[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.