Is South Korea’s extremely rapid modernization one of the greatest success stories in history, as is typically thought, or has it been an extinction-level catastrophe for Korean civilization?

That’s what I came away wondering after reading three fascinating recent pieces on South Korea’s demographic collapse (below). South Korea’s total fertility rate is under 0.8 (the lowest in the world) and falling. The impact of this will be exceptionally rapid: at a 0.7 TFR, for every 100 South Koreans around today there will be only 4.3 great-grandkids. “It’s as if we knew a disease would kill 94 percent of South Koreans in the next century,” is how Malcolm and Simone Collins put it in Palladium.

In other words, in a mere two generations, a distinct nation that survived for at least 3,000 years through constant struggle and repeatedly fending off larger invaders, the nation of proud Goryeo and Joseon kings, will disappear from the earth, having spontaneously decided to lie down and die out. In historical terms, it’s hard to state how unprecedented this would be.

Bizarrely, only North Koreans may remain to inherit the Korean peninsula after the End of History and the Last South Korean.

And as these three pieces explore (in quite different ways), this seems to be the direct result of South Korea’s rapid modernization into a “developed” country. So what does that mean? At the civilizational level, was economic and social modernization actually a fatal poison pill for South Korea (also now among the unhappiest countries in the world by polling)? Is this a warning the rest of us in the developed world should heed? Given the stakes, these seem like big questions we should be considering urgently – but instead mostly avoid thinking about.

So check out the below and then let me know what you think.

palladiummag.com/2023/04/06/birth-rates…

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/s…

firstthings.com/article/2023/05/anti-na…

(I decided I didn’t have enough to say on this to write a full Substack post, so trying this out as a longer note.)