on December 4, 2025, 12:17:40, in reply to "it works out to something like 4 greatgrandchildren for every 100 people..."
Previous Message
which is bananas.
that being said, if they can handle the (significant) problems with the social safety net and decaying infrastructure, i'm not convinced it's all bad for a place like south korea.
south korea is about the size of the state of indiana. the population of indiana (which, while mostly rural, doesn't feel particularly empty and which has cities/sports teams/etc.) is 6.9 million. south korea's population is 51 million. i'm not convinced that a 90% population decline for south korea is necessarily cataclysmic.
that does assume that they figure out how to transition, that they don't continue to fall from that point and that the united states continues to guarantee their security (or there are other technological advances that make such a guarantee unnecessary). Previous Message
Some countries with really low "total fertility rates" have a real crisis looming, especially with resistance to immigration and no internal ethnic / racial group that picks up some slack from the majority. (That's obviously a topic of debate for Europeans, with more fertile Africans and Muslims migrating in large numbers.)
South Korea’s birth rate currently stands at 0.748 in 2024 , a slight rise from the record low of 0.721 in 2023. That compares with an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average of 1.43 in 2023. The commonly cited “replacement rate” for countries to prevent a declining population is 2.1.
What a 0.72 fertility rate means for South Korea is that for every 100 Koreans, they would have about 36 children at current levels , shrinking the workforce across generations.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/27/south-koreas-birth-rate-collapse-threatens-growth.html
Also, "100 South Koreans will have an estimated 15 grandchildren."
https://x.com/Valen10Francois/status/1995986097977823728
A population goes down really fast with a birth rate like that.
In my own family, I have two daughters and two grandchildren = 1.0 fertility rate for them.
"Iowa women were better than Illini men" - Potomac45
