Where have all the Korean babies gone?

How realism on IQ can boost fertility rates and save civilisation

The Korean drama SKY Castle follows the lives of four of Seoul’s ultra-wealthy housewives, all of whom want to secure a place for their children at Seoul National University’s medical school by any means possible, and at any cost. (‘SKY’ is an acronym for the three most prestigious universities in Korea: Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei.) After a slow start, it would become the highest rated drama in Korean cable history. Female lead Han Seo-jin (Yum Jung-ah) hires Kim Joo-young (Kim Seo-hyung), an ‘academic coordinator’ with a ‘one-hundred percent success rate’, despite nagging doubts that Kim’s bizarre, psychologically-driven methods may have had something to do with the suicide of her friend Myung-joo after the unexplained disappearance of her son – who Kim previously tutored – soon after he was admitted to SNU.

Who would want to raise children in such a hothouse? Not many: in 2023, South Korea’s total fertility rate (TFR) fell to 0.78, breaking its own previous record low – a low that itself had no real precedent anywhere across the globe – from the previous year.

With such low rates, who is it who does still have children in Korea? That’s a difficult question. Participation rates in tertiary education are extremely high in South Korea among both men and women (over 70 percent), and anti-feminists will be quick to observe the apparent connection between the rapid increase in tertiary education participation rates for women and the rapid fall in South Korea’s TFR. Moreover, unlike in Japan, students at elite universities are split roughly evenly between men and women. Yet the TFR of women with only a high school diploma or less is also pathetically low, and research published in the Korean social science journal Health and Welfare Issue Focus in 2020 found that by 2017, TFR had almost totally converged between the two groups – 1.08 for those without a degree, and 1.07 for those with a degree. The equivalent in 1997 was 1.75 and 1.34 respectively, demonstrating that fertility has in fact fallen considerably more quickly for less educated women, despite them now representing a more select group than before. Also concerning is the partial convergence between the TFR of women in work (0.50 in 1997, 0.71 in 2017) and women not in work (2.49 in 1997, 1.50 in 2017). This suggests that although efforts to improve maternity leave and related benefits for working mothers may have paid some dividends to the Korean fertility rate, they have not been nearly enough to offset the factors pushing down fertility in general, among both women in and out of work.

It will still be a few decades until South Korea’s catastrophically low TFR truly begins to bite. Though the cohort born from the 1990s to the early 2000s is small, which will cause inevitable fiscal strain, it is not yet so small that the situation is totally unmanageable. As some Korean observers have argued, the point of no return will probably be if there is no rebound in fertility as this cohort enters their mid-thirties, as this will almost inevitably produce a vicious cycle of smaller and smaller cohorts themselves producing a new cohort far smaller than their own. Such a rebound, however, seems very unlikely. Long-term population projections are by nature highly speculative, but Korea’s national statistics agency (generally inclined to optimism) predicted that the Korean population will nearly halve by 2100.

South Korea’s fertility troubles, while extreme, are not at all atypical in developed East Asia. Japan at this point has a relatively high TFR of 1.34, though many decades of sub-replacement birth rates mean that the extent of the economic damage of this almost unprecedented demographic experiment will be able to be surveyed there first. The Taiwanese TFR is 1.22; the Singaporean 1.10; Hong Kong’s is 0.87. China’s official (pre-COVID) TFR was 1.70 in 2020, but most independent researchers – extrapolating from a variety of other statistics such as the number of childhood vaccinations administered and the popularity of various internet search terms relating to pregnancy and childcare – believe this claim to be entirely implausible, estimating the true Chinese TFR to be around 1.3 in 2020, and hovering around 1.0 in many of China’s wealthiest provinces.

In fact, what we may be seeing is a global fertility bust centred around what we might call ‘striver societies’, almost regardless of their level of economic development, and only somewhat weakly connected to the advance of ‘feminism’. For instance, despite still very much being (in polite parlance) a ‘developing country’, and hardly a feminist paradise, India’s overall TFR is just 2.0, below the replacement rate (2.1), and it is notable that the areas of the country with higher fertility rates are widely known for being extremely backward (e.g., Bihar and Uttar Pradesh). Some other poor countries with below replacement level fertility rates include Bangladesh (1.93), Iran (1.56) – the ‘based’ mullahs apparently not helping out much there – and Thailand (1.01). By contrast, most European societies (especially pre-COVID) have somewhat higher fertility rates – relative, that is, to their level of economic development – and this is true even when ignoring the effect of (usually higher) immigrant fertility. Naturally, countries that most fully combine the big three – striverism, consumerism, and feminism – will see the lowest fertility rates of all.

Consumerism and feminism are familiar to most, but what do we mean by ‘striverism’? In essence, the ruling ideology of ‘striver societies’ – ‘striverism’ – is the perverse marriage of the meritocratic ideal, however imperfectly implemented, with a deeply environmentalist understanding of the world that is partly mere delusion, and partly directly (and increasingly) encouraged and rewarded by the institutional structures of society. While almost all developed societies share some of these attributes to a greater or lesser extent, they are currently more pronounced in East Asia – and among Asian immigrants in the West – than in Europe, which is a region that, despite the taboo on openly discussing the idea of hereditable (and largely immutable) intelligence, has quietly remained closer to the original meritocratic ideal that it pioneered.

Not all of the Anglo-American meritocrats of the early to mid-twentieth century were intelligence testers, but the majority were; and the vast majority of these intelligence testers were also ‘eugenicists’, i.e., those who believed that intelligence was largely immutable from birth and highly heritable – e.g., Ronald Fisher, Cyril Burt, and Hans Eysenck.

Striverism, by contrast, is a populist pseudo-meritocratic ideology that, while intellectually parasitic on its predecessors, in many ways places itself directly at odds with this older (and deeply biological) idea of meritocracy, in particular through its dogmatic environmentalism, and through its undeniable moral disdain for those who are seen to ‘fail’. The strivers, despite their lack of scientific credibility, eventually outcompeted the intelligence testers in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ for much the same reason that the environmentalists outcompeted biological essentialists more generally: striverism is usually (wrongly) thought a more optimistic ideology, with much space to accommodate the self-improving drive within much popular culture – the bestselling self-help book, the #grindset of the temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Such an ideology is perhaps most attractive of all to first-generation immigrants who have often found themselves on a significantly lower rung in their new society and chosen to foist the crushing burden of their impossible hopes and dreams on their children.

What sort of behaviours does such a worldview tend to promote? Putting all your eggs into one basket: ploughing enormous amounts of resources into just one or (at most) two children – both in terms of money and, crucially (for the wealthy), time. For parents, ‘failure’ is ultimately avoidable, so long as one puts in enough effort. Better to have a single doctor in the family rather than settling for one successful small businessman and two mere peasants. In the West, it remains something of a status symbol for the very wealthy to have four or more children: think of that family with a big house in Dulwich who somehow manage to send all five of their children to an expensive private day school and still go on their yearly ski trips. This seems to be much less true in a country like South Korea, where you might appear to be somehow negligent, almost regardless of how much money you have to spend: the TFR of the ultra-wealthy residents of the fictional SKY Castle is a measly 1.6 (and even this is probably too high).

In Korea, it is considered a societal virtue that even the rich, beautiful, and intelligent must in effect torture their own children by forcing them into tedious rote learning for ten hours a day. No shortcuts are to be allowed. It would be almost unseemly for someone to succeed without being seen to have ‘earned’ it through their own hard – very, very hard – work. Strivers legitimate inequality rather differently to meritocrats: rewards, in an ideal world, should be mostly equal to effort rather than equal to talent (and in particular innate talent).

This is despite the fact that it is still much more acceptable in East Asia than in the West to talk openly of someone having ‘good genes’, including for intelligence. In SKY Castle, protagonist Han Seo-jin (Yum Jung-ah), in fact the daughter of a drunkard who sells blood and tripe, goes to enormous lengths in lying to her children about her true parentage for this essentially biological reason – because she did not want her children to lose confidence in themselves due to apparently lacking propitious genes for schoolwork. Law professor Cha Min-hyeok (Kim Byung-chul) explains to his wife that their twin sons (unlike their older daughter) lack ‘good genes’, and thus need to be disciplined severely. And does this biological understanding of intelligence also partly explain why the show eventually chooses to reveal that the father of high-achieving Kim Hye-na (Kim Bo-ra), who is raised by a single mother, is in fact a doctor who got the highest marks in the country in his college entrance exam? Bizarrely, however, this openly biological understanding of intelligence does not seem to alter behaviour in any real way: people are content continue trying to skim off every last drop of natural, biological talent by throwing the kitchen sink at the environmental side. This is even more true in Singapore. The open endorsement of eugenics by the country’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, has given much protection to dissident scholars, yet such ideas have had very little impact on the country’s educational culture.

In the West, the opposite situation prevails: it is more or less taboo to discuss hereditarian ideas in polite society, but in practice many people behave as if hereditarianism, or at the very least some kind of more or less immutable intelligence – even if this immutable intelligence is often believed to be basically ‘random’ and apparently unrelated to biological parentage – is true. In the second episode of the Norwegian television series Hjernevask (Brainwash), presenter Harald Eia visits a Norwegian school and asks the children which one of their classmates was the ‘best’ in the class. After picking out one girl, who upon questioning reveals that she was born to an economist and a teacher, another girl quickly volunteers – unprompted – that (presumably unlike her classmate) she hadn’t ‘inherited the best genes for schoolwork’, but insists that she did not ‘resent’ her parents for this. She seemed to accept the fact that her natural abilities were rather limited, and could not realistically be overcome by ‘hard work’, in stark contrast to most East Asians.

Those who have been socialised into the norms of polite English society would probably not speak in such a blunt manner, fearing accusations of ‘classism’, but would likely not disagree with this assessment in private. And every upper-middle class family in Britain must have a story of the hapless son of wealthy acquaintances who, despite the parents pulling out all the stops, was simply unable to overcome his (biologically) workaday intellect. An expensive private school, some tutoring on the side, a ‘dyslexia’ diagnosis for extra time, A-Level retakes at the dreaded ‘crammer’, a tactical (re)application to an unpopular joint honours course at a second-rate Russell Group university – all this, and he still found himself forced into the humiliation of studying ‘business’ at a nameless former polytechnic.

While this intuitive understanding of intelligence in the West can sometimes combine with modern pieties to create amusing environmentalist delusions, such as the frequent claim among the well-to-do that the number of books in a house is somehow causally related to a child’s intelligence, it is clear that people in the West at least to a certain extent behave as if many of the central claims of modern intelligence researchers are actually true without ever having to be told of them: some children are able; other children are not, and that’s just life. Although parents naturally feel somewhat responsible for the life outcomes of their children, this sense of responsibility is rather limited compared to what it is in East Asia.

Two of our family friends, a Korean couple, were always surprised that at school, a sizeable proportion of their teenage daughter’s class in New Malden did not try very hard or indeed care very much at all about their grades, noting that in Korea the proportion would have been far smaller even in small towns, and close to zero in any of the more fashionable areas of a city like Seoul. Parents, who on the whole had high – often unrealistically high – expectations of their children, would simply not allow their children to behave this way.

Their child, I’m sure, was working hard, as is to be expected of the offspring of recent Asian immigrants in the West. Such a strategy will likely pay some dividends, given the relatively low g-loading of GCSEs and A Levels. Their daughter would probably be more likely than her peers to attend an elite university and get a respectable job. However, while beneficial to individuals, such a strategy becoming overly prevalent within society at large is only destructive: no more than a vicious rat race of spiralling expenditures of money – and time – on an education dedicated solely towards boosting exam scores, gradually shutting out extra-curricular activities and more holistic forms of education that refuse to merely ‘teach to the test’. ‘White flight’ from heavily Asian suburbs in California should therefore be presented in a less negative light than it has been thus far: white parents are mainly fleeing from an educational culture that they (rightly) view as obnoxious, not because their children are ‘inferior’ to their Asian competitors.

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South Korea demonstrates that striverism is an ideology that is incapable of reproducing itself. British meritocrats should therefore urgently push to increase the g-loading of tests so that the relentless ‘hard work’ of ambitious second-generation immigrants and thoroughly irksome highlighter girls is not inappropriately rewarded over raw biological talent. This will greatly reduce the efficacy of many of the destructive behaviours described above, and eventually will probably also reduce their prevalence. Strivers, by contrast, will make the opposite choice to meritocrats, as they choose to legitimate inequality not through tests that reveal innate talent, but rather by salvation by ‘Effort Alone’. There were probably a number of reasons for the removal of the highly g-loaded verbal analogies questions from the verbal section of American SAT, but it is clear that extremely high-scoring Asian groups were more than happy with this decision. This can partly be explained by relative Asian weakness in the verbal section (in part due to ESL test-takers), but it can also be explained by the fact that this section more or less cannot be trained, and thus is highly unappealing to those with an East Asian educational mindset.

Increasing the g-loading of tests is therefore not merely good practice – i.e., a better way of finding and rewarding genuine talent; both more fair and more efficient – but is actually required for our country to demographically maintain itself, and in the process remove one of the ideological planks that underpins the cult of mass migration. Environmentalism is not just stupid, but a civilisational threat in the near-term.

Environmentalism also serves to encourage some of the most noxious recent developments in British educational culture, such as the spread of Catherine Birbalsingh’s tyrannical disciplinarianism, where children are given detentions for looking at the clock in class or forgetting their ruler, all towards the achieving the great end of increasing a would-be roadman’s GCSE Maths grade from a 3 to a 4 – petty, and antithetical to British tradition.

South Korea is also a reminder that we should also consider whether forms of education spending more directly relevant to Britain might also be supressing fertility rates. It seems likely that private schools push down upper-middle class fertility in Britain: indeed, I know a number of families who had one less child just so they could afford it. Grammar schools are often presented as offering ‘private education for free’ to middle class parents – and this, for some reason, is a Bad Thing. Obviously, we at Pimlico Journal think otherwise: allowing those in society who we most want to have children to worry less about education is Good, and will undoubtedly pay Britain dividends in the long-run.