What I’ve been reading: Saving the Protestant Ethic: Creative Class Evangelicalism and the Crisis of Work by Andrew Lynn.
For those of you in the Indianapolis area, I want to highlight a great upcoming event. Farah Stockman, author of the great book American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, will be in town speaking about her book on March 19th at 6pm at the Carmel Clay Public Library. (Registration required).
Stockman’s book is about the lives of workers in a bearing plant in Indianapolis that closed and moved to Mexico. I hosted her for a discussion about it on my podcast last year.
The New Yorker has a long and fantastic piece on falling fertility rates in its new issue. There’s a particular focus on South Korea.
Today, declining fertility is a near-universal phenomenon. Albania, El Salvador, and Nepal, none of them affluent, are now below replacement levels. Iran’s fertility rate is half of what it was thirty years ago. Headlines about “Europe’s demographic winter” are commonplace. Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, has said that her country is “destined to disappear.” One Japanese economist runs a conceptual clock that counts down to his country’s final child: the current readout is January 5, 2720....
It will take a few years before we can be sure, but it’s possible that 2023 saw the world as a whole slump beneath the replacement threshold for the first time. There are a couple of places where fertility remains higher—Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa—but even there the rates are generally diminishing. Paranoia has ensued....
Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the most significant decision any individual might make with unanswerable questions about our collective fate, so a theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything—gender, money, politics, culture, evolution. Eberstadt told me, “The person who explains it deserves to get a Nobel, not in economics but in literature.”...
South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is the lowest rate of any nation in the world. It may be the lowest in recorded history. If that trajectory holds, each successive generation will be a third the size of its predecessor. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren….Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary….Outside of Seoul, children are largely phantom presences. There are a hundred and fifty-seven elementary schools that had no new enrollees scheduled for 2023. That year, the seaside village of Iwon-myeon recorded a single newborn....
The after-school program was about to start. It featured two options: 3-D printing and something Lee called “a new sport.” She could give me no details on the new sport, which was played on Tuesdays. In the past, they had offered volleyball, badminton, and soccer, but such extravagances required a critical mass. She let me wander the school, which felt like a museum of childhood artifacts: an unlit but well-stocked gymnasium, a darkened cafeteria outfitted with a little proscenium stage, enormous forsaken playgrounds, ballfields gone wild. The only apparent concession to the demographic reality was a robotic apparatus for playing Ping-Pong by yourself....
Korea’s demographic collapse is mostly taken as a fait accompli. As John Lee, the political analyst, put it, “They say South Korea will be extinct in a hundred years. Who cares? We’ll all be dead by then.” The causes routinely cited include the cost of housing and of child care—among the highest in the world. Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ”…The reporter said, “When I write about this, I think, Well, what would change my mind? The answer is nothing. It’s the norm not to want kids.” Like many Koreans, she dotes on her dog. Finding gifts in Seoul for my two little soccer fanatics at home required deliberate planning—I schlepped all over town looking for national-team jerseys in child’s sizes and had to settle for black-market knockoffs—but there is a pet depot on practically every block. Last year, strollers for dogs outsold those for babies. She said, “I’m not saying people value dogs more than they value children.” She paused to gesture to the other patrons: “But all you have to do is look around.”...
Koreans cite the pressures and costs of excessive education as a large part of their reluctance to have children. (American parents in liberal enclaves might share a version of these misgivings.) An auspicious Korean childhood culminates in acceptance to one of Seoul’s three most prestigious universities. Admission is primarily based on a student’s performance on the national collegiate entrance exam, or Suneung, which is administered every year on a Thursday in November. The opening of the stock market is delayed that day, and many construction sites are closed. Bus and metro services are increased to ease traffic congestion. Students running late may avail themselves of a police-motorcycle escort. During the English-comprehension section, which requires absolute silence, air-traffic control suspends all takeoffs and landings.
Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.
Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Photo: Picryl, in Public Domain.
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