Yep, it could be the latest pick-up line at the Hongdae clubs.
According to Bloomberg, in a speech to a panel of 500 bankers in Seoul, Jim Rogers said that creating more babies is essential for economic growth in not just Korea, but also Japan and other Asian countries. Jim Rogers is the co-founder, along with George Soros, of the Quantum Fund.
Some choice cuts:
Urging Koreans to procreate is about more than Rogers’s love of parenthood: Korea needs to increase its birth rate for the sake of the economy. So do Japan and other key Asian nations, he said…
….Yet working too much is, according to surveys, why many Japanese don’t have more sex and, by extension, babies. A recent survey by condom maker Durex found that Japanese couples have sex 45 times a year, less than half the global average of 103 times.
Japan’s birth rate has been falling since 1972, and in five years, people over age 65 will outnumber children by two-to-one. Add an aversion to increased immigration and Japan is looking at a future without enough labor. So, Keidanren wants workers to have more time off to, well, be together.
Speaking of sex and the worsening economy, it appears Koreans are using condoms, lipstick and cheap, gut rot booze (a.k.a. soju in the evil green bottle) to help cope.
Daymn, where da party at?
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Population growth? It’s very a shortsighted solution, especially in this day and age. Besides, who’s really responsible for the economic meltdown? Birthrate or greedy CEOs?
Koreans should stop listening to these Wall Street crooks.
The world is already overpopulated, so urging people to have more babies so that we can use up our limited resources more quickly does not make sense to me. A decline in world population is much more preferable because it should make it easier for us to feed and clothe those of us who are already here, and it would give our earth more time to replenish itself.
Sometimes economic theories do not make sense to me. For example, if the population declines, then what is wrong with economic growth also declining? Why can’t a decline in consumption be considered a good thing?
Maybe it is time for our economies to deflate and for the rich to lose many of their riches. Maybe it is time for all of us to simplify our lives and to stop consuming so much. Maybe it is time for America’s automobile companies to go bust, for those of us who live beyond their means to have their feet knocked out from under them, and for the mansions of the world to fall into decay and be returned to the forest. Maybe it is time for all of us to rethink our lives and stop being slaves to consumerism.
Korea does not have the resources to support continued population growth. Technological development can also fuel economic growth without draining resources.
I recall reading somewhere that if population growth is factored out, Japan’s economic growth rate has been a little higher over the last ten years than that of the US, where clumps of McMansions and shopping centers sprouting up like weeds are an eyesore all over the country. One silver lining in the recession cloud may be a shift in spending from mostly imported consumer goods to badly needed infrastructure.
among demographics I am familiar with, US Hispanics really show little or no curbing of reproduction.
I’d say the US whites are the ones who are having babies at 35,34,33 and wondering why they are having trouble conceiving. Your eggs are 35 years old. You should breed at age 24 and lay that baby.
US Blacks probably lead the US population in things like pregnant at age 15.
Have I offended everyone?
Relax. It’s all based on personal observation.
I know for sure that Koreans in Korea try to keep the kids under 2 per household, because hagwon costs are the main constraint on reproduction. Yeah, hagwon costs.
I think Korea leads the world in exporting children for adoption.
There, I offended everyone equally, best to my ability.
Man, I may fap to The Wondergirls but that’s just disgusting.
It’snot the industrialized nations that have to curb their reproduction. They already do so relative to the third world. It’s the third world countries that population is out of control and where resources are strained past breaking points.
India has a billion people. Has that stopped them from having 6-, 7-, 8-children families?
#3,
Exactly. God forbid that there would be fewer consumers…or that South Korea would consider granting permanent residency and, ultimately, citizenship to its migrant workers.
#3 and #8, don’t worry. That day is coming sooner than later. The Korean thieves that brought the 1997 IMF crisis, turned out to be small town two bit players compared to the rich American thieves who are at the helm right now. Marc Faber is predicted in October that the long term US treasury will turn into useless toilet papers and the US will surely go bankrupt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....&eurl=
That should do a good job of downsizing everything.
eat shit, cm.
A country is strong if it has a growing population, expanding out to new suburbs with 30 year mortgages, working until age 65-70 before retiring.
Countries with declining population, or an easy life with 10-20 year home loans where people retire at 55, will probably remain a 2nd rate country in terms of economic and military might.
Most young people in East Asian countries don’t want to marry early and have more children. You can’t just point fingers at them and say they’re selfish. In urban cities it’s very difficult for a young couple to get by, because of high housing costs. As soon as the government spends many millions of dollars to build light rail out to (previously) rural areas where housing is cheap, established, older & wealthy property investors swarm in to “fry up” the prices for personal gain.
One possible solution is to build light rail out from the cities, and acquire land along the way for new master-planned suburban construction, and make the housing units avail at low prices to young couples with certain resale restrictions. To qualify, the couple must be under the age of 30 and have at least one child. Ideally, you should price it so that a young family can get by with one income, so the wife can stay home and have more kids.
Failing that, the government can make itself attractive to immigrants. If you don’t want immigrants to “take over”, you simply choose them from groups with low birth rate.
3 things:
(1) The problem with economic contraction is that it makes it very hard to attract investment to anything. As they say in the steel biz “The first ton of steel costs $50,000, every ton after that is free.”
What finance guys do is they look at their current cash money, and ask “What will I do with this?”, and they start fiddling with their spreadsheets, making all sorts of assumptions about the future to determine how long it will take to make back their money if they lend it to someone, buy a stock, start up a venture company, finance a new drug trial, buy real estate, join a partnership on a new steel mill, convert it into Aussie dollars…whatever. And of course the object is growth, with all its concomitant repercussions for the environment, etc, as bemoaned above.
When they’ve built their model, they place the cursor over the bottom right corner, and drag that spreadsheet out as far they want, counting money all the way. But only if the forecast is growth. If the forecast is contraction, then those investments just won’t happen. The money will wallow in short-term money market accounts, and wait, and wait, for a growth opportunity.
(2) You’re on the wrong track with food. The world makes enough; more than enough. As the world’s population has increased, its capacity to produce food has outpaced population growth. The problem is one of distribution, not production, and the biggest barrier to distribution is not finance or infrastructure, it’s protectionism.
(3) If you want to reduce consumerism, you just have to find a way for people to be content being undifferentiated. The root of the consumerist economy is convincing people that they are all unique, and this isn’t hard, because people want to believe it. I was astounded on a trip back to Canada when I looked at the dental floss section in the drug store – more than 40 different types of dental floss. From coffee to cars, desk chairs to cell phones, everything everything is being built to be multiply modified and endlessly varied and quickly replaced so that YOU, the consumer, can show the world how special and different you are, based on your purchasing decisions. Would you be happy again with a simple choice between waxed and unwaxed, or would you complain that neither one really satisfies the special needs of your particular dentitia?
You can’t overcome people’s desire for differentiation by any means I know of. Religion doesn’t work – the environmental movement’s lack of appeal proves it. Education doesn’t work – everyone knows what I’ve just written, but they still demand their special coffees. The only thing that might bring them to their senses is a reacquaintance with poverty, where they just can’t afford any more to purchase their way into a unique identity. And it seems that’s probably on the way. Welcome back to the era of discovering what really matters in life – and Merry Christmas.
#11 Most young people in East Asian countries don’t want to marry early and have more children. You can’t just point fingers at them and say they’re selfish.
Definitely. It is a personal choice, and countries experiencing a decline in birth rates are the sum total of millions of personal choices.
People in industrialized nations consume much more resources per capita. We need to curb our consumption.
@Linkd:
It is possible to curb consumption. In the US, there are a hardy few who have committed to the 3Rs and buy almost nothing new. I furnished my apartment mostly with second-hand furniture. A colleague of mine buys Goodwill castoffs, fixes them up, and resells them.
A lot of the consumption I see isn’t differentiation but rather conformity and expression of group membership. This is true not only of teenagers but adults.
gbevers
“The world is already overpopulated, so urging people to have more babies so that we can use up our limited resources more quickly does not make sense to me. A decline in world population is much more preferable because it should make it easier for us to feed and clothe those of us who are already here, and it would give our earth more time to replenish itself.”
I totally agree with you on that. The world has more people on it than it can support. And countries (and so called economic specialists) trying to encourage their citizens to have more children are being self centered (nationalistically centered?). They are going by logic that is too simplified and short sighted. They should at least understand that the overall well-being of our planet is just as important as their national interests. I also think that overpopulation is responsible in part for global warming. Any new infant added to the world population will live an entire life using fossil fuels. A decrease in world population would make our efforts to control global warming a little more easier.
If Asian and European (don’t a lot of European countries have a low birthrate problem also?) countries are worried about decreasing population they should accept more foreigners as its citizens, from countries that have dense populations, to compensate. That would help poverty stricken areas by preventing its people from competing over limited resources too much.
I find it distasteful when Korea’s government agenda to increase birthrate reflects on television. These days a lot of dramas depict middle-aged people having babies (a 52 year old getting naturally pregnant?), families that have two or more children, young pregnant women deciding to be single moms when the boyfriend afraid of commitment dumps her and worst of all pregnant teens deciding to ignore evil ‘life hating’ parents who push abortion. Government propaganda pushing ideas on to viewers is one thing, but encouraging pregnant teens to have their babies? That’s going to far and irresponsible. They are not gonna live picture perfect lives raising a child as depicted on TV.
It’s common for industrialized countries to have low fertility rates. There’s really only one that goes against that trend and that is the US-of-A. At a rate around 2.1, the surplus of babies didn’t come from Angelina Jolie herself, but from immigration and other economic factors. Until Korea has a more lax immigration policy, their native population will never support a fertility rate around 2.
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