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.
