South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. The total fertility rate (TFR) required for a population to maintain its size over time is generally considered to be 2.1 children per female.
The implications of South Korea's anemic fertility rate are catastrophic. Over the next two generations, the country's population is expected to decline from approximately 50 million to around 20 million.
South Korea is not an isolated example of the fertility crisis. Dr. Alice Evans, a social scientist who has been studying the collapse in fertility around the world for 15 years, says that South Korea represents the tip of the iceberg. She says, "Fertility is collapsing everywhere all at once."
Evans was on Ross Douthat's "Interesting Times" podcast this past week and noted that it wasn't just first-world, industrialized countries whose fertility rates were collapsing. The crisis is in South America, the Middle East, and across Asia. The bottom line is that, except for sub-Saharan Africa, fertility rates are cratering all over the world with enormous implications not just for the economy, but human civilization in general.
There are many explanations for the collapse in fertility rates. Leftists believe it's a lack of social services that keeps people from having babies. Others on the left point to women's choices and liberalism, making having a family an unattractive alternative.
How does that explain fertility rates crashing in Egypt, in Tunisia, and in Turkey?
"So something is happening very recently — maybe in the past 15 years — everywhere all at once, across vastly different economies, across vastly different governance and welfare systems and across vastly different levels of liberalism versus religiosity," notes Evans.
She notes a crisis in "coupling": an explosion of single people worldwide. These singles aren't just waiting to get married. They're not "dating" in the traditional sense, and many have no plans ever to get married and have children.
If we look empirically at the data for a range of countries, we find that an increasing number of people are staying single. That is, they are neither married nor cohabiting.
So in the U.S., over half the people between 18 and 34 are neither cohabiting nor married. They’re single. And that’s the same case in much of Latin America, East Asia, in China, in South Korea. I chat to all my Chinese students, many single, with no expectations, no plans, no desires to be married. So that’s a massive, massive global friction. So if people are staying single, that is closely correlated.
If we look at the data, the decline in people being married or a couple is almost one-to-one with the decline in children. It matches so closely, in both the U.S., in China, everywhere. This is more closely correlated than anywhere else and across multiple countries. The data is so strong.
Evans points to the significant increase in "personal online entertainment" with the proliferation of apps like Netflix and the explosion of internet gambling (online gambling "has become absolutely massive across Brazil and Latin America," says Evans) as well as the popularity of MMOGs and social media apps like Instagram.
Evans refers to this phenomenon as "retreating into a digital solitude." She (and others, like Jonathan Haidt) attribute this digital solitude to the significant increase in smartphone usage.
"But what if tech outcompetes our social connections?" Evans wonders. "That already seems to be happening, not just in coupling, but the wider rise in solitude."
It all relates to finding a way to bring boys and girls together again in social situations and let nature take its course. After that, we can work on convincing younger people that having kids is the most rewarding thing they will ever do.
It will involve reviving the idea of "community" in ways we've not considered before. A religious revival would be beneficial in fostering a return to genuine communities. Within such communities, childbearing is, if not encouraged, certainly accepted.
There are no easy answers to addressing a problem that absolutely has to be addressed. The survival of our civilization depends on it.
