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How to fix Korea's birthrate? Put girls in school earlier, controversial report argues
(koreajoongangdaily.joins.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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And you know, that's not a bad thing. Especially when the global birthrate is still higher than replacement, and the planet is finite.
Short term, East Asia should be less racist and take a few immigrants. Long term, we will need to figure out another way to keep the species going within the next few centuries.
Or simply accept that population will go down
Population shrinking is probably a good thing, but population shrinking too quickly might be all sorts of bad.
It’s hard to see where we really are with so many variables, so many future decisions, but I believe we’ve passed the point of “good shrinking” and are well into “all sorts of instability and disruption”. If replacement rate is 2.1 kids/woman, and South Korea is already like 1.1, that’s a huge difference. As current generations pass, each succeeding one will be half its size. That’s a problem.
That can be solved by welcoming immigrants because it won't be solved by trying to force people to have kids. When social programs are introduced to help people raise a family you see a little bump in the numbers and then it goes back down again. It's as if people realize that having a family isn't just a financial decision, crazy right?
Medium term, yeah. After a few centuries you're reaching dangerously small levels, though, assuming normal mortality. Maybe you're onboard with extinction, but for a couple reasons I'm not, even as shit as we are.
Ok, so the only way to reverse it is to reduce access to birth control and go back on women rights.
There's a whole lot of stuff that people in this discussion are blaming for birthrate going down but if you look at historical data it was going down even before these things were issues, just because people are more educated, have access to birth control and women have rights over their body. You're not moving back above 2.1 without getting rid of these things.
Have you ever read A Brave New World? If we can get artificial wombs going - in a few centuries, which is a reasonable timeframe, I think - we could do it that way.
Yes, I know, it wasn't supposed to be a society to emulate, but that part at least seems fine to me. Getting rid of birth control would be dumb, absolutely agreed.
One is science fiction, the other is the reality we live in.
Which thing is the reality we live in?
The trajectory of the human population is intrinsically a far-future question, of course I'm bringing science fiction into it.
Artificial wombs are science fiction, the reality we live in is that babies need a mother and women don't want enough kids to renew our population when they're actually given the choice.
It's nice to dream, but let's face the fact that we're probably heading in a direction where human population will eventually be going down and is predicted to peak at this end of this century.
Like I said, in the medium term, sure. We'll still have billions for many decades after that, and then we have to start thinking about a solution.