South Korea: hyper-competitive and childless

There are enough people to go around: eight billion now, compared to two billion less than a hundred years ago. Fifty-one million in South Korea, compared to only 12 million a hundred years ago. So why are South Koreans obsessed about their low birth rate?

It is certainly very low now. The average number of children a South Korean woman will have in her lifetime is just 0.72, whereas the birth rate needs to be at least 2.1 children per woman to prevent the population from falling.

Lots of developed countries have low birth rates nowadays, especially in East Asia – Japan is 1.3 children per woman, China is 1.2 – but no other country is below 1.0. South Korea is not just leading the parade, it is so far out in front that it is almost out of sight.

The national anxiety about this is so great that South

Korea’s President Yoon Suk

Yeol has finally said the unsayable. His country’s citizens are “excessively and unnecessarily competitive,” he admitted – and that is why it has the world’s lowest birth-rate.

The steadily declining birth rate has been perceived as a ‘problem’ for almost two decades now, and various governments have thrown an estimated $286 billion at it with no effect whatever.

All sorts of incentives have been tried: subsidized housing, free taxis and even direct monthly cash payments for couples who have children. Married men are exempt from military service if they have three children before turning 30; mothers can hire nannies from Southeast Asia and pay them below minimum wage.

Nothing worked, and the birth rate is still falling fast. At the current rate of decline, it will be down to 0.5 in just five more years, at which point the country will only be replacing one-quarter of its present population. What is driving this extraordinary collapse?

We know that it is not some peculiarity of Korean culture in general, because there is a control for this particular experiment: North Korea, which beneath a thin veneer of Communist ideology is a traditional Korean dynastic state. And the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (to give its full name) has a birth rate of 1.8 children per completed family.

Whatever it is, it’s specific to South Korea – and what stands out is the sheer speed with which South Korea became a fully modern democratic society. It was still a dictatorship 30 years ago. It was still a very poor and poorly educated country 50 years ago. It was a war-torn wreck 70 years ago, and a downtrodden Japanese colony 80 years ago.

Now it is in the same income bracket as Canada, France and Japan, but it made that transition three times faster than Japan did and social attitudes don’t change that fast. Even in Japan women face many challenges at work, but in South Korea they are virtually insurmountable.

Three quarters of South Korean women have a postsecondary education, but they are expected to leave work for at least two years after having a child. Even after that they face obstacles in getting back into the workforce at the same level – yet South Korea is the most expensive country in the world to raise a child, and one income is not enough.