Korean population could drop by 85% in next 100 years: study

From the article

South Korea’s population could plummet to just 15 percent of its current level by 2125 if the nation’s ongoing demographic decline continues unabated, according to a private think tank in Seoul on Wednesday.

In its latest long-term forecast, the Korean Peninsula Population Institute for Future used a cohort component method to project Korea’s demographic trends over the next century. This internationally recognized technique estimates future populations by incorporating factors such as birth rates, mortality rates and immigration patterns.

Under the institute’s worst-case scenario, South Korea’s population could drop to 7.53 million by 2125 — a sharp fall from the current 51.68 million. This would be even less than the current population of the city of Seoul alone, which is over 9.3 million.

Drastic studies like this rarely account for changes in behavior.

Kurzgesagt did a video on this recently.

Not looking good for S. Korea.

https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk?si=8UXtDiqY6coAAib_

Good.

What was the population 100 years ago? Out of curiosity….

I wonder how the figures are distributed by socio-professional category and wealth class, it could also give an indicator of the type of change, will the poor resist better and there will be this delta resulting in a country with a less wealthy class who will have to climb the social ladder without having benefited from inheritance or will they disappear to the benefit of the wealthier managerial classes, if the wealthy classes have more children, then Korean society will have a stronger middle-class base, which will have earned their wealth through inheritance (which should lead to even richer people); if the wealthy Koreans don’t have children, then the wealth of these families will be extinguished to the benefit of the state, without any generational redistribution.

We could also ask questions about other themes, such as religion. Let’s say by example that Protestants have far more children there, and that these children are adult Protestants, so we could observe a fairly strong natural progression in this theme.

The answer obviously to import millions of third world peasants with low IQ, no formal education, and high propensity to violence.

North K will just have to wait for their neighbour to collapse by itself.

“Mom, can we have more Koreans?” — “We have Koreans at home!”

In all seriousness, it is interesting to see these predictions for stark drop offs in population a couple decades after similar fear-mongering about overpopulation. Both are clearly righteous in the danger of the threat. But it’s hard to know exactly what will happen. Diaspora populations aren’t going to come back, but imagine what would happen if the world’s “Irish” went to live in Ireland, for example.

Unless they learn to breath underwater, the population will drop by 100% by this time. It will be covered by the ocean, like most of south east Asia.

I know that bad work-life balance and the cost of living are the biggest reason for people having kids, but I’d be very interested to see the correlation of PFAS concentration and fertility across the world

It will be even faster, at some point infrastructure will crumble and society will follow close behind. At that point, birth rates will drop even harder, people who can will leave for greener pastures until only old people remain who will die out.

If they feel like not having enough people, there are still countries in the world where the birth rate is over 4 and millions of people are actively trying to leave. The solution really is very simple, the only problem is racism.

Treat your workers like shitstained serfs with a crippling work culture and low wages and nobody wants children anymore. Can‘t believe that someone is really surprised by that.

And the USA will follow them very soon, like most parts of Asia and Europe.

Or maybe with technology they just get only girls in the future. When each woman gets one girl then population stays stable – except for the men.

Declining birth rates make sense when you consider that we don’t really value children. Only our material assets, and cognitive and physical abilities, are valued. Children are either a huge gamble on their future achievements (if your goal is to accumulate intergenerational wealth) or an unpaid labour of love. And by love here, I mean non-transactional behaviour where you do something for someone out of genuine affection. We can’t help but be conditioned within capitalism to view human relationships as transactional, including parenthood. The notion that poor material conditions and high cost of living are behind low birth rates is not supported by historical or contemporary evidence of the relationship between living conditions and fertility rates. People just don’t really want children that much. Which, frankly, is fine. Society will undergo major changes and a new world will follow this one.

We don’t see the fall of nations very often and a fall by this means is something that we all need to take note of. If you create conditions where people cannot have kids or feel so demoralized that they don’t want to have kids, you’re going to face population collapse.

There’s a reason why we are constantly screaming to tax the rich. This problem is 100% solvable and Korea and many other countries facing the same kinds of issues can rebound pretty quick if they take a harder look at themselves. What’s more valuable, short-term quarterly gains for rich people who already have more than they can handle, or the future of your entire civilization?

Testament to the ruling establishment political classes, that they’ve created a country no one wants to have a family in.

[My honest reaction to this study](https://xkcd.com/605/)

All popular will be dropped that much or more anyway by then with climate change.