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| Is South Korea Disappearing? | Is South Korea Disappearing? |
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| 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. For instance in 2021 the United States stood at 1.7, France at 1.8, Italy at 1.3 and Canada at 1.4. | 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. For instance 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, in provisional data for both the second and third quarters of 2023, to just 0.7 births per woman. | 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, in provisional data for both the second and third quarters of 2023, to just 0.7 births 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. Run it again, and you’re nearing the kind of population crash caused by the fictional superflu in Stephen King’s “The Stand.” | 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. Run it again, and you’re nearing the kind of population crash caused by the fictional superflu in Stephen King’s “The Stand.” |
| 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 without adaptation, 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. | 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 without adaptation, 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. |