I saw something interesting today, and had to check the maths on it because it just seemed unbelievable. Turns out, it isn’t.
South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world. The data I saw was 0.84 births per woman, which is well, well below replacement of 2.1. Those numbers don’t seem to mean much in the abstract, but when applied to the real world, are startling. One way to do this is to work out how many great grandchildren you might expect from a population.
Here is the maths:
Take 100 South Koreans, 50 of whom are women. At the current birth rate, that cohort will have 42 children, 17 grandchildren, and 7 great-grandchildren. That is a 93% extinction rate over four generations, so under 150 years. Our species, or at least the South Korean part of it, has found itself at a serious evolutionary bottleneck.
When we think of world ending events, Hollywood and writers have lead us to think it will be aliens, nuclear war, or a meteor hurtling towards earth. Turns out, it’s a societal suicide en-masse. We either figure out a way to have more children, or we rely on the nations that are still population booming (Niger, Chad, Angola, Mali, Central African Republic etc) to provide immigrants.
It’s a complex issue, that’s for sure.
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