A lot of people are, in general, in denial of what reduced fertility will bring. Consequences lag effect by decades so it's not exactly a secret what the future will hold. For instance most don't realize that Japan is still in the 'good ole days', relative to what awaits them in the future, even as places like Tokyo start to shrink today.
I also think people don't realize how fast things start happening once they do start happening. For another example there you can approximate the change in population due to fertility (once a fertility rate is shared among a population) as being a scalar on population of fertility_rate/2 every 20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 means each and every woman has 1 child on average, yet nonetheless that means your population ends up declining by 50% every 20 years, exponentially, until you start having a healthy number of children again, or go extinct.
So for a bemusing one one, North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war. And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. South Korea with their fertility rate of 0.75 will not only see catastrophic population decline, but their entire economy will collapse alongside it. Going from 0.75 to a healthy fertility rate is probably not going to happen, so the North needs to merely wait, and keep having children.
> And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist.
Except their fertility is below replacement also and as a poverty stricken repressive regime that relies on food aid from South Korea, China, and probably Russia lately the latter having their own terminal demographic crises… they might not out-survive the south for long.
Your article gives North Korea a fertility rate of 1.78, which is substantially higher than even the US at 1.62. South Korea is an entirely different world at 0.75. So you're looking at a population change per 20 years of -11% in North Korea, -19% in the US, and -62% in South Korea!! None of these are good of course, but the timeline of decline and collapse are quite different. All numbers from here, which is just a cleaner representation of UN numbers: https://www.worldometers.info/population/world/
In the end I think the future will become much like the past in that fertility is essentially the point of a nation. What is a few generations of fading prosperity when the longterm cost is the very survival of said civilization? It's just a nonsense deal that nobody would ever agree to on a macro scale, but that most of all Western civilization is trending towards.
Think about the implications of what you're suggesting in practice. You're not going to attract tens of millions of desirable migrants. They literally don't exist. And this is even more true as South Korea is but an extreme example of a trend happening through most of all Western bloc nations.
So you're going to end up having to import people with relatively little education, skills or experience, who don't speak, read, or write the language, have no knowledge of the culture, dramatically different working/cultural values, and so on. Europe was, in many ways, a trial run for this sort of scenario on a far smaller scale than what you're talking about, and the results have not been good. Immigration is not really a sustainable solution.
I think the Irish are a great example. We often think it was some huge migration because they had a really tough time integrating in spite of being near to completely culturally compatible. But the interesting thing is that that migration was negligible in size. The largest impact probably came after the Great Hunger in Ireland after which about a million migrants came to the US. [1] So that's a million migrants in a population of 31 million - 3.2%.
In fact for all the talk about the US being a nation of migrants we never had a foreign born population exceeding 14.8%. [1] And that was in 1890 after which a large number of anti-migration bills began being passed, culminating in a low of 4.7% in 1970. It's now up to 14.3% and once again issues are emerging at almost the exact same threshold. Go figure.
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So now let's consider your idea. South Korea is trending towards a scenario where they will eventually be losing 62% of their population every 20 years. And obviously that is exponential - it's not like it slows down, not unless they start having babies again. To maintain this decline with immigration would require literally just replacing just about the entire former population of South Korea with migrants.
You're talking about migration on a scale unimaginably larger than anything before, with what by necessity would be an extremely low quality of migrant, simply owing the massive numbers needed. So the idea of using immigration to "solve" this is essentially just proposing populating an 'abandoned' land with whoever wants to come. And of course that's possible, but obviously this is not a solution to anything by any reasonable meaning of the word 'solution.'
Your article seems to be describing citizenship scams. Quoting it:
"In 2022, out of the 792 South Korean women who entered into marriage with Vietnamese men, 556 were remarriages. Among these, 482, or 86.7%, were women who originally came from Vietnam and had become naturalized South Korean citizens. They acquired South Korean nationality through their first marriage with local men, then divorced, and later remarried Vietnamese men."
Beyond this, many/most places in Asia have a culture that views previously married women, or single women over a certain age, very negatively. In China the term is 'leftover women.' That can make it difficult for these women to marry a local, and make it very easy for a foreigner to find a wife that may be more desirable than one he might be able to find in his own country. But it's not doing much of anything for fertility.
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But more generally, what you're implying here is that fertility is a cultural problem and not necessarily an e.g. economic one. And I completely agree with you on that. But you're essentially aiming to change the culture by simply bringing in an inconceivably large bunch of new people (relative to previous migrations) and assuming things will turn out okay. But wouldn't it be rather less extreme to simply push for sustainable cultural values to begin with? Most Western nations are still fairly close to sustainable levels.
>But wouldn't it be rather less extreme to simply push for sustainable cultural values to begin with?
Completely change a culture that's developed over hundreds of years to make life too stressful to raise a family ?
The moment people(women) had the agency to opt out they did.
>Most Western nations are still fairly close to sustainable levels.
>Summary: U.S. population growth is projected to decline, and the population will become much older over time. Preventing these outcomes will require faster immigration by several multiples of its current rate.
Immigration is holding up the populations of many western nations.
Honestly it might just be time for a economic system that doesn't demand infinite growth. Who are we to tell a 25 year old to settle down and have 2.1 kids.
This is really a triumph of individual freedom over anything else. 100 years ago you'd be 20, pressured to marry someone you don't really like, and expected to have kids even if you'd rather do something else.
The current generation is largely saying no. It's not just an economic issue, most negative population growth countries are relatively wealthy.
You're intuition's a bit off on this issue. Here [1] is one poll on American's preferences in terms of fertility, among countless others you can find. They all tell the same tale: Americans want to have children, but aren't. And even those that have children aren't having as many as they want. The overall number that do not want to have children at all (8%) is verging on statistical noise.
And the motivation for having a stable, and ideally growing, population isn't about economics - it's about culture. Countries aren't defined by borders, but by the people within those borders. If you simply swap the populations of America and Saudi Arabia they're not going to start acting just fundamentally different. The two countries would begin to rapidly resemble the countries the people came from, even if the old rules and establishment initially remained in place.
And Western culture has currently found itself in an unsustainable place which means that if things don't change, it will simply die only to be replaced. And I think that'd be a shame, because while it has its own deep flaws, it's undeniable that Western culture has had an extremely positive overall influence on the world.
>And Western culture has currently found itself in an unsustainable place which means that if things don't change, it will simply die only to be replaced. And I think that'd be a shame, because while it has its own deep flaws, it's undeniable that Western culture has had an extremely positive overall influence on the world.
Your not wrong, but I think your dealing with an overly optimistic view of things. Just because someone says in a poll they want a family doesn't mean they have the means to start one.
At 19 my first girlfriend wanted twins, but it would have completely infesible for that to happen.
If we want this dream world to happen, it would need to be one where you can graduate highschool, buy a house and support a family. This mythical time has only existed once in American history.
Less people are making it. When you can barely eat, getting married and having a family isn't likely. And the decline in marriage rates supports this.
>We find that marriage rates among the middle class have declined significantly over the past 40 years and have now fallen below those in the top income quintile.
You're spinning in 180s fast enough to make somebody dizzy. It's clear that what's happening isn't some "triumph of individual liberty". So why is it happening? Economics is often given as a reason, but that's also not supported by data.
There is an extremely strong inverse relationship between fertility and income. And the reason for that, as you seemingly were already acknowledging yourself not long ago, is culture. We live in a wasteful culture where people are trained to want new things, and especially expensive things, solely because of advertising and culture.
Poor kids with Jordans that they can't tell apart from regular shoes blind, and mid class kids with the $1000 phones that they couldn't tell apart from a free-with-plan one for what they use them for, are the same sort of nonsense. These people are seen as gullible exploitable idiots by the corporations selling them product, and that is how all of society should see them, because it's true.
And I think people chase these things under some fantasy that it'll make them happy. But it never does - not beyond the length of time that e.g. you stick to a consistent argument, so they're left chasing carrots forever. Always planning to start that family once they finally catch that carrot. But they never do.
I don't think culture changes from the top, but rather from you and I. And that eventually leads to the top. Lincoln, for instance, did not end slavery - society ended slavery. Had it not been Lincoln it would have been somebody else imminently, perhaps done far more gracefully. Of course the top can enact change through forceful measures, and they can also try to influence culture, but more often than not they are products of us all.
And the idea for cultural shift is not hard or illogical in the least. Get rid of the consumerist mindset and you're probably 99% of the way there. Of course the problem there is that consumerism maximizes profits for corporations and GDP for politicians. Further emphasizing that the change must start with you and I. Like you said, perhaps it's time to acknowledge that infinite economic growth isn't really a realistic or even desirable goal.
There also seems to have been a collaborated push against traditional norms, which was probably just the natural extreme of expressions of freedom rather than any grand conspiracy - in fact Plato discussed this exact phenomena in his arguments against democracy thousands of years ago. And traditional norms should not define us, but they should be the norm. And indeed they already are, but you'd never know that if you paid any attention to marketing, media, and so on. Basically I think we want to create a society that walks a more reasonable middle ground rather than being on one extreme of norms = dogma, or on the other extreme of anti-norms = dogma.
I also think people don't realize how fast things start happening once they do start happening. For another example there you can approximate the change in population due to fertility (once a fertility rate is shared among a population) as being a scalar on population of fertility_rate/2 every 20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 means each and every woman has 1 child on average, yet nonetheless that means your population ends up declining by 50% every 20 years, exponentially, until you start having a healthy number of children again, or go extinct.
So for a bemusing one one, North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war. And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. South Korea with their fertility rate of 0.75 will not only see catastrophic population decline, but their entire economy will collapse alongside it. Going from 0.75 to a healthy fertility rate is probably not going to happen, so the North needs to merely wait, and keep having children.