Impossible you say? South Korea is many times wealthier, which shows up in every way possible; food, transport, healthcare, and energy, best demonstrated by the photo below.

But not in area of life that is absolutely essential, producing more people. Watch the video at the bottom of the post.

Demographic models are unlike most other models, being based on solid, measured quantities like death rates and birth rates. Like the rest of the West the former has been falling for over a century, although it now seems to have stabilised with healthcare not able to fight off simple old age. The real problem is that birth rates have also fallen, in many cases below the rate required just to replace the existing population.

Japan was the canary in this coal mine, the problem showing up in the 1990’s with a falling population, exactly as predicted twenty years earlier by demographers. But South Korea is now the #1 example of the fate that awaits China and most other nations, especially in the West:

  • To stabilize the population, each woman needs to have about 2.1 children. In fact, in the 1950s, Korean women had about six children each.
  • In 2024 it dropped to 0.72 per woman, the lowest of any nation in human history, and in the capital, Seoul, it’s 0.55.
  • If the birth rate continues at this rate, then for every 100 Koreans, the number of children born in the next generation will be 36, then in the next generation it will be 13, then in the next generation it will be 5. So in just four generations, every 100 Koreans will have just 5 children.
  • This phenomenon is already underway: for every four 50-year-old Koreans, there will be just one one-year-old child [in 2024].
  • This has not been very noticeable until now. This is because South Korea’s total population is at an all-time high at the time of writing, and its working population and GDP are both growing.
  • [By 2060] The population would fall by 30%, shrinking from 51.7 million to 35.8 million.
  • This makes South Korea the oldest country in history, with one in two people over 65.

With such a population mix you can’t fight a war against a nation, even a much poorer one, with vastly more people.

  • South Korea’s pension fund is the largest in the world, with approximately $730 billion (approximately 110 trillion yen). However, pension funds are expected to stop growing in the 2040s and run out in the 2050s, meaning that by 2060 the working generation will have no choice but to support the elderly.
  • To maintain the pension system, we need at least two to three workers for every elderly person. However, by 2060, the number of workers supporting one elderly person is expected to be around 1.01.
  • The working population is expected to fall by more than half, to around 17 million. [And that’s tied directly to the size of the economy: productivity improvements would have to be larger than anything seen in human history]
  • The culture would also suffer: 20% of South Korea’s population already lives alone, and 20% of the population said they have no close friends or family. By 2060, these figures are predicted to worsen, with 50% of Koreans over 70 years old expected to have no siblings and 30% expected to have no children.
  • The number of young people aged 25 to 45 is expected to fall to 5.6 million by 2060. As a result, there will be almost no one to carry on culture.

The smart way for North Korea to invade would be to simply send vast numbers of its people across the 38th parallel and dare the South Koreans to shoot them. It’s likely that the latter would welcome them with open arms, as they do now, but the sudden influx of poverty stricken, poorly educated, brainwashed and sickly people would not restore South Korea’s economy. In fact it would likely make everything worse in the short term as education and social welfare systems, already under strain, would collapse. Housing might not be an issue, given how many will be empty, but they’ll have fallen into a state of disrepair and their’s more to housing than simply having a roof over your head, as the North Koreans already know.

Perhaps then most terrible aspect of this story is that it seems to be unfixable, at least within a democracy. Nothing so far – tax credits, financial assistance with housing and childcare – has worked. About the only thing that might work would be to tie future education for woman to producing 2-3 kids in their twenties rather then spending that time in universities, because it’s a simple fact that once woman hit their thirties their reproductive rates fall dramatically, both in terms of fertility and the time and energy required to care for young children that is competing with their work. In theory men could carry more of the load of caring, but that also doesn’t seem to work in any culture in the world, for reasons wired so firmly into the male brain that feminism hasn’t changed it.

This may sound shocking, but South Korea will soon begin to collapse in every respect: demographically, economically, socially, culturally and militarily…