Email: Demographic Anxiety
A private reaction to the Cosmopolitan Globalist essay 'Destiny and Demographics'
I recently visited my family to attend a funeral (which I may write about later) but while in their company I watched the film Parasite, which is a dark psychological drama that explores class differences in modern South Korea.
I saw an article in the Cosmopolitan Globalist Substack newsletter by Claire Berlinski, 'Destiny and Demographics' (pasted below). This was my off the cuff reaction to one piece of data, which I found amazing and terrifying.
In case you’re wondering: yes; this is the kind of email I write to friends and family. I recently sent a long message (on Instagram, which I’ve been told I ‘don’t understand’) to an ex about O. Cordyceps and Toxoplasma Gondii and the ways that fungi and bacteria can ‘hack’ and guide the behaviors of much larger organisms (like ants and mice and even humans). She replied and said something about her current boyfriend, to which I replied ‘okay but what about toxoplasma gondii?’ I’m currently single, which you might hardly believe but I assure you is true. I don’t get it either. Who doesn’t want to receive long, unsolicited missives on Asian demographic trends or insectoid fungal infections? It’s fairly baffling.
(my email):
Regarding our post-viewing conversation about Parasite: this article claims that the birth rate of S. Korea is now .78 (children per family - or per woman, to be more precise). A country needs a birthrate of 2.15 (or massive immigration, which Korea does not permit and could not accommodate) simply to stay at 'replacement level'. A shrinking population doesn't just have implications for school enrollment or military recruitment. The 'lost' people are, by definition, at the youngest end of the population distribution. That means less young adults in 20 years, less productive citizens to support the groaning weight of eldercare and retirement benefits, and-ultimately-less people having children. Like recession leading to unemployment which leads to underconsumption which leads to lost profits which leads to unemployment, etc etc the loss of young people (relative to a hypothetical scenario in which Korean couoples had more children) is what economists call a 'vicious cycle' and scientists call a feedback loop: the effectuation of the dynamic worsens itself, so every iteration gets worse at an arithmetically accelerating rate even if the numbers stay exactly the same.
There are no easy answers to this problem but Peter Zeihan makes a convincing case that the countries with the human capital development infrastructure (decent schools and healthcare and dynamic cities) AND healthy populations of young people will have a massive advantage over their competitors during this century.
How does a country avoid this? Cheap housing, economic growth, incentives (like targeted tax benefits), guaranteed maternity leave and subsidized childcare are all possible ameliorative measures. You basically want to make it easier and more attractive (less expensive, more status-bearing) for people to have kids. Children are their own psychological and economic reward (not in every case but on the average) so you want to reduce the costs and risks, which tend to be heavily front-loaded. Culture is a HUGE variable though, and that's much harder for governments to shift. South Korea has a very normative and status-conscious mate selection regime which heavily penalizes marrying "below one's class" or sexual/romantic libertinism or casual family formation. These are all now obstacles to what I imagine the government's goals must be in this area.
South Korea is in trouble. The last data I remember seeing had Italy with rates of 1.2 and S. Korea with rates of 1.1 cpf (I think... it's been years) but .78 is catastrophic. Every generation will effectively see the share of S. Korea which is young more than halved. In 60 years there will be about 15-20x more septuagenarians than there are children in the country, according to some quick mental math. Just think about that for a minute.
Elon Musk received widespread ridicule and disbelief when he named 'underpopulation' as the biggest looming threat to society. I'm not sure if it's the biggest but it's not small.
It's worth noting that this kind of situation has never existed in human society before. We've never seen anything close. The book Children of Men imagines the social effects of a society with no children and if you imagine the effects in Korea will be similar (but less severe) we can add nihilism, lack of psychological investment in the future or in the social contract, violence, criminality, substance abuse, a profusion of cults, and a general coarsening of social and sexual relations to the massive economic effects that await Korea.
Even if they started working on this right now and righted the ship within 10-15 years (which frankly doesn't seem possible) they'll still have a 'lost generation' and experience massive social and economic distortions in the coming decades.
Interesting times!
The article to which I was reacting
Destiny and demographics
Why don't secular people in wealthy countries have kids?
We had an interesting discussion in the comments yesterday. Subscribers: If you don’t join or at least read the comments, you’re missing one of the benefits of paying for a subscription. Unlike every other comment section on the Internet, ours is not a sewer. It’s lively, friendly, and intelligent, and often, it’s where I accidentally write a bonus essay. I never mean to do that. But sometimes I reply to someone and realize that what I’ve written was more interesting than what I’d planned to send out that day. So do check out the comments, meet other subscribers, make friends. Anyone who pays to read the Cosmopolitan Globalist is probably someone who enjoys thinking about the same things you do.
The conversation arose in response to the item I posted the other day about South Korea’s demographic disappearance: Korea’s plunging birthrate alarms government. Total fertility—the number of children per women—plunged to .78 last year, which is astonishing. The replacement rate is 2.1. In Japan, the number was .81. This is obviously catastrophic for the country’s future, and it’s catastrophic for its economy, right now: South Korea is confronting massive manpower shortages. I remarked of the article that the population bust Peter Zeihan warned about is here, and I said:
This seems to happen to every country that industrializes and no one knows what to do about. (Yes, Israel is an exception, but until recently, so was the United States. Israel will probably have the same problem soon enough.)
In response, our reader WigWag wrote:
Devout people make babies; secular people don’t. It’s really that simple. As the United States becomes more secular, its birth rate will continue to decline. Israel has one of the highest birth rates in the world because the ultra-Orthodox routinely have more than six children per couple. That’s double the rate of the rest of Israel’s Jewish population and three times the rate of secular Israeli Jews. The religious Zionist population (less observant than the ultra-Orthodox, but observant nonetheless, also have a very high birth rate. Israel’s secular population (the citizens freaking out over a minor judicial reform) has a much lower birth rate than the rest of the nation’s Jewish population and its Arab minority. Secular Jews in Israel are likely to enter a demographic tailspin just as reform and secular Jews in the United States have. Societies that eschew religion are committing demographic suicide all over the world.
No comment on the part about “freaking out over a minor judicial reform.” To my surprise, though, I actually agreed with the rest of his remarks. You can read my long response to him here, and to make it even easier, I’ll append it below, slightly edited for clarity.1 But on reflection, I think this theory is incomplete. And on further reflection, I think the theory is wrong.
(Pay to see the rest…)