Plain English with Derek Thompson: Why Fertility Rates Are Plunging—in the U.S., South Korea, and Everywhere Else

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Today's episode is about the decline in fertility, a global phenomenon that we're going to analyze

by zooming in on two countries. First, the US, and then at greater length, South Korea,

which has by some measures seen the fastest and steepest decline in fertility of any country in

the world. But first, America. Last year, 3,661,220 babies were born in the US. That sounds like a

lot. Historically speaking, it's not. It's actually 15% below our peak in 2007. And it means America's

total fertility rate, that is the average number of babies a woman today, is expected to have in

her lifetime, based on current trends, total fertility rate, is essentially stuck at its

all-time record low in the US. For many decades, the US birth rate has been below the so-called

replacement level of 2.1. Today, it's around 1.6. Well, sometimes, to be totally honest,

I feel a little weird when I talk about fertility and birth rates, like these are just ordinary

statistics with decimal points, like fertility rates, monthly use car inflation,

just a bunch of numbers. Because fertility is not just a bunch of numbers. It is complicated.

It's personal. It's emotional. And it's private. Should we have a kid? How many kids should we

have? How will we conceive, give birth? How will we raise these kids? Can we afford to have more?

These are some of the most personal and sometimes anguishing questions that a person or a couple

can make in their lives. And I'm aware of the fact that when we try to squeeze these

personal individual decisions into the boring, straight jacket of policy analysis, it can

lead to some weirdly dehumanizing language. That said, I am fascinated and have for many

years been fascinated by this issue because there's no getting around the fact that the

collective private decisions of hundreds of millions of families really does shape the

future of population growth. And then there's no getting around the fact that population growth

is one of the most important factors in determining economic growth, tax revenue, productivity,

the welfare state, innovation, public finance. We're in a moment right now in world history

where every major world economy is projected to have a shrinking population at some point

in the next 20 years. And many countries are already in decline. I'm talking about Europe,

Japan, China, Brazil, maybe next, then Malaysia, Bangladesh. By 2050, Thailand is projected to

be older than present day Italy. We've never lived in a world like this where basically all

the major countries are shrinking at the exact same time. And no country gives us a better

glimpse of this impending future than South Korea. In 1960, just six decades ago, the average Korean

woman gave birth to six children. Today, the fertility rate in South Korea is less than one.

Less than one. The country is notable for having both the world's lowest fertility rate and the

longest average female lifespan in the world. Now, if American and Korean women did not want

children at all, I think it'd be incredibly weird and inappropriate and monstrous of me,

like sitting here in this little room in front of a microphone, to say that the logic of economic

growth dictates that we force them to have kids. That's obviously deranged. But the reality is that

in many of the richest and hardest working countries, individuals and couples aren't having as many

kids as they want. And this is true for a large number of reasons. It goes down to work and career

to the cost of living, to the cost of raising and educating children, to the fear of the rising

costs of raising and educating children, the cost of caring for your parents, cultural expectations,

and so on. And this is a big, thorny, rich topic. And that's why I'm very glad to have

a really wonderful expert to guide us through this conversation. Today's guest is Andrew Yeo,

a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for East Asian Policy Studies,

and also a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

In this episode, we look at the thorny and complicated issue by first zooming in on South

Korea, where Andrew gives me an education on a country I'm extremely curious about,

lowest fertility rate in the world. But frankly, I know very little about South Korea, its politics,

its culture, its work environment. And so I need a guide through this. And then we zoom out and

we talk about how South Korea might be a canary in the coal mine for the rest of the planet

when it comes to the many ways that fertility rates affect just about everything else.

I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

Andrew Yeo, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me here.

In the open that I just recorded, I talked about the breaking news on US birth rates,

which are just about at their all-time record low. I want to put a pin in America right now,

and I'm going to come back to the US at the end. I want to talk to you about South Korea,

which has not just among the fastest declining birth rates in the world,

but also, to my mind, the lowest fertility rate in the world. Before we get into why this is

happening, Andrew, how would you summarize what's happening in Korea?

Right. So it's not something that to take pride in that you're number one in terms of having the

lowest birth rate in the world. But there's a confluence of factors that are driving this

trend, and it relates to changing attitudes towards work. It's related to the high cost of

education, and just the cost of living, particularly in cities like Seoul, the capital,

and the largest city. It's also related to changing trends related to marriage, I think,

with more women in the workforce, and then also women thinking about their careers there, delaying

marriage. Actually, in the last 10 years, the marriage rate has dropped by about 35%. So that

also means less children, but there's still a stigma of raising children on your own.

So it's work, it's high cost of education, high cost of living and housing,

and I just think one final piece of this is, many like to note how South Korea has grown

rapidly. And it is a tremendous success story that I think South Korea wants to tell the world,

and many countries want to emulate the secret sauce behind South Korea's economic development.

But it develops so rapidly that you have to keep in mind that the pace of societal change has just

occurred so rapidly. And I think one of the side effects has been the declining birth rate.

And I was looking at the statistics in the 1970s, the number of children that the family's bore

was between four and five. And so in 40 years, you go from four to five children to having less

than one per household. So part of that, I think, is just the rapid changes that have taken place

in South Korean society in such a short period of time.

I think that's a fantastic overview to pivot off of the very last thing that you said. It really

struck me when I was looking at comparative fertility rates in South Korea versus the U.S.

that in 1960, Korea had roughly two times more children per woman than the U.S.

And today, the fertility rate in the U.S. is almost or roughly twice as high as Korea.

So it is flipped in a really remarkable way, even as both those numbers have come down.

You set out a really good, I think, menu of explanations for what's happening,

work, cost of education, marriage, and some cultural things. Let's start with work.

A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay for The Atlantic about a phenomenon that I called

workism. And workism was my corning for this idea that in many places in the U.S., especially among

the elites and also in other places around the world, lots of people who had turned away from

religion and become more secular had made work the centerpiece of their life in a way that almost

seemed to replace organized religion, like the things that people historically sought

from organized religion, whether it was self-actualization or community transcendence,

meaning in life, they now sought those things from a career. South Korea has one of the longest

work weeks in the developed world. And I found you, in part, through an article that linked

the declining fertility of South Korea with this phenomenon of workism. So tell me a little bit more

about the culture of work in South Korea, how unusual you see it relative to other developed

countries and how it might play a role in declining fertility.

Sure. I mean, work has always been, Koreans work very hard, and they do have one of the longest

work hours in the world. But I want to emphasize that there's a difference between work, though,

and also productivity, because I think Korea is also a productive country. But let me just give

you one anecdote. So I remember when I was in Korea, this is about 10, 15 years ago, and I was,

I wanted to hang out with a friend. I was a student, so I hadn't had more time. He said,

oh, no, I got to be in the office. I was like, well, are you done with your work? And he said,

yes. And I said, well, when are you going to leave? He said, when the boss leaves. I said,

when is that going to be? He says, that's about nine or 10 p.m. And so part of it is that, yes,

Koreans work very hard, but there's also this culture that you want to show others that you're

working hard as well. In this case, you know, you can't, it looks bad if you leave before your

boss. So everyone in the office is just staying until late, even if they're not necessarily

doing work. So that's what I mean by this differentiation between doing work and then

being productive. But that being said, I do think Koreans take pride in that they're working,

you know, that they work these long hours. And the work itself, work life, in a sense,

becomes a family. You know, it's, I think it's changed since the pandemic a little bit. But

if you're familiar with, you know, work culture and age, I said, so if you're, if you're

working in a business environment, you get off work at nine, and then you'll go out for a late

dinner. And then you'll go to have drinks, maybe one round, maybe two round, maybe you'll go to

karaoke. And it's not necessarily every night. But it's this idea that, you know, you are with,

it's not work, it's even after work, but that you're spending a lot of time with colleagues

in the setting. It means that you're not, you're not getting, you're not productive in the other

place in the bedroom. And so we see that people have really prioritized work, not just for the

sake of work, but it becomes, as you said, like a replacement for religion work, and in some ways

becomes an idol then. But it's also where your social life begins to revolve around as well too.

And you feel that if you don't stay late, if you don't go to the dinners, it's called haishik

in Korean, but the group dinners, that somehow you're going to be left out. And that's also

something that's cultural, because in Korea, you tend to stick together with the group, you do

things as a collective. And so yeah, so there's these pressures to stay at long hours at work.

A, because I think Koreans generally do work hard, there's a strong work ethic, but B, because there's

also social pressure to stay in the office longer and then the hangout even beyond office hours.

Yeah, just to tie the bow on the concept of work is, historically, if you think about

the tradition and ritual of getting meals with people who are a part of your community,

there's Shabbat, there's Sunday dinners, that has been a religious thing. And when it comes to,

what do we organize our community around? Well, we go to synagogue together, we go to church together,

that is the way that we are seen and we see others as belonging to the same community. But when

there's 10 hours a day spent at work and then three hours every day or every other day that's

spent at dinner and drinks with people from work, then yeah, that does become the tentpole

around which society is oriented. And I can see how that would either delay marriage or delay

childbearing or childbearing. That makes me think of one other question, which is that in the U.S.,

the decline in fertility is very concentrated among young women. If you look at birth rates by

age group, among teenagers, the birth rate has declined 80% since 1990. Among 20 to 24-year-olds

has declined about 50% since 1990. Birth rates are slightly up for people in their mid to late 30s

and they're clearly up for people in their 40s. So while overall fertility is declined,

it seems like that's mostly a story of fewer babies being had among people under the age of 25.

Is there a similar story to tell about the decline of fertility in South Korea where

women and marriages or having kids and getting married, these are activities that are being

pushed back into one's mid to late 30s? Yeah, I mean, I haven't looked at the statistics or the

demographics broken down into age groups, but my sense is that there could be a similar trend

where marriage, well, I think across the board it's declining, but I do think because of the

delay in marriage that maybe you might see an uptick in the number of women having babies in

their mid 30s, even early 40s. So instead of not having babies, you're maybe having one, possibly

two, which may not have been the case because even in the 60s and 70s, Koreans also got married

very young, much like the United States, but as society became much more industrialized as

the sort of urban work environment led to further delays in marriage, especially when

women were beginning to enter the workforce. But going back to your question, there could

be similar trends, but I think that in terms, I think across the board the birth rates may have

gone down, but maybe not gone down as much for those in their 30s and maybe 40s because of women

just delaying their marriage. And you're right, in the 20s in the younger group, I think it would

have gone down even more also in Korea because just in your 20s, you're not getting married at all.

You're just choosing to stay single. Let's go to the issue of cost of education,

and we'll fold in cost of living and housing in just a second. I just want to hold on cost of

education. We did an episode a few months ago on achievement culture and anxiety around the world

because there was some emerging research that showed that the most ambitious and high-achieving

schools tended to have the most anxiety. A lot of that research was done in Korea on so-called

cram schools. So I only know a little bit about this, but you open that box a little bit. Let's

open it up fully. Tell us about how the cost of education and education culture in Korea feeds

into this story. Yes, it's pretty insane. These cram schools are referred to as hagwan in Korea.

They're ubiquitous in Korea. And then there's certain neighborhoods that are really known for

very good cram schools that help students. So these are extracurricular activators schools where

usually from middle school, I mean, they have them for elementary children as well, to elementary

school age children as well, but really from middle school to high school. This is very serious. It's

a real deal where you go to school and then you get out of school, let's say around two, three or

three, and then you will go to this cram school where you will study math, English,

math, science with the whole intent of getting ahead of your other classmates so that you can

be better prepared by the time you're in your last year in high school. So high school is

three years in so three years of middle school, three years of high school. You have to do well

on the college entrance exam. So all of this is in preparation to do well on this college entrance

exam to be ahead of your classmates so that you can get into one of the top schools in Korea,

because there's this assumption that if you don't graduate from the top, one of these elite

colleges in South Korea, that you're not going to make it, that you're not going to have a job and

you're not going to be successful. And so that's, it's like a rat race for many parents and kids,

but it's quite depressing because it means you're really not having much fun from the time that you're

in middle school because you are sent to these cram schools and you can be there until 9, 10. I

think there's a law that was passed that actually said you have to go home after 10 p.m. But that's

why it's so expensive because you're sending kids to these cram schools and then there are other

extracurricular activities as well too that aren't maybe focused. It might focus on the arts or it

might focus on music, but the point is many, many children are involved in these activities and it's

expensive to do. The other thing that you've seen, I'll just tag this on as well too, some feel that

if you're not going to get in, if the stars aren't, if you're not really aligned to get into one of

these elite schools, if you have wealth or means, you then send your kids abroad to the U.S. or

Canada because in that way at least you can have a leg up by speaking fluent English and having

studied, having a more globalized education. But that also costs a lot of money as well too to

send your kids abroad at an early age. And so I just want to understand, I mean it's interesting on

its own as a piece of information about Korean culture, but the way that the existence and

culture of cram schools reduces fertility is what? It increases the cost of education. So

thereby like the cost of raising a kid is so high that people that have gone through those

programs are less willing or less interested in raising multiple children that they have to

raise through these cram schools. Is that the effect or is it something else?

Because the idea is to raise children, you have to have lots of money, but it's become a

self-reinforcing problem though where because there's less children, when you do have kids,

you really treat them like princesses or princelings. Like scarce assets, yeah.

My uncle has like granted or even my cousins, they're sending their kids to private kindergarten

where they speak. It's because they're English kindergartens and those are very popular, but

that requires money. So even families who are just middle class, to me it surprises me. And

this is where the priority is, you give everything to your children. I think this is partly driven

by, I know as a social scientist, culture sometimes gets a bad word, but there are these

remnants of Confucian thinking or society where the children, there's a contract where

children, they're obedient to their parents, but the parents try to give everything for

their kids that they sacrifice. What do they have? So even if you're not wealthy or you're

from the middle class, you'll try to send your kids, try to give them the best opportunities

that you can. But when you have two kids, that doubles the cost. So there's this assumption

that it's very expensive to have children. And so I think it just deters young families from wanting

to have more kids, if any, these days. Let's talk about housing. I know that one of the

thorniest issues in affordability in Korea and in many countries around the world, including the

U.S., is the cost of housing, especially in the richest and most productive cities. So in Korea,

that would be the capital of Seoul. How important, how central is the fact that housing and other

essentials for a young adult life are so expensive that it encourages a lot of young people who are

already wrapped up in work over romance to say, do I really want to add to all of this the cost

of raising a child, especially at a time when raising a child requires putting them through

an incredibly intensive and expensive cram school? How central is the cost of housing?

Yeah, so housing is a central piece to this problem as well too. In some ways, we put the cart

before the horse because in the minds of Koreans, you want to be established to some degree before

you have kids. So the idea is that we're trying to save up money for housing and the cost has

gotten exorbitantly expensive. This is true in any urban center around the world, but

many Koreans don't want to live in rural areas or in farm. There's no future really for

individual farmers. So people have come up, migrated to the city. Everything is happening in

Seoul, but it means there's not enough housing, or at least not enough affordable housing. So

the costs have really skyrocketed. I mean, this was probably the number one election

issue for the last two election cycles. And the previous president, Moon Jae-in,

actually ran on a platform that he could actually help. And he wanted to talk about the economy,

and he promised affordable housing for young Koreans. And they made some policy adjustments,

and it actually made housing prices go even higher. So then the conservative candidate who

now the Korean president, Yoon Sang-hyun won, in part because he criticized President Moon on

housing, and he's promised to create a million new homes or apartments for affordable housing for

younger Koreans. I mean, he has yet to deliver. But the point is that housing has become a real

political issue just because of the costs. And the other thing about South Korea is that

in the United States, once you're 18, so I grew up in Ohio, and once I went to college,

that was pretty much the last I ever... I mean, I would go back and visit my parents,

and I would stay there in the summers. There was a year I didn't have a job, so I was hanging out

there. But you're pretty much on your own, you're independent. But in Korea, at least in Seoul,

until you're married, it's quite common to just live with your parents. So that's why

this idea that you have to have your own home or you want to be independent before you start a family

is... I think there's an emphasis on that process of having a stable housing. But because it's so

expensive, of course, you feel, when are we going to be able to have our own home? And when are we

going to have some sort of stability and settle down? This is actually common for a lot of men,

as well too, in terms of their thinking. And so that, again, delays starting a family or having

kids because you want to have that foundation put in place first. It's interesting because

I'm not an expert on South Korea at all. And so to a certain extent, I'm doing

the somewhat inappropriate and American-centric thing of just relating everything that you're

saying back to my experience of living on the East Coast of the United States. But I think

there's something very relatable in the idea that marriage, it seems to me, especially in the middle

of the 20th century, was a lower rung on the ladder of life, that it was more acceptable and

common to get married young and then figure out what you wanted to do in life, then establish

yourself in a career. But in the modern world, certainly in places I've lived, DC, Chicago,

New York, and perhaps also in Seoul, marriage seems to be becoming, it's a higher rung on the

ladder of life. And having children, therefore, is a much higher rung on the ladder of life.

Before you touch those rungs, you have to spend much more time in school. Americans are much

more educated than they were in the 1950s. They're much more likely to graduate from high school,

much more likely to graduate from college, much more likely to take on a graduate school program,

much more likely to get a PhD program, that's minority experience, but there's more Americans

doing it. Then they're more likely to say, okay, I want to be established in a career before I

settle down. Okay, well, that takes a while because it's really hard to get established

in your career. Then you say, all right, you have enough saved so that I can have an apartment or

have a house feel settled in my financial life before I have a kid. Okay, that's more rungs,

especially because it's been hard to save for a millennial in the 21st century.

And so I guess what you're hearing me sort of piece together is that it just seems like

the decision to have a child is just so much higher on the ladder than it used to be. And

that's something that I'm hearing you say is true about Korea, and I think it is very much true

about the US and probably many other countries in the Western world. Does that sit with your

understanding of the situation here? Yeah, I think it does. It's not just a story about Korea,

but it's about modernity and how again, the family, the conception of family and work and

that balance and how that has shifted in a modernized society. And what you were saying about how

more Americans know they think about going to college, getting an education, and then thinking

about their careers, and marriage has to come later. Whereas in the past, marriage is just

something that you did. There are times where people got married right out of high school

that would be unheard of in Korea, and it's less common. It may still be common in

some parts of rural America and also in possibly rural Korea, but Korea is one of the most educated

societies in the world. It's roughly 70% of South Koreans go to college, have a post-secondary

education, and then many go on to graduate school. I mean, there was a running joke about the number

of PhDs who are driving cabs in Korea because they aren't jobs. Part of the reason why they keep

furthering their education is because there's limited job prospects. And so the idea, there's

this idea that if you have education, if you have more education, you'll be more marketable.

So tying back to the story about family's marriage and then having children, again,

all of that gets delayed because you keep piling on more and more degrees.

You know, an interesting fact about education too is in the United States, I think South Koreans

are like the third in terms of the number from Asia, the number of students studying abroad in the

U.S. I mean, it's third. They're a distant third behind India and China, but if you think about

how much smaller Korea is compared to these two other countries, that's huge when you're sending

tens of thousands of Koreans each year for graduate work, for graduate studies, and then also

undergraduate education in the United States. But again, it's this idea of

kind of figuring out what, just for lack of a better term, figuring out life first and what you

want to do before you get, before you decide to get married and have children. And what we're seeing

is because this is becoming a more of a pattern and a norm, maybe not a healthy number, a positive

norm that you see many, especially women saying, and maybe it's okay not to get married,

or maybe it's okay to get married later. And so you do have a lot of women now just in their 40s,

50s who decide to remain single. One of the iron laws of industrialization,

especially after the advent of birth control in the pill, which is clearly playing a role here

in giving couples and women specifically the power to determine how long they can

wait to have children, is the fact that wherever women are empowered around the world, we see

fertility declines. Like wherever female education attainment rises, fertility declines toward

replacement level and often falls below it. You mentioned that trends in female education and

culture in Korea are an important part of this puzzle. And this is a subject, you know,

female culture in Korea about which I know absolutely nothing. So,

dilate on that a bit if you could. What's there that we should add to this puzzle?

Sure. So, like other places, Korea has, so Korea is still a paternalistic society and

especially at the corporate world at senior levels, like there's still very few women,

but in terms of women in the workforce, that has changed. And there has been,

you know, the women's rights movements have, you know, the feminist movement that has also,

you know, that had emerged in South Korea as well to post-democratization in the 80s and the 90s.

They also went through their Me Too moment as well four or five years ago. So, there's this

conscious of, you know, about, conscious about women's right, about having gender parity. I

think it's far from there, the current government. I mean, there was a lot of criticism about

President Yoon and that his cabinet had, I think, like two, maybe three women total. And so, many

saw that that was a step backwards. But that being said, you know, you are seeing a lot of women

trying to move up on the career ladder. In the foreign ministry, for instance, you would never

see any women in the past. I was talking with some other think tank experts who work in the Korea

space, and they were saying it was really nice to see a lot of women now serving here in Washington,

D.C., in the South Korean embassy, or the U.S. South Korean embassy in Washington, D.C. And then,

when I go visit the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I also see a lot of women. So, yes, they've entered

the workforce, and many of them want to move forward. There is definitely a glass ceiling,

but I think for them, because they're thinking about their careers and they find meaning in their

careers and they want to move forward, it also means making choices. Because if you start a family,

it may mean taking time off. And, you know, Korea has fairly generous parental leaves, you know,

up to a year. They're extending it now to 18 months in some cases, but it's shifted up to a year.

But let's say you leave for one year, you know that your managers or your boss may not be happy

with it. And so you decide, well, even if there is this generous subsidy, you may not take it,

or you may decide that once you take time off for a while, that it's actually,

you might be less motivated to get back into work, or more likely you find that it's difficult to

break back in. I mean, they're holding your job for you ostensibly, but, you know, it doesn't mean

that you're falling behind, that you're not going to get the promotion. That may be one of the

reasons behind some of the lag or the glass ceiling that I mentioned for women being able

to get into higher levels of management. But yeah, there's a trade-off. And so-

I think that's so interesting. And I think about that in the US as well, that, you know,

for parental leave in a more patriarchal or paternalistic system, the national policy

that's giving women their maternity leave is essentially saying you are rewarded

for having a kid. Thank you. But the corporate policy says you're punished. It's the opposite.

And so it's this poison chalice sometimes to take all of this paid subsidized time off of work

because the managers are going to punish your entirely legal decision to take that time off.

So that's really interesting, right, when there's a discrepancy between the character of

the national policy and the culture of the corporate policy. This raises the issue of

government response. Surely the Korean government, like I think many other governments around the

world, don't want the birth rate to fall to 50% of the replacement rate or below,

which is the case for Korea. How has the South Korean government responded? And is it working

at all? Sure. So let me just give you the quick answer. The South Korean government has spent

$200 billion over the past 16 years on child care subsidies and for parental leave support.

This is in the form of monthly child care subsidies, return to work program for mothers,

parental leave policies to now incentivize men to also share the burden of care work, setting up

funding for daycare centers. But clearly when your birth rate is 0.78, something is still

not working. So the short answer is no, it hasn't really turned the ship around. And that's where

I think the government, they might be on the right track, but it's not going to be resolved by

just policy. And I think this is where you have to see a shift in norms and a shift in culture.

And the hope is that by creating these policies over time, eventually people's attitudes and

these norms and these existing cultures will shift to accommodate women. And if we go back

to the previous example that you gave about women in some ways being punished, if they take time off

for work, we see this now. There's actually a backlash among young men saying that we're being

left out. It's not fair that women are getting, there's affirmative action for women or they're

getting more benefits. And this has actually propelled President Yoon to his electoral victory

because one of his base was actually young men in their 20s and 30s who were fed up. It was like

the backlash against the feminist movement. So that might be the thinking of men. Or if you're a

manager, legally, you have to let this female employee return back to work. But you might be

grumbling about her saying that she's been off for a year and now she has to come back,

you have to fit her in. But you want to change the attitude or norms so that it's actually okay,

that it's actually quite normal for women to take time off from work and we should embrace them

when they come back because they can bring in a different set of views or identity. It's like

in the think tank academic space about panels, you know, we hear a lot about manuals. And

someone had a reporter once asking, what do you think about how?

Just to be clear, manuals are panels.

All men on a panel. Yeah. And now it's a thing where if you see it, it's like, oh,

this looks weird and we need to have more representation from females. And you'll try to

reach out to, you know, female scholars or experts in Korea. Though you can look at,

you can go to a conference and you'll see that there's a lot more catching up to do,

even though I think they're beginning to change. I can see it from some of my younger

colleagues from young, younger professors that they're aware of the issue. But I was just at a

conference two weeks ago and it was all men. So the policies themselves, maybe we need to wait

for attitudes begin to shift and to catch up. But at the moment, they're not really solving the

problem. And that's what I've argued before in other outlets that I see it as more of a

band-aid solution at the moment because there's these structural forces that I think are

contributing to the lower birth rate. You know, we had talked about work or we had talked about

the high cost of education. You know, it's these things that, or, you know, the lack of affordable

housing. I think these are all contributing to the low birth rate. So by throwing money at,

you know, childcare subsidies or daycares, those are all, they may all be helpful on the surface,

but it's not really fixing the underlying problems that is leading to a lower and lower

birth rate every year. At some point, I feel like it's going to have to stop and, well, hopefully

it won't stop at zero. But it's already, it's been under one for, you know, several years now.

And that's a real concern for the South Korean government.

Yeah. I mean, when I think about the issues that you're putting on the table and folded into the

philosophy that I am building for this book that I'm working on right now, you know, I think a lot

of, I think about these ideas through the lens of cost and supply. And if the supply of housing is

too low and the cost of housing is going way, way up, and maybe childcare and daycare are

over-regulated and undersupplied in terms of labor and so the cost of childcare and daycare

is going way, way up, that means that the cost of living and the cost of raising a child becomes

exorbitant, exorbitant at the level of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars too much,

end quote, too much more than we would want. So if the cost of raising a child is going up by tens

of thousands of dollars and the childcare subsidy on the part of, say, the Korean or the American

government is, say, you know, a couple hundred dollars a year, you know, a few dozen dollars a

week, well, it's, you know, I guess what's the proper metaphor here? It's the Band-Aid solution.

Like, there is an open gash. There is a compound fracture. The bone is poking through the skin

and the government is offering a Band-Aid. Like, this is not a Band-Aid problem. This is a much

more structural problem. You have to fix it at the bone. And so, you know, I'm singing my own song

here, but like, this is where I say you need a structural solution for cost of housing,

you need a structural solution for cost of education, for cost of daycare. And fundamentally,

I see those as supply problems. Demand for housing is what it is. Demand for childcare

is what it is. In some ways, it's going down. People are having fewer children. You have to

solve these problems at the supply level if you're going to encourage people to have as many children

as they want. Like, that's the ultimate goal. It's not to force people to have more children

than they want. That's rather horrific. It's to allow them to have the number of kids they won.

And so many studies in the U.S. and Korea seem to suggest that one of the reasons fertility

is declining so much is precisely because people cannot have the number of children that they won.

Sorry, that was a brief rant. I want to tie the Korean experience to other countries around the

world. So, I was looking at some OECD numbers that suggested that the four lowest fertility rates

in the world, in the modern world, are South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

All rich Asian countries. Do any of the reasons that you mentioned span all those Asian countries?

Or is this best thought of as four distinct stories, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore,

which just happened to be geographically clustered?

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because I was at a conference in Taiwan and they were saying that we

have the lowest birth rate. We were arguing about, no, I think it's actually South Korea.

But I wasn't aware about Singapore and Hong Kong. But do you know that the four countries or

political units that you mentioned are the Asian Tigers? These were the four countries that had

developed rapidly, went through rapid economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s. And so these were

again the success stories. And they're now kind of wealthy, rich. They have rich populations in

Asia, but they're the ones that are facing this birth crisis. And so I don't think that's

coincidental. And so something that's common in all of them is that there is this idea about

workism, a work ethic. I think that comes from the idea of a hard work ethic and education.

And so the commonality underlying that is that they are a Confucius society still,

or maybe Neo-Confucius society. So that's still ingrained. But they modernize very quickly. And

then we see women now. I still think in Asian cultures, opportunities for women still lag

behind those in the West. But there has been improvement in that space. But you see women now

wanting to think about their careers and career advancement. But then they also have concerns

about, well, if we have a family, we're going to have to, we're going to have to put a pause and

that's going to make my career suffer. So they may face similar challenges. I don't know what the

housing situation looks like in all those places. So the Singapore, I know is very, because I've

traveled there quite a bit, is very costly and expensive. So that might also be a shared concern

as well, too, where you feel that you need stability. You need to have that foundation

before you set up a family. And in small countries, I think that's more so than a place like the

United States. Because again, when you live in a small space and your parents are still there,

the reason why I left my home in Ohio when I was 18 was because I went to college in a

different state. And then I got a job in a different state. So it doesn't make sense for me to live

with my parents. But if you're in Seoul and your parents are in Seoul, it's the path of

least resistance and that you may just stick with your parents. So yeah, I don't think it's

coincidental, but it seems like there may be some shared challenges among all these

small but wealthy Asian countries that developed rapidly.

Right. I mean, the stylized story that I guess I was telling myself in my head is

catch-up growth, the likes of which we saw with the Asian Tigers, catch-up growth is growth.

Growth tends to raise prices. Growth also comes from working really hard sometimes,

working really hard, reduces family and romance time. And when you put those things together,

the cost of life is rising, the cost of raising children is rising, work anxieties are expanding

to fill one's young adulthood. You are squeezing family formation from both ends. You're squeezing

it from a cost perspective and just squeezing it from a time perspective. I want to make sure

in the remaining time that we have together that we talk a little bit about the consequences

of the birth rate decline. None of the world's 15 largest economies have a fertility rate

over 2.1, which is the replacement rate. The aging and shrinking, this is Mike Burden, the

economist. I just published a cover story for the economist about this where he pointed out that

the aging and the shrinking of the world is going to pose a threat to the most disruptive

innovation and to entrepreneurship. He has this incredible stat which says that as recently as

2000, Japan, where the fertility rate has like Korea really declined quite a bit in the last 20

years. In the last 20 years, Japan's share of patents filed in hydrogen storage, computer vision,

and self-driving has declined by 50% across all those categories.

That's an argument that says shrinking countries not only face economic problems and only face

tax revenue problems, they might also face second order productivity and innovation

challenges because innovation might be the domain of the young. What do you see as the most

important consequences of declining birth rates in, as we can see, all of the largest economies in

the world? Yeah, I mean, certainly creativity and innovation may go down. Economic growth will

also suffer as well too. These are all kind of on the economic side of what happens, what

the consequences are of a low birth rate. But my expertise is on foreign policy national

security and that's something that I've been following as well. And so for South Korea,

I think this is more, this may be more of a problem for South Korea than any of the other

countries that we had mentioned because South Korea still faces North Korea across the border.

And there's always the threat, the looming threat of North Korea. There's also concerns about,

there is a desire for unification at some point. But what it means is that there's compulsory

military service for all South Korean males. And the concern for the Korean government is that

they're not going to be able to have the human power to really defend themselves. And so it means

you either have to have women then come into the military, which I mentioned these angry young men

who are saying it's not fair that not only are women getting paid leave, but

they don't have to serve in the military. They're not giving up 18 months of their life to

have to serve. So there is some argument to that. So it means you're either going to have to women

or you're going to have to rely on technology. But I think the government has been concerned and

is aware of this problem that I think when they did these models, they were saying that you needed

about 600,000, a force size of about 600,000 to deter North Korea. But we're on pace. I think

right now it's about 500,000 and in about five, six years, it's going to be around 400,000 in terms

of the force size of the South Korean military. And so I think from maybe about a decade ago,

they've been really transitioning and relying much more on technology. They've been investing

much more money and resource into technology, upgrading weapons. South Korea for the last

seven or eight years has annually increased its defense budget by about five, anywhere between

five to seven percent. And part of it is to modernize their Navy and Air Force, but that's

also in part because they realize that they're going to need to rely more on technology in the

future. But that has second order effects as well too. You're spending more money on your

military. That means, well, what about things like social spending or like social security?

It's aging. South Korea is also an aging society as well too. But what about the plans for housing

subsidies? So you can see that it has these second order effects as well. So that's

some of the consequences of having this lower birth rate. And you're creating this vicious

cycle or catch 22 then. And so I think this is, we see falling birth rates and you might think

it's not that big of a, I mean, it is a big deal. But at first blush, it might just sound like an

interesting study, but then you realize that it affects all sorts of issues from the economy to

innovation and even to national security. So yeah, there's definitely multiple consequences to this.

I had not really even thought of the national security aspect of it, but I find that really

interesting. As an on ramp to my very last question, we had a couple of weeks ago an

interview with the CEO of Enduro, one of the largest suppliers of drone technologies to the

Defense Department. And it occurs to me as you're talking about a declining human workforce to

defend Korea or defend America or defend whatever other country that's facing declining birth rates,

you can supplement that with automated technology. The automate everything solution is something

you can, you can pick up if you say, well, we can't raise birth rates. We simply have to,

if we need a certain amount of work done in the economy, automate that which we don't have enough

people to do. But if someone didn't want to accept that answer, if they said no, the automation of

the economy is either impossible or infeasible or inhumane, we need to find some way to make it

easier for people who want to have more children to have more children. That's very hard to do.

It seems like it requires working, as we said, at the bone at the structural level of cost of

housing and cost of education. What are some ideas in the policy frontier that you've seen

that might actually work to increase birth rates so that people can have as many children as they

want? Yeah, it comes down and this is something I struggle with even here in the United States

about having a proper work life balance. It goes back to your first point about work,

but it's harder when everyone, let's say you get a job. I have friends who find jobs outside of

Seoul. They're professors or they work in government in the South Korean government,

but it's not in Seoul. They're in some other province, but because of the education system,

they still want their kids to live in Seoul. They are doing this commute. They're away from

their family for the week and then they come back on the weekends. That's actually not on common,

that's not conducive to a family. Is there a way for you to get families together,

to keep them together? This isn't a policy directly about trying to tackle low fertility

rates, but the Korean government had this idea where at least when it comes to the public sector,

they wanted to move things out of Seoul. Actually, they built this news. It was like a city. There

was nothing there and it's called Sejong City. It's in the center of South Korea and they just

moved some government buildings that were there and many research institutes that were government

related. I'm most familiar with the Korean Institute for Development Institute. I remember

many people were angry. They said, why do we have to move to this relocate outside of Seoul? Some

moved to Jeju Island, which is even further out. There's a lot of grumbling and complaining,

but going back to this Sejong City, which is really just a city with a lot of government

employees, public sector employees, after about a decade, it's become really nice. Because you

have a lot of educated people there who work for the government, they have good schools. In the

past, you saw a lot of people commuting back to Seoul, but now you're seeing families actually go

down there. It's quite pleasant because the housing is more affordable. It's not so crowded.

Things are now, there's more of a cultural life there. I think that's why people didn't want to

go there initially either because there's just absolutely nothing there. But that's something

that the government did, at least for the public sector, where they could break up parts. We want

to move out of Seoul. And I think that's one approach to maybe, it may not resolve the problem

entirely, but that might be one step. Well, the very last point that I want to make is,

on the one hand, you can imagine government policies moving people to cheaper

areas. Those are sometimes called heartland visas in the US. But another thing that's kind of doing

that in a subtle way is remote work. There was a paper, I think, published earlier this year by

the economist Adam Mozemek and Lyman Stone, a demographer that essentially looked at survey

data of 3,000 American women from the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey. And it found that

female remote workers, especially older female remote workers, were more likely to intend to have

a baby than all office workers. And it suggests that remote work might in some subtle ways

promote family formation, not only by fixing what's sometimes called the two-body problem,

where romantic partners find employment in different cities and they have to choose between

their career and their relationship, but also because if remote work reduces commutes and

allows people to live in cheaper areas and they don't have the problem of sky-high housing costs

and sky-high daycare and sky-high childcare, costs come down a little bit because they can live in

these cheaper areas and still have work that is based in the more expensive areas. And remote work

ends up kind of ironically and surprisingly helping to raise the fertility rate. Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, because it's the commute times. So young families, it's a two-hour commute one way. It's

crazy how they're commuting. And by the time you get home, it's 9, 10 p.m. and you're already so

tired. And I absolutely think that that's another solution. The problem right now is when I talk

to people in Seoul, they're not working remotely. The public sector, they're saying, yeah, we have

to go in every day. So I'm not sure why remote work has not picked up as much as it has. I know

it's an ongoing conversation and an American workspace as well too, but that would certainly

help relieve some of the pressure. It would give Koreans more time to spend with family,

with their spouses. So that would be another solution as well too. Somehow there has to

be some kind of movement or some way to persuade the government to allow for that flexibility.

I do think it comes back to my earlier discussion about needing to be seen at the workplace and

being seen as a team player. I think that's what makes it harder to do the remote. I think in the

U.S., people can work fairly independently and on their own and that's seen as okay. But in Korea,

I think that seems a bit harder. So again, we may have to see some kind of attitude or cultural

shift. The other point I want to make is that the pandemic may be the external shock that maybe helps

right-size the ship that's been sinking, that's the declining birth rate. Because I told you that

pre-pandemic, Koreans would just hang out really late after work going on dinner and then drinks

and then karaoke. But many of the establishments stopped doing that or they closed at 10. In some

ways, that's not good for business. You want to support businesses. But I think that culture

hasn't quite returned at least to pre-pandemic levels. And I'm hearing some people, at least with

families, saying, oh, it's kind of nice that we don't have to hang out until like 1 a.m. or 2 a.m.

and we can actually go home. But it's not saying that you're regulating curfew. You're not imposing

curfew hours or regulating how late that you work. But that's not a government policy. But you could

do things to encourage people not to stay out so late. But I really feel like a lot of this

is revolves around cultural norms and attitudes. And those things have to change in tandem with

the policies that the government tries to put forth and trying to improve, increase the birth

rate. I think that's so interesting, especially the point about just how late

certain bars and restaurants stay out might have a downstream effect on

people's decisions about family formation. I think it ladders up to a bigger point, which is that

this is a whole of society phenomenon. Sometimes I'll tweet about declining fertility

and people will say, this is a simple story. It's just about delayed marriage or it's just

about birth control. It's just about the pill and all of the things that necessarily and

consequently follow the introduction of easy and cheap and reliable birth control. And one of the

lessons that I'm taking away from this conversation, and it's a little bit of cognitive reinforcement.

So I guess it's someone adhering to my priors and biases. This is really complicated. It is about

housing costs. It's about education costs. It's about education culture. It's about work culture.

It's about what people do after work. So it's about socializing. It's about bar and restaurant

hours. And it's about government policy. This is such a naughty, naughty problem. And I really

appreciate you walking me through it and treating it with the care and nuance that I think it

deserves. Andrew, thank you so much. Thank you so much also for helping me untangle some of these

issues, but it was a real pleasure being on the show. Plain English was hosted and reported by

me, Derek Thompson, and produced by Devon Manzi. We'll see you back here every Tuesday for a brand

new episode. Have a great week.

you

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