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Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by dragonwriter on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @12:38PM (#28051228)
> It is actually quite hard to raise the birth rate, Japan has been trying for years

Not...really.

> UN report on Japan's birth rate policy attempts:

And details defects in the specific policies (notably, these defects are, one who is familiar with policies of the type will notice, ways they fall short of the support policies in many European countries that aren't even specifically trying to boost birth rates.)

E.g., a paid family leave policy with low payments and lacking legal force, so many employers haven't actually implemented it.

This is a government making a pro forma show of “doing something” about a problem, not a serious policy effort.

Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by twelve40 on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @12:46PM (#28051329)
> Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its important

Do you have any examples or even just any precedents how decades of declines and lowest birth rate in the world have been easily and successfully turned around, or this is all just hypothetically probably not hard?

Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by asdfasgasdgasdg on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @01:02PM (#28051542)
As far as I can tell, there has yet to exist a condition under which the political will to really tackle this problem has been present, so you would not expect to see an example of a country successfully addressing it. This is pretty normal for humans -- waiting until a problem becomes catastrophic to do anything about it -- as we have seen in other areas recently. We will see how things are going in another few decades.
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Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by dragonwriter on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @01:47PM (#28052014)
> You can’t rescue ethnic groups that refuse to procreate.

Ethnicity is more memetic than genetic.

> Look at Norway and Sweden, the people in those countries long ago decided their culture was not worth preserving.

Culture isn't transmitted by reproduction but by socialization. Immigration tends to involve socialization; indeed, the usual observation about future generations of immigrant populations aligning to preexisting native low birthrates in the developed world is evidence of either culture transfer (meaning reproduction not key to preserving culture) or that birth rates are a product of material incentives not culture (indicating that reversing low birth rates at need is a matter of changing material incentives, not culture.)

Either way, the low current birth rates = irreversible drive to cultural death claim is inconsistent with the evidence.

Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by novok on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @01:24PM (#28051784)
The examples are older and from authoritarian countries, but china and iran had state sponsored baby booms. China was started by mao, iran was also started by the revolutionaries shortly after the revolution.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/06/why-does-iran-ha...

Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by twelve40 on Monday August 16, 2021 @01:36AM (#28195234)
Thank you for sharing, it was interesting to read. However, the article is not at all clear about the actual effect of those state measures. Wikipedia says that the steadily high total fertility rate in that country plummeted after 1985.
Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind by emil0r on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @06:37PM (#28055093)
Hungary. They started about ten years ago, and I believe they have managed to turn the trend.