from Hacker News

kurzgesagt: South Korea's demographic issue is killing their country [video]

by maxloh on 4/20/25, 6:50 PM with 25 comments

• by CharlieDigital on 4/20/25, 7:49 PM

  Taiwan not far behind, but with a smaller population to start with.

  Domestic policy seems to be hard to fix since it requires a massive cultural shift that may take a generation and requires big changes in the economic structure (income, employment law, child care capacity, etc.) that are going to have push back from corporations.

  Immigration is also a bit of a challenge as SK, Japan, and Taiwan are all a bit xenophobic to extents and of course, the languages are not easy to gain proficiency.

  I also think that this generation of people just think differently on matters of child rearing and what it means in life. (East Asian elder millennial w/2 kids). Even if money were no issue, I wouldn't want more kids.

  Will be an interesting couple of decades.

• by tim333 on 4/21/25, 12:27 AM

  >2060...economic collapse...will poverty among the elderly be common, but a big chunk will be forced to work...

  This seems to pretty much ignore AI and robots which will be able to do all/most of the work way before 2060. Probably before 2040.

  Maybe the future is more AI/human uploads and less bio models.

• by teddyh on 4/20/25, 7:50 PM

  The community-selected title by the “Dearrow” browser plugin is “The long-term effects of South Korea's unprecedented fertility crisis”, which is a better title.

• by cedws on 4/21/25, 5:45 AM

  Too bad Kurzgesagt became yet another clickbait channel.