South Korea Saw First Quarterly Increase in the National Birth Rate in 8 Years
Maybe the Korean government’s focus on trying the raise the national birth rate might be having some success if this small statistical is an indication of things to come:
The number of babies born in South Korea rose for the first time in more than eight years in the second quarter of 2024, data showed Wednesday, as the country is grappling with its ultralow birth rate.
A total of 56,838 babies were born in the April-June period, up 1.2 percent from a year earlier, according to the data compiled by Statistics Korea.
It was the first time since the fourth quarter of 2015, when the number went up 0.6 percent.
You can read more at the link.
What’s up with all the pink cribs?
That’s a cesspool of gender assumption.
Before I was married, I would have volunteered to greatly assist South Korea in making babies; but they missed their opportunity.
Now I think CH might be right about AI.
I spent about a week creating a python script to read files and update web pages. Then I used our internal LLM to create a similar app.
It practically duplicated my work in three minutes.
Mind you, my main job is not software development; but junior and mediocre developers ought to step up to the plate and “git gud” or they’ll need to “git gon”…
Koreans want Korean babies, and they don’t want to create more of the freakish right-wing Trumpians waving Confederate flags and shouting MAGA.
I’m too lazy to work out the exact math, but rough estimated annual % change in births is somewhere between -2 and -3 percent for the last couple decades.
With that in mind, a positive 1.2% isn’t small. It’s a +3.2 to +4.2 change in the rate. This is a major change, and if one bothered to do the calculations, it’d probably be 3 to 6 sigma which is to say very unusual. Negative 2 to 3 growth drops the base number by 10 to 15 percent over 10 years.
Of course this may all be temporary (this 1.2 figure is only for the quarter sp who knows if it’s at all sustainable). It might be a post covid shutdown bump. It might be government policies. It might be any number of various factors that may or may not be also interacting with each other. Hard to tell at this time.