Dark Cloud over Korea's Future: the Birth Rate

I’m not a conspiracy theorist but I’m very open-minded about alternative theories that go against the mainstream opinions. For example, I don’t believe that JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald (probably not alone in that regard), and I think the arguments for some unknown technology (not the human brute force) at work for building the pyramids in Egypt are, at minimum, very compelling.

With that established, I’ll bring up a fact in today’s Korean society that is very disheartening and offer one of those “alternative” theories on why that might be. It is hard to digest this data, but South Korea has the lowest birth rate (“fertility rate” is the official name) in the world by a wide margin. No other country even comes close. This is a massive, massive problem—something that worries me a lot more than any foreign military threats or potential for natural disasters.

The above chart from the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) via NPR (National Public Radio, for those who aren’t familiar, a respected non-profit news organization) report has a very interesting point of reference. While the South Korean birth rate has continued to be the lowest in the world since the early 2000s, it was still above 1.0, albeit barely. However, it starts taking a nosedive around 2015 when it dropped below 1.0. What happened in 2014 which led to the 2015 numbers?

(A discussion of conventional analyses made this posting too long. I’ll talk about it separately later. Just know that there is something called…)

this is an ill-fitting image of government’s official public policy website regarding the 3-po generation, wouldn’t you say?

“3-po generation (삼포세대, sahm-po-seh-dae)” is a phrase that’s been thrown around a lot since about 10 years ago. Sah-m (삼) is number 3. Po (포) is the first letter of the word 포기 (po-gi), which means “to give up, abandon.” As you might imagine, it refers to a group of 20 & 30-somethings that have given up on 3 things—dating, marriage, and having children. As if this wasn’t gloomy enough…

This 3-po has since expanded to 5-po, 7-po, and finally to n-po. The 4 things that were added were; social life, ability to buy a house, dreams, and hope.

You have to take the last two with a grain of salt, but the fact that those two words were even mentioned in this light is unspeakably horrifying. If the current birth rate, below 0.8, continues, South Korean population will more than halve in the next 40 ~ 50 years, and there’s even a talk of the nation itself disappearing. That thought is probably a hyperbole but no doubt this is a grave national security issue among many layers of problems.

Now, I’ll offer up an idea that I’ve read that’s counterintuitive but seems to make sense.

I tend to bring up TV shows often because they’re accessible not only to Koreans but to anyone who’s interested in Korea and is much easier to understand than reading newspapers, research papers, or books. And today is no exception.

In 2013, two similar reality-based TV shows started airing, one on MBC and the other on KBS, two competing broadcast companies. The MBC show was called 아빠, 어디가? (Dad, Where Are We Going?) and the KBS’s show was titled, 슈퍼맨이 돌아왔다 (The Return of Superman). Both shows had basically the same premise—celebrity dads taking care of their small children, giving the moms a break.

Both shows were acclaimed for being family-oriented, wholesome, and different from other shows. They both had very high ratings as well.

On a side note, that 짜파구리 chapaguri thing from the Oscar-winning movie Parasite originated from one of the episodes of Dad, Where Are We Going? which caused quite a sensation back then.

Anyway, these two shows generally centered around the dads taking their children to different places in Korea and experiencing things, like temple stay, farming, camping, snow rides, in order to show how wonderful and rewarding it was to have kids and spend time with them. Sounds harmless and even commendable, yeah? The problem was, they started doing things that no other normal people could do or afford. Say you’re a dad in late 30s or early 40s, and in the middle management of a company or a small business owner, do you really think that you can take couple of days off of work, take your pre-teen kids to Jejudo and go parasailing? Not a chance in hell.

Or, how about getting special treatments everywhere you went, taking trips to all corners of Korea and even Japan every 2 to 3 weeks? In another universe, maybe.

These two probably well-intentioned shows backfired in a major and unexpected way. Despite high ratings, they have turned into a fantasy show, not reality shows. I myself remember watching a few episodes back in those days and thinking the same thing—WTF? Who the hell can afford to do all those things? Can you imagine other kids watching the same TV program and asking their dads, “Dad, can we go there? Can we do that?” BTW, I stopped watching these shows all together—I love my kids and I’ll do anything for them, but the stuff that they were portraying on TV on what makes a good father was completely out of touch with reality.

I have no way of knowing in any data-driven basis, that these TV shows had a detrimental effect on young Korean couples having babies, but knowing that these two shows started airing in the middle and late 2013 and reaching peak popularity in 2014, and the birth rate suddenly dropping below 1.0 in 2015, you can’t help but wonder about the correlation between the two. The shows seemed to reinforce, by several orders of magnitude, the thought discussed in the next paragraph.

Raising kids in Korea is incredibly expensive (mostly on the parents’ own volition, truth to be told). One of my elementary school friends that I’ve managed to keep in touch with all these years is a surgeon at a huge hospital in Seoul and his wife a branch manager/supervisor at one of the major banks (considered a cushy job). No matter how you slice it, they are an elite class couple, and they have one daughter. I asked them half-jokingly one day why they didn’t have more kids and be more “patriotic.” They replied in concert, “do you have any clue how expensive it is to have kids here?” Then, my friend added, “you walk around Seoul with your 3 daughters and people will automatically think that your dad, not you, must be a super rich person. Because there’s no way a man in his early 40s could be that rich to have 3 kids.”

That little conversation told me a lot about the status of the Korean social structure and that something was very wrong with it. Not that I didn’t know that before, but to the severity of it, I wasn’t aware of. I know that the government has been trying to remedy the situation for couple of decades now, but they’ve all been “put a band-aid on it” policies, not “get to the root of the problem” policies. Hopefully things will turn around, and quick.