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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25668 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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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.

Coincidentally, Randal O'Toole just published an article on the same topic. He thinks the lack of low-density housing is a contributing factor.

South Korea’s high-rise housing and low birthrates are closely related. People don’t have children if they don’t have room for them. High rises are expensive to build so living space is at a premium. Birth rates are declining throughout the developed world, but they have declined the most in countries like South Korea, Russia, and China that have tried to house most of their people in high rises.

South Korea became a high rise country when it rapidly industrialized after the end of the Korean War. People moving from rural areas to the cities to get jobs created a housing crisis, and then-current urban planning theories held that high-rise housing was the best way to house people. Remember that, even though South Korea was the “good guys” in the Korean war, the country was still a dictatorship until about 1990, which meant the leadership could direct the country into one style of housing even if residents might have preferred otherwise.

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:

  1. 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."

  2. 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.

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.

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!

South Korea, Russia, and China that have tried to house most of their people in high rises.

Ignoring one child policy in China and blaming it all on highrises seems to be weird and disqualifying it.

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.

High rises are cheap though, relatively speaking. Endless suburbs are not.

O'Toole says the opposite.

People like single-family homes because of privacy, yards, and other amenities, but these are reinforced by another factor: cost. Density advocates often portray multifamily housing as affordable housing, but it is only affordable because the housing units are so much smaller than single-family housing.

According to Zillow, as of March 31, 2022, the typical single-family home in the United States was worth $338,000, while the typical condominium was worth $332,000. In places that use growth boundaries or similar policies to restrict development at the urban fringe, the differences are much greater: single-family homes in the San Francisco metro area are 57 percent more expensive than condos, while in Seattle they are 63 percent more expensive.

Condos may be less expensive, but that’s because they are smaller. Zillow once published costs per square foot of single-family homes and condominiums, but no longer does so. However, data I downloaded from 2016 indicate that the average price per square foot of condominiums was 33 percent greater than the average for single-family homes.

According to California developer Nicholas Arenson, the higher cost is due to multi-story construction, which requires elevators and more concrete and structural steel. Two-story multifamily housing costs about the same, per square foot, as single-family homes. But a third story adds 30 to 50 percent, a fourth story doubles per-square-foot costs, and five or more stories are even more expensive. Since urban planners favor four- to six-story mid-rises, units have to be very small to be priced lower than single-family homes.

And:

Beyer [a promoter of densification] cited “costs of sprawl” research by Rutgers University’s Robert Burchell and Sahan Mukherji that found that “conventional development” imposed greater costs on urban service providers than “managed development.” This research was largely hypothetical and compared the costs of low-density development vs. high-density development on vacant lands.

They found that low-density development would cost $13,000 more per housing unit than high-density development. That’s a small amount compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars added to the costs of housing when urban-growth boundaries are in place.

Beyer and density-loving planners, however, aren’t talking about building dense developments on vacant lands. Instead, they want to rebuild low-density neighborhoods to higher densities. Improving the infrastructure needed to support those higher densities will be much more costly than simply building on vacant land.

A webcast audience member asked whether “low-density housing bankrupts communities through higher infrastructure, service, and transportation costs.” I know of no communities that have gone bankrupt due to low-density housing costs. I do know of cities that have defaulted on bonds they sold to support the high-density housing for which there was supposed to be a pent-up demand, but that demand didn’t materialize.

Claims that development doesn’t pay for itself simply aren’t supported by history. This nation has been developing for hundreds of years. Who paid for the urban services if not the residents and businesses that used those services? At the local level, most deficit spending and default risk today is due to generous public employee pension and health-care plans, not to the infrastructure needed to support new development.

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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