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The problem with highly-automated industrial societies is that you need relatively few people to maintain them. They need to be intelligent, of course- that's why hay gets made about "only the stupid breeding"- but the first indication that there were way too many people for a society to house without serious efforts towards UBI/make-work/bureaucratic expansion came to the US in the 1930s and it's weird nobody seems to realize this.
South Korea has a surplus of people relative to the economic opportunity that can be found there; that's why their education system is a hellscape, that's why women don't feel the need to marry men for resources nor are men in a position to accumulate an attractive surplus (since the average man and average women are roughly equal in industrial and post-industrial productivity, and the men lose some of that through the draft, and the women complain that the post-military men just show up and compete successfully for the same level of jobs).
Their TFR of 0.7, and the fact men can't attract women/women can't be attracted to men in equal conditions like that, is thus natural and probably good for the country long-term, but certainly not beneficial in the short-term (you'll see this effect in Russia after the war even if they lose; perhaps the best thing for South Korea to do at this point is to invade the North, since they've got a lot of resources they aren't using there).
This doesn't seem right to me, as South Korea's fertility problems, and indeed those of most of East Asia's, are far more severe than in the West.
I'm partial to the explanation by Hanania that East Asians are hyper-conformists. This explains why their education system is a hellscape by those who experience it. Education is a zero-sum status competition, and practically everyone in their societies are competing. This also helps to explain why they stopped having kids, as cutthroat educational competition explains part, and then once a lot of people aren't having kids, the entire society decides it's OK to forgo doing so since none of their neighbors are doing it.
The economic opportunity per capita in the West is higher than it is in the East, and if you assume the Easterners are better workers that only serves to compound the problem (i.e. they need an even greater level of opportunity to function correctly than even the average American does simply because they're more efficient at exploiting it, so a lack of that opportunity is going to be harder on them).
That's part of why the US leads Western TFR (despite the generous terms European countries give to their citizens to have children it doesn't seem to be helping, but remember that the average European is significantly worse off compared to the average American even before the US sabotaged their gas supply). Twice the population for the same regional GDP paints an awfully grim picture and that's been true even before the MENA human wave.
And the Indians aren't a refutation of this, because their urban areas (40% urbanization) are just as bad for TFR, but perhaps it's a different story when your standards are that low? (I'd argue the same for China, but maybe that falls apart considering I also made this point about 100-year-ago US, which kind of had the same thing going on.)
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I think one explanation is that East Asian laborers are much better than Western ones.
One Japanese laborer at a convenience store is worth at least 2 and probably more like 3-5 American workers. In such conditions, it does create a race to the bottom for labor.
No doubt someone will chime in that the US has higher total factor productivity than Japan. That's true on a societal level. But the low wage workers in Asia are simply spectacular compared to their US equivalents.
We can see this in academics as well. Add a typical Asian kid to a typical American classroom and the Asian kid will excel due to a much higher level of effort. But when all the kids are Asian, it's a wasteful arms race. The smart kids still get the best grades, but everyone's working 3x as hard.
Asian societies are optimizing for worker drones, not for human flourishing. Without irony, they would be better off if they weren't such try hards.
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Given the likely effects of a war on Seoul (half the population is in the Seoul metropolitan area), that will depopulate the country faster than their birthrate will. Maybe the survivors would be willing to breed, I suppose.
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