This is a YouTube interview (Conversations with Jim Penman) discussing South Korea’s low fertility. The host lists government incentives (birth/postpartum vouchers, parenting allowances, parental-leave subsidies, low-rate mortgages, public rentals, foreign housekeepers) and recent 2024 stats (238,000 live births, 0.75 fertility rate, 14.9% jump in marriages). Jim Penman argues financial incentives will fail: the root causes are changing attitudes, priorities and character driven by prosperity and cultural pressures; he suggests neuroscience-based approaches are the only viable path to reverse the decline.
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Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Jim Penman. And today we're going to be talking about South Korea because South Korea is cited a lot in your new book which will be out soon, the Birth Rate Crisis. So let's just get, let's just go over a few of them, what they're trying in South Korea and see what you think about that. So newborn families get 2 million won birth voucher and a 2 million won postpartum voucher. They get a monthly parenting allowance which starts at 700,000 won for the first year and 350,000 won for year two. And then although the stat now hands out about 29.6 million won over eight years for each child. So I don't know what that is to currency, but I presume it's a significant amount of money. There's a parental leave gap which they've brought in. Employees can also claim a subsidy when they need to hire a replacement worker. The U Fleet program also offers low rate mortgages and more public rentals for young couples. There's a whole bunch of things they're trying as well. They're even bringing in foreign housekeepers to help people lighten with domestic chores. There's a whole bunch of different unique, I'd say incentives. So let's list but here are the stats. Live birth births rose 3.6% to 238,000 in 2024. The fertility rate though is still 0.75 fertility rate which is still the world's lowest. The government's targeting 1.0 by 2030, which is still far below the replacement rate of 2.1. In saying that marriages have jumped 14.9% in 2024, helping the small rebound. But what would you sort of say about that?
Those sort of figures, it's going to.
Fail, going to fail.
To actually 2.1 children per woman is replacement level. They're now about 0.7 as you say, I don't think it's going to get to one. I don't think it's going to get close to one. In fact, when you have a look at attitudes and I've just been studying these things recently, let's put them into the birth rate crisis book. The attitudes of people in Korea are dramatically getting worse. There's less and less people now even compared with a couple of decades ago. Less people are happy with marriage. Take views like is a married man happier or a married woman happier than one who is single? The actual even just in the past couple of decades, the proportion of people saying that they are has gone down and the people are saying just the same just happen to be single has gone up dramatically. That's men and women. If you had a look at the attitudes towards children, is it better to have children? Is that a part of a marriage? Even just in the past couple of decades, you see the, that's going, that's changing. People are less and less likely to think that children are necessary for marriage. It's going in totally wrong direction. And the interesting thing is the young are affected most of all. And we did this all over. So the South Korean situation, I can say it's not going to go up 0.7, it's going to go down. And there's nothing fundamental that the Korean government can do about it directly because none of these bribes will work. Because the problem is not money, it's character, it's priorities. And as long as people's priorities are against marriage and against children, you're never going to have the current. The only solution is neuroscience.
We sort of talked about this in previous episodes. But with a country which is very advanced like South Korea and they're obviously spending a fortune on this sort of stuff, why haven't they come to look at stuff that you're doing?
Because they're totally misunderstanding what's going on. You ask people why they don't have children and they always focus on money and people believe them. They say yes, that's why it is therefore give them more money. But it doesn't work because it's not money, it's priorities. If you're the kind of person, if you. And it's not a fundamental thing, it's not something that you can change from the propaganda. You can't. It's to do with it. It's a basic change in character that's driven by a whole lot of changes inside, including prosperity in itself that's causing a change in character that causing people to prioritize family and children less. So unless you can change the character, you can't solve the problem. And no amount of money. I think they did a figuring once that said that if you gave people enough money they would actually have more children. But it's in the region of like a million dollars US per child to get one extra child. Completely, utterly impossible. And I didn't even know if that would work.
And it's an interesting country, South Korea as well. The very, very high tech, very high paced, you know, the kids that have those classes which they send them to like 10 o' clock at night, 11 o' clock at night. So very, very full on culture as well. But I think that's part of the.
Problem actually in those countries. In South Korea the, the level of ferocity and competition for high paying jobs is such that the kids have a terrible childhood. It's really bad. Not only that, but it puts enormous pressure on parents. They had to spend so much money and so much time.
Yeah.
And they don't enjoy the kids and the kids don't enjoy being.
You know, I remember there's a foreign correspondence show and they have to send them to these, I can't remember the name of it but they send to these kids and they go to 10 o' clock at night, 11 o' clock at night, these study things and the dad's for working three jobs delivering packages and all these sorts of things.
It was to try and, try and pay for this. So they have, they have fewer and fewer children. They put more and more, which is, just doesn't work. It doesn't work. There's no rules. You want to have more kids. One of the things we've got to stop doing is being helicopter parents. We've got to stop pushing our kids so much. It's not good for them psychologically, emotionally and character wise. It's not helping them at all. And this whole idea that you've got to be super educated and get into the highest prestigious universities and jobs and so forth is really backwards. What's wrong with being a construction worker or something like that if that's where you're going or doing a lesser job but having a better life and having a few more kids. Yeah.
It's quite sad to watch actually how competitive the, their school, their system was there. You go to school and that's 10 o' clock at night, 11 o' clock at night.
The East Asian countries that are so focused on these extreme pressure on children to achieve are the ones that are having the fewest kids.
Yes, they are. And it's a big, big concern. And you just think, you know, the government says, you know, hopefully they get a hold of your book and we're hopefully going to do some translations of your book into Korean and some other languages.
We have to show them they're barking up the wrong tre. It's completely the wrong solution. You can't bribe people to have more children. You need to change your character. And the change of character is very deep seated. The only way to do that is neuroscience. South Korea is a very wealthy country with very clever people with very advanced technology. You just have to start looking in the right direction they can solve the crisis. It could be done within just a few years and you can have replacement level fertility. There is a way to do it. We just got to show the Koreans.
Awesome. So thank you very much for that interview today, Jim. Birthrate crisis mailing list is in the description as well. And if anyone wants to reach out to Jim, check out JimPeman.com and send us a message as well.
