https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-24/fastest-aging-wealthy-economy-breaks-own-fertility-record-again

Quote
South Korea has once again shattered its own record for the world's lowest fertility rate as it faces the prospect of its population of 51 million people more than halving by the end of this century.

Korean women were estimated, based on 2021 data, to have an average of just 0.81 children over their lifetimes, down from 0.84 a year earlier, the statistics office said Wednesday. The number of newborns declined last year to 260,600, which equates to about 0.5% of the population.

The BBC Rethink series (thanks Rupert) had a series on demographics. The talked about Korea. One takeaway that I got was that a nation has three dials and you can set two dials to high, but not three:

1. low immigration
2. low fertility
3. dynamic economy

In other words, you can have low immigration and low fertility if you are willing to give up on a dynamic economy, which is the choice that Japan has made. This post made me wonder about Korea and immigration. Following a link in the original article, I got to this

QuoteRecruited four years ago to represent the ruling Saenuri Party as a proportional representative in parliament, Lee has become an outspoken campaigner for immigration in a society that prides itself on ethnic homogeneity

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-02/movie-star-turned-lawmaker-spurs-immigration-debate-in-korea#xj4y7vzkg

So it sounds like most Koreans want to walk the path of stagnation.

As as strong as the anti-immigration voices in the US are, it always strikes me how much the melting pot mentality we (I??) have. This willingness to let a nation wither for the sake of ethnic homogeneity just seems so foreign to me (for lack of a better phrase). It's hard for me to wrap my head around that choice.

>> for the sake of ethnic homogeneity

Ethnic issues are part of the mix, but so is the realization that unconstrained population growth is a recipe for difficulties of many sorts.

Certainly unconstrained growth in parts of the world is a major stressor there too. Nigeria above all.

But in Korea we are not talking about unconstrained population growth, but population freefall. The projection is for the country to lose over half its population if fertility rates hold steady and immigration doesn't fill the gap. Those are big ifs, of course. The future has a way of surprising us.

Still, that sort of decline has all kinds of problems too. In particular things like the ratio of working people to retired people gets so out of whack, you can end up with each working person supporting two retired people and it becomes very hard for people to get services. Radically increasing the retirement age helps with that, but most governments can't do that.

A modern country cutting its population in half in 70 years is unprecedented. In fact, I doubt there's any modern industrialized country that has ever seen any population decline over a period of 20 years (Japan is 10 years into modest decline).

What happens? Who takes care of all those old people? What happens to all the housing? Japan has bet big on robotics instead of immigration. But there are some interesting articles about people living in these 1960s towns in Japan that consist of mostly empty apartment blocks. Sort of like the Japanese version of some of those Detroit neighborhoods, except everyone lives in one giant, increasingly empty building.

That said, the future is not predictable. Traditionally, fertility has been tied to economy. After the Black Death, age at first marriage and thus fertility increased as land was more available and there was an inheritance effect where family wealth that had been splitting got concentrated.

If the compensation for the rare few workers still left gets high enough, that might reverse the trends. For example, if it becomes financially feasible for only one spouse to work and still have three kids, I think you'll see a lot more families with three kids. There's no reason to think that the current fertility rate will in fact last 70 years.

Anyway, it's fascinating.

Japan births at new low as population shrinks and ages | AP News

https://apnews.com/article/business-japan-economy-82a54de52e3d121b80b9ba2bc0917225

The global drop in birth rates seems to be accelerating.  I bet the current projections are off.

8 billion people, 6 billion jobs.

Or 6 billion people, 4 billion jobs
http://th3core.com/talk/hardware-technology/robotic-apple-harvester-in-action-oddlyterrifying/

It remains to be seen.

Sperm counts worldwide have plunged 62% in under 50 years: study

https://nypost.com/2022/11/15/sperm-counts-worldwide-have-plunged-62-in-under-50-years-study/

>>sperm

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/475460-the-last-straw?language=en-US

>>>sperm

Xenoestrogens are ubiquitous today.  Testosterone levels are declining too.  The average human is less futile and has less sexual desire than just a few decades ago -- that's only part of the picture though.  I do believe that there are a lot of social and economic reasons for the decline too.

BTW: if you are in the mood for an on-topic dystopian movie I highly recommend Children of Men.

>Children of Men

Great flick!! One of my faves.

Quote from: littleman on December 01, 2022, 06:34:16 PM
The average human is less futile

If only that were not a typo.

>less futile

Sorry, my dyslexic brain does weird things with typed text.  I'll sometimes see letters on the page that aren't there or replace words with other words.  It's very strange, but I can't fully trust what I see.