Has South Korea Fixed its Baby Bust？ (Gov Paying $1M+ Per Marginal Kid)
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Summary
South Korea has seen a slight uptick in their fertility rate in the first quarter of 2019, but it s still the worst in the world. Is there a bottom floor to collapsing fertility rates? And if so, how bad is it?
Transcript
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hello malcolm i'm so excited to be with your sorry let me try again hello malcolm i'm so
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excited to be here with you today because we are going to talk about some trending news about
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south korea's fertility apparently they're seeing a little bounce upward oh but everyone's like oh
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why this is relevant okay because south korea for a long time has had a rapidly declining fertility
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rate it has the world's worst fertility at their current fertility rate for every 100 south koreans
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there would only be five great-grandchildren and their fertility rate has gone down almost every
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year for the past 20 years except for this year and in 2024 there was a little bit of a bounce and
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then there's even a slightly bigger bounce in the first half of or at least the spring of 25 and this
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brings up a couple of very important questions for the rest of the world one is a lot of people said
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there's a bottom floor to collapsing fertility rates there is a number that when you get so low and what
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i always said historically is well where is this floor if nobody has hit it yet you know how is
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south korea still going down if this imaginary floor exists and so the question is has south korea
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hit this imaginary floor and simone is going to argue it's pretty compelling evidence no they haven't
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yeah we're going to talk about this yeah because i mean i think this is this is really just a fart in
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the wind i'm going to walk you through what actually changed with fertility in south korea
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whether south korea's present strategy is sustainable given also what they paid for this
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change because it is no hold on you gotta you gotta start this at the start they paid over a million
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dollars for every edition let me stop with the spoilers but i want to give you one more spoiler
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actually because at the end i want each of us to kind of freestyle on what we would do if we
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personally were put in charge of south korea's fertility and mine boils down to three words
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all right k-pop chapelle sorry k-pop chapelle oligarchy i'm excited go for it go for it go for
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it all right so as a lot of people have seen in the news especially if you follow fertility south
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korea has recently experienced a notable though still modest improvement in its fertility rate
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and number of births reversing a long-standing decline so what happened ultimately was that the
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total fertility rate in south korea rose from a devastating 0.72 in 2023 to oh 0.75 in 2024
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and then in the first quarter of 2025 the tfr further increased to 0.82 which is i mean like
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kind of wow i mean because we just it kept plummeting so this is nice to see
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it's the highest quarterly figure since early 2022 so there's that but the this is this is kind of
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encouraging because it is the first annual fertility rate increase for 2024 that's the first one in nine
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years it was just in continuous decline since 2015 and the fact that the rebound is becoming a little
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bit more pronounced from 2024 to 2025 is nice like i'm not gonna i'm not gonna poo-poo that like it's
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really nice to see but let's talk about how many extra babies were actually born in 2024 there were
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a total of 238 300 babies born good for them that's awesome we love it that's an increase of just
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8 300 compared to 2023 so we also have to consider like this is a fairly small population meaning that
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like it doesn't take a whole lot to make the numbers look really different meaning that really
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small things could be at play here and and then it this doesn't change the fact that south korea's
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even their improved birth rate is still the worst in the world so i want to talk about how bad it is
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their improved birth rate is still in the sevens the the 0.7s that is well for the year it went up to
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0.83 in the first quarter we're going to see how the rest of the year plays out
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where's 83 okay but the point here being is 0.83 is basically nothing like
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even if they they they they kept like rising or they they got a bit up they would still
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already be at a collapse level economic collapse in 2023 a breathtaking 40 percent of south koreans
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over 65 live below the poverty line but in 2060 this number may seem lovely in comparison
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today south korea has one of the largest pension funds in the world but it's projected to be
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completely depleted by the 2050s so in 2060 pensions will have to be paid by the working population
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the minimum a society needs is between two to three workers per retiree paying for them with
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their taxes but even if we assume that all south koreans over 15 will be working in 2060 the country
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will have less than one worker per senior so not only will poverty among the elderly be common
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but a big chunk will be forced to work except they may not be able to find jobs because by 2060
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the south korean economy may have collapsed okay wait this is all a bit much is there no way back
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why there really is no way back the problem with the demographic freight train is that once it
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hits things become irreversible let's say fertility in south korea magically triples to the replacement
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rate of 2.1 children per woman and stays there in 2060 it will be an inverted pyramid on top of a
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barrel and there would still be only 1.5 people of working age per senior over 65 even in the best made
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up scenario south korea has to pass through an unavoidable bottleneck before it will recover
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yeah because even though they've increased the fertility rate among the young population
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you have to keep in mind that 60 of the population is over the age of 40 and can't even have kids
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yeah so here we're talking about the fertility rate within the smaller population that can still have
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kids and in addition to that we're dealing with the issue that there's already this huge missing
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population within korea it takes yeah the damage has been done and and we also need to remind people
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who may not like may be new to this concept of fertility rates and whatnot a replacement fertility
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rate like if we're going to keep a population stable is 2.1 like per mother there have to be 2.1
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children okay because you're kind of replacing the mother and the father and 0.8 is nothing to be
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proud of but it's important to note here that even if tomorrow south korea's fertility rate went
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back up to 2.1 okay they would still if you look at the math to support their aging population before
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those 18 year olds could come of age yeah their systems are still going to collapse before that
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date their social security welfare medicaid well and i think to your point also they're still at
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risk of like let's say even it went way up suddenly they're also like their culture is also to a great
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extent being lost because thank you pointed out to me when we were just talking about this offline that
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a lot of these these births are resulting from marriages to women who are foreigners one in four
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rural south koreans who is married and has a kid married a foreign wife so they're bringing in
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they're importing people from other countries to have as their wives when they are having kids yeah
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and that's that is gonna that is gonna shift culture i mean like one of the things that we're
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concerned about with demographic labs i'm not like oh we have to keep like ethnic purity but i i don't
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want to lose the unique south korean culture or perspective i want there to be a broad variety
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ideally even broader than what we have now of cultural perspective so maybe there's some mixing
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here but like i mean i like that like some creation of new like you know korean plus vietnamese or
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whatever else is popular in south korea among passport bros but yeah anyway like this isn't this
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isn't exactly like a win for like south korean people will make it to the future because also like
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their their passport growing their way into these marriages but marriages are a key factor behind
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this rebound and one of the reasons why i think it is going to be short-lived because it is thought
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that this this surge in marriages that has has preceded these births it has to do with people kind of
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making up for lost time in the pandemic so it's a little bit artificial all the people who didn't
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date during the pandemic then dated after and have now reached that point at which they have dated
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they have married and now they're having kids meaning that after this point we're gonna see
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a drop off again because all those people making up for lost time who are like at that point in their
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lives where they're like i'm going to get married no matter what just couldn't do it at the same like
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the time they planned to due to lockdowns and then of course you know the korea still hasn't done
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anything about all the sort of cultural headwinds that make parenting unsustainable the work-life
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balance problems etc but let's go into what south korea paid for the change that you have to go into the
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numbers here yeah so just a reminder in 2024 238 300 babies were born that's an increase of 8 300
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compared to 2023 and i'm i'm doing back the napkin populate calculations here but in 2024 the ministry
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of health and welfare budget was 122.5 trillion won that's about 92 billion usd and a significant
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portion of that went toward child rearing support fertility treatments and expanded parental benefits like
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that's a lot of money um and keep in mind like in terms of things that are being paid to families
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basically about 22 000 is given for each child born um like to families regardless of family income or
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composition which i mean that'd be great like it's not helping but that'd be great we wouldn't say no
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to it um then the monthly stipend for parents having kids you know yeah if you want to give me money
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the monthly stipend for for parents having kids uh uh sorry for parents of newborns increased
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to 1 million won about 740 for the first year and then 500 000 won about 370 for the second year
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in terms of like lump sum birth vouchers because they're just giving cash payments like direct cash
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payments to parents as an incentive here so not only have already like a lot of funds been allocated but
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they're like upping the ante i think out of desperation so let's just assume that of this
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92 billion u.s dollar budget for 2024 that the ministry of health and welfare was given let's just
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assume conservatively 10 of that went to fertility boosting efforts which i think is conservative
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considering how much money is being given to families would you say 10 is fair i'd say 10 is fair yeah
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okay so if we do 92 billion dollars times 0.1 and then we divide that by 8 300 we get 1.1
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1 1 1 1 million 108 000 and 133 so so that's over 1.1 million dollars per extra child like if we if we
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you know ask the ministry of health all right well so what did all of your fertility spending get you for
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these you know this growth that you are so proud of yeah they paid a lot for that when it's sort of
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sustainable it's obviously not really not this is why the solutions have to be cultural and so when
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people come to me and they're like oh look south korea has hit the floor i'm like no they haven't
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they've hit the floor of panic not on the floor of like real social change yeah exactly yeah that
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and it's hard because i mean as has been discussed i mean in many other podcasts we've done by many
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people south korea is one of these places that developed really rapidly in terms of economic
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development but then socially developed much more slowly so in terms of like women have gotten
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empowered in terms of education and career and all these sort of very modern expectations they've
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gone really far but there are still these social expectations that they do the majority of the
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housework they do the majority of the child rearing and so they're sort of stretched between these
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things and that builds a ton of resentment and they're just like screw that and you end up with
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movements like the 4b movement where women refuse to date or get married or have kids or have sex and
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and they just just reject it because the terms are not good so south korea has to sort of reconcile
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these really fundamental issues before they get to a point where it becomes okay and that's that's what i
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wanted to discuss it's like well what would actually save south korea i want to point out before we get to
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what would save south korea yeah is it even if this is a real floor that's been discovered in south
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korean fertility rates what it tells us is the floor happens after a society has already dipped
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because it's too little too late yeah even if this is sustained it's too little too late but like i said
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i really think this is people making up for lost time but it's not no i mean like i'm saying even
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if everything they're saying is right even if it turns out that the floor is around like 7.5 and then
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it bounces and begins to go back up it's irrelevant because the time it takes to go down and keep in
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mind south korea was going down faster than other countries what this means this was a 15 year streak
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of going down again yeah like this is is that it takes too long to get the next generation in the
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pipeline and that the next generation will not be in the pipeline before the country's economic system
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collapses yeah because you need you need us like so a lot of people have seen these you know
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population like graphs that sort of show like oh look that this this pyramid is growing as is you
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know future generations get bigger and bigger and then you know some like china are going in like this
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and it's ah like that's when you know governments are going to start to collapse and social services
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are no longer going to work because you have what malcolm calls a dependency ratio cascade where you have
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an insufficient number of actively contributing taxpayers paying for a growing number of dependents
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and and that's what we're trying to to deal with here that's what we're trying to avoid is is this
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kind of ratio the dependency ratio cascade so already like even if like let's say the pyramid
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you know it was growing and then you have this like you know 15 years of shrinkage and then it grows
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again you still have to deal with the 15 years of shrinkage like that next booming giant baby boom
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population let's say somehow you like you figure it out really quickly that's that's a period of 15 years
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yeah like what's going to happen for that 15 years where there's an insufficient number of taxpayers to
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pay for everything like you still have to figure that one out and let's let's let's be like even if
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it's not a full let's assume it's a five-year window let's assume it's an eight-year window okay how do you
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get through that window literally how do you get through that window the math doesn't work well and
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also like at that point you know people with the kids are maybe going to be fleeing the country you
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know they're moving out because yeah it's not safe all the all the promises of the child care are no
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longer being you know met anymore you're out of there i know is kids who are like high performing
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south koreans are raising their kids to live in other countries yeah like singapore or united states
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or yeah like they're out of their kids well they don't want their kids to grow up in south korea
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because the the core thing that needs to be reformed in south korea is the culture
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yeah yeah there's this few i mean for those not familiar with south korean culture there's this
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really intense upbringing where it's just like tests and they'll what do they do when there's
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like the big test day like this test sort of determines your entire future you can't get
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sick during the day you just have to go no matter what you have to be able to take your test they
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stop the freeways they stop the planes so nobody can be distracted they it's like everything is
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dependent on this one test but what i said because you go how do you how do you fix this i said you've
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got to modify the grade that students get on this test by how many siblings they have
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so this is right this is your solution for south korea yes not by the test i don't know i mean
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like but what you say is it is you say look these people had less money to send their kids to
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after school camps and everything like that they had less money like this is this is about the
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children's you you're not getting an accurate judgment of their intelligence you're getting their
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ability to memorize and perform quickly and go to camps and stuff right so if that's the case
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then it's only fair that the in terms of accurately measuring competence that you downwards modify
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them based on how much time and money their parents had to spend on them in relation to this stuff
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i kind of feel like though this test is kind of a has-been when you and i were in south korea
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one of the people who was showing us around was saying that yes it used to be that the goal of
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the typical south korean youth would be to work at one of the big prestigious companies after
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going to one of the big prestigious schools and you can only get to one of those big prestigious
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schools of course if you score well on one of these tests because those tests are everything
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but then the new even then and this was back in 2018 that we visited south korea 2019 the the new
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top desired jobs among youth were social media influencer like youtuber and cook like these
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aren't things that require schooling anymore so i just don't know i mean maybe it would be
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compelling to parents who are delusional about the kids desires but i don't i don't know how much it
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would make a difference i disagree in america your top desired job can be you know a youtuber which
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is in america as well as far as i know yeah it doesn't mean harvard no longer matters you know
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harvard will eventually no longer matter but it doesn't no longer matter yet and the the systems that
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make harvard matter are falling apart more slowly than the systems that make the top universities in
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south korea matter because this is dependent about everything in terms of your role in society
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perhaps but i would suggest something a little bit more okay dude and weird yes of course you would
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simone i married a dystopian and weird woman we were talking about this today where i was like
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i you're like i love processed foods i want more science in my foods and i was like you know you
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other than me are one of the only people i've ever met who likes the world more processed when other
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people like walk through a city and they're like oh they tore down a you know a park to a forest to
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build down a parking lot and i'm like well the parking lot's a sign of industry look at these
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beautiful rows in our local grocery store look at the diversity of products the packaging the
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everything everything on the shelves here how do you not wonder at this it is a marvel of human progress
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yes yes when i it's about knows when i drive by the big you know like like industrial cities right
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like plants right i'm like oh if only we could buy one of these like run down turn it into like a giant
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he cannot pass yeah like you know your typical like trope of a man is they can't walk by like a
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busty gorgeous woman without you know rubbernecking her and and malcolm's rubbernecking problem his his
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neck whipping around issue is every time we pass by some large industrial looking factory with all
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the smoke pipes and the giant tanks and the blinking lights he desperately wants to buy it i want to live
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i want to have that be our headquarters and everybody sees we are industry you know anyway continue
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you've had fantasies about having different like you know purple smoke coming out from the you know
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just like changing the smoke colors that come out from the how did i meet a weirdo who doesn't think
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that i'm a weirdo for this he's like oh i actually agree with you on the processed foods in the industry
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i bet a lot of people are going to chime into the content comments and be like yeah i mean when you
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look at consumer behavior people are overwhelmingly choosing highly processed foods and snack foods of course
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this is changing a little bit with osmbic and we are kind of seeing the markets shift in response to
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that but still if you if you're not undergoing medical intervention you are you're going to be
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okay okay okay okay so what is your dystopian plan here simone what people are missing when it comes to
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prenatalist policy and incentives is most of the governmental interventions that are encouraging people to
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have kids are just blanket incentives for everyone you know i will give money and you know like this
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22 000 to parents you know per child regardless of your level of income like we will just give it to
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you no matter what we just want everyone to have kids and one like the cool thing about the cause of
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prenatalism is that to save an entire country an entire culture an entire religion or ethnicity
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whatever it is that you care about saving this doesn't address the dependency ratio cascade but i'll get to
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that next necessarily but it can make sure that there is a future for whatever this perspective
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that you want to see in the future it will make it survive is just if if between eight to 17 families
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manage to develop a version of their culture that is intergenerationally durable meaning that they have
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a lot of kids like we'll say like five seven ten like per per descendant and each descendant raises
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their kids so well and passes on their culture so well that their kids in turn want to have five to
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seven kids and raise their children in that culture and if you keep that up you're good like you know
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this is this is really not an issue anymore and i love that element of prenatalism because that's
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saying okay only the super enthusiasts about having families and raising kids need to be involved with
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this and everyone else who wants to be a dink and live their lives and not have kids is super free to do
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that and i really like that i want people to not be shamed or coerced into doing anything i also want
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people who are super into doing something to have the freedom to do it and to be awarded for doing it
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so one that is one factor that goes into my south korean fertility policy the second factor is the key
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issue with dependency ratio cascades and with demographic collapse and with governments failing to be able to
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pay for the social services of the most vulnerable people in society isn't a warm bodies issue
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it's a taxpayer issue and just paying any old family a ton of money to have kids isn't necessarily
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going to solve your problem just bringing in immigrants isn't going to necessarily solve your
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problem because immigrants are eventually going to get old and not everyone is going to be the same
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level of a tax contributor i mean like in new york city that the top 10 or 1 pays for like 50
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percent of the the city's income right in taxes like it's it's insane when you look at who actually
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contributes most of the tax revenue whether you're looking at a federal level or you're looking at a
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city or state level the top percentage of earners are paying the vast majority of the taxes so i also
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think that fertility policies that focus disproportionately on taxpayers especially when you're looking at
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governmental stability and your ability to meet the commitments be it debt service or social security
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food aid health care etc like you should be looking okay how do we get more taxpayers not how do we get
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more people and i'm not seeing countries do that and and so here's where i just think and and and
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there's a culture factor too do you as you said yourself right like they're they're focusing too
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much on like you know child care and all this stuff and we're not resolving the cultural issue right
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that having kids is not this aspirational desirable thing most south koreans when they think about
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having kids is oh god i don't want to subject them to the terrible childhood that i experienced
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i you know i i don't want to now be torn not only between this really demanding career with no work
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life balance and but also raising a kid and being expected to do most of it like it just sounds so
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right you also need to make it socially and culturally that desirable hence hence oh and i just i just
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let's walk through the math i also want to point out like back to my first point just if you have
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just seven families and they they all had seven kids each and then those grandkids had seven kids
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and those great grandkids had seven kids and then the great great grandkids had seven kids now you've
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already got 16 807 people and if you repeat that whole cycle again you've got 282 million 475 249
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people and keep in mind south korea's current population is 51.71 people sorry sorry 51.71
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million people so in just in just you know a couple cycles in the longer scheme of things obviously
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this takes a long time if like one generation comes every 30 years but if you manage to make
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just seven families be intergenerationally durable you've got something that is is basically you skip a
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generation with every exponential amount of families you get at the beginning something that's 49
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families you get you know no that's true yeah yeah and and and so you could have not just south korea
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maintained you could have south korea taking to the stars and so much bigger than than it ever ever was
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and that's kind of like but that doesn't solve it before systems start to collapse and this is important
00:24:45.800
that's true but no no this is this is why we we introduced the the perfect simone solution that
00:24:50.900
everyone should just listen to in south korea which is my k-pop chable oligarchy all right tell me about
00:24:56.920
the k-pop chable oligarchy yeah so just to define chables south korea is kind of known for having
00:25:03.100
what what are called chables which are like these huge business conglomerates which are associated with
00:25:08.820
very wealthy and powerful families like there is a samsung family and these families are like very
00:25:15.640
very wealthy and very famous and there's a little bit of like a hereditary monarchy thing going on
00:25:20.260
which works really well with the very hierarchical sort of social class sensitive south korean culture
00:25:27.340
right i mean like what was your experience with chables in when you were working in south korea
00:25:31.060
and venture capital well i mean they controlled everything as i said the thing that really
00:25:35.080
shocked me about the chables and the way north korea related to all of this south korea what south
00:25:39.440
korea south korea not as different as you would think when you go to the chables headquarters which i've
00:25:44.620
toured some they have shrines to their glorious leaders that are you know and i've often said of
00:25:50.220
south korea if you understand south korea as a capitalist democracy you don't understand south
00:25:54.520
korea what south korea is is a number of fascist states competing amongst each other in a facsimile
00:26:02.640
of capitalism and and i remember they look down so much on entrepreneurs that if you're in a marriage
00:26:10.080
market that's looking oh what what score does it get me my career in a marriage market it's under
00:26:14.860
fishermen what yeah yeah that's right under fishermen actually they have these right where
00:26:20.300
like if you're trying to like use a dating service they do score you like you're not just talking
00:26:24.840
abstractly here social work and value you're like no if i literally pay someone to be a matchmaker for
00:26:30.620
me i'm getting a score and my score is fishermen but it's worse our fund i mean we constantly got in
00:26:38.360
trouble with the government because we did the horrifying thing of investing in people who
00:26:42.760
didn't go to top universities and i didn't say didn't go to universities i didn't say dropped out
00:26:47.040
of university i said didn't go to the top universities and it's not korea this is like investing in like
00:26:52.160
meth addicts right like you are a social harm and this led to my boss being arrested this led to other
00:26:58.740
people in my company being arrested like we were constantly for political points because you know
00:27:04.140
everybody agrees with the show well if somebody just makes their money out of nowhere then something
00:27:08.880
is wrong in society they were they were disrupting the social order that's yeah and that's the thing
00:27:15.380
is i think that you know when you when you look at fertility solutions for a country you can't disrupt
00:27:21.040
the social order you need to yes and the social order and i'm gonna yes and it all right do it do it
00:27:27.380
so i'm like okay chables yeah like they're a thing let's not try to undo them let's lean into them
00:27:35.020
so i'm saying this this project of mine this could either be government funded so you know the south
00:27:39.640
korean government can kind of ease this along or it could be privately organized but what i want is in
00:27:45.960
korea you could say it's creating a new aristocratic class or it's just leaning into it to ultimately create
00:27:53.600
eight to seventeen high fertility families so there has to be some kind of like either america's got
00:27:58.740
talent style like audition to become one of the new seed families because we need more chable families
00:28:04.680
than there are now right like you need i would say minimum of seven families it's like super high
00:28:09.520
fertility you know to solve this fertility cascade this dependency ratio cascade problem so like either
00:28:15.560
america's got talent style thing or like the government like literally providing exclusive contracts
00:28:22.220
to the chosen families who also have to be commercial magnates in some way right so you have eight to
00:28:29.760
seventeen high fertility families they need to be regarded as aristocratic basically royalty and
00:28:35.580
members who have fewer than seven kids get disinherited and shunned um outsiders can marry in but they
00:28:41.940
have to accept south korean culture i think that's really important but each family should be run like a
00:28:48.040
a korean pop band because this is also like a huge thing in south korea is this like manufactured
00:28:54.500
run by the state what are they run by a company one of the chibalds yeah either no i would say this is
00:28:59.660
either no and you're creating new chibalds so i each each of these families needs to have a private
00:29:05.180
business specialization so already you have like samsung it does like tech what i want south korea to
00:29:11.540
create with its new additional chibald families because you need to have this like you need to have
00:29:15.300
enough aristocratic families for there to be like genetic variation maybe one specializes in
00:29:19.900
reproductive technology you know it's it's starting to clone people it builds the artificial wombs it's
00:29:24.320
it's doing that's our family's job simone i know i know no i mean it would be great if there's a
00:29:29.000
couple families across many countries then there's the human augmentation family south korea is already
00:29:33.560
famous for its its its plastic surgery just like but but you know take that a step further you know
00:29:39.160
they're already so good at plastic surgery they've got the infrastructure they have the like
00:29:42.580
educational pipeline let's bring it to like okay now there's a heads-up display inside your eyes now
00:29:49.840
your skin has tattoos that are animated now like you know all the like let's let's build a night vision
00:29:56.720
like you know just so a human augmentation family or collection of families one should obviously be
00:30:01.620
military tech because north korea ain't going away for a while like yeah you know i mean there isn't to
00:30:07.720
my knowledge i mean maybe like samsung makes military tech but like you know just really
00:30:12.360
specializes in that because also it would make the country stronger but yeah basically have like
00:30:16.580
you know these are these are strategically useful specializations but you're also at the same time
00:30:22.120
creating a new royal family and a new table and and bonus points if if the lives of each of these
00:30:27.620
tables is extremely public like they they each have a reality tv or they're all extremely active on social
00:30:33.580
media and like everyone desperately wants to marry into this family to work at one of the companies
00:30:39.660
to make their way up and maybe fully democratize this whoever said that democratization was an
00:30:46.460
important part of this the important thing is it one you are making high fertility families high profile
00:30:53.680
you're giving them a lot of commercial power and they're having a lot of kids so you're you're having
00:30:58.640
a lot of really high taxpayers being born they lose all of their favor and advantages that give
00:31:03.700
them an unfair advantage if they don't maintain their high fertility as a family and because they're
00:31:09.360
so prominent and because they're both like chables and like k-pop chables so they're like made famous
00:31:14.540
and they're romanticized and they're like yeah you can't do this intergenerational oh so you think
00:31:18.580
other people would want to copy them yeah no and we've seen this so i want to cover this in another
00:31:23.820
episode on pronatalist propaganda but there was a series of soap operas that played out in various
00:31:29.700
regions in brazil that sort of depicted this very aspirational middle class life and they affected
00:31:34.820
fertility significantly unfortunately they they allowed they allowed people to have fewer kids because the
00:31:40.540
families in these in these soap operas had like one or two kids and people and brazil at the time had more
00:31:46.220
kids but it's clear that when you make a certain family format aspirational and high class
00:31:53.060
people are going to conform with that and and this was shown like in regions where where this network
00:31:58.820
didn't show there was no change in fertility fertility is absolutely shaped by propaganda and culture
00:32:05.460
and when you make things like your celebrities and your aspirational royalty very high fertility i
00:32:13.420
absolutely think it will affect the average korean but what you're also doing is making sure
00:32:18.240
that the people who are literally required by law to be high fertility in order to maintain
00:32:23.060
their strategic advantage and commercial advantage you're also getting a lot more taxpayers which
00:32:28.820
i think is great and keep in mind that right now korean pop stars are like even if they're dating
00:32:37.700
someone and sometimes i think they're contractually not allowed to date anyone yeah they're not well i
00:32:42.020
need they'd often lose their as i pointed out in the episode that we did on like japan and stuff like this
00:32:46.380
they can they can lose their like jobs not just their jobs because of the company but like the fans
00:32:52.600
will turn on them if they're seen as dating anyone or anything like that and how that is extremely low
00:32:58.140
fertility like no where are the aspirational people in south korea that are having kids like
00:33:02.980
the number one celebrities in south korea are like perpetually young and single this is not modeling
00:33:12.240
anything that's going to give people an aspiration of what married life could be like and and that's
00:33:17.760
crazy and so you have to i think a really underrated element of of what's going on in south korea and
00:33:24.300
what they really should be looking at is hey like what can we do in media to promote to make families
00:33:31.560
not even something that's like desirable but like literally something you can wrap your mind around
00:33:37.140
because i think a lot of people it's just like the most obscure thing in the world i mean keep in mind that
00:33:42.100
kids in higher fertility families you know they're around babies all their lives you know they have
00:33:46.940
younger siblings they see this a lot maybe they're in a church community where they see a lot of babies
00:33:51.060
south korean kids are typically growing up only kids i i imagine that most adults who are having
00:33:58.720
children in south korea now like all these parents who are having babies yeah this is their first time
00:34:04.160
holding a baby this is their first time seeing a baby in like recent history for i mean yeah that's
00:34:10.920
that's that's the problem right and so like if you don't have exposure through media or through some
00:34:15.800
other program that's a problem and i am intrigued by what russia is doing because russia does actually
00:34:21.320
have like literal active bans on media that it sees to be antinatalist yeah so like they're they're
00:34:29.120
actively really trying to shape i mean it's too little too late to them you know again to the point
00:34:33.100
of south korea for sort of a different flavor of reasons and we'll get into this in another episode but
00:34:38.120
yeah i think it's just it's underrated i think the solution for every country is very different
00:34:42.920
but i i really think that south korea would benefit from a k-pop chable oligarchy of like really
00:34:49.440
desirable royals i mean come on have you like watched the k-dramas about like the royal families
00:34:54.520
and the drama and like i love it i love it but they gotta yeah they gotta have all the kids
00:34:59.080
like imagine if google and in amazon and tesla were like royal families and like the executives
00:35:07.280
were these really beautiful like brothers and sisters who were single and who had to marry
00:35:12.800
someone at the company um and you're like not only like there would be all these like young men and
00:35:18.520
women who not only are like doing the very best to be like the smartest most high achieving most
00:35:22.740
professionally adequate person but also like hoping hoping to catch the attention it's kind of like
00:35:28.620
all those girls who were like super keen to go to saint andrew's when prince william was there
00:35:32.640
like i have a shot i went i went right after he was there i i wanted a shot i mean we all want it but
00:35:39.540
wouldn't that be cool i'm not i'm not even like bisexual and i would have been like
00:35:43.740
but it's a prince but to be yeah i mean like if you have a shot at royalty you gotta take it and
00:35:49.960
imagine an unfortunate accident before we consummate anything it would be like imagine if elon musk's
00:35:56.000
kids all worked at like spacex and like tesla and like you had a shot it you know like if we knew
00:36:02.500
like our kids had a shot at like marrying into like tesla royalty oh my gosh like have you entered
00:36:08.580
the tesla family we're a teslas now we're a spacex family now families like elon wouldn't pass that
00:36:17.280
down to his kids right like this isn't the way no and that's that's why you have to create this
00:36:21.260
whole new like conspiracy you have to you have to like you have to have families audition into this
00:36:25.080
to be like i am by the way simone you're gonna love this the new york times did this piece right
00:36:31.680
here you see this this image here yeah you saw this on the zizians yeah i'm gonna talk about it i
00:36:36.700
also have an episode outlined on the rise of new secular religions she wanted to save the world
00:36:43.020
from ai then the killing started i love that they don't they don't mention that she has
00:36:48.320
wasn't always a she well the new york times wouldn't even think to question that this might be a male
00:36:55.060
sex pest um but they they have killed people a number of them in their quest for self-aggrandizing
00:37:02.920
well i think what makes ziz an impressive cult leader is i don't believe that any of the murders are
00:37:10.240
are actually ziz murders i think that they are ziz follower led murders for my understanding so
00:37:15.760
and and the level it's like that's that's mob boss level right like you know are like somebody asked
00:37:22.300
them to pay rent or something like that like god they're never about like their actual goal like
00:37:27.920
why won't you die so i can get my inheritance parents yeah like they're very how dare you stop me
00:37:34.140
on the side of the road immigration enforcement officer like i'll kill you for that and they did right
00:37:40.140
like they're they're very but it was funny as they talk about all these grand goals and how
00:37:44.580
uncompromising they are and yet every murder they commit is about their own convenience
00:37:48.280
we're gonna get into it i'm excited to talk about the rise of secular religions we're gonna
00:37:53.720
we're gonna talk about that and it's sort of its role in fertility too but yeah i really i think that
00:37:59.160
there there are two big takeaways i want people to have from this i mean in terms of like beyond the
00:38:03.640
okay we we don't really care that south korea has a fertility bump because they still have serious
00:38:07.420
problems the under underrated under discussed elements of fixing fertility are one malcolm's
00:38:14.300
concept of the dependency ratio cascade where we need people to pay for the dependence and
00:38:19.940
people have gotten jezebel got very mad at us they're like they let the cat out of the bag
00:38:24.560
that they not all babies are the same someone on someone on x was just criticizing us that that
00:38:30.100
they imply that there are certain people who should you know there there are certain people who are more
00:38:34.680
desirable to be born than others and we're like no man like we're just looking for someone to pay the
00:38:39.080
tab like i don't i mean like is that nice i don't know how nice that is that's kind of exploitative if
00:38:44.940
you ask me but whatever i just don't want millions of people to die and suffer it's not millions it's
00:38:51.480
hundreds of millions hundreds of millions not millions hundreds of millions and then the other
00:38:58.000
underrated factor here is is the role of of culture and status and if you do not make
00:39:04.740
families and and this and this stuff like high status and i agree that there's like a creepy way
00:39:11.500
to do it like the china way where there's someone knocking on your door being like hey is it your
00:39:15.960
where are you in your cycle when are you gonna have kids you know they're like being the creepy
00:39:19.700
mother-in-law when you already have a creepy mother-in-law like you don't need more yeah you're in china my
00:39:24.180
gosh yeah the government's just gonna make that's like that's gonna backfire but i really think that
00:39:28.520
if there's just like aspirational royal family like again like if if you could marry in i don't buy this
00:39:34.860
at all this would not work it's not scalable you can maybe force you can say this is what is scalable
00:39:40.840
saying no one can be a k-pop idol unless they already have a kid you are you are not malcolm
00:39:46.520
that is how you have to start you've got to have a kid but then people be like oh then two then three
00:39:52.240
like you have to have three kids to be a k-pop idol you gotta have four kids to be a k-pop idol
00:39:56.420
then it becomes high status right yeah oh and then i mean then you're gonna have all the south
00:40:03.040
korean beauty treatments for like postpartum so then south korea is gonna be yeah and for your
00:40:07.720
kids of course as well you gotta have them look like the most beautiful baby in the world
00:40:11.400
that's no i just i really want there to be like a south korean shable that just does like human body
00:40:16.800
augmentation because they not only yeah like because i mean i feel like there's some cultures
00:40:21.980
or like groups or families or whatever that will do human body augmentation but it's going to be
00:40:27.620
like that like mechanicus you know it's like like let's skull and it's like blah and it looks weird
00:40:33.580
but like koreans it's just going to be like these like elven beautiful like they'll find some way to
00:40:40.040
make your hair look weightless even though you're in like earth's gravity you know like it's just going
00:40:43.980
to be of course yeah well i mean in the ai in the ai environments we're going to be in you know our
00:40:49.040
kids will be dating was in virtual environments using avatars i'm almost certain yeah but i mean
00:40:54.760
irl still matters maybe maybe not in korea probably not you look at you look at korean society and how
00:41:03.000
quickly it's descended into the internet they're going to be dating avatars oh they still they still
00:41:08.760
judge your ability to either look gorgeous or pay to look gorgeous so sure in current korean society
00:41:16.660
but keep in mind we've got to create i don't want them to give that up i like it i like it's such a
00:41:21.900
beautiful place everyone i loved when you and i were like walking down the streets of seoul and in
00:41:26.640
gangnam and we're like we are the ugliest people in this street like everyone here everyone is beautiful
00:41:31.780
yeah you're so pretty you're so pretty all right so what are we doing for dinner tonight so you're
00:41:36.820
gonna do the rendang with rice and i'm going to make pizzas for the kids because i think that
00:41:41.840
slip and slide action they had today before the thunderstorm will have worked up an appetite
00:41:45.880
assuming they haven't been fed copious amounts of junk food after that which i'm a little well
00:41:50.560
cook up the the rendang very excited for that do you want me to saute it with extra garlic or
00:41:55.700
anything else we don't have any onions we're gonna just cook it down i want to see how it tastes
00:41:58.760
and then it's cooked down a bit okay so just summer it i'll simmer it for like one fact i learned today
00:42:03.680
which really shocked me and i i sent you a map of this i don't know if you saw this
00:42:07.640
but the summer camp that flooded oh god you did it was in a flood pane it wasn't just in a flood
00:42:16.160
pane it was in a dried river bank like literally built into exactly in the center of a dry they even
00:42:25.540
appeared i would not have thought to look at that as a parent and now i'm going to be looking at that as
00:42:30.240
apparent well no but what's crazy about it is is they seem to even own the property that wasn't
00:42:35.820
within the dried river bank they just decided to build it come on i'm sure it was prettiest within
00:42:42.000
the you know dried river bank well because oh i guess you get the views of the hills and everything
00:42:45.940
but the point being is if you've had a house that has been anywhere near a flood zone like ours right
00:42:51.840
like we see the water creep up i would have immediately looked at this location and been like
00:42:56.580
are you guys effing insane and they had a by the way a 12 hour warning i love that people are
00:43:03.500
blaming this on trump and elon musk and everything like that they had a 12 hour flood warning for the
00:43:08.200
national services and everyone was like trump and elon did this with their cuts no who did this was the
00:43:13.360
idiot counselors who didn't move the kids when they had a 12 our house every time you and i get a flood
00:43:21.400
warning and they are very rarely 12 hours in advance they're usually about six hours in advance
00:43:26.080
we move everything in our in our house we prepare to leave we like because i understand what flood
00:43:33.380
warnings mean right like you have to fundamentally be kind of retarded about flood warnings to get a 12
00:43:39.640
hour flood warning for something and say i don't care like we're not gonna so so there what disturbs me
00:43:46.040
even more is on social media there are all these like influencer stuff who are like giving links to
00:43:51.960
fundraise for like the the the girls in the camp and i'm like this money is just going to scam artists
00:43:57.640
like it's not going to help the girls get found like they're being looked for now by everyone who
00:44:03.080
can possibly look for them i don't know they're 100 percent dead if i'm sorry if if a if a pre-teen
00:44:09.880
girl disappeared in a flood they're dead well that there was that one woman who floated 20 miles and
00:44:17.460
got into a tree like there are people who've survived for amazing periods of time in these
00:44:24.520
floods so i don't the the missing girls are dead i don't understand how anyone could not
00:44:31.680
they would have they would have they would have gone to the shore then gone to somebody with a phone
00:44:36.340
and then they would have called somebody right like they're not retarded no i mean the woman who was
00:44:40.780
found in the tree like the tree was surrounded by floodwaters like the floods are still there there was
00:44:45.840
more rain so they they have to be found within the flood water or within the floodplains but
00:44:52.540
but if you just looking at the map of this i'm like this is not chump or elam first of all it's
00:44:59.300
they have the warning that they needed and second of all whoever built this camp here you don't even
00:45:05.980
build if you if you are a camper like a regular no i and i disagree with you i think a lot of people
00:45:11.080
build camps on floodplains because they're like well it's okay everything gets washed away in a
00:45:15.900
flood it's a temporary camp and they just it there there's just people aren't thinking seriously about
00:45:21.740
it i was taught not to build camps on floodplains like do not build and it's not floodplains you're
00:45:27.880
calling it floodplains it's a dried riverbed that is very different from floodplains a dried riverbed is
00:45:35.060
where the water regularly flows whenever it gets hot it is notable that the camp like
00:45:41.940
had they not received any severe flooding in the past but and this is texas as well so i grew up in
00:45:48.780
texas and at my family's ranch we i mean i always remember my family every time we'd walk by it they'd
00:45:54.440
be like that's where the floodwaters went and they point to like marks on trees and i showed you the
00:45:58.880
marks on trees i don't know if you remember me saying like you see that white mark way up there
00:46:02.780
you can even see them around where i mean where we live like literally where we walk you can see
00:46:06.580
where floodwaters went and it's high yeah like this is something that should have been ever present for
00:46:11.860
everyone in this situation and people can be like how dare you say it's their fault i am sorry i
00:46:17.460
wouldn't build a temporary camp in a in a dried riverbed well so what what is advice that parents
00:46:23.260
can take home from this to just if they're like devastated by this and well i mean if i was a
00:46:30.020
if i was a parent i was like i want to be safe with my kids when you send your kids to camps or
00:46:36.600
something like that like conduct a basic sanity check of safety like our it is every building in
00:46:45.420
the camp was built within this floodplain like i i would honestly ask yourself like until we knew
00:46:51.620
about this would you be checking camps that we'd send our kids to yes planes yeah given that every
00:46:57.280
couple years our house has floodwaters come up around it and we've had to deal with the consequences
00:47:01.260
you and i are acutely aware of floods in a way that other people may not be you know and i think
00:47:06.880
that some people don't realize if you're near a lake or a river or a stream or if you're buying a home
00:47:12.520
near a lake river or stream you need to pay attention to this octavian's probably trying to get into the
00:47:16.480
house now so i love you i love you too now of our kids and i'm really sorry for the families
00:47:20.720
did you learn anything interesting today yeah i was listening to a really interesting
00:47:27.740
podcast called decoder ring no no no sorry called articles of interest about
00:47:34.020
school uniforms and catholic school uniforms and like kind of how they came together and
00:47:41.620
you know how they came to be and i love stuff like that i'm a sucker for clothing history
00:47:47.240
it's so funny that so many items of catholic religious significance or that came out of
00:47:55.440
catholic communities i think when people hear them within our modern culture the first thing they think
00:48:01.640
is oh that's a sex thing when i hear the catholic school girl school girl yeah when i hear catholic
00:48:08.320
school girl uniform i'm like oh it's a weird sex thing right or you know when i when i see one of
00:48:14.420
those flagellates or whatever when i you know oh yeah but yeah no but what's what's interesting
00:48:20.660
actually is so the reason why those plaid skirts specifically sort of became normalized in catholic
00:48:26.800
schools only after you saw the rise of parochial catholic schools which were in response to the
00:48:33.260
pervasion of public schools also developing a reputation for being more unruly so this led to
00:48:39.620
this rise especially when they stopped prayer in schools of people flocking to parochial catholic
00:48:46.220
schools which cost a little bit but were still affordable because before that catholic school
00:48:50.660
was really more for like people who are quite wealthy and then it was seen that like people
00:48:54.860
were better behaved in catholic school but the reason why plaid skirts sort of became the de facto
00:48:59.140
thing was because it was there were a lot of irish catholics and it's thought that the plaid
00:49:03.720
probably was influenced by that but the earlier catholic schoolgoer uniforms actually looked a lot more
00:49:08.240
like kind of like my clothing like which dresses like a long black skirt and long black sleeves
00:49:14.620
kind of like a sort of nun in training uniform but made with really nice fabrics because you know this
00:49:20.560
was for wealthy young women and often the you know these not parochial schools but what came before for
00:49:26.560
catholic schools were convent schools like basically schools out of convents and the uniforms are very
00:49:32.540
different in that way but what even predated those were uniforms for other catholic institutions like
00:49:39.120
asylums or like orphanages where the uniforms were more helpful in one you just kind of had this
00:49:45.400
population of people who needed to be clothed but also it was helpful to identify runaways
00:49:50.320
this kind of connection between school uniforms and like fascinating imprisonment but what's also
00:49:59.060
interesting is several people in this podcast were interviewed who'd grown up like who both had very
00:50:04.160
distinctive styles but had also grown up in catholic schools one in nepalese catholic schools the other
00:50:09.800
one in american catholic schools and they hated and rebelled against the uniforms but also really
00:50:15.320
appreciated having the uniforms because the uniforms enabled them by their very restrictiveness to develop
00:50:21.360
a distinctive sense of their personal style and i really see that like with our kids right our kids
00:50:27.440
wear uniforms but they have extremely distinctive personal style and i think when you grow up sort
00:50:32.200
of wearing anything especially in this age of like disposable clothing and it's just so much choice
00:50:36.680
you kind of you end up thinking that you're expressing yourself when you're really just expressing like
00:50:43.020
the whims of consumerism well and we've seen this within youth culture dress recently becoming so
00:50:48.080
unattractive yeah and really a lack of ownership of of attempting to present a unified style anymore
00:50:54.440
yeah and i think that when our kids do start you know when they when they do deviate from the family
00:51:00.320
uniform it's going to be in much more interesting ways and very intentional instead of just being
00:51:04.000
like i'm just gonna like people don't think about it and then they think that they're being
00:51:07.880
unique when they're really being basic bitches or whatever the male equivalent of that is so that's
00:51:13.080
interesting the other thing that i was listening to just now was a decoder ring podcast about the
00:51:18.620
boston cinematic universe how like there are all these movies where boston is almost a main character
00:51:23.940
you know and it's like boston culture and these boston accents and boston people really yeah and
00:51:29.480
like why is that the case and it was pointed out near the beginning of the podcast which i haven't
00:51:33.560
finished that you know there are many cities that have bigger populations than boston like i think san
00:51:39.420
san antonio was an example they gave san jose and i realized yeah there are all these cities in the
00:51:44.040
united states that have very big populations but no cultural cachet well they're not i mean it makes a lot
00:51:52.640
of sense if you think about it for a few seconds the the main reason is because harvard and mit
00:51:58.420
and and are in boston and that means a lot of elites have lived in boston for a period of their life
00:52:04.940
which means that it gets disproportionately featured in media the same way anywhere where
00:52:10.040
there's not a lot of elites coming out of those other cities i can't even remember anymore
00:52:14.900
so they're not particularly relevant from the position of the type of people who write
00:52:19.340
movies or tv shows well there's also a lot of narrative richness when you when you contrast
00:52:24.440
the elites of boston which is definitely a theme that they pointed to in the podcast with the lower
00:52:30.720
classes in boston specifically like the the irish catholics of boston you would find that in these
00:52:37.220
other cities as well the difference is and you could say oh well then you don't get the narrative but
00:52:41.920
if you look at tv historically like older movies and shows they actually showed these other cities
00:52:49.280
much more in places like boston much less i mean consider like dallas right like the famous show and
00:52:56.000
stuff like that like this was really common back then and it contrasted the elite culture and the
00:53:00.460
non-elite culture and this was normalized but with the consolidation of harvard and elite universities as a
00:53:07.660
class status authentication mechanism particularly within the media industry as the urban monoculture
00:53:13.220
consolidated within that industry it became very rare keep in mind if you are writing movies at a movie
00:53:20.580
studio today i would bet like a good like 25 of your friend group spent a portion of their lives in boston
00:53:28.740
and so it may seem like a small city to you but from the perspective of people who are writing stuff it is
00:53:36.200
not a small city yeah yeah okay interesting so like the rise of credentialism could be yeah plus also
00:53:44.320
there's like is there a san antonio like are there the same amounts of stereotypes it seems some cities
00:53:49.960
are really good at developing stereotypes and others there absolutely are think about cities that you are
00:53:55.200
san jose you don't know much about that city but you have lived in other cities like dallas and you
00:54:03.320
would say does dallas have as many stereotypes about people from it as boston has about it
00:54:08.200
yeah i doubt maybe fort worth dallas has become you're familiar hold on you you you remember the idea
00:54:14.700
of the 100k what is it millionaire oh the 40k millionaire 40k millionaire and this idea of
00:54:21.160
that's that's like a whole structure of a way of living that's built out of that which is as built up
00:54:28.280
is any bostonite social structure or way of living but maybe not as universally recognized
00:54:33.980
and people yeah but that's the point why is it not as universally recognized because it's not
00:54:38.140
generating people who have control over major studios that's that's and it used to you know
00:54:44.300
like tex avery and as we pointed out like a lot of the old cartoons came out of like dallas and stuff
00:54:48.880
like that but again with credentialism people like that who grew up in in texas just couldn't get jobs
00:54:55.200
in the way that you used to within the media industry could be and it was pointed out in this
00:54:59.320
podcast decoder ring by the way totally recommend it that this was a a novel thing relatively speaking
00:55:07.200
like goodwill hunting was probably one of the first to really make this more of a thing like just ben
00:55:12.820
affleck's stuff but and matt damon stuff but before that boston would show up in movies but like
00:55:19.440
no accent no mannerisms like no nod to bostonian culture so yeah maybe maybe that's a factor i have
00:55:28.480
to finish listening to the episode but yeah i thought it was interesting all right