South Korea, the country with the world’s lowest birth rate, expects it to fall even further in the next two years while its overall population is expected to plummet to levels not seen since the 1970s.
The new data underscores the demographic timebomb that South Korea and other East Asian nations like Japan and Singapore are facing as their societies rapidly age just a few decades after their dramatic industrialization.
South Korea’s total fertility rate, the number of births from a woman in her lifetime, is now expected to drop from 0.78 in 2022 to 0.65 in 2025, according to the government’s Statistics Korea.
It is a bad thing for that countries economy. Populations where elderly people are disproportionate to younger people require an unusually high number of care takers, and those caretakers are not participating in careers that maintain or increase the countries standard of living. So for instance, there may be fewer people working on maintaining roads and infrastructure, which means the quality of those things will decline. If you apply that thinly across everything except elder care, you get increased scarcity across the board, which generally increases costs while decreasing quality.
Governments might have thought of that when they were spending decades endorsing wealth inequality and subsidizing everything from the top. Why make more people when life’s already not worth living and everything continues to get worse at an accelerating rate?
Politicians aren’t known for their morality and selflessness.
Or especially their ability to think long term.