SEOUL: Once again, Elon Musk (pic) is back to tracking South Korea’s nose-diving birth rate.
With just 0.72 births per woman in 2023, South Korea has emerged as an extraordinary case study among developed countries grappling with declining fertility rates – a sort of Petri dish for what might lie ahead for societies facing a demographic crisis.
These unprecedented numbers have made the country a favourite reference point for Mr Musk, CEO of Tesla and X and US President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, in his increasingly alarmist warnings about an impending worldwide population collapse.
“2/3 of Korea will disappear every generation,” Musk wrote on X on Nov 27, retweeting a report from Think Global Health.
The shared screenshot, based on World Bank data, shows South Korea’s fertility rate plummeting from over five births per woman in the 1960s to today’s record lows. The screenshot’s caption cites long working hours, low wages, and falling marriage rates as key factors.
According to Statistics Korea, the country’s projected fertility rate for 2024 is 0.74 – a slight uptick from 2023, though still nowhere near the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 1.51, or the 2.1 needed for a stable population.
This is not the first time Musk, currently the world’s richest person, sounded the alarm about South Korea’s demographic trajectory.
At the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh in October, he warned that the South Korean population would shrink to “about a third” based on current trends.
In September 2022, he claimed the country was “tracking to lose about half its population roughly every generation”.
Earlier in 2022, he singled out South Korea and Hong Kong as “experiencing the fastest population collapse”.
Musk, a father of at least 11 children with three different women, has turned falling population numbers into something of a personal mission over the years, calling it “the biggest danger civilization faces” and “a much bigger risk than global warming”.
His message has made him a poster child of the pro-natalist movement, which has lately gained traction globally in its push to get people to have as many children as they can to counter demographic decline.
In May, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declared the fertility crisis a “national emergency” and announced he would launch a new government ministry to tackle the problem. - The Korea Herald/ANN
