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Every society has their "golden path": study, employment, marry, have kids, retire, die. In Korea, the golden path is very well-established: study, get into a university, graduate, get a white-collar job, get engaged, buy a condo, marry, move into the condo upon returning from the honeymoon, and have kids 9 months later. Note two things: first, marriage is scheduled shortly after the couple buys a condo, and second, that most of the people who deviate from this golden path (traditionally) will have been low-status, low-class, or of lower impulse-control. Deviations from the path result in a loss of social status, a lot of awkward conversations with friends and relatives, and sometimes even the loss of legally-mandated benefits (which benefits are rather small to start out with).
So the failure to have kids is tied up in a cultural resistance to deviate from the path, as well as with inability to buy flats.
The average price of a flat in Seoul doubled from 2018 to 2021.
There isn't much more to be said. Any dual-income, median-wage-earning, responsible millenial couples (1) who were saving up to get married discovered mid-pandemic that the prices on flats were rising at roughly 5x the rate at which they could put away money. (2) Half the young professionals I know were hodling their savings into cryptocurrency and stonks, because nothing else had a high enough rate of return to keep up with housing (and then Tether blew up).
The government is unlikely to do anything about housing prices: popping the housing bubble would devastate the economy, stop a bunch of construction projects needed for increasing housing supply, devastate the wealth of the political class, and wipe out the wealth of retirees who were putting their money into housing funds and are very politically active. Much easier to shrug shoulders about subsidies for kids are not working and there is nothing that can be done.
(1) Young white collar couples will not earn median income in Korean society. Millenials in their 30s might, but in their 20s they are working overtime gratis for a chance at getting promoted.
(2) This oversimplifies, omitting the interest rates on jeonsae mortgages, which are a whole 'nother level of fucked up: the tenant takes out a mortgage to put down a deposit for a two-year housing lease, where the deposit is capped at 80~90% of the value of the property. The landlord keeps any interest made when investing the deposit, and when the two-year lease is over may renegotiate and increase the deposit amount. So the tenant needs to save up the money for an upcoming increase in the deposit while also paying back for the interest on the deposit to the bank. At some point around 2021 jeonsae increases of $100,000 were not uncommon.
Tether never blew up, are you thinking of Luna?
Yeah, I was thinking of Terra. Not really into crypto.
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UST & USDT easy to get mixed up. Terra, potentially?
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The “social expectations” pressure theory just doesn’t make sense. If South Koreans are such slaves to social pressure, how is it that they feel so easily able to shirk it all and avoid marriage and kids entirely (which is surely even more shameful)?
It’s socially easier to say ‘I haven’t found the right girl/guy’ than to have a bunch of kids and refuse to provide the expected massive parental investment.
Rushton’s pet peeve was to rank blacks > whites > asians on every scale, and r/K was a big one, it fits with the observed fertility.
But the fertility results have been decreasing for blacks, whites and Asians, especially in industrialized countries. In US the black fertility rate is only marginally higher than white fertility rate, and when compared to the 7-8 child families from over a century ago, the Asian rate is not that different, either. I've never understood how the "r/K fertility strategy" thing is supposed to fit with the current data.
Still fits (ok, hispanics should be lower, but they’ve had less time to be culturally acclimated). I don’t mean it’s strongly genetically predetermined, obviously culture plays a large role. r/K provides an explanation why supposedly pro-children cultural beliefs (that they should be supported) are effectively anti-children. The west is facing a tradeoff between a few supremely coddled and educated children, and enough of them.
The legal and cultural responsibilities of parenthood should be massively curtailed. Safe haven laws should be expanded to the first 18 years of the child’s life (obviously the other parent should get first dibs). I don’t mean people should walk away from their responsibilities, just that they should be free to. It would lessen the pressure on those who don’t, encouraging them to have more. Right now the decision to have a child is the equivalent of signing an irreversible, decades long legal servitude contract.
Given the apparently dire fertility situation (and attendant pension problems etc), it’s even doubtful that aborting/not having kids is worse for society than filling orphanages with the children of unfit mothers and cads. I would certainly prefer to grow up in an orphanage than not exist at all. Seen that way, the ‘best interest of the child’ doctrine works against the best interest of the child.
I resolutely agree with you that this is the case; it's offensive to human dignity of all people that a child's mother should be arrested for the crime of letting their nearly-biologically-adult-aged child walk down the street seemingly-unsupervised.
Yes, explicitly encouraging kids to exercise the freedom they used to have back before we went off the deep end is going to result in some chaos, but actually allowing them to grow for once might have positive consequences 30 years down the line when they start judging having kids as worthwhile now that the shadow of Karen (enforced by the State) isn't looming over them.
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I agree but probably from a different angle. This article (linked in the OP), is a must read. Something is seriously wrong in the water in SK, there just seems to be a much higher base rate of the (almost universal and new) gender animosity in SK. Hell they have a womens version of MGTOW that seems to be just as radical as the male version and they elected an "incel" president (says so on the article).
My gut feeling is that "to fix the birthrate, you must first fix the fuck rate". I would like to see some data on male-female attractiveness differentials and gender animosity and birth rates, broken down by country. I think the conversatives despite being the only ones to talk about the fuck-rate aspect of it all are still putting the cart before the horse. Something is severly broken in modern (m|d)ating, and I think it gets given less credence in these conversations than it should be. Yes, I'm bringing practically 0- evidence, but it's a very latent gut feeling I have.
I think Korea is just a country that naturally takes things to extremes. Like when Buddhism was introduced they got super into Buddhism, and then more recently they took to Christianity hardcore. Online gaming, Go/baduk, and boy/girl pop groups. SK is super capitalist while NK is super communist. And not just big things but silly little fads like eating streams or Taiwanese cakes (the failed business of the family in Parasite) seem to take the whole country by storm one day, then disappear the next. So it makes sense to me that they would also push feminism and MRA to their most toxic extremes.
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Thanks for providing some of these extra specifics. The raw economics on the ground often get lost in the "reporting" (because journalists are scared of math)
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