[pjc50]

> Nobody knows

Have you tried asking them? In particular, asking the women who are making the career-or-children decision?

South Korea is invoked, but it seems like the population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/sou... of which 20m live in Seoul.

This discussion comes up a lot on HN, and it seems to be one where there are answers, but people don't like the answers, so they go back to feigning ignorance.

[blagie]

No, the population has not "levelled out" in Korea.

These dynamics have a pretty long timeline. To give an extreme example, if you, for example, have a city with 10M old people who can't have kids anymore, you can reliably predict the population will be 0 once they pass.

The demographic pyramid of South Korea is scary:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m...

Learn how to read these plots and what they mean.

There are almost no young people.

There are almost no kids in South Korea.

Unless there is mass immigration, the population of South Korea will implode.

Even if people began breeding like rabbits today, there is nothing that can be done; when the 0-20 year old population is of working age, there will be a massive number of old people, and almost no one of working age.

[pjc50]

> There are almost no kids in South Korea.

That page says 11% of the population is under 15.

Rather like global warming, the question is "what are the old people of today prepared to change in order to avert a problem that only becomes acute after they are dead?"

[blagie]

It's going to become acute well before. It's more like the tragedy of the commons.

You need a tax / working base of some size to produce enough stuff. That simply won't be in place when the current kids are adults, and adults or elderly.

Barring robots and AI -- which admittedly looks like a very real possibility now -- the current adults will not have enough working-age people to support them when they're old.

Indeed, the problem is acute only because they won't be dead. We're all counting on our kids to support us when we're old, only now indirectly, via taxes and mechanisms like social security.

If South Korea simply had 1/4 of its current population, everyone would have more space and resources, and things would probably be okay. Property values and economy would contract in absolute terms, but everyone has more stuff.

[bell-cot]

To portray it as an existential problem for South Korea - I'd focus on their next-door neighbor. Elderly folks might be of limited utility when the (North) Korean People's Army marched in. And the South's cyber-defenses might well prove inadequate, to keep their drones and robo-soldiers functioning properly.

[AnimalMuppet]

And a population where, say, everyone uniformly lives to 75 should have 20% of its population under 15. So that page says that South Korea has just over half as many kids as it should have for a stable population.

[gwd]

> population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m

This video would beg to differ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk&pp=ygUWa3Vyemdlc...

That said, I am inclined to disagree with his take -- when women and men are both expected to work 996, when housing takes up a huge percentage of your income, when the only way you think you can assure a good life for your children is to pay exorbitant amounts for private tutoring, then yeah, 0 or 1 seems like the best option.

This may be a bit of a weird take, but I wonder if it might make sense to just explicitly make "rearing the next generation" a "public good" career choice. Some people are far more cut out, by personality and character, to raise children. Rather than trying to exhort every single family to have 2.1, find people who are good at child-rearing, give them training, and give them government support to raise 8 kids.

[pjc50]

Why have two people linked the same youtube video as if that's some kind of response to a graph? The population has (past tense) levelled out. It is roughly flat over the past few years. It is not yet falling at a significant rate. It is a long time away from "the population is 5% off its peak", and my argument is that that is the real signal (in the control theory sense) which people might respond to, the rise in empty properties and unfilled jobs.

> find people who are good at child-rearing, give them training, and give them government support to raise 8 kids.

"Mother of the Soviet Union" or "welfare queen"?

It might work, but a lot of people get really, really mad at taxpayers money subsidizing other people's children.

[gwd]

> Why have two people linked the same youtube video as if that's some kind of response to a graph?

Because the "but" in the sentence implies that leveling out means there's no problem. Filling out the missing pieces:

> South Korea is invoked [as an example of a country that is in major trouble], but it seems like the population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m [, which implies it's reached a stable and sustainable equilibrium.]

The video predicts not that it's at a stable plateau, but that it's reached the apex of its curve and is about to begin plummeting.

[ben_w]

> Rather than trying to exhort every single family to have 2.1, find people who are good at child-rearing, give them training, and give them government support to raise 8 kids.

Do you mean more like surrogacy, or more like teacher/personal tutor?

The former… I'm told is medically inadvisable over 5 births, even if humans used to have 10 in the hope of 2 surviving to adulthood. But that may be confounding variables given 5+ is unusual.

The latter is, I think, a good idea that people will object to actually paying for — "teacher" is not as highly respected a profession as it ought to be.

[DoingIsLearning]

> This discussion comes up a lot on HN, and it seems to be one where there are answers, but people don't like the answers, so they go back to feigning ignorance.

A real interesting data point that made reconsider some of my assumptions on birth rates in developed nations is Israel.

There is a really interesting piece (albeit with a conservative bias) that can articulate this far better than I can. [0]

[0] https://nationalpost.com/opinion/danielle-kubes-the-truth-be...

[bell-cot]

The Nat'l Post just says "it's cultural".

Without data on the relative affordability of living and having children in Israel, and on how parent-friendly (especially mom-friendly) life actually is there - that's 95% useless for comparing to other countries.

(Yes, I get that a very pro-child culture could translate to very pro-child policies.)

[Etheryte]

This is not what has happened in South Korea though. They've hit the top of the curve and pretty much every projection agrees that it's drastically downhill from here, the main disagreement is over how quickly. Kurzgesagt has a good video on this [0], they estimate that by 2060 the population of South Korea will have shrunk by 30% and will be heavily skewed towards the elderly.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk

[harshreality]

Sometimes asking people will give you true insight, and sometimes it will give you false insight because the people themselves don't consciously know and make things up that seem right but are not; or, a behavior or decision is the product of a chain of other things that's too complex to reason about or communicate easily even if each link in the chain is consciously known.

On South Korea, you might want to consider this chart instead: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/KOR/sou...

KOR's Fertility rate has been under 1.25 for two decades. It follows then that "stable" population can only be the result of three factors:

1. Pushing the population curve out through longer lives;

2. Immigration;

3. Time-effect offsets of the fertility rate; for instance, if it's the projected fertility rate of females born in a given year, it would take roughly 20-40 years for the fertility rate to have its effect on the population curve.

[pjc50]

I deliberately chose the population number graph rather than the birth rate graph because that's the one that actually affects resource usage (housing etc), rather than its first derivative.

If the numbers start dropping to the extent that opportunities open up, I believe that people's views might start changing.

We see localized depopulation of e.g. small Italian or Japanese villages as the local economy dries up. But Korea still has a real and growing economy! It's just perhaps not evenly distributed.

[viridian]

You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. The median age is 45.6 and rapidly rising. All of these people can't decide to adapt to market conditions and have children. The population crash is almost inevitable unless SK breaks free of population-wide human behaviors and goes from having less than 1 child per couple to having 6.

[baxtr]

It’s sad that there seems not be structured research on this topic.

Also important to ask people who had children 30-50 years ago why they decided to have children and then to compare to today.