[HN Gopher] South Korea: The only middle power of its kind
___________________________________________________________________
South Korea: The only middle power of its kind
Author : mooreds
Score : 169 points
Date : 2021-08-03 12:56 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nationalinterest.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (nationalinterest.org)
| alephnan wrote:
| Wait. Korea was just updated to a developed country last month
| ?!?!
|
| > South Korea's rise to a middle power status comes without much
| historical baggage
|
| In terms of technological, industrial and infrastructural
| innovation, SK has less 'tech debt' than Japan and the US.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Upgraded by some specific UN agency. They don't have a monopoly
| on labeling countries developed and probably lag years behind
| dotcommand wrote:
| All of these kind of propaganda is the same. But nationalinterest
| is a propaganda outlet and the author "is a Member on the policy
| advisory boards of the Ministry of Unification, the Ministry of
| Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the National
| Assembly's Committee on Unification, Diplomacy, and Trade."
|
| Without reading the article - "Western" values/democracy,
| "liberal values" and lgbt. I guarantee it.
|
| Firstly, you can't be a "power" if you are occupied. You are a
| vassal, nothing more.
|
| The only thing korea will be used for is to spread the lgbt
| agenda in asia as it's the weakest asian "power". It isn't a
| secret that we've been trying to peddle the lgbt agenda to asia
| and everywhere we tried - japan, taiwan, philippines, thailand,
| etc - flat-out rejected. The silly awards ( oscar, etc ) and
| praise ( like this propaganda piece ) are just worthless payments
| given to korea in exchange for accepting and peddling the lgbt
| agenda. Isn't that what the article is really about?
|
| > Liberal values such as freedom of speech, basic human rights,
| and racial and LGBT equality could have a universal appeal if
| advocated by non-Western democracies like South Korea.
|
| There it is. Vassals/subjects/etc are always 10 or 20 years
| behind their masters. The only thing south korea is an example
| of, is selling themselves and their people to the highest bidder.
|
| Maybe instead of doing other's bidding, south korea should look
| at their hideous fertility rates (lowest in the world), growing
| societal divide and reuniting their divided country. Certainly
| more important than mindlessly peddling "Western" interests. No?
| Or is that what "powers" do, serve other people's interests?
| eranima wrote:
| It's pretty disgusting that this crap is upvoted on Hacker
| News. This site's slow descent into reactionary politics is
| saddening
| ndkwj wrote:
| How dare someone not be a liberal!
| kayone wrote:
| it's absolutely amazing that you are criticizing someone else
| for pushing an agenda. Please enlighten us, wtf is the lgbt
| agenda. it sounds scary.
| poopypoopington wrote:
| "Indeed, South Korea is the only country that successfully made
| its transition from a former colony to an advanced economy. One
| could say that Australia or Canada, along with the United States,
| used to be a colony."
|
| One could say that Australia, the US, and Canada used to be
| colonies because they were colonies. Like what? Do you not know
| basic world history?
| emptysongglass wrote:
| I don't see anyone mentioning this so I'll take a gander with my
| "modern jackass" [1] solution based on my own personal
| observations of the reasons why I don't want kids:
|
| I have so much I still want to do with my life and I want to sink
| what time free from work into dinners and trips with my wife.
| Given the extant threat modern nations face, why aren't they
| offering to care for and raise our children? They'd be raised by
| professional caregivers with educations in pedagogy, surely an
| in-aggregate higher quality of childcare than that given by
| stressed out, first-time parents. Mine did a terrible job of
| raising me. I think if Denmark or South Korea wants a higher
| birthrate they should offer to step in.
|
| I've been around my friends' kids, it's not pleasant. There's a
| very "big ego thing" going on and sudden tantrums that threaten
| to topple the softest evening.
|
| Just my 2 cents but I have a hard time understanding why none of
| these governments have proposed such a system. I'm sure there'd
| be a big uptake. Open to being schooled here but please be nice.
|
| [1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/293/a-little-bit-of-
| knowled...
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I love my kids, it's everyone else's I can't stand. :)
| Tade0 wrote:
| > why aren't they offering to care for and raise our children?
|
| But they do. You'd be surprised how many crucial skills are
| taught in kindergarten.
|
| But there's also the question of scale - for certain things
| infants and children need their caregivers' undivided
| attention. Otherwise you end up with something akin to an
| orphanage, and there are plenty of data points suggesting that
| going in this direction is a very bad idea.
|
| Overall some things are already being done, other don't scale,
| so it's up to the parents to do that and the government's role
| to make it as easy as possible.
| asoneth wrote:
| Many countries already invest substantial resources towards
| caring for children in the form of subsidized daycares, public
| schooling, subsidized food, etc. I expect demographics will
| force many countries to become even more generous in this
| regard.
|
| If you're referring to the government or other entity taking
| _primary_ guardianship of children that does already occur in
| the foster /adoption system, but I don't understand why you
| think that would boost the birth rate. Would it motivate you to
| have children if the government offered to take them off your
| hands after they're born?
|
| I suppose the closest example I can think of to something like
| that would be joining a commune or kibbutz and avoiding the
| childcare chores, but I understand that most of those groups
| have a whole other set of demographic/retention issues.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful response.
|
| > Would it motivate you to have children if the government
| offered to take them off your hands after they're born?
|
| Yes, I'd give them all the babies int the world if they
| offered to take them off my hands after they were born.
| "Kibbutz" was the word that sprang to my mind when I wrote my
| first comment.
|
| I'm curious, too, if the state could professionalize
| birthing: a woman would be paid a hefty sum to bear a child
| to term and the child's care would be taken over by an
| intimately sized kibbutz. My understanding of the failure of
| orphanages is that it is both the origin of trauma that
| haunts its orphans and the poverty of resources and
| caregivers allocated to them.
| asoneth wrote:
| > I'd give them all the babies in the world if they offered
| to take them off my hands after they were born
|
| Assuming you have not already done so, perhaps becoming a
| surrogate or donating sperm would be an option for you?
| While it's not exactly handing a baby to the state, there
| are many couples who would be interested in raising
| children but are not biologically capable.
|
| At least of the parents I know, I am skeptical that simply
| offering to take additional children off their hands would
| incentivize them to continue giving birth to more children.
|
| > a woman would be paid a hefty sum to bear a child to term
|
| In the US the market has determined that sum to be $25,000
| on average.[1] I don't know whether you would consider that
| hefty, but it's at least an order of magnitude lower than
| what it would take to incentivize me to bear a child.
|
| [1] https://surrogate.com/surrogates/becoming-a-
| surrogate/being-...
| mypastself wrote:
| Among other things, the fact that South Korea is referred to by
| name a total of seven times in just the first paragraph makes
| this look less like a "real" article and more like M.L.-generated
| SEO keyword stuffing.
| calmd wrote:
| SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you
| think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the
| lowest birthrate in the world.
|
| This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon,
| or they will have to open up massive immigration which will
| completely change the country.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea
|
| How does the developed world pull out of this type of tailspin?
| Japan and other nations are also facing this exact same issue and
| we seem to be not paying attention to it.
|
| The core issue is that in most of the developed world, people do
| not have enough children. And even immigrants in their second
| generation and beyond also do not have enough children, as such
| it appears to be a cultural/way of life/society norms problem. It
| is as if the developed modern world is currently designed as a
| population sink.
|
| This is going to be one of the grand challenges of the 50 years.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| As far as I can see the only problem is with how the pension
| systems are structured. A falling birth rate by itself doesn't
| really mean that much. In fact there might be benefits for
| employment, like there was after the black death. But as it is
| our current economic system is based on growth and having more
| young people supporting the elderly. So it seems like if the
| trend continues we will have to restructure retirement
| benefits.
| 100011 wrote:
| There is no reason to believe that 'immigration' can fix the
| native birth rates of South Koreans. This is an implicit
| assumption dreamt by the utterly deranged.
| michaelt wrote:
| No, but if the problem is "we don't have enough carers to
| care for our elderly people" then importing carers via
| immigration is a quick fix.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| Invent/make artificial womb. It's already feasible I think.
| Probably tons of money to be made. Why it's not a thing yet?
|
| Women have many options/entertainment now and don't want to go
| through pregnancy especially multiple times. This coupled with
| fact that you have only 10 years for childbearing (before 40)
| and you drastically cut carrier advancement when it just
| started explains a lot IMO. Requiring two people to support
| family in XXI century feels like a scam and race to the bottom.
| It's mostly due to scarcity of land that you have to bid on
| housing (that owned by too rich people in many cases, so they
| literaly can manipulate market to extract rent) and all
| profitable activity moved to cities so you also want bw there.
|
| Make housing cheaper => I think will happen with
| decentralisation of energy sources and cheaper transport
| (tesla). Also some family friendly social policies (china?).
|
| I think remote work made a lot of people choose to live in
| houses instead and this might lead to some positive change in
| demography.
|
| But the cheapest way IMO is to just make families trendy via
| Hollywood (instead of this homo propaganda on Netflix)
| robjan wrote:
| Who benefits from the artificial womb? The bearing of the
| child is much less of a disincentive than other factors like
| money, space and the ultra competitive school system we have
| in many Asian regions.
| [deleted]
| jollybean wrote:
| Demographic decline is only a bad thing from a fairly singular,
| industrialist, globalist perspective.
|
| While it definitely means some reduction and prestige and
| power, and in some areas scale does provide advantage - in most
| ways, it's not decline in anything but the 'major shareholders
| of the economy'.
|
| It's a 'Investor Problem' for the most part.
|
| Japan never needed 180M people to maintain their standard
| living, so from the average person's perspective it looks
| different.
|
| Otherwise, it's a little bit of an economic Ponzi scheme.
|
| Of course, 'permanently fewer children' to the point where
| population goes to 0 - well that's a problem, but hopefully
| they will mitigate that and find a happy equilibrium.
| keewee7 wrote:
| The solution is immigration but with high barrier to entry.
|
| I live in Denmark, a country portrayed as anti-immigrant by
| American and British media.
|
| However there is no opposition to educated professional
| immigrants from India, China, Iran and Eastern Europe.
|
| Brain drain of these countries could be a problem but countries
| like India and Iran are probably producing many more highly
| educated individuals than they can domestically employ.
| mathverse wrote:
| You cant just easily immigrate to CJK countries.You will not
| become a part of the society.That's just impossible.Not even
| those of us that married koreans,speak the language and know
| the customs are that accepted in the society.We are tolerated
| and easily live and work there but you will never become
| korean or japanese or chinese.
|
| You will always be the "foreigner".
| Aperocky wrote:
| China is slightly more culturally inclusive having less
| homogeneity but the immigration laws are basically "Don't
| come (unless you're ethnically Chinese)", not that there
| are any real demand..
| scotty79 wrote:
| That's normal. If you move to Poland from wherever, don't
| expect you'll ever become Polish. Not really. Even if you
| are slavic as f. You have a better chance if you speak
| flawless Polish with flawless neutral polish accent (and
| look slavic as f). But as long as people know you came from
| other country and didn't have any polish ancestors you'd
| still be foreigner. But we will respect you for doing well
| to blend in.
|
| Only America is a country where you can call yourself
| American after living there for few years.
| simmanian wrote:
| To give you another perspective, I would say that many East
| Asians living in the West don't feel like they actually
| belong there either. I moved to west coast America when I
| was a child. I still remember vividly the first thing I
| heard and understood in class. It was another kid telling
| me that I'm a "stupid Asian." The barrier is there. We feel
| it. And let's not pretend Europe is better about this.
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| There are Japanese-only establishments in Japan. Ever
| seen those in the west?
| simmanian wrote:
| I was hoping people would find it in themselves to try to
| rid the world of these invisible barriers instead of
| pointing out how "they do it worse than we do."
| fleaaaa wrote:
| Difference on appearance will always be there unless the
| gene is mixed till the degree you can't tell the race. As
| in exact opposite position of yours, I think it's just a
| thing that can't be addressed in our life time, though I
| might be wrong.
| garden_hermit wrote:
| Studies mostly show that, in the long run, family-based
| immigration policies lead to more economic growth than the
| "best and brightest". Basically, forming immigrant
| communities is useful--they provide support to new entrants,
| and lead to better outcomes for everyone. Importing a few
| educated doctors, rather than families or broader
| populations, leads to less long-term benefit.
| Sammi wrote:
| Interesting. Would love a source.
| Balero wrote:
| This is hopefully just a temporary solution though. What
| happens when these places get rich enough that their birth
| rates also drop?
|
| To butcher an unrelated saying: "We can't all get immigrants
| from each other".
| backprop1993 wrote:
| Iran scheduled to peak in 2060:
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/iran-population
| scbrg wrote:
| Perhaps we need to find another way to fuel the economy
| than the never ending pyramid scheme called population
| growth. At 8 billion (causing massive environmental damage)
| a drop in population would certainly not be a bad thing.
| simmanian wrote:
| My hot take is that we need to find a new system that
| doesn't depend on perpetual economic growth. With both
| China and India rapidly developing (that's what, 3
| billion people with money to spend), climate change will
| only accelerate until and unless we find an alternate
| model.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Pay people to be stay at home parents so they don't face an
| enormous opportunity cost / survival threat to having a kid.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| They do that in France, and birth rates are actually higher
| than most Western nations
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I could not find anything on this. I see that they have
| payments to support households with kids but do they
| specifically pay people to be stay at home parents?
| iammisc wrote:
| Except the USA where we don't do anything. Don't even have
| paid maternal leave.
| mushbino wrote:
| This is why the US relies heavily on immigration. Keeps
| profit margins higher.
| iammisc wrote:
| Except non-immigrants and immigrant americans both have
| higher birth rates, even if immigrant's are higher.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Extrapolating current trends to infinity always predicts some
| kind of disaster.
|
| But current trends never continue forever. In large part
| because we like to avoid disasters.
| jinseokim wrote:
| I live in SK, so I have a lot of things to talk about the
| birthrate.
|
| The reason why the birth rate strangely low, is quite
| interwoven. TL;DR: People (think they) are not capable enough
| to raise a child.
|
| First: Real estate prices is skyrocketing. This bizarre
| phenomenon began in the 2000s. The 17th administration
| completely reversed the situation, which became another
| problem, and the 18th administration made real estate prices to
| soar again. The 19th (present) administration tried to control
| real estate prices with complicated regulation, but it never
| worked so far.
|
| Second: An educational craze. 386(1960s) and X(1970s)
| generations believe that children should go to the prestige
| university to survive in this harsh world. So they let their
| children go to 'hagwon'[1], something like cram school but
| really competitive. E.g. (a) Almost students in SK go to
| hagwon. (b) Some 6th~9th grade students study 10AM~10PM
| everyday in hagwon during the vacation, to pass an enterance
| exam specialized high school(10th~12th grade). (c) Some
| kindergartens promotes themselves as "English Kindergarten";
| where every teacher and student speaks English. The problem is
| -- because of these craze, a lot of childless family concern
| that they can't afford expenses for hagwon($300~400/mo in
| average. In the case of the above-mentioned entrance exam, It
| goes more than $1000/mo) so their child won't be happy because
| they'll fall behind when they grow up.
|
| Third: Saving for retirement. Because of these problem, rearing
| child in Korea costs an arm and a leg. In the past, education
| was not overheated like this, and Korean-specific mindset
| forced family to give birth. However, starting with military
| administration's birth control policy, people changed their
| mindset, and now a significant number of people are more
| interested in saving for retirement than give birth.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagwon
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Why is immigration the answer? All you need is workers, not
| immigrants. SK will probably do what the gulf states do. They
| will bring in foreign labor but with a clear separation between
| expat workers and potential "immigrants". These people will
| work finite contracts and then be literally sent home once the
| contract is over, mooting any concept of naturalization. Gulf
| states have done this relatively successfully for decades.
| juskrey wrote:
| With complete degeneration of nearly everything else
| mushbino wrote:
| Why is the issue low birthrates and not an economic system that
| relies on perpetual growth? Is there a more sustainable system?
| nwienert wrote:
| There's no problem with low birth rates, this is a meme that is
| told by a few economists and yet a very slight depopulation is
| not only survivable but has upsides as well and so far both
| South Korea and Japan (for going on three decades) have
| maintained incredibly competitive across nearly all metrics,
| certainly far better off than the US in so many ways. I got in
| an extensive debate over this with statistics a few months back
| on HN and have yet to see convincing evidence: lots of news
| articles that are inconclusive, and charts that show them doing
| as well or better than any European country or most any country
| in the world.
| maeln wrote:
| Yes it is possible to manage ... when you have almost no
| government run retirement system. In country where the
| workforce pay for the retired, like France and a lot of
| European country, having your workforce shrink is a huge
| issue.
| 100011 wrote:
| This is correct. There is no logical reason or empirical
| evidence that opening country to mass immigration will help
| fixing native birth rates. Problems such as housing will just
| increase as there's more competition for a 5 square meter
| flat.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's another offshoot of the "growth at all costs!" mentality
| you see in Wall Street and governments.
| refurb wrote:
| What do you think pays for your healthcare, public
| pensions, infrastructure as your population ages out of the
| workforce?
|
| The Grenadier Guards?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We've seen an immense growth of productivity since the
| 1970s in the US, with stagnant wages. Perhaps it's time
| some of that goes into the issues you mentioned instead
| of wealthy pockets?
| nwienert wrote:
| As long as gov spending per capita is not near or above
| income (ie, responsible fiscal policy) and you don't
| over-inflate, there's no reason you can't support all
| this with declining population.
| calmd wrote:
| Let's take that at face value.
|
| If shrinking populations are okay, what is the desired
| population level? Right now no country seems to be able to
| stop this decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just
| currently shrinking.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > If shrinking populations are okay, what is the desired
| population level?
|
| The answer might simply be "we don't know" here.
|
| > Right now no country seems to be able to stop this
| decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just
| currently shrinking.
|
| Why is that being treated as inherently _bad_ , though?
| calmd wrote:
| > Why is that being treated as inherently bad, though?
|
| We are not making this decision completely willingly, it
| is more just happening and it is out of the governments
| control. To me this means it is risky, and can we pull
| out of it? How do we pull out of this shrinkage?
|
| I guess the good thing is that the developed world is all
| in this together, rather than only parts of it. That
| reduces the chance of massive disparities as a result of
| the changes it causes.
|
| If would feel much more comfortable that we completely
| understood it, and how to control it.
|
| There will be a lot of changes that will occur. For
| example conservatives are less effected by population
| shrinkage than liberals in the US -- probably just
| because conservatives are less likely to be city
| dwellers? Or maybe it is conservatives have different
| values... or a combination of values that effect whether
| they live in the cities.
|
| Atheists have lower reproduction rates than those who are
| religious as well. (which probably correlates with
| liberalism/conservatism as well.)
|
| I wonder if there are any genetic contributions to
| conservatism/religiousness? If so this may be a period of
| rapid genetic evolution...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > We are not making this decision completely willingly,
| it is more just happening and it is out of the
| governments control. To me this means it is risky, and
| can we pull out of it? How do we pull out of this
| shrinkage?
|
| Isn't all this equally true of population growth as well
| as shrinkage?
| ptsneves wrote:
| No. Major population growth has been happening since the
| times of the new world migration.
|
| The only major time i can think of where there were major
| depopulation events are in the times of the Fertile
| Crescent civilizations and perhaps in Asia in Angkor Wat.
| In both of the scenarios this massive depopulation led to
| the extinction of those civilizations.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > No. Major population growth has been happening since
| the times of the new world migration.
|
| Nah, at least not of this magnitude. The world's
| population only hit a billion at about 1800, two billion
| around WWII. We're now at nearly eight. The idea that we
| understand all the consequences of that is silly; we're
| only just recently starting to understand the climate
| change aspect of it.
| mazlix wrote:
| I'm not sure with the numbers but but bc were dealing
| with populations/exponential growth it's possible the
| rate of pop growth (doubling time) hasn't changed much
| for a longer time period.
|
| However the childhood mortality rates have gone down so
| raw # of children per household could be lower and still
| have a higher growth rate.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| There is no problem with low birth rates in the long term.
| There are, however, massive problems during the many decades
| when the population pyramid is inverted and there are 4 or 5
| retirees for every child, a ratio which Japan is about to hit
| and where South Korea will be in a couple of decades as well.
|
| As for why this is a problem, Japan's pension system is
| already insolvent and the country is starting to experience
| massive manpower shortages in sectors like nursing,
| agriculture and construction. Sometime last year Japan passed
| the point where the amount of money & effort needed to
| maintain existing infrastructure exceeded the country's
| capability to build it, and the depopulation and dilapidation
| of Japan's second/third tier cities and the countryside is
| already striking and poised to accelerate rapidly as
| villages, towns and cities can no longer fund their basic
| obligations.
| [deleted]
| citrusybread wrote:
| I mean, you could almost make the same argument for Canada
| & the US.
|
| It's mostly due to political gridlock here, but look at all
| the crumbling bridges and dams -- the transit that never
| got built, and the feeling that somehow we are wealthy yet
| we never have any money for important issues.
|
| Japan's GDP per capita still keeps growing. And the average
| Japanese still has an excellent quality of life.
|
| Japan also has so many pointless infrastructure projects;
| things like laying concrete into river beds to control
| their flows, or retention systems to stop mudslides that
| only started because they clear-cut forests and replaced
| them with sugi as a make-work project... The workers are
| there, if they got rid of the make-work projects.
| CrimpCity wrote:
| Can you link to your previous thread?
|
| I'm just curious if you considered military concerns since
| war is a young man's game as they say.
| calmd wrote:
| I think robotized war changes the equation a bit here. At
| least with regards to non-adjacent conflicts. But for
| adjacent conflicts between non-superpowers, if one area is
| depopulated, it may be much easier to walk in and keep that
| territory.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you
| think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the
| lowest birthrate in the world.
|
| Its kind of amazing how often people make judgements based on
| extrapolating demographic trends over much longer terms than
| there is any reason to think that they will hold, and then as
| soon as they fail turn around and do the same thing based on
| the _new_ demographic trend.
|
| Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its
| important.
|
| OTOH, most of the arguments I've seen for it actually being
| important (in the near term) are the kind where you scratch the
| surface and underneath is pure racism, so I'm not all that
| concerned.
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| > Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its
| important.
|
| Yes it is. The only first-world nation with replacement birth
| rates is Israel.
|
| Caucescu famously tried to increase the birthrate and that
| backfired spectacularly. Sweden tried to do a lot of stuff,
| still doesn't work. Japan also tried.
| oblio wrote:
| Ceausescu. And he did achieve it for quite a while, ergo
| "decreteii":
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770
| tablespoon wrote:
| > OTOH, most of the arguments I've seen for it actually being
| important (in the near term) are the kind where you scratch
| the surface and underneath is pure racism, so I'm not all
| that concerned.
|
| Can you go into more detail on that? In some respects
| "demographic suicide" solved with immigration has many (but
| not all) of the characteristics of colonization, and I think
| it's a reasonable speculation that colonized and diminished
| cultures would be unhappy with more than just the coercive
| aspects of their colonization, and that a non-racist person
| could have reasonable anxieties about their culture becoming
| diminished and dying out in the future. Though I suppose
| racists probably see an opportunity to exploit those
| anxieties to spread their racist ideology.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Can you go into more detail on that?
|
| A typical example is a two-step argument equating
| race/biological heritage with culture and/or ethnic
| identity coupled with appeals to an imperative to preserve
| culture and/ot ethnic identity.
|
| Something like this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28051854
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Something like this:
|
| Honestly that comment doesn't read "racist" to me. Maybe
| the disconnect is taking "culture" too literally, or
| using "culture" when one really means "people" (i.e. a
| combination of culture and ancestry/descent). Also even
| though an entire culture can _technically_ be transmitted
| memetically, that 's _practically_ not the case except in
| cases of early childhood adoption. Immigrant populations
| may tend to take on certain cultural characteristics
| (e.g. economic and political ones) of the population they
| get socialized into, but those characteristics may not
| actually be the ones particular individual cares the most
| about preserving (e.g. culture in a narrower non-
| anthropological sense, like religion and and attachment
| to certain literature).
|
| And even assuming a full memetic replication of a
| culture, I don't think the last member of a colonized
| people would be entirely happy that his people went
| extinct even if some of the colonizers fully took up his
| culture.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > even though an entire culture can technically be
| transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case
| except in cases of early childhood adoption.
|
| The excellent blog ACOUP has just had a five-part series,
| "The Queen's Latin", in part describing mass cultural
| transmission from Rome to various ethnic groups in
| Europe. TLDR: it helps to have a culture that readily
| accommodates different religions and other regional
| variations.
|
| Cultures are not fixed for all time; they change all the
| time.
| oblio wrote:
| The thing is, many countries have cultures based on
| opposition. There's a reason most national days are
| celebrations of an independence war.
|
| So for many of these countries you're asking for a
| lobotomy.
| forkLding wrote:
| It is actually quite hard to raise the birth rate, Japan has
| been trying for years (see https://japantoday.com/category/fe
| atures/lifestyle/Tokyo%E2%...). The real impediment is that
| it is now too costly to raise more than 1-2 children and also
| not enough time.
|
| UN 2015 report on Japan's birth rate policy attempts: https:/
| /www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf... To
| summarize, they've started policies and measures since
| 1992-1994 but UN reports and I quote: "Despite these efforts,
| Japan's family policy so far appears to have been largely
| ineffective."
|
| There are other news opinion articles from Japan: https://www
| .japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/06/04/editorials/u...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It is actually quite hard to raise the birth rate, Japan
| has been trying for years
|
| Not...really.
|
| > UN report on Japan's birth rate policy attempts:
|
| And details defects in the specific policies (notably,
| these defects are, one who is familiar with policies of the
| type will notice, ways they fall short of the support
| policies _in many European countries that aren 't even
| specifically trying to boost birth rates_.)
|
| E.g., a paid family leave policy with _low_ payments and
| _lacking legal force, so many employers haven 't actually
| implemented it_.
|
| This is a government making a _pro forma_ show of "doing
| something" about a problem, not a serious policy effort.
| twelve40 wrote:
| > Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides
| its important
|
| Do you have any examples or even just any precedents how
| decades of declines and lowest birth rate in the world
| have been easily and successfully turned around, or this
| is all just hypothetically probably not hard?
| emil0r wrote:
| Hungary. They started about ten years ago, and I believe
| they have managed to turn the trend.
| novok wrote:
| The examples are older and from authoritarian countries,
| but china and iran had state sponsored baby booms. China
| was started by mao, iran was also started by the
| revolutionaries shortly after the revolution.
|
| https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/06/why-does-
| iran-ha...
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| As far as I can tell, there has yet to exist a condition
| under which the political will to really tackle this
| problem has been present, so you would not _expect_ to
| see an example of a country successfully addressing it.
| This is pretty normal for humans -- waiting until a
| problem becomes catastrophic to do anything about it --
| as we have seen in other areas recently. We will see how
| things are going in another few decades.
| ffwszgf wrote:
| You can't rescue ethnic groups that refuse to procreate.
| Look at Norway and Sweden, the people in those countries
| long ago decided their culture was not worth preserving.
| No amount of policy will change that
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You can't rescue ethnic groups that refuse to
| procreate.
|
| Ethnicity is more memetic than genetic.
|
| > Look at Norway and Sweden, the people in those
| countries long ago decided their culture was not worth
| preserving.
|
| Culture isn't transmitted by reproduction but by
| socialization. Immigration tends to involve
| socialization; indeed, the usual observation about future
| generations of immigrant populations aligning to
| preexisting native low birthrates in the developed world
| is evidence of either culture transfer (meaning
| reproduction not key to preserving culture) or that birth
| rates are a product of material incentives not culture
| (indicating that reversing low birth rates at need is a
| matter of changing material incentives, not culture.)
|
| Either way, the low current birth rates = irreversible
| drive to cultural death claim is inconsistent with the
| evidence.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| There's trying and then there's trying. Japan is doing the
| first kind, where you put some effort in, but it's kind of
| limp.
|
| The other kind of trying is when you put vigorous effort
| into making it easier to have children. Dramatically ramp
| up childcare support. Strongly enforce anti-discrimination
| laws, particularly in the case of discrimination against
| mothers. Forbid employers from requiring more than 40h of
| work per week under certain (very high) compensation
| thresholds. Provide direct payments to parents that
| substantially offset the costs of additional children.
| Align housing policy with the need for larger dwellings for
| larger families, but still with decent commutes. Etc.
| novok wrote:
| I think the real changes needed are also politically
| unpopular with a bunch of old people and other
| politically powerful classes. Making children more viable
| for the young will probably mean making real estate not a
| good investment for one example, making house spouse /
| the homer simpson lifestyle more viable, thus reducing
| the labor force and increasing the cost of labor and so
| on.
|
| For now, it's easier to kick the can down the road.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| This is right too. Although on some level one suspects
| parts of this problem are self correcting over a longer
| timescale. If the predicted population implosions begin
| to manifest, there will also be a corresponding decrease
| in the demand for housing, and a corresponding increase
| in wages paid to labor as it becomes more scarce. These
| trends will make having children easier. I know it's hard
| to picture that world but many times it has come to pass
| that we have arrived after twenty years at a world that
| would have been hard to predict.
| iammisc wrote:
| > Dramatically ramp up childcare support. Strongly
| enforce anti-discrimination laws, particularly in the
| case of discrimination against mothers. Forbid employers
| from requiring more than 40h of work per week under
| certain (very high) compensation thresholds. Provide
| direct payments to parents that substantially offset the
| costs of additional children. Align housing policy with
| the need for larger dwellings for larger families, but
| still with decent commutes. Etc.
|
| Where has this been shown to work?
|
| By and large, the nations with more childcare support,
| more protections for pregnant women, etc have lower
| birthrates than those that don't.
|
| For example, if we look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d..., then America seems
| to be the developed country with the highest birth rate
| despite having little of the social policies you mention.
|
| In fact, based on that chart, it would seem the opposite
| is true. The less social safety net, the more kids. This
| makes intuitive sense since if government isn't taking
| care of you, you'll need children to.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I think it mostly has to do with access to convenient
| birth control, like IUDs and birth control pills.
|
| Give poor women education and access to those, and even
| poorer countries will see similar declines in birth rate.
|
| I think humanity's growth was dependent on women not
| having a say in the matter. All the situations I see
| where women have gained the ability to easily choose
| whether or not to have kids lead to lower birth rates.
| tuatoru wrote:
| I remember seeing a study which followed the spread of TV
| across Brazil and the decline in birth rate. It was the
| soaps wot dun it.
|
| Seeing new role models who had interesting lives, and
| _especially_ learning that it was possible to withstand
| pressure from grandparents to have children seemed to be
| more important than mere availability of contraceptives
| or education.
|
| IIRC there was a similar effect in Bangladesh, but it was
| harder to track since TV rolled out more quickly there.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Agree.
|
| One wrinkle is the gap between how many children women
| say they want when surveyed (about 2.5 in most western
| countries) and how many they end up having on average
| (fewer).
|
| It could be that the surveys are asking the wrong
| questions, or that for some people they just never get
| the circumstances they want.
|
| As far as I know that gap has never been conclusively
| explained. Hypotheses abound, of course.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > By and large, the nations with more childcare support,
| more protections for pregnant women, etc have lower
| birthrates than those that don't.
|
| That's because they also have more public poverty and
| old-age support; which reduce the incentive for large
| families as old age and disability "insurance".
|
| Which on its own is a good thing, but if you want to
| encourage births anyway, your public support for
| parenting has to offset the effect that has on incentives
| to have children, which is a very bif effect. Nations
| don't do that because they don't think its an important-
| enough public need to warrant that approach.
| iammisc wrote:
| Correct. More elderly welfare programs discourage family
| formation. Anytime I mention this, people think I'm nuts,
| but you seem to have come to the conclusion on your own.
| terrorOf wrote:
| as if Japan is gold standard to compare lol. See how
| disfunction Japan is at this Olympics first and think more.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| One simple alternative to "massive immigration": Reunification
| with North Korea.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| Simple is doing a lot of legwork in this sentence I think.
| lvl100 wrote:
| You're assuming a lot here and utilizing an outdated view.
| Population growth is not necessary when you're primarily an
| export-focused country such as South Korea. And more
| specifically when your biggest trading partner is none other
| than China.
| deeviant wrote:
| > The core issue is that in most of the developed world, people
| do not have enough children
|
| The carrying capacity of the planet earth would like to have a
| talk with you.
|
| Continuing exponential population growth is obviously not a
| sustainable path forward. At some point, The world's economies
| are going to have to realign to a flat population and will have
| to adapt to the demographics there of. And if humanity does not
| choose not to do so, at some point in the future, the choice
| will be made for us.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _going to be one of the grand challenges of the 50 years_
|
| I'm sceptical of this claim. Demand per capita grows unabated.
| Working lives are lengthening. A smaller population living well
| is economically indistinguishable, in the aggregate, from a
| large one living poorly. Maybe post-industrial civilisations
| settle into a lower-population steady state than ones requiring
| lots of unrefined labor.
|
| Yes, dependency ratios will mean re-jiggering the skewed
| benefits almost every country provides its old at the expense
| of the young. But that, too, isn't a bad thing, particularly if
| it encourages labor force participation.
|
| (There is another comment arguing demographic the dividend's
| inverse is a myth. I don't go that far. I just think it's a
| manageable problem versus a catastrophe.)
| closeparen wrote:
| Young people consume things that can be made at scale. The
| march of technology makes the things we buy cheaper, better,
| and more abundant. At the same time, it makes labor related
| to the production of that technology more valuable.
|
| Old people consume 1:1 care. And as medical technology
| improves, elderly people survive increasingly complex
| conditions requiring increasingly labor-intensive management.
| At the same time, work with scalable impact is still getting
| more valuable, so 1:1 care positions have to pay more to win
| workers, so 1:1 care gets more expensive (cost disease).
| [deleted]
| dTal wrote:
| >...Working lives are lengthening. A smaller population
| living well...
|
| Wait a sec - a population being economically forced to retire
| later (or not at all) is not one "living well". People are
| being squeezed.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Demand per capita grows unabated.
|
| I don't see that. Demand for what? Consumption? Increasing
| the flow of "stuff" from store/Amazon to the landfill? If we
| account for inflation, what's increasing?
| gruez wrote:
| >If we account for inflation, what's increasing?
|
| GDP per capita growth is still growing a few percent
| (accounting for inflation).
| nerdponx wrote:
| I am very much looking forward to a lower-birthrate future in
| which fewer people live better and more sustainably.
|
| The problem is in the short/medium term, figuring out how to
| pay for all these checks that politicians have been writing
| over the last 50 years.
|
| The problem isn't that "the young" have to support "the old",
| it's that a lot of promises were made on the assumption of
| indefinite growth.
| thow-01187 wrote:
| Unfortunately, low fertility rate is not a one-time problem
| of boomer generation followed by a stable plateau. It leads
| to a perpetual spiral of gerontocracy, high dependency
| ratios, under-investments and general vitality being sapped
| out of the populace. It's no coincidence that Italy and
| Japan, once vigorous and creative, are not exactly bursting
| with enthusiasm in the past ~20-30 years
| simonh wrote:
| I understand japan isn't as exciting as it used to be,
| but they still have a pretty dynamic and influential
| popular culture. I understand their working population is
| declining relative to retirees, but eventually those old
| people will start to die. Anyway, its not as if this will
| be some sort of old people zombie apocalypse.
| atom_arranger wrote:
| Random idea:
|
| What if the votes of each age group were weighted to
| account for the size of that group, e.g. making the votes
| of 18-20 have the same weight as the votes of 40-42, even
| if there may be more people in the 40-42 group.
|
| This would prevent an aging population from giving too
| many benefits to older age groups, and would encourage
| policies that consider long term impacts more.
| namarie wrote:
| > What if the votes of each age group were weighted
|
| Because the principle of "one person, one vote" is widely
| (and correctly IMO) accepted.
| mjmahone17 wrote:
| In many places and for certain purposes (the US and the
| EU for instance), geographical regions have one vote,
| regardless of their population size.
|
| It's unclear that an age-based distribution instead of
| geographic distribution would be worse. But it would
| probably be unrealistic to achieve without basically
| completely upending existing political structures.
| rat87 wrote:
| The EU isn't one country
|
| The US is one country and disparate voting power between
| states(mainly in the Senate, to a lesser extent with the
| electoral college) is a real problem. I see little reason
| to make it worse. Although it's useful to rhetoric out
| how little sense the current system makes
| harpersealtako wrote:
| The point of having both proportional and state-based
| voting is to incentivize both small and large states to
| stay in the union. The optimization is for political
| unity over perfectly representative democracy. It makes
| perfect sense when you consider the ideals and goals of
| its implementation -- that being a compromise in order to
| convince both small states and large states to cede large
| parts of their sovereignty to what at the time were
| effectively foreign nations.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| And this system wildly over-represents the landowning
| elites as a result
| vkou wrote:
| One person, one vote is proportional representation,
| which is not widely practiced.
|
| What is actually practiced is 'One collection of zip
| codes, one vote.'
| benrbray wrote:
| You don't need to weight the groups, since everyone
| experiences all ages (not counting early death).
|
| My proposal is: Multiply the number of house reps and
| senators by ten (for instance). Each representative now
| represents a district / state as well as a decade of life
| (for instance). When voting for an age-graded role, your
| vote only counts towards the decade of life that you're
| currently in. You can only run for a position that
| matches your age range.
|
| This would have a number of advantages: Disrupt two-party
| dynamics. Increase granularity of representation. It's
| harder for older folks to take younger folks hostage.
| Younger folks will feel more enthusiastic about voting
| for someone who actually represents them.
|
| Probably, you'd want to fiddle with the numbers based on
| age demographics. 7-year intervals is probably the right
| number, with a big bucket for people over a certain age.
| (So, 18, 25, 32, 39, 46, 53, 60, 67, 74+) might be right.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| >Disrupt two-party dynamics
|
| and that's why it'll never happen without a revolution
| [deleted]
| gedy wrote:
| Shades of 3/5ths Compromise maybe?
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise
| jerkstate wrote:
| So strange to me that when UBI is discussed, pervasive
| automation is right around the corner to pay for it, but
| when birth rate decline is discussed, the only solution on
| the table is open borders. I wonder why that could be?
| slothtrop wrote:
| There's complete cognitive dissonance and confusion at
| the moment over popular notions of national prosperity.
| On one hand people readily agree that the GDP is an
| inaccurate measure of prosperity, that wealth gained
| mostly goes to the top and it ought not be a prime focus,
| while at the same time suggest that high rates of
| immigration are crucial to prop up said GDP. Many
| countries with stagnant birthrates are rather enviable
| places to live, i.e. Iceland, Japan, SK. Besides a large
| aging population to support for a generation in some
| cases, I don't see the problem.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Well, in the cases of Japan and SK, there is the issue of
| elderly people beginning to commit crimes on a regular
| basis in recent years because prison is free and they
| can't afford a retirement home.
| CamTin wrote:
| The American solution to this problem is just to charge
| people for the expense of being arrested and jailed:
| https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/2091-jail-fees
| tomato-sauce wrote:
| I don't think people are saying the only solution is open
| borders. More immigration is just the most obvious
| answer. It is possible in today's world without relying
| on future technological developments. But when talking
| about UBI, people don't look to immigration as a solution
| since they would need to be payed the same benefits as
| anyone else (unless this was some sort of two tiered
| society). UBI proponents then look towards automation as
| a solution.
| vkou wrote:
| > but when birth rate decline is discussed, the only
| solution on the table is open borders. I wonder why that
| could be?
|
| Because people saying that are doing accounting with
| money, not productivity.
|
| People need three things to live in retirement. Food,
| water, shelter[1], and some degree of medical care. We
| are not in a demographic collapse situation where society
| cannot be productive enough to fail to provide the first
| three to the retired. The latter is the only thing in
| danger of seeing some cuts.
|
| [1] Housing isn't expensive because building four walls
| and a roof is expensive. Housing is expensive because
| there's no upward bound on the cost of a square foot of
| land in a city.
| Zamicol wrote:
| That's a dangerous bet.
|
| If you're wrong, the consequences are dire.
|
| If you're right, there's not much upside compared to being
| prepared for being wrong.
|
| That's not a reasonable calculation.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| IMO Science and technology is a max() operator on the peoples
| ideas. Also, division of labour should go down in a smaller
| population, so I think this is far from linear in reality and
| a population collapse can be actually devastating
| frenchy wrote:
| The value of any max() would depend on the distribution,
| though.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| By adding new random variables to the max() its expected
| value should monotonically increase, no?
| jyscao wrote:
| > A smaller population living well is economically
| indistinguishable, in the aggregate, from a large one living
| poorly
|
| I'm sceptical of this claim. Young people and old people are
| biologically different, in the aggregate. Obvious differences
| in physical capabilities aside, arguably even more impactful
| for the future of a given nation are their psychological
| differences; i.e. innovation and risk-taking invariably comes
| more from the younger generations.
|
| Perhaps if you're only considering dollars being circulated
| in a domestic economy, an abundance of wealthy old folks can
| potentially offset the lack of youthful societal members. But
| the developmental direction such a demographic structure
| pushes its society is unlikely to be good for sustaining
| itself in the long run.
| robjan wrote:
| One factor that needs to be considered is that in Korea, as
| in many Asian regions, people are expected to look after
| their parents when they get old. Society and social security
| have been build around this assumption.
| kijin wrote:
| That's been changing very rapidly in SK. Almost everyone in
| their 40s and 50s today have been putting money into public
| pension plans as well as a multitude of private options.
| When they retire, they won't be economically dependent on
| their children. Nor can they expect to, because their
| children's generation is by all means poorer than their
| own.
|
| Whether those public funds and private options will be
| enough, of course, is a different question.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| There is no magic in this world. When you make an
| investment into a company, you become dependent on the
| people that work at that company.
|
| When you're investing in a private fund, or in real
| estate, you're still relying on your children. The
| material wealth you are consuming is still being produced
| by the generations that come after.
|
| If your children's generation is poorer than your own and
| if there is less of them, then there is nothing you can
| do except rely on the children of people in other
| countries.
| mathverse wrote:
| The average price of an apartment in Seoul is hitting $1M
| and the avg gdp per capita is around $38k.I am afraid a
| lot of that wealth is just real estate market speculation
| that might burst when the supply outstrips demand in 50
| years.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Why are you so confident supply will every outstrip
| demand?
|
| The government could just mandate old buildings get
| destroyed and turned into parks.
|
| Remember, >55% of people are homeowners - they'll vote
| for anything that will protect the value of their homes -
| especially if non-homeowners pay for it entirely.
| kijin wrote:
| I doubt that there will be a major, irrecoverable housing
| crash in South Korea within the lifetime of anyone who
| grew up believing that their children will support them
| later on. In the meantime, retirees who own nothing but
| an expensive apartment can reverse-mortgage their homes
| for a stable source of income. The bank, not their
| children, will inherit the property.
|
| Two reasons why I don't think there will be a
| supply/demand mismatch:
|
| 1) Housing doesn't simply stay there once it has been
| built. Koreans seem very eager to tear down "old"
| buildings (anything more than 30 years old), so it's
| going to be fairly easy to control supply if demand goes
| down.
|
| 2) The number of people per household is steeply
| declining. Even if the population drops to half of the
| current level, if there are only half as many people per
| household, the total number of housing units needed will
| be largely the same. Smaller units will become more
| popular, though.
| mathverse wrote:
| I hope you are right for the sake of both of us.
| smhost wrote:
| it really is a great challenge, because for example america
| will have to rethink its habit of paying for today's excesses
| by harvesting the labor of future generations. it's a
| completely different inter-generational relation than we have
| now.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| One core issue is housing. And the core issue with housing is
| that prices are an arms race where everyone always wants more.
| Most people would have two or three kids if they felt like they
| could afford it.
|
| The second core issue is modern dating. That one I don't know
| how to fix, but the essential issue there is the dynamics of
| dating not requiring commitment coupled with financial security
| for women mean long term pair bonding happens at a lower rate
| and later in life.
| pitaj wrote:
| I think one of the biggest issues facing modern dating is the
| collapse of various socialization activities outside of work.
| Religion is on a decline so people don't meet at church.
| Hobby groups are all online now.
| aikinai wrote:
| Neither of these apply to Japan, especially Japan decades ago
| when their birthrate fell to around the current rate. So
| that's a pretty strong data point against these theories
| being key factors.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| What?
|
| 1. Yes, obviously Japan housing prices have fallen from
| their insane 90s peak, but housing is still very expensive
| in Japan, and especially in urban areas where most Japanese
| (especially younger Japanese) live, space is famously at a
| premium.
|
| 2. I can barely count the number of times I've read
| articles on the reasons Japanese women don't want to get
| married. Unlike some Western nations, there is still a
| cultural expectation in Japan that women do a ton of
| housework and childrearing with little help from men, to
| the point that famously elaborate childrens' bento boxes
| are a source of stress. Many Japanese women with careers
| easily see marriage as a net negative, obviously different
| than decades past.
| aikinai wrote:
| 1. Space is limited, but always has been. Housing at the
| scale and quality expected in Japan is still very
| affordable and isn't correlated with birthrate. This one
| is easy to disprove.
|
| 2. The reasons you listed are completely different from
| the one I responded to, and these are certainly potential
| factors. At least they're often considered reasonable
| suspects in Japan.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| How does childcare look in SK? I believe that in much of the
| Western world, families living further apart is a problem for
| having children. Having grand parents nearby can make having
| children so much easier. In the US I think you either need
| family nearby or have a lot of money to avoid having children
| becoming totally overwhelming and very negatively impact all
| other aspects of your life.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| I don't know about South Korea, but looking at some other
| asian countries, there are a couple of things, I think the
| housing part falls into number 3 but is only a small part of
| the whole:
|
| 1. Having children without being married has a bunch of
| problems, and in some countries like singapore gets punished
| for it in lack of certain social services
|
| 2. Most of these societies expect women to work or have their
| husband take care of them. Maternity leave is in some aspects
| as bad as or worse than in the US.
|
| 3. Having children is expensive and the education stress that
| follows for over a decade after giving birth is even more
| straining. The subsidies people get in Asia hardly even make
| up for the cost of a c-section. Sure the same might be true
| for the USA, but we know it's not a good place to compare
| things to. But birth and housing are also a fraction of the
| long term pain of raising a child in those societies.
|
| Other people have mentioned dating. I think modern societies
| in general have had a break down in social structures, where
| people used to get their partners from.
| babesh wrote:
| I wonder if we need UBI to stabilize the birthrate.
| Basically if people have some assurance that their kids can
| be supported and have decent prospects in life then perhaps
| they will have more kids.
|
| Also, our big cities have evolved to serve adults vs
| children. We have a proliferation of services for adults:
| sit in restaurants, cafes, coffeehouses, etc... Just look
| at turnstiles to the subway and the stairs you need to
| ascend/descend. Good luck trying to push strollers or drag
| children around in our urban areas.
| mathverse wrote:
| For Korea it's not about UBI but about terrible working
| conditions and societal pressure. Even with UBI you want
| your children to go to the best schools so they can get a
| job at one of the Chaebols.
| babesh wrote:
| Wouldn't UBI serve as a counterweight to terrible working
| conditions and societal pressure?
| mathverse wrote:
| Koreans still have a culture of face.It's hard to admit
| that you live on just UBI and cant hang around your
| friends in places where you cant really afford to be.
| closeparen wrote:
| Unfortunately I think "decent prospects" is more of a
| relative social status assessment than an absolute income
| level assessment.
| soperj wrote:
| >2. Most of these societies expect women to work or have
| their husband take care of them. Maternity leave is in some
| aspects as bad as or worse than in the US.
|
| Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, looks like Korea has a year,
| just split into maternity and parental, and Japan has a
| year off for both mother and father, although the father
| seldom takes it. Which countries are comparable to the US?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > Having children is expensive and the education stress
| that follows for over a decade after giving birth is even
| more straining.
|
| This times 100. The US education system has a lot of flaws,
| but for the most part, school placement is usually based on
| geographical location (which comes with its own set of
| problems), the SAT and ACT are not terribly difficult, and
| more importantly those college exams can be retaken
| multiple times a year.
|
| East Asian education is extremely competitive with
| competition for spots starting as early as pre-K (age 3).
| Japanese media often shows how students get their grades
| ranked and posted outside of the classroom. The college
| exams are more comprehensive than the American ones; the
| South Korean Suneung is scheduled to take 9 hours. The
| Suneung (and Chinese gaokao, Japanese Center Test,
| Singaporean GCE) are only held once a year, so if you want
| to retest you have to wait the whole year.
|
| And then there is the problem of school bullying:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/metoo-style-reckoning-
| ove...
|
| > "A lot of the people used to say bullying matters in
| school were merely immature scuffles between teenagers,"
| she said. "Some would even blame the victims, saying that
| it is their problem that they cannot fit in."
|
| > Two decades ago, her daughter was beaten by a dozen
| schoolmates and spent five days in a coma. Yet, when Jo
| attempted to hold the students accountable, the wider
| community viewed her as a troublemaker, and her family was
| forced to move to another area.
| babesh wrote:
| The high tech/high income areas in the US are behaving a
| lot like this. There is a focus on getting into elite
| colleges and it propagates all the way down the system to
| preschool. As you alluded to, this makes it very
| expensive. People have maybe 2 and sometimes 1 kid...
| definitely below replacement level.
|
| The one difference I have noticed is that some of those
| Asian countries are more extreme in that more people
| choose to not have kids and more people choose to have
| only one kid instead of two.
| iammisc wrote:
| > The second core issue is modern dating. That one I don't
| know how to fix, but the essential issue there is the
| dynamics of dating not requiring commitment coupled with
| financial security for women mean long term pair bonding
| happens at a lower rate and later in life.
|
| One way to fix it is the government deciding to highly
| encourage 'old-fashioned' social norms.
|
| For example, we could have single-sex spaces, which help the
| sexes develop unique cultures that they then have to rely on
| each other for.
|
| Or we could encourage single-income-earning, realizing more
| men are going to take advantage of this, and encourage more
| stay-at-home parenting, realizing that more women will take
| advantage of this (but by no means should the sex of either
| role be forced).
|
| Or, we could change sex-ed curricula to focus more broadly on
| family formation and its importance.
|
| Encourage church membership, since that used to constitute a
| large portion of the dating pool, and makes it easier for
| people to find others like them.
|
| Idolize the roles of mothers and fathers and how it's a
| national duty.
|
| There's lots of ways to fix it. The willpower simply isn't
| there. Of course, many people are in complete denial as to
| the root causes too. The truth is sexual attraction is
| fundamentally based on sexual difference. Save for a slim
| minority of the population, this is true across the board
| (yes, even in homosexual relationships). The reason why
| dating sucks and people can't find partners is because we've
| attempted to eradicate all sexual difference, but every once
| in a while human nature overpowers even this, and we see
| phenomena which our current culture cannot explain but is
| easily explainable in the larger context of the human
| condition (for example, the popularity of 50 shades of grey
| amongst women, or the popularity of 'seduction culture' and
| the manosphere amongst men).
| feoren wrote:
| Honestly this sounds like a dystopian nightmare. It sounds
| like you're saying we all need to go back to everyone being
| a Good Christian who knows Their Place In Society and that
| will solve everything. Yikes! Maybe I'm reading too much
| into it, or do you actually want a Handmaid's Tale future?
| iammisc wrote:
| How can you honestly compare what I wrote to the
| handmaid's tale, in which women are forced to breed with
| men who are not even their husbands? There is no overlap
| between the two visions. Stop the strawmanning. There is
| literally nothing 'Christian' (your word, not mine) about
| men married to infertile women having mistresses. That's
| literally antithetical to the whole thing.
|
| You talk about 'knowing your place in society' as if
| that's a bad thing. A lot of social problems today
| descend from the fact that large portions of the
| population have no place in society.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I'm not sure that dating "not requiring commitment" is the
| issue.
|
| It's difficult to commit to dating when you are time-poor and
| struggling to even get close to the financial trajectory that
| your parents were on.
|
| It's too easy to blame the kids or whatever, without
| considering that the kids had and have it _harder_ in many
| ways than the old people did. Being a millennial in the '00s
| was pretty good, being a millennial after '08 has not been
| good (unless you happened to get a sweet high-paying tech job
| in the '10s).
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| This is actually part of what I'm talking about. The sweet
| high-paying tech jobs went to a group of people that can
| comfortably afford to live without marrying off. They date
| around because they can. I know, because I got that sweet
| job in 2008 just at the start of the tech wave and I dated
| around quite a bit and the pressure to get married for
| financial reasons wasn't there and the social pressure to
| get married for its own sake wasn't either. This isn't how
| it looked like in the 1950s or earlier. Most people didn't
| date 100 different women or wait until they were 35 to
| start a home with someone. It's partially financial and
| partially societal.
|
| At the other end of the spectrum the increasing gap between
| rich and poor pushed a lot of men completely out of the
| dating pool because they can no longer afford basic housing
| for themselves, so even if they would be willing to commit
| they don't have options.
| refurb wrote:
| This doesn't jive with the idea that high paying, lower
| skilled jobs were plentiful in the 50's and you only
| needed one income for a family let alone a single person.
| closeparen wrote:
| There is a middle way here, which is to partner and
| commit early, but take some time to enjoy being young
| adults together before you become chained to a childcare
| routine. I have a sense that this leads to a more stable
| family in the long run, and it's what my own parents did.
|
| It is pretty hard to find though. It seems people want
| either hot casual sex or a house in the suburbs within 6
| months, not much in between.
| pishpash wrote:
| Why is it a tailspin? People do not have children because of
| over-population, except instead of this being controlled by
| Malthus, it is now controlled by Adam Smith's invisible hand.
| The market is signaling resource constraints and desires fewer
| humans and more robots.
| com2kid wrote:
| > How does the developed world pull out of this type of
| tailspin?
|
| Make childcare easier. Traditionally people lived in the same
| town as their parents and in-laws. Now days it is thousands of
| dollars a month in day care.
|
| Want your kids to go to college? In 18 years that is expected
| to cost well over 100k for a state school.
|
| Raising kids has gotten more stressful and more expensive, of
| course people aren't having kids! And those who do stop after
| one.
|
| Not that I have any good idea for childcare. Real estate prices
| in cities are so high that opening a day care is not the wisest
| financial decision. Home day cares are a solution, but
| licensing and compliance issues abound that can also destroy
| their ability to stay in business.
|
| Heck in America if I want a care that seats more than 4 (I'm
| ignoring the "5th" middle seat) I am stuck buying a bloody SUV
| or minivan. Can't even get a 3 row compact people mover because
| CAFE rules quite literally ban their existence. So 2 kids is
| basically has a "get a giant vehicle" tax attached to it. Live
| in a city? Have fun parking that SUV!
|
| And how about schools? In my city, a house that is zoned to
| good schools has a 200-300k price premium! Want to move to an
| area with really good schools? That can become a 500k premium.
|
| Japan has separate issues, if fathers are working 10-12 hours a
| day and are never home, and women are expected to just stop
| their careers after having kids, well of course women aren't
| jumping at the chance to start a family. Raise a kid with an
| absentee husband? No wonder that isn't going over well.
|
| tl;dr life is too expensive. We've created a society that does
| not promote having children or having a family. Everything down
| to our underlying infrastructure is anti-family.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Hungary and Poland are making serious efforts to boost their
| birth rates.
|
| Hungary gives life time tax exemption to mothers of 4 children,
| and may lower that to 3.
|
| It's too early to tell if it's working.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/04/baby-bonuses-f...
| iammisc wrote:
| Hungary and Poland also have incredibly interventionist
| governments who are happy to not only ecourage family
| formation through economic policy but also cultural policy.
| The former is fairly easy and many other developed countries
| are going down that road. The latter is the part that some
| countries in Western Europe and the USA do not want to touch
| with a ten foot pole, but it is the more important metric.
|
| You want more families? You need to unashamedly celebrate
| your nation and culture.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > This is going to cause significant economic problems quite
| soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which
| will completely change the country.
|
| They'll have to unite with North Korea eventually. Make of that
| what you will.
| info781 wrote:
| We have lots of people on earth, they just need to be able to
| move to where they want to go. Low birthrate issue is nonsense.
| Let a couple million people from the Philippines in to Korea
| problem solved.
| csomar wrote:
| Not really. Immigration has become an issue lately because a
| human (or a bare-human) is worth much less.
|
| 1.000 years ago a bare illiterate human had some considerable
| value. He could work in the field or he could fight. More
| humans, more food and production. More humans, more manpower to
| fight your enemies.
|
| Now a bare semi-educated human is a liability. Which is why
| most countries are refusing their entrance. Times have changed.
| In a near future where wars will be fought with robots and
| drones, you need less manpower (and their wives/kids); and thus
| you need much less of your general population; and much more of
| a few specialized people to achieve your goals.
|
| We are getting there, whether we are self-aware of it or not.
| ken47 wrote:
| In 100 years, educated, intelligent people like us could
| easily be a "liability," as even budget AI far exceeds human
| intellect on every conceivable dimension. Through their
| robotic bodies, which they can produce themselves, they can
| exceed human physical limitations in every imaginable way.
|
| It's going to happen. Ambitious, power-hungry humans are like
| moths to a flame.
|
| So if you want to imply that you possess some level of
| intelligence, then take a small inductive step, and then,
| consider reevaluating your moral outlook on the value of
| human life.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of a shrinking
| workforce, though.
|
| And as retirees continue to make up a larger portion of the
| popular vote - they'll continue to demand more from a
| shrinking workforce.
|
| At some point (I imagine in my lifetime) - the straw will
| break the camel's back.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> juice you can squeeze out of a shrinking workforce
|
| On the assumption that the economy is based on a workforce.
| An economy can be based on paper assets. An "innovation
| nation" that makes GDP out of intellectual property assets,
| banking and offshore investments could sustain itself
| without the need for an ever-growing labor force. SK isn't
| Luxembourg, but nor is it India.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Luxembourg
| luckylion wrote:
| As a tax haven, Luxembourg depends on France + Germany's
| tolerance for tax evasion though. Granted, it has worked
| out great for them, but it's not necessarily a long-term
| strategy.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I hate this viewpoint. It makes it seem like retirees are a
| nefarious bunch who are taking advantage of youngsters.
|
| In reality, age discrimination makes it nigh impossible to
| land a meaningful job once you're over the age of 60.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Agree that age discrimination is a big, complicating
| factor. Saw this impact a very qualified family member
| who had to tap some connections in their network of past
| coworkers just to find a mediocre role. (They're
| massively over qualified.)
|
| I think another reason for some negative feelings is the
| appearance that some generations have pulled up the
| ladder after their accent: in real estate, pensions,
| healthcare, etc.
| csomar wrote:
| > And as retirees continue to make up a larger portion of
| the popular vote - they'll continue to demand more from a
| shrinking workforce.
|
| Sure, if you fail to outsource to other countries; or
| automate your economy enough.
|
| > There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of a
| shrinking workforce, though.
|
| For most countries, you can get access with a job offer.
| Countries are not against people who can get employment
| where they have shortages.
|
| But a "bare human" is barely employable which is how he
| turns into a liability. ie: immigrating more people
| (randomly) will generate a negative return at least in the
| short-term.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of a
| shrinking workforce, though.
|
| For the developed world, where a lot of the wealth coming
| in is capital returns from global corps whose ability to
| generate wealth isn't constrained by local population size,
| that just means you need to tap that more effectively. It's
| a problem for the payroll tax model of social support
| funding, perhaps, but unless you are emotionally attached
| to that model, I don't see that as a big cost.
| Retric wrote:
| Yes, similarly retiree savings isn't limited to your
| economy. A country could have a continuous stream of
| goods imported that's supported by past investments,
| which is more or less the goal of sovereign wealth funds.
|
| However, it requires great long term management making
| the system overall less stable.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Automation is progressing faster than new 'types' of jobs
| are created. In many sectors they'll be poised to be
| oversaturated with workers. Owners are happy to remove the
| human element wherever reasonably possible.
| spothedog1 wrote:
| Except the US has a large labor shortage that predates
| covid in construction, agriculture, domestic work,
| scientists, engineers and more. If automation comes then
| great but the basic principals of more people in an
| economy means more demand for goods and services still
| applies.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Pay more and the labor shortage will disappear. Every
| industry exploiting temporary visas or undocumented
| workers claims there's a shortage.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| There is no labor shortage. When wages increase in all
| those areas those labor 'shortages' mysteriously end.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Except the US has a large labor shortage
|
| No, it has less labor supplied at current prices than
| purchasers would prefer. Market clearing quantity at
| current prices being less than buyers would prefer
| is...the normal case of a market economy.
|
| It's only a _shortage_ if buyers paying more wouldn 't
| increase market clearing quantity, because of some
| constraint besides "you haven't offered enough money to
| convince more people to sell their labor".
| rossjudson wrote:
| I agree with you. The critical question here is, on a
| broad scale, whether the competitiveness of the American
| economy depends on lack of choice for low-wage workers.
| Example: The health insurance system reduces choice for
| workers, who are legitimately terrified of losing
| healthcare.
| spothedog1 wrote:
| The US def has a labor shortage if it wants to stay
| globally competitive in some sectors. Americans will
| either buy strawberries from immigrants on agricultural
| visas, they will buy strawberries overseas or they won't
| buy strawberries. There is no scenario where they buy
| strawberries picked by people making $30/hr.
|
| The US tech sector can pay every software engineer 300k
| starting salary but at some point you're completely
| hobbling the ability for new businesses to start and
| grow.
|
| US has been letting in millions of IT immigrants for
| decades and it's technology salaries are highest in the
| world. Simply put the demand created by these immigrants
| for more software services outstrips the increase in
| supply of engineers. They also start a ton of new
| companies so you have agglomeration effects of having
| more people.
|
| Sure US companies can and should pay more but there is
| certainly a point where labor is expensive enough to make
| new growth prohibitive. The USA has much more abundant
| cheap labor than Europe which is why we have all the new
| innovative companies starting and not there. When these
| companies grow they produce lots of high skilled jobs as
| well. Think of Uber. Lots of drivers are low skilled
| immigrants, but the ability for a new company to have so
| many to drive for them spurred and entire new industry
| with thousands high paying tech jobs as well.
|
| Low skilled immigration is a win win win for the USA.
| Americans get cheaper goods and services, a fast growing
| dynamic economy and hard working tax paying citizens to
| grow the nation and make it richer. They create huge
| demand for goods and services growing the US economy and
| market size. Low skilled immigrants may not be working
| the most glamorous jobs but they come to the US
| voluntarily knowing their children will vastly out earn
| them and be American. They prefer it to the situation
| that they left behind. These people are not financial
| liabilities to the USA.
|
| None of this is an argument against higher pay, workers
| rights, safety standards. Uber drivers and strawberry
| pickers should be protected with the full force of the US
| government from abuse, and we should have safety nets in
| place to make sure they're not destitute. Those should
| all be sought after. But increasing low skilled
| immigration makes the USA much richer overall and should
| be drastically increased.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Since you mentioned strawberries, Driscolls, the U.S.
| berry giant, a) actually yields most of its strawberries
| from Mexico, and b) is poised to increase automation even
| further. Have a look at the careers page here and take
| note of what they're seeking in the U.S. proper -
| https://www.driscolls.com/about/careers
|
| > There is no scenario where they buy strawberries picked
| by people making $30/hr.
|
| You're presenting a false dichotomy. Not only would
| people would pick strawberries in the U.S. season for
| less than that (assuming they would seek unskilled
| labor), consumers are accustomed to paying premium for
| "local" produce when in season.
|
| > The US tech sector can pay every software engineer 300k
| starting salary but at some point you're completely
| hobbling the ability for new businesses to start and
| grow.
|
| There are always young engineers starting out desperate
| to get a job who would kill for the opportunity to work
| at a startup.
|
| > the demand created by these immigrants for more
| software services outstrips the increase in supply of
| engineers.
|
| FANG serves a global market, and the notion that there's
| some sort of lack of software services that consumers
| want is ludicrous. In the first place these are quickly
| filled in by app creators capitalizing on opportunity, in
| the 2nd, people generally don't know what they want when
| it comes to as-of-yet-invented software, they're _told_
| what they want by large companies.
|
| > Americans get cheaper goods and services,
|
| They already get that from imports.
|
| > a fast growing dynamic economy
|
| Benefiting the rich overwhelmingly.
|
| Notwithstanding skill, because immigration isn't just
| about low-skilled workers (Canada doesn't prioritize it
| for instance), high supply of workers is lobbied for on
| the part of companies in order to suppress wages. That is
| the only reason.
| spothedog1 wrote:
| > Since you mentioned strawberries, Driscolls, the U.S.
| berry giant, a) actually yields most of its strawberries
| from Mexico, and b) is poised to increase automation even
| further. Have a look at the careers page here and take
| note of what they're seeking in the U.S. proper -
| https://www.driscolls.com/about/careers
|
| Yea but that's my point. In the US for a lot of
| industries such as agriculture you can allow immigrants
| to come to the US and pick them for cheap or its going to
| get outsourced. There isn't a scenario where you have
| highly paid strawberry pickers. The amount of people
| paying premium for local produce is a drop in the bucket
| compared to the overall market. American consumers
| overwhelming buy whatever the cheapest produce is. I
| think increasing the number of agricultural visas for
| Mexican & South/Central American workers to come the US
| is a good thing, otherwise those strawberries just get
| grown in Mexico. Even in the depths of the great
| recession Americans were not lining up to pick produce,
| it's just not a job Americans want to do or are there
| enough non-immigrant workers in places with lots of
| farms.
|
| > There are always young engineers starting out desperate
| to get a job who would kill for the opportunity to work
| at a startup.
|
| This is much more true in the US than Europe because we
| have way more startups that make it big. And we have way
| more startups that make it big because there are so many
| more engineers here. More skilled tech immigrants is
| good. It's a cycle.
|
| > FANG serves a global market, and the notion that
| there's some sort of lack of software services that
| consumers want is ludicrous. In the first place these are
| quickly filled in by app creators capitalizing on
| opportunity, in the 2nd, people generally don't know what
| they want when it comes to as-of-yet-invented software,
| they're told what they want by large companies.
|
| I'm not sure what point you're even trying to make tbqh,
| did I say there way a lack of software services? I'm
| arguing when more tech immigrants come to the US, they
| create more demand for services like cloud computing and
| other SaaS. That in turn increases the need to hire more
| engineers to fulfill the demand. The end result of
| letting more highly skilled immigrants come to the US is
| a fast growing and innovative tech sector more-so than
| other nations. Yes tech is global but a huge, outsized
| part of it is centralized in the US. The more people we
| allow to come here, the more startups can hire and grow.
| If you cut off immigration, lots of startups wouldn't be
| able to hire enough engineers to grow as they would get
| out competed by the big tech companies. Yes you can pay
| more, but if you have 20k job opening and 10k engineers
| then the companies that lose that bidding war just won't
| get started or grow.
|
| > Americans get cheaper goods and services,
|
| America is filled with lots of double income highly
| educated couples with children that rely on low skilled
| immigrants as nannies, landscapers, cab drivers and other
| domestic jobs that can't be exported but make their lives
| run. As long as there is no abuse and the immigrants want
| to be here and make enough to get by, I don't see this as
| a bad thing. They are willing to work incredibly hard to
| give their children the chance at a better life.
|
| > Benefiting the rich overwhelmingly. If you're in the
| top 40% of America you're rich. Hacker News is filled
| with rich engineers due to the points I've outlined
| above. America is really good at creating more and more
| rich people because we're good at business. Back to my
| Uber example, how many millionaires has Uber created, and
| how many immigrants make some money and get the chance to
| support a family based on it. Now if they think the
| bargain isn't worth it, then they don't have to stay in
| the US. But the truth is lots of them do think its worth
| it because they and their children will be better off
| down the line.
|
| > Notwithstanding skill, because immigration isn't just
| about low-skilled workers (Canada doesn't prioritize it
| for instance), high supply of workers is lobbied for on
| the part of companies in order to suppress wages. That is
| the only reason.
|
| If you believe this you've missed my entire point. The
| labor market is supply and demand. If you think it
| suppresses wages you've missed the entire demand side of
| the equation. Immigrants increase demand more than they
| increase supply. Wages are not reduced. There is papers
| and papers worth of academic literature on this subject.
| The only demographic that sometimes looses out is low
| skilled workers who directly compete with low skilled
| immigrants. There is very little of this overlap as a lot
| of the poorest American's aren't willing to go pick
| produce or cut lawns. If more immigrants lowered wages
| the US would have the lowest wages in the world but it
| doesn't, not by a long shot. By your logic software
| engineers would be making poverty wages due to high
| levels of immigration, but they don't. They're some of
| the highest paid people in the country. More immigrants
| mean more economic growth which is good for everyone.
| oblio wrote:
| > Low skilled immigration is a win win win for the USA.
|
| Mediocre, bad, unlucky or badly located, geographically,
| citizen workers lose out. And then they vote for Trump
| :-)
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _It 's only a shortage if buyers paying more wouldn't
| increase market clearing quantity, because of some
| constraint besides "you haven't offered enough money to
| convince more people to sell their labor"._
|
| Yes, that constraint is immigration law.
| [deleted]
| rat87 wrote:
| Automation isn't an issue (except for wealth gap).
| Automation opens up new jobs
| slothtrop wrote:
| The point not being that automation is an issue, but that
| a slowly shrinking workforce is not one either.
| [deleted]
| hackeraccount wrote:
| If true it's a mistake. Education is a piss poor measure of
| people's ability to contribute.
| acituan wrote:
| One of the most nihilistic takes I've seen in a long while.
|
| With "worth", "value", "liability" you are only talking about
| the narrow, economic definitions of those words.
|
| The problem is not everything valuable is captured in
| economic expression, not everything is readily marketable,
| which doesn't mean they are not valuable. And I am not being
| romantic here; for the longest time we suffered for not
| measuring the value of childbirth, mothering a newborn and
| general domestic labor for example. (Surrogacy being new
| aside, also doesn't make a reliable proxy because it doesn't
| measure mothering in situ, contractual asymmetries get priced
| into the transaction.)
|
| Hyperindividualistic western fantasy assumes even attachment
| and emotional needs can be marketed (eg therapy), but suicide
| rates show that traditional close-knit societies fare much
| better. Just because you can't measure the dollar amount of
| small talk and care from your neighborhood grocer, doesn't
| mean it is worthlessness.
|
| People are worthless only if you waste them. You risk wasting
| them when you instrumentalize and objectify them excessively,
| when you interject the market into relationships you
| shouldn't.
|
| The waste theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy of
| neoliberalism. And I agree that we might be getting there if
| we don't awaken from the normativity of market thinking.
| fierro wrote:
| cue amateur historian pontification
| cheriot wrote:
| Every child born is a "bare illiterate human". Are you also
| making an argument against having children?
|
| If you want to be really draconian about it, immigration can
| select for people with skills where the home populate will
| always have the same average of innate abilities.
| yongjik wrote:
| The real world is not some dystopian SF ruled by cool kids
| wearing shiny armor. The world's economy is still run by
| people consuming goods and services, creating demands -
| declining population is not an insurmountable problem but it
| does pose a huge challenge for any nation's economy.
|
| Fewer people -> fewer sales for Ioniq and Galaxy S -> less
| money made by these companies -> less money available for
| industrial research -> worse technology for your servers,
| drones, military satellites, submarines, whatever -> lose the
| war.
| [deleted]
| jorblumesea wrote:
| Automation isn't at the point where you can get economic and
| productivity growth with a declining population. Maybe in the
| future this will be true, but it's not true now. Even highly
| automated economies will see contraction and tax base
| decreases. The current solution, ala the Bank of Japan, is to
| run huge deficits, and they are on the cutting edge of what
| an aging population looks like.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| This is delusional. We're extremely far away from automating
| the entirety of society.
|
| As people have less kids, age out of the workforce, and live
| longer, who's going to pick the crops? People far away in 3rd
| world nations? Who's going to be working the jobs to pay
| them? Do we expect the small amount of working-age people to
| support themselves + their kids + retired parents +
| grandparents? Who's going to be the nurses and the
| firefighters?
|
| Japan and Germany both have aging populaces and low birth
| rates. Germany is taking the immigration route, and Japan is
| taking the automation route (as it's much more xenophobic).
| From a macroeconomic perspective, Germany's strategy seems to
| be winning.
|
| And I don't know about you, but when I'm old, I'll take a
| human nurse over a robot nurse any day of the week.
| spothedog1 wrote:
| This is inaccurate. More people, even low skilled ones are
| still a huge benefit to your society. They buy goods and
| services in the local economy increasing demand and work tax
| paying jobs. Immigrants children grow up to greatly out earn
| their parents pay way more in taxes than they their parents.
| The only immigrant group that could be considered a liability
| are older low skilled workers who have passed the age to have
| kids and live a couple of decades of working years. The
| reason certain countries don't like immigration is because a
| conservative faction wants to keep society in place.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| > The reason certain countries don't like immigration is
| because a conservative faction wants to keep society in
| place.
|
| This is so simplified that it is basically false. There are
| a range of reasons for not supporting immigration, but
| basically no one wants to "keep society in place". I will
| note that the USA had historically low immigration in the
| post-war period that was associated with rapidly rising
| wellbeing[0].
|
| [0]: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-
| hub/charts/Ann...
| spothedog1 wrote:
| That was almost entirely due to America rebuilding Europe
| and every other major industrial power knocked off their
| perch for a couple of decades. It had nothing to do with
| immigration. Additionally Americans were still having
| lots of kids at that point so the population was growing
| without immigratiom.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Those European countries also developed fast without much
| immigration (including Switzerland and the Nordics, which
| were not affected much by the war). It may have nothing
| to do with immigration, but you certainly haven't proved
| that.
|
| Edit: Currently the poorest parts of the US population
| are stagnating at best, at a time when rates of both
| legal and illegal immigration are quite high. It is hard
| to make the argument that immigration is preventing
| things from getting worse.
| js2 wrote:
| > Currently the poorest parts of the US population are
| stagnating at best, at a time when rates of both legal
| and illegal immigration are quite high. It is hard to
| make the argument that immigration is preventing things
| from getting worse.
|
| An argument that immigration is a net positive for the
| economy:
|
| https://www.thebalance.com/how-immigration-impacts-the-
| econo...
|
| Some anecdotes of small towns being saved by immigration:
|
| https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-
| matters/article/...
|
| https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/08/15/hmong-
| immigrants-he...
| adventured wrote:
| > Some anecdotes of small towns being saved by
| immigration
|
| Why would saving small towns in general be a value?
|
| The US has desperately needed vast consolidation of small
| population centers and increased population density
| toward greater urbanization, for many decades.
|
| One of the worst attributes of the US is its over-sprawl
| and weak development of public transportation. The ideal
| would be to eliminate thousands upon thousands of small
| towns, with those populations moving to far superior
| situations in or near cities, and for the US to stop
| being lazy and stupid about building out public
| transportation.
|
| Saving small towns is certainly not a good argument for
| huge volumes of low-skill immigration at exactly the
| wrong time in history for that type of immigration. The
| US should be copying Canada and Australia, focusing
| primarily on high-skill immigration and dramatically
| reducing low-skill immigration. What the highly developed
| welfare states all grasp that the US still doesn't
| (apparently), is that the immense value in high-skill
| immigration, beyond the obvious, is that it brings a huge
| immediate net tax positive that pays for your existing
| population's social welfare costs, whereas low-skill
| labor does something closer to the exact opposite. Most
| low-skill labor would struggle to covers its own real
| social security cost over time, much less everything
| else. The US has a very progressive taxation system,
| high-skill labor foots the tax bills. High-skill labor is
| also vastly superior as it pertains to net healthcare
| costs and system subsidization. Every functional welfare
| state in Europe knows all of this, meanwhile the US is
| wandering around like an idiot in the dark bumping into
| walls.
|
| Far less low-skill labor, more automation, far more high-
| skill labor, increased social safety net from the net tax
| boost of inverting the labor focus, build public
| transportation, greater consolidation of population
| centers, all linked by regional high-speed rail. We
| already know this model works exceptionally well and we
| know exactly why it works.
| stevula wrote:
| > Those European countries also developed fast without
| much immigration
|
| That doesn't seem correct, at least not universally.
| Germany invited a large number of immigrant workers to
| deal with its labor shortage after WW2.
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter
| dtech wrote:
| Similar for the Netherlands and Belgium
| spothedog1 wrote:
| Yea they were mostly rebuilding the physical world and
| not having to completely rebuild society from the ground.
| Small countries like the Nordics aren't great examples
| because they're so small and a massive part of their
| wealth came from selling oil to the wider world. The
| amount of oil revenue generated per person in those
| countries allowed them develop such a high standard of
| living along with really smart and egalitarian government
| policy and investment. That's not really repeatable for a
| country as large as the US although money could certainly
| be used better.
|
| France invited large amounts of immigrants from Africa to
| help rebuild so it's not like they didn't see
| immigration.
|
| I think there are two main reasons that the poorest parts
| of the population are stagnating. One is poverty traps,
| and especially multi generational poverty traps are very
| hard to escape. Another is geographic location. Americans
| dont move as much as they used to, all around the world
| poorer people move to areas with more jobs and
| opportunity but today mostly richer people move and
| poorer people stay put in areas that are impoverished.
|
| Immigrants largely don't come with a set geography or
| generational poverty weighing them down which is why
| their kids do so well.
| ardit33 wrote:
| This is pretty wrong. Most immigrants come from much
| poorer countries, and they themselves have to restart
| everything from scratch, with little saving and no home
| ownership.
|
| People coming from the Philipines, or India, or Eastern
| Europe, post communism from the 90s had to restart
| everything from scratch, including learning the language,
| yet over time they end up doing well.
|
| You have this weird mentality, that all immigrants are
| coming rich, and from rich countries, which is the
| opposite from the truth.
|
| I guarantee, that Someone in Bangladesh coming here, has
| had a much harder life, than the average minority living
| in Brooklyn or Queens.
|
| Yet, even the obstacles, they end up doing better than
| the locals. So, initial conditions are not the major
| hamperer of success.
| haakonhr wrote:
| That's inaccurate at best about the Nordics. Norway, yes,
| and Denmark to some degree. Neither Finland or Sweden
| have or had any significant oil and gas reserves, but
| built their economies on industry (and mining to some
| extent).
| pastage wrote:
| Agreed, but mining has historically been a big in Sweden
| (part of the reason why so many minerals were named by
| Swedish scientists). While we now have focus on other
| areas it has always been an important part of the
| economy.
| [deleted]
| throw37388 wrote:
| There is limited supply of housing and low qualified jobs.
|
| Maybe read what Marx wrote about Irish immigrants to UK.
| And those already spoke local language and shared similar
| culture.
| spothedog1 wrote:
| Limited supply of housing is an artificial local
| government constraint using tools like zoning and
| permitting to stop the construction of new housing keep
| prices high for incumbent owners. I agree it's a huge
| problem but I would rather fight the constraint on supply
| than limit demand (partially immigrants) when they
| contribute so much else. We shouldn't restrict economic
| growth and deny millions of people the chance at a better
| life to appease NIMBYs.
|
| USA is amazing at assimilating immigrants. Mostly the
| places the furthest away from any immigrants that don't
| actually interact with them have a problem. The melting
| pot isn't a myth it's real.
| throw37388 wrote:
| Please. We have 40% unemployment in Greece among young
| people. Housing is bloody expensive to build. It is not
| some goverment conspiracy!
|
| Did you actually try to immigrate into US? It is one of
| the worst countries at accepting immigration. Any normal
| country gives citizenship after 5 years of residency. In
| US it is like 30 years.
|
| And from far away it looks like your melting pot is
| broken. Too many groups fighting each other.
| spothedog1 wrote:
| Not familiar with housing in Greece. I should have
| clarified I'm talking about the US where housing is quite
| cheap to build but regulations make it illegal to build
| most types of housing.
|
| I was born in the US but a lot of my family are
| immigrants and I know how tough the system is, I'm
| arguing to make it much easier.
|
| I'm sure on the outside it does look broken and there are
| lots of issues to fix, but take a walk around pretty much
| any American urban metro area and it's working amazingly
| well.
|
| I can understand the situation in Greece is much
| different, especially when compare the amount of refugees
| compared to the population of Greece. But I think a lot
| of the issues boil down to Greece having a quite shit
| economy at the moment causing more issues. If jobs were
| abundant in Greece then I think immigration wouldn't be
| as contentious. Although that's just me taking from no
| experience. I'm interested in hearing your view.
| throw37388 wrote:
| I would love to see how American cities deal with large
| scale immigration. SF got maybe 10k people on its streets
| and there is already talk about martial law and
| forcefully mopping people into rehabs. What would SF do
| with 1 million people on its streets? Athens and other
| cities managed...
|
| Greece does not have a shit economy, we do relatively
| well. There are simply not enough jobs.
|
| US is the same. Show me an entry level job, that pays
| enough to buy a house and raise a family...
| spothedog1 wrote:
| Do you mean like NYC? Literally the city built on large
| scale immigration? Also the state of California. Houston,
| Texas is the most diverse city in the country and you can
| buy a house for less than the national average. There are
| hundreds of millions of people in the US who own homes
| and raise families on entry level jobs, the just don't
| live in high cost of living areas. That's not to say
| their lives are all perfect and rosy but its possible.
| I'm not denying housing affordability is a problem, it
| absolutely is but narrowing your view of America to SF
| when it is the most extreme example is a little
| disingenuous. My hometown has tons of people where 2
| parents work slightly above minimum wage jobs and own
| homes and raise families. It's 2 hours from 2 major
| cities. You can absolutely have a good life without
| making a ton of money. Now healthcare... that's a
| separate issue.
|
| I'm not sure where you're getting your news on America
| but martial law isn't being declared anywhere. Most of
| the country is relatively peaceful and people are happy -
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/351932/americans-life-
| ratings-r...
|
| If there are simply not enough jobs in Greece, that means
| the economic situation isn't great. A highly functioning
| economy should be produces lots of jobs as businesses
| grow and expand. I'm not arguing Greece should take more
| immigrants though, you sound like you don't want them and
| neither does your country. I would be happy for America
| to accept all of them, refugee or PhD Scientist, but
| unfortunately the political situation at the moment
| doesn't allow for that.
| bialpio wrote:
| "30 years" is factually incorrect. The requirement is to
| be a permanent resident for 5 years (I can find links if
| needed). Source: I'm currently awaiting my naturalization
| appointment, if all goes well the total time from setting
| my foot in the US to becoming a citizen will be few
| months short of 9 years (~2.5 years on work visa & 5
| years on green card + ~1.5 years wait for naturalization
| appointment).
| bialpio wrote:
| With that said, it may be tricky to become a resident [1]
| in the first place. There are per-country-of-birth
| quotas, currently the wait times for people born in China
| / India can be significant (if taking the work visa
| route), up to 11 years. The longest wait that I see is
| for family-based immigration from Mexico - 24 years' wait
| for "married sons/daughters of US citizens". [2]
|
| [1] resident to me means lawful permanent resident
|
| [2]
| https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-
| law0/v...
| matthewmorgan wrote:
| Or read what Malthus wrote before him.
| the_rectifier wrote:
| How about no.
| fleddr wrote:
| Maybe we have to rethink our economic system so that
| producing more humans just to create new customers is a
| perverse incentive.
|
| Less humans means less demand means less work. In our
| current paradigm, this is a problem. In a healthy paradigm,
| it is a solution.
|
| Less people? Rebalance human development with nature. Less
| consumption of resources? Wonderful. Less jobs? Great,
| let's all work less and live more.
|
| Many would call this utopia, I call it sanity. I'd also say
| that couple not reproducing or doing so at increasingly old
| age, is the ultimate sign of how our economic system
| doesn't even support one of the most natural things there
| are: to form a family. It is openly hostile to this option.
|
| And we want do double down on that? The trend of economic
| security is going to be even less, not more.
| nostromo wrote:
| Their point is that is becoming less and less true and will
| likely be false soon. Most labor simply isn't worth as much
| as it used to be. This is evident in stagnant wages and the
| view of large families not as assets but as liabilities.
|
| You can try to spur local demand by expanding your
| population (via birth or immigration) but what we really
| care about is GDP per capita. Most very populous countries
| are not wealthy.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Most labor simply isn 't worth as much as it used to
| be. This is evident in stagnant wages_
|
| You're assuming an efficient market, which we've long
| known is a flawed assumption.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Where is that assumption? I'm not seeing it in the claim.
| delecti wrote:
| Taking stagnant wages to imply that the labor is _worth_
| less is taking for granted that reduced prices means
| reduced value. It 's probably more accurate (though still
| oversimplifying) to view it as a cartel suppressing
| wages.
| luckylion wrote:
| > They buy goods and services in the local economy
| increasing demand and work tax paying jobs.
|
| That heavily depends on the immigrant group, and is, on
| average, not true in most of Europe where many immigrants
| heavily depend on welfare and it turns into
| intergenerational dependency. I'm sure it's different in
| countries that aren't offering full benefits to immigrants,
| and are much harder to reach via illegal migration, i.e.
| the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, but that kind of
| blanket statement isn't accurate.
| spothedog1 wrote:
| I've read about this and a big reason is it's simply so
| much easier to get a job in the US. You're not dealing
| with unions and America just has way more low paying
| jobs. You can def argue this isn't a good thing but
| working a low paying job is better than working no job.
| pastage wrote:
| More low paying jobs just leads to more misery for poor
| people, and more money for me. That is not how I want to
| live.
| ses1984 wrote:
| You're thinking in humanistic terms, not geopolitical
| terms.
| spothedog1 wrote:
| I'm thinking in purely economic terms
| whoaisme wrote:
| Meanwhile people who live in the real world know what you
| just said is a crock of nonsense.
| ahoy wrote:
| This is nihilistic and terribly misinformed. A LOT of
| foundational economic activity is what we derisively call
| "unskilled labor," performed by the very "semi-educated
| humans" you're talking about.
|
| In the US alone, we literally import seasonal workers to prop
| up our agriculture industry. We pay them just enough to
| survive, give them few rights and little stability, and
| generally tread them as an underclass.
|
| People like this undergird the whole of the modern global
| economy.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| According to China, one solution is to kill after school for-
| profit education, which is crippling families due to unbounded
| competition.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| SK doesn't have a large amount of land to grow into which means
| real estate is expensive which in turn limits population growth
| (people have less kids when real estate is expensive). SK has
| one of the highest population densities in the world [1] Having
| a stable population with that kind of constraint on land seems
| like a good thing.
|
| [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/south-korea-
| popu...
| thow-01187 wrote:
| I'm continually amazed how this isn't #1 topic on governments'
| agenda across the developed world. We're looking at South Korea
| losing 95% of its generational cohort size in 100-year
| timeframe. 80% for Japan or Italy, 70% for Germany, etc.
| Climate change is on everyone's mind - but what's the point of
| solving climate change if there's barely anyone left to inherit
| the planet?
|
| Black Death, Mongols, world wars, not even intentional
| genocides managed to inflict this level of population loss. And
| it's met with yawns and shrugs, as if it's unavoidable like
| gravity.
|
| And no - people's desire to have children hasn't dropped all
| that much:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...
|
| https://www.oecd.org/els/family/SF_2_2-Ideal-actual-number-c...
| tpm wrote:
| Barely anyone left? Africa alone is projected to have a
| population of 3 billion by 2100.
|
| https://qz.com/africa/1881468/how-fast-is-africas-
| population...
| pepperonipizza wrote:
| These countries must invest in ectogenesis. I really don't
| understand why this is never talked about when the low
| fertility rate in the developed world is discussed.
|
| South Korea has invested billions in trying to have its
| fertility rate increase by giving incentives to couples, it has
| only worsen.
|
| We must get to the idea that it will be almost impossible in
| the developed world to get back to a fertility rate above 2.
|
| Ectogenesis can be one of the solution.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| You'd have to know the fundamental reason why people in SK
| (or anywhere) aren't having kids. Maybe it's women not
| wanting to be pregnant or give birth but maybe it's not - if
| it's for example, people aren't up for the investment that
| kids require then ectogenesis will get you nowhere.
| tootie wrote:
| I think the solution lies not in more people but in more
| sustainability and shift away from competitive capitalism as an
| economic model. I genuinely think that it's inevitable. The
| great challenge of the next century will climate. We're on the
| fence right now between a climate-induced nightmare world and a
| post-scarcity economy where resource competition no longer
| drives global conflict.
| [deleted]
| baybal2 wrote:
| > How does the developed world pull out of this type of
| tailspin?
|
| 1. Find a young woman
|
| 2. Make her happy, and confident in you
|
| 3. ?
|
| 4. Pull your family for the next 30-40 years
|
| With all respects, I always seen a family as a man's
| responsibility, and a failure at creating/maintaining one to
| coming from man's deficiencies first.
|
| In virtually every human culture in the world, even matriarchal
| societies, it is by default that a man needs to put more effort
| than a woman to score a marriage. It is very deeply ingrained
| into human culture.
|
| A man can always always find another woman if one does not want
| a family with him up until mid-thirties. A lot of time.
|
| And yes, I really want to have a family, and I really want to
| work hard to have one.
|
| It really sucks for bachelors. Unmarried people in most of Asia
| effectively lost 2 years of their reproductive life, and
| probably will lose at least 1 more year.
|
| It's completely incorrect to think that China had any much of
| normal life after quarantine succeeded. Last 12 months was a
| life in constant paranoia, extreme social unease, and daily
| life disruptions from periodic Covid breakthroughs.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| _A man can always always find another woman if one does not
| want a family with him up until mid-thirties. A lot of time._
|
| If you filter out the overweight, tattoo-covered ones, having
| kids by another man etc. you are left with just a few percent
| though.
| baybal2 wrote:
| In comparison to Russia, or China, America is a paradise
| for late marriage.
|
| The higher up you are on the social ladder, the quicker are
| the spouses taken from the marriage market.
|
| I was fortunate to go into somewhat prestigious highschool
| back in Russia. The last 3 bachelors from my class are all
| the people who managed to get it abroad.
|
| Everybody else was gone by mid-twenties, anybody with
| higher education by 23 at most.
|
| Seeing an unmarried woman with PhD level education, job,
| own roof over her head, and no skeletons in the closet over
| 30 in Russia is likely a hallucination. In Canada, I met
| new such almost monthly, and I grew rather rather
| complacent.
| iammisc wrote:
| You should not be downvoted. Historically, this was the view.
| A traditional 'family' was mainly seen as a man's
| responsibility. The word 'husband' itself literally means a
| man bound to a house (i.e., a family or a lineage).
|
| Best of luck in your search for a wife. As a married man with
| kids, starting a family is the most wonderful thing. I feel
| terrible for young men and women during COVID, it's just a
| terrible human tragedy created by the government. IMO, dating
| should have been considered an essential activity. It would
| have been good for restaurants and the economy and young
| people. Tell the married people with kids to stay home while
| the young people can all go dance it up and get hitched. It's
| foundational to society.
| sct202 wrote:
| It's going to be hard to convince couples living in 1 bedroom
| apartments to cram in 2 kids just so that the country can hit
| replacement level fertility rates. Large urban cities just
| don't seem built for families, especially with the way that
| larger spaces are priced.
| calmd wrote:
| So urban cities are anti-child? Thus we will see cites change
| or depopulate?
|
| Does low fertility correlate with dense urban dwelling and
| sky high real-estate prices? I suspect it probably does, but
| I haven't seen any proof.
|
| Maybe this shift to remote-first work that happened over the
| last 18 months will help....
| wastedhours wrote:
| > So urban cities are anti-child? Thus we will see cites
| change or depopulate?
|
| Or, people now value cities more than they value having
| more children, leading to depopulation due to replacement
| rate reduction, rather than people leaving to have more
| children.
| Ceezy wrote:
| Exepnsive cities are tied to low birth rate not just
| cities. Lagos is a megalopolis but with good birthrate.
| asoneth wrote:
| > we will see cites change or depopulate?
|
| Or neither. Cities since at least the Roman era have been
| considered "population sinks". That is, they often maintain
| or grow their population by attracting surplus population
| born outside of the city.
|
| As an experiment, if you ever find yourself in a large city
| like San Francisco, New York, London, or Tokyo, ask around
| and note what fraction of the residents you meet were
| actually born in the city.
| novok wrote:
| There are many cities that seem more child friendly than
| others although. Like berlin, or even new york compared
| to SF.
| asoneth wrote:
| Agreed. SF can afford to drive away families as long as
| it can continue to attract far more net population growth
| than the housing stock can support.
|
| From a purely financial standpoint, skimming motivated
| young talent from around the world and then discouraging
| them from having kids or encouraging them to leave if
| they do seems like it would be a cheaper approach than
| raising a native population.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I am not a professional in this field at all, but my
| personal experience suggests that we need more smaller
| cities, more densely connected, or perhaps more and smaller
| "downtown" areas within a single city. Then people could
| have a bit more personal space (less geographic
| concentration reduces demand and price pressure in specific
| areas), while keeping density and interconnectedness high
| to support mass transit, walking/cycling, and socially
| connected communities.
|
| I think this would make cities a bit more "pro-child" than
| they are currently.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| You are describing Seoul and Tokyo perfectly.
|
| Despite having tens of millions of people and average
| densities much higher than most cities, they're both
| among the most livable cities in the world.
|
| Both of them inherited pre-war street layouts (in Tokyo's
| case, despite being bombed, the layouts stayed the same).
| So neighbourhoods have narrow streets which makes them
| safer to walk (due to cars needing to drive slowly) and
| more interesting. And most neighbourhoods have older 2-4
| storey or newer 10-20 storey apartments that provide the
| density to enable local shops and amazing public transit.
|
| So much easier to raise children when you have everything
| you need within walking distance in the same
| neighbourhood, including child care.
| mathverse wrote:
| I dont find them particularly livable.Yeah maybe when you
| are in your 20-later 30s then they are livable but they
| are absolutely dreadful when it comes to having a family.
|
| All that convenience that you see is there because of
| that fast paced life style people have.
|
| Source: Married to korean and lived in Korea.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| I lived in Korea for years and have visited Japan as
| well.
|
| Having lived in Toronto, South Korea (Ulsan), and now SF
| (Sunset), I can't imagine a better place for a family to
| live than many neighbourhoods in Korea.
|
| Now that I've got a wife, dog, and newborn baby, we
| needed to purchase a car to get them around (since SF
| public transit isn't good enough for this). At least in
| Toronto we were within a few hundred metres of
| doctor/dentist/pharmacy, but lacked a walkable grocery
| store despite being in the city.
|
| There are reasonably nice walkable streets, but in both
| Toronto and SF the neighbourhood streets are too wide,
| which results in traffic going way too fast along them.
| I've seen some traffic-calmed streets with artificial
| barriers and curves but there's not much.
|
| When I lived in Korea, both neighbourhoods I lived in
| contained everything I needed, and would have needed if I
| had a family at the time. And walking around (even with
| no sidewalks) was a pleasure because cars took the main
| roads. (Only the delivery scooters were a menace, which
| I'm sure you were familiar with ).
|
| Of course, this excludes societal pressures, personal
| finances, etc that affect local Korean and Japanese
| people.
|
| This is anecdotal, but I've been casually studying urban
| planning for years to help quantify why I found daily
| living in Korea to feel so much nicer than anywhere else.
| mathverse wrote:
| My take on living in Korea vs Europe (I have no idea
| about cities in North America)
|
| 1. Noisy apartments and noisy streets typical for asian
| megalopolises.If you can afford to live in one of the
| more quality condos it's better though.
|
| 2. Commuting by subway for an 1h with 1-2 stops to change
| lines is dreadful during peak hours.It's worse than
| commuting by car from a suburb here in Europe.Michael
| Wolf's video captures this very well:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxZLq3IpYAU
|
| Living in Korea is convenient but not comfortable.
| jonpurdy wrote:
| 1. I can see noise being an issue in Tokyo and Seoul
| because build quality isn't great and there's not much
| noise insulation. So you're heavily dependent on
| neighbours keeping quiet, and I was fortunate to have
| good ones. Funny enough, I've had far worse experiences
| with neighbours in both Toronto and SF despite better
| sound insulation.
|
| 2. I didn't mention commuting because I was referring to
| living locally within a neighbourhood where you don't
| have to leave. I didn't commute far (walked to work), and
| I couldn't imagine commuting with multiple line changes
| in either Seoul or Tokyo. It was bad enough in Toronto
| with just a 30 minute commute. (I won't commute ever
| again due to remote work so it's no longer a
| consideration for me.)
|
| You're lucky to live in Europe, where the suburbs/non-
| downtown is much more livable and walkable than North
| America. In many ways, many European cities have the best
| of both worlds.
| chasd00 wrote:
| You're basically describing suburbs (not exurbs). Despite
| having everything you wish for suburbs are apparently the
| greatest threat to civilization since the trinity test.
| azemetre wrote:
| Only a "threat" because they don't have the tax base to
| support the infrastructure that is needed so it requires
| massive federal subsides and they are massively
| inefficient.
|
| For the entire recorded human history, people have lived
| in cities just fine.
|
| The problems today are entirely self created and imposed
| by governments and culture of people.
|
| Take housing, the easiest way to solve the housing crisis
| in Canada and the US is to build more supply and a
| variety of housing (boarding homes, multi-family homes,
| 12-unit condos, mixed housing, giant apartment complexes,
| studios, micro studios). That would likely alleviate a
| multitude of problems cities have and probably solve a
| few others unexpectedly (increasing the tax base, the
| variety of people that live there, etc).
|
| But walk into any public development meeting you will see
| a few dozen people force the process to a crawling halt
| because of a myriad of reasons. The needs of the few now
| outweigh the good of many.
| ticviking wrote:
| Suburbia in the US is a very different beast. One of the
| most difficult Problems is how completely the US
| infrastructure basically assumes it only exists for cars.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It will if it is embraced. I also hope countries take the
| opportunity to build new remote-first cities conducive to
| family life.
|
| Otherwise, maybe the 'modern city' is where cultures go to
| die.
| iammisc wrote:
| The thing is cities don't need to be anti-child. But you're
| right... they absolutely are.
|
| It's not just the apartment size, it's the entire setup. For
| example, my city of Portland let the bars remain open while
| shutting down the parks during COVID. It just sends the
| message that those in charge don't care about families.
|
| Or look at the tolerance for deviant homeless. It's one thing
| to be compassionate. It's entirely something else when that
| compassion extends to men exposing themselves and
| masturbating in front of young children (which has happened
| here before).
|
| America's cities have become playgrounds for single adults,
| instead of their historical place as places for all kinds of
| people.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190910-the-major-
| citi...
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-
| have...
| mc32 wrote:
| Probably true. However, on the past or even in rural India
| people fit parents and a number of children in small abodes.
| So, it's possible. People have done it and lived, people do
| it and live in some places. Some people just don't want to
| and don't have to either.
| fleaaaa wrote:
| This is very true as a Korean living outside of the country,
| It's happening slowly but the cultural resistance and all kind
| of shitstorm related low-birthrate/immigration is about to
| happen.
|
| It's pretty ugly situation inside right now it seems like.
| Koreans still have the idea that it is a homogenous country and
| majority of korean is pretty extremely conservative about this
| new policy obviously, you could easily imagine it's like
| ticking bomb.
| neom wrote:
| My wife is from Busan and her parents don't speak English nor
| are they educated, and I would consider them extremely "Korea
| Conservative", nevertheless, they're aware of the issue and
| it is discussed openly, how to continue to emerge Korea, and
| I think it is this issue that primarily made them comfortable
| with their daughter marrying a foreigner, of the options,
| marry a foreigner or destroy the country, I suspect Koreans
| will take the latter. If I had to guess, your countrymen will
| fair a lot better than expected, likely through policy of
| controlled "acceptable foreigners", strong demand of cultural
| adoption of said "acceptable foreigners", and through
| Automation/Robotics/AI. I was very surprised to see a lot of
| conversation among the young people in Korea about the future
| of the society surrounding the themes of what a hybrid
| socialist/capitalist robotics AI utopia would look like, if I
| was to bet on anyone getting there, it would be SK.
| Animats wrote:
| _SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you
| think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the
| lowest birthrate in the world._
|
| Yes, by 2100, the population might be all the way down to where
| it was in 1980.
|
| Also, at some point, South Korea and North Korea may settle up,
| much as West Germany and East Germany did, and for much the
| same reasons.
| contra-doubts wrote:
| This article is wildly off-base and totally misrepresents South
| Korea, both factually and in tone. There are many ways that South
| Korea is a great country but this article misses the mark.
| Source: I've been married to a South Korean for 10 years.
|
| > South Korea was able to make these achievements without a
| citywide nor a nationwide lockdown.
|
| A large part of the country is literally in Level 4 lockdowns now
| (no gatherings >5, beaches closed, pubs closed, daycares closed,
| etc). [1]
|
| South Korea has mandatory military service for all men. They're
| required be in the military for nearly two years. [2]
|
| Korean society is high patriarchal. Domestic violence is
| persistent. Families are not complete until they have a son.
| Multiple daughters are considered a burden. Gender roles are
| consistently enforced.
|
| Sex crimes are a major issue [3]. Nearly every woman has been
| assaulted in a serious and unusual way (men outside windows,
| breaking into their apartment, flashing, etc). By law cellphone
| manufacturers have to program their phones to produce a shutter
| sound when a photo is taken. This was an attempt to curb upskirt
| and other voyeur photos. Female-only train cars are common due to
| rampant groping on public transit.
|
| People absolutely do not trust their government. In 2016 the
| president was impeached in one of the most bizarre political
| scandals of the last decade. [4] There was a dizzying array of
| conspiracy theories involving the ferry boat that killed 294
| people (mostly highschool students) [5].
|
| The country's economy is dominated by a small group of super-
| corporations (chaebols) like Samsung. A massive percentage of the
| population is employed with just a few firms and nearly all
| products are produced by them. The amount of influence these
| groups have is something out of dystopian sci-fi. [6]
|
| South Koreans frequently believe in superstitions, fortune
| tellers, urban legends, etc., and generally struggle with
| critical thinking or questioning established ideas.
|
| [1] https://www.garda.com/crisis24/news-alerts/505386/south-
| kore...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_South_Korea
|
| [3] https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/06/16/my-life-not-your-
| porn/...
|
| [4]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Korean_political_sc...
|
| [5] https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-
| Pacific/2014/0723/Why-S...
|
| [6] https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2021/03/24/chaebol-reforms-
| are...
| carabiner wrote:
| Agree with your overall sentiment even if I don't agree with
| every point. Article is just Korean boosterism from a Korean
| writer, without much reflection or critical thought.
| yongjik wrote:
| Some of what you wrote is rather questionable interpretation,
| and some others make me wonder if your spouse left the country
| in 1980s and never visited Korea since.
|
| > Korean society is high patriarchal. Domestic violence is
| persistent. Families are not complete until they have a son.
| Multiple daughters are considered a burden. Gender roles are
| consistently enforced.
|
| Korea does have gender equality issues, but this is outdated
| info. Decades ago, it was illegal for a doctor to tell the sex
| of a fetus, because some people would want a son and
| selectively abort girls, resulting in huge sex imbalance. These
| days, very few people under 70 would think "a complete family
| needs a son" - if you say anything like that you'll be publicly
| ridiculed.
|
| Telling fetus sex was made legal in 2010, because nobody gave a
| damn about "having a son" any more.
| gniv wrote:
| > South Koreans frequently believe in superstitions, fortune
| tellers, urban legends, etc., and generally struggle with
| critical thinking or questioning established ideas.
|
| You provide references for the other points, but not this. I
| can see it being true for older people, but is it really true
| in general? (I actually had this question before since I'm
| seeing a lot of shamans in the kdramas and it puzzles me since
| there is little of this in the west.)
| bingbingbong wrote:
| In my experience, there is a lot of little urban legends and
| superstitions that young people still take part in / talk
| about, but it's unclear how many do it for fun and how many
| partially believe it. Anecdotally, I've met plenty of young
| people (20s) who believe the whole bloodtype/personality
| thing.
| franhield wrote:
| South Korea is one of the leaders in technology and other fields.
| Also, they are one of the fastest internet providers in the whole
| world. The problem is that the country can truly unleash its
| untapped potential if the North and the South decided to unify
| under the leadership of the South.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Being a fast internet provider is all relative. If you only had
| to maintain the landmass equivalent to the state of Indiana,
| you can quickly upgrade everyone's infrastructure. The
| government also initially started the telecommunications
| projects, now they're all transitioned to the private sector.
|
| North and South Korea are complementary in economic capability.
| Some even go as far at to conclude that the reunification
| efforts between North and South Korea may be hindered because
| of this fact.
| novok wrote:
| I don't think the land size argument really holds water. You
| can provide good internet in the top 10 major economic
| metros, and in aggregate that is a small landmass. And the
| USA has a very good bandwidth capacity at the data center
| level, so that is not a bottleneck either. It's purely
| political in the USA.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| What' the average internet speed in Indiana?
| second--shift wrote:
| pretty poor, as a percentage of land mass.
|
| not too bad, as a percentage of population.
|
| Most of Indiana by land is (very) rural, and in probably
| half of counties the fastest internet available will be sub
| 10Mbps.
|
| In the major metro areas, Verizon/Frontier, Comcast, and
| AT&T "compete" and provide 1Gbps, with Frontier at least
| offering FTTH. I pay $60/month for 400/400 fiber.
|
| source: i worked for a (rural) ISP in Indiana.
| vjdingdong wrote:
| German unification was unthinkable until the soviet union
| collapsed. Maybe in 25 years, the 2 Koreas will be reunited,
| making Korea an even bigger power on the global stage.
| forinti wrote:
| The DDR had about half the income per capita as West Germany.
| South Korea is currently at about 24x the per capita income of
| the north.
|
| It would be a huge challenge to unify those two economies and
| it would surely take decades. South Korea developed itself from
| the 1960s onwards, so I would guess that unification would take
| that kind of time frame (50-60 years - if they could pull off
| another such miracle).
| dougmwne wrote:
| Ok the other hand, it would give the south a ready source of
| young labor, which they absolutely will need going forward.
| Managed properly, it could be a huge boon.
| publicola1990 wrote:
| German 'Reunification' happened before Soviet Union collapsed.
| Also UK, France etc were against German Reunification as well
| before it happened.
|
| Also Austria is still not unified with modern Germany.
| tnova wrote:
| Austria was never part of Germany. It was part of the Holy
| Roman Empire and after that the German Confederation, with
| the latter being dissolved in 1866. The first actual united
| German state was founded in 1871 as the German Empire,
| without Austria (Kleindeutsche Losung).
| cyberlurker wrote:
| A nice sentiment but seems less likely every year that goes by.
| The South doesn't even really want the North because it would
| be an economic burden. Or so I've read.
| m_mueller wrote:
| I think like with Germany it is predicated on the collapse of
| one of the backing superpowers - China or the US. Tbf. at
| this time (after Trump era) it's hard to tell which one is
| more stable.
| novok wrote:
| It depends how they treat the north when they do the
| integration.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I don't know that it will actually happen any time soon. I
| don't think South Korea wants the burden of modernizing the
| North and despite what most coverage indicates, I don't think
| Kim Jong-un is crazy enough to actually start a war. As long as
| Kim doesn't die or get killed, I think North Korea will sadly
| remain as it is for a long time.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Dead comment in this thread with apt observation:
|
| >Firstly, you can't be a "power" if you are occupied. You are a
| vassal, nothing more.
|
| SK (also JP and TW), as nominal American satraps, with their
| political existence underpinned by American security commitments,
| will have problems exporting synthesized east/west liberal models
| because others in the region without suchy commitments are driven
| by desire for security first and foremost. Usually that means
| suppressing liberal values / sources of foreign influence. A
| nation who can't defend itself is going to have hardtime being a
| role model, it's like a trust fund kid lecturing to others about
| bootstraps. The author's affiliation in specific SK ministries
| and submission from nationalinterest also should give readers
| pause.
|
| That said, SK is making some interesting pivots into military
| industrial complex. There's sufficient technological expertise
| and heavy industry that I can see them being a credible middle
| power model if they took lead on self-defense and distance
| appearance of being a US "vassal". Sending forces to Hormuz to
| secure oil route after Iran drama is also a good start.
| jacob_rezi wrote:
| On a tangent, I moved to Korea in 2016 when I was 23 to take
| advantage of the government's push for global startups.
|
| I wrote a post about it here
| https://www.jacobjacquet.com/blog/building-a-global-startup-...
|
| Anything related to Korea's startup ecosystem, feel free to ask
| cturner wrote:
| "Indeed, South Korea is the only country that successfully made
| its transition from a former colony to an advanced economy."
|
| This is not right. Each of the following meet the same criteria,
| including the author's caveats - Taiwan (also Japan), Greece
| (Ottoman), Finland (Swedes), Ireland (British), numerous Central
| European nations (Soviet Union). Some others that are debatable -
| Cyprus, Malta, Israel, Singapore, Chile. At the time of their
| handovers, Hong Kong and Macau would each have met the
| definition.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| > One could say that Australia or Canada, along with the United
| States, used to be a colony. Nonetheless, what is distinct
| about South Korea is the fact that it was colonized by former
| imperial Japan by coercion
|
| They say this and then move on. The distinct thing is that it
| was Imperial Japan rather than Imperial England? I'm not saying
| those empires were similar, but it seems to me that they made
| the distinction just so they could ignore the aforementioned
| countries.
| usaar333 wrote:
| And Taiwan is ignored because the UN doesn't even consider it
| a country.
| mathverse wrote:
| Korea is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Joseon but the thing
| is koreans carry the spirit of Hell Joseon wherever they go and
| work with other koreans.
|
| We (my wife is a korean) live in Europe and the same things that
| stressed my wife (and our korean friends) exist whenever you have
| to work with other koreans and their companies.It's not as bad as
| in Korea but it's still something that I can easily notice.
| vbtemp wrote:
| I'd be curious to see a Slate Star Codex piece on this. One of
| his classic pieces was "Meditations on Moloch"
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ (
| and related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-
| toxoplasma-of-rage... )
|
| It seems like the similar thing here - _literally everyone_
| sees how agonizing, exhausting, detrimental, and
| counterproductive the current system is. _No one_ likes it. But
| yet, despite that, there 's some gradient it goes against that
| prevents clearly better alternatives from emerging. I wonder
| what that case is in Korea, the subject OP, Japan, Taiwan, and
| other countries.
| mathverse wrote:
| It's very simple actually.Koreans hate the working culture
| and long working hours but at the same time require
| convenience that can only be achieved by maintaining this
| hellish working culture.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| _at the same time require convenience that can only be
| achieved by maintaining this hellish working culture._
|
| That's a core problem for every industrialized country.
| We've become addicted to the cheap goods that NAFTA has
| allowed us. And it may end up eating societies alive.
| simmanian wrote:
| With all due respect, this analysis is grossly reductive
| and only touching the surface of a complex phenomenon. Long
| working hours can be found in many East Asian countries not
| limited to just Korea. Sure, love of convenience is partly
| to blame, but let's not ignore the history and cultural
| elements behind it. It goes without saying, but without the
| long working hours, Korea would not have become the "middle
| power" that it is today either. The "hell joseon" article
| you linked is an interesting phenomenon especially because
| no other East Asian country is so critical of its own
| culture and conditions. S. Korea is unique in that its
| people are almost always looking to criticize and change
| their ways to compete on the world stage.
| devchix wrote:
| > South Korea's rise to a middle power status comes without much
| historical baggage
|
| The kingdom of Joseon was annexed entirely by Japan in 1905.
| Modern Korea (nevermind the North/South prefix) would not exist
| had the US not enter WWII. The 35-years under Japan is a major
| flashpoint in Japan-Korea relation, it's a joke that the thing
| that unites North and South is their common hatred of Japan. I'm
| surprised there's not a more nationalistic jingoistic attitude
| from South Korea, given their economic state today. Historians
| agree that the costly outcome of the Russo-Japanese war led to
| the rise of militaristic Japan and their entry into WWII.
| yongjik wrote:
| The thing is ... complicated.
|
| America defeated Japan in WW2, leading to the liberation of
| Korea, but it was immediately followed by the US and the Soviet
| dividing the country in half. To make matters more complicated,
| the US backed a right-wing former independence fighter, who
| turned out to be a corrupt asshole who rolled in the same bed
| with national traitors (those who had worked for Japan under
| occupation). Because America now needed a strong military
| presence to fight the cold war, it also pushed Korea to be more
| friendly with Japan.
|
| The end result is that, in Korea, the "right wing" is
| friendlier toward the US and Japan, while the "left wing" tends
| to be more nationalistic (i.e., wanting a unified Korea) and
| hostile toward Japan. (Of course, even this is a gross
| simplification ...)
| devchix wrote:
| The thing is _super_ complicated! The US under SecDef William
| Howard Taft backed the Japanese annexation of Korea (tacitly,
| as it didn 't do anything in protest) in return for Japan not
| raising a row over the US acquiring The Phillipines, during
| the Spanish-American war. Everybody is retconning history.
| Anyhow, the point is, it's a reach to say Korea's history has
| little historical baggage. Why is it not a poor, angry,
| belligerent nation state whose chief export is "freedom
| fighters" with massive chip on shoulder, as opposed to the
| technical, democratic state it is right now.
| yongjik wrote:
| Err... I don't think your second point necessarily follows
| the first point. For a country to become "angry an
| belligerent, with massive chip on shoulder," it needs (1)
| angry, desperate people, and (2) someone who would gain
| politically by fanning the hatred (often in a self-
| reinforcing cycle).
|
| I think the anti-Japanese sentiment didn't really took off
| because, once you start looking into the matter, you'd
| rapidly realize that half of the country's ruling class was
| national traitors, at which point the question will become
| strictly verboten. By the time the country became
| democratic enough so that people could actually raise these
| questions, there was no point in becoming a "freedom
| fighter." Sure, everybody loves to hate Japan (especially
| when there's a soccer match), but nobody with half a brain
| would want to, say, visit Tokyo and blow up stuff ... it
| makes zero sense!
| devchix wrote:
| You're right, thanks for the nuanced view. I guess my
| impression here is that modern Korea, with its own
| cultural identity: dress, food, language, literature,
| history ... would not have been if the US hadn't entered
| WWII. I don't mean to create indebtors, it's an
| observation on how a country+culture could survive or
| disappear on a turn. And given what tenuous a beginning
| it had, it's amazing that South Korea is the entity it is
| now.
| simmanian wrote:
| The article seems to be saying that since Korea never conquered
| and/or colonized other states, there's less EMOTIONAL baggage,
| allowing Korean culture to spread more easily.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > Historians agree that the costly outcome of the Russo-
| Japanese war led to the rise of militaristic Japan and their
| entry into WWII.
|
| There was an awful lot going on in Japan during the Taishou era
| tho.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| I'm sure the US military presence and support plays a big part
| in keeping the lid on major conflict between South Korea and
| Japan. There is significant historical baggage from Japan
| colonizing Korea.
| eatonphil wrote:
| My wife is South Korean so I'm biased. But I've been to Japan and
| South Korea and if you're looking for one of the most modern
| nations in the world, I strongly recommend you go to Korea. The
| only comparable country I've been to is the Netherlands or maybe
| Denmark.
|
| In contrast, the US and Japan seem to be somewhat falling apart
| with a peak in infrastructure and buildings a few decades ago.
| It's not that bad of course but relative to countries like South
| Korea and the Netherlands I think you'll agree.
|
| Also, in my experience Korea was way more ready to handle English
| speakers than Japan was. I was surprised how I felt so lost in
| Japan not being able to read or speak Japanese. (Of course I
| don't expect to go to another country and be catered to. It's
| just that I was spoiled by Korea. And I wanted to address any
| reasonable concern that Japan might be friendlier for tourists
| than Korea.) In contrast in Korea there was a lot already in
| English and all the service workers I met spoke English well.
| audunw wrote:
| > Also, in my experience Korea was way more ready to handle
| English speakers than Japan was.
|
| In Seoul yes, but not necessarily other places, in my
| experience. I had really confusing experience trying to sleep
| over in a spa in Busan. The only English phrase we got out of
| them was "Robot steal your phone". Admittedly this is not a
| place tourists would generally go though. We got recommended
| doing it by Korean friends and our hostel host in Seoul helped
| us find the place.
|
| In Japan I experienced a few times that a Japanese person that
| could speak english would come over to help me if I was staring
| at something (map, ATM machine) in confusion for a while.
| Didn't experience that in South Korea even though I stayed
| there longer.
|
| I agree that South Korea feels extremely modern.. but not
| _much_ less than Japan. I wonder if it has something to do with
| how recently the infrastructure was built. Maybe South Korea is
| just at that perfect stage now where nothing is too old, and
| yet they 've managed to improve/refurbish almost everything.
| I've noticed Taiwan is a mixed bag. Some places feels insanely
| modern, while there's still big areas with a lot of old
| construction. But then those areas tends to be the ones with
| the most charm and the best night markets.
| totoglazer wrote:
| Having visited all the countries mentioned within the last few
| years - definitely agree. Seoul is an incredible, modern city,
| unlike any other. Tokyo largely feels like it was frozen in
| time.
|
| Parts of Amsterdam have that sort of feel, but it's definitely
| more mixed. Not crumbling, but old and making do since it's
| fine.
| alephnan wrote:
| > Tokyo largely feels like it was frozen in time.
|
| Economically, Japan has been in stagnation since the late
| 80s.
| yorwba wrote:
| Economically, Japan's GDP per capita (measured in 2010 US$)
| was 39,240 in 1991 and grew to 49,000 in 2019, a 25%
| increase. Yes, it's slower growth than before, but slow
| growth is still growth, not stagnation. For comparison, New
| Zealand was at 38,345 in 2019: https://data.worldbank.org/i
| ndicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?end=2020... (also threw in the
| graph for South Korea)
| Clewza313 wrote:
| During that time the USD has suffered around 88%
| inflation measures by CPI, so in real terms that implies
| they're going backwards.
| spfzero wrote:
| That's inflation in US prices. It may not be
| transferrable to another country, where various things
| cost more/less, and rise/fall differently through the
| years.
| oezi wrote:
| When my parents went to Japan in the eighties they were
| shocked that coffee in Tokyo was 4 times as expensive as
| in Germany. When I visited in 2016 I was similarly
| shocked that a vending machine Coca Cola costs half of
| what it costs in Germany. Japan's deflation has led the
| country to be very affordable.
| pehtis wrote:
| It has been in stagnation since the 80s:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades_(Japan)
| ekianjo wrote:
| > stagnating
|
| That's a nice way to put it, it's been actually decreasing
| clearly over time since 1989, with ups and downs on the
| way: https://mebfaber.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2009/12/japan.jpg
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| What is the y axis?
| zuminator wrote:
| That chart is a crude snapshot of the Nikkei 225 from
| 1990 to 2009. Since then it's rebounded by quite a bit
| although it's still quite a bit under its Dec 1989 peak.
| But of course a stock market index isn't the full
| economy, so I would disagree that this chart by itself
| constitutes proof that Japan is stagnating.
|
| Chart source: https://mebfaber.com/2009/12/20/japan-the-
| us-and-the-lost-de...
| fleddr wrote:
| I don't think Amsterdam is what is meant by the Netherlands.
|
| Amsterdam is basically a super old village built in a swamp
| that it interesting for its history, architecture, culture,
| and so on. Or for the red light district and weed shops, if
| you prefer that. It's not a display of infrastructure.
|
| The Netherlands has some of the best developed infrastructure
| nation-wide: roads, railways, and most famously its massive
| water management systems, as half the country is below sea
| level.
|
| It is also very well developed economically (punching far
| above its tiny weight), technically, and socially (hybrid
| welfare system).
|
| By comparison, many parts of the US feel like a 3rd world
| country.
| _RPL5_ wrote:
| "well developed economically (punching far above its tiny
| weight)"
|
| I am being a nitpicker here, but I think there is no
| correlation between country size and level of economic
| development. Many of the richest polities in the world are
| quite small. Places like Singapore & HK come to mind.
|
| I think bigger countries, even if they are "1st world," can
| sometimes look rather rough, because there is a lot of
| variation between different regions / municipalities /
| neighborhoods. It can be surreal sometimes, but it is what
| it is.
| fleddr wrote:
| I should perhaps clarify that it's not just the _level_
| of economic development, rather specifically it 's scale.
|
| For example, would you expect the Netherlands, smaller
| than a typical US state, to be the world's #2 food
| exporter? From a tiny country that is also extremely
| densely populated?
|
| To produce a number of mega corporations like Unilever,
| Shell (partly dutch), Philips, Heineken, the like...and
| this doesn't even begin to describe lesser known
| companies in extremely heavy transport, water management,
| mega scale infrastructure.
|
| Combined with the extremely favorable location of being a
| distribution hub (Rotterdam), indeed similar to
| Singapore.
|
| So I basically agree, it doesn't require a large country
| to produce a lot of economic output. Yet I'd still say
| the food export fact is a crazy one, as you would expect
| that to very much be surface-related.
| throaway3141593 wrote:
| > Yet I'd still say the food export fact is a crazy one,
| as you would expect that to very much be surface-related.
|
| I would expect food _production_ to be area-related.
| Rotterdam is Europe 's busiest seaport, and one of the
| busiest seaports in the world, so I'm not the least bit
| surprised that the Netherlands is one of the world's top
| food exporters.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| I felt the same way about Japan when I first visited it in the
| late 1990s. Japan has stagnated badly since then, and due to
| the demographic crunch, it's essentially certain that Seoul in
| 2040 will look like Tokyo in 2020. (Unless North Korea
| transforms it into a smoking crater in the ground, that is,
| since the entire city is within artillery range of the border.)
|
| Also, in my experience, Koreans speak even less English than
| the Japanese do. Seoul is still OK, maybe Busan, but out in the
| sticks there's zero signage and very few speakers.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Not to discount your experience at all, but I have been
| outside of Seoul too and I still didn't feel too overwhelmed.
| Specifically I spent a bit of time in Bundang (a suburb of
| Seoul), Busan and Jeju.
|
| One more massive advantage Korean has over Japanese is that
| Korean has a fairly simple alphabet so you can read and
| pronounce words after only a little practice.
|
| In contrast, it takes quite a while to be able to read
| Japanese with their three writing systems and Kanji in
| particular.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > In contrast, it takes quite a while to be able to read
| Japanese with their three writing systems and Kanji in
| particular.
|
| On the other hand, if you can read Chinese.. then reading
| signage in Japan is like having half Chinese half weird
| squiggly stuff but the Chinese half would still mostly make
| out most of the sense.
| Razengan wrote:
| Most modern how?
|
| Is everything just recently built or actually designed with
| modern principles in mind that will still feel relevant a
| decade down the road?
|
| I'm no researcher of any thing but the casual impression I've
| gotten from reading here and there over the years is that South
| Korea has plenty of problems, social and otherwise, and some of
| them pretty archaic and morbid (like idols collapsing on stage
| but nobody helping them)
| eatonphil wrote:
| The trains running in the subways are much newer, cleaner,
| and wider than the ones in NYC or Tokyo or Paris or London
| (based on my own observation).
|
| They also continually build out entirely new rapid lines like
| the Bundang express line which takes you from a suburb of
| Seoul to the center of Gangnam (a major district) in 15
| minutes.
|
| Their buildings are also mostly new. It seems like every
| decade or two Koreans demolish older buildings and replace
| them with new ones. Whereas the US and Japan seem more often
| to keep old buildings around for much longer (and don't clean
| them).
|
| The cars on the street in Seoul were also newer than the ones
| I saw in Japan (although similar in age to NYC). For example
| the taxis in Japan look like 80s BMWs. They look very cool
| for that reason but also seem pretty old.
|
| Finally in Japan there's a lot still done by cash and weird
| single-purpose ticket machines. It would be a hardware
| hackers dream because of the variety and number of ticketing
| machines everywhere.
|
| But in contrast Korea has gone almost totally cashless
| everywhere or so it seems. You just "tap" with your phone.
| The US is getting there, and maybe Japan is now too since
| it's been a few years since I was last there.
|
| I wrote a bit more about this a while ago (and included pics)
| here: https://notes.eatonphil.com/on-nyc-tokyo-and-
| seoul.html.
| alephnan wrote:
| > The trains running in the subways are much newer,
| cleaner, and wider than the ones in NYC or Tokyo or Paris
| or London (based on my own observation).
|
| One of the complaints I had from my SK friend is that other
| subway platforms don't have safety walls
|
| > Finally in Japan there's a lot still done by cash and
| weird single-purpose ticket machines. It would be a
| hardware hackers dream because of the variety and number of
| ticketing machines everywhere.
|
| Are they connected to the internet?
| eatonphil wrote:
| I think Tokyo has this too but I agree. It seems insane
| to go on every other subway in the world that doesn't
| have this.
|
| For NYC I've read that it's complicated:
| https://nypost.com/2021/02/10/mta-says-subway-shove-
| preventi....
| alephnan wrote:
| > I think Tokyo has this too but I agree.
|
| Yes, but it's not common. I live here. Maybe in certain
| wards that have more international residents, such as
| Minato.
| eatonphil wrote:
| > Are they connected to the internet?
|
| Sorry I didn't mean that in the sense of "cracking" but
| just that people who are into hardware would find it
| awesome that there's so much use of electronic hardware
| in Japan.
| Razengan wrote:
| So most of those things amount to being "mostly new" and
| made recently, an advantage which will be lost until they
| keep replacing and rebuilding them.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Au contraire, it's the _ability_ to make changes and
| build new things in an existing society that is so
| impressive. The US (let's say NYC specifically) cannot
| build a lot of new core infrastructure like fast subways
| because it's expensive and difficult to get the home
| owners and community on board.
|
| Seoul the city and metro area are both more populous than
| NYC. And yet you see them rapidly pivoting to fast new
| lines like this Bundang line. You see them demolishing
| old buildings and building new ones. You see them
| switching their entire payment system to digital-first.
|
| On reflection I think this is mostly enabled because 50M
| is still a small-ish population and the country is fairly
| culturally homogenous. Combine that with a desire to
| compete with their bigger neighbors (Japan, China, the
| US, etc.).
|
| I think Korea (like smaller countries in Europe) has a
| pretty unique ability to pivot existing society into new
| technology.
| tsudonym wrote:
| Japan has Apple Pay Suica that worked on my US iPhone,
| Korea required me to keep a physical T-money card at all
| times.
|
| This may change like next year but Japan has had a 5 year
| head start. https://www.imore.com/apple-pay-coming-korea-
| part-k-new-deal...
|
| Japan has updated their taxis since 2017 - roll out has
| been slow but I've rode in them multiple times as a tourist
| since then. https://global.toyota/en/jpntaxi/
|
| I love Seoul for it's nightlife/cheaper restaurants, but I
| can't help but notice that it once tried to be an urban
| sprawling American city. It's just not as pedestrian
| friendly as Japanese cities, and I find myself taking more
| cabs than I would in Tokyo despite the Seoul metro being
| world class.
|
| The cheonggyecheong stream used to be a disgusting urban
| highway and I'm sure there are plenty more.
| https://www.landscapeperformance.org/case-study-
| briefs/cheon...
| ubercore wrote:
| I moved to Norway, been living here for about a month now.
| I haven't see Norwegian money even once. I think I've seen
| one ATM. Granted a month is not a lot of time, but it's
| startlingly cashless.
|
| The only annoying thing so far is that my US based Visa
| card just can't be processed in some places even if Visa is
| advertised. When I called Chase to see if it was a security
| thing, they said they didn't even see the charge attempted,
| and said there are 2 different kinds of credit processing
| in Europe? I haven't done any research into that yet,
| though. Overall, I just bring my phone and pay for
| everything with my iPhone.
| alephnan wrote:
| > South Korea has plenty of problems, social
|
| Social problems to what cultural viewpoint?
| eatonphil wrote:
| "Hell Joseon" is one I can think of. The idea is that it's
| too expensive and competitive to have kids and a successful
| career/life anymore. It seems (from my totally naive
| outsider view) that a lot of young Koreans feel very
| depressed about their options.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| So, like the San Francisco Bay Area...
| eatonphil wrote:
| But for an entire country.
| andrewzah wrote:
| "South Korea has plenty of problems, social and otherwise"
|
| So does the US, and Japan, and ... basically every country.
| Each country is going to have pros and cons. Talking with my
| Korean friends, their perspective is that the US also has
| plenty of problems, social and otherwise. Are they wrong? And
| we've had discussions around e.g. why US cops are going
| around killing US citizens, etc.
|
| The pros for Korea for me include hospitable people, great
| food, universal healthcare, and fantastic public
| transportation (you can get around basically the entire
| country via bus/metro/trains with a unified T-Money card). I
| also felt a sense of unity that I don't often feel in the US.
|
| Some cons would include a work culture around working insane
| hours and compulsory drinking. Those are changing with the
| current generation though. Schooling is extremely competitive
| since everyone is trying to get into a handful of colleges in
| order to have career prospects with the large
| conglomerations. And having to worry about the air quality
| index is annoying from my US perspective.
| keykoo wrote:
| I'm sorta surprised by your statement. I've lived in Seoul,
| Tokyo, and NYC for various periods of my life and I'd
| definitely say Tokyo feels the most "modern" when you scratch
| beneath the surface.
|
| For example, I'd say the basic subway system between Seoul and
| Tokyo are pretty similar but you also have the advantage of a
| vastly superior rail network that serves Greater Tokyo and the
| rest of Japan. KTX and SRT in Korea are improving every year
| but don't really compare yet. Additionally, the new subway
| stations in Seoul are quite nice (Line #9) but you also have
| really old lines (Line #1) where many of the stations are so
| badly maintained they feel inferior to their counterparts in
| Tokyo (Ginza, Hibiya).
|
| I can't really speak to the english speaking issues in South
| Korea, but in Tokyo I never really had any issues even though I
| don't speak Japanese. Most places in Tokyo will have english
| menus because it's a tourist centric city. Neighborhood family
| owned dives probably don't speak english very well but they
| wouldn't in Seoul either.
|
| The thing that makes Seoul fall short for me is the standard of
| building maintenance. Although things are changing, it was
| generally the case that for several generations of building
| maintenance they just expected to tear them down and rebuild.
| Tokyo has a similar problem, necessitated by constant building
| damage and updated building codes from earthquakes, but the
| biggest difference is that a lot of these buildings in Seoul
| are 10+ stories tall. Most of Tokyo's building stock is <10
| stories. It's become cost prohibitive in Seoul to actually tear
| these buildings down and rebuild them.
|
| One of the worst things for me is how car centric Seoul is.
| It's rare in Tokyo to have 3+ lane roads that aren't toll
| road/expressways. They're all over Seoul and the side roads are
| packed full of "valet" parking for restaurants that don't
| actually have parking lots. The entire car culture feels way
| more chaotic there than Tokyo. In Tokyo, you can't buy a car
| unless you prove you have a registered parking spot. In Seoul,
| you just double park your neighbor and put your phone number in
| case you need to move your car.
|
| Lastly the air quality in Seoul is way worse than Tokyo. Feels
| like you constantly have to stay indoors for weeks during the
| bad "yellow dust" season.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Upvoted for the opposing observations.
|
| I have taken KTX but I have not taken (non-subway) rail in
| Japan. The KTX train I took was similar in quality to German
| inter-city rail or American regional rail lines. That is to
| say, it wasn't that special.
|
| The air quality issues are a huge pain for sure.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| The yellow dust is commonly thought to come from China. It's
| not good but isn't an issue South Korea can address alone.
| pcurve wrote:
| I think there are pros/cons of car culture and systems in
| both countries.
|
| Japan's car-ownership experience is rather hostile. Expensive
| tolls, Shaken inspection, and higher price tags than SK. In a
| way, this benefits tourists because streets are cleaner, cars
| are newer, and people tend to drive less.
|
| In Korea, it's flipped. It's great place for car ownership.
| But from tourists POV, it's chaos.
|
| As much as I love Japan, I'd prefer to live in Korea while
| visit Japan as tourist. Seoul isn't so bad once you go
| outside from central Seoul to new cities. Everything is more
| spread out, cleaner, and very modern.
| toephu2 wrote:
| > The only comparable country I've been to is the Netherlands
| or maybe Denmark.
|
| I guess you've never been to China?
| eatonphil wrote:
| I have not.
| odiroot wrote:
| > My wife is South Korean so I'm biased. But I've been to Japan
| and South Korea and if you're looking for one of the most
| modern nations in the world, I strongly recommend you go to
| Korea. The only comparable country I've been to is the
| Netherlands or maybe Denmark.
|
| Have you been to Singapore?
| eatonphil wrote:
| No I have not but I agree this would probably make the list.
| Maybe some of the Gulf city-states too but I haven't explored
| them very much.
| alephnan wrote:
| Singapore has 1/10th the population of South Korea, and
| 1/20th the population of Japan.
|
| Singapore has less than 1% of South Korea's land mass, which
| is 25% of Japan.
|
| It's not a fair comparison on the scale of the
| infrastructure.
| eatonphil wrote:
| To be fair the Netherlands and Denmark are pretty small
| too.
| messe wrote:
| Singapore is 728.6 km^2, while the Netherlands and South
| Korea are 41,865 km^2 and 100,363 km^2 respectively. The
| Netherlands and South Korea are much more comparable.
| someperson wrote:
| South Korea, Taiwan, and China all developed their
| infrastructure relatively recently, so it makes sense that
| their skyscrapers and subway systems are gleaming.
|
| Fast forward 50 years (once the demographic collapse has fully
| hit Asia and Europe), and we'll see if their infrastructure
| continues to be so modern.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Yes but compared to Japan? All of Asia started from scratch
| after WW2 and Korea was only 10 years behind Japan due to
| their war.
|
| But Tokyo infrastructure felt basically as old as NYC
| infrastructure to me (a totally qualitative impression).
|
| That said, Tokyo is massively cleaner and nicer than NYC even
| if some of the infrastructure seems old. There is no question
| it is nicer than NYC.
| SECProto wrote:
| > All of Asia started from scratch after WW2 and Korea was
| only 10 years behind Japan due to their war.
|
| The Seoul subway [1] opened its first line in the mid-1970s
| (8km of line 1). Most of their subway growth opened in 1995
| and later, a huge amount post-2000.
|
| The first Tokyo subway line [2][3] opened in 1927, with
| only 3 new lines since the late 1970s (and barely even any
| line extensions in the 2000s)
|
| It feels newer in SK because it is.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul_Metropolitan_Subway
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toei_Subway
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Metro
| presentation wrote:
| I live in Tokyo - on the surface certain lines have dated
| exteriors on their trains and stations, but they are
| maintained so much better and built with much more care to
| the surrounding environment that it's impossible for me to
| compare with NYC.
|
| NYC's trains are constantly late, always go out of service,
| are deafeningly loud, incredibly slow, filthy, don't have
| great coverage outside of the Manhattan core and generally
| unreliable. Tokyo's are always on time, very clean, pretty
| silent, have incredible coverage of the entire metro area
| especially in combination with the bus networks (which also
| are efficient, clean, and don't hold lower-class stigma),
| and are super fast.
|
| The lines that aren't underground in NYC tend to be
| depressing under the tracks and pretty unlivable around
| them, leading to tons of urban blight; the over-ground
| lines in Tokyo, thanks to their thoughtful design and
| reasonable noise level, are often full of shops,
| restaurants, bars, and walking paths that people actually
| use, positively contributing to their neighborhoods.
|
| The main thing that feels "old" about Tokyo's trains is
| just that they look like they were decorated a long time
| ago or are kinda plain; but from a functional perspective
| they outclass practically any system on the planet,
| especially when taking into account the integration into
| the broader Shinkansen network. They have the best safety
| record of any rail system anywhere and are economically
| sustaining. The only major complaint I have is that it's
| relatively expensive fare-wise, especially considering
| transfers between different rail companies' lines/buses.
|
| Also, it's worth checking out the pre-Olympics revamp of
| some lines - for instance Ginza Line (Shibuya station
| especially) and Odakyu Line (Setagaya Daita-Shimokitazawa
| in particular) got a lot of station and neighborhood
| renovations that give them that sparkly new shine.
|
| Aside, I've also lived in Shanghai before - the rail
| network in China is something to watch, their high speed
| rail stations and urban networks are very nice as of late,
| although they need more express lines within city limits
| (Shanghai/Beijing are enormous so crossing the city by rail
| takes a long time).
| _RPL5_ wrote:
| I have not been to Japan, but I have read several fairly
| detailed accounts coming from multiple travel bloggers.
|
| One thing they all pointed out is that Japan is full of
| what by our standards would be considered semi-antique
| technology like trolleys from the 1950s and computers and
| fax machines from the 1990s, that are all still being
| used, and maintained in really good condition.
|
| Living in Tokyo, do you notice this as well? I assume
| this sort of commitment to maintenance / "orderliness"
| must be cultural?
|
| What do the really bad parts of Tokyo look like?
| cyberlurker wrote:
| Having spent some time (not as much as you I'm sure) on
| both metros, I agree. NYC subway could be so much better
| and should be the pride of the city and state, but due to
| mismanagement and politics it's not great and getting
| worse.
|
| It's almost an insult to Tokyo to compare their wonderful
| subways to NYC. I hope that changes in the future.
| m_mueller wrote:
| I actually love the rugged but high quality stainless
| steel look of Japanese trains. I think Starship might
| bring this look back into fashion. Functional and
| extremely durable. Airstream caravans are another example
| of it and they're beloved too.
| Danieru wrote:
| > But Tokyo infrastructure felt basically as old as NYC
| infrastructure to me
|
| In part because it is, most of Tokyo's major subway lines
| were built in the 1960s to 1970s. Ginza line was built
| before WW1 and was the first subway in Asia.
|
| The highways were all built soon after the war too.
|
| Thus part of the issue is age. Japan stabilized much sooner
| than Korea and built up faster.
|
| A bigger component though is Japan's preference to build
| new then let sit. Maintenance for visual reasons is rare.
| Thus combined with the high humidity stuff rusts and molds.
| You can see rust on iron beams waiting at the JR platform
| in Shibuya! Literal rust on one of the most high traffic
| stations in the world with gleaming skyscrappers as your
| backdrop.
|
| In part Japan feels like a retired country. All the heavy
| lifting has been done. The mortgage paid. I joke with
| friends we are young people in an old country. Everything
| around us is going into the night, and we are just now
| waking up.
|
| I like it, but I can see why others would prefer a newer
| country.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Thanks for the perspective! I also don't mean to say one
| is better or worse. I think Tokyo, Seoul, and NYC are
| awesome. I've lived in NYC for the past 5 years and it's
| by far my favorite city in the US.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Also, in my experience Korea was way more ready to handle
| English speakers than Japan was.
|
| One of the key problems is that Japan has a huge domestic
| market and does not 'need' English to survive. Korea, on the
| other hand, is a lot more dependent on its external connections
| and a push for better English proficiency makes a lot of sense.
| davidjytang wrote:
| China and Taiwan had been compared a lot. China's cities look
| much newer than Taiwan cities. But people's general way of
| carrying themselves differs a lot. Technological advances also
| varies.
|
| If your "modern country" means "modern buildings", then I can
| agree. But if you're saying people, culture, art, technology of
| South Korea is more "modern" than other countries, I would
| disagree.
| publicola1990 wrote:
| But after watching 'Parasite' amd 'Host', it does seem a Country
| with rampant inequalities.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Funny how the article doesn't mention that Korea is a divided
| country technically still at war.
|
| Besides the development of modern South Korea out of a brutal
| military dictatorship is largely parallel to that of other Asian
| countries: Taiwan, Singapore, Japan and China.
| ptsneves wrote:
| The article title explicitly calls out South Korea.
|
| The country is also recognized as sovereign nation by more than
| 188 countries, having a seat in the United Nations as well.
|
| Territorial disputes are common even in Europe, as well as
| developments out of brutal dictatorship. I honestly do not get
| your point :)
| Clewza313 wrote:
| There are no territorial disputes in Europe that involve
| nuclear powers threatening total annihilation on neighbors.
| Seoul is within easy artillery range of the North, and the
| badly misnamed DMZ (or, rather, both sides outside the zone
| itself) is among the most militarized places on the planet.
| vlads wrote:
| You must have somehow missed the ongoing war in East
| Ukraine.
| radmuzom wrote:
| OP was explicitly referring to South Korea too. If you are
| not aware of their extremely brutal past, here are few links
| to get you started (these articles just skim the surface,
| much deeper study is needed if you really want to get into
| the details).
|
| https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/05/south-korea-park-chung-
| he...
|
| https://www.smh.com.au/world/south-korea-owns-up-to-
| brutal-p...
|
| https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/the-forgotten-history-of-
| sou...
|
| https://archive.is/fBa5L
| ptsneves wrote:
| The brutal past exists in Europe as well. Portugal had a
| colonial war up to 1974 with records of mass executions in
| Africa. Franco's Spain had it's own dark history with mass
| graves still being uncovered. Franco' regime ended even
| later and the country still has staunch Franco supporters.
| Do you not consider Salazar or Franco's regime up to par to
| South Korea? If not what is the criteria?
|
| Also to answer the other comment, Russia has repeatedly
| toyed with the idea of a nuclear bombing to Warsaw as well
| as invading the baltic. The baltic states are more than
| within range for a ground invasion. Poland has a border
| with the Kaliningrad enclave as well. Now you might say,
| that Russia would not dare... Well ask any baltic state how
| scared shitless they were with how easy Russia imposed
| itself on Ukraine. I honestly do not see how Korea is in a
| much different scenario.
| tus89 wrote:
| Is it really that different from Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, (what
| was) HK, even Malaysia...lots of Western democracy+asian
| culture+high tech industry countries.
| carabiner wrote:
| Worth mentioning is that this article is written by a native
| Korean. A bit heavy on the boosterism.
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