[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.