of it all are still putting the cart before the horse. Something is severly broken in modern (m|d)ating, and I think it gets given less credence in these conversations than it should be. Yes, I'm bringing practically 0- evidence, but it's a very latent gut feeling I have.
I think Korea is just a country that naturally takes things to extremes. Like when Buddhism was introduced they got super into Buddhism, and then more recently they took to Christianity hardcore. Online gaming, Go/baduk, and boy/girl pop groups. SK is super capitalist while NK is super communist. And not just big things but silly little fads like eating streams or Taiwanese cakes (the failed business of the family in Parasite) seem to take the whole country by storm one day, then disappear the next. So it makes sense to me that they would also push feminism and MRA to their most toxic extremes.
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Thanks for providing some of these extra specifics. The raw economics on the ground often get lost in the "reporting" (because journalists are scared of math)
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I think that's it. My impression is that if you're a South Korean woman (or East Asian in general), you're expected to both be successful in a career (to uphold your family's investment in you and make your parents proud) and to get married, and be respectful to your husband's family, and produce kids while combining that with a career. It's the "you can't have it all dilemma" turned up to eleven, because at least in the West women are not expected in the same way to be at the beck and call of the mother-in-law and husband's family.
So if you're a young Korean couple, why would you want to get married? Or start having kids? Too much crushing expectation from all sides both from your families and the surrounding culture.
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I’ve said this before, but birthrates in the post-contraceptive world depend on whether people expect to enjoy raising kids. South Korean childhood seems legitimately awful for everyone involved; of course a realistic thinker opts out of doing it a second time!
If you look at groups with the pill that have above replacement fertility rates, by contrast, you see people who want to have kids. Rednecks really look forwards to going to their kids’ sporting events and taking them fishing and teaching them to work on cars, and have an entire genre of very popular music about how wanting to be a mother turns otherwise plain-looking women phenomenally beautiful.
And it’s not necessarily that one is clear eyed and the other is hopelessly romanticized; South Korean childhood is legitimately much more unpleasant than redneck childhood, for both parties. But you don’t have to go to South Korea to see the impact of attitudes towards Natality; blue tribe fertility is on the lower end of average for the developed world and blue tribe culture is full of fretting about how awful motherhood is. You contrast that to red tribe culture and it’s obvious.
People want kids when they expect to enjoy parenting. I’m not saying there aren’t economic or structural issues going on. But remember the study of teenaged girls who had to take care of a baby doll like a real baby, discovered they liked it, and then went and got pregnant? Wanting kids is a pretty big factor and people on the motte underrate it significantly.
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The average parent succeeds though, contrary to the average startup. Wiping a baby's ass and feeding it is very doable, and so is the rest. It's not always fun, but even the least gifted parents mostly manage not to kill their children.
This sounds like BS to me. In Europe, the Czech republic is the most atheistic country, and they have nearly 0.5 babies per woman more than very catholic Poland. AFAIK neither of those has huge numbers of immigrants that could skew statistics. In Western Europe, France has a rather high birthrate, also in the native population - once again, a highly post-christian nation.
In France, the issue seems to be that it's normal to have children, nobody expects women to drop out of the workforce for several years, and it's normal for men to spend time with their very young children. And you can find a nanny or a creche rather easily, so living far away from your parents or in-laws is not something that would stop you. Having children isn't seen as a life changing and life defining event - it's just something you do, and mostly not a big deal. I get the impression that countries like Germany (and maybe Korea) just lost that attitude, and the pressure of getting that huge and consequential thing right makes people simply question their ability - and avoid children altogether.
It seems clear to me that the incentives for having children aren't the same in religious and areligious societies, but the infrastructure for child friendly areligious societies can be built.
The closest commonly collected statistic which captures what I think you are talking about, is Female Workforce Participation. According to World Bank FWP and TFR are (including only OECD countries):
Australia 62 1.2
Austria 56 1.7
Belgium 51 1.6
Canada 61 1.4
Chile 49 1.5
Columbia 51 1.7
CostaRica 50 1.5
Czechia 52 1.8
Denmark 59 1.7
Estonia 60 1.6
Finland 57 1.5
France 53 1.8
Germany 56 1.6
Greece 45 1.4
Hungary 53 1.6
Iceland 71 1.8
Ireland 60 1.7
Israel 60 3.0
Italy 41 1.3
Japan 54 1.3
Latvia 55 1.6
Lithuania 59 1.3
Luxembourg 58 1.4
Mexico 46 1.8
Netherlands 61 1.6
NewZealand 67 1.6
Norway 64 1.6
Poland 51 1.3
Portugal 55 1.4
Slovakia 56 1.6
Slovenia 55 1.6
SouthKorea 55 .8
Spain 53 1.2
Sweden 62 1.7
Switzerland 62 1.5
Turkey 34 1.9
UK 59 1.6
USA 56 1.7
SouthKorea, Australia, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Japan, Poland are bottom 7 with regards to TFR, with their FWP in order being: 55, 62, 53, 41, 59, 54, 51. Not particularly low, Italy not withstanding.
The above data plotted, for whatever that's worth.
So no correlation. If you really really want to squint, there's a slightly positive correlation (which I did not expect).
It's basically zero correlation, take out the Israel outlier and the sign of the beta will flip.
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I've sometimes said that once you encounter a family with more than three kids, you don't really need to ask whether they go to the church but which church they go to.
Within my friends group, the two families with 4 kids are both Orthodox (my daughter's godmother's family and my brother's family), and from time to time I encounter the owner of a small firm that cleans our apartment once a month, a Pentecostal lady with 8 kids. Our Orthodox parish is bustling with young parents.
OTOH probably half of my secular friends are childless (generally by choice, sometimes due to mental issues or lack or partners), and the ones with kids typically have one or two, some being single parents of one child who want more but being a single parent of course makes dating considerably more difficult.
The problem regarding public policy is that there's really no easy to way to bolster actual religiousness by state policy. At most you get cultural Christianity (like in Poland and Russia due to conservative pro-religious policies there) that tends to decay to a stale shell in quick time and has had no major impact on fertility rates. The only policy that would seem like something that produces results would be implicitly subsidizing high-fertility religious minorities, but even Christian high-fertiliy religious minorities (ie. Laestadians in Finland) tend to be notably cliquish and standoffish regarding the people not in their minority, and few people would really want to rely on a policy that might mean an explosion of influence among such groups.
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There are a few hypotheses here:
In 2, there's an assumption smuggled in, which is that absent a "religious" belief system, viewing life realistically means that children are a net negative. But this all depends on what one values. I'd basically interpret a belief system that concludes, after looking realistically at things, that children are a net negative as self-centered hedonism. It's the self-centered hedonism that is the problem, not looking at things realistically. One can certainly value children in themselves while being consequentialist atheist materialist rationalist.
What's needed is a value system that takes a longer view while accepting reality (insert diatribe about blank-slateism causing everything wrong in the world). Basically, future people matter, happier, smarter, better future people matter, and the best thing one can do with their life is make an infinite tree of such people by having kids. It might be that what I'm describing basically is Judeo-Christian ethics, but I think removing the supernatural takes us so far from what the original religions are about that it doesn't make sense to call it that.
That's certainly true for me. I want 3 kids, ideally, but regardless of the financial hardship it might cause me, it's 2 or bust.
The future belongs to those who show up, and I can't imagine there are many people who are more likely to be similar to me than my own flesh and blood, yet.
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Not necessarily; there's the pessimistic anti-humanism of more philosophical antinatalism, wherein children are also a net negative to themselves.
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In game theory, this can be a case of pluralistic ignorance, where people's preferences aren't successfully articulated and people end up agreeing to a suboptimal outcome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance
Thank you for this. Learning has occurred.
I feel like game theory is almost like the German language in its ability to constantly create useful and concise labels for complex/abstract ideas.
Definitely. I spent many years not appreciating GT, despite a strong interest in other parts of economics.
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I've heard German described as many things, but concise? That's a first! It might well be accurate, I don't speak it myself.
It is rather unpleasant on the ears, in my humble opinion, I'm forced to use a VPN for certain purposes, and believe me that when it defaults to a German server, the ads that precede the prurient content make my ears bleed. I don't know how the poor bastards pull off dirty talk.
Really? You find modern-day German unpleasant-sounding? I agree that old German accents were pretty harsh-sounding, but almost all of the Germans I’ve known have been so soft-spoken that their language sounded downright pretty.
French, on the other hand, is hideous. I don’t understand how it ever became “the language of love.”
The elevated status of the French language’s phonetics among Anglophones has got to be some sort of psyop, or maybe a holdover from the age in which French was the universal language of European aristocracy.
With regard to German, I imagine that the popular conception of the language as a harsh and angry one is largely mediated by a certain 20th-century art student’s use of it. Mark Twain, for instance, writes the following in 1880:
How things change.
SCHLACHT is great, it’s closely related to slaughter, schlacht-en, schlacht-hof. Even phonetically it sounds like a man drowning in his own blood. BATTLE is wobbly and inconsequential.
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I wish so very much that the US right/conservative movement was not so clearly dominated by the religious types. Even many socially conservative beliefs can be defended quite well on entirely secular grounds. (And there’s the irony that the best family structures these days are in left-leaning college-educated marriages.)
Libertarians tend to be more secular, but also more outnumbered and without institutional/political power.
As America becomes more secular, something needs to give. I think this is one more reason why Trace’s post from last week is happening. Anyone born in the last few decades associates the GOP with the Religious Right, Bush and his failures, and Trump. Even if you hate progressives, you’re not likely to want to move to the right, as things are.
Of course, the trad/conservative culture in SK obviously has some problems having nothing to do with theology.
How sad how many Americans and others died to save SK so that it could become a major success story, only to face dying of old age. I guess many of our ancestors would take the same view of modern society overall.
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Coincidentally, Randal O'Toole just published an article on the same topic. He thinks the lack of low-density housing is a contributing factor.
O'Toole is close to the mark in surmising that the low birthrate is housing related, but Korean houses haven't gotten smaller in the past 30 years, so the declining birthrate doesn't come from "feeling cramped".
Instead, buying a flat (usually a condo in a high-rise) is the cultural norm in Korea upon marriage, and to marry without a flat lined up is to be subject to a lot of awkward questions. Imagine trying to avoid answering 200 variations on "so where are you going to live?" Anecdotally, the price/availability of housing has delayed every Korean marriage I am aware of. People really don't marry unless they can afford the property or win a housing lottery.
So the question O'Toole should be asking is not "why small houses?" but instead "why expensive houses now?" Part of that price could be the dependence on high-rises, but it doesn't quite have explanatory power: High-rises are more expensive to build per unit floorspace, but they are less expensive per family unit than detatched single-family homes. Construction costs cannot explain why the average sale price of a condo in Seoul is now more than one million dollars, in a country where the median income is around 50,000 dollars. The cost of housing is instead set by two other factors:
Everyone wants to live in Seoul, because of the metropolis network effects: there are more jobs, more services, better infrastructure, more retail/entertainment options, better hospitals, and better schools in Seoul. Consequently, moving to Seoul is high-status: "마소의 새끼는 시골로, 사람의 새끼는 서울로." - "Send your kids to Seoul, and your foals and calves to the countryside."
The housing market is dominated by speculation. For the past 15 years hodling Seoul apartments has been more lucrative than any other investment. People who have cash have been putting it into housing, people who don't have enough cash to buy flats outright have been putting it into housing "stocks" and taking out mortgages which release money if they win a government-run housing lottery (protip: for an edge in the lottery, get your disabled relative to apply, quietly buy the flat from them after a few years have passed, then flip the flat for profit). Due to a change in policy around 2020, even the mortgage route has recently became infeasible for the middle class:
Korean housing policy has been a disaster. The long and short of the linked article is that the last administration attempted to control housing prices by increasing property taxes and making it harder to get a mortgage, but this priced the middle class out of the market in Seoul and Incheon, and speculators who have cash have continued buying, with the price of condos doubling from 2018 to 2021.
My read on this is that the government is either dominated by or beholden to the speculator class. What remains to be seen is why the people seem resigned to the situation, instead of seeking alternatives. In a sane world, housing prices increasing beyond measure would incentivize more construction and more people seeking alternate housing arrangements to raise their families. To a certain extent, more construction is happening, with Seoul set to increase the limit on high-rise height and developing new satellite cities. But until then, few people seem willing to take the prestige, economic, or stability hit of moving to the countryside, trying to raise children in rental flats, or trying to raise kids in their parents' homes. Instead, young people of middling means have been moving abroad to have kids.
If the population starts really falling (and the same is true in China) even in Seoul then house prices collapse by default. I’ve seen all kinds of speculation as to why this might not be the case but I can’t see it, you can’t prop up a rental market with a huge number of empty units, especially if any landlords have mortgages or want to release equity in some other way. All you need is a few years of property heading the other way and its psychological value as a speculative asset is punctured indefinitely.
If it really is house price related then the problem is going to solve itself in short order.
That's all true, and housing prices have leveled off in some neighborhoods, so the end of the bubble may be nigh. The next step is that housing speculators push for increased immigration and increased social atomization to boost housing prices and to cover the domestic labor shortage caused by boomers retiring and millenials refusing to do blue-collar work. This will boost the anti-immigration party, which is on the left in Korea.
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What’s Israeli housing policy look like? They’re the only conventional developed country above replacement, seems like we should compare.
From what I've learned, there's nothing unusual beyond settlements.
Israel has a very natalist culture, which I think is mostly explained by their national trauma. Israel also has a very low power distance index (only Austria is lower among the developed countries, but I haven't experienced this in practice), which means you can't lose any status by having more children, living in a more cramped house and having less stuff, because you can't gain any status by having a bigger house, a bigger car and vacationing on Bali.
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I'm under the impression that the bulk of the above average fertility comes from conservative Jews, who are willing to endure financial hardships and the more secular Israeli society's begrudging tolerance.
Less-orthodox Jews do well too, and even secular ones are way better than anywhere else in the modernized world.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/danielle-kubes-the-truth-behind-israels-curiously-high-fertility-rate/wcm/72a8dfda-a442-47d8-8a23-76faac276fa9/amp/
Thanks for the additional information!
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Ignoring one child policy in China and blaming it all on highrises seems to be weird and disqualifying it.
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High rises are cheap though, relatively speaking. Endless suburbs are not. We cannot return to our agrarian, rural past.
Lots of US economic issues could be improved by way more high rises in places like San Francisco, NYC, and the urban core of basically every metro.
Density may have negative effects on birth rates, but if you have strong birth rates you gotta build up.
O'Toole says the opposite.
And:
The mistake you are making is not differentiating the value of a sq ft of housing from a sq ft of land. You have to compare apples to apples and mind the counterfactuals of supply and demand, with consideration of land use policy constraints.
The price of housing is a function of supply and demand, and dense/vertical construction is the only way to increase supply in most cases, where empty land is gone and artificial land isn’t an option. So dense housing is cheaper than the alternative of lower supply in that high-demand area.
When land is valuable and in short supply, building vertically becomes economical. Arbitrarily building skyscrapers is not typically a good idea. Generally, developers and investors work really hard to figure out where it makes sense to build however high, and when they’re lucky the zoning lets them actually build the best thing feasible.
Manhattan real estate is so valuable in large part because it is so dense and it is so dense because it is so valuable, in proximity to employment and amenities creating high demand. San Francisco is so much less dense than NYC because SF zoning laws and planning decisions prohibit density increases to match what the market would call for, given the high demand.
An empty lot or a house in say North Dakota or rural Texas is way cheaper. Until perhaps oil is discovered nearby, and then demand surges.
If you average out those high- and low- demand areas nationwide then, yeah, you’re going to get to nonsensical conclusions like “dense housing isn’t cheaper.”
Cities mismanaging land use policy and infrastructure spending (and pensions) is a tale as old as … the last 60 years or so in the US.
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I suspect a major contribution to reduced TFR is that children used to be a boon (after a certain age); they are now a burden until they reach adulthood and often beyond. It sounds like this is even more true in South Korea than the US.
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Birthrates only matter if you have mass immigration (or some domestic to-the-end demographic competition, as in Israel between Arabs and Jews). I guess it’s fun to speculate about whether America will be ruled by 500 million Amish in a thousand years, but it’s very questionable whether they can sustain themselves beyond a certain population size.
If South Korea goes from 50 million to 20 million people, so what? Mass automation will make most jobs redundant in the near future, and AI and robotics will replace soldiers for defensive purposes. Their country will still be populated by Koreans who are descendants of the current inhabitants, and there will still be enough of them to preserve their culture and traditions. Over time, the most fecund minority (possibly some Christian groups, idk?) will reproduce more, and fertility rates will slowly start to rise again.
But South Korea will still be South Korea. Can the same be said about Germany, France, or Canada? The Black Death is a great example, because if you have a homogenous country and 60% of the inhabitants die and the rest survive, the character of the nation hasn’t permanently changed. If you replace the population, on the other hand, you replace the country.
Well, you've saved me the trouble of saying the same.
There are a few places in the world, like South Korea, China and Japan, that are so far into demographic decline that they'll potentially experience tangible and severe hardships and decreased QOL from it, but most of the West or the rest of the world will largely not notice anything but business as usual till the current robust association between youth, a large population and economic productivity becomes uncoupled.
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Has been a boogeyman since the 1970s. Automation is only replacing jobs with low consequences of failure. Planes fly themselves already, yet pilots are still paid to sit in front.
No they will not. The military could be much more automated than it already is, but refuses to allow computer programs to control its most expensive assets.
AI is only replacing paralegals and code monkeys.
Humans dreamed of heavier-than-air flight since the Neolithic if it's commonality in dreams is anything to go by. Didn't stop the invention of airplanes and rockets.
Pilots are a tiny fraction of the cost of operating an airplane. Most airlines buy models that were developed years or decades before they reach the hand of consumers. Refits and validation of existing control systems are expensive.
We've got self-driving cars in commercial use now, available for the common prole to hire, I can only chuckle ruefully at anyone who finds that less significant, when the set of drivers of motor vehicles so grossly outweighs the number of pilots.
That may or may not be true, until race dynamics develop and they have no choice but to hand control over to their AI, initially with rubberstamping that will only get more minimal and eventually non-existent. The alternative is being rolled by opponents who do, with the only saving grace being the possession of nuclear weapons as a fuck-you button. Notice how drones are utterly dominating modern conflicts?
Line, meet the blank space to the right and top of you.
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If you’re okay living in a society of pets who sway docilely in whatever geopolitical winds come their way until some energetic bully shows up and displaces everyone, fine. I wouldn’t want to live in a society like that, and neither will most of the talented and ambitious young people. This creates a vicious cycle where your society becomes full of old people and spiritually sedentary young people. Sclerotic societies aren’t healthy for most people except for the most sclerotic, and you don’t want to live in a society full of them.
It’s not like people in such a society seem extremely happy, or satisfied. They’re stressed, corralled into a narrow path to social respect, and low-fertility aside, are sexless. Westerners who visit Korea or Japan find it charming and cozy af. But people who live and work there have very different impressions. My Korean immigrant wife came to America when she was 12 and is a scientist in America doing cutting edge basic research. Prior to that she wasn’t very good in following the narrow Korean mold of success and best case would’ve been stuck in some bugman office job at a giant conglomerate.
Also, the assumption that robots will save all the old people from having any young people to look after them is also pretty heroic, and kinda sad.
Who exactly is this "energetic bully" that's capable of wiping away a heavily automated industrialized nation with plenty of money and resources to spare for the purposes of running their automated defenses?
How exactly did they avoid the same fate, while having a comparable military base, when almost every developed country is succumbing to demographic aging?
That's all irrelevant, it's the only solution* to the problem given the failure of most natalist policies, at least until the advent of something that works, which will almost certainly be after automation makes it moot. And that's leaving aside the potential for real senolytic drugs or therapies that just make the old young again.
*Leaving aside all of us dying before this has time to happen
I assume this references Korea's history of being a subject of foreign powers like China and Japan. It's understandable though, China is so much bigger than Korea, resistance is uneconomical. And look at their geography! A peninsula that can easily be cut off by the Chinese navy, their whole country well within range of short-range ballistic missiles.
If that's the relevant comparison, then how exactly will China remain or become "energetic" when they suffer from the same demographic decline as Korea does? If they managed to retain that, somehow, why didn't Korea?
As in geopolitics, game theory makes what might otherwise be irrational, rational. Korea is a turn-key nuclear power, if they can credibly commit to nuclear retaliation no matter how costly, they're largely safe from war.
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Have you both seen Past Lives by any chance?
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