South Korean Fertility Collapse 🇰🇷 🤰🏻👩🏻🍼📉
From 6 Children per Woman to Under 1 in a Lifetime
That’s bad. From 6 children per woman to under 1 in one lifetime.
I know cynics always sound smarter, and nothing sounds smarter than the post-Malthusian misanthropic meme of “well, there are too many people anyway, humans are a disease on the planet and the sooner we’re gone the better, if we shrink we’ll be more sustainable, etc”
It may sound sophisticated at cocktail parties, but it’s a very bad take.
The planet is plenty big for many more billions of people, and the universe — as the JWST is reminding us — is nothing but endless space and resources, with nobody around to appreciate it (at least in most of it as far as we know). Expanding human consciousness and keeping our civilization vibrant enough to keep solving our problems is the way out, not a slow collapse into a zero-sum world…
Existence at all is so unlikely that it is a privilege, and we should be very careful about wishing non-existence on billions of future people based on shaky economic theories or temporary, solvable problems. After all, if our ancestors had stopped even trying because they were so sure there would never be enough food for 1bn+ people on the planet…
In the same way that a big city has more innovation, creation, entrepreneurship, cross-pollination between smart people, etc, than a small village, a planet with 10 billion people is more vibrant than one with 1 billion. We just have to decouple the number of people from various bad things (ie. It’s probably worse to have 1 billion people powered by coal and oil than 10 billion powered by nuclear and deep geothermal).
Back to South Korea. Bloomberg wrote in 2021:
The typical age of a new mother in South Korea is 32, according to the National Statistical Office. The number of births per woman sank to a record low of 0.84 last year, the lowest rate in the world; in Seoul the rate is 0.64. The United Nations estimates that by 2050, Korea’s share of elderly people will become the largest of any country. (Source)
It’s a tragedy. Too bad the human mind has trouble grasping the severity of events when they’re happening slowly… 🐌
I think an obvious solution is to massively increase worldwide efforts on curing and mitigating the diseases of aging to radically expand \healthy\ and \youthful\ life, but we’re also going to have more kids, because societies where the demographic pyramid flips around have all kinds of problems that aren’t easy to solve (especially not quickly — problems that are created slowly are rarely solved quickly).
Immigration helps, but fertility has been going down rapidly globally too, so moving people around can only help so much, and in the longer term we’ll need to really start caring about what gets in the way of people becoming parents and removing some of these roadblocks.
🧭 This first appeared in Edition 320 of Liberty’s Highlights. New here? I made a page for that: Start Here.