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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.
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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