Joo Hyung-hwan, vice chair of South Korea’s Presidential Committee on Aging Society and Population Policy, said on Monday that his country’s fertility rate is expected to rise slightly when the data from 2024 is fully tabulated.
This is welcome news for South Korea, the country with the world’s worst confirmed demographic decline, even though the improvement predicted by Joo will be minimal.
“If the recent increase in the number of marriages and births continues, the country’s fertility rate is expected to be about 0.74 this year, which is higher than Statistics Korea’s initial long-term projection of 0.68 and last year‘s figure of 0.72,” Joo said on Monday.
If this projection holds up, it will be the first increase in South Korea’s fertility rate in nine years and the largest increase in 14 years. According to Statistics Korea, the government statistical agency, September 2024 was the third straight month in which more than 20,000 babies were born.
A fertility rate of 0.74 births per woman is still far, far below the level of 2.1 needed for population stability, let alone growth, so South Korean officials are keen to understand exactly how this baby bump was achieved.
Joo urged business leaders to transform South Korea’s workplace culture to nourish demographic growth by implementing more family-friendly policies – or they might soon find themselves without enough young workers to keep their enterprises running.
“We are entering a new normal era of labor shortages, moving beyond mere mismatches in the labor market. It is time for companies to establish new survival strategies for themselves,” Joo said.
Joo also credited the increased number of marriages in recent years for bringing more children into the world. Some observers caution this marriage surge was largely a result of post-pandemic euphoria and might fade soon.
As with other industrialized nations facing demographic crunches, South Korea has implemented a wide variety of government subsidies to reduce the cost of childbirth and childrearing, including a $750 cash allowance for newborns, increased parental leave, and tax incentives for businesses that create “family-friendly work cultures.”
None of this has been enough to reverse the decline, probably because the real “cost” preventing young South Koreans from starting families is not just the high cost of maternity care or daycare, but the tremendous opportunity cost of setting career and personal goals aside to become mothers and fathers, especially mothers.
South Korea’s birth rates collapsing so precipitously in the new millennium has prompted vigorous discussion on why – and how other countries might avoid a similar fate. One factor often mentioned is the rise of an extremist left-wing feminist movement in South Korea known as “4B,” which took shape about ten years ago. Some pinpoint the birth of the movement as the Gangnam murder of 2016, in which a man stabbed a woman to death for ignoring him.
“Bi” is a Korean word for adamant refusal, so the name of the movement translates to “Four Nos,” specifically “no dating, no marriage, no sex, no children.”
4B is an expression of angry, radical feminism, the mirror image of the “incel” phenomenon among young Western men. Some of its adherents believe they are sending a message to the male-dominated business and political system by denying them sex, in the manner of the classical Greek comedy Lysistrata, in which women tried to end the Peloponnesian War by staging a “sex strike.”
The number of women who announce themselves as adherents of 4B is not large, but they have an outsized impact on South Korean culture, which is filled with confused and unhappy young people. Some observers believe the rise of 4B exacerbated the demographic crisis by pulling young women out of the dating and marriage pool, while others see it as a response to demographic collapse, as women feel they are being unfairly blamed for the demise of the next generation.
The 4B movement has grown influential enough to attract notice from women in other countries, including in the United States.
CNN recently claimed there was a surge of interest in 4B among “young liberal women across TikTok and Instagram” after the election of Donald Trump, although the report offered only anecdotal evidence for this contention and talking about militant celibacy online is much easier than actually doing it.
“I have been waiting for this to happen. It took eight years to reach you guys!” South Korean feminist writer and 4B pioneer Mingyeong Lee told her new American followers on Monday.
No matter how many women might fully commit themselves to a movement like 4B – or how many young men might swear off women and dating in similar fashion – the cold, hard, biological truth is that population stability requires young people to start having children at a young age, and a fair number of couples must have more than two children to hit the threshold for growth.
Any cultural trend that makes young people less likely to embrace that enormous commitment is bound to have a negative effect, especially since getting upwardly mobile, career-minded youth to embrace that commitment was already difficult.