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Re:For many young South Koreans, dating is too expensive, or... by _Microft on Sunday May 12, 2019 @07:44AM (#19891332)
TFR (total fertility rate) plummets because it used to be necessary that it was way higher when the child mortality rate was higher - and indeed a decreased in fertility rate follows a decrease in child mortality with a few years of delay.

Having a child used to be a random experiment and you needed to make sure that one makes it through to care for you when you will be old or sick. Pensions, health and welfare systems and much better child mortality rates make it unnecessary to have many children. A replacement fertility rate of slightly over 2.0-2.1 is/would be fine in developed countries.

Re:For many young South Koreans, dating is too expensive, or... by blattimwind on Sunday May 12, 2019 @07:49AM (#19891351)
> A replacement fertility rate of slightly over 2.0-2.1 is/would be fine in developed countries.

Yeah, but that's now what we're having. My country sits at 1.4, and the only subpopulations with above replacement rate TFR are non-indigenous, so to speak.

South Korea has a TFR of below 1.

Japan has a TFR of ~1.4.

Most European countries are somewhere between 1.4 and ~1.7.

The US is below 2.

The West is dying out, and has been for a while.

Re:For many young South Koreans, dating is too expensive, or... by duchenne on Sunday May 12, 2019 @07:48AM (#19891345)
But, in South Korea, the replacement fertility rate is already lower than 1, and it keeps decreasing every year.
Re:For many young South Koreans, dating is too expensive, or... by _Microft on Sunday May 12, 2019 @07:54AM (#19891366)
By the way: if someone wants to look up (total) fertility rates, Our World In Data has you covered, of course:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab...

(You can change the countries displayed by clicking the (+) sign on the right hand side of the graph. I preselected UK, US, Germany, Iran and South Korea here.)

Re:For many young South Koreans, dating is too expensive, or... by luckylion on Sunday May 12, 2019 @07:50AM (#19891354)
> A replacement fertility rate of slightly over 2.0-2.1 is/would be fine in developed countries.

And many developed countries are far below that. That's what I read the parent to write about, not the shift from pre-industrial to industrial times.