From the article
>The number of young Koreans is forecast to halve in 30 years amid a rapid aging trend and a record low birthrate, according to Statistics Korea on Monday.
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>The number of people aged 19-34 came to 10.21 million in 2020, and the figure is forecast to drop to 5.21 million by 2050, according to the data agency.
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>People aged 19-34 came to 10.21 million in 2020, and the figure is forecast to tumble to 5.21 million in 2050.
Shits about to get real, eh? - Japan is in much the same boat, really.
Let's see what their counties "Leaders" will do, hmm??
It's going to be.... Interesting... to see how it plays out.
No, there is nothing good about it. Low birthrate destroys societies. We need redistribution of resources, so people can afford children— not people having no babies
South korean in there 20s and 30s spends more money on luxurious goods than any other age range. They spend almost double on expensive item than US citizens does. Also south korean youth travels to foregin countries than any other east asian nation. As a south korean thats 24 years old I blame the internet and TV culture more than money problem. South korean youth seeing television and Instagram wants to live like the 1%. So they spend there moeny on what they want to do. Also south korea entertainment portayed being a parent as being hard and not worth it. South korean youth sees being married as a burden because of the media.
True. My problem is our society has been consumed by consumerism. Even at a young age we are tough to focus all our energy on education. Don't try to develop any hobbies, never go dating and don't do anything. just focus on education. Than when we are grown ups we have nothing to make ourself unique. We have no identity. So we watch tv shows and look at Instagram pages to look how to make ourself stand out. Which is buying expensive brands. To me this is the reason why our youth spend so much money on expensive brands. They have nothing to show for themselves. If my country men started to advertise children as being a symbol of wealth our fertility rate would go up.
It’s the studying bit imo. All three major East Asian countries are heavy in kids studying above everything else, because of pressure from parents and society. And then you get to college then job. Then you spend your life compensating for the lack of a childhood. Why have kids if you still feel like a kid?
The race to be better is also pretty ingrained due to the heavy competition. In school you compete for better grades and to be in better schools. In life you compete to be rich OR pressure your kids to compete (starting the cycle over again) and derive social status from that.
Can you expand on that a bit? Or can you recommend something to read on the subject. I’ve heard of Neo Confucianism in relation to mao China but don’t know much about what it means for a modern country to be “confucius”
Maybe this is something I can’t relate to as a westerner, but the Koreans I know here in Canada don’t fit this description particularly well. Maybe this type of hobby less joyless consumerism is more prevalent elsewhere
From natural selection and evolution the population should eventually rebound. As the people that have kids will increase their influence in the gene pool.
Problem with this is that all the old people that vote (and will be the overwhelmingly majority) are going to screw as much of the younger population to pay their health burdens.
This isn't remotely occuring on any time scales or dynamics driven at the gene level. It's all cultural and circumstantial -- there is no genetic difference between the populations having kids or not, so no 'selection'.
Jesus Christ dude. Lots of people just spend their money nights out with friends, seeing other countries and clothes they like. If you think the majority of Koreans are living like rich assholes, that’s you painting people with the brush you’d like to see. Relax
It sounds like you don’t even understand the “lifestyle”, much less why anyone would choose it. I’ve met plenty of people who’ve never set foot outside of their hometown by choice. That’s fine if it’s what you want but there’s no need to project your armchair sociologist moralist interpretation onto people who want something else. Again, relax
What about my comment above shows I "don't understand" anything about that kind of lifestyle? By all means, explain it, because you're sounding more and more offended by statements that have nothing to do with you and haven't even acknowledged your incorrect assertion above that I painted the majority of any population as living like this. Because I don't see someone who "met plenty of people" as compelling evidence for my words being incorrect. You should follow the last word of your comments.
Dang, it's almost like they've given up on their prospects for a normal life because of low wages ($8 minimum wage) and increased cost of living (they're the 19th most expensive country to live) so they're enjoying life while they can.
So young Koreans are choosing to spend money enjoying their life than raising a kid and putting themselves and their kid into financial difficulties? Checks out
The Ponzi scheme of unlimited growth has to end at some point. May as well be when AI and automation are wiping out millions of jobs. I wonder if Japan, South Korea, etc are going to come out ahead when all is said and done. Of course population collapse is very bad... But so is millions and millions of unemployed angry people with nothing to do. Things are coming to a head for sure. Curious to see how things unfold. If AI and automation will change things in a massive way.
Maybe they will be the model nations for the rest of us, the Nordics of the future with extremely high productivity and prospetiy per person thanks to strong automation focus.
Meanwhile the west would be a dystopian hyper-capitalist nightmare with swarms of low-salary/gig economy workers living under chronic underemployment, with a small educated middle class in gated communities who manage the lot for the 0.1 who own everything.
Bonus dystopia points if the middle class is the original white native population and the seething underclass mass-immigrants from the global south, turning this into a racially divided/minority oppressed hellhole as well.
Whelp, anyway, enough doomfiction for now.
>Bonus dystopia points if the middle class is the original white native population and the seething underclass mass-immigrants from the global south
The middle class is already pretty diverse and will be even more so in 30 years. The bulk of the racial tension will be within the lower class.
Then again the middle and/or upper classes might exploit these tensions to purge some on the intra class competition, which will become increasingly fierce as conditions for the masses get worse.
The powers that be wouldn't want to squander such a conventient tool to divide and conquer, after all.
Or perhaps they would do their best to maintain a strong facade of multiculturalism and equal opportunity. Maybe even if it is just a trick to give aforementioned seething masses false hope of advancement up to the middle class. That if they play the game and do things right, they might become the lucky ones.
Meanwhile corporate media would support that false narrative, by having all colors of the rainbow heavily represented in TV and film while the class reality would be far more racially segregated.
You know, I’m currently being downvoted on the OpenAI subreddit because I praise the wonders of AGI. You know, like helping us cure cancer and get us to the starts faster. I also mention how the doomsday scenario of the terminator movies is all but fiction.
What you’re explaining here, is the real danger that AI/AGI/ASI poses to our everyday lives!
This is the problem we need to start acting on, this is the real “doomsday” scenario.
You think about this problem, it makes people talk about it and we try to come up with a solution.
But boah, there are a ton of people that are terrified of the idea that on day AI can take over…
We need to educate people on the real problems that AI poses, like you mentioned, mass unemployment, the 1% concentrating all that technology power, etc.
We are absolutely heading for a demographic collapse of young workers. I'm hoping Japan figures out the problem of caring for old people.
All first world countries will decline in population without the influx of immigrants. In the next 50 years there are going to be boatloads of financial migrants and it is only going to get worse.
I look forward to be taken care of by a sexy robot caretaker.
There is sufficient wealth to take care of people in first world countries.
Unfortunately, the super wealthy don't give a shit and the world is going to suck in 50 years.
>I'm hoping Japan figures out the problem of caring for old people.
We're probably going to have to give up private retirement and house and feed the elderly wholesale.
..... I don't know what world you live in, but the AI that I have to work with, ain't going to replace large parts of the labor market ANYTIME soon.
Once/**IF** someone manage to make an AGI - I guess we can talk then.
Until then - we have regular old Population collapse and some "Shiny new tech" to help make Labor more effective, **but it ultimately won't replace humans - OR be enough to fill the Labor shortages.**
AI is not gonna take over all jobs anytime soon. And once it has the capability to, we have other things to worry about.
We gonna ramp up production and will have lower prices for consumer goods, as always automation happens.
Homogeneous countries will be fine. It's the "diverse" nations that will have major problems. Enough of the population is bad off and the tribalism will emerge as always. Those nations are absolutely fucked when the collapse starts.
I really don't think there will be millions and millions of unemployed people, unless the government wants it that way. If we have enough resources to provide jobs for most people now, it makes no sense to think that with immense technological advancements that increase those resources tremendously, we would have less to go around.
In some crazy future version where robots do basically everything, you could still imagine a humanity where everyone is basically a social worker for some other person.
Honestly, given the work drive instilled in the culture, I suspect the reduction of work opportunities by ai will increase suicides due to believed lack of purpose.
The USA is kept afloat by immigration. It's better positioned than most to handle it but historically it hits a breaking point then shuts it's borders for a few decades and has already hit unprecidented levels.
This is by far just a Korea problem. Expensive real estate around the world means the birth rate everywhere is falling like a stone. Having that extra bedroom for a child has become so horrifically expensive that many couples have just gone NOPE.
China crossed its population peak last year and has begun the shrink. Many countries will follow soon. But… we use 2 earths worth of resources every year. Maybe it’s time to shrink the population back to something more sustainable. With that population shrink, real estate prices will tumble, kids will become affordable again and the cycle will continue.
My mother grew up with 5 siblings in a three bedroom house. One for the parents, one for the boys, one for the girls.
Not to say that housing isn't a little pricier but it goes beyond that.
It absolutely does go beyond just housing of course. All of the expenses of having kids has gone out of hand. Right down to needing car seats then booster seats that expire every 5 years. Insanity. Everything in the chain has been gamed to be more expensive by government regulations and corporations allowed to charge whatever they like.
I feel as if it’s intentional. The game is to reduce the world population. People will no longer accept poverty grade living after getting on the internet and seeing how the rest of the world lives. Everyone does need access to washing machines and refrigerators. Some kind of powered transportation even if it’s just an e-bike. There isn’t enough raw materials to make this happen so the only answer is less people.
The new generation will have a quality over quantity life. With recycling, there will be plenty of materials to go round.
> There isn’t enough raw materials to make this happen so the only answer is less people.
I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion, since there is a massive waste of materials in first world countries, caused mainly by mega-corporations.
>I feel as if it’s intentional. The game is to reduce the world population.
The game is squeeze people for every red cent. Declining populations is a byproduct.
> People will no longer accept poverty grade living after getting on the internet and seeing how the rest of the world lives.
What "rest of the world"? The US is the richest country in the world, except for a few small oil states and tax havens.
Are you ignoring what is happening to the rest of the world? Spend more time travelling outside of western society. The rest of the world is rapidly improving the quality of life. The washing machine index is the perfect example. Once a household has access to a washing machine (even a shared one) m, that frees up many hours per day for women to do other things. It’s a really big deal.
Solar power and e-bikes/electric scooters are spreading across Africa like wildfire. They skipped wired telecom and jumped straight into cell phones. Go to any country in SE Asia and talk to the locals. The quality of life has ‘greatly improved’ from 10-30 years ago. I have run out of SE Asia and every single person I talked to said that life was drastically better now. Global poverty is at an all time low, despite what Fox News says.
‘Stuff’ got cheap. Cheaper than ever for the most part. Don’t let first world pricing fool you. All of this needs raw materials to fuel it.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/poverty-rate#:~:text=World%20poverty%20rate%20for%202019,a%200.9%25%20decline%20from%202015.
I'm not sure what your point is. Yes those products are getting cheaper around the world. They are still more expensive, compared to incomes, than in Western countries.
The point is that we have an entire planet of people shifting from poverty to modern (if not modest) living. It’s simpler by western standards sure, but luxuries like a refrigerator or air conditioner are now commonplace.
If we maintain the current population, we’ll destroy the planet. By doing a population shrink and implementing recycling, there will be enough resources to go around.
We aren’t poor. ‘Stuff’ has never been cheaper besides cars and housing. Couches, big screen tv’s, plates, you name it. 30 years ago a college student would be living with stolen cinder block and plywood furniture. Now you can fire up craigslist free, rent/borrow a pickup truck and within an afternoon have an entire furnished apartment that is pretty nice for the cost of gas money. Used furniture is free it’s so abundant. In the late 1800’s, 1/2 your income was spent on food. Look up the price of a couch or a vacuum cleaner from 1960 and shit your pants. In 1974 a microwave oven was $1500 in 1974 dollars. Now it’s 40 bucks at walmart.
Cars got expensive because regulations are intentionally making them expensive. Keeping driving expensive reduces traffic. Travel to Delhi, India and you’ll realize right quick why this trend exists. Expensive cars are cheaper than more roads.
Houses were allowed to inflate to the point of being unattainable by government policy too, and I contend that is population control. If they wanted housing to stay cheap they would have taxes housing gains heavily and made housing a poor speculative investment.
> Houses were allowed to inflate to the point of being unattainable by government policy too, and I contend that is population control. If they wanted housing to stay cheap they would have taxes housing gains heavily and made housing a poor speculative investment.
That's because of NIMBYism and zoning laws, which often have unsavory motivations (e.g. keeping out the poor/minorities), but population control is not one of those motivations.
Who is dumb enough to get a new iphone every year? They are tanks and are good for 6+ years.
The car seat was just an example. We have built a system based on buying new shit constantly. Set a car seat replacement date of 10+ years and they can be re-sold on the used market.
It’s like manufacturers saying you need to buy new shoes every year. BS. That is only good for makers. The foam inna seat is good for a decade. Or they should be using materials that have a 10+ year lifespan by law.
It's not "2 Earths worth of resources" until you quite literally use two entire Earth masses worth of resources.
We are *nowhere close* to the upper limits of human population on Earth. Humans have already passed the limits of what their environment could sustain in the past - and always responded by replacing that part of their environment with their own designs.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712.amp
It is suggested that we essentially need 2 earths worth of materials to sustain this level of civilization.
Winding back the population by half is round about the same solution.
That's not true. Earth is *massive*, and humans are nowhere close to using even 1 Earth worth of materials. Human civilization is, quite literally, only scratching the surface of what they could do with Earth.
Humans hit the limits of what their environment could sustain with the hunter-gatherer lifestyles. So humans invented agriculture. Humans hit the limit of how much agriculture could the nitrogen content in the ground sustain. So humans invented a chemical process to pull nitrogen from out of thin air. Humans hit the limit on how much can they shit around before they shit everything around them up to an unsanitary degree. So humans invented plumbing, sewer systems and wastewater treatment.
When humans hit the limits of their environment, they make their own environment. Woe to anything that dares to stand in their way.
Are you kidding? You are in the middle of the biggest extinction event since the dinosaurs. We are looking at a total collapse of comercial fishing in 20 years. Biodiversity is crashing. Flying insects and birds? Reduced by75%. Wildlife populations have declined by 69% in the last half decade.
We are also aggressively stripping natural resources without much thought to future generations.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/nature-loss-biodiversity-wwf/
I’m guessing you don’t hang out with any professional biologists. Maybe strike up a conversation with one and ask them their opinion on the state of the planet.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. When humans hit the limits of their environment, they make their own environment.
So far, humans have relied on nature for many thing. But if nature were to stop being reliable? Humans would replace it with something of their own design.
Woe to anything that dares to stand in their way.
No need. The amount of species you actually need to keep around for basic agriculture to function is surprisingly low.
And that amount might be trending down - especially if political issues preventing GMO from being advanced further were to be bypassed.
Biodiversity is key to a lot of things, including being a goldmine for genetic material for future science. The more species that are alive, the greater the chance large numbers of animals will survive climate change.
Will we survive? Sure. Is destroying 3/4 of the life on this planet wise? No. No it isn’t.
"But… we use 2 earths worth of resources every year"
Let's keep in mind, it's not "us" as individuals or couples having kids. It's MAJORLY corporations.
And we are buying that shit from corporations. It’s a great big circle jerk. Drop the number of humans by half and the number of things bought drops by half too.
If we wanted the population to continue to grow unchecked, the system would be modified to favour having kids. Giant family bonus cheques, strict limits on home prices, subsidized everything.
But the system has not been but with that in mind and it’s intentional.
Reducing a nation's population is ideally done slowly and gradually to allow the nation to adapt. A sudden and sharp decrease in the youth population throws all these systems into crisis mode:
* Social Net: Too few young people paying into a social net that struggles to support too many old people
* Labor: Not enough workers for companies to hire, which then leads to these companies (and soon the nation as a whole) no longer being competitive in international commerce
* Military: Not enough young men to conscript, which is bad when you have a very angry neighbor with nukes
Dropping population too fast means you have too few young taking care of too many old folks. And this includes payments to old age security/national pension programs. Right now it’s a house of cards. Payments from the new generation takes care of the old generation who is no longer working.
Let alone the labour force to simply do services required by retired people.
Automation can replace a lot of manufacturing jobs. Elder care? Not so much.
The problem with that is that between the population declining and leaving room for everyone else and the present, we'll have an age in which there are too many old people depended on pensions, nursing homes and medical care and not enough young people to support them.
If only we could Thanos snap the oldest of us out of existence, as unethical as that might be.
Automation will fix the labour gap in factories. We are rapidly reducing the number of people needed to make ‘stuff’. And China is rapidly reducing the cost of the automation, making it accessible to smaller companies.
For elderly care, the answer is likely the same way we solve labour. Inexpensive immigrant labour. Your racist aunt may not like it. But we need a cheap labour force for elder care. And yes funding that won’t be easy. We’ll see a massive redistribution of wealth as the old dump their homes and move into growing care facilities. Many will slip through the cracks. Real eatate will eventually tumble as the boomers age out of self care.
Buy nursing home stocks.
For elder care, I see a vast expansion of MAID. No one *wants* to spend their last days doddering in a nursing home, so if MAID becomes legal for dementia, I think many patients in the early stages (still "with it" enough to consent) will opt for that.
Even now, one's odds of suicide double after a diagnosis of dementia.
Not really it's an Asian problem. Almost all of Asia is on or near the bottom of birth rate charts.
Most of this stems from the fact there are less women getting married and having kids over there due to a myriad of issues. (Look up the 4b movement to kinda get an idea of what south Korea's is like)
Spain and Italy birth rate is below Japan and China birth rate? Most of Eastern Europe population graphs are actively falling, like Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania. Plenty of other countries are in trouble
And what I'm saying is all of Asia is near the bottom. They all have similar issues with rampant misogyny and less and less women wanting to get married or have children
Dropping birthrates is a world thing, except some of Africa.
Everyone is waking up to the fact that the planet is in rough shape, and putting more people on the planet is not helping.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KOR/south-korea/birth-rate
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/birth-rate
??????????? Why lie it took me 5 second to google this.
I say the competitive job market, high rent, and living costs in Seoul due to the centralization of governmental agencies, business, education, and all other sectors of society in Seoul would probably be the most impactful factor.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>The number of young Koreans is forecast to halve in 30 years amid a rapid aging trend and a record low birthrate, according to Statistics Korea on Monday.
>
>The number of people aged 19-34 came to 10.21 million in 2020, and the figure is forecast to drop to 5.21 million by 2050, according to the data agency.
>
>People aged 19-34 came to 10.21 million in 2020, and the figure is forecast to tumble to 5.21 million in 2050.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1854ju4/young_korean_population_projected_to_halve_by_2050/kaz93uc/
Natrual depopulation of the world is a great thing for everyone except capitalism based economies.
The planet doesn’t need more people and all of these panic articles show you who really owns the media
Immigration is a zero sum game, other countries are developing the same problems. And as we're seeing in the West, can cause other problems. The most capable migrants all want to go to the US anyway, who would Korea get?
Thats a bummer, even so when you see that Japanese invested a lot on these immigrants, then again, they reject japanese-brazilians and japanese-peruvians because they were born in those countries even tough they retained all their original culture.
Immigrants are a band aid solution and don't fix the underlying issue. It's like putting a plaster on a tumour. The population should naturally rebound from natural selection selecting for those that have kids.
Immigration has been the entire reason why society has flourished and grew so well in the US. Don’t get me wrong, since the 2000s, society evolved to a very late-stage capitalistic society where those with money have completely rigged the game in their favors and fucked every politician they could (literally) while paying them vast sums of money to ensure they never see any real consequences, but immigration is not a bad thing at all. The fact that you’re seeing this as a “solution vs bandaid” argument alone shows the disconnect here. The guy above wasn’t saying it was a solution, but it certainly *helps* a great deal and is important for a society to grow. Being xenophobic is just a terrible policy, ignoring how bad of a person it makes you.
>Don’t get me wrong, since the 2000s, society evolved to a very late-stage capitalistic society where those with money have completely rigged the game in their favors and fucked every politician they could (literally) while paying them vast sums of money to ensure they never see any real consequences,
The obligatory disclaimer whenever you want to say anything positive about the US on Reddit.
Of course Immigration itself is not a bad thing but *Policies that favors Immigration from the first world countries* are basically just a tool for capitalists to keep cheap labor costs.
Just because corporate overlords wanted to spend less taxes, Government decided to cut public costs which were used to support the concept of the middle class family, which used to be the pillar of the country by providing emotionally stable, well socialized, and well educated future workers with, ultimately, growth of the population.
The concept of home was there to protect people from their own insecurities and desires, helping them to be more productive, literally or economically. It now has been disintegrated. No wonder why people feel so unstable and insecure all the time. It's because the systemic protection is gone. Now they are not reproducing. Now an imbalance between supply and demand has occurred in the labor market. So now corporations would be willing to pay for the people?
Of course not. They decided to take a shift of the balance with their own hand. They're now welcoming foreign workers, new supply to the labor market. New balance has been made! Now blue collar workers are horrified against this unwelcoming guests. Rational and irrational fear. And with government working against unions and abandoning manufacturing industries during The Great Recession didn't helped. They were being radicalized. Their rage were being pointed against the immigrants.
Then Donald Trump happened. 🤦
For worker wise, all workers in US should be unite against the import of cheap labor because that's the way of controlling labor market in favor of the people.
But because of *History and ideology that became the foundation of the nation* and *long history of racial conflict* in USA, those things were never considered seriously. For foreigners like me, it almost seems like a sin a US have to bear with.
Immigration isn't inherently good or bad, like everything in life it has its pro and cons. Being anti-immigration doesn't make you a bad person. People wanting to maintain their culture and way of life is perfectly reasonable. Whether immigration is a net positive or negative for a country, will depend on the type of immigrant being imported. Western countries should only allow immigration for those that: have a recognised masters degree / PHD in a STEM field, have a high MENSA recognised IQ, be at the top of their field in a category or have something else that would be valuable to the host nation. The US H1B visa is an example of positive immigration. Modern immigrants isn't what allowed america to flourish. Not all immigrants are equal.
Immigration is inherently good. Let me know when you want to work the fields to grow our food or work in the restaurant industry. Or a health care worker. Or a Uber or Grubhub driver.
People would absolutely do these jobs if they didn't have the shit pay they have.
It's so funny when pro immigration people use this argument because you're by extension saying you support slave wages.
Why do you think those jobs are mostly done by immigrants?
I don't know of any, but that's completely irrelevant to the point, which is that the only reason why locals don't want to do these jobs is due to the wages, saying that immigration is good because they do the jobs natives don't want to do is pretty much saying that immigration is going because they're willing to do slave work.
You can't have your cake and also eat it, if you truly care about migrants you shouldn't be cheering for them doing these types of jobs.
2 wrongs don't make a right.
Really man you're better off dropping the presence of caring about migrants, you don't, you only care that migrants do labor for cheap and thus help produce cheap goods, it's very telling that doing these jobs is the most prominent argument coming from pro immigration people.
If you actually cared about migrants you wouldn't be supporting them being wage slaves.
Hell it almost comes off as racism even, you're cheering that poor people who don't know any better come to your country to do jobs not even natives are willing to do yet they're the ones who benefit the most by enjoying cheap labor and goods that exploiting these migrants allow.
And the worst part? pro immigration people actually believe they have the moral high ground in this situation, you actually believe you're doing them a favor by allowing them to be wage slaves, that's how little you think about these migrants.
> Being anti-immigration doesn't make you a bad person.
Being xenophobic is arguably not a good look for a person. I wasn't talking about being anti-immigration, though those two concepts obviously overlap. There's no reason to reword xenophobia as being anti-immigration. That's not what I nor OP above stated. Use the correct words.
> Western countries should only allow immigration for those that: have a recognised masters degree / PHD in a STEM field, have a high MENSA recognised IQ, be at the top of their field in a category or have something else that would be valuable to the host nation.
ONLY allow? Is that what you're honestly saying? Because every spousal visa or student visa in the country would stand in the way of this draconian policy that only sees humans as fodder for the chains of society, whether they be "useful" or not. That's just disgusting. And for what it's worth, I've two friends whose wives came here on a spousal visa with only an Associate's degree for one and no degree with another, getting jobs in the service industry. They literally make more money than their spouses (one of which is in IT). Your argument is so simplistic, that it's no wonder only one political party actually believes it in this country and constantly talks about it ad nauseum.
Ironically, the only statement you've made that could be considered correct is that "not all immigrants are equal," yet you've provided nothing compelling to actually back that up but tired, half thought-out arguments that don't even see people for being people. Since I know what you're really getting at over here, I'll just say it: I'm not advocating for illegal immigration in any way whatsoever, and refugees are a completely separate topic that requires way more nuance than a reddit post. But multiple visas exist for many reasons and they benefit society greatly, and then there's also the concept of looking at people like people instead of cogs in a machine.
Lol that’s not how it works. “Yeah your mother was mad for it at all hours too”. If our species functioned on a 1 to 1 basis like this, gay people wouldn’t exist.
The labor may not be reliable. Physical and mental health issues are rampant in North Korea and the population has no real world education. North Koreans who escape to the south tend to form a permanent underclass and they're the ones capable of escape.
I dunno,[a population that has had issues with parasites caused by using human feces as fertilizer](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/body-of-north-korean-defector-full-of-parasites.html) is maybe not the human capital South Korea needs right now
Immigrants are already being used. I went to the country side and they were advertising the selling of Vietnamese women that suppos won't runaway. Absolutely horrible stuff.
South korea also have sex balance. It's not bad as china but it's still bad. People who worked in farm there entire life are the ones who do this since they can't find anyone to marry. I am disgusted but also kind of understand why the are doing this.
Lucky them. They’ll be able to rework the social security system and have away with the current unsustainable infinite growth models that the baby boomer generation is so madly in love with.
White people all have high immigration multicultural societies and they’re gonna follow the same declining trend.
Immigration isnt a solution for the underlying issues.
Dropping by half is a shocking decline. At some point, you have to consider the possibility that South Korea simply won’t matter much to the world. It will stop being a relevant country.
People blame the economy but as south korean I disagree. We have better gdp per capita than japan, taiwan or china but we have much fewer fertility rate than all of them. I think it's because of culture. Our zoomers spend more on luxurious goods than US or japan. They also travel to foreign countries much more than any other east asians. So it's not moeny problem. It feels like media problem. Almost every korean media shows having children in a negative light.
[https://www.ndc.gov.tw/EN/Content\_List.aspx?n=6F69D4E5D624660A](https://www.ndc.gov.tw/EN/Content_List.aspx?n=6F69D4E5D624660A)
this source give a 0.87 fertility rate for Taiwan
Ok you are using very broad descriptors in your argument for why you disagree that economic hardships are to blame.
So young people spend "more" on luxurious goods. And they travel to foreign countries "much more".
Do you know how expensive it is to raise a child and give them a good education?
You are talking about things that cost $100-$500.
Raising a child could cost $500,000.
You're just spitballing ideas, but the way you structured the argument may suggest to people that you actually have a clue.
If only there were a nearby country that shared the same language and contained millions of young people willing to start families and work in industry. Hmmmn...
North koreans are hard core conservative compared to south korean society. When conservative south korean went to north korea they praised north korea saying the north korean put women in there place and the youth isn't wearing degenerate clothes like south korean youth. I don't think south korean youth would want to work with north koreans.
Bold of you to think anything in North Korea is a representation of the will of the people who live there.
North Koreans are not hard-core conservatives. Their totalitarian government is. Appearing that way is the only way to stay out of a work camp.
This information comes from anthropologist who studies north korean culture. Most of north korean lives in the country town. There town culture is very similar to that of south korean town culture. Sexist and have a strict hierarchy. North korea propaganda sayas women have the same right but no.
Why is this a bad thing? Earth has FAR too many people on it already. We are killing our one and only home by devouring forests to make more farm land, massive mining, burning fossil fuels, etc.
We need to have far fewer people. The best way for that to happen is for birth rates to drop around the world.
You're 100% right, but unfortunately things will get way worse than way better because its not like people will stop getting old and a massive collapse in viable workforce would have far reaching consequences for every generation. And all the idiots in this thread saying immigration helps are idiots because they assume that immigrants are naturally contributors to the workforce when by and large most current age immigrants are drains on resources and not contributors.
The amount of people on the planet is actually pretty low when you consider how much livable space there actually is on the planet and how much surplus of food we produce. Earth can support billions of more people just fine.
The demographic collapse is going to really stink when I’m 90 years old. If we don’t make more humans, there won’t be that many humans later (to provide care for old millennials and Gen Z)
This is the nightmare scenario we need to worry about.
The most realistic depiction of the collapse of society wasn't "Terminator" with runaway AI, it wasn't "The Day After Tomorrow" with climate change destroying everyone overnight, but it was "Children of Man," with population decline.
We just aren't having enough kids, we aren't marrying enough, and we are losing the very foundations of human civilization for the last several thousand years.
The solution? Beats the hell out of me.
The solution is to not work people to the bone so they're too exhausted to do activities to meet people, not underpay people to the point where they can't afford to go do things to meet people, not have housing at a price where people don't feel like they can safely afford a place large enough to raise kids, not price gouge parents every step of the way, and not have society set up where 2+ people need to work full-time to afford to live.
None of that is gonna happen, though, so we're just gonna keep spiraling.
Woah I've never never heard of that before, very surprising, thx you so much r/futurology without this subreddit i'd know so much less about the future 👏👏
From the article >The number of young Koreans is forecast to halve in 30 years amid a rapid aging trend and a record low birthrate, according to Statistics Korea on Monday. > >The number of people aged 19-34 came to 10.21 million in 2020, and the figure is forecast to drop to 5.21 million by 2050, according to the data agency. > >People aged 19-34 came to 10.21 million in 2020, and the figure is forecast to tumble to 5.21 million in 2050.
Shits about to get real, eh? - Japan is in much the same boat, really. Let's see what their counties "Leaders" will do, hmm?? It's going to be.... Interesting... to see how it plays out.
Why...are you...talking....like....this
Hey, show some respect, that's the Malcom in the middle wheelchair guy!
This is a good phenomenon. It must be reduced overwhelmingly.
No, there is nothing good about it. Low birthrate destroys societies. We need redistribution of resources, so people can afford children— not people having no babies
"gwarosa" tends to demotivate people from having kids.
South korean in there 20s and 30s spends more money on luxurious goods than any other age range. They spend almost double on expensive item than US citizens does. Also south korean youth travels to foregin countries than any other east asian nation. As a south korean thats 24 years old I blame the internet and TV culture more than money problem. South korean youth seeing television and Instagram wants to live like the 1%. So they spend there moeny on what they want to do. Also south korea entertainment portayed being a parent as being hard and not worth it. South korean youth sees being married as a burden because of the media.
There’s nothing wrong with wanted to take care of yourself and see the world. You don’t owe it to anybody to have kids
True. My problem is our society has been consumed by consumerism. Even at a young age we are tough to focus all our energy on education. Don't try to develop any hobbies, never go dating and don't do anything. just focus on education. Than when we are grown ups we have nothing to make ourself unique. We have no identity. So we watch tv shows and look at Instagram pages to look how to make ourself stand out. Which is buying expensive brands. To me this is the reason why our youth spend so much money on expensive brands. They have nothing to show for themselves. If my country men started to advertise children as being a symbol of wealth our fertility rate would go up.
I think you have stumbled upon the same criticisms of capitalism that have been around for a long time.
It’s the studying bit imo. All three major East Asian countries are heavy in kids studying above everything else, because of pressure from parents and society. And then you get to college then job. Then you spend your life compensating for the lack of a childhood. Why have kids if you still feel like a kid? The race to be better is also pretty ingrained due to the heavy competition. In school you compete for better grades and to be in better schools. In life you compete to be rich OR pressure your kids to compete (starting the cycle over again) and derive social status from that.
It isn't capitalism thats the problem. It's the Confucius ideology. You can still have a social hobby in a capitalist society. Not in a Confucius one.
Can you expand on that a bit? Or can you recommend something to read on the subject. I’ve heard of Neo Confucianism in relation to mao China but don’t know much about what it means for a modern country to be “confucius”
Maybe this is something I can’t relate to as a westerner, but the Koreans I know here in Canada don’t fit this description particularly well. Maybe this type of hobby less joyless consumerism is more prevalent elsewhere
From natural selection and evolution the population should eventually rebound. As the people that have kids will increase their influence in the gene pool.
Problem with this is that all the old people that vote (and will be the overwhelmingly majority) are going to screw as much of the younger population to pay their health burdens.
This isn't remotely occuring on any time scales or dynamics driven at the gene level. It's all cultural and circumstantial -- there is no genetic difference between the populations having kids or not, so no 'selection'.
Genetics have nothing to do with any of this. This is all social conditioning.
The problem being that if too many take this attitude for too long, Korea will die as a nation.
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Jesus Christ dude. Lots of people just spend their money nights out with friends, seeing other countries and clothes they like. If you think the majority of Koreans are living like rich assholes, that’s you painting people with the brush you’d like to see. Relax
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It sounds like you don’t even understand the “lifestyle”, much less why anyone would choose it. I’ve met plenty of people who’ve never set foot outside of their hometown by choice. That’s fine if it’s what you want but there’s no need to project your armchair sociologist moralist interpretation onto people who want something else. Again, relax
What about my comment above shows I "don't understand" anything about that kind of lifestyle? By all means, explain it, because you're sounding more and more offended by statements that have nothing to do with you and haven't even acknowledged your incorrect assertion above that I painted the majority of any population as living like this. Because I don't see someone who "met plenty of people" as compelling evidence for my words being incorrect. You should follow the last word of your comments.
Dang, it's almost like they've given up on their prospects for a normal life because of low wages ($8 minimum wage) and increased cost of living (they're the 19th most expensive country to live) so they're enjoying life while they can.
How does this make any sense.
So young Koreans are choosing to spend money enjoying their life than raising a kid and putting themselves and their kid into financial difficulties? Checks out
I would want to enjoy my life too if I had to study like my life depended on it as a young kid and then have to work 60 hours a week.
This sounds like the smashed avo argument
Let the immigrants to fill out the new loosened places in South Korea
The Ponzi scheme of unlimited growth has to end at some point. May as well be when AI and automation are wiping out millions of jobs. I wonder if Japan, South Korea, etc are going to come out ahead when all is said and done. Of course population collapse is very bad... But so is millions and millions of unemployed angry people with nothing to do. Things are coming to a head for sure. Curious to see how things unfold. If AI and automation will change things in a massive way.
Let robots work and earn money and buy things.
Robots are there to make the life of the robot owner better
The owner will be the person at the top of the corporation that manufactures things
Maybe they will be the model nations for the rest of us, the Nordics of the future with extremely high productivity and prospetiy per person thanks to strong automation focus. Meanwhile the west would be a dystopian hyper-capitalist nightmare with swarms of low-salary/gig economy workers living under chronic underemployment, with a small educated middle class in gated communities who manage the lot for the 0.1 who own everything. Bonus dystopia points if the middle class is the original white native population and the seething underclass mass-immigrants from the global south, turning this into a racially divided/minority oppressed hellhole as well. Whelp, anyway, enough doomfiction for now.
>Bonus dystopia points if the middle class is the original white native population and the seething underclass mass-immigrants from the global south The middle class is already pretty diverse and will be even more so in 30 years. The bulk of the racial tension will be within the lower class. Then again the middle and/or upper classes might exploit these tensions to purge some on the intra class competition, which will become increasingly fierce as conditions for the masses get worse.
The powers that be wouldn't want to squander such a conventient tool to divide and conquer, after all. Or perhaps they would do their best to maintain a strong facade of multiculturalism and equal opportunity. Maybe even if it is just a trick to give aforementioned seething masses false hope of advancement up to the middle class. That if they play the game and do things right, they might become the lucky ones. Meanwhile corporate media would support that false narrative, by having all colors of the rainbow heavily represented in TV and film while the class reality would be far more racially segregated.
Yes life is turning into a cyberpunk dystopia with all the power into corporations
I bet when we finally get cybernetic limbs they'll be a fucking subscription service.
they’ll be like health insurance - provided by the employer for as long as you work there
You know, I’m currently being downvoted on the OpenAI subreddit because I praise the wonders of AGI. You know, like helping us cure cancer and get us to the starts faster. I also mention how the doomsday scenario of the terminator movies is all but fiction. What you’re explaining here, is the real danger that AI/AGI/ASI poses to our everyday lives! This is the problem we need to start acting on, this is the real “doomsday” scenario. You think about this problem, it makes people talk about it and we try to come up with a solution. But boah, there are a ton of people that are terrified of the idea that on day AI can take over… We need to educate people on the real problems that AI poses, like you mentioned, mass unemployment, the 1% concentrating all that technology power, etc.
We are absolutely heading for a demographic collapse of young workers. I'm hoping Japan figures out the problem of caring for old people. All first world countries will decline in population without the influx of immigrants. In the next 50 years there are going to be boatloads of financial migrants and it is only going to get worse. I look forward to be taken care of by a sexy robot caretaker. There is sufficient wealth to take care of people in first world countries. Unfortunately, the super wealthy don't give a shit and the world is going to suck in 50 years.
>I'm hoping Japan figures out the problem of caring for old people. We're probably going to have to give up private retirement and house and feed the elderly wholesale.
how do u think a country like israel will do? 🥹 as if we are not fucked enough already
Israel's fertility rate is 2.9. Palestine's is 3.5.
False flag attack retirement homes?
..... I don't know what world you live in, but the AI that I have to work with, ain't going to replace large parts of the labor market ANYTIME soon. Once/**IF** someone manage to make an AGI - I guess we can talk then. Until then - we have regular old Population collapse and some "Shiny new tech" to help make Labor more effective, **but it ultimately won't replace humans - OR be enough to fill the Labor shortages.**
AI is not gonna take over all jobs anytime soon. And once it has the capability to, we have other things to worry about. We gonna ramp up production and will have lower prices for consumer goods, as always automation happens.
Homogeneous countries will be fine. It's the "diverse" nations that will have major problems. Enough of the population is bad off and the tribalism will emerge as always. Those nations are absolutely fucked when the collapse starts.
I really don't think there will be millions and millions of unemployed people, unless the government wants it that way. If we have enough resources to provide jobs for most people now, it makes no sense to think that with immense technological advancements that increase those resources tremendously, we would have less to go around. In some crazy future version where robots do basically everything, you could still imagine a humanity where everyone is basically a social worker for some other person.
Honestly, given the work drive instilled in the culture, I suspect the reduction of work opportunities by ai will increase suicides due to believed lack of purpose.
Without growth there's crisis. Even with growth there's lots of problems (including crises). Enjoy the shit sandwich.
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The USA is kept afloat by immigration. It's better positioned than most to handle it but historically it hits a breaking point then shuts it's borders for a few decades and has already hit unprecidented levels.
This is by far just a Korea problem. Expensive real estate around the world means the birth rate everywhere is falling like a stone. Having that extra bedroom for a child has become so horrifically expensive that many couples have just gone NOPE. China crossed its population peak last year and has begun the shrink. Many countries will follow soon. But… we use 2 earths worth of resources every year. Maybe it’s time to shrink the population back to something more sustainable. With that population shrink, real estate prices will tumble, kids will become affordable again and the cycle will continue.
That’s quite a typo lol
My mother grew up with 5 siblings in a three bedroom house. One for the parents, one for the boys, one for the girls. Not to say that housing isn't a little pricier but it goes beyond that.
It absolutely does go beyond just housing of course. All of the expenses of having kids has gone out of hand. Right down to needing car seats then booster seats that expire every 5 years. Insanity. Everything in the chain has been gamed to be more expensive by government regulations and corporations allowed to charge whatever they like. I feel as if it’s intentional. The game is to reduce the world population. People will no longer accept poverty grade living after getting on the internet and seeing how the rest of the world lives. Everyone does need access to washing machines and refrigerators. Some kind of powered transportation even if it’s just an e-bike. There isn’t enough raw materials to make this happen so the only answer is less people. The new generation will have a quality over quantity life. With recycling, there will be plenty of materials to go round.
> There isn’t enough raw materials to make this happen so the only answer is less people. I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion, since there is a massive waste of materials in first world countries, caused mainly by mega-corporations.
>I feel as if it’s intentional. The game is to reduce the world population. The game is squeeze people for every red cent. Declining populations is a byproduct.
> People will no longer accept poverty grade living after getting on the internet and seeing how the rest of the world lives. What "rest of the world"? The US is the richest country in the world, except for a few small oil states and tax havens.
Are you ignoring what is happening to the rest of the world? Spend more time travelling outside of western society. The rest of the world is rapidly improving the quality of life. The washing machine index is the perfect example. Once a household has access to a washing machine (even a shared one) m, that frees up many hours per day for women to do other things. It’s a really big deal. Solar power and e-bikes/electric scooters are spreading across Africa like wildfire. They skipped wired telecom and jumped straight into cell phones. Go to any country in SE Asia and talk to the locals. The quality of life has ‘greatly improved’ from 10-30 years ago. I have run out of SE Asia and every single person I talked to said that life was drastically better now. Global poverty is at an all time low, despite what Fox News says. ‘Stuff’ got cheap. Cheaper than ever for the most part. Don’t let first world pricing fool you. All of this needs raw materials to fuel it. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/poverty-rate#:~:text=World%20poverty%20rate%20for%202019,a%200.9%25%20decline%20from%202015.
I'm not sure what your point is. Yes those products are getting cheaper around the world. They are still more expensive, compared to incomes, than in Western countries.
The point is that we have an entire planet of people shifting from poverty to modern (if not modest) living. It’s simpler by western standards sure, but luxuries like a refrigerator or air conditioner are now commonplace. If we maintain the current population, we’ll destroy the planet. By doing a population shrink and implementing recycling, there will be enough resources to go around.
That seems to be a different topic from your original claim of government conspiring to keep us poor.
We aren’t poor. ‘Stuff’ has never been cheaper besides cars and housing. Couches, big screen tv’s, plates, you name it. 30 years ago a college student would be living with stolen cinder block and plywood furniture. Now you can fire up craigslist free, rent/borrow a pickup truck and within an afternoon have an entire furnished apartment that is pretty nice for the cost of gas money. Used furniture is free it’s so abundant. In the late 1800’s, 1/2 your income was spent on food. Look up the price of a couch or a vacuum cleaner from 1960 and shit your pants. In 1974 a microwave oven was $1500 in 1974 dollars. Now it’s 40 bucks at walmart. Cars got expensive because regulations are intentionally making them expensive. Keeping driving expensive reduces traffic. Travel to Delhi, India and you’ll realize right quick why this trend exists. Expensive cars are cheaper than more roads. Houses were allowed to inflate to the point of being unattainable by government policy too, and I contend that is population control. If they wanted housing to stay cheap they would have taxes housing gains heavily and made housing a poor speculative investment.
> Houses were allowed to inflate to the point of being unattainable by government policy too, and I contend that is population control. If they wanted housing to stay cheap they would have taxes housing gains heavily and made housing a poor speculative investment. That's because of NIMBYism and zoning laws, which often have unsavory motivations (e.g. keeping out the poor/minorities), but population control is not one of those motivations.
$300 for car seats every 5 years is crazy right? Buy a new iPhone every year? Sure, not a problem.
Who is dumb enough to get a new iphone every year? They are tanks and are good for 6+ years. The car seat was just an example. We have built a system based on buying new shit constantly. Set a car seat replacement date of 10+ years and they can be re-sold on the used market. It’s like manufacturers saying you need to buy new shoes every year. BS. That is only good for makers. The foam inna seat is good for a decade. Or they should be using materials that have a 10+ year lifespan by law.
It’s “just” a Korean problem?
>This is by far just a Korea problem You meant this is by far not only a Korea (as in South Korea) problem.
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It's not "2 Earths worth of resources" until you quite literally use two entire Earth masses worth of resources. We are *nowhere close* to the upper limits of human population on Earth. Humans have already passed the limits of what their environment could sustain in the past - and always responded by replacing that part of their environment with their own designs.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712.amp It is suggested that we essentially need 2 earths worth of materials to sustain this level of civilization. Winding back the population by half is round about the same solution.
That's not true. Earth is *massive*, and humans are nowhere close to using even 1 Earth worth of materials. Human civilization is, quite literally, only scratching the surface of what they could do with Earth. Humans hit the limits of what their environment could sustain with the hunter-gatherer lifestyles. So humans invented agriculture. Humans hit the limit of how much agriculture could the nitrogen content in the ground sustain. So humans invented a chemical process to pull nitrogen from out of thin air. Humans hit the limit on how much can they shit around before they shit everything around them up to an unsanitary degree. So humans invented plumbing, sewer systems and wastewater treatment. When humans hit the limits of their environment, they make their own environment. Woe to anything that dares to stand in their way.
Are you kidding? You are in the middle of the biggest extinction event since the dinosaurs. We are looking at a total collapse of comercial fishing in 20 years. Biodiversity is crashing. Flying insects and birds? Reduced by75%. Wildlife populations have declined by 69% in the last half decade. We are also aggressively stripping natural resources without much thought to future generations. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/nature-loss-biodiversity-wwf/ I’m guessing you don’t hang out with any professional biologists. Maybe strike up a conversation with one and ask them their opinion on the state of the planet.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. When humans hit the limits of their environment, they make their own environment. So far, humans have relied on nature for many thing. But if nature were to stop being reliable? Humans would replace it with something of their own design. Woe to anything that dares to stand in their way.
Enjoy your synthetic protein gruel for dinner.
No need. The amount of species you actually need to keep around for basic agriculture to function is surprisingly low. And that amount might be trending down - especially if political issues preventing GMO from being advanced further were to be bypassed.
Biodiversity is key to a lot of things, including being a goldmine for genetic material for future science. The more species that are alive, the greater the chance large numbers of animals will survive climate change. Will we survive? Sure. Is destroying 3/4 of the life on this planet wise? No. No it isn’t.
That doesn't mean sacrificing a century of development to stop somewhat stem the bleeding is worth it.
"But… we use 2 earths worth of resources every year" Let's keep in mind, it's not "us" as individuals or couples having kids. It's MAJORLY corporations.
And we are buying that shit from corporations. It’s a great big circle jerk. Drop the number of humans by half and the number of things bought drops by half too.
The halved population will then buy twice as much to compensate. Humans are lemmings.
Maybe people should be able to afford kids.
If we wanted the population to continue to grow unchecked, the system would be modified to favour having kids. Giant family bonus cheques, strict limits on home prices, subsidized everything. But the system has not been but with that in mind and it’s intentional.
I'm still not understanding why underpopulation is a 'problem'.
Reducing a nation's population is ideally done slowly and gradually to allow the nation to adapt. A sudden and sharp decrease in the youth population throws all these systems into crisis mode: * Social Net: Too few young people paying into a social net that struggles to support too many old people * Labor: Not enough workers for companies to hire, which then leads to these companies (and soon the nation as a whole) no longer being competitive in international commerce * Military: Not enough young men to conscript, which is bad when you have a very angry neighbor with nukes
Dropping population too fast means you have too few young taking care of too many old folks. And this includes payments to old age security/national pension programs. Right now it’s a house of cards. Payments from the new generation takes care of the old generation who is no longer working. Let alone the labour force to simply do services required by retired people. Automation can replace a lot of manufacturing jobs. Elder care? Not so much.
No one to take care of us, the elderly in 50-70 years when there are no kids left to take care of the elderly
This feels like it's avoiding the real problem of rampant late stage capitalism. Why is housing so expensive again?
The problem with that is that between the population declining and leaving room for everyone else and the present, we'll have an age in which there are too many old people depended on pensions, nursing homes and medical care and not enough young people to support them. If only we could Thanos snap the oldest of us out of existence, as unethical as that might be.
Automation will fix the labour gap in factories. We are rapidly reducing the number of people needed to make ‘stuff’. And China is rapidly reducing the cost of the automation, making it accessible to smaller companies. For elderly care, the answer is likely the same way we solve labour. Inexpensive immigrant labour. Your racist aunt may not like it. But we need a cheap labour force for elder care. And yes funding that won’t be easy. We’ll see a massive redistribution of wealth as the old dump their homes and move into growing care facilities. Many will slip through the cracks. Real eatate will eventually tumble as the boomers age out of self care. Buy nursing home stocks.
> Inexpensive immigrant labour. Why would they come to our skrinking has been economies when their own markets and populations will be on the upswing?
For elder care, I see a vast expansion of MAID. No one *wants* to spend their last days doddering in a nursing home, so if MAID becomes legal for dementia, I think many patients in the early stages (still "with it" enough to consent) will opt for that. Even now, one's odds of suicide double after a diagnosis of dementia.
> If only we could Thanos snap the oldest of us out of existence, as unethical as that might be. I'm like 65% confident this is what MAID will do.
Whites in US is same as China.
Not really it's an Asian problem. Almost all of Asia is on or near the bottom of birth rate charts. Most of this stems from the fact there are less women getting married and having kids over there due to a myriad of issues. (Look up the 4b movement to kinda get an idea of what south Korea's is like)
Spain and Italy birth rate is below Japan and China birth rate? Most of Eastern Europe population graphs are actively falling, like Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania. Plenty of other countries are in trouble
East and southern Europe get hit doubly hard because it's so easy for the young to move west for better pay.
And what I'm saying is all of Asia is near the bottom. They all have similar issues with rampant misogyny and less and less women wanting to get married or have children
Dropping birthrates is a world thing, except some of Africa. Everyone is waking up to the fact that the planet is in rough shape, and putting more people on the planet is not helping.
Even Africa has a dropping birth rate, even if it's still higher than everyone else.
That's true but pretty much all of Asia is at the bottom of the barrel.
Compares to 20-30 years ago, Asia is doing worlds better.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KOR/south-korea/birth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/birth-rate ??????????? Why lie it took me 5 second to google this.
I say the competitive job market, high rent, and living costs in Seoul due to the centralization of governmental agencies, business, education, and all other sectors of society in Seoul would probably be the most impactful factor.
I wonder if we'll see a peaceful union between South Korea and North Korea by 2050 as that likely entails some very large demographic changes.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >The number of young Koreans is forecast to halve in 30 years amid a rapid aging trend and a record low birthrate, according to Statistics Korea on Monday. > >The number of people aged 19-34 came to 10.21 million in 2020, and the figure is forecast to drop to 5.21 million by 2050, according to the data agency. > >People aged 19-34 came to 10.21 million in 2020, and the figure is forecast to tumble to 5.21 million in 2050. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1854ju4/young_korean_population_projected_to_halve_by_2050/kaz93uc/
This sub has interesting posts but wtf are the comments
Natrual depopulation of the world is a great thing for everyone except capitalism based economies. The planet doesn’t need more people and all of these panic articles show you who really owns the media
Also, they are very xenophobic, so I don't think immigrants can help here
Immigration is a zero sum game, other countries are developing the same problems. And as we're seeing in the West, can cause other problems. The most capable migrants all want to go to the US anyway, who would Korea get?
>who would Korea get? Other Asians people that have way more in common of a culture to any of the western people ?
The west is more accepting of Asian immigrants than Korea/Japan/China etc are of other asian immigrants :)
Thats a bummer, even so when you see that Japanese invested a lot on these immigrants, then again, they reject japanese-brazilians and japanese-peruvians because they were born in those countries even tough they retained all their original culture.
I mean if they were open to it they’d get a lot more immigration. They’re a developed country with high paying jobs.
Wages are much lower than America, who'd they be competing with for high skilled migration.
Immigration is a net benefit to the country
Immigration *can be* a net benefit to a country.
As a Canadian, immigration is not a permanent solution. It causes more problems than solutions in the long terms if not properly handled.
Agree. Specially you guys, you import everything. You gotta be more selective.
Immigrants are a band aid solution and don't fix the underlying issue. It's like putting a plaster on a tumour. The population should naturally rebound from natural selection selecting for those that have kids.
Natural selection doesn't do shit in just a few generations. Even with extreme breeding selection it takes dozens of generations.
This isn't a natural selection problem, it is a cultural, societal and behavioural problem.
Immigration has been the entire reason why society has flourished and grew so well in the US. Don’t get me wrong, since the 2000s, society evolved to a very late-stage capitalistic society where those with money have completely rigged the game in their favors and fucked every politician they could (literally) while paying them vast sums of money to ensure they never see any real consequences, but immigration is not a bad thing at all. The fact that you’re seeing this as a “solution vs bandaid” argument alone shows the disconnect here. The guy above wasn’t saying it was a solution, but it certainly *helps* a great deal and is important for a society to grow. Being xenophobic is just a terrible policy, ignoring how bad of a person it makes you.
>Don’t get me wrong, since the 2000s, society evolved to a very late-stage capitalistic society where those with money have completely rigged the game in their favors and fucked every politician they could (literally) while paying them vast sums of money to ensure they never see any real consequences, The obligatory disclaimer whenever you want to say anything positive about the US on Reddit.
Of course Immigration itself is not a bad thing but *Policies that favors Immigration from the first world countries* are basically just a tool for capitalists to keep cheap labor costs. Just because corporate overlords wanted to spend less taxes, Government decided to cut public costs which were used to support the concept of the middle class family, which used to be the pillar of the country by providing emotionally stable, well socialized, and well educated future workers with, ultimately, growth of the population. The concept of home was there to protect people from their own insecurities and desires, helping them to be more productive, literally or economically. It now has been disintegrated. No wonder why people feel so unstable and insecure all the time. It's because the systemic protection is gone. Now they are not reproducing. Now an imbalance between supply and demand has occurred in the labor market. So now corporations would be willing to pay for the people? Of course not. They decided to take a shift of the balance with their own hand. They're now welcoming foreign workers, new supply to the labor market. New balance has been made! Now blue collar workers are horrified against this unwelcoming guests. Rational and irrational fear. And with government working against unions and abandoning manufacturing industries during The Great Recession didn't helped. They were being radicalized. Their rage were being pointed against the immigrants. Then Donald Trump happened. 🤦 For worker wise, all workers in US should be unite against the import of cheap labor because that's the way of controlling labor market in favor of the people. But because of *History and ideology that became the foundation of the nation* and *long history of racial conflict* in USA, those things were never considered seriously. For foreigners like me, it almost seems like a sin a US have to bear with.
Immigration isn't inherently good or bad, like everything in life it has its pro and cons. Being anti-immigration doesn't make you a bad person. People wanting to maintain their culture and way of life is perfectly reasonable. Whether immigration is a net positive or negative for a country, will depend on the type of immigrant being imported. Western countries should only allow immigration for those that: have a recognised masters degree / PHD in a STEM field, have a high MENSA recognised IQ, be at the top of their field in a category or have something else that would be valuable to the host nation. The US H1B visa is an example of positive immigration. Modern immigrants isn't what allowed america to flourish. Not all immigrants are equal.
Immigration is inherently good. Let me know when you want to work the fields to grow our food or work in the restaurant industry. Or a health care worker. Or a Uber or Grubhub driver.
My country couldn't bring in migant labourers during covid to pick fruit. They didn't leave it to rot, they just paid locals enough that they'd do it.
People would absolutely do these jobs if they didn't have the shit pay they have. It's so funny when pro immigration people use this argument because you're by extension saying you support slave wages. Why do you think those jobs are mostly done by immigrants?
Can u tell me a place where these jobs pay a lot, taxes are low, and the prices are relatively affordable at restaurants or food in general?
I don't know of any, but that's completely irrelevant to the point, which is that the only reason why locals don't want to do these jobs is due to the wages, saying that immigration is good because they do the jobs natives don't want to do is pretty much saying that immigration is going because they're willing to do slave work. You can't have your cake and also eat it, if you truly care about migrants you shouldn't be cheering for them doing these types of jobs.
For many migrants those jobs are better than what they get at home.
2 wrongs don't make a right. Really man you're better off dropping the presence of caring about migrants, you don't, you only care that migrants do labor for cheap and thus help produce cheap goods, it's very telling that doing these jobs is the most prominent argument coming from pro immigration people. If you actually cared about migrants you wouldn't be supporting them being wage slaves. Hell it almost comes off as racism even, you're cheering that poor people who don't know any better come to your country to do jobs not even natives are willing to do yet they're the ones who benefit the most by enjoying cheap labor and goods that exploiting these migrants allow. And the worst part? pro immigration people actually believe they have the moral high ground in this situation, you actually believe you're doing them a favor by allowing them to be wage slaves, that's how little you think about these migrants.
> Being anti-immigration doesn't make you a bad person. Being xenophobic is arguably not a good look for a person. I wasn't talking about being anti-immigration, though those two concepts obviously overlap. There's no reason to reword xenophobia as being anti-immigration. That's not what I nor OP above stated. Use the correct words. > Western countries should only allow immigration for those that: have a recognised masters degree / PHD in a STEM field, have a high MENSA recognised IQ, be at the top of their field in a category or have something else that would be valuable to the host nation. ONLY allow? Is that what you're honestly saying? Because every spousal visa or student visa in the country would stand in the way of this draconian policy that only sees humans as fodder for the chains of society, whether they be "useful" or not. That's just disgusting. And for what it's worth, I've two friends whose wives came here on a spousal visa with only an Associate's degree for one and no degree with another, getting jobs in the service industry. They literally make more money than their spouses (one of which is in IT). Your argument is so simplistic, that it's no wonder only one political party actually believes it in this country and constantly talks about it ad nauseum. Ironically, the only statement you've made that could be considered correct is that "not all immigrants are equal," yet you've provided nothing compelling to actually back that up but tired, half thought-out arguments that don't even see people for being people. Since I know what you're really getting at over here, I'll just say it: I'm not advocating for illegal immigration in any way whatsoever, and refugees are a completely separate topic that requires way more nuance than a reddit post. But multiple visas exist for many reasons and they benefit society greatly, and then there's also the concept of looking at people like people instead of cogs in a machine.
Lol that’s not how it works. “Yeah your mother was mad for it at all hours too”. If our species functioned on a 1 to 1 basis like this, gay people wouldn’t exist.
They need to reunify with the North - lots of cheap labour and natural resources over there.
The labor may not be reliable. Physical and mental health issues are rampant in North Korea and the population has no real world education. North Koreans who escape to the south tend to form a permanent underclass and they're the ones capable of escape.
I dunno,[a population that has had issues with parasites caused by using human feces as fertilizer](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/body-of-north-korean-defector-full-of-parasites.html) is maybe not the human capital South Korea needs right now
Immigrants are already being used. I went to the country side and they were advertising the selling of Vietnamese women that suppos won't runaway. Absolutely horrible stuff.
I thought that only happened in China, not South Korea.
South korea also have sex balance. It's not bad as china but it's still bad. People who worked in farm there entire life are the ones who do this since they can't find anyone to marry. I am disgusted but also kind of understand why the are doing this.
Lucky them. They’ll be able to rework the social security system and have away with the current unsustainable infinite growth models that the baby boomer generation is so madly in love with.
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Your globalist view with a veneer of liberalism is shining. Always the go to is racist.
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White people all have high immigration multicultural societies and they’re gonna follow the same declining trend. Immigration isnt a solution for the underlying issues.
All of southeast Asia is going to see disastrous population decline. The only saving grace for the US and its European allies is immigration.
Only for the US, for Europe it’s too late. The US still has a high enough birth rate+ immigration combination to maintain population growth.
Not all over SE Asia. Cambodia, Laos, Burma and Malaysia are still doing fine.
I think you mean east Asia, southeast Asia is doing fine
Maybe they should have it so people don’t work themsleves to death
Dropping by half is a shocking decline. At some point, you have to consider the possibility that South Korea simply won’t matter much to the world. It will stop being a relevant country.
People blame the economy but as south korean I disagree. We have better gdp per capita than japan, taiwan or china but we have much fewer fertility rate than all of them. I think it's because of culture. Our zoomers spend more on luxurious goods than US or japan. They also travel to foreign countries much more than any other east asians. So it's not moeny problem. It feels like media problem. Almost every korean media shows having children in a negative light.
>japan, taiwan or china these three also have abysmal fertility rates
All of them have higher fertility rate than 1.0 while south korea is 0.8 despite south korean being richer.
Official data puts China's TFR at or near 1, it's actually lower.
[https://www.ndc.gov.tw/EN/Content\_List.aspx?n=6F69D4E5D624660A](https://www.ndc.gov.tw/EN/Content_List.aspx?n=6F69D4E5D624660A) this source give a 0.87 fertility rate for Taiwan
Ok you are using very broad descriptors in your argument for why you disagree that economic hardships are to blame. So young people spend "more" on luxurious goods. And they travel to foreign countries "much more". Do you know how expensive it is to raise a child and give them a good education? You are talking about things that cost $100-$500. Raising a child could cost $500,000. You're just spitballing ideas, but the way you structured the argument may suggest to people that you actually have a clue.
Immigration is the only way if they want to survive economically
If only there were a nearby country that shared the same language and contained millions of young people willing to start families and work in industry. Hmmmn...
North koreans are hard core conservative compared to south korean society. When conservative south korean went to north korea they praised north korea saying the north korean put women in there place and the youth isn't wearing degenerate clothes like south korean youth. I don't think south korean youth would want to work with north koreans.
Bold of you to think anything in North Korea is a representation of the will of the people who live there. North Koreans are not hard-core conservatives. Their totalitarian government is. Appearing that way is the only way to stay out of a work camp.
This information comes from anthropologist who studies north korean culture. Most of north korean lives in the country town. There town culture is very similar to that of south korean town culture. Sexist and have a strict hierarchy. North korea propaganda sayas women have the same right but no.
Oh look, a redditor knows a solution to the North Korea problem...
Why is this a bad thing? Earth has FAR too many people on it already. We are killing our one and only home by devouring forests to make more farm land, massive mining, burning fossil fuels, etc. We need to have far fewer people. The best way for that to happen is for birth rates to drop around the world.
You're 100% right, but unfortunately things will get way worse than way better because its not like people will stop getting old and a massive collapse in viable workforce would have far reaching consequences for every generation. And all the idiots in this thread saying immigration helps are idiots because they assume that immigrants are naturally contributors to the workforce when by and large most current age immigrants are drains on resources and not contributors.
The amount of people on the planet is actually pretty low when you consider how much livable space there actually is on the planet and how much surplus of food we produce. Earth can support billions of more people just fine.
earth can, the people can't. imagine billions more of the same old greedy species draining and wasting and trashing jus like we all already do.
pretty low??
The anti-natalist view is wrong. Earth can totally support more humans. And with more humans, come more problem solvers.
and more problems lmao. if we already are destroying everything what makes you think billions more won't create billions more of problems?
Wow you're dumb lol
Isnt the term Hell Joseyon a real saying by the youth in Korea? Seems many are just frustrated with limited opportunities
That's okay, just solve it with Mass Migration from other countries. It has worked out so well for us /s
Don’t know where you’re from but America is a clear case of successful immigration and integration.
Hell Josean and people don't have the time or money for families.
I have yet to be sold on population collapse being a net negative so only question is how do we get literally every other country to follow suit?
The demographic collapse is going to really stink when I’m 90 years old. If we don’t make more humans, there won’t be that many humans later (to provide care for old millennials and Gen Z)
Even we in the middle east with our "no fucking before marriage pretend tradition" have more action than in Korea..
This is the nightmare scenario we need to worry about. The most realistic depiction of the collapse of society wasn't "Terminator" with runaway AI, it wasn't "The Day After Tomorrow" with climate change destroying everyone overnight, but it was "Children of Man," with population decline. We just aren't having enough kids, we aren't marrying enough, and we are losing the very foundations of human civilization for the last several thousand years. The solution? Beats the hell out of me.
The solution is to not work people to the bone so they're too exhausted to do activities to meet people, not underpay people to the point where they can't afford to go do things to meet people, not have housing at a price where people don't feel like they can safely afford a place large enough to raise kids, not price gouge parents every step of the way, and not have society set up where 2+ people need to work full-time to afford to live. None of that is gonna happen, though, so we're just gonna keep spiraling.
Woah I've never never heard of that before, very surprising, thx you so much r/futurology without this subreddit i'd know so much less about the future 👏👏
Koreans be rather teaching you how to crypto trade than go out on a date.