Considering Fertility Rates in South Korea

For a good long while Japan was the country most associated with demographic decline--its population peaking in 2008, and declining consistently for the nearly two decades since (from 128 million in 2008 to 125 million in 2022 according to the World Bank). However, South Korea has in recent years got more attention, hitting that peak later (2020), and declining only slightly after, but seeming to be in an even more precarious position due to the slippage of its fertility rate even below Japan's in the twenty-first century. Where Japan's figure has fluctuated between 1.3 and 1.4 since the 1990s, Korea's has usually been below that level these past couple of decades, slipping below 1 in 2019, and in 2020-2021 standing at 0.8.

Unsurprisingly the country has got a good deal of attention for the fact, with a recent BBC report from the country interviewing various women about the matter. Most of what they found struck me as unremarkable for anyone who has followed discussion of these matters for any length of time. One expects a BBC report to hew to a particular line about the subject, and for the most part it does.

Still, the story of a woman identified as "Minji" got my attention--because it looked beyond "the usual." Minji discussed what can only be called the brutality of the educational system, and the world of work for which it prepares the young. As she put it "'I've had to compete endlessly, not to achieve my dreams, but just to live a mediocre life'"--and indeed "not want[ing] to put a child through the same competitive misery she experienced" was the decisive factor in her not having a child.

Competing endlessly not to achieve one's dreams, but just to live a "mediocre life," is exactly the kind of life that a great many people, most people, end up with in a society where people are offered aspirationalism instead of egalitarianism, and, in line with the view that society is to be judged not by how it treats its "least" but rather its richest and most powerful members, "winner take all" outcomes as everyone else is told that they have nobody to blame but themselves for their discontent. Of course, they rarely have a platform from which they can speak of their experience, while those who do have platforms (in the main, the courtiers of those rich and powerful winners whose first and foremost qualification for the position of courtier is consistency with the winners' prejudices) are generally disinclined to say anything on their behalf. Still, here is a piece of such testimony, deserving of consideration by those at all capable of a critical view of the way in which people today have grown accustomed to living--the more in as it is here explicitly connected with a deep personal rejection of the Rules of the Game to which the conventional so gleefully insist There Is No Alternative.