Same South Korea that suffers from one of the lowest fertility/birth rates in the world?
No better way to motivate young people to start a family, than to force them to work even more. Yes, I know this said "managers" - but let's be real, if your manager works 6 days a week, so are probably you too, in a country with work culture like SK.
Line managers have a variety of means to motivate employees, if they are told to work 6 days a week. They will mostly imply that their team should as well. Even in cases where its illegal for them to do so.
> The number of young Koreans who opted out of the job market in May was recorded at about 400,000, the highest since 2020. Despite the government's measures announced last year to integrate this group into the labor market, their number increased again after nine months as the number of full-time jobs decreased.
> However, experts believe that such policies have their limitations if there aren't enough quality jobs for the 15-29 age group.
> "The impact of high interest rates and reduced investment following the pandemic has led to a decrease in quality jobs desired by young people," Kim Gwang-suk, head of research at the Institute for Korean Economy & Industry, said. "This situation has resulted in a decline in regular employment and a loss of job-seeking motivation among young people."
If you are older, you are likely trapped in your job and must do. If you are younger, you are likely not, and can opt out. Based on trajectories, what do we think will happen to more young folks who age into working age? Grind? Or opt out? Consider how this impacts total fertility rate, at a time when South Korea has set a record for lowest in the world.
> South Korea's fertility rate, already the world's lowest, continued its dramatic decline in 2023, as women concerned about their career advancement and the financial cost of raising children decided to delay childbirth or to not have babies.
> The average number of expected babies for a South Korean woman during her reproductive life fell to a record low of 0.72 from 0.78 in 2022, data from Statistics Korea showed on Wednesday.
This is how Japanese companies get their employees to work unpaid overtime. They give their line managers overtime pay, and everybody else is too ashamed to go home before their boss.
> Same South Korea that suffers from one of the lowest fertility/birth rates in the world?
I feel like the endgame of our "line goes up for the wealthy" system is - people abandoning making other humans.
The amount of pressure on 20s/30s people is immense. A 9-month pregnancy, maternity, and parenthood has become so risky from a job/earnings perspective for an individual. There is zero stability. Even hunter/gatherer societies created stability for their pregnant women and children.
Personally, I'd argue there's a _lot_ more stability for someone in the modern West than a hunter/gatherer living on the plains. I'm not really sure what stability you're talking about in hunter gatherer societies, my understanding is that they generally existed on the edge of subsistence and would be absolutely mind boggled by amount of excess we enjoy today.
> I'm not really sure what stability you're talking about in hunter gatherer societies
While the absolute conditions of hunter gatherers were abysmal compared to modern western standards, they didn't suffer relative decline in the living conditions due to pregnancy and child rearing. Their tribe took care of their house, food, security and child rearing. In other words, they had a community.
Today with the nuclear family mindset, if you don't have parental benefits, you will be hard pressed to figure out your rent, food or insurance and you will see a relative decline in your lifestyle. Humans have big aversion to relative declines even if their absolute lifestyle would still be better than their hunter gatherer ancestors.
> Personally, I'd argue there's a _lot_ more stability for someone in the modern West than a hunter/gatherer living on the plains. I'm not really sure what stability you're talking about in hunter gatherer societies, my understanding is that they generally existed on the edge of subsistence and would be absolutely mind boggled by amount of excess we enjoy today.
The hunter or the gatherer was not abandoned from the tribe/laid off/thrown on a PIP during a pregnancy for not finding enough fruits for the tribe CEO.
I’d say stability is irrelevant in the face of the absence of contraception… no matter how hard life is, humans have and will copulate, like other animals, and produce babies – unless contraception.
South Korea is an outlier even among wealthy countries. They have an extreme work culture (beginning from school in the early stages) that takes a toll on people .
On one hand, we can say this work ethic/culture enabled them to go from third world to first in less than a century. But stretch it too much and the country suffers population collapse.
I wonder if being bordered by a rabid enemy (North Korea) also plays a role in the low birth rates. Maybe people don’t want to give birth to kids that might end up fighting war in the long run.
There's this social technology called "marriage" in which these risks are absorbed by the husband, and in which the husband is legally compelled to do so even if he doesn't want to, and compensate you for lost earnings potential if the marriage dissolves.
So yes, there might be zero stability if your intention is to be a single mother. But I've heard that application of this novel idea could be helpful with these concerns. Maybe Koreans could look into this incredible new technology?
Is anyone able to contextualize this better? What crisis are they responding to? TFA mentions "sluggish business" and a looming demographic crisis, while labor groups call BS on the messaging. Is there anything really going on or is this just a "feels" thing on behalf of leadership?
Usually, these headlines seem outrageous because they are taken out of context, but in this case there appears to be no additional context that can help make sense of this debacle. According to Korean media, chaebol subsidiaries (Samsung/SK/Lotte/etc) are demanding "crunch mode" from their executives. Nobody knows why they are doing this, and what they are trying to achieve with only executives present. News articles say the executives are holding meetings or studying current events.
Profits are projected to tank heavily so I think they are showing up just for the sake of it. I thought Korea was way past this BS. Apparently not.
The world has entered a mild recession, and many company leaders are panicking because they don’t know what to do. Their gut reaction is to “look busy” and overwork. Locally in Silicon Valley, many companies I interact with seem to be doing the same thing.
The west has a lot of inefficiencies that were never really tested before. Think ceos paying themselves huge amounts for short term thinking (Boeing), a lot of people living off generational wealth and not needing to contribute meaningfully, many examples of rent seeking, governments subsidising big businesses in response to political donations, etc.
Not that china doesn't have problems but it’s clear there’s now a competitor. The temptation here is to work the few who actually contribute even harder. Bump the working days, push retirement age up until it’s non-existent but whatever you do don’t touch the elite.
Sounds like they used to work 7 days a week, and 20 years ago the country attempted 5 days a week. So this is not an increase but a partial return…which is bonkers.
It causes me to reflect, once again, that what we consider normal is somewhat arbitrary, and may serve someone else’s needs better than it does our own.
It's funny, people make the same argument in favor of 4-day workweeks. So, according to this argument, bot 4-day and 6-day workweeks will lead to more employment! Anything but 5 days, it seems.
I have yet to read any formal literature that 6 day work weeks lead to better anything. You get a short term (3-4 week) production boost that very quickly tapers off.
But business seem to be stuck with "butt in seat" age mentality, so they aren't responding rationally to this
I'm pretty sure every civilisation used to work 7 days a week. 5 days became the norm for us.
Korea really did earn its way off the back of its now elderly population slaving away for a better future for their kids. But right now the middle age people are slaving away for a better future for themselves and it's at the cost of the younger people rather than for their benefit.
An executive or even just regular managers working more sounds like a recipe for busywork and managers excessively looking over the shoulders of ICs. The result potentially being even less productivity.
Yup. I remember when COVID lockdowns hit and everyone started working from home, my company suddenly had a zillion new initiatives and projects that appeared out of thin air and we were all busier than ever. Not more productive though.
My theory was that sending all the managers home opened their schedules considerably and so they coped with the emptiness by generating new work.
Suddenly when starting WFH the management required detailed time tracking and summaries of each day.
Somehow tracking productivity was not seen as neccessary when we were all sitting in a downtown office scrolling through Reddit with our headphones on, but it became a top priority when we started doing the same thing from home.
And this is in a culture where busy work is rampant anyway. You can be sat in the office 12 hours a day doing nothing, so long as you are there and seen to be working.
Living the same thing here and keep getting told it seems like we aren't "finishing" anything and projects seem to just drone on and on. Well when you keep introducing things as "high priority" and "urgent" it means something has to drop off the list (even if it doesn't "officially") however in his brain that can't be true.
> Hour later he called back to find out what we had done, the answer was "nothing". Again I had to explain:
"I have 4 P1s, 5 P2s and I don't know how many other tickets."
This reads as a lesson in miscommunication more than mismanagement. On his first call, he should have explicitly asked for an ETA. (Even if the assumption was you would immediately start working on his ticket.) On the first call, after his ticket was escalated, he should have been provided with the new context.
The solution, ironically, might be inserting a manager between you and him who can better handle communication.
Normally I wouldn't have even spoken with the sales guy, but I saw his name on my phone and "Bob" was generally a good sales executive and actually pretty good to support so I answered. Long story short Bob's next call was to my management team (who already knew I was swamped) to get me some resources.
This was very much a situation where things just had to reach a certain point / inconvenience the wrong people before it was resolved.
What my favourite is managers creating whole new lists for themselves so they can say they are at the front of the line. Then are baffled that this is insufficient prioritization that 7+ top lists can't all be top. It really helps highlight who are the do somethings vs the do nothings in an org.
I was actually still on the phone with the first P1 from before "Bob" the sales guy first call. Normally I wouldn't have even answered on my second line but generally Bob was a good guy and I knew he could pull the needed strings to actually get extra resources needed. Eventually Bob got the right people on the line, demanded I work his issue (we had a good working relationship) and some other techs took my other tickets. I preferred that outcome anyway.
Bob was actually a good guy, his questions weren't unwarranted, it's just a really good story to demonstrate how people forget that other people are busy too.
This is how most teams I've worked with "solved" this problem: By creating "P0". Now, everything we are actually working on is P0, and we don't know how to prioritize among them. Soon, someone will propose a P-negative-1...
No, it's a "we need the stock to rise for the stockholders this month so we're going to burn hard for no reason".
Funnily enough Australia uses this very idea for terrorism. "We hear that terrorism threat may or may not be higher than yesterday." is a thing that Australian PMs do when things look bad or its a slow news day. They word it in such dumb ways as quote: "there is some extra terrorist chatter right now" [1]...
People in power can use fear of things to look like they're doing more work.
That sure will help with the Korean demographic crisis, they'll be fucking like rabbits after those long days. And they can't wait to give the same future to their children...
South Korea is fucked if they don't change their atitude. North Korea will win the long game simply because there will be nobody left to fight at South.
Predicting population growth out 100+ years is unlikely to be accurate. South Korea is likely to have a larger population out as far as we can reasonably predict.
Have you seen how grim the current fertility rates are? Agreed on extrapolating outwards being iffy but this isn't a 100+ year thing. It's something happening right now
Short term a lack of people can change attitude around immigration. As a wealthy country SK can definitely attract people if they choose to do so.
Long term, the people born each year are children of people who decided to have kids which is counter to the overall trend in the country. There’s huge selective pressure around deciding to have kids in modern societies.
"Long term, the people born each year are children of people who decided to have kids".
If there's far fewer parents because this cohort of potential parents is much smaller, then you have necessarily fewer children going forward. Even if you double the number of people that want kids, it becomes very hard to reverse the demographic decline, let alone grow your society. Even if you could, there's still a giant demographic hole in your population that will cause big issues over time.
Outside of immigration (which is a big discussion on its own) PLUS a healthy birth rate among these immigrants, I'm unsure where your optimism comes from for them reversing their demographics and growing.
Immigration is a terrible solution to a population crisis. That's like dousing an electrical fire in water. Sure, the fire might disappear for a second before it kills you.
Increasing tax burden on young people to support old ones will discourage that.
Immigration is a very dificult topic in both Japan and South Korea societies. The fact that EU is becoming increasingly anti-immigration won't help to advocate for this.
Where are you getting the specific values of 6 months and ±2% out 10 years? Genuinely curious to learn more. Maybe back-testing of archived predictions from prior decades against the eventual reality?
... I mean, North Korea has pretty much the same population growth dynamics as South Korea, and fewer levers to meaningfully address it (in particular, South Korea can address it through immigration, whereas even if NK was willing to cope with that from an ideological PoV, it's hard to imagine it being a particularly popular destination.)
According to Wikipedia, NK fertility rate is 1.91, while SK currently at 0.72. One takes log(0.05)/log(1.91/2) ~= 65 generations to reduce birth cohorts to 1/20 of the initial population size. The other does the trick in log(0.05)/log(0.72/2) ~= 3 generations.
Sure, but their actual population change statistics, today, are similar, presumably due to higher infant mortality (almost 10 times as high!) and lower life expectancy, NK. Like, sure, on an infinite time horizon where nothing else changes forever, you might expect NK's population to eventually exceed SK's, but even under those circumstances it won't be happening for a very long time.
(In practice, you'd probably expect NK's birth rate to keep dropping, too, and SK's will eventually reach equilibrium if it hasn't already.)
I was going to say that the math was off by 2, but nope, you're right. Fertility rate is based on each woman, not on a couple.
Even if they kept the 0.81 rate that they are on, then you'd get:
Gen1: 100 people: 50 men + 50 women; 50 women have 40 babies (40.5, but lest round to just 40)
Gen2: 40 people: 20 men + 20 women; 20 women have 16 babies
Gen3: 16 people
Given that the current average age of a woman at the time of her first birth in SK is 33 years old (!?!?!), you'd expect the 100 people of SK to be just 16 people somewhere near 2090. Meaning that it's current population of ~52M goes to ~8M in ~70 years. An 84% reduction in 66 years, or 1.28% per year.
And it looks only like it'll get worse for them.
I can't think of any war or plague or natural disaster or famine that has ever done such a number to a population of that size over that long of a time. Granted, that hasn't happened yet.
Still, whatever the hell is happening to them is something to be avoided like a war or a famine or a plague.
People who talk about demographic crises seem to forget that populations grow in a S-shaped curve with things leveling out when resources become scarce.
The reasons cited for the crisis are "demanding work cultures, stagnating wages, rising costs of living, changing attitudes toward marriage and gender equality, and rising disillusionment among younger generations."
This rhymes a lot with scarce resources: people lack the time and money to raise kids.
So maybe 1 more day off helps alleviate lack of time, but lack of money might persist if wages scale with hours worked.
South Korea has substantially more men that want children than women that want children. It's also not short on men that can financially support a family. What it seems to be short of is men that are willing to do anywhere close to 50% of the work involved in raising a family.
Makes sense, men literally don't have to do shit, it's like going to an online baby store and waiting 9 months for amazon delivery. On the other hand women can die in the process or more usually just have their entire body subtly destroyed in countless ways, from bone loss to getting actual depression. Rich people use surrogates for a reason.
Only strictly traditionally. There are lots of stay at home dads and moms who only briefly paused their careers for a minimum amount during maternity leave (see: outside the US where you don't just get fired). But the entry level cost is always completely one sided.
Anecdotally, I believe this occurs because I have witnessed, but is not observed at scale in the data. Even Pew Research shows aggregate belief system that men are providers [1], women are caretakers, even as pay between both reaches parity [2]. Chance of divorce doubles for men when they become unemployed, but the same effect is not seen in women, for example [3].
Most of my data and observations are US centric; if you have data from outside the US, and I would love to review any citations you can provide simply out of curiosity from a sociological perspective.
> marriages where the husband is the primary or sole breadwinner has fallen steadily in recent decades, driven mainly by the declining share of marriages where the husband is the sole provider – this was the arrangement in 49% of marriages in 1972, while today that share is _23%_.
> share of marriages where the wife is the sole or primary breadwinner has increased from 5% in 1972 to _16%_ today
Well I would've expected that to be a bit higher, but that's still only a 7% difference which is extremely minimal given that it's not been that long historically since it's even been, you know... legal.
The rise of both having to be equal providers probably has more to do with the rising cost of living and flat wages than anything else. Some of that caused by suddenly having twice the workforce of course.
Thanks for the cites. The stereotype is that women want babies and men don't. Many stereotypes are just an overgeneralization. This stereotype is just dead wrong.
IIRC, the article I read about Korea said that the difference in Korea was much more stark, that men were twice as likely to want children as women.
You don’t understand. Women _want_ to work, like most people. House caring is a shitty, mostly thankless, boring, unpaid job — most of white collar jobs are much better in comparison. Rich people outsource most difficult parts to hired help. And for those who don’t — the total experience is not that interesting and too exhausting, only possible if there are no other options in life.
I understand that women want to work. However both parents working does not appear to be a tenable position. In a male-centric local like Korea, a man who can pay for a family is a good catch. Hopefully he respects his wife.
The irony here being that if you have more free time and more social safety net, having more kids becomes easier, hence you grow your consumer market and labor force. I wonder what a 4-day work week would do to birth rates…
Maybe falling fertility is the true capitalist death spiral?
Aren't they being crushed by social welfare costs though, at the end of the day? It's not a 1-dimensional thing. Expensive pensions, healthcare etc extracted from the working age population.
How can you not be crushed by social welfare costs if your population is not constantly growing (which is impossible in a finite system, but most especially when women are empowered to not have children they don't want)?
By taxing the super-rich, so the productivity gains in the economy are fairly shared with workers to raise children and sustain their families, and do not end mostly stashed in tax heavens.
Good luck moving the needle faster than the total fertility rate declines. Based on the evidence, this is unlikely to occur even though it is the only path to success. It’ll take decades for the old folks with their ideas age out [1], and young folks can get leverage.
By allocating fewer resources in that area, and not building the system around a Ponzi scheme. Basically, going back to the way things used to work pre-Ponzi.
If you have a savings-based pension system like Australian superannuation, where the elderly live off the interest on their savings, not off wealth transfers from working people.
Whether investment gains or direct payment transfers, the old are still living off the young, it is simply which Rube Goldberg design it is. Someone is being productive (young), and someone else (old) is gaining from them by some shared delusion economic accounting claim. Doesn't matter if those are investment gains in a capital market allocation system or direct wage tax transfers to social payments. Neither system works if the old don't have enough young to squeeze, hence the panic over the rapidly falling fertility rate and population decline: there will be, for at least the next 100 years, many less young productive people to dump the debts of today on (regardless of the accounting mechanism).
Having savings allows old people to assert ownership over a larger part of the economy, but it doesn't prevent the economy from shrinking. The amount of wealth produced depends on the amount of people doing the producing. In an economy without working age people, there is nothing for the elderly to buy.
So, who are the managers managing on their extra days in the office? If that day is just about writing documents and emails, that could be done at home (far from ideal, but preferable to working an extra day). If they're just meeting with other managers, does that take an entire work day every week?
> Labor groups claim the “crisis” and “emergency” measures are mostly for show.
Without further information, I think I agree with the labor groups on this one.
Does executives working more hours for a company like Samsung increase revenue or reduce costs? I’m not an Econ experts but the economic trends in the article point to situations out of the companies control that likely won’t be solved by better strategy.
Although I say this, knowing my employer has poor strategy and more man-hours might help. What would help more though is consultants.
Not sure why South Koreans don't try to get out, since education is super strong they could probably move to USA or some other country with more money, easier working culture, and relatively lower housing costs
I can't speak to attitudes, but when I was in grad school years ago, Koreans were very well represented in my program. There were fewer Korean students than Chinese but more than Indian. Generally they do well in both coursework and research so there's likely at least some opportunity to stay in the states, assuming they don't have obligations back home.
With respect, this is luxury thinking. "Just leave" is not a strong argument for anyone except detached/atomized Westerners who have no culture/family/tribe to be a part of anyway.
Most of the people who did this recently (at least in SV) aren't westerners, they're people from different parts of Asia who want better economic opportunities. Doesn't have anything to do with western "alienation" or whatever you're on about
One of my friends works at a technology-adjacent (i.e., technology enabled, but not technology-focused) company that was recently acquired by a Korean chaebol.
They put in place a Korean-American country manager who was aghast at how much vacation time and public holidays Europeans have. The rift between the US and Europe is already sizable, but we’re talking major culture shock here.
Anecdotally, he was also a bit amazed when people started leaving the office before nightfall.
It's a big of a catch-22 in the sense that being required to work all those extra hours will undoubtedly have a negative impact on folks' real and perceived ability to support children, even if they want them.
It seems to always step from that CEO, or chief, or VP that works 7 days a week in some capacity. Maybe its an hour or two on the weekends to send some email about an idea they had or something they want to see but its enough that those below them feel they have to respond to that higher up so they work another 2-4 hours to account for him working those 1-2. Then it comes down to managers and tech leads who have to work half or the entire day sometimes to make up for that one chief thinking their 1 hour of work was enough to raise a question that will solve an issue.
It's kind of the same principle as "on call", if you want someone to be consistently available for periodic, unpredictable events, you have to have them available all the time.
I left a company because they started to consider "exempt" employees as "on-call"
24/7. They felt like adding personal numbers to OpsGenie and other alerting systems was perfectly reasonable.
"Exempt" employee status is a real disservice in the technical field . With uptime and security issues constantly being identified and requiring immediate intervention its really allowed employers to exploit salaried employees to work extra hours without compensation.
It turns out that being pregnant and giving birth is, while a miracle and beautiful and fulfilling, kind of a horrifying, painful, unpleasant shitshow, and that given the choice, women will opt to do it an average of fewer than twice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, I absolutely think they are. I think the short-term solution is for countries to relax immigration policies (so that places with weaker women's rights can send their surplus population to places with stronger women's rights), the mid term solution is to take the burden of childcare off women so that the people making the decision about whether or not to have kids aren't the same people getting punished for having kids, the long term solution is to sink a ton of money and resources into obstetrics research to make pregnancy and childbirth as pain-free as possible, and the super long term is to hope that that research lands us with an artificial womb.
It is a crisis but the solution in the 1960's will not be the solution in the 2020's. RoK could not afford to lose the China market, but they have and there really is no replacement.
No better way to motivate young people to start a family, than to force them to work even more. Yes, I know this said "managers" - but let's be real, if your manager works 6 days a week, so are probably you too, in a country with work culture like SK.