280
Over 4,000 schools shut down nationwide as student numbers plunge - The Korea Times
(www.koreatimes.co.kr)
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
280 points (100.0% liked)
World News
51563 readers
1877 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
- Blogsites are treated in the same manner as social media sites. Medium, Blogger, Substack, etc. are not valid news links regardless of who is posting them. Yes, legitimate news sites use Blogging platforms, they also use Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and we don't allow those links either.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
SK is not going to be a good example because, in addition to the usual reasons for a declining birth rate, they also have some pretty extreme racism, sexism, and a work culture that even worse than Japan in many ways. Why would you want to have kids in South Korea‽
Let's say you do have a wife and kids... Good luck getting home to see them on time on the regular!
What's incredible is that the government's stance on this situation is that it is preserving their culture. What they really mean is that they're keeping out foreigners and not cross-breeding with the riffraff (which is... The rest of the world).
They will "preserve" themselves right into extinction.
There's a reputation amongst the air force that if you're deployed to korea you'll come back married to a local, they really don't want to live in korea
Yeah, if anything they should only be looked to as examples. Then do the exact opposite lol
Most other countries do their best to create environments that are hostile to children, but in a different way.
I basically agree. It's hostile to be one and it's not particularly friendly to afford one either. Half my friend group lives with their parents still because I'm getting a job won't let them afford a place to live, which is an absurd statement but also just true.
I think that there will be a revolution that completely upsets things like work life balance and housing costs and whatnot and only after the economy suffers a severe depression from the population this match, forcing the issue against their will
And hardline anti immigration.
Don't forget who's their neighbour. North Korea might win without shooting a single bullet.
It would be pretty wild if the Korean reunification was accomplished due to the complete demographic collapse of South Korea.
Though, NK isn’t doing that much better, coming in with a fertility rate somewhere between 1.3 and 1.4, which is somewhat unusual when compared to other countries with extreme poverty.
The population of North Korea is approximately 26.5 million while South Korea is around 51.7 million. North Korea has already overtaken the South in total number of births per year (~340,000 VS ~250,000 in the South).
If the current trend continues (which I doubt it will), that means North Korea's population will overtake South Korea some time around 2090-2100.
Instead, what's going to happen is South Korea will have a regime collapse and then they're going to have a "come to Korea" moment (like a "come to Jesus" moment, but Korean-themed and much more literal). There's all sorts of things they can do to improve their situation practically overnight (from a geopolitical perspective) but they've so far refused to do so (for racist reasons).
Either they're going to fortify their population with foreign stock or they're going to demonstrate "the superiority of the Korean race" by going extinct.
Many of them think preserving their culture is more important (or dignified) than extinction.
With countries as homogenous as Japan and South Korea, I don't see racism having a statistically significant effect
Sexism is an issue in both cultures, but if that is a major factor why is Japan's fertility rate right between Spain and Finland?
Work culture in South Korea is certainly problematic, although I would again bring up Spain and Finland. I would also note Japan's work culture has had a massive shift over the past couple decades. The average Japanese worker works far fewer hours than the average American worker, and fewer than the OECD average. The '90s stereotypes about Japanese work culture are no longer true
Here's a better question: Why would you want to have kids in North Korea?
The fertility rate in the north is more than double the South, but here's a more interesting fact: The birthrate in the North has been steadily declining for decades in almost lockstep with the South (note: there is a bit of wonkiness with a couple years in both data sources. Ignore the outliers), just at a slightly slower pace
I used this site to compare country pairs. With the Koreas you can see shared inflection points, such as in 1981, and a general trend line that looks the same
Then compare Russia and Ukraine. A much more volatile fertility rate. In 1986/1987, both countries share a local maximum, followed by a very sharp decline that continues until a local minimum right around 2000. We don't see this pattern with the others (although they all seem to follow the same trend)
Finally you have the US and Canada. Shared local maximum in 1990/1991, and again in 2008. Both closely follow each other in terms of fertility rate inflection points, but not at the some times as other pairs
Also of note: All the lowest fertility rate countries (South Korea, Taiwan, and China) are geographically near each other, with very similar primary industries - high-tech manufacturing
My hypothesis: The most important factor is environmental. Likely an air pollutant of some kind (maybe several kinds)
I don't have much evidence for this other than correlated fertility rates, but it's the only thing I can think of that fits the data
Consider that there might not be a single unifying explaination and instead a number of compounding factors.
Right, which is why I specified most important factor. I put it in the hypothesis to be more prominent, but perhaps I should have bolded it?
Fair enough, I meant to subtilty disagree with you on the hypothesis that pollution is the leading factor and instead suggest that it may not be the leading factor, as I have been taught that socioeconomic factors like education do most of the explaining. But that is not what I wrote of course.
But I'm no expert on the matter so you might very well be right either way. The topic appears to be well studied though, but I haven't gotten around to reading any papers
Pollution would make sense if people were trying to have kids but couldn't. But they're not trying to have kids at all!
The more likely explanation—related to tech—is that we don't need kids anymore. For 99% of human history, children were necessary and not having kids was basically impossible (horny kids and no birth control). Kids were how humans kept alive/stable as well as expanded their power and influence! It's also how they got cared for in old age (though that's a much lesser concern because I seriously doubt humans of the past thought that hard about such things when living to 40 was considered amazing).
Now we have birth control and—in Western societies—stability/safety is much more likely if you don't have kids. We've basically flipped the script on our evolution.
You want people to have kids? Flip the script back! Make anyone under 30 without kids pay a massive tax that pays for the kids of people who have them! Basically, make everyone who didn't have kids pay child support.
Make having kids the best damned economic decision anyone can make with diminishing returns after two (kids).
While that's certainly a contributing factor worldwide, I think the data contradicts it quite a bit. Japan, as an example, has the elderly heavily rely on their children as a retirement plan. Far more so than countries like the US that has a higher birthrate. Also include that while undeveloped countries like Kenya have some of the highest birthrates in the world, it's far less than similarly developed countries had 100 years ago
There is a bit of a misconception there with average life expectancy. Once you made it to adulthood, your life expectancy was far higher than would be expected from an average life expectancy of ~40. It was brought down heavily by all the young deaths
I don't doubt this is a strong factor, but if it were the largest factor, wouldn't we expect countries with strong social programs like Norway to have much higher birth rates? I suppose those social programs would tend to correlate with birth control
I was unfamiliar with Norway's program so I looked it up...
49 weeks of maternity leave? FUCK YEAH!
$160/month (USD equivalent) for kids under 6? Not nearly enough! That is of negligibe impact and doesn't come close to offsetting the costs of raising a child.
My two takeaways from this, learning about Norway's programs:
Also, "when everyone gets a subsidy, no one gets a subsidy" (my own saying). It seems inevitable that daycare costs would increase by the subsidy amount in order to capture it as profit. Basically, long-term subsidies like that ultimately fail because of basic economics. They can work fine in the short term, though.
I still stand by what I said: Having kids makes you less economically stable and until we fix that, fertility rates will continue to decline.
Seems like the biggest thing that needs to be fixed though is housing costs.