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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.
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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