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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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I saw a thread om twitter explaining that low fertility in South Korea is due to parental investment competion:

It's amazing how far people go not to point out every Korean born requires >9k hours of costly test prep for a chance at "good" college otherwise you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die.

I have to wonder if there's a taboo.

In high fertility countries, slightly older kids raise their siblings.

That's the answer. It's not a hard mystery.

17 y/o Koreans can't help raise their 15 y/o siblings, because Korean teens are preparing for college exams, which only expensive adults can help with.

That's it.

Do people even bother asking Koreans?

Surely any married Korean couple, if you ask them why they don't have four kids, will surely bring up the nightmarish prospect of ensuring that all of them are "properly placed"?

"Have the older kids tutor the younger ones" yeah, right!

https://x.com/anarchyinblack/status/1817684593908080960

At this point, I wonder if we in the US could somehow shift our immigration strategy to target South Koreans. We receive people who will be good citizens and diligent workers, they get a society that isn't as insanely high-pressure.

As someone currently living in S Korea, I don't agree. Or at least, it's not that simple.

Korea has had a low birth rate for a while now, since the 80s, but it's only recently that's crashed into "OMG", sub-1 levels. Something has happened more recently. And it's not the tiger moms. If anything, I think they've eased up a bit on the childhood hardcore test prep stuff. I see more kids and teens hanging around now in malls and arcades, goofing off, or going to "fun" schools for things like drawing and sports, while the old-school test-prep schools are kinda languishing.

If anything, it might be a generational trauma kind of thing. In the 80s and 90s, people really did feel like they needed to study hard-core to get into a good college to have any chance of a good life. Now the country is much less poor, and there are a lot more options, including "alternative" paths like k-pop singer or esports streamer for kids who are not conventionally good students but have other talents. But people still remember the miserable childhood they had, and feel like "having kids = misery."

"Just ask any couple why don't have kids," well, it's not that simple, because people don't always open up about their deep emotional issues, you know? They'll probably just say "the economy" because that's a nice safe excuse. Doesn't really explain why the birth rate always seems to go the opposite direction as the GDP.

Why are you saying that South Korea was 'poor' back then as compared to know, relatively speaking? I don't think it was. This was before the Asian financial crisis of 1998, when SK was considered one of the Asian tigers. I mean I'm rather confident that one could make a decent living in South Korea without a college degree back when the manufacturing sector was booming.

they were a "tiger" because they grew so quickly, not because they started out as some wealthy financial center. Their inflation-adjusted gdp per capita in 1980 was $4000. Which, ok, isn't as dire poverty as some nations, but certainly made it hard to find a middle-class job. Compare Japan which was at $19,000 in 1980.

they were a "tiger" because they grew so quickly

Yes, that's what I meant. (Supposedly the tiger metaphor originates from tigers being able to jump really far.) I'd assume that a growing economy a) creates a large number of jobs in manufacturing and industry that are available to people without college degrees b) gives average people a sense of optimism, because one can believe that prosperity has increased, and will continue to increase.

otherwise you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die.

I know this is indeed the root of the problem, but if this is indeed the social reality, it's baffling how a society can end up with norms such as this.

This sort of norm can only be sustained when there is plenty of human potential to waste in the first place. So it causing low fertility is probably a feature, not a bug: if success above the very lowest level is a high-cost tournament, there's probably too many people.

I'm not sure that really explains the phenomenon. Singapore has much higher population density than Korea, but parental investment seems much smaller. It's also not clear why there should be so much human potential to waste, especially in the era of globalization.

The TFR in Singapore and South Korea are roughly equal though.

Singapore is like 40% higher.

I've seen worldwide data online 5-10 years ago. Singapore was shown with the lowest TFR in the entire world while S Korea was the 3rd lowest or so, tied with Hongkong and Taiwan, roughly.

That was true 5-10 years ago and is no longer true.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=2002..latest&country=SGPKORTWNMACHKG

Thanks. I checked the graphs. Am I supposed to see a big difference between the TFRs of SK and Singapore? Because I don't.

Perhaps Singapore's economic system can just use more people (proportionally) at those higher levels of achievement.

South Korea is very prosperous, though. The competitiveness doesn’t seem to match other developed countries with similar income rates, it’s not like in Britain or Germany people have to win an insane rat race or be Amazon warehouse workers.

All the OK-paying middle class jobs that pay just fine in every developed country exist in South Korea, and wealth inequality is average. It’s not India where life outside the top 5% sucks. The focus on the elite rat race is bizarre. The US has niche credentialist PMC status games for medicine or finance or big law or academia, but they are way outside of the life experience of most Americans.

South Korea is very prosperous, though.

Not compared to Singapore, Britain, or Germany. My thought about Korea (and Japan, which has a somewhat similar system) is it just isn't dynamic enough to accept more people at higher levels. If Samsung/LG/Daewoo/Hyundai can only use N such people each year, persons N+1 on through infinity are going to be sweeping floors.

It just doesn’t track with lower inequality levels compared to most Western countries in Korea and Japan though. There isn’t a tiny elite who pass the meritocracy test and go to elite colleges who are making tons of money while everyone else is poor (like in India with the IIT system), that’s not the distribution in these places.

No, South Korea has a tiny elite which makes lots of money (without passing any test), then a small group which passes the meritocracy test to make upper-ish middle-class income. Inequality levels are lower than the US because there are fewer and poorer rich, not a larger middle class. A Tesla software engineer in the US is proportionally poorer than Elon Musk than a Samsung software engineer in S. Korea is than Lee Jae-yong, but the Tesla software engineer is far better off.

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Uh, isn’t South Korea at basically-western-European levels of prosperity? Like there’s no reason life can’t be perfectly decent for people who aren’t 90th percentile.

They have the same GDP per capita as Spain, or 66% of the UK.

In PPP terms they're about equal to the UK though, so I guess it depends on what you think about nominal GDP Vs PPP, as well as maybe GDP per capita per hours worked.

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