I would assume the exact opposite given that this will probably probably crank up pressure on working-aged people as more and more old people need to be supported by fewer and fewer young. I would also assume a significant exodus of the young to places with actual opportunities rather than a country sized retirement home where no one wants to invest in the future because anything built to fit the needs of the population at any given moment will be massively overbuilt in the near future.
1. young people leave for better states
2. young people outvote old people (not likely)
3. young people refuse to pay and force the government to raise the social security age to 83.
i hope it's 3. in 1935 the average life expectancy was 60 to a social security age of 65, so 1.08 times the life expectancy. the life expectancy now is 77, so keep the same 1.08 times and we have a minimum age of about 83.
it really baffles me how the same generation that talks about how "millennials and gen z wont work hard" literally wants to force us to pay for their retirement. they had 65 years to save up money, they can pay for it themselves.
How they would be able to "refuse to pay" if payment will come as form of taxes for goods and services? And moreover they won't be able to "force" government to anything since government will be representing and working for the majority of people who voted for them: older generations
> lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
Many provinces are barely scraping by, young workers are not only effectively directly supporting pensioners, they are now delaying young workers retirement age, and you better not believe the old folks will willing to eat into their own money.
It will take 90 years for this lump to pass, and another 20 years for the newborns to grow up... you're talking about a recovery that will take a century...
A century of decline seems like a pretty good reason to panic to me...
More like ~53 years for all the current lumps to pass given a life expectancy of ~86.
Yeah, something is definitely wrong with the site because actual population pyramid data looks much more alarming:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2019%EB%85%84_%ED%95...
Or https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Pyr... as mentioned by a sibling comment.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/South_Ko...
Also it matches up with the article, which says 261k babies were born last year. wikimedia show about that, with ~130k male and ~130k female. population.io says 454k which is way off.
Which looks pretty divergent for the last 5 years specifically, judging from
https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Pyr...
Choose your country, chooose Probabilistic Projections, Fertility, then Births.[1]
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/Birt...
That the data must be wrong, there should be some small variation and it doesn't pass the sanity check of declining birth rates.
> After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
I like your optimism, but do we see anything like that in the real word after depopulation? There are many shrinking cities or areas, eg Detroit in the US or East Germany (people moving to the west), and the results are hugely negative and a downward spiral. Instead of people enjoying lack of traffic congestion, shrinking cities can't afford their oversized infrastructure anymore, which begins to deteriorate from lack of upkeep.
Grossly, south korean couples each makes 1 child. So its population is going 1/2. To correct that and return to previous level, every couple formed among those children would have to bear 4 children.
I think they won't and it looks grim.
Calculating the carrying capacity of the world before agriculture would have given you a much different number than after it.
By that logic we shouldn't be applying arguments like "It is quite normal in ecology to see crashes and recovery in the event of overpopulation".
It is not blind faith to say that we should expect that the different dynamics could be different when the rules of the game are different.
Again, if the foxes see the rabbit population declining and can start producing rabbit substitute before they start starving, of course we would expect a different dynamic to be possible.
“Carrying capacity” is a technical term that implies, among other things, that no further population growth can occur.
It doesn’t just mean “too many” or “more than we’d prefer”.
Well look at the bright side of your unrealistic South Korea extinction scenario; no more DMZ and North Koreans will spread southward!
Of course this will never happen, there is no likely scenario for South Korea to have zero inhabitants. Y'all are High-larious.
... millions of Pakistanis, Egyptians and Nigerians moving there to escape their overheated, overcrowded countries.
After the lump passes through South Koreans will look around and see a lack of traffic congestion, abundance of housing, lack of competitors for their now abundant resources, and lack of disproportionately large population of unproductive elderly dependents.
Wanna guess what happens in that welcoming environment? My guess is people feel inclined to make some babies.
I don't understand why people tend to treat these low fertility rates as some kind of invariable biological dysfunction. These aren't infertile masses of people; they're perfectly capable of multiplying like rabbits.
The planet has shitloads of people, maybe we're finally reeling things in from an overshoot and are on the inevitably pendulum-like path towards population stability. There's no reason to panic unless you've got substantial evidence these people are physically incapable of having children.
Edit:
How about some DATA: go to https://population.io, select Rep. of Korea, plug in some age/gender b.s. and scroll down to "Age Distribution" at the left column. Now look to the left of ~20yo (younger than 20), it's a nearly horizontal line. What does that tell you? There's a uniform rate of Korean babies per year under 20 years old. To the right of this, there's a massive lump of elderly people with a slightly smaller lump of middle-aged people. There's no reason to believe this horizontal line left of 20yo won't just continue into the future; it looks quite stable for the last ~20 years.