South Korea is dying (but it has a plan) 

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It's quite Amazing how they were able to fit two dystopias in one peninsula.

Crazy that they planned a modern city and didn't think of public transport.

I'm Korean and there are few errors. 1. Sejong has been around for 10 years now, and most of things are already built there. 2. The Korean government is not planning to fully replace its capital to Sejong. Only less than half of its government departments are located there and there is no further plan to move the rest to there. Also the main cause of the low birth rate is the fact everything is too competitive. They've been taught from young age that money is everything. Korean people genuinely do not like seeing others becoming successful, and gossiping is what people do with their friends the most. Students are obliged to go to universities at all cost and get masters if better, and along with the fact Korean men go to military for 2 years, most Korean men get their first proper job in their late twenties and early 30s. Almost all Korean people want to live in Seoul or around there making the housing price extremely high. This, along with the fact people start making profit by their 30s, makes it difficult to get married and settle down. In Korean culture, the male side has to prepare a fully owned home prior to marriage and this makes marriage a challenging life event. So Korean people that are rather poor do not even think about getting married. Korean parents also have to spend most of their income on their children's education in order to send them to good universities. This is also the cause for married couples to not have kids, and the high elderly poverty rate of 60%.

If birds don't have a nest, they won't lay eggs. What if nests cost 30x what the birds can afford?

If you've ever seen how ridiculous the education requirements for children are and that anyone who doesn't land a job at Samsung is considered a failure, you have to wonder how anyone with an ounce of compassion will bring a child into that society.

South Korea is heading towards Cyber Punk while North Korea is stuck at Steam Punk type of dystopias

"We don't know why they neglected a transit system" Bruh you literally said the reason earlier in the video, the city planners spent all their time obsessing over self-driving cars.

The issue is, that if you earn 10k a month and an apartment costs 8.5k a month, then you are not a rich country. Wealth is dictated by middle class disposible income.

Imagine building a trillion $ city but forgetting it's transportation infra.

A bunch of government employees having a few kids in a sequestered, stagnant, soul-less techno-city is not a solution.

Government: Doesn't build affordable homes Also Government: Why is the birth rate falling?

Imagine building a new city without public tranportation. What is this, USA?

"It's 1998, and cell phones are shrinking in size..." I didn't even see a cell phone until 2001 lol.

I lived in Korea and I met so many Koreans who hated their study in engineering, medicine, math, etc but had to due to parental and societal pressure to a point that they just hated life. This pressure is also created by parents and society as they had to build the country from nothing and expect their kids to do the same. I can imagine that if you go through this all you would never want to get kids and get them through the same torture. My outside perspective is that it would be more efficient to try to improve the work-live balance and working culture in general.

Let me guess, they didn't want to piss off the car companies by building a transit system or maybe they thought it would improve GDP numbers by boosting car sales.

The last thing you need if you're looking for affordability, is anything "cutting-edge".

A population of 500,000 breeding in Sejong at a higher rate will not make a dent in the larger scheme of things.

After WW2 many nations experienced a Boomer population. This was fueled by cheap housing that any 22 yr old on his first job could afford. And all of those young men were employed at jobs that payed well enough to let them afford a house and a car at a young age. Their wives did not have to work, and in every Western nation there was a population boom. So that is the formula: Jobs that pay enough that only one income earner is required to afford a home with some space. Simple. Some of the wealthiest people have the largest families. There are many multi-millionaires with 6+ children. Some have huge families of 12+ children. Because they can afford it and they have the room. Give people space and resources, and they will procreate.

They are over worked. No time for a hobby, no time for love.

"Our country is going to Hell in a handbasket! What should we do?" "Uhm, I dunno, build a new city?" - Egypt. Saudi Arabia. China. And now, South Korea. ... Am I the only one that fails to see how that is supposed to help solve anything?

its not "economic success" when your people dont have time to enjoy life, when your society has a gender-relations crisis and when your country is dominated by corporations.

As a Korean, I can definitely say that sejong has already FAILED

A car-centric city would have called been "cutting-edge" in the 1960s. NOT IN 2024! Young people are soo done with high priced, car-centric hellholes.

This might be gross generalization but I feel like S-Korea and Japan are willingly working themselves to extinction. I mean who in their right mind stays in Seoul and rather commute everyday for multiple HOURS each way than just move where their job is? These people don't seem to value sparetime all that much (even though time is the only resource no one can get back), they'd rather be on the move all the time. I'm no psychologist but there has to be a reason for that in the national psyche.

This video is a really strange way to say "late stage capitalism is killing the human race."

No, we don't have a plan. Especially our current government.

It feels kinda absurd that a city of 500,000 should be the solution to a the fertility crisis of a country of >50 million. Sejong is nothing but a drop in the bucket. Sejong has achieved a minor improvement in fertility rates if it did anything for that at all (other factors such as lower cost of living and government employees being more concentrated there might also explain it). However even if Sejong had a fertility rate of 5, that'd not change much about Koreas crisis.

"Everyone always has a plan, until they get hit in the face by a population graph." - Mike Tyson

Yeah no. Unless we revolutionize our modern lifes, you aint getting +2 children per family in industrial nations. -Too little time -Too costly (heck +340k is still a stupid number for anyone in the middle class). -Usually both partners have to work, further feeding into "too little time" A new city may reduce the money burden, but it is still there and you still have too little time to raise a child. Increasing productivity, taxing the rich and lessening mandatory work hours, while lessening the economic burden for families is a much more meaningful intervention here.

I'm South Asian, the traditional family in most cultures is the EXTENDED family, not the nuclear family (response to statement at 9:00 in the video). A nuclear family is the western idea of a family (US and western Europe). An extended family allows parents to earn a living, while the children are cared for by the extended family. Nuclear family puts too much pressure on the parents, especially in societies where there is a lot of economic pressure, and so puts people off having a family

South Korean Youth: It's too expensive to have kids. South Korean government : We will build a new City.

Designing a city in east Asia without an adequate public transit system is the fastest way to see your project fail

Wait, they designed a new city that was supposed to be family-friendly, and they forgot about public transportation? Wow

Wait, we have a plan? As a Korean, I didn't know we had a plan! Sounds like you understand us better than we do ourselves!

Hmm, we have a saying in my culture: "The living inherits the world."

Why do you keep using images from China throughout the video? Please check your sources.

Sejong is quite clearly made for rich government officials and corporate elite, lack of public transport is showing. It's not going to help, only worsen already big economic divide.

It’s completely doomed and the halving by 2100 seems very optimistic. They are probably looking at having between 15-20 million people by then. With two thirds being over 60.

Mouse utopia experiment explains South Korea and the West in general.

So it's just the rich and powerful relocating to a city with an artificial beach.

What's funny is that birthrate in North Korea is much higher at 1.8 (still not enough though).

Hey man, I really enjoy your content and I've been watching your videos for a while. But I don't know if the background music has gotten louder, but ir definitely takes away from the experience of watching your videos :)

''Why aren't our people having kids?'' *looks at psychotic work culture* Yea, wonder why

Ridiculous property bubble and companies treating employees as disposable are main causes.

Self driving cars means you are basically handing over your freedom to the government/government controlled company. 🤷🏼‍♂️

in what world is 400k affordable housing? even if they have 5 kids per woman in sejong, how will that be replicateable in the rest of the country? sounds like they are not even trying to fix the issue, or nobody has the courage to do what has to be done.

To make matters worse it has one of the highest rates of emigration,professionals are moving out due to escape Korea's superficiality, bullying, high costs of raising kids etc. Korea has to fix its social aspects too

Hello from Turkey. Turkey's birth rate also dropped to 1.53. This is very low for a developing country. Houses are very expensive due to inflation, the minimum wage is 500 dollars, but the cost of marriage varies between 15-30 thousand dollars. New houses are always built for foreigners, and those who buy a house for 400 thousand dollars are given citizenship as a gift. Foreigners live in luxury sites and developers try to sell houses to foreigners with foreign currency. For Turkish citizens who do not have a house, houses with affordable payment options are not built.

Finance a full salary split between the mother and father and mandatory split of the childcare. Let employers encourage employees to stay at home with the child, work when you can. Without acceptance from society, it will not change, this is mostly a culture problem.

Sounds like N. Korea just needs to wait them out and before long theyll be able to just walk in and inhabit the place.

No wage raise, no 6hr work day, no government subsidy on housing, no solution at all

The irony: modern technology is one of the reasons the nuclear family is broken.

Soon we'll know if "shrinking yourself healthy" is a viable strategy on a national level.

Man, every nation be like: mmm lets build a new capital for like millions of people, lets build this new city, lets build 10000km of roads, all the while the highway next to my town is being built for 40 years now

We're consistently told there are too many people in the world so don't have kids. We work hard but still can't afford to have kids.

Sounds a lot like when I stayed in Canberra, Australia during my school time. More than 75% of population is taxpayer funded public servants. Plenty of green, but transportation was not the best. Urban sprawl, bad for environment.

Ah yes, the series of (A country) Is Dying (...) is ongoing

Do the Koreans count the babies born out of wedlock? Many babies end up in the "baby box" because the mothers are underage and not married. Are these children part of the calculation?

He keeps saying that sejong is proof its reversible. No. Reversible is 2.1 ratio Anything under 2.1 but above their current rate is just slowing down the trend, _in essence dragging it out over a longer time span._

It looks like governments around the world are willing to try all kinds of weird and wonderful things to raise their fertility; everything but the one thing that is known to actually work (patriarchy). Eventually, this reality will become so stark that it will be impossible to ignore.

It is a shame that South Korea is going to have problems paying for pensions, but compared to their resources, they are currently overpopulated. Just like folks 40 years ago didn't think that their population would collapse in the future, it is stupid to assume that any current demographic trends will continue for four generations.

Before clicking on video I immediatly thought: "Korea Unification?"

Whats crazy thats its not only happen in developed country like s korea. Here in indonesia for example, population is still growing, but in major cities the population pyramid is shrinking or stagnating. And we're not even wealthy enough to do anything.

This video is all nonsense. What do women want? Loyal husband with money to support the family. Samsung, LG, Posco, etc, demand an export economy with annual inflation and horrible currency exchange rates that hurt husbands and families. Husbands cheating and financial problems create financial issues and trust issues. Due to the horrendous exchange rates and costs, women who would prefer to raise children are forced to work and make money for their families, and they don't really trust or appreciate their husbands. The whole situation is a catastrophy and building a new city fixes none of this.

"Stable jobs and affordable housing encourages people to get more babies" . Who would have thought, huh. It is amazing how we managed to wreck those two hard prerequisites though.

Building a new city alone cannot solve the decline in birth rates if citizens are choosing not to marry and have children, as seen in places like Japan. People are placing more value on material things like career, social status, and financial stability, and less on building a family. If having a family were promoted as a positive and fulfilling choice, people might be more inclined to pursue it. The issue of low birth rates is becoming a global concern, as more people choose to stay single even when they can afford to have a family.

Government building a whole city for the future, putting all the cost burden as tax on young generation. Not even providing basic necessity services. & Thinking why people aren't having kids. If young generation is stressed and don't have time. Who will have kids, Teenagers or old people ?

Sejong does not have metro rail system not because of corporate greed or ignorance (check extensive rail network in Seoul), but because the city was intentionally designed to only have around 500k citizens and not to grow. Sejong is not designed to be another generic city. It was planned as new administrative capital, thus the people living there are either working for the government or people working in service industries for the government workers(e.g. retails, transport, etc). The Sejong was intentionally built this way because the whole idea of sejong is not starting another massive city. It was supposed to mark a beginning of series of new small cities that have their own specialization, in desperate attempt to decentralize industry and wealth which are currently extremely focused on megacity aka Seoul metropolitan area.

How the F do you not plan for a rail system when you're building a city like this!?!??

South Korea's biggest issue is their education system which has lead to degree requirements being sky high, this needs to be overhauled and then Korea needs to open it's borders to non-degree possessing people who are skilled in certain fields, if Korea removed their degree requirement for immigration tax paying people would flock there, Korea's high tech infrastructure is second to none and a big reason so many people want to move there, the issue is they're unable to because they don't have a sheet of paper and that prohibits Korea from making use of so much skilled labour

Governments of Egypt, Brazil, Saudia Arabia and now South Korea: - Everything is fucked, lets start all over again with a new capital, that will solve all our problems...

To have children you need two essential things: 1) Economic stability 2) Free time Having just one and you are most probably will not have a kid or have less than you wanted.

Affordable kindergartens? They must be fully covered by the government with no doubt

Oh good, they are doing the only thing old men in power know how to do, waste more money.

They did not “forget” public transport they kowtowed to Kia/hyundai

Seoul - then places video clips of Hong Kong 1:12 lolol

Lived in Korea recently. And I must say Sejong city is very nice, high tech, modern and has some great buildings. But the city is almost dead. It's no where near the business of even gyeonggido cities.

Samsung's HQ isn't in Seoul. Its in Suwon.

A half-baked thought: somewhere in Holy Scripture one can read something to the effect of: "You cannot serve God and Mammon". I think this is quite correct also in the light of falling birthrates. There is, of course, more to it than this, but try to take it as a poetic exclaimation. The issue of falling birthrates will be solved (or, biologically speaking, won) by people willing to make the most sacrifices on their own part. For whatever reasons, culturally immersed and/or convinced religious communities seem to contribute extraordinarily to population growth. There is a psychological and cultural aspect to that; there are "signals" in these communities which are essentially child = good. Most non-religious, or irreligious people tend to be far more cynical/realist about children. For example; cost + time - personal fulfilment + social pressure = child good or bad. A culture actively celebrating children as inherently valuable will logically have more of them. We are simply witnessing the inevitable breaking point of materialist culture. As everyone else can probably tell. Sejong will fail.

The nuclear family is not the traditional family unit in most cultures. More often and for most of history, communal raising of kids has been the norm. It is more efficient and has better outcomes.

The hyper capitalistic and hyper conservative social structure is what is lowering the birthrate. Building a city isn't going to solve anything.

Two kinds of societies in the world: Gender-equal societies that aren't breeding enough, and gender-unequal societies that are breeding more than enough. Given time, which kind do you think is going to dominate? EDIT: Notice all the responses this has gotten, trying desperately to ignore the obvious, to come up with ANY other explanation they can cling to.

A large part of child care is the excessive private tutoring. I've seen it first hand parents spend thousands of dollars a month on math, science, reading, foreign language, sports, and art classes. Most of them are unnecessary. Sure you want your kid to meet the high competitive standard on tests. But what about art or sports. Most of the kids just want to do it for fun. But Koreans find being an amateur unbearable. You don't simply buy a sketchpad and watercolors and paint for fun. You must learn the form from a teacher. Then when you become proficient you move on to oil paints, or ink, or acrylics. And you must do still life, abstract, portraits, landscape and so on. All this for a 10 year old that just wants to learn to draw their favorite cartoon character and has no aspiration to be a professional artist. Apply this mentality to sports, hobbies, music, and academics. Parents spend $100-$300 a month per subject. This amounts to them spending up to $2000 a month just on tutoring. And that's with the government setting limits on what tutors can charge per hour (legally). And rich parents will pay even more for 1:1 lessons with top tutors.

🇰🇷 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 is strong alliance.

It's the work culture. You can't fix it by creating a new city. There has to be massive political and social change.

역시 외국인들은 한국을 정확하게 평가하는군요. 우물안에 갇힌 한국인들만 모릅니다..

edit: i also want to say, the nuclear family is not actually the traditional family unit. the nuclear family wasn't invented until the 20th century, or the 19th century if you're being really generous. before that, people would live with multiple generations in the same house (including grandparents) and what we now consider "extended family" (eg. aunts and uncles and some cousins). most people worked in agriculture, which would be in or near the home (requiring little travel). children were expected to contribute to the household by doing less demanding tasks like picking fruit or feeding farm animals. they were watched by any adult in the larger community who was available. men and women alike worked in agriculture, though men would generally be the ones who would travel to sell stuff if required. women have quite literally always worked and the only women who didn't have to were noblewomen with a lot of resources whose families hired servants to do labour. a family structure of mother father and children without any other family members is a very recent invention and judging by the stress levels in society today and the pessimism and how few people want to have children, i think we should consider it a failed experiment and go back to relying on each other like an actual society. i love how instead of trying to improve the quality of life they're just making a planned city and expecting that to make people start having more children. middle class people simply cannot afford to be in relationships, let alone have children. literally if you look at any documentary on this topic where they ask people why they aren't having kids most of them say they just don't have time or money to be in a relationship or for children. the culture of overworking is so ubiquitous that after work you're often expected to go for drinks with you colleagues, which is literally just more work since you're important the hierarchy from the office into the pub or whatever where you're getting drinks, and at the end of the day people end up going home late and having no time to themselves. some jobs even expect you to work 6 days a week. and with all of this work people still aren't even making enough money to be financially comfortable. south korea is basically like 10 corporations pretending to be a government. there are so few good jobs that on top of school parents put their kids into a bunch of extra prep classes just so they can have a chance at getting into one of the best colleges so they can have a chance at getting one of the good jobs. and people are looking at all of this and thinking damn, i dont want to have kids just so i can subject them to this. and the government is thinking, lets make a planned city and this will somehow fix all of the social problems in the country ?????

Unending population growth is not a possibility. Until we figure out an economy that can handle stable or falling population we're screwed.

"Rising rents mean falling birth rates" -Confucius

It sounds like the Government and companies will benefit from me having kids than me. Then why should i pay for it?

lol this video’s info is so out of date it’s laughable. No, Sejeong did not become the new capital city, and no, none of the big corporations moved to there. All it did was move newly wedded couples away from Seoul, to somewhat cool down the housing market. Next time, ask a local Korean person for better insight regarding all Korean related affairs instead of looking up Wikipedia.

watching this thinking 120km? that's less than half hour trip on high speed rail! then I learn they don't even have a subway at their new city!?

The city where I live, Prague, gets a ton of tourists from South Korea all year. I’ve often tried to chat up Korean ladies and they are absolutely un-approachable! I’m not the most good-looking, but I usually manage to entertain a pleasant chat with tourists of any nationality, but Koreans are so closed off. I think it’s something to do with their culture, but that’s why I’m not surprised to see these numbers. If not even walking in the most romantic city in Europe gets you in the mood to talk to a guy, nothing will.

Irony is that might need come to an accommodation with North Korea. To help each other out.

the richer the country the fewer kids are bein born, cant help but notice a trend, today only poor countries are having more and more kids, or the majority of them. The more your life is better and you have more resources the lesser is desire to sacrifice yourself for kids and in a way ruin your life, and I have seen this in almost every developed country especially in the West of EU

the single biggest correlation with low fertility rate is simply feminism. it is the % of educated women, and the % of women in the workforce. this factor accounts for 98% of differences in fertility levels.

Seriously? No public transit? I don't know anything about city planning, but I would have caught that. I would have thought that public transit would be a major point.

How can you make a video on this topic without addressing the social issue that has resulted in a whole movement where women do not want children in retaliation of the patriorchal society. "A 2022 survey found that more women than men - 65 percent versus 48 percent - don’t want children. They’re doubling down by avoiding matrimony (and its conventional pressures) altogether. The other term in South Korea for birth strike is “marriage strike. President Yoon Suk-yeol, elected last year, has suggested feminism is to blame for blocking “healthy relationships” between men and women. But he’s got it backward - gender equality is the solution to falling birthrates. Many of the Korean women shunning dating, marriage and childbirth are sick of pervasive sexism and furious about a culture of violent chauvinism. Their refusal to be “baby-making machines,” according to protest banners I’ve seen, is retaliation. “The birth strike is women’s revenge on a society that puts impossible burdens on us and doesn’t respect us,” says Jiny Kim, 30, a Seoul office worker who’s intent on remaining childless. "

Why would people want to have children? The cost of living is skyrocketing and it's harder for women to find jobs after having a child. It's hard to raise a child these days and sometimes, when a couple decides to divorce, only one parent is responsible enough to care for the child/ children and is left with all the responsibilities that two people are supposed to share. It's quite understandable why people don't want to have children anymore and some women don't even want to get married because of this. This is not just in Korea, this is happening in many parts of the world.