By mid-century, immigrant workers will be almost as numerous as native-born workers (AINZ 2016)
Readers took exception to a population forecast in my last post: children of mixed parentage will make up a third of all South Korean births in 2020 (Lim 2011). Yet in 2015 they made up only 5% (Lim 2017). From 5% to one third—is that possible in only five years?
This forecast was tangential to my argument. Ultimately, the rate of population replacement is less important than the final outcome. All the same, this forecast seems to me plausible because South Korea's population is changing at an accelerating rate. There are three interacting reasons:
Logarithmic increase
The increase in births of "multicultural children" is logarithmic, and not linear. In 2015, such children numbered 207,693 and more than half were under 6 years of age (Wiki- Multicultural Family in South Korea 2019). This factor, alone, will cause the annual number of such births to double or even triple between 2015 and 2020.
Declining fertility of native-born women
The total fertility rate declined from 1.25 births per woman in 2015 to 0.98 in 2018 (Steger 2019). The rate of decline is probably higher for native-born women. In addition, fewer of them are of childbearing age. These two factors are together driving down the total number of births. In one year alone, from 2017 to 2018, the birth rate fell by 8.6% (Steger 2019).
Shift in sources of foreign brides toward high-fertility countries
Initially, many foreign brides were ethnic Koreans from northeast China, where the total fertility rate is even lower, only 0.75 births per woman (Wang 2018). The ethnic mix is now shifting toward brides from Southeast Asia, where TFRs are three or four times higher: Philippines: 3 births per woman, Vietnam: 2 births per women, Indonesia: 2.1 births per woman, Cambodia 2.5 births per woman.
So will "multicultural children" make up 33% of all births in 2020? Forecasts can be wrong, but I don't think this one will be far off the mark. On the one hand, the annual number of such births seems to be more than doubling every five years. On the other hand, the total number of South Korean births is falling sharply.
By the way, that forecast doesn't include labor immigration
Please note: this is not the whole story of population replacement in South Korea. There is also labor immigration, which will become more and more important demographically:
[...] The government has brought in an immigration policy that actively embraces immigrants. Last year, it formulated it in the low birth rate and aging measures and economic policy direction. It will actively accept immigration and solve various economic and social problems such as lack of population. Immigration policy will be in full swing after 2018.
[...] According to the data from the Korea Immigration Policy Institute, a steady influx of immigrants is needed to increase the potential growth rate by 1 percentage point. In 2020, there will be 4,994,000, and in 2030, 9,927,000. In 2035, 10,864,000 people will be needed, a quarter of the total working population of 41.75 million. In 2050, 16,116,000 people will be needed. In 2060, there will be 17,224,000 people—only 4 million people less than the domestic workforce (21,865,000 people). (AINZ 2016)
It’s not clear whether these immigrants and their children will be entitled to citizenship or will always be guest workers. In the end it doesn’t really matter. They will become a permanent presence in South Korea.
Can South Korea overcome its fertility crisis?
Fertility rates can rise, just as they can fall, as one commenter noted:
[...] there's no reason to think native Korean fertility is going to stay at such a low level indefinitely. Birth rates go up and down and yearly TFRs are just a snapshot. A number of European countries had fertility drop to very low levels and have seen their TFRs increase significantly, though usually not to replacement. Czech Republic, Romania, Russia and Georgia all come to mind. (Georgia's fertility is now at replacement actually, thanks to their church.) I could see South Korean fertility following that pattern.
Yes, fertility rates can rise, but vigorous action is needed to make them rise. I'm not convinced that such action will be sufficient in South Korea's case. Detailed analysis suggests that the fertility rate is so low because many young adults are trapped in "nonregular" jobs that offer little stability and no benefits, particularly maternity or parental leave. They are nonetheless expected to meet traditional preconditions for family formation:
Our analysis also indicates a very limited scope for future fertility increase in Korea, especially because larger families have almost vanished. [...] The low fertility will be sustained by irregular work contracts among younger people and a combination of unfavorable labor market conditions for women with families and the persistence of traditional gender roles and expectations regarding their family roles, household tasks, caring for dependent members, and childrearing. (Yoo and Sobotka 2018)
The example of South Korea suggests that social conservatives may be wrong in blaming the West's fertility crisis largely on the decline in traditional values and the rise of alternative sexual lifestyles (single motherhood, gay marriage, etc.). These factors are much less important in South Korea. Furthermore, an argument can be made that some traditional values are doing more harm than good in the current economic environment, both in South Korea and in the West, specifically the idea that parents shouldn't start a family until one of them has secure employment. In most cases, that precondition will never be met.
The main problem is thus twofold: 1) young adults increasingly have precarious employment and are postponing childbearing until their situation becomes sufficiently stable; 2) the culture in general has shifted away from the family and toward employment as the ultimate meaning of life.
Young South Koreans should explore alternative means of gaining income and accept the idea that family life can be just as rewarding as work life. This will be difficult to do, however, if the South Korean government pursues its commitment to globalism. Young adults are increasingly thrown into competition with poorly paid foreign workers, either through outsourcing of employment to low-wage countries or through insourcing of low-wage workers for "3D jobs"—dirty, dangerous, and demeaning (Mundy 2013).
Employers are in fact incentivized to bring in foreign workers. South Korea has the largest wage gap of OECD countries between local and immigrant labor, and the gap remains even when one controls for differences in work skills (Hyun-ju 2015). This use of immigrants to do "work that Koreans won't do" has the perverse effect of increasing such employment while reducing employment that can support a family.
References
AINZ (2016). Population in 2750 South Korea, large-scale immigration government in progress. January 9
https://issuecollecter.tistory.com/178
Hyun-ju. (2015). Korea's wage gap between local, foreign workers largest in OECD. The Korea Herald, September 9
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150909001162
Lim, T. (2011). Korea's multicultural future? The Diplomat, July 20
https://thediplomat.com/2011/07/south-koreas-multiethnic-future/
Lim, T. (2017). The road to multiculturalism in South Korea. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, October 10
https://www.georgetownjournalofinternationalaffairs.org/online-edition/2017/10/10/the-road-to-multiculturalism-in-south-korea
Mundy, S. (2013). S Korea struggles to take in foreign workers. Financial Times, September 17
https://www.ft.com/content/afcdefd4-1c1c-11e3-b678-00144feab7de
Steger, I. (2019). South Korea's birth rate just crashed to another alarming low. Quartz Daily Briefs, February 27
https://qz.com/1556910/south-koreas-birth-rate-just-crashed-to-another-alarming-low/
Wang, M. (2018). For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Retrospective and Predictive Study of Fertility Rates in China (November 8, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3234861
Wikipedia (2019). Multicultural Family in South Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_family_in_South_Korea
Yoo, S.H. and T. Sobotka. (2018). Ultra-low fertility in South Korea: The role of the tempo effect. Demographic Research 38(22): 549-576.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26457056.pdf?acceptTC=true&coverpage=false
26 comments:
Do you mean exponential growth? Logarithmic growth is extremely slow.
"The example of South Korea suggests that social conservatives may be wrong in blaming the West's fertility crisis largely on the decline in traditional values [...]. These factors are much less important in South Korea."
I'd consider contraception contrary to traditional values, and it seems like South Koreans use that a lot (mostly condoms and not so much oral contraceptives, see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.maturitas.2017.03.187). I like to blame pathetically low TFRs on modern sexual immorality which very much includes contraception, so I'll blame the death of South Korea on immorality as well as trying to make women work like men.
I live in Poland and it's striking how low fertility is seen as a sign of a lack of disposable income, when in reality Poland had a much higher TFR during the much harder decades of communism or the also quite painful 1990s. The Polish government tries to remedy the low fertility rate by offering $130/month for every child, with rather underwhelming results. It seems like a better policy would be to ban all forms of contraception (as well as not push young women to work), as modern contraception is a new and very major selection pressure and the only evolutionary fit strategy is to choose not to choose, which seems like it would massively favour married people who refuse to use contraception or people who lack the future orientation to prevent multiple unwanted pregnancies.
But since we're faced with a fairly novel (~60 year old) selection pressure, wouldn't TFR in all the affected countries naturally rise even without a foreign influx, simply due to high TFR type of people (such as the most religious and rigid conservatives) internally replacing low TFR types (such as the more liberal, anti-religious types as well as career-oriented women)? I've seen a graph suggesting that on the political spectrum alone in the USA the most conservative are above replacement while the most liberal are around a TFR of 1.0, whereas TFRs across the political spectrum seemed rather uniform before the advent of the pill. Such a drastic difference would allow to predict a pretty significant internal replacement with high TFR types making more high TFR children, and we can reasonably expect such a difference to be present in more than one country and to last for as long as effective contraception stays widely available. Yet I have a feeling that this is not fully being taken into account when projecting future national TFRs and rather that TFR homogeneity is assumed which leads to a failure to predict such internal replacement.
Best guess is changing role of women (“female emancipation” to some) is main culprit behind TFR decline. Another guess is Korea is replacing themselves with foreigners because of their large-scale adoption of evangelical Christianity by many (Japan has same problem with TFR but is much less Christian and doesn’t seem to be replacing itself).
Maybe the hermit Kingdom of North Korea will replace the new South Korea at some point in the future.
My main concern is for Western countries – still it bothers me that Koreans might not exist in the world of the future – but of course we are merely motivated by hate.
"But since we're faced with a fairly novel (~60 year old) selection pressure, wouldn't TFR in all the affected countries naturally rise even without a foreign influx, simply due to high TFR type of people (such as the most religious and rigid conservatives) internally replacing low TFR types (such as the more liberal, anti-religious types as well as career-oriented women)?"
I've seen people argue that this is the case for France's relatively high and stable TFR's of 1.8-2.0 children per woman. Fertility tanked in France generations ago, before it did in any other country. On the other hand a lot of French people are immigrants from North Africa or descended from immigrants from other countries in Europe, mostly Portugal and Italy. So it's hard to know how much of a factor such selection among indigenous French people might be over there.
I think the reasoning is sound though. If a country can ride out a few generations of low fertility without importing mass labor it should see its fertility rise again. The Japanese may pull this off.
Also, I'm a little confused (maybe because I can't read the source document, which is in Korean) about the Labor Immigration section of the post.
Is addressing the labor need cited by the Korea Immigration Policy Institute in the way that that Institute suggests the official government policy that is/was going to be "in full swing" by 2018? In other words, is the Korean government's new immigration policy going to bring in 17 million people by 2060? I would expect Koreans to respond to that the way Europeans have, by voting for "far-right" parties that promise to curtail immigration. But you might have a better sense of the Korean view of these things than I do.
OntheSly I think that it would take longer than this (I'd say definitely more than one century) before that "internal replacement" could pump the numbers from 1.4 (a typical number in Europe) all the way back to 2.0. In the case of France I am convinced that the best explanation for the TFR reaching 2.0 is that about 40% of the newborns have African origins (and rising by about 1.25 percentage points/year, estimate based on the national rates of postnatal sickle cell disease screening, which aren't provided anymore due to "misuse") and I'm guessing that the parents of those 40% might have a much higher TFRs than the rest of the country. If the TFR appears stable it might well be a combination of parents of African origin becoming more numerous while their fertility goes down, seemingly in convergence with the natives.
But in the case of countries like France you should also have internal replacement among the people with African origins, those who fit in best and adopt the modern French lifestyle also have a low fertility in convergence with the native population, those who are most divergent and isolated from mainstream French society have the highest fertility, so alienation from French society is an evolutionary advantage, and I'd wager that this puts a limit on how low their collective TFR can get. So African-origin TFR goes down due to cultural-medical changes but is due to bounce back when most of the people who could be seduced by modern ways end up taking their genes to the grave and the only ones left are those who reject all sexual modernity and secularism. And for the native French it should also be rising but probably much slower since even the conservatives just aren't that conservative when it comes to such matters. You will find that many of Le Pen's voters are in favour of free abortions and even more of them can't imagine life without contraception.
I agree that Japan should have what it takes for this internal replacement to bring TFR back up after long enough, although I don't know about any subdivision of Japanese society having superior fertility. Again the fertility dip is just what you expect from suddenly introducing a new selection pressure (in this case making reproduction almost entirely a matter of deliberate choice, which is rather unprecedented and reckless), so even if the pressure is permanent the fertility rate should go back up as the species adapts, assuming no other form of competition/replacement.
I had thought the 40% figure had been debunked? Wikipedia mentions coverage from a French newspaper stating that the number was exaggerated by some hospitals decision to test all babies regardless of ancestry.
...God, the Wiki article on the demographics of France just goes on and on since it seems the government won't collect direct statistics regarding ethnicity and race, but I don't see much independent support for the 40% figure.
You should not rely on Wikipedia for such controversial topics as you can expect a heavy anti-racist slant. I read the "debunking" and as usual with anti-racist debunkings it largely confirms what it claims to debunk (much like the debunking of ethnic replacement on RationalWiki's article on Peter Frost, somehow France being 70% ethnic French confirms that there's no such thing as ethnic replacement). The best point made in the debunking is the fact you mentioned that some maternity wards mostly around Paris test all the babies due to the vast majority of them having African ancestry, but according to the official PDF report it's also in the Paris region that there is the highest ratio of tested babies who turn out to be affected by sickle cell anemia, so they can't be overtested by much. Besides they're only supposed to test when both parents are from at risk regions (although who knows what's the actual practice), so uncertainty cuts both ways, and it's only for metropolitan France, it doesn't include all the overseas parts of France. But it's clear from the regional differences that the rate of testing is a function of the ethnic makeup of the newborns, and the overall rise has a rather steady rate which proves the rapid change of ethnic makeup. I'd say that taking those numbers at face value is probably the closest estimate we can get, and even if the real number is 10 percentage points lower we're only a few years away from seeing the real number catch up.
Le Monde's debunking https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2014/09/12/drepanocytose-la-maladie-genetique-qui-excite-l-extreme-droite_4486737_4355770.html is quite funny in that it offers 5 bullet points that mostly miss the mark:
1. Medical testing isn't an ethnic census. But ethnic censuses are forbidden (why, the world wonders) and there's no better proxy. The article does confirm that a newborn with one parent who is known to have one parent not at risk to carry the disease shouldn't be tested.
2. Semantics, people of African descent from overseas territories aren't immigrants, although if they do give birth in metropolitan France they are effectively internal migrants.
3. The figures are "manipulated". Much of the article is about reminding us that most black people in France are French and not migrants (some are even more French than far-right militants who are partly Italian or Polish, the article claims), so therefore those numbers say nothing about immigration, which is true but also not what anyone cares about.
4. 20% of births are from non-French parents (but remember, only far-right conspiracy theorists fantasise that France is being replaced by non-French people). The article concedes that 17.4% of births are from 1 or 2 parents not born in the European Union (I'll let you guess which continent most of them are from), when we can reasonably guess that most people of breeding age of African descent were born in France. The article confirms that immigration stopped being the main driver of population growth decades ago, despite the aforementioned 17.4% figure.
5. It's racist to focus on race rather than immigration status.
The article drops some gems, it tries to tell us that if we go back enough generations everybody has some foreign ancestry therefore "Parler de « population autochtone » n’a donc pas grand sens" ("to speak of a native population doesn't make much sense"). How can ethnic replacement be real if the natives aren't real? I do have a great-great-grandfather from Wallonia, therefore I'm not a French autochtone anymore than anybody else is. As absurd as it is I've heard that talking point many times over the last 20 years, it's actually a popular thing to claim that all French people are foreigners. So it's another debunking that confirms everything but relies on the irrelevant, like the distinction between immigration and African ancestry, to be able to claim to have debunked anything.
Anyway remember that it's 40% for people in France of age 0, it's probably less than 20% for people aged 18 and probably much less than 10% for people of any age. There's nothing surprising about any of this if you assume a somewhat anemic fertility rate for non-African people (I'd bet on anything between 1.4 and 1.65) and a strong (but not outstanding, perhaps around 3.0) TFR for people of African ancestry. Which makes the situation interesting due to its lack of equilibrium, the high TFR population has its fertility enabled through the welfare state by the low TFR population's work. The high TFR population can expand rapidly until it crushes that system and becomes subject to Malthusian conditions that would once again keep its growth at bay.
I've talked about TFR so much but forgot that it's not the whole picture, generation frequency matters a lot too, and that's where the WEMP becomes disadvantageous. A non-WEMP population sees its fertility increase relative to a WEMP population by virtue of having shorter generations. I don't know if there's any data on the topic concerning France (or for that matter immigrants in Korea), but I'd expect the difference between African and non-African people in France to be quite significant to the point of accounting for much of the African growth.
''Thanks to church''
To the institutional apophenia. The ''dumbest'' is having kids. I don't know what's worse, a population growing stupid or less people*
If the conserfs have something near to ''cognitive flexibility'' they would be capable to use appropriate words combined with social justice policies AND for example, reduce fertility rates of african and muslim people in France without being labelling as racist. But, when a mind is incapable to think in spectrum, in the very existence of spectrum between binnary ends, they just can do stupid things. Subtle and efficient thinking is often a sign of high intelligence. Interestingly, ''liberal'' [leftist] politicals has been more flexible and subtle in this matter.
"Anyway remember that it's 40% for people in France of age 0, it's probably less than 20% for people aged 18 and probably much less than 10% for people of any age. There's nothing surprising about any of this if you assume a somewhat anemic fertility rate for non-African people (I'd bet on anything between 1.4 and 1.65) and a strong (but not outstanding, perhaps around 3.0) TFR for people of African ancestry."
Actually, those figures make more sense. Amazing how differential fertility rates can change the makeup of a population in just a few generations.
Also, Michel, you're a racist for pointing it out. lol.
The only positive trend that I can imagine (as someone who doesn't like to see people get ethnically cleansed regardless of their race) is that the tfr in France is slowly receding from its high water mark in 2010, which may be a sign that French-African fertility is starting to converge to ethnically European levels.
There doesn't seem to be much support for this from Wikipedia though. Births to parents both of whom were foreign born leaped from 11% of all French births to 14% of all French births between 2010 and 2014.
FORMER GOOGLE EXEC: AI WILL REPLACE 40 PERCENT OF JOBS IN 15 YEARS
"But in his most recent book, “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,” Lee argues that AI displacement will be fundamentally different.
Lee told CBS that this wave of automation and worker displacement will happen much more quickly than others, such as the invention and distribution of the steam engine. Part of that is because AI algorithms can be shared around the world among developers and business leaders with little need for new infrastructure. No railroads or highways or power grids need to be built.What’s left to be determined, Lee said, is whether the best moneymaking AI will come from America, which houses most of the top AI developers, or China, where smartphone apps like WeChat give businesses rich data on nearly all aspects of users’ lives.".
South Korea most automated nation on earth, says report. The UK? Going nowhere
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/06/06/robot-baristas-latest-front-south-korea-automation-push/
In the 1980's Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew employed Hans Eysenck as a consultant in a program to encourage intelligent professional people to have more children, or at least some children. Peter Turchin talks about elites overgrowing their niche as a cause of conflict, so low reproduction in the higher classes may be a source of elite stability in the AI replacement of humans jobs famine.
I happen to think there are not going to be all that many jobs for human workers in 30 years. Most projections suggest the white collar clerical or assembly line jobs the indigenous population in South Korea are happy to do will become the first to be almost completely automated. So native South Koreans are going to be in direct competition with immigrant communities for the service occupations that remain. Humanism and liberalism will fade away as the economic and military value of human beings collapses, although that will not be much of a change for East Asian countries. Lee Kwan Yew once said that in Asia the individual is seen, not as child of God as in the West, but as an ant. This may be a key advantage for China and Korea ect, because the Western liberal individualism ethos will not permit the use of data in the way for example, Japanese society will.
The coming problem will not be the old one of what participatory democratic rights for the individual will best mobilise the population for the greatest military or economic potential, but how to justify letting them keep any rights at all. The elite's natural and most dangerous potential enemy is always the lower orders of the ethnic majority, so I expect the immigrant population will be the semi-auxiliaries of the elite in the coming conflicts.
The very idea that the correlation between social class and INTELLECTUAL intelligence is significant, seems more wrong than correct. Lots of people who are in social ''elite'' levels are very lazy and convenient thinkers. They are just good to earn money and getting rich [and fullfill their egos] but not to think about world problems and solutions. Here in Brazil, majority of elite voted in Bolzonaro ~70%, one of the dumbest president ever. Seems, many them voted him because they think selfishly, about their own privileges and in combination with incapacity to overpass their own biases and think correctly about stuff'ies. That's one of the most problematic thing about IQ. Our capacity to score higher in IQ tests don't translate significantly in our capacity to think correctly, to build a mostly factual and morally correct heuristics. And it's very aggravating about elites, those who govern the nation.
Nigel,
The words "exponential" and "logarithmic" are synonymous. Actually, the rate of growth should eventually slow down. We are looking at relatively high-fertility women who are moving to a country that provides good conditions for family formation in rural areas. So they are probably having even more kids than they would in their home countries. We have seen a similar phenomenon with Mexican immigrants to the U.S. After an initial period, however, this factor should become less important.
Michel,
Poles, especially young adults, used to have more job security. Yes, the wages were lower, but there was not the phenomenon of young people postponing childbearing until their jobs become secure. Also, the consumer culture was less developed. When I was in Russia, a common refrain I heard was "You walk past the store windows and you feel terrible because you know you'll never have enough money to buy that stuff." In the past, consumer goods were cheaper (or not available).
Banning contraception and abortion will cause a temporary increase in the TFR, which will then fall back to its previous level. This was the experience of Romania under Ceausescu.
On the sly,
You can translate into Korean by using a Chrome Web Browser. Yes, the policy will be to bring in 17 million people by 2060. You can find a more detailed explanation of liberalization of South Korean immigration policy at:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/south-korea-carefully-tests-waters-immigration-focus-temporary-workers
They use the term "temporary guest workers" but it's not stated whether these workers or their children can apply for citizenship, as has been the case with other labor migrants. Nor does it say whether they will have to go home after a fixed period of time. In any case, when you get the numbers up to 17 million it doesn't really matter. They will become a permanent part of life, as has been the case in Germany.
I remember looking into that figure of 40% of newborns being of African origin. There may be a slight overestimation, but the figure is essentially true. The criticisms of that figure don't explain its steady rise over time.
Sean,
I'm skeptical about claims that automation and robotization will eliminate most jobs in the near future. There have been recent improvements in AI, some of them dramatic, but we're starting to hit barriers to further improvements.
I didn't know about the example of the Romanian decree 770, I find the desperate determination with which people tried to work around it fascinating. I think this shows how a strong religious culture is so much more potent than the harshest of decrees on a population unwilling to comply or self-enforce. Maybe the threats of eternal damnation and of the disapproval of one's peers are more powerful than harsh top-down rule and its brutal punishments, but maybe there are also strong cultural differences in what people wish for. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't believe that Christians in previous centuries were generally so desperate to abort on a routine basis on such a scale to the point of women dying by the thousands (a Foreign Policy article on the topic claims that "by 1989, an estimated 10,000 women had died as a result of unsafe procedures"). My idea of the most typical situation in most of Europe during the late Middle Ages and early modern period is mostly married couples making 4 to 10 children and seeing almost half of them die young, nothing like what I just read about thousands of women tempting death or orphanages overflowing with unwanted babies. It seems like high fertility used to be better tolerated and handled than in the Romanian example, and that seems like a cultural problem more than a practical or logistic one.
Very good point about Poland, however my perception of the problem comes from talking to many Poles about the topic (which comes up very often as I like to broadcast my wish to have a very large family), most people (typically rather well-off big city liberals in the 25-38 age range, hardly representative but relevant because they have stable well-paying jobs, plus the promise of government money for every child) either want no children at all or just one, not two. They genuinely don't want many children and are very glad they have the means to make sure that doesn't happen. Many women in their 30s even seem wholly uninterested in any kind of romantic relationship and prefer to focus on their career, not out of necessity but out of aspiration and enjoyment. Weird priorities and I don't know if it's due to a generational culture change, but I'll gladly repopulate their nation.
Peter, "You can translate into Korean by using a Chrome Web Browser".
The main problem is indoctrination in government schools about the requirements to raise one or more children. It make like it is super costly and difficult, but it is just a way to justify the existence of government schools and government social services (meddling) with people lives.
The cause of the problems is mainly the welfare state taxing productive people to fund unproductive people. Cut that away and you can have free immigration as few will come to starve without government support. Families will push women to choose good providers instead of running the cock carousel.
And, of course, fiat money, Without fiat money you can not fund welfare state because the costs would be borne immediately by the taxpayers. But with fiat you can delay the moment the bill must be paid. Higher the debt, higher the tax burden, higher the government welfare, higher the labour participation by women, lower the fertility rate.
With welfare no one is incentivized to have a family, women in particular, because they have an husband in the government and it is very undemanding. Take away the government and women must compete for good providers and men for good wives. And good wives make children.
''Unproductive'' people. Without workers, no have society.
Michel,
Religion works on many levels. It works internally, in the minds of people, but it also works through external coercion (family, friends, the local priest …).
Sean,
Sorry, I should have written "translate from Korean."
Painlord,
Russia has a lot of illegal immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus region, yet welfare is very rudimentary. Immigrants are attracted by the higher standard of living; welfare is secondary.
Santo,
Society requires not only productive people but also law-abiding people. Criminal gangs are very productive.
No, Peter, logarithmic growth is slow, exponential growth is fast. Calling exponential growth logarithmic is something only biologists do. They are confused. Don't learn mathematical terminology from biologists.
Anyway, I analyzed the French sickle cell numbers in some detail on my blog and I believe they are basically correct.
https://halfassed.science.blog/2019/06/01/demographic-change-in-france-i/
https://halfassed.science.blog/2019/06/08/demographic-change-in-france-discussion/
@Peter Frost
"Russia has a lot of illegal immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus region, yet welfare is very rudimentary. Immigrants are attracted by the higher standard of living; welfare is secondary."
Yes. Right.
But without the welfare state they MUST integrate to get a job and get enough to be able to survive and live,
Without the welfare state we get mainly the people willing and able to work and integrate in a productive society. If they fail to integrate they are forced to return home or starve; surely they don't breed.
With the welfare state the parasite has an incentive to come and breed and the productive have an incentive to leave because they are taxed to support the parasites.
The integrated immigrants (in common jobs) are often the most anti-welfare and tough on crime compared to natives (at least this is my experience in Italy).
Currently England seems to have a problem with new generation:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/sep/20/shameful-rise-18-of-children-leave-school-without-basic-qualifications
East Asians in the West also have very low birth rate, so liberalism did not help them either. Btw Korea became more liberal in the last 30 years and its family structure is no longer Confucian.
The evolution of family policy in South Korea: From Confucian familism to Neo-familism
The first period (1945–1988) was an era of embryonic Korean family policy when family intervention was limited and indirect based on Confucian familism. During the second period (1998–2003), explicit family policies emerged, but the Korean government kept family intervention to a minimum; maintained a division of roles between the state, the market, and families (the state as the regulator and the market/families as the providers); and maintained patriarchal family relations and gendered family roles based on Confucian familism. However, the third period (2003–2016) shows the explosive expansion of family policies and changes in policy goals and regimes based on Neo-familism, which emphasizes democratic and equal gender relations within families and a family-friendly/supportive society.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/aswp.12137
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