In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone delve into the complex factors contributing to South Korea's alarmingly low fertility rates. They explore how the country's unique chaebol system, extreme meritocracy based on measurable statistics rather than efficacy, and hierarchical culture have created an environment that discourages having children. Malcolm proposes a unconventional solution that could potentially fix the problem in a single generation, but acknowledges the cultural resistance it would face. The hosts also touch on the loss of Korean culture and cuisine that will occur if the fertility crisis remains unaddressed.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] a lot of people see South Korea and North Korea as being a almost antithetical to each other. When that really isn't the case, what South Korea is a collection of North Korea's competing against each other under a capitalist the broad economic rule system.
And that's what the chiabols are And Korea is also an extremely meritocratic system, but meritocratic in regards to measurable statistics, not in regards to measurable efficacy.
And this is the core of what will cause Korea to fail as a culture and what makes it unsalvageable, . And I'll get to why, because it may seem like such a small thing you want to fix the entire Korean system, I'll tell you how you fix it.
You can fix it in one generation, Korea. Listen to me here. You freak the fuck out if you do this, but it would fix things
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! [00:01:00] We are so excited to be joining our audience today with the newest member of our family. Many people know that I worked in Korea, I lived in Korea for a year, and it was where I started caring about fertility rate issues but before I get further on that, I want to introduce our audience to an alternate country. Now, in this alternate country, they've done everything right.
In this wonderful, conservative country, same sex marriage is still illegal in the year 2024. Porn is illegal in the year 2024. Abortion was illegal until just this year. Three years ago, there's almost no immigration and total ethnic homogeny. Women are permanently underclass citizens. And for the last 20 years, the government has spent over 200 billion dollars trying to increase fertility rates.
In this one serval country, Companies will pay their citizens [00:02:00] 75k to have kids. Of course, this is a joke. The wonderful country I'm describing here is, in fact, South Korea. All of these things are true about South Korea. They have tried both the fever dream fantasies of the right and the left, and it has not worked from cash handouts to ethnic homogenous state to banning abortion, to banning pornography.
This is why I always laugh when people suggest these things. I'm like, these things were institutionalized in Korea before their fertility started to collapse and have been there throughout the entire process. And people will be like, How bad is the situation in Korea really right now? The average number, and this I'm quoting here, the average number of expected babies for a South Korean woman during her reproductive life cycle fell to a record low of 0.
72 from 0. 78 in 2022. Data from statistics on South Korea showed Wednesday. [00:03:00] And if you project this forward, South Korea is now projected to have a fertility rate of 0. 68 in 2024, and they are on track to meet that. That means that for every 100 South Koreans alive today, there will be 11. 6 grandchildren.
Not great grand children, Grandchildren for great-grandchildren, it's less than four, and this is assuming it doesn't continue to fall. And keep in mind it's falling by like it felt like 11.5% last year, like insane. And where most of the country is collated. Now in Seoul, the fertility rate's only 0.55.
That means you are shrinking the population to a quarter of its size, basically, every generation. That is insane. For every four South Koreans, there is one kid in Seoul. Now, to, if you think, oh, because I love demographers, they're always like things shift. I'm like, yeah, but you [00:04:00] can look at the trailing data.
Okay, in South Korea, only I found two statistics here. It's either only 2. 9 percent of Koreans are born out of wedlock, or only 2 percent of Koreans are born outside of marriage. This was a statistic done in 2022, so fairly recently. But the number is very low. So if you want to get a projection of the number of Koreans that are going to be born, you can look at the number of marriages that are going to form as being the Absolute upper limit to that number.
Only 27 percent of women in their 20s considered a marriage essential last year. This is a 53 percent decline from 2008 in South Korea. This was in 2023. 23%. So only 23 percent of the young population even could have a kid. That is absolutely wild when you consider that the population [00:05:00] already has 60 percent of their population over the age of 40.
And if you take that statistic and you go, okay what about that 22 billion that they gave out, right? What is that per person in South Korea? Because I decided to do a calculation, like how much of that per family, given the percent of the population that is under the age of 40. And I calculated that out to be about 28k per male female pair, assuming that everyone was getting married in that under 40 demographic.
That's an insanely
Simone Collins: high
Malcolm Collins: number. Yeah, in terms of what's being paid out. And what's another interesting thing that we are seeing, though, that is worth noting in the statistics is a rise in the acceptance of out of wedlock kids with 20 percent expressing a positive perspective on it in 2020 up from 11.
1 percent in 2020. So in half a decade, almost double the acceptance. Now it's still low, but you can see a change in perception as society is beginning to become desperate. But from what we see with
Simone Collins: numbers in [00:06:00] Sweden, for example, that acceptance doesn't necessarily correlate with higher fertility. Like fewer couples than ever are getting married.
In Sweden, more having couple or sorry, having kids while staying unmarried, but their birth rate is also going way down. So that's not even a sign of hope.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I what I want to elevate here is in the thesis of this particular video, cause it's something I was meditating on recently. What do you need to change about Korean society to actually fix their fertility crisis?
If you ask Koreans, you are going to get two broad answers, and they're both wrong. Now, generally, the first answer they're going to say is, it's just the economics. I can't afford to have kids. Which is partially right, but not in the way they mean. And what's really interesting is I saw some studies done recently on like space because people always try to work like NIMBYism, building more housing policy, right?
And what you see actually is a [00:07:00] correlation between the number of people who live around you and your fertility rate in the United States. So did you know that your average United States citizen or family that lives in a house that they are either renting or own, but like a house, not an apartment or a subdivided house is above replacement fertility.
But as soon as you get to apartments where houses are subdivided, it goes down to 1. 8 and then it continues to go down the more people live in that apartment complex. Now, this is a big problem in South Korea, where the majority of the population lives in these ultra high rises, even when they're living in rural areas.
Yeah, we've
Simone Collins: talked about this before. For example, we took a train out, literally, actually, ironically, to a baby convention. Where they sold lots of baby products. And in this town outside or city outside Korea, there was nothing around except for a couple high rises of apartments, a giant mall, and then this convention center.
So there, there weren't, spread out suburbs like you'd expect to see in the United States or
Malcolm Collins: even Europe. It was just. It's [00:08:00] very weird to go along the Korean countryside as you'll like, it's farms, and then a collection of three skyscrapers clustered next to each other.
Simone Collins: There are obviously exceptions for this. We did visit some towns outside Seoul that had houses, but they were small. They were like, yeah, they were little villages. Yes, this is not where a huge swath of people are living for our understanding.
Malcolm Collins: But so people will blame that. But the problem is a lot of countries have that and not a lot of countries are quite as extreme as Korea and fertility rates.
The other thing that people will blame is the gender wars in Korea. And this is definitely a phenomenon. I'll put a statistic on screen that shows that while you have a political difference between women and men in the United States, there are two conservative men for every one conservative woman in the U.
S. And one progressive man for every two progressive women in the United States. So the odds there are not good if you're looking for a partner that is politically aligned with you, but in Korea,
it is dramatically worse and more extreme and becoming more extreme over time.
But if you want learning about that, [00:09:00] there's a great YouTube series on it called the Gotcha Gang Wars parts one and two, both fantastic if you want to get an understanding of Korea's history. And I could focus on that and say maybe if they could fix their gender problems, it would fix their fertility rate.
But there is actually a bigger problem in Korea, which means even if you could fix the housing situation, even if you could fix the gender wars situation, I still don't think they would come anywhere close to fixing their fertility problem. And it is interesting to note because it is not a problem that we have in the United States and we have it a little bit in Europe, but not nearly as bad as Korea.
Has it? Oh, yeah.
Simone Collins: Although I wonder we'll get into this later, but I wonder if this is also a major issue in Japan.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think it is a partial issue in Japan. So Korea is not a capitalist economy and I need to be extremely clear about this to our listeners. It is an economy that allows for capitalism.
But has not sorted itself capitalistically in the [00:10:00] same way that, when many people think about communism, for example it would be possible for under capitalist rules one company to basically dominate all of daily life and pay everyone a UBI and then basically end up with a communist system under a capitalist hierarchy. In the same way that like people often see communism as fundamentally at odds with democracy and it's no, you can vote communists into power. You can vote fascists into power. For example, these things aren't in conflict with each other.
You can set up a capitalist system and have another system develop under it. And the chi bold system in Korea is fundamentally very different from the way capitalism works in any other country. And it is also fundamentally why Korea cannot fix its fertility crisis.
Simone Collins: Can you first, just for people who aren't familiar with it, sorry, define the chaebol system?
Malcolm Collins: I'm going to go deeper into all of this [00:11:00] because a lot of people see South Korea and North Korea as being a almost antithetical to each other. When that really isn't the case, what South Korea is a collection of North Korea's competing against each other under a capitalist hierarchy or capitalist the broad economic rule system.
And that's what the chiabols are. When you go to North Korea, you will see these shrines and these museums to the dear leader and everything like that. And they deify him and they come up with all sorts of stories about him and they have these strict hierarchy based system. If you go to any of the Chaibolds, which I'll get to a deeper explanation in just a second, but just for example, Chaibolds would be like Hyundai, Samsung, etc.
You will find the museums
dedicated to the founder of the Chaibold and it will be almost as mythical as the museums you would see in North Korea. They will have his little shoes from when he was a kid [00:12:00] up on a golden shrine. They will have it is weird if you are coming from an American system.
So people who are broadly familiar with tribolds, they are like, so tribolds are like big economic conglomerates, 3M in our country or something like that or GE in our country, and it's no.
That is not really what Chibolds are. They are much, much bigger than that. Just let me paint a picture of what it's like to live under a Chibold system. I can go, as a Samsung person,
To my Samson day job, go home to my Samson apartments, which will say Samson in giant letters on the side of them, go shop at the Samson grocery store, buy Samson insurance, watch Samson TV on my Samson phone. The one where I would see it everywhere, yeah. Yeah, Samsung Is the one with the apartment building. Literally every [00:13:00] aspect of your daily life is under this company. It is not like there are like, 20 of these that really matter that compete, but there's more to begin with.
And so you can think, okay, if they try to be capitalistic, how did companies gain this much power? The answer is twofold. Part one has to do is when they converted to capitalism, they were under a fascist regime. dictator. So a fascist made them a capitalist system before they became a democratic system.
As he converted them to capitalism, he used state resources to hyperspeed this conversion by pouring resources into individual competent families who had companies to grow those companies at a super fast speed. And this created the birth of the original chivals. But this system would have fallen apart without Korean culture, which is the second thing at play here.
When I mentioned that South Korea is actually more like North [00:14:00] Korea than you would imagine, and people were like then why aren't people starving in South Korea? And it's competition. And people are like competition can't be it. It's no, we wrote a book on governance, non bestseller in the Wall Street nonfiction section, top of the list.
And so we know what we're talking about when it comes to governance structures. For a governance structure to maintain efficiency, really all you need is for the possibility of it to fail and be replaced by a competitor and for it to compete with consumers against competitors in a relatively free economic system.
What Korea is essentially multiple fascist dictatorships that are competing against each other for the population to join them. It's almost if you think of seasteading, the initial seasteading thing, they were like what we'll do is we'll create like modular cities where people can split off and go join other cities.
If they're not being run well. And so you could even have a fascist city that could be desirable. That is basically the way the Korean economy works. Although people build a huge degree of loyalty to their companies as well, so even when the companies are treating them as well, they don't split off as frequently as you [00:15:00] would see in other systems.
And it hasn't led to inefficiency. It's actually a decent system if all you're caring about is capitalistic output. However, if you care about quality of life, this is a totally different thing altogether, which we're gonna get to in a little second here. But the other reason why tribals have persisted after they were originally set up is because within Korean culture, you do have this strong predilection for strict hierarchical structures
And I want to give you an idea of how hierarchical Korean culture is. When you are in Korea, if you're there for even a short time, people are sure to ask you their age. Your age. Because the way they talk to you changes. Like the grammatical structure changes. If you are even a few months older than them.
It matters that much. And when you leave your company, go home or hanging out with your friends, your title in the same way [00:16:00] in the U. S. that we use terms like Mr. and Mrs. Is often your position at the company. Like CEO would be like your title in a social setting. CEO Malcolm. That is how much this stuff matters in Korea.
It is baked into every layer of the culture. Some startups in Korea have tried to get around this through doing things like Insisting that everyone uses English all the time and only English names because it causes people to use different grammatical structures because they don't fall back on these, which leads to less hierarchy.
Like it is that bad. It is people are like, okay so we've got to get to why all of this matters.
Simone Collins: And I would say this is even a trope. I'm watching a Korean drama now on Amazon prime that is about a dating coach, actually a female dating coach. And it begins with a bunch of meet cute situations and then individuals involved like the man and the woman in each situation, not following through and not dating, which is so [00:17:00] South Korean, but there is a, like a small publishing company, like a startup in this drama.
And it's. The CEO of it keeps giving these speeches about how we like, we should not, we should have an open office. We should only address each other by our first names to have open and easy communication. So I think it's even become a trope or a joke. for visionary or self aggrandized, trying to be visionary people in South Korea, trying to break down these barriers and it being seen ironically by the culture is
Malcolm Collins: cringe, which is really interesting to me.
And this, to understand how much the tribal system matters in Korea, you are like not a part of it. Person of equal status to other people if you don't work at one of the Chibolds.
The Chibolds are extremely important to your social status within Korea. They are, when you are dating somebody, when you are, like, your life is spent to try to get that perfect test score so you can get into [00:18:00] the perfect Chibold. And Korea is also an extremely meritocratic system, but meritocratic in regards to measurable statistics, not in regards to measurable efficacy.
And this is the core of what will cause Korea to fail as a culture and what makes it unsalvageable, really. And I'll get to why, because it may seem like such a small thing. Why is the meritocratic thing so important? Because in Korea, and when I say meritocratic in the extreme, there is a test one day each year.
You can only take it this one day. If you're sick, you have to wait until next year. This is the test that determines what colleges you get into. It is so important, they ground all of the planes on that day. This test is the most extreme, so there's no potential distractions, that's why they do it. They ground traffic that day.
Simone Collins: That just sounds like it would make me extra bad at taking the test, because they make such a big deal out of it. It
Malcolm Collins: sounds horrible. Oh yeah, it [00:19:00] is nightmarish. Is there a spike in
Simone Collins: suicides right before the test?
Malcolm Collins: A huge spike and after gosh there's lots of things of parents like killing their kids, even like I've seen, they didn't get high enough scores or.
Or kids killing their families
because they didn't get a high enough score or, it's horrible.
Give you an idea of just how horrible it is. One in three students in Korea feels suicidal. According to this poll I found.
Malcolm Collins: Everything is based around this one meritocracy and this is a problem with statistics based meritocracies instead of efficacy based meritocracies. In America, you can fail out of college and still start a company.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it's almost a badge of honor.
Malcolm Collins: In America, we a stall the entrepreneur. These people are all the politicians, they're America's greatest strengths as a small business owner. You do not have this mindset in Korea at all. I remember I was looking because at Korean matchmaking things I wanted to see like what rank I would get on a Korean matchmaking website.
Okay. To see who I'd get matched with as like a partner. And And they [00:20:00] give your job a status, right? Being an entrepreneur is right under being a fisherman in status. Wait, you're better. You're more
Simone Collins: of a marriage catch
Malcolm Collins: if you're a fisherman than an entrepreneur in Korea. But it needs to be understood how demonized this is.
So at my VC, we were the number one early stage venture capital firm by government survey. So this meant that when the government did a survey of where early stage startups wanted capital from, like what was considered the most prestigious capital to get, that was my firm. And I was their director of strategy and people kept getting arrested at my firm.
They basically ruined the founder's life. This was a man who made a lot of money tried to pour that money back into making the Korean economy better and he spent I think five years in jail over this. And it was all overturned. It was all proven to be political. It really genuinely like this experience in Korea, having them raid our office and stuff like that kind of makes me hate the Korean government and the Korean culture.
But like part of me loves the Korean culture, but [00:21:00] seeing the way that they targeted and what was the sin of this company? Yeah, they made up some trumped up charges that were mostly proven to be trumped up as time went on. But what was the core sin of this company? And I remember being told like by other Koreans that I talked to that this company was bad news because what it was doing We found an arbitrage opportunity.
We would invest in people who went to non top tier colleges,
Simone Collins: so it was a lot like the like peter teal's thing with Encouraging kids to not go to college and instead just pursue a
Malcolm Collins: business Yeah, that was it. Yeah. We also invested in some people who dropped out of college, which was seen as particularly bad in the US.
If you can't understand why people would hate this so much, it would be like in the US if there was a VC firm that like disproportionately invested in only meth addicts. You'd be like, that's a very bad message for children to invest in math addicts. Like obviously our society, because in Korea in the U S when we look at rich people who have gotten rich because of [00:22:00] institutional mechanisms, like their parents were rich for many generations and they were born into The ownership of 3M or something.
We're like, they don't deserve that money. That is society not working properly because they didn't build that wealth themselves.
Simone Collins: In
Malcolm Collins: Korea, it's actually the exact opposite. If somebody gets rich out of nowhere, it's ah, something fishy must have happened. They must have cheated in some way because this isn't how our society works.
Our society is this strict incremental meritocracy. Now, what does all this have to do with fertility rates? Okay. Cause we're going to get to that. And I think what indeed very interesting. So it came to me because I was actually meditating on this topic for a while. Can we get low fertility rates?
How do I fix it? How do I fix it? And somebody was talking to me recently and I was like, Oh yeah, I want to have 12 kids. And there you go. You better start saving now to pay for them. I think it was my actually who sent this to me for college. I was just laughing, I was like, obviously I'm not paying for my 12 kids [00:23:00] to go to college, that's comical.
You can't afford that. No, no realistic person, no matter how wealthy you are, could afford 12 kids in college. In the U. S., that is not damning those kids to a life in the middle class. If you look at, and there's been some great studies at this, of So you've got to be able to sort by the people who could get into the top colleges which is one of the problems.
If you're just sorting by the people who got into and went to top colleges, then you're partially sorting for the people who got in. And there's been some studies who did a good job of like blind testing this through like accidentally not admitted people or something like that. And it found marginal differences between the people who got into Harvard and didn't get into Harvard.
This is more true in wealthier individuals and for non wealthy individuals. Typically, if you're from a less wealthy family, elite colleges matter a lot more to you than, Less selective colleges or no college at all.
But if you're from a wealthy or above average income family, they really don't matter that much.
Malcolm Collins: American society is actually very good at sorting at uplifting people who are [00:24:00] competent and didn't go to top universities. Because in America, if you start a small company or something like that is seen as the most legitimate way to rise up in society. The most legitimate way to make money. And it is the most culturally aggrandized way.
In Korea, you can't do this. In Korea, because of this meritocratic system, it means that when I have additional kids, those are resources not going to the kids I already have. And those are resources, so my family, like what I have in America, there's been some great studies on multiple kids, because a lot of people are like, oh, isn't that going to hurt your kids prospects in life?
And it's You didn't think to look like people have done studies on this. I think it's like up to three kids. Every kid actually helps all of their siblings prospects in life in mental health. And then after that, it is a marginal decline with every additional kid. It's not that important in something like South Korea.
You're basically halving their life prospects [00:25:00] with every kid you have. So you pulled up some statistics here. Do you want to go over them, Simone, or do you want me to? Yeah,
Simone Collins: just to , just to give a picture of just how much people are spending in this case I found one article on what is it called?
Sorry. I found one article on Korea Junang Daily that reported, and I'm just going to quote here. Spending on children's private education nearly equals what these families paid for food and drinks. That's 636, 000 won. And housing and utility bills, that's 539, 000 won. But that's just an average. In reality, parents in their 40s and 50s spend million won, spend millions of won a month on sending their children to middle or high schools.
In or sorry on sending their children in middle and high schools to afterschool academies. Now, these are just an aside, the ones that help them prep for this insane test and other assessments that are big bottlenecks to getting into major [00:26:00] universities that Malcolm mentioned. The article continues.
Relatively poor families are no different. Monthly private education costs. 482, 000 won for the bottom 20 percent income group more than their food and beverage cost. It cannot be a normal society if lower income families spend more on educating their children than living cost. If so, what is the need for public education?
So that, I think that article gives you a picture of just how much parents feel like they have to spend. Can you imagine spending more On, and this is not your child's school. Parents obviously complained in the United States. Oh, I spent, 40, 000 on my, kids, private middle school every year.
And it is insanely expensive, but these are kids who go to public school in South Korea, and these are good schools. It's not like school in South Korea is terrible, but parents feel like they need to spend incrementally on top of that. Which I should say this, there's an underrated side effect of this, which I do see show up in a lot of.
[00:27:00] Documentaries and other pieces on low fertility rates in South Korea is Not only is this really expensive for parents, it's pretty miserable for children. They're not enjoying they have the highest
Malcolm Collins: suicide rate in the world by far, last I checked.
It's so bad that 42.3% of deaths among teenagers are due to suicide. And over 50% of people in their twenties are due to suicide. We is 47.9% of the deaths of people in their thirties are due to suicide. That is insane when you're dealing with about half of all deaths among young people are due to suicide. And for those just listening, I had posted above a statistic, which showed that now. South Korea has the least happy students in the OACD. Oh, Andy S South Korea does still appear to top the world suicide. Charts.
Simone Collins: Yeah, throughout middle and high school, which is when you are most prone to having serious depressive issues, being really emotionally unstable, right?
Like, when you're most vulnerable emotionally. [00:28:00] You are having zero fun. You're going to a cram school after school, your parents are paying through the nose for it. So they really expect you to do well because they are sacrificing a ton. You can't just blow it off. It's not like some free program that they're not sacrificing for as well.
So your parents are straining, you're straining, no one's doing what they want to do. It's ridiculous.
Malcolm Collins: And it doesn't get better as you get older. So this is from this V. Malkowitz piece, the most recent one who friend of the show, love the guy. Every time I read about South Korea, the situation seems worse.
The linked post has women working nine to six saying they have no time for anything else. Often studying IV drip on weekends to be able to keep working and acting like that is normal. Talk of women forced to leave their jobs or past promotions due to having a child is common. And from a quote that I found where you also see this is one 28 year old woman who worked in HR said she'd seen people who were forced [00:29:00] to leave their jobs or who were passed over for promotions after taking maternity leave, which had been enough to convince her to never have a baby.
Both men and women are entitled to a year's leave during the first eight years of their child's life. But in 2022, only 7 percent of new fathers use some of the leave compared to 70 percent of new mothers. You can see how geared this is against women here. And I think that, This you're like what people are really like on IV trips, so they don't have time to eat, so they just study all day, work all day.
Yes. This is real when you build a meritocratic system that isn't based on efficacy. So consider the differences in the American system and the Korean system and why the Korean system always leads to this outcome.
The American system is about building systems that genuinely improve the lives of other people as measured by other people wanting to pay for those [00:30:00] systems.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And that's why you have notes like Tim Ferriss foundational For our work week, right? We extol that. We don't care that he works four hours. We care that he makes so much money and gets so much done.
Malcolm Collins: So the goal of the American system is to, with the minimum amount of effort, produce the maximum amount of social good as measured by what people will pay for.
This is the fundamental goal of capitalism and is why I love capitalism. It is a great system for efficiency and reducing suffering overall. Whereas most other systems and people are like what about the people who aren't producing things that improve the quality of other people's lives?
And I do believe that we should have some level of safety net for those individuals, but it should be fairly minimal. Like I, I. I am okay with the people who are not improving the lives of other people suffering to some extent. Now, the problem with capitalist systems is that they do not do a good [00:31:00] job of motivating long term goods, i.
e. good for the environment or having kids, because they can't use the kids immediately, at least in the short term. Eventually, they will start paying attention. Making their own kids or having their own family towns and stuff like that. But that is only when the economic pressures begin to affect the companies, right?
But outside of that, within this American system, what I am focused on with my kids, like when I think about, Educating them when I think about raising them is how do I make them the type of people who can produce something that other people are going to want right in the Korean system. It is also a true meritocracy, but in a completely different context, it is the currency is totally different.
Yes, based on work hours and score measurable things. To a lot of people at the surface level, this can appear more just [00:32:00] because they haven't thought about the downstream consequences of establishing things in this manner,
Both: right? Because
Malcolm Collins: everyone can compete in an open system that isn't directly tied to the outcome.
put of these individuals in terms of goods that other people want, you lead to everybody rushing towards these incremental improvements. Which means that there is never an economic case to be made for having seven or 12 kids. And a lot of people like when we talk about seven kids and we'll do another episode on this, they're like, that's an insane number of kids.
The average American had seven kids in the 1800s. Okay, AVERAGE. AVERAGE. Does that mean for every American who didn't get married, or had no kids, there was another American having 14? Okay. That meant for every American who decided to have a family of three kids, there was another family having 11, this is a, it is normal [00:33:00] to raise large families in this sort of mindset, but you've got to build a mindset around this a mindset of abundance and of true efficacious capitalism, because even if you solve all these other problems in Korea, you don't solve the basic economics of having a kid, nor do you solve the terrible quality of life.
When you look at Koreans, much more than the U. S. In the U. S., it is the apocalyptic thinking, which I think is core to the American identity, which people use to justify why they won't have kids. Or we could say frontier
Simone Collins: thinking.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, don't you know the world's about to be destroyed? Don't you know that the the climate's about to crash?
In South Korea, they say, don't you know that my life is terrible? Why would I bring somebody else into this? There was one story I was reading about a woman who told her husband, I just cannot justify it given how low the quality of life is in this country. And that's heartbreaking, but it's also true.
Korea as a society, and I do not think that you might think that I'm anti [00:34:00] tribal here, I'm not. I think that the tribals are the only thing that can fix this.
Simone Collins: Interesting. Wait, how do you think that? One politically speaking and philosophically speaking, we aren't a tribal in general because we're anti any concentration of power in one organization or any organization that gets too large because it starts to grow cancerous growths that are very wasteful.
I think to get rid of the tribal
Malcolm Collins: is to get rid of the core of Korean culture.
Simone Collins: Okay. So yeah, you basically you're against cultural oration more than you are efficient markets, but how could tribal's fix this problem?
Malcolm Collins: So tribals need to change. What they are judging the job candidates on that they are accepting
Simone Collins: So if they change it to market based forces rather than performative forces you
Malcolm Collins: would see if you want to fix the entire Korean system, I'll tell you how you fix it.
You can fix it in one generation, Korea. Listen to me here. You freak the fuck out if you do this, but it would fix things. How do you [00:35:00] fix the entire, the tribals wouldn't even need to do this. A politician, a single president could do this. If they could get this past students scores on this single exam that they do.
Should be modified by the number of siblings they have.
Both: So you apply
Malcolm Collins: a modifier like they get multiplied by 1. 3 or something like that. If they have a sibling 1. 5, if they have two siblings, 1. 6, if they have three siblings, that would offset the cost downside to having additional kids in terms of how well they do on this test.
Now people would say, that's not the kid's fault. Shouldn't you be modifying people's career prospects based on how many kids they have, right? Wouldn't that do more? And the answer is no, not really. And I'll explain why one that would take an intergenerational time to have an effect. But two there, you are forcing companies to do something that is fundamentally [00:36:00] against their best interests, which is searching like, unfairly raising the status of people who are not necessarily more productive within the company. However, in a system where these kids didn't do worse because they they were less competent. It's not that they're going to be worse at picking up company skills or anything like that. It was because they had less resources due to how many kids their parents had when contrasted with how their parents could have deployed resources.
This system now allows parents to essentially work to change the system for their kids by having more kids. You, very quickly, would get families having five or six kids if you made this one change. But there is another change that I would add on top of this that could be done from the perspective of Chivals.
Which is to stop hiring people based on these scores. And start hiring people based on proven efficacy in real world environments.
Both: In the
Malcolm Collins: US, this is largely how hiring works. This [00:37:00] isn't like an insane system. When I applied to a company in the US, yeah, my GPT, GPA matters a little bit. But they're looking at my extracurriculars.
How many clubs did you run? How many things did you do? Have you started a company before? Have you started any sort of business making venture before? Even a
Simone Collins: common convention in resumes when one adds bullets under the description. Is something along the lines of, increased sales by 14%. Like people definitely sell themselves based on tangible achievements made for previous employers or independently.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I have an MBA from Stanford, which is in terms of graduate degrees. I think still the hardest graduate degree program to get into in the world, much harder than most PhDs. At least PhDs at Stanford or Harvard. We've done another video where we went over the stats on this because a lot of people aren't familiar with how hard top tier MBA programs are to get into.
And while this helps me with jobs, it more opens doors for phone calls and talking to people. It's not, [00:38:00] like getting it. And it's the same with Simone, graduate degree from Cambridge. So we have these top tier degrees and they definitely open doors and they definitely help. But even now the system's beginning to transition away from them, especially if you're talking about top tier jobs.
And this also, we need to be realistic about the way the American system works in America. GPA does matter if you're going to work for one of these giant bureaucracies. Okay. But the giant bureaucracies are increasingly becoming less and less palatable places to work in America. As the gig economy rises, you are entering a world where more and more your actual ability to create things that people want to pay for is your value within the economic system.
And when you're dealing with the elite part of the economy, Like the part that the Stanford MBA opens up to me, that part values education. The least the other part that values education pretty low is the small local part of the economy. If I'm going to work for like local, whatever business owner, he cares much [00:39:00] more about what things I've started in the past.
Same with if I'm starting like a local landscaping company or something like that. It is only this middle bureaucratic part that really no one wants to work in anyway. That middle bureaucratic part is the high part of Korean society and is their entire system. That's why you have people on these IP trips, where they will go into work and I, this is true in Japan and Korea workplace theater is everything in these countries.
Both: You
Malcolm Collins: can't leave until your boss has left. Even if you're no longer working, it's stupid. Anyway. So any final thoughts, Simone?
Simone Collins: Yeah. I do think This is an important discussion to have because we often point to the gender wars, but the gender wars, while real, are not as pronounced as you might think. And I think this is a much bigger factor when people are looking at what they're going to do.
Malcolm Collins: I'd actually say that the gender wars are currently why fertility rates are low.
If you look at that low marriage rate, what was it?
27 percent of women in their twenties. [00:40:00] Only 27 percent think that marriage is essential.
Industry Collins: A
Malcolm Collins: decline from 53%. in 2008. So a really quick decline there. And that means that, those women aren't getting married.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: The truth.
So people want to say then how do you save Korean culture? When a Korean moves to the U S their fertility rate increases by about 50%.
Industry Collins: The
Malcolm Collins: way we save Korean culture is through multiculturalism. It is through the Koreans that had the gumption to leave their country and set up ethnic communities that can intergenerationally maintain a sense of cultural identity, but within ecosystems that value them for their productivity.
In America, like what are the classic Korean businesses? It is entrepreneurship. That is what Koreans are known for in America. People may not know this, but I think it's actually the majority of sushi restaurants are run by Koreans in America. So they often do Japanese food in America, but they also often, the Korean laundromat, the Korean [00:41:00] so often do you see disproportionately the entrepreneurial spirit because they are pushed out of their own country, it's not rewarded in their country in the way it is in America.
And it creates an excellent opportunity for us to focus on helping those communities, because I don't think there's anything we can do for Korea at this point, unless some figure in the country decides to want to change the culture instead of thinking the solution is just to go more conservative or to side with one side of the gender wars, because both sides of the gender wars have genuine grievances in Korea right now.
And there's really no fixing it within Korea that I can see without, as I said, Simple fix. All you have to do is change their score on that major exam based on how many siblings they have. And you're going to see a flip like that. You're going to see riots. You're going to have a yeah,
Simone Collins: I couldn't imagine seeing that ever actually [00:42:00] happen.
But
Malcolm Collins: because people don't want real solutions. They want lip service. They want handouts. They want that's the commodity they I've heard that Korea is becoming more. Diverse in the countryside these days. People have told me, I'm like, Oh, that's great. You're bringing in like seasonal migrants.
That is not I've been in Seoul. Seoul is not a diverse, go to Seoul. You won't see I could go a day without seeing anyone who wasn't a Korean. Yeah. I had people who I invested in. Like I chose their company for investment. Tell me that they weren't fully comfortable with me being in the country for aesthetic reasons, it makes the country gross to have too many ethnicities here.
Simone Collins: Koreans are so beautiful. I think it's more just that we're just not beautiful enough. Yeah, it's sad, this is why we have people who are trans Korean, but the surgeries just don't work out. So don't try guys. Just don't try. It's not gonna, can't pull it off. Oh I feel bad because I love South Korea.
I think Koreans are awesome. Really cool [00:43:00] people. And I also think that they, I don't know the non chable system is pretty amazing. When you look at the creatives in Korea, when you look at the small startups, they're actually doing really amazing things. And I think the reason why we don't see them as this dynamic that you have spoken about in other podcasts, whereby the green market is just big enough to keep startups within it.
Meaning that they're not forced to be global first but then that means that we never really, it's very hard for them to jump out of that economy once they've optimized themselves around it because it's so idiosyncratic. So I just feel as this nation slowly dies through its low birth rates, we're also losing this immense creative talent that is blossoming there.
Oh,
Malcolm Collins: it's so true, yeah. Because they destroyed the lives of their youth through this system. And not just that, I need to, if we're just gonna talk about Korea, their culinary so if you're in America and you have eaten Korean food, [00:44:00] you don't get it. Korea has a whole diversity of foods that like we don't have in the like I'll explain this differently in the U.
S. You can go to restaurants that are very different. I could go to an Indian restaurant or an Italian restaurant or a American pub, like gastropub type restaurant, right? And you would, this is a big diversity of food types within Korea. There are as many diverse food type restaurants that are totally unique to the country.
When you get Korean food in the United States, you are getting just one of those food types.
Simone Collins: Yeah, like typically Korean barbecue or something related.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's like these like hot pot places you can go to where they like only serve these giant like hot pots of dishes. There's other type that I absolutely love where it's like a ring of egg around the outside of a dish and then inside it's like this caramelized meat that you dip in the egg and it's fantastic.
Then there's those fantastic meat [00:45:00] restaurants where it's like meat specialists. And then you dip them in this fermented bean paste as well as a few other things before eating them.
Simone Collins: You're not even mentioning all the Italian inspired food, all the French inspired food.
Malcolm Collins: Totally different than French or Italian food.
Like in the same way. But it's
Simone Collins: just like with Japan, they put their own spin on it.
Yeah. They put their own spin on it and it's so freaking good. It's so much better than real Italian food or real French food. It's insane.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Or their ice cream places. There's a special type of dessert you can get there that they have restaurants to specialize in, which is like a shaved ice thing.
But it's like really smooth and I've never seen it in the United States or anywhere else. It's really fascinating. Oh, one type of Korean restaurant that has made it into the United States and people might not know that this is a specialty food that came from Korea. If you want to get an idea of Korean food diversity is Paris Baguette.
If you've ever eaten at a Paris Baguette and you're like, I have never seen food like this before. What is this weird decorated hot [00:46:00] dog device? That is not from Paris. That is a Korean chain, and it is a type of food, like they're cool croquet buns that have the curry inside of them.
That is not from Europe at all. That is a specialty dish in Korea that could not be more different than I think what most people think of when they think Korean food in the United States, which is more just Korean barbecue, which is honestly, when I'm in Korea, I almost never eat. I think it's one of the worst types of Korean food which is just so sad.
Oh, and beep and bop, which is like weird because people in the west.
We've been Bob and yet at Korea, it's like something you would only have at like a corporate cafeteria or like a school. Like you don't go to BB and bop restaurants that I've seen in soul at least.
Malcolm Collins: Oh God, and they're boiled chicken restaurants. They have some that's even worse than that. So one of the things just to rag on Korea a little bit here. So you go to Korea and one of the weird things about Korea is everyone there intuitively believes that like food is like really important to your health.
Like even though they've gotten over all of this like ancient medicine and stuff like that, they like actually haven't. [00:47:00] And they're like if you're down, then you need to eat this sort of food. Or if you're feeling this, you need to eat this sort of food or this sort of food is good for this season.
So the two garbage tier Korean restaurants that they have in Korea one is Korean style sushi. Which is different than Japanese style sushi. It is garbage. Oh, the other type is Korean boiled fish that you'll get everywhere in the country. Oh, see,
Simone Collins: I thought, we're going to have your more controversial take, which is very popular among some people, but not you.
Which is Korean pizza. It's like
Malcolm Collins: the eyes and skin and stuff, and they'll send it
Simone Collins: to you? You hate Korean pizza, which is both very expensive Oh,
Malcolm Collins: Korean pizza is Oh, talk about Korean pizza, this is fascinating.
Simone Collins: It has all sorts of stuff on it. It seems very fancy, and it seems really cool, and it seems incredibly modern and futuristic.
Malcolm Collins: What is the stuff that it'll have on it? Can you Oh, it'll
Simone Collins: have we have cheese stuffed crust. They'll have all kinds of stuffed crust. They will have layers of stuff. There are all these crazy gimmicks.
Malcolm Collins: While you're pulling that up, I'm going to talk about the medicinal food that like I've been to restaurants there and it is so bad. It is [00:48:00] boiled chicken. And what they do is they put like a whole chicken in like boiling water.
And then you just eat the boiled chicken from like the full Chicken? They'll take the head off and everything, so it's not like super gross. Oh my god. But it is
Industry Collins: just
Malcolm Collins: blandest, and you eat it with salted water. That is what you eat it with. It is the blandest food I have ever had.
Simone Collins: Yeah, that does not sound good.
That does not sound good at all. Yeah, I'll let you separately, like in post, go find examples. I'm not finding any. Something to
Malcolm Collins: definitely try when you're in Korea, by the way, is Korean fried chicken. One opened up near us, and it is Not okay. It's not as good as the stuff that I would get in.
Now here you might be thinking Korean fried chicken. I can't be that dissimilar from American fried chicken. One it's generally much better when you get it in Korea than American fried chicken. It's like dramatically more moist. I don't know the difference in how they cook it, but [00:49:00] also just the whole routine around eating.
It is very different. For example, the appetizer that you get at the table, you know, instead of like nachos or something like that beforehand, or not nachos, but, you know, chips and dip like you'd have in a Mexican restaurant. So at the place that I used to go. It was raw pasta. They had like a thing. like a cylindrical thing.
filled with raw pasta.
You would, you would munch on while waiting for your dish. You don't like crunchy crack, crack, raw pasta. Yeah. That.
Malcolm Collins: So sweet potato pizza, for example, is common in Korea. Oh, that was, sweet potato is actually really interesting in Korea. So you can go to a Korean 7 Eleven, and in the winter, they will have warm potatoes. You can buy, just buy a potato and snack on it as you're walking. And I get them all the time.
It's actually really good.
Simone Collins: Yeah, sweet potatoes were also a big thing in Japan. Just selling them from the carts. Really nice and warm and steamy in the winter when
Malcolm Collins: it's cold. Haven't even talked about street food yet. But yeah, all the things we're losing. I guess what I was trying to get with this is I think we can think that South Korea has [00:50:00] successfully exported the best parts of their culture overseas because of. K pop and everything like that, and they just haven't.
When they go extinct, we are going to lose things. that our grandchildren will never be able to fully recreate or recognize as a unique cultural contribution. And that saddens me.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. I'm on the Korea pizza hut website. So one example of an, a typical fancy Korean pizza is A seafood King, which has tons of shrimp all over it.
There are some prawns and then you can always get like a special edge to your pizza, like a special crust or just the original dough crust. But special crusts are not like special crusts in the United States where they're like cheese stuffed each crust in the seafood King pizza that I'm looking at. It looks like a pastry, like a cheese filled pastry.
I I don't know how else to describe it. And you can
Malcolm Collins: also get [00:51:00] I'm looking at one here. So this one has things like egg tart pizzas. Yeah. Which has barbecued meat and egg tart. Or this one here is sweet and sour pork pizza, which right here they, so this is the description of somebody who's reviewing them.
Finally, truly stretching the limits of what qualifies as a pizza fusion. And ultimately food is culinary Frankenstein's monsters. With no crust or bread to speak of, this pizza is built upon layers of breaded sweet and sour pork, which is covered in kimchi and mozzarella cheese, and then sprinkled with olives.
Simone Collins: And these all seem like they would
Malcolm Collins: taste really good. The bread of this pizza. is breaded sweet and sour pork. It is a pizza where the bottom layer is essentially a what's the word for that? Where they, it's that, that German dish schnitzel, but like sweet and sour schnitzel for the bread. [00:52:00]
Simone Collins: Yeah. So you're like, I'm done with that.
But then you order in it and it's,
Malcolm Collins: no, it's not good. It's like soggy often and not very tasty. I think when you get that complex,
Simone Collins: you just can't. Make it work the same way.
Malcolm Collins: You'll get an idea of this. If you go to Paris baguette, like if people want a genuinely unique Korean dish in their local area, go to Paris baguette the croquettes are what I would suggest as the best dish.
Cause it's one of the most, but if you go for the dishes that are really meant to be visually appealing. Like the hot dog style dishes you'll see that they're tasteless and plasticky. And this is not uncommon in Korea. Anyway, I love you to death Simone. This has turned out to be one of our longer episodes but worth it to talk about a place that is I think really important to me.
And I think that there are real solutions to Korea's fertility rate that the government could really implement. But it needs to understand that the problem is more systemic than they are giving it credit for, and the way that they fix it is with the families that are having seven [00:53:00] or eight kids, not the families having three kids.
And so they need to find systems that people can cheese that will lead to that, and that can end up saving Korean culture and Korean ethnicity from being a footnote in history. While the other thing that we need to do is support our local Korean communities and prevent them from losing their cultural distinction.
Which would be I think truly sad.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And I have to say once again, you have surprised and delighted me. I love that I've read so many explanations as to why there are fertility problems in South Korea, never before have I read look at the tables and also look at the. performative meritocratic sorting system for talent.
So thank you for finding more interesting angles to look at these problems. I love you so much, Malcolm.
Malcolm Collins: I love you too.
This episode's likely gonna go live interspersed [00:54:00] with old episodes that we filmed for the backlog during the during the birth.
Why South Korea's Fertility Crisis is Unsolvable (Unless They Make This One Change)