Honda Uni-Cub brings us one step roll closer to Wall-E's world

Wall-E, in case you haven't seen it, is a brilliant film of the dystopian future genre in which a rag-tag band of humans find themselves fleeing chaos in a post-apocalyptic world in which anthropomorphic computers and robots are hell-bent on their destruction and/or preventing their return to Earth.

If you have seen Wall-E, you're probably wondering what I was on when I watched it.

Yeah, yeah, it's a kids' film, with an i-Robot-you love story to boot, but it really is about a dystopian future, a post-apocalyptic world filled with destruction, loads and loads of chaos, and anthropomorphic computers and robots, some of which are preventing humankind's return to Earth. And one of them really does seem to be trying to kill the captain (or at least incapacitate him).

But the joke's on him: morbid obesity would have done the captain in soon anyway.

And that brings me to my point (yes, I do have one). Honda recently unveiled its answer to the Segway (as if we needed one): a glorified electronic unicycle called the Uni-Cub. They might as well have called it the Uni-Club, because it will figuratively club you to death.

You're probably wondering what I am on now, but bear with me, please. When the Segway was first released, it was hailed for the supposed community-altering aspects it would bring. Instead of jumping in their cars, people would hop on their Segways and zippily go places that were a little too far to walk but too close for the guilt-ridden to drive (yes, there are a few of us).

The idea was that, with more and more people milling about at street level, this would lead to shops, cafés, neighborhood eateries, food kiosks, etc., sprouting like weeds and American cities would become like Seoul, Tōkyō, London, Paris, Roma, Hong Kong, Pusan, Ōsaka, Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, Cairo, Athens, Brussels, Stockholm, Milano, Firenze, Marseilles, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, or just about every other city in the entire world.

Alas, this utopian future world never materialized. The Segway instead resulted in three major trends: Waikiki tourists getting plowed into by uncaring Honolulu motorists, national park rangers looking utterly ridiculous, and two entire generations conditioned to misspell the perfectly usable word segue.

The Segway was too expensive, too bulky, and it caused presidents to fall on their face. But the Honda Uni-Cub aims to resolve at least one of those issues, since it can even be used indoors. Simply put, you can, if you so desired, never walk anywhere.

And that brings us back to Wall-E's world.

This is technology gone horribly wrong. What is the difference between the top photo and this one just above? Holographic computer screens and about 50 kilos per person.

This is the part of the essay where my public health background kicks in: God made us bipedal for a reason. Walking provides us with salubrious functionality that goes way beyond getting from Point A to Point B. It keeps our blood pumping, it provides just enough stress on our skeleton that it encourages healthy bone replacement, and it helps regulate blood sugar. I run three miles a day, but if you can't run or jog then you should walk.

Even just a walk around the block with your dog, your s.o., and/or your kids or parents would do wonders for your health and longevity that you wouldn't get if you were mostly stationary and sedentary. Those of us in public health simply cannot emphasize that enough (seriously, we can't stop, it's like a genetic flaw or something).

And that leads me to what should by now be an obvious conclusion: Honda's Uni-Cub is part of a plot by the Japanese government to once and for all solve its demographic crisis. If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look a the charts on this post (a very high-traffic post for this blog, and one of only two in this blog's top ten that don't include scantily clad women). Japan's "population pyramid" is an inverted pyramid, and South Korea is catching up on this trend.

No economist has yet figured out how to maintain high standards of living with a graying population characteristic of an inverted pyramid like this.

Simply put, what had long been considered a "normal" population distribution was a pyramid like the one at right, where it had a large base of young people and it tapered off at the top where all the old people (i.e., retirees) would be. The idea being that those toward the bottom would work and toil (much like the people who built the actual pyramids) and the fruits of their labor would be enough to support the elderly in their old age, as well as the base (which is made up of children who, thanks to Charles Dickens, can no longer be put to work legally).

But years of declining birth rates have meant loads of old people and not enough young workers. We used to have twenty workers per retiree, and soon we'll have just around two because the top is growing faster than future workers are being replaced and the elderly are living to 100 instead of dying a year or so after retirement due to smoking-related illness, preventable infections, public safety problems, or nagging.


Replacement birth rate is about 2.1 children per adult woman (2.0 to replace the woman and the man who impregnated her, presumably her husband or long-term boyfriend, and 0.1 to replace those who die before reproducing or never marry). But countries like South Korea, for example, implemented birth control programs so successful that its birth rate plummeted from something like seven children per woman (not an exaggeration even though it sounds like one) to just 1.2. That's two people being replaced by 1.2 offspring. That is the very definition of a dying society and the reason why Korea is now embracing immigration and its own brand of "multiculturalism" (다문화주의).

The Japanese have the same problem as Korea, but have chosen (so far) to eschew immigration in favor of technological solutions. And by that, I mean robots. Robots will be trained programmed to take care of the elderly and do all the tedious tasks that now require a fully human health care worker. But denial is, like the aforementioned pyramid, a river in Egypt, and this technological fix can only go part of the way.

Ostensibly, Honda's Uni-Cub will be part of this effort to handle the elderly like glazed donuts on the conveyor belt at Krispy Kreme, but I'm pretty sure that they were really designed as part of some darker final robotic solution (my ominous point from several paragraphs up, in case you were wondering just where the hel1 this tangent was going).

Gin-san and Kin-san:
Public Enemy #1

It's pretty clear: Honda's Uni-Cub is part of the government's effort to trim the top of the inverted pyramid by inducing obesity in the Japanese population. Start 'em young... er, youngerish. Give 'em a Uni-Cub at the age of, say fifty, and by the time they reach seventy or so, when their government pensions are kicking in, about half of them will be just like the scooter-lounging humanity in Wall-E. And that means they will kick off at seventy-five instead of ninety-five, thus relieving pressure on the non-retired population.

You think I'm kidding, but I'm deadly serious.

View Honda's propaganda video, if you dare:



...

Moonsoo season

The governor of Kyŏnggi-do Province (Gyeonggi) is saying the biggest threat to South Korea is not North Korea or China: it's the lack of new South Koreans that will become economic producers later on.

From Bloomberg:

The biggest threat to South Korea’s economic health isn’t from North Korean aggression or Chinese competition, according to Kim Moon-Soo, governor of the country’s largest province and a potential presidential candidate. It’s from the country’s low birthrate.

South Korea will face “a very big obstacle to our growth” unless families have more babies, Gyeonggi Governor Kim said in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. The government needs to be “more active” in providing child care and lowering families’ education cost, he said.

Women with careers, who tend “not to marry and not to have children,” have added to this “difficult” issue, said Kim, the third-most-favored candidate from the ruling Grand National Party for next presidential election, according to a Realmeter poll this month. Gyeonggi province has introduced incentives for encouraging government employees to have more children, Kim said.

South Korea’s fertility rate was 1.21 per woman in the last five years -- the fourth-lowest in the world, according to United Nations data.

Yup. It's not the fault of corporations that don't make it easier for college-educated women to work and raise children. It's not the fault of SoKo husbands who, on average, do very little housework. It's not the fault of real estate speculators who make home-buying so ridiculously expensive that a married couple needs two incomes just so they can move away from mom-and-dad (or mom-in-law).

Nope, it's the fault of those selfish career-minded women. I'm sure Governor Kim will do just fine in next year's presidential race.

If we can't birth new Japanese, we'll just make 'em out of holograms

At least, that's the message I'm getting from this:

Pop princess Hatsune Miku is storming the music scene.

With her long cerulean pigtails and her part-schoolgirl, part-spy outfit, she’s easy on the eyes. Yes, her voice sounds like it might have gone through a little –- OK, a lot –- of studio magic. Legions of screaming fans and the requisite fan sites? She’s got 'em.

And, like many of her hot young singer peers, Miku is extremely, proudly fake. Like, 3-D hologram fake.

Miku is a singing, digital avatar created by Crypton Future Media that customers can purchase and then program to perform any song on a computer. ...

A few months ago, a 3-D projection of Miku pranced around several stadium stages as part of a concert tour, where capacity crowds waved their glow sticks and sang along. Here's the starlet performing a jingle titled, appropriately, "World Is Mine."

The result is here:



Now if only we can get a few million Mikus to deliver pizzas, work in grocery stores, care for elderly, work fishing boats, etc., etc.

How many millions of overseas ROK nationals in the Korean diaspora?

The Korea Herald article about reduced emigration from Korea also addressed another topic: the millions of SoKos who live outside of South Korea. It's a rarely touched upon topic, but it's different enough from the original news item that I thought it deserved its own focus. I'm reprinting the entire section so that no data is lost:

Meanwhile, separate government data showed among 2.87 million South Korean nationals living abroad, up to 2.29 million will be eligible to vote in the parliamentary elections scheduled to be held in 2012. The number represents more than 6 percent of the nation’s 37.8 million eligible voters.

The election law was revised in February last year to grant suffrage Korean residents overseas, including some 1.22 million people with a permanent resident status in countries such as the U.S. and Japan. Under the revision, some of them cast their ballots for the first time in the parliamentary by-elections held on April 9 in 2009.

The measure could wield strong influence in the upcoming elections, especially considering the fact that some of the election results depended on a narrow margin of no more than hundreds of thousands of votes.

Up to 73 percent, or 2.1 million overseas Koreans, are living in the U.S., Japan and China, with more than 1.65 million staying temporarily for work or studying purposes, according to the National Election Commission.

The figures, however, could only be temporary as many people are hesitant to register as living aboard or report acquiring a permanent resident status or citizenship in another country, the election watchdog said.

In 2007 the top court here ruled unconstitutional the law that restricted the voting rights of overseas Koreans, prompting moves to grasp the exact number of Korean nationals living abroad and grant them suffrage. The National Assembly approved of the bill calling for such rights last year.

So that's an estimate of nearly three million ROK nationals living abroad. When I helped out with overseas voter registration in Seoul, we were given estimates of six or seven million US citizens living abroad, a number equal to an average state. Given that the US with twice the number of citizens abroad but has six times South Korea's population, that means a South Korean is nearly three times more likely than an American to live outside his/her country.

For decades, if they were to obtain another country's citizenship, they were often stripped of their ROK nationality. Imagine not being able to get citizenship in the United States, for example, lest you be forced to sell your family land back in Kyŏngsang-namdo. They could also lose many of their rights as ROK nationals if they merely obtained permanent residence status in another country (e.g., a US green card).

But lately, Seoul has been reconsidering and changing a lot of these policies, since such draconian measures encourage shadow citizenship, economically and legally hobble ROK nationals who go back and forth from South Korea to another country of residence, and dampen ethnic Korean participation in the electoral process abroad (often with undesirable effects).

For example, South Korea is trying to find a way for ROK nationals to have dual citizenship in a way that doesn't permit evasion of mandatory military service. Spouses of foreign citizens whose countries require their ROK bride or husband to get a green card (or equivalent) if they wish to visit the US no longer see their rights as ROK nationals automatically eroded.

And of course, green card-type residency for foreign nationals married to South Korean husbands and especially wives are now the norm, while paths to residency and ROK citizenship have been opened up to many others. And the thing which has been the biggest boon for me has been the ability to own real estate despite being a foreign national, which was also designed to allow former ROK citizens to keep their land if they obtain citizenship elsewhere.

All of this adds up to a situation where the large number of ROK nationals can more easily make their status officially known. The actual number could be far higher. And if there were four, five, or even six million ROK citizens living abroad, how many would vote in presidential, provincial, or local elections? Can they become a wild card? (Maybe it's all the more reason to institute a Peruvian-style automatic runoff in elections where no candidate has gotten a real majority instead of allowing them to win with a mere plurality.)

Emigration from South Korea drops below 1000

I guess when population growth drops to barely one kid per couple, it's a good thing for there to be fewer and fewer out-going emigrants.

From the Korea Herald:

On the back of the lingering global economic downturn and comparatively brighter circumstances at home, no more than 900 South Koreans are anticipated to move out of the country by the end of this year, falling below the 1,000-mark for the first time in a decade, the Foreign Ministry said.

According to the figures released for the annual parliamentary audit and inspection, a total of 694 South Koreans have moved abroad as of September, with an average of 77 people registering overseas per month.

This is the sharpest decrease of emigrants since 2000 when up to 15,307 moved abroad. The number of emigrants has been dropping continuously sine then, with 9,509 leaving the country in 2003, 8,277 in 2005, 4,127 in 2007 and 1,153 last year, the ministry said.

I'm not sure how the audit arrived at what constitutes an emigrant, but I would submit that many ROK nationals are essentially part-time or temporary emigrants. That is, they go abroad for long periods of time to live, study, work, and even start families, with fuzzily indefinite return dates. Non-returners may not end up in those government stats. For example, South Korean citizens make up an enormous portion of foreign students in the US and Canada; how many of them never end up returning to South Korea to take up residence again?

Still, if the criteria to be considered an emigrant has remained constant over the past decade or so, it is telling that there were over fifteen thousand fitting that definition in 2000 but fewer than one thousand this year. A regularly improving standard of living may be a huge factor, but also at play, I believe, is a harsher impression about what's out there in places like the United States: higher crime, considerably less job opportunity, lack of social support services like guaranteed health insurance, loss of social capital, etc.

Meanwhile, the one thing that many South Koreans most wish to take advantage of in the US — a more open educational experience at the primary and secondary level and a better quality educational experience at some of the universities — can still be had without officially emigrating. Think of the kirŏgi families (wild goose families) where the wife goes abroad with the kids, or the college-age son or daughter who decides that, say, the University of California is a better fit than a second- or third-tier college in Korea.

Come to think of it, though, maybe we should reconsider the kirŏgi family concept.

Finally, while the reduction of emigrants may seem good for efforts to recover the birth rate, if a lower number of permanent emigrants is compensated by an increase in part-time or temporary emigrants, it may be a wash for the birth rate. Those who go abroad to study may end up delaying marriage and/or reducing the overall number of kids they have upon their return, making their numbers no better than if they had left.

We should also note that there are returning emigrants that officially number in the thousands — more than the number leaving. The Korea Times article on this same news item puts the number of returning ROK nationals at 4301 last year and 3205 as of the end of September this year. How many of these are bringing back future workers and how many of them are simply going to be cashing pension checks?

In other words, it's still a demographer's and economist's nightmare.

Och'ŏnmanmyŏng

The population of the Republic of Korea (the southern, friendly one) has officially crossed the fifty million mark. It was a baby girl born on September 13. Interestingly, the 49,999,999th ROK resident was a baby born to a Vietnamese woman from Kyŏnggi-do Province.

Still, with so many couples have just one baby or none, we are haunted by the same inverted population pyramid that has been plaguing Japan. 

Really, there needs to be some sort of campaign for couples to get to baby making. We can call it "ROK On!" and it should involve romantic music and daycare vouchers.

It's a man's woman's world

Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal reported that young women in America's urban centers are earning more than their male counterparts:

In 2008, single, childless women between ages 22 and 30 were earning more than their male counterparts in most U.S. cities, with incomes that were 8% greater on average, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data released Wednesday by Reach Advisors, a consumer-research firm in Slingerlands, N.Y.

The trend was first identified several years ago in the country's biggest cities, but has broadened out to smaller locales and across more industries. Beyond major cities such as San Francisco and New York, the income imbalance is pronounced in blue-collar hubs and the fast-growing metro areas that have large immigrant populations.

The greatest disparity is in Atlanta, where young, childless women were paid 121% the level of their male counterparts, according to Reach Advisors.

These women have gotten a leg up for several reasons. They are more likely than men to attend college, raising their earning potential.

Between 2006 and 2008, 32.7% of women between 25 and 34 had a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 25.8% of men, according to the Census.

And men have been disproportionately hit by heavy job losses in blue-collar industries.

This trend continues beyond the age of thirty, after which traditional roles of wifehood and motherhood, along with other social factors, start to take huge bites out of earnings:

While these particular women earn more than their male peers, women on the whole haven't reached equal status in any particular job or education level. For instance, women with a bachelor's degree had median earnings of $39,571 between 2006 and 2008, compared with $59,079 for men at the same education level, according to the Census.

And I'm guessing it will be quite some time before young women in South Korea (or neighboring Japan) enjoy similar gains.

Ultrasound and abortion:America and Korea and their opposite cases

Exhibit #437 that the US and South Korea are (often) each other's Bizarro World. In the New York Times today we have an article on how ultrasound is being used in a weapon in the battle for abortion:

The technician told Laura she was at 11 weeks. “Do you want to see your ultrasound?” she asked. “I’d rather not,” Laura answered promptly.

Laura, who asked that her last name not be used, had come to the New Woman All Women Health Care clinic in Birmingham with her mind set on having an abortion. And she felt that seeing the image of her bean-size fetus would only unleash her already hormonal emotions, without changing her mind.

“It just would have added to the pain of what is already a difficult decision,” she said later.

Over the last decade, ultrasound has quietly become a new front in the grinding state-by-state battle over abortion. With backing from anti-abortion groups, which argue that sonograms can help persuade women to preserve pregnancies, 20 states have enacted laws that encourage or require the use of ultrasound.

Alabama is one of three states, along with Louisiana and Mississippi, that require abortion providers to conduct an ultrasound and offer women a chance to peer inside the womb.

Late last month, Oklahoma went a step further. Overriding a veto by Gov. Brad Henry, a Democrat, the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted a law mandating that women be presented with an ultrasound image and with a detailed oral description of the embryo or fetus.

Contrast that with South Korea, where abuse of the ultrasound procedure and other sex-determining technologies were seen as causing a higher abortion rate (and in a country where such rampant pregnancy termination is nominally illegal, allowing it to be used as a key tool in reducing the fertility rate). Abortions were  not uncommon when would-be parents who learn of their fetus's sex might be more apt to abort the pregnancy if it's not the sex they wanted. This was usually son-preferring families aborting female fetuses, which led to a disproportionate gender ratio.

Of course, ultrasounds are an important part of maintaining the health of the mother and the fetus, so the solution was to outlaw the reporting of the fetus's sex to the prospective parents (and for the life of me, I'm having trouble finding a link... even if I include "Korea" in the search parameters, I end up with stories about China or India). [Edit: Oh, here's one from the WHO!]

Like many laws on the books in Korea, however, the enforcement of this legislation was lax. Doctors and parents got around it by thinly veiled statements intended to reveal the information indirectly: "Oh, looks like you're going to be decorating your baby room in blue," "Ah, your kid will make a fine soccer player some day," or even, "I think your in-laws will be very pleased." Silence from the doctor was also a form of code.

Of course, growing opportunities for women, as well as their expanding value in a society where marriage-age females are scarcer and scarcer, have meant that there are fewer and fewer families who would abort a child simply over its sex, but they're still out there. Such sex-determinant abortions may in fact have been only a small portion of overall pregnancies and even overall abortions, but they were enough to cause a gender imbalance that South Korean society will be paying for for sometime.

Korea demography reader (March 24, 2010 edition)

• About 310,000 couples got married in 2009, down from 328,000 the year before and 344,000 in 2007.

• The Hyundai Economic Research Institute says that the ratio of economically-active population aged between fifteen and sixty-four to total population in North Korea will likely surpass that of South Korea in 2020, a private research showed Sunday, which could indicate a sign of economic slowdown in the South.

• The Supreme Court says some 725,000 South Koreans legally changed their name over the past decade. I know several people who have done this. Among the reasons are seeking a new life after a divorce, or seeking better "luck" by changing from some unfortunate name to something better. (Story also here.)
• South Korea passes a "highly significant milestone" with the country's first-ever refugee to be naturalized.

Korea demography reader (March 21, 2010 edition)

• The Ministry of Gender Equality has changed its name to Ministry of Gender Equality and Family after taking over duties of after taking over government policy on family, youth, childcare, and multicultural family affairs from the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

• The number of jobless female college graduates has hit a record high. The portion of unemployed women with college diplomas is a whopping forty percent.

• Meanwhile, the number of "regular workers" (those on contract for full-time work of at least one year) hit a record high of 9.7 million, accounting for 60% of the work force, while the numbers of day workers and the self-employed fell.

• South Korea is the chintziest, cheapest, and most miserly country in the OECD when it comes to college scholarships. Of course, one reason may be that ROK college students have lucrative kwa•oé (과외, private teaching) to use for relatively low-cost tuition and they tend to live at home anyway.

• A thirty-eight-year-old man from Ethiopia has become the first refugee to be naturalized as a Korean citizen. 

Korea demography reader (March 18, 2010 edition)

• A study by Job Korea has found that 80 percent of working women delay childbirth, a major piece of South Korea's low-fertility puzzle.

• A survey of 73,000 "multicultural" families reveals that foreign-born wives are on average ten years younger than their Korea-born husbands, while foreign-born husbands are only 1.3 years older than their Korea-born wives. Some 38 percent of them are in families earning between 1 and 2 million won per month, and 36 percent of foreign-born wives have not graduated from high school. The Joongang Daily also dealt with the report.

• The National Human Rights Commission has written a complaint on behalf of the approximately five thousand high school girls who are forced to leave school upon getting pregnant. A related story is in the Joongang Daily.

• The Korea Times has an article on Jeon Jaehee [전재희, chŏn chaehi] the Minister of Health and Welfare who is tasked with improving the nation's basement-level fertility rate. 

Korea demography reader (March 12, 2010 edition)

• South Korea may have reversed the "missing women" phenomenon.
• The OECD says rich nations must work to close the gender pay gap, especially in South Korea and Japan, where the gap is widest. 
• Educators are pushing to have Chinese characters brought back as an elementary school elective, which point the way to it returning as a compulsory subject. 
• Minority newborns will become the majority in the US this year (if you count them all together). Another way to look at this is that every newborn will be a minority.
• South Korean elderly are struggling to find jobs to survive.
• The legal status of women in South Korea is reportedly improving.
• President Lee has instructed public servants to pay more attention to the livelihood of the nation's underprivileged, saying they should be more concerned about public welfare.

Korea demography reader for March 9, 2010

• The Economist has a story on the "war on baby girls" (which it calls "gendercide"), or how technology has conspired to wipe women off the face of the Earth. It addresses how "technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies," and South Korea gets an honorable mention in this one. [HT to Wangkon by email]
• A Hannara Party lawmaker  is saying that only 47% of all immigrant children in the ROK (those who arrive after birth, not those born in South Korea to immigrants) receive formal education in South Korea due to a lack of language skills, while that number drops to 30% for high schoolers.
• One in four people around the world still believe that a woman's place is in the home.
• Meanwhile, South Korean men and women agree housework should be shared, but they don't always agree on what that exactly means.
• Females in South Korea have overtaken males in university admissions (more here). 

ROK females overtake males in university admissions; a bad sign for South Korean fertility

According to the Korea Times, 82.4% of females now enter four-year schools versus 81.6% of males:

Many women are prioritizing their career over raising a family. They even outpace their male counterparts in some professional fields, emerging as an essential part of the nation's highly-educated and sophisticated labor force.

Reflecting women's growing role in Korean society, a larger portion of female high school students went on to universities than their male counterparts last year for the first time in history, Statistics Korea said Sunday.

It said 82.4 percent of female high-school students entered universities in 2010, higher than the 81.6 percent for males. It was the first time the ratio was in the females' favor since the statistical office began compiling data.

In 1990, only 32.4 percent of young women moved on to university, but the ratio has continued on an upward curve over the past two decades, reaching as high as 83.5 percent in 2008.

There is one glaring problem there that a lot of policy makers don't address: Why do we make it so advantageous for (financially and socially) for people— male or female — to go to four-year schools (or at least, we make it so ostracizing if they don't)?

Going to a four-year university instead of a two-year college requires, on average, more than the two years' difference because of lost time spent trying to get into the four-year school (which causes delays of one or two or more years for many students). And that doesn't include the parents' wages spent on getting an edge on the entrance exam.

All this leads to downward pressures on fertility, for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that it makes raising second or later children prohibitively expensive, such that many families opt for just one (and this causes the cycle to repeat itself, because then they feel a need to invest everything in that one child getting into a top-ranked school).

But this worship of four-year schools also leads to later ages for graduation, which cuts into prime fertility ages. Despite the best planning of families to the contrary, when women get married earlier, they are in a position to have more babies; this is simple demographic math. This doesn't mean we should have people get hitched at eighteen, but when you have people getting married at thirty-one instead of twenty-eight, or twenty-nine instead of twenty-six, they produce less children, whether that's the plan or not.

The government should look for ways to encourage the hiring of two-year college graduates with good pay in meaningful work — and let's face it, they often know more about real work than their four-year counterparts — while at the same time not taking away too many opportunities for today's crop of four-year graduates. Right now, the average wage-seeker has it all backwards if you're trying to encourage a higher birth rate: when they can't find good jobs they seek more education, not less.

At the same time, we might want to find ways to boost military manpower with more career soldiers so that the mandatory conscription system can eventually be eliminated. The two-year stint (eventually to be eighteen months) forces people to put life plans on hold in a way that is detrimental to efforts to produce larger families. Furthermore, career soldiers can get married and have kids, unlike their conscripted counterparts.

It's time to think out of the box.

Korea demography reader for week ending March 6, 2010

• Singles make up 20% of all households in South Korea.
• The population of NEETs (for "not in employment, education, or training," a Japanese neologism) reaches 400,000 in South Korea. 
• The Joongang Daily has a feature on how "multicultural children" (usually referring to families where one parent is Korean and the other is not) may be behind other kids in language skills. 
• Suicides among seniors are on the increase.

2010 Japanese population pyramid and 2010 South Korean population pyramid

Japanese and South Koreans may not be pregnant with babies, but their countries' population pyramids (which don't look like pyramids much at all) are pregnant with subtext. More to come.

Source: US Census Bureau International Database

Japan's dangerously fertility rate, in a nutshell

Though an extreme case, this represents a trend that has demographers, sociologists, economists, and government wonks quite perplexed.

Link here. Shell of a nut, indeed.

And my apologies for merely sending links, but that's the best I can do when my only access to the Interwebs is my iPhone, with which Blogspot doesn't seem to play nice.

South Koreans mansei! Long live South Koreans!

Korea is a nation of heavy smokers, heavy drinkers, reckless drivers, and traffic dodgers* but according to a report by South Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare, Korea's life expectancy will be the second-longest in the world, topped only by Japan's, by 2020.

Longevity will each 81 years in 2020, second only to Japan's 84.7 years, so say data from the United Nations. I don't know if this is accurate, but they already say that South Korean life expectancy will be around 78 years this year, behind Japan's 82.1 years and Italy's 79 years (China's is 71.4 years and and the U.S.'s is 77.5 years).

The same report warns of Korea becoming an "aged society" where a dangerously low birth rate, 1.19 children per mother in 2003, means that the average age will get older and older (Japan and Italy, which have the aforementioned long life spans, also have very low birth rates).

The CIA World Factbook, has different statistics, however. For women, it is 79.76 years, but for men it is only 72.19 years, maybe due to all the smoking, drinking, reckless driving, sleeping around, and choking on one's own vomit on a frozen street in Chongno on Friday nights. The CIA Factbook also gives the "fertility rate" as 1.26. Those 0.07 babies are important: they're paying for my social security.

Of course, if North Korea launches Korea War II, longevity could be cut in half, but we're trying to be optimistic here.

* To be fair, there are many, many, many exceptions to all four things on this list, probably constituting a majority of the people, but these are major life-shortening behaviors that come to mind.