Korea's birth rate drive struggles to sway 'YOLO' generation

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/koreas-birth-rate-drive-struggles-sway-yolo-generation-2024-08-27/

14 6 2 years ago

octopoc2• 2 years ago

What is needed is a shared identity with a vision for the future. Subsidies are good but not enough. It’s like the people who think America is a proposition nation: they never understood what made America great. A proposition can’t inspire anything that increases birth rates.

digitalengineer• 2 years ago

I'm sure this has nothing to do with it: "Asia’s Most Overworked Country Wants to Improve Work-Life Balance—By Raising Work Hours" and they are raising the cap on overtime! https://www.vice.com/en/article/south-korea-69-hour-work-wee...

octopoc2• 2 years ago

Ugh yeah that would be another prime candidate. I guess what I'm getting at though is how to help people want to have families. Whether they a family is even possible is the question you're bringing up, which is a good one as well.

1899-12-30• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-po_generation

huuhee3• 2 years ago

It's interesting how Koreans managed to to fit both Communist and Capitalist dystopias on the same peninsula. Seems like being overworked to death by corporate overlords is even worse to birth rate, than traditional oppression and starvation. North Korea might yet win the long-term game through demographics.

big-green-man• 2 years ago

And all approaches to this problem will continue to fail. It's not a question of affordability, it's a question of priority and social incentive. Sure, there are people that would have children if housing and things were more affordable, but they're not the majority of people in this situation, so all that can do is slow down the process.

These people don't want to have children. Two generations of marketing and propaganda designed to encourage hedonism, sanctioned by governments im the name of economic growth, driven by the intense need to outcompete rivals they are arguably at war with, has resulted in a culture of people who do not want to give up the amenities they enjoy in order to care for someone else. You see this across the western world, the exact same pattern, although it's more stark and recent and sudden in the east. The cold war drove societies to prioritize economic growth in order to win, and in order to achieve this, artificially created domestic markets using individualistic and hedonistic advertising. Then on the back end you now have an economy that can weather a storm and on the front end you get to show the world how superior your system is because look at all the nice things everyone has. As a consequence, you've got a couple of generations of people, each with increasing intensity, that consider their own children to be competitors against them for their own happiness.

How do you fix this? I don't know. I don't know that it can be fixed without significant amounts of suffering. I don't think it can. From my perspective, there are a handful of potential solutions, each of which I'm sure the top eggheads in the governments of all these countries have thought about, and each of which I expect to be tried by at least one of these countries. They are:

1) a brave new world,

2) a handmaids tale, authoritarian dictatorship mandating reproduction, which means oppression the likes of which we have rarely seen,

3) extinction of cultures, but states won't just go out with a whimper so this looks mostly like mass migration and fast, intense cultural change, complete with upheaval that comes along with such a shock, and

4) propagandistically engineered generational division that encourages a sort of counterculture "return to family" idea where a generation rebels by focusing on kids, and insists that those elders that didn't have the foresight to rear children are on their own.

I'm sure there are other ideas, but you can glean from each of these that they each come with at least one demographic that will suffer badly. In the first two it's everyone, in the third it's mostly natives but ultimately everyone, and in the final option it's the elderly who will retire into squalor. We will probably see some mix of more than one of these in each country that must resort to them, and the first one is the least likely because it is very much a science fiction scenario but the technology exists already to pull it off if some state decides to pursue it. I'm partial to number 4 if a better solution cannot be had. 3 looks most likely and is already being tried in places that have had these problems for a long time and/or that have relatively recently had their populations decimated by warfare, but it's only a stopgap until this becomes a global problem, which we are seeing the beginnings of now. I do believe that in the US, where number 3 has been going on for quite some time, that number 4 has recently begun.

Korea's birth rate drive struggles to sway 'YOLO' generation

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