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 gonna. [00:03:00] I'm not gonna poo poo that, like it's really nice to see. But let's talk about how many extra babies were actually born. In 2024, there were a total of 238,300 babies born. Good for them. That's awesome. We love it. That's an increase of just 8,300 compared to 2023. So we also have to consider like this is a fairly small population, meaning that like.

It, it doesn't take a whole lot to make the numbers look really different, meaning that really small things could be at play here. And, and then it. This, this doesn't change the fact that South Korea's even their improved birth rate is still the worst in the world.

Malcolm Collins: So, well, I wanna talk about how bad it is.

Their improved birth rate is still in the sevens, the, the zero point

Simone Collins: sevens that is well, for the year. It, it went up to 0.83 in the first quarter. We're gonna see how the rest of the year plays out.

Malcolm Collins: Eight three. Okay. But the, the point you're being is, is 0.83 is basically nothing. Like [00:04:00] even if they, they, they, they kept like rising or they, they got a bit up, they would still already be at a collapse level.

Kurzgesagt: Economic collapse in 2023. A breathtaking 40% of South Koreans over 65 live below the poverty line. But in 2060, this number may seem lovely. In comparison, today, South Korea has one of the largest pension funds in the world, but it's projected to be completely depleted by the 2050s.

So in 2060. Pensions will have to be paid by the working population. The minimum a society needs is between two to three workers per retiree paying for them with their taxes. But even if we assume that all South Koreans over 15 will be working in 2060, the country will have less than one worker per senior.

So not only will poverty among the elderly be common, but a big chunk will be forced to work, except they may not be able to find jobs because by [00:05:00] 2060, the South Korean economy may have collapsed.. Okay, wait. This is all a bit much.

Is there no way back why? There really is no way back. The problem with the demographic freight train is that once it hits, things become irreversible. Let's say fertility in South Korea magically triples to the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, and stays there in 2060. It will be an inverted pyramid on top of a barrel, and there would still be only 1.5 people of working age per senior over 65.

Even in the best made up scenario, South Korea has to pass through an unavoidable bottleneck before it'll recover,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. 'cause even though they've increased the fertility rate among the young population, you have to keep in mind that 60% of the population is over the age of 40 and can't even have kids. Yeah. So here we're talking about the fertility rate within the smaller population. They can still have kids. And in addition to that mm-hmm.

We're dealing with the issue that there's already this [00:06:00] huge missing population within Korea. It takes

Simone Collins: 18 years. Yeah. The, the damage has been done. And, and we also need to remind people who may not like, maybe new to this concept of fertility rates and whatnot, a replacement fertility rate, like if we're gonna keep a population stable is 2.1.

Like per mother, there have to be 2.1 children. Okay. 'Cause you're kind of replacing the mother and the father and 0.8 is nothing to be proud of, but it's important

Malcolm Collins: to note here that even if. Tomorrow, south Korea's fertility rate went back up to 2.1. Okay? Mm-hmm. They would still, if you look at the math, to support their aging population before those 18 year olds could come of age.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Their systems are still going to collapse