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Has South Korea Fixed its Baby Bust? (Gov Paying $1M+ Per Marginal Kid)
In this episode, we delve into the intriguing bounce in South Korea's fertility rates after decades of decline. Join us as we explore the reasons behind this shift, the sustainability of the current strategies, and the cultural impacts. We also discuss the geometric potential of human reproduction, the challenges of demographic collapse, and propose innovative solutions like a K-Pop Chaebol Oligarchy to address these issues. Additionally, we cover cultural influences on fertility perceptions, dependency ratio cascades, and much more.
Simone Collins: . [00:00:00] Hello Malcolm. I'm so excited to be with your, sorry. Lemme try again. Hello, Malcolm. I'm so excited to be here with you today because we are going to talk about some trending news about South Korea's fertility. Apparently they're seeing a little bounce upward ho, but, and everyone's like, oh,
Malcolm Collins: why this is relevant.
Okay. Yeah, because South Korea for a long time has had a rapidly declining fertility rate. It has the world's worst. Fertility rate at, at their current fertility rate. For every a hundred South Koreans, there would only be five great grandchildren, and their fertility rate has gone down almost every year for the past 20 years, except for this year.
And this brings up well, in
Simone Collins: 2024 there was a little bit of a bounce, and then there's even a slightly bigger bounce in the first half of, or at least the spring of 25.
Malcolm Collins: This brings up a couple of very important questions for the rest of the world. One is a lot of people said there's a bottom floor to collapsing fertility rates.
There is a number that when you get so low, and what I always said historically is, well, where is this floor if [00:01:00] nobody is hit it yet? You know, how is South Korea still going down? Yeah. If this imaginary floor exists. Yeah. And so the question is. Has South Cria hit this imaginary floor? And Simone is going to argue it's pretty compelling evidence.
No, they haven't. Yeah, we're we're gonna talk about this.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Because I mean, I is, this is really just. A fart in the wind. I I'm gonna walk you through what actually changed with fertility in South Korea, whether South Korea's present strategy is sustainable given also what they paid for this change.
'cause it is, no, hold on. You gotta, you gotta start this at the stu, they paid over a million dollars for every addition. Lemme stop with the spoilers, but I gotta give you one more spoiler actually. 'cause at the end I want each of us to kind of freestyle on what we would do if we personally were put in charge of South Korea's fertility and mine boils down to three words.
K-Pop cha. Sorry. K-Pop cha bull oligarchy. I'm excited. Okay, go for
Malcolm Collins: it. Go for it. Go for it. Go on. Do it. Alright.
Simone Collins: So, as a lot of people have seen in the news, [00:02:00] especially if you follow fertility, South Korea has recently experienced a notable, those still modest improvement in its fertility rate and number of births reversing a longstanding decline.
So what happened ultimately was that the total fertility right in South Korea rose from a devastating. 0.72 in 2023 to oh 0.75 in 2024. And then in the first quarter of 2025, the TFR further increased to 0.82, which is, I mean, like, kind of, wow. I mean, 'cause we just, it kept plummeting. So this is nice to see.
It's the highest quarterly figures since early 2022. So there's that. But the. This is, this is kind of encouraging 'cause it is the first annual fertility rate increase for 2024. That's the first one in 90 years. It was just in continuous decline since 2015. And the fact that the rebound is com becoming a little bit more pronounced from 2024 to 2025 is nice.
Like, I'm, I'm not
Published on 5 months, 2 weeks ago