South Korea to see population plummet to 1970s levels, government says
cnn.com
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.
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That doesn't sound like a bad thing.
population decline is better for the environment, but terrible for social services. If it gets to an extreme level, suicide rates of elderly would spike (which in South Korea, is relatively speaking, higher than the rest of the world)
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.
Lower population isnt but the reasons why the population is declining are.
People are essentially shamed into perpetuating a poisonous work culture that makes people not have the time or resources to support a family even if they wanted to and there seems to be no sign of that changing.
On top of economic concerns there's also infrastructure concerns. Small towns don't have metro stations, or massive power grids, or skyscrapers. These things are far too expensive to maintain for how little use a small population would get out of it. So what happens if a metropolitan city suddenly has the population of a small town? All the infrastructure of that city is now way too big and expensive to maintain. The city would need to spend a lot of time and money downgrading their infrastructure. It's much better for populations to increase or decrease gradually rather than a huge sudden change.
On top of what @friend_of_satan said, countries will not be able to keep up with their current productivity on top of the aged out work-force. This means their GDP will fall severely.
This is a really big deal for most of the world economically and we've already passed the point where we could mitigate it.