Why South Korea's Fertility Crisis is Unsolvable (Unless They Make This One Change)

In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone delve into the complex factors contributing to South Korea's alarmingly low fertility rates. They explore how the country's unique chaebol system, extreme meritocracy based on measurable statistics rather than efficacy, and hierarchical culture have created an environment that discourages having children. Malcolm proposes a unconventional solution that could potentially fix the problem in a single generation, but acknowledges the cultural resistance it would face. The hosts also touch on the loss of Korean culture and cuisine that will occur if the fertility crisis remains unaddressed.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] a lot of people see South Korea and North Korea as being a almost antithetical to each other. When that really isn't the case, what South Korea is a collection of North Korea's competing against each other under a capitalist the broad economic rule system.

And that's what the chiabols are And Korea is also an extremely meritocratic system, but meritocratic in regards to measurable statistics, not in regards to measurable efficacy.

And this is the core of what will cause Korea to fail as a culture and what makes it unsalvageable, . And I'll get to why, because it may seem like such a small thing you want to fix the entire Korean system, I'll tell you how you fix it.

You can fix it in one generation, Korea. Listen to me here. You freak the f**k out if you do this, but it would fix things

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! [00:01:00] We are so excited to be joining our audience today with the newest member of our family. Many people know that I worked in Korea, I lived in Korea for a year, and it was where I started caring about fertility rate issues but before I get further on that, I want to introduce our audience to an alternate country. Now, in this alternate country, they've done everything right.

In this wonderful, conservative country, same sex marriage is still illegal in the year 2024. Porn is illegal in the year 2024. Abortion was illegal until just this year. Three years ago, there's almost no immigration and total ethnic homogeny. Women are permanently underclass citizens. And for the last 20 years, the government has spent over 200 billion dollars trying to increase fertility rates.

In this one serval country, Companies will pay their citizens [00:02:00] 75k to have kids. Of course, this is a joke. The wonderful country I'm describing here is, in fact, South Korea. All of these things are true about South Korea. They have tried both the fever dream fantasies of the right and the left, and it has not worked from cash handouts to ethnic homogenous state to banning abortion, to banning pornography.

This is why I always laugh when people suggest these things. I'm like, these things were institutionalized in Korea before their fertility started to collapse and have been there throughout the entire process. And people will be like, How bad is the situation in Korea really right now? The average number, and this I'm quoting here, the average number of expected babies for a South Korean woman during her reproductive life cycle fell to a record low of 0.

72 from 0. 78 in 2022. Data from statistics on South Korea showed Wednesday. [00:03:00] And if you project this forward, South Korea is now projected to have a fertility rate of 0. 68 in 2024, and they are on track to meet that. That means that for every 100 South Koreans alive today, there will be 11. 6 grandchildren.

Not great grand children, Grandchildren for great-grandchildren, it's less than four, and this is assuming it doesn't continue to fall. And keep in mind it's falling by like it felt like 11.5% last year, like insane. And where most of the country is collated. Now in Seoul, the fertility rate's only 0.55.

That means you are shrinking the population to a quarter of its size, basically, every generation. That is insane. For every four South Koreans, there is one kid in Seoul. Now, to, if you think, oh, because I love demographers, they're always like things shift. I'm like, yeah, but you [00:04:00] can look at the trailing data.

Okay, in South Korea, only I found two statistics here. It's either only 2. 9 percent of Koreans are born out of wedlock, or only 2 percent of Koreans are born outside of marriage. This was a statistic done in 2022, so fairly recently. But the number is very low. So if you want to get a projection of the number of Koreans that are going to be born, you can look at the number of marriages that are going to form as being the Absolute upper limit to that number.

Only 27 percent of women in their 20s considered a marriage essential last year. This is a 53 percent decline from 2008 in South Korea. This was in 2023. 23%. So only 23 percent of the young population even could have a kid. That is absolutely wild when you consider that the population [00:05:00] already has 60 percent of their population over the age of 40.

And if you take that statistic and you go, okay what about that 22 billion that they gave out, right? What is that per person in South Korea? Because I decided to do a calculation, like how much of that per family, given the percent of the population that is under the age of 40. And I calculated that out to be about 28k per male female pair, assuming that everyone was getting married in that under 40 demographic.

That's an insanely

Simone Collins: high

Malcolm Collins: number. Yeah, in terms of what's being paid out. And what's another interesting thing that we are seeing, though, that is worth noting in the statistics is a rise in the acceptance of out of wedlock kids with 20 percent expressing a positive perspective on it in 2020 up from 11.

1 percent in 2020. So in half a decade, almost double the acceptance. Now it's still low, but you can see a change in perception as society is beginning to become desperate. But from what we see with

Simone Collins: numbers in [00:06:00] Sweden, for example, that acceptance doesn't necessarily correlate with higher fertility. Like fewer couples than ever are getting married.

In Sweden, more having couple or sorry, having kids while staying unmarried, but their birth rate is also going way down. So that's not even a sign of hope.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I what I want to elevate here is in the thesis of this particular video, cause it's something I was meditating on recently. What do you need to change about Korean society to actually fix their fertility crisis?

If you ask Koreans, you are going to get two broad answers, and they're both wrong. Now, generally, the first answer they're going to say is, it's just the economics. I can't afford to have kids. Which is partially right, but not in the way they mean. And what's really interesting is I saw some studies done recently on like space because people always try to work like NIMBYism, building more housing policy, right?

And what you see actually is a [00:07:00] correlation between the number of people who live around you and your fertility rate in the United States. So did you know that your average United States citizen or family that lives in a house that they are either renting or own, but like a house, not an apartment or a subdivided house is above replacement fertility.

But as soon as you get to apartments where houses are subdivided, it goes down to 1. 8 and then it continues to go down the more people live in that apartment complex. Now, this is a big problem in South Korea, where the majority of the population lives in these ultra high rises, even when they're living in rural areas.

Yeah, we've

Simone Collins: talked about this before. For example, we took a train out, literally, actually,