More deaths than births

By Park Moo-jong

Fifteen years ago in 2006, David Coleman, a population expert and demographer at the Oxford Centre for Population Research, warned that South Korea could become the first country on the planet to lose its entire population because of its low birthrate.

Six years ago in 2015, the National Assembly Research Service released a dreadful report that South Korea will be "empty" by 2750 without any effective efforts to halt its falling birthrate. Though the worst-case scenario predicts the situation after 735 years, it must have given the people the creeps: "Koreans will be extinct by 2750."

The same year, the U.S. CIA World Factbook said that the sound of babies crying is increasingly disappearing in South Korea due to the ever-dropping birthrate, which was only behind Singapore in 2014.

Apparently shocked by the 2006 Oxford Centre's warning, the government hurriedly set up the Low Birthrate, Aging Society Committee under the direct control of the president to boost the then shockingly low birthrate of 1.08.

Fifteen years later in 2021, a government report showed that the nation's population shrank for the first time in its history in 2020. Last year's birthrate is expected to stand at 0.8, the undisputedly lowest in the world.

The low birthrate means that the nation has for the first time hit the "population dead cross," when the number of deaths surpasses births, as there were only 275, 815 newborns, while 307,764 people died, about a 3 percent increase in deaths from the previous year.

Over the past 15 years since the establishment of the special apparatus to tackle the serious problem, the government has, indeed, poured in as much as 200 trillion won ($180 billion) to help raise the birthrate.

To the humiliation of the government's "efforts," however, the situation continues to worsen, leading us only to experience the population dead cross. In short, the medicine has proven useless. Where did all the money go?

It is common sense now that the falling birthrate and aging population will naturally lead to labor shortages, declines in consumption, decreases in industrial production, reductions in the armed forces and shrinking national finance.

So, what's the main "culprit?"

Few do not know it. Young people are increasingly shunning marriage with the average marriage age ever climbing. The number of people living single is also increasing with one in four South Koreans in the age group of 60 or older doing so.

Then again, why do our youngsters increasingly avoid becoming husbands and wives just in order to live alone, thus contributing to reducing the population?

The stubborn trend not to have children is not only caused by economic factors, but also social ones. In other words, the younger generation of today do not think getting married and having babies is a "necessity" in life.

Society has failed to create an environment for young people to live a marital life and raise children easily. The key elements are employment, housing and education. Surveys show that most newlyweds complain that they face a heavy financial burden for housing, childcare and education.

Like a huge crevasse in the iceberg, many cracks can appear in the course of marriage such as astronomical wedding costs, difficulty in finding employment, the increase in women's economic activities and the financial burden for childbirth and childcare.

On top of the questions is the supply of housing for newlyweds. The government's repeatedly failed housing policies are only causing sharp rises in housing and rent prices to the despair of young people.

Making the situation worse must be the incumbent government's unswerving scheme to rake in housing-related taxes, which is mainly responsible for the sharp hikes in housing prices, to move ahead with its populism ahead of next year's presidential election.

The incumbent government is spending money like water "in order to help people suffering from financial difficulties due to the COVID-19 pandemic" and in an apparent bid to woo voters.

The government should earmark the budget instead to increase jobs and supply cheap housing since the pandemic is causing greater job and income insecurity for those in their 20s and 30s, forcing them to give up marriage or delay having babies.

The low birthrate is a more serious problem than the nuclear threat from North Korea for it is related directly to the survival of the nation.

The government has no choice but to offer various privileges to newlywed couples and those who give birth to two or more children such as tax reductions, support for school expenses and establishment of free state-run nursing facilities.

Who would not love to hear babies crying at this time? I'd like to hear, instead, Louis Armstrong's (1901-67) 1967 song, "What a Wonderful World."

The legendary African American jazz and blues singer trumpeter was describing the bright future half a century ago: "...I see friends shaking hands (we do not shake hands due to the coronavirus), saying how do you do. They're really saying I love you. I hear babies crying. I watch them grow....."

Park Moo-jong (emjei29@gmail.com) is a standing adviser of The Korea Times. He served as the president-publisher of the nation's first English daily newspaper from 2004 to 2014 after working as a reporter since 1974.