There is No Floor to Falling Birth Rates

Some of you probably know know that South Korea has an insanely low TOTAL FERTILY RATE (how many babies a woman has) at \~.73 and that Seoul's TFR is even mondo-redonculous-insanely low at around .55 which means that it takes almost four Seoul women to make one baby.  That's already really bad.  And Seoul isn't a small population.  There are almost 10 million people in it, that's larger than the population of over half the countries on the planet.  So as a floor of TFR that's already pretty bad.   Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut, it occurred to me to try to find out what the TFR was for women who were -born- in Seoul.  According to a survey only about 48% of people living in Seoul were actually born in Seoul . The rest are migrants from the provinces aaaaaaaaand every last one of those provinces has a higher TFRs than Seoul (Jeonnam / Sejong ≈ 0.97,  Busan ≈ 0.66, Incheon ≈ 0.69). That means the 0.55 average must be pumped up by non-Seoul-born women.  There is no way it can't be since it's the lowest of the low. I did a back-of-the-envelope mixture calculation: If \~48% are Seoul-born and migrants average \~0.7–0.85, then the math works out like this: If migrants are at 0.70 → Seoul-born TFR ≈ 0.39 If migrants are at 0.75 → ≈ 0.34 If migrants are at 0.80 → ≈ 0.28 If migrants are at 0.85 → ≈ 0.23 And if you adjust for the fact that younger, child-bearing age cohorts in Seoul are even more migrant-heavy than the general population, the Seoul-born number is probably closer to the lower end of that range.  So the “real” TFR of women actually born and raised in Seoul is probably somewhere in the 0.25–0.40 range, with a best guess around \~0.30 kids per woman. That’s staggeringly low. For every six women born in Seoul, together they’ll produce less than one child. Whatever it is about life in Seoul (the social milieu, the grind, the number of things people do other than raise kids) the result is a demographic extinction spiral. And here’s why it matters that Seoul-born women are even lower than non-Seoul-born women: fast-forward to 2045 or 2065, and ask yourself this: will daily life, politics, and the economy in the rest of Korea look more like today’s countryside, or more like today’s Seoul? The answer tells you what the future really holds, not just for Korea, but for urbanized societies everywhere.