Key Points

• Demographics are density.
• Shrinking populations will destroy Southeast Asian countries.
• It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve.
• Also, top analyst reveals “The Next Nvidia” ready to soar.

Austin Smith and Michael Muir discuss the severe demographic challenges faced by Southeast Asian countries, particularly focusing on South Korea. They explore the impact of overwork culture, high housing costs, and intense competition on fertility rates. The conversation highlights the psychological and structural barriers to raising families in these environments and compares the differing birth rates and median ages between North and South Korea, emphasizing potential national security concerns.

Transcript:

Yeah, there was actually something I wanted to bring up was the work culture in South Korea and Japan as well.

In fact, China too.

In fact, all of these countries have worked extremely long hours.

And again, that has the knock-on effect.

I mean, how are you going to meet someone if you have to work an extremely long working day and the culture in South Korea, it’s taboo to leave before the boss.

Um, even if your work’s done, you’ve just got to hang around the office for however long.

And then afterwards, there’s a lot of pressure to go for drinks.

Um, again, uh, uh, you know, I lived there, so I know I’ve seen it firsthand is they call themselves a last minute society.

You know, you can suddenly get roped into post-work drinks at the last minute.

So how are you supposed to meet a partner, raise a family under these conditions is very difficult.

In Japan, they even have a term for it.

Death by overwork is the rough translation.

So these things that are ingrained in the culture and the societies are not easily remedied.

And there are huge barriers to raising families.

There’s a major psychological component here, which is people typically have and raise families and grow families and have large families when they feel generally optimistic.

And it is challenging to feel generally optimistic if you’re in a situation where perhaps as a young person, one of these countries is extremely competitive.

You’re working 12 to 15 hour days.

You’re getting roped into drinks late at night.

It’s very expensive.

So it is hard to remain optimistic in an environment where you’re both working that hard and money is that tight.

And you are also but the catch-22 of that is you create a dynamic where you have less children and then your aging population ages and it makes it even more challenging to be a young person.

It’s almost like, you know, it’s like, uh, it feels as if there’s almost like a point of no return here.

And so far, you know, it’s not as if Japan and South Korea and these Southeast Asian countries are unaware of this.

South Korea has plenty of incentives to motivate people to have families.

But it is just a very challenging thing to reverse someone’s psyche and culture if they’ve grown up in an environment of zero or one children and it is so competitive.

It takes a long time to reverse that psyche to get to that place of optimism where they even feel comfortable having children.

A family and even thinking about replacement rate, much less where we are today, which is well below that.

Yeah.

And so as we mentioned, we were talking about some of the effects.

We mentioned that national security can even be one.

So if we compare South Korea’s fertility rate of about 0.7, which obviously is just far, far below replacement rate, North Korea’s is about 1.8.

And the median age of these two countries is also worth comparing because South Korea’s average age is about 45.5 and then North Korea’s 35.

That’s not enough to necessarily bridge the gap between the two militaries, but that’s going to have a serious concern.

That’s going to have serious national security concerns maybe in the next 15, 20 years.

There’s just not going to be enough able-bodied Korean males to defend the country.

Is it fair to say that North Korea’s biggest weapon may not be militarily?

It is something, you know, what we might traditionally associate as a weapon, like missiles or a navy, but simply their birth rate and their population?

Not necessarily, simply because North Korea is one of the least food secure countries on Earth.

That is a major problem they have.

Again, accurate data about North Korea is hard to come by, and any statistic you hear about North Korea should be taken with a pinch of salt.

But it’s estimated something like 40% of the North Korean population is malnourished.

And I know there’s been some flooding in the past week or so.

And so one of North Korea’s biggest problems is it really doesn’t have a lot of land that can be used for farming.

It has very little natural resources and energy is dependent on outside help.

So any kind of adverse weather conditions could have catastrophic effects on the population.

So their problem is they just can’t support a larger population as it is right now.

So I don’t think they’re going to overtake South Korea.

I mean, right now, the difference is about two to one.

There’s two South Koreans for every one North Korean.

That’s probably going to be about, I think, the projection.

Again, these are projections.

It’s not cast iron, not certain.

But South Korea’s population is going to contract, probably around 30 million by the turn of the century.

North Korea’s is going to also retract, but a little bit slower.

So they’ll reach rough parity by the end of the century, I think.

Again, that’s if nothing changes, which it could.

Well, a million factors and so many different considerations in what is a very complicated relationship between two countries.

But thank you so much for explaining it and putting into context everything from population and economies and cultures and terrain here and military conflicts to help us orient to this important corner of Earth and understand it better.

So thank you so much for your time.

Of course.

Thank you.

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