South Korea’s depopulation could be warning for West
For some time now, South Korea has been a striking case study in the depopulation problem that hangs over the developed world. Almost all rich countries have seen their birthrates settle below replacement level, but usually that means somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 children per woman. In 2021, the United States stood at 1.7, France at 1.8, Italy at 1.3 and Canada at 1.4.
But South Korea is distinctive in that it slipped into below-replacement territory in the 1980s but lately has been falling even more — dropping below one child per woman in 2018, to 0.8 after the pandemic, and now to just 0.7 children per woman.
It’s worth unpacking what that means. A country that sustained a birthrate at that level would have, for every 200 people in one generation, 70 people in the next one, a depopulation exceeding what the Black Death delivered to Europe in the 14th century. Run the experiment through a second generational turnover, and your original 200-person population falls below 25.
By the standards of newspaper columnists, I am a low-birthrate alarmist, but in some ways I consider myself an optimist. Just as the overpopulation panic of the 1960s and 1970s mistakenly assumed that trends would simply continue upward, I suspect a deep pessimism about the downward trajectory of birthrates — the kind that imagines a 22nd-century America dominated by the Amish, say — underrates human adaptability, the extent to which populations that flourish amid population decline will model a higher-fertility future and attract converts over time.
In that spirit of optimism, I don’t actually think the South Korean birthrate will stay this low for decades, or that its population will drop from today’s roughly 51 million to the single-digit millions that my thought experiment suggests.
But I do believe the estimates that project a plunge to fewer than 35 million people by the late 2060s — and that decline alone may be enough to thrust Korean society into crisis.
There will be a choice between accepting steep economic decline or trying to welcome immigrants on a scale far beyond the numbers that are already destabilizing Western Europe.
There will be inevitable abandonment of the elderly, vast ghost towns and ruined high-rises, and emigration by young people who see no future as custodians of a retirement community. And at some point, there will quite possibly be an invasion from North Korea (current fertility rate: 1.8), if its southern neighbor struggles to keep a capable army in the field.
A number of patterns set South Korea apart. For instance, one oft-cited driver of the Korean birth dearth is a brutal culture of academic competition, piling “cram schools” on top of normal education, driving parental anxiety and student misery, and making family life hellish in ways that discourage people from trying it.
Another is the distinctive interaction between the country’s cultural conservatism and social and economic modernization. For a long time, the sexual revolution in South Korea was partially blunted by traditional social mores — the nation has very low rates of out-of-wedlock births. But this produced intertwining rebellions, a feminist revolt against conservative social expectations and a male antifeminist reaction, driving a stark polarization that has reshaped the country’s politics and knocked the marriage rate to record lows.
It also doesn’t help that South Korea’s conservatism is historically more Confucian and familial than religious in the Western sense; my sense is that strong religious belief is a better spur to family formation than traditionalist custom.
But we, too, have an exhausting meritocracy. We, too, have a growing ideological division between men and women in Generation Z. We, too, are secularizing and forging a cultural conservatism that’s anti-liberal but not necessarily pious, a spiritual-but-not-religious right. So, the current trend in South Korea is more than just a grim surprise. It’s a warning about what’s possible for us.