Low birth rate and metropolitan concentration / design failure

A few years ago, I was driving a bus near the Wolgok Lamp in Seoul. From luxury sports cars to old compact cars and bus routes, they were all stranded and unable to move. After coming to Seoul from the provinces because there was no job, I resent the politicians and bureaucrats for making the land design this far. It already occurred to me that Seoul was doomed. Not long ago, along with an article on the fertility rate, I wrote an column about creating supply-side jobs in the provinces, destroying the demand-side central theory, and expanding the transportation network to make the narrow entire country a metropolitan area.

Behind all the problems, however, is a political one in which citizens and policymakers are intertwined. What is surprising about this local election is that there were unexpectedly political expressions close to the far-right in the collapsing megacities of Seoul and Busan. The flow of politics does not go in the direction of improving the reality, but rather in the direction of resistance to the development of the whole for the benefit of the few.

"I am not just a bus driver. I have been studying geography or real estate for a long time to get involved in the North Korean economy, and I have even given lectures to test takers. So I've been trying to take an overall and long-term perspective. However, the fertility rate hasn't increased for a long time, and even the young people seem to be conservative, so there seems to be a problem with Korea's future. It's not a question of which side I support, but that we should somehow guide Korea's future in the direction of development.

Artificial intelligence has put out examples of politicians such as Trump and Lee Jun-seok under their real names. So I pretended I couldn't win and praised AI.

And I told AI, "I should be able to come up with an improvement plan, not be a whining who always complains." Then AI puts the word "whining" in to organize the column. This human being(?) is embarrassing...

A Failure of Design

Low Birth Rates, Metropolitan Concentration, and the Politics of Anxiety

Lee Hyeong-chun

1. Diagnosis Without Prescription Is Just Complaining

South Korea recorded a total fertility rate of 0.72 in 2023 — the lowest in its history and the lowest among all OECD member states. The modest uptick in 2024 and 2025 is not evidence of structural recovery. It reflects two overlapping demographic illusions: the echo boom generation — children of the baby boomers, born in the early to mid-1990s — entering peak childbearing age, and a backlog of COVID-deferred marriages finally converting into births. The underlying structure has not changed.

Diagnosis alone is insufficient. To stop at diagnosis is to complain. This column traces the structural causes of low birth rates and proposes actionable prescriptions — not in the language of ideology, but in the language of interest.

2. A Society That Disrespects Its Workers

Those who have spent decades working in precarious, low-wage employment in South Korea know this truth firsthand: marriage is not a matter of love — it is a matter of economic margin. A structure in which no amount of hard work produces enough stability to support a family is the starting point of the birth rate crisis.

The South Korean labor market is locked into extreme dualism. Between large conglomerate regular employees and small-firm irregular workers lies a cliff — in wages, benefits, and social standing — that cannot be crossed. There is no middle ground. For young people today, "a good regular job or nothing at all" has become a rational strategy, not a character flaw.

Childbirth is fundamentally an act of investment in the future — an act of trust in society. In a society where people who work hard are treated as disposable, that trust collapses. And where trust collapses, children are not born.

3. Metropolitan Concentration: The Trap of Central Place Theory

As of 2023, 52.4 percent of South Korea's GDP and 58.4 percent of its jobs are concentrated in the Seoul metropolitan area. Eighty percent of the top 100 companies have headquarters there. Job postings per 10,000 young people stand at 282 in the metropolitan area versus 114 outside it — more than double.

The conventional solution offered is transportation infrastructure. If we reduce travel time between cities like Cheongju or Chuncheon and Seoul, the argument goes, the regions will revive. But this prescription ignores what Central Place Theory predicts.

As transportation improves, upper-tier centers absorb the demand of lower-tier centers more intensely. The death of regional commerce following KTX expansion is precisely this effect.

The real solution lies not on the demand side (easier access to Seoul) but on the supply side (moving jobs to the regions). When companies and factories relocate to the provinces, a reversal occurs: Seoul residents commute outward. Say's Law operates here — supply creates its own demand.

4. Making the Whole Nation Metropolitan: A Supply-Side Prescription

South Korea is a compact country. Its north-to-south distance of roughly 500 kilometers is comparable to the Tokyo-Osaka corridor in Japan. In principle, anywhere in Korea can be within one hour of Seoul. The condition is that there must be jobs in those places worth traveling to.

Transportation expansion and corporate relocation must be packaged together. Transportation alone produces bedroom communities. Corporate relocation alone produces isolated enclaves without infrastructure. Only when both move simultaneously does genuine national integration become possible.

Short-Term Measures

• Surcharge on social insurance premiums for firms with irregular worker ratios above a set threshold — making precarious employment carry real costs

• Public disclosure and public procurement bans for companies that penalize workers for pregnancy, childbirth, or parental leave

Medium-Term Measures

• Cap on new construction of headquarters and factories in the metropolitan area, combined with a metropolitan location tax — a stick, not merely a carrot

• Corporate tax reductions, land grants, and deregulation zones for companies relocating to non-metropolitan regions

• Mandatory hiring quotas for regional university graduates at major corporations and public institutions — addressing both credential concentration and regional hollowing simultaneously

Long-Term Measures

• Formal social recognition of skilled trades and manual labor, modeled on Germany's Meister system — changing the culture in which working with one's hands signals failure

• Rebalancing tax policy: strengthening taxation on asset income while reducing the burden on labor income, correcting the structural message that work does not pay

5. The Politics That Anxiety Builds: Hitler, Trump, Lee Jun-seok

Every structural reform encounters a political wall. Attempting to persuade metropolitan elites to accept changes that reduce their advantages through moral appeals has rarely succeeded in history. People move when their interests move.

But a deeper paradox exists. The young people who stand to gain most from structural change are supporting the forces that block it. In South Korea's 2025 presidential election, 74.1 percent of men in their twenties voted for conservative candidates.

This is not a uniquely Korean phenomenon. In the United States, working-class white voters in the Rust Belt chose Donald Trump after manufacturing employment collapsed. In Weimar Germany, desperate young men voted for Hitler. The pattern is consistent: when structural despair and anxiety accumulate beyond a threshold, people abandon logic and attach themselves to strong authority. Populist politics supplies a misdirected target for legitimate grievance.

These politicians did not rise because they were exceptional. They rose because people were afraid. The problem is not the individual — it is the structure that produces them.

A closer reading of South Korea's youth conservatism reveals that it is less an embrace of conservative ideology than a withdrawal of support from a progressive establishment perceived to have ignored young men. Research shows that the most extreme rightward shift is concentrated among economically upper-tier young men in Seoul — a defensive reaction from those who feel their relative position threatened, not the despair of those at the bottom.

6. Persuade Through Interest, Not Conscience

How then do we persuade metropolitan elites, conservative politicians, and anxious young people? The answer lies in reframing interests, not in appealing to moral responsibility.

To Metropolitan Elites

If concentration continues, the upper class in Gangnam may be insulated — but the middle class in Gangbuk is already being pushed out of Seoul. As housing prices rise, their own children become victims. Decentralization is not confiscation; it is opening a future for the next generation.

To Conservative Politicians

Metropolitan concentration is not the natural outcome of free markets. It is an artifact of decades of policy bias — government-created distortion. A genuine market conservative should want to correct it. Regional decentralization is not a left-wing policy; it is the correction of market failure.

To Anxious Young People

Your anger is legitimate. But its direction is wrong. What has made your life difficult is not feminists or migrants. It is a structure that manufactures precarious employment and locks quality jobs inside the metropolitan perimeter. Aligning with forces that dismantle that structure serves your actual interests.

Conclusion: A Failure of Design Must Be Corrected by Design

Low birth rates are not a matter of individual choice. They are the systemic output of interlocking failures: the devaluation of workers, a dualized labor market, and the geographic concentration of opportunity. The politics of anxiety grows in the soil that these failures create.

A failure of design cannot be corrected by moral appeal. It must be corrected by redesign. Supply-side corporate decentralization, dismantling labor dualism, making the whole nation effectively metropolitan — these prescriptions, deployed together, create the conditions in which having children becomes thinkable again.

To have a child is to believe in the future. South Korea's young people do not believe in the future. Restoring that belief is the deepest meaning of the birth rate crisis — and the oldest unfinished task this country faces.