I mean, same could be said about South Korea. It would instantly drag their GDP per capita down by more than half, and that's not even counting how much money would need to be spent to re-develop NK.

Genuine question that I'm trying to learn about - the industrialisation of Japan and South Korea led to huge wealth creation and increases in quality of living. I know some of that is stagnating now and especially in South Korea things are difficult, but why isn't North Korea ever spoken of in those terms rather than always the GDP hit to South Korea?

If both counties sustain their current trajectories, in 50 years it will be NK re-populating and re-developing SK. And the "if" here is mainly about NK, chances of SK getting out of the death spiral are very thin.

I recently read/watched videos about the "population time bomb" in South Korea and how it's almost irreversible now. It really surprised me, it's one of those things that's hard to visualize. And it's not even long term!

They can always allow more immigration. National populations don't grow only by births.

Apparently, due to cultural, political and economical issues, South Korea cannot/won't do this. I suppose it theoretically could, but in practice it would mean it would cease to exist as it is now.

Due to the scale of their population collapse, the influx of immigrants would have to be massive. Which country does that? It would completely overtake its native ethnic population... which unlike a country built on immigration like the US, is surprisingly homogeneous.

I'm no expert, I encourage you to read on the matter. It apparently truly is something that cannot be stopped now. It surprised me as much as it (apparently) does you.

By the way, countries that are better off, like the US, are largely helped by immigration indeed. Which is why anti-immigration policies would be like shooting themselves in the foot.

> I suppose it theoretically could, but in practice it would mean it would cease to exist as it is now.

But it's going to cease to exist as it is anyway. One way or another. And the people that remain will not be staring at a wall waiting for it to end. Also, young people seem to have a radically different mindset there, which is what tends to happen when they see their parents screwing everything up.

Maybe the culture isn't there yet but it will be. Having said that, I would never be happy to live in a country with strict moral codes like Japan or South Korea. But I'm sure many people would be. In particular conservatives tend to love these societies, you often hear comments like "this is what we should do here in the US".

I'm a raging pro-lgbt polyamorous kinky progressive so for me it would be the wrong place. But there are lots of people that would love this kind of thing.

I mean, I don't know what to tell you. You seem to be reacting in disbelief, "this cannot be true".

But reality shows it is happening, it is accelerating, and young people are part of the problem.

It's a real thing, and the consensus seems to be it's irreversible, however bizarre it may seem to us.

I just think life finds a way. Societies don't just disappear. They just change. There's too much value in Korea to just give up.

Will it disappear as we know it? Yes. But that is true everywhere. The America as you knew it in 2010 is also gone forever (and not for the better, unfortunately with its current politics). Same in Europe where the nazis are trying to take over. Change is a constant.

Life doesn't always find a way. Mass extinctions are a thing. Even human cultures & ethnic groups have disappeared without a trace.

The South Korean population time bomb is a completely different thing to America in the 2010 changing.

Have you read what people who study demographics currently believe about South Korea. An informed opinion is really needed to discuss this, this is not about "feelings".

Life finds a way, just not necessarily your life or your kids'

> But there are lots of people that would love this kind of thing.

Doesn’t the fact that the people in said culture have decided it’s no longer worth reproducing, en masse, because of how their life is, imply that a lot of people wouldn’t actually like that kind of thing?

> Apparently, due to cultural, political and economical issues, South Korea cannot/won't do this.

Because it's not a problem yet. What's going to stop them from doing it when the birth rate becomes a problem? Almost nothing.

> Due to the scale of their population collapse, the influx of immigrants would have to be massive.

Not really. You are mistakenly extrapolating the situation in the Western world, where purposefully brought in almost only criminals and freeloaders, to Korea. If you organize immigration of labor, then not so many immigrants will be needed

I'm not "mistakenly extrapolating" anything, I'm describing the current consensus by population experts. No need to debate me, I'm no expert, I'm just paraphrasing what experts believe. I'm as surprised as you are, I only recently learned of this.

> What's going to stop them from doing it when the birth rate becomes a problem? Almost nothing

Their birth rate is already a massive problem. The South Korean government already acknowledges this is a crisis, it's just that the measures that are politically/socially viable just don't cut it, and Koreans seem unwilling to consider more drastic measures. But the problem is already here, and acknowledged, and already impacting the population of South Korea (there's apparently a "loneliness epidemic" going on already).

Because of the shape the population pyramid takes (more old people than young people) once it reaches the tipping point, which in South Korea it already has, there's no going back. No matter how they try, they simply don't have enough young people to revert it anymore.

> If you organize immigration of labor, then not so many immigrants will be needed

This is not (just) about labor, it's about population decline. Even if Koreans dedicated themselves to having more children, it wouldn't be enough anymore. They are beyond the tipping point. They would need massive immigration to live there and have children there and effectively become "the new Koreans"... and this is obviously unpalatable to many.

I encourage you to read on this. Do not debate me: I'm not the expert here!

> I'm describing the current consensus by population experts.

These are not experts, they are deep state propagandists.

I mean, fortunately (or unfortunately), such processes have been going on for decades, and these experts have been in business for decades. So, nothing prevents us from analyzing their early models, explanations, projections, and forecasts, and comparing them with reality in order to form an opinion about the level of their expertise

> Their birth rate is already a massive problem.

Not exactly. Low birth rate itself is not a problem. What is a problem is the future consequences of low birth rate . And these consequences generally have not yet occurred, i.e. there is no problem yet.

> Koreans seem unwilling to consider more drastic measures

Yes, because there is no problem yet

> once it reaches the tipping point

Then it will become a problem and nothing will stop them from bringing in some foreign labor to fix it.

> They would need massive immigration to live there

Not that massive. Your ideas about the required amount of immigration to fix the labor shortage problem are probably formed by extrapolating Western immigration processes. But the point is that you can’t extrapolate like that. There are no obstacles to carrying out immigration tens of times more effectively than the West does.

Just to understand how irrelevant this issue is for Korea at the moment: the twentieth century was quite a turbulent time for Koreans, and now quite a lot of ethnic Koreans live outside of Korea. Many of them know the Korean language, want to move to Korea, but even with repatriation programs, this is not such an easy process. Korea has so many Koreans inside the country that they are quite reluctant to grant residence permits even to other Koreans with foreign citizenships.

Time shall tell, but as of today I think this view is delusional. For native Koreans this would do roughly as much good as mass immigration into Americas did to native Indians.

> These are not experts, they are deep state propagandists.

Deep state? I feel like I've stepped into a conspiracy theory. What does the deep state have to do with anything? Deep state from which country? The US? Korea?

> Not exactly. Low birth rate itself is not a problem. What is a problem is the future consequences of low birth rate . And these consequences generally have not yet occurred, i.e. there is no problem yet.

Why "not exactly"? It's understood by everyone that low birth rate is a problem because of its rippling effects, which are not immediate. When I say "a massive problem" I mean "already in the near future".

But apparently it's causing problems for young people today, already.

> And these consequences generally have not yet occurred, i.e. there is no problem yet.

South Korean society is already quite unhealthy, and apparently for younger generations even more so.

To be clear: the numbers alone don't tell the full story. Population density is not the important metric here, but population aging is. There could be lots of Koreans today, but if the distribution is top-heavy, it cannot help them.

Let's do something else: link me a serious (non-conspiracy) study that there is no population decline crisis in South Korea, and I'll read it with an open mind. Be forewarned though, if it's a conspiracy article I'll ignore it.

How did they manage to brain control millions of people like that? I mean it’s so ludicrous to an outsider.

In the initial era of the split between North and South Korea, South Korea both was run by a bunch of people who had a history of outright killing leftists, and the United States was involved in similar actions.

The lack of serious offramps to reunification, along with not as huge a delta in quality of life between north and south for a long time (aid from other countries sure helps!), allowed the DPRK to establish itself as its own nation.

Now there is the surveillance state apparatus allowing the DPRK to exist in its current form in perpetuity. And even if tomorrow they showed up and said "let's unify Korea", South Korea (even ignoring all the ideological reasons it might not want to) would likely be unwilling to absorb an extremely poor country and pay for it (see the painful experience of Germany's unification).

There is probably no off ramp that exists unless people are willing to let the elite walk away clean from the situation in one way or another, and it seems hard to imagine such a future.

And if you are a north korean elite and you are allowed to travel to northern china, you will see a place where things are running more smoothly, but you're still going to see places with massive amounts of internal controls and restrictions. So who's offering the upside to some regime change here?

> see the painful experience of Germany's unification

I had thought that Germans from both sides were overwhelmingly supportive of re-unification, even if it would cause short-term pain??

It's my understanding there were plenty of USSR nostalgics in the east given how long it took for the free market to "trickle down" and the east to catch up economically. They never did catch up all the way anyway.

Today the areas that were previous controlled by East Germany overwhelmingly vote for right wing parties though.

I believe the AfD political party in Germany won significant support in those areas of Germany that were once behind the Iron Curtain.

Yes, they won control of an entire state and almost won another.

People vote far right because they're fed up with the status quo, and perceive the far right can't be that much worse when everything is already so bad. Politicians who are not far right would do well to take this into account in their politics. Sadly, they don't, and history repeats.

I don't think that people are like... against unification in principle, but if you are looking at it from the perspective of the State.... lots of pain and money, and at least in the German experience there was plenty of decent state enterprises for West Germany to (glibly) pillage from. People will handwave about North Korean resources, but even those are more or less accessible via China.

And on top of that at the end of the day Germany now has this bloc that votes "the wrong way" in all of its elections. Glib analysis though.

The German split was resolved 35 years ago and is still visible. How much time would a reunified Korea take to equalize itself? If you're a person who cares only about the economics of it all, how long do you think it would take for the payoff of unification to occur? Just seems quite long.

Would you consider that half of the USA also votes the wrong way too? And the UK? London people tend to think the rest of the country votes wrong as well. There is a divide in most countries, I think Germany is not that different, except for the fact that it actually was split up before!

For the first couple decades while it was ahead of South Korea economically (in large part due to support from China/USSR) it was not that bad but during that time the system of absolute control by the Kim family was setup and once it was up it is too late to really do anything due to how absolute/brutal the control is (you say anything wrong and you and your whole extended family end up in a prison/death camp)

Basically people are willing to put up with a lot if their lives are getting better (economic growth). Problem with that is what kind of system of control an authoritarian government can setup in that period of growth.

Empiricism in the face of a totalitarian regime is difficult.

Less of brain control, and more like slaughter of anyone who disagrees or rolls their eyes. Read accounts of those who escaped

It's funny to say that because we're living in a bubble too.

Nearly every authoritarian country starts with people promising good things. A lot also start with rebels fighting against a group that led a massacre. They're underdog groups with popular support.

Then those underdogs take over. They become paranoid about the possibility of being killed themselves, so they repeat the massacres they fought against. A lot of people who supported the new regime think it's just a few remaining enemies being taken out. It won't happen to them. Then the government starts laying out methods to solidify their control. The list of things seen as traitorous and against national interests grows. It becomes a frog in a boiling pot situation. By the time people realize they might be a target, the system is too complicated and widespread to take down alone, and a new generation of youths have been raised knowing only the current system. And to those youths, things are stable. The most terrifying thing to people raised in stability is the idea of losing that stability. So keeping your head down and following the law is much better than absolutely anything else.

And with the absolute control of information that NK has, a significant portion of people really don't even know a better world exists out there. And they're terrified of anyone that even talks about shaking things up.

Not limited to non-Western countries btw. We are also vulnerable.

It looks like a liberal fantasy. The truth is that along the rivers that run on the border with China there are posts with machine gunners every 100 meters. Brainwashing is obviously nearly zero-effective, since they have to resort to machine guns.

China did not, and still doesn't, want US troops at its border. That's why it originally intervened and why it supports North Korea. At the time there was also a further risk that the US might invade China.

That doesn't have to be the result of it. A more humane regime in NK doesn't mean reunification has to happen. And, part of the reason those US forces are in South Korea is the threat of the North. By threatening US involvement in case of an attack.