Why South Korea’s Victory over the North will Prove to be Fleeting
How many times have you been scrolling on social media and seen the following image:
Free market capitalists love to cite the Korean example for why capitalism has triumphed over communism. Korea has proved to be a unique test case because the people are ethnically homogenous and the country was arbitrarily divided down the middle 71 years ago when the Korean war ended. It is very hard to run social experiments on a countrywide level but sometimes fate delivers the goods. East/West Germany and China vs. Taiwan are a few other notable examples.
On every objective metric imaginable South Korea appears to be victorious. GDP per capita is around 23x higher: $36,000 vs $1,600. The average lifespan in the south is 83 years vs. 72 years in the north. The infant mortality rate per 1000 births is 3 in the south whereas it is 15 in the north. The list goes on: infrastructure, automobile ownership, internet access, medical care, working conditions, human rights, diplomatic relations, and cultural impacts on the rest of the world. People all over the world are listening to K-pop and watching Squid Game on Netflix.
As a rabid free market capitalist myself I have long cited this example as to why capitalism is superior to communism. But my declaration of victory was premature. If North Korea can continue to simply trudge along in a few generations they can conquer the South without firing a shot.
The average fertility rate in the North is 1.8 births per woman while in the South it is .7 births. A fertility rate of just over two is needed to maintain current population levels. This is because each woman needs one child to replace herself and one to replace a man. Hopefully our hypothetical couple is in a committed relationship, but at this point I’m not going to be choosy. If current birth rates persist in 4 generations the population of South Korea will decline by 94%. This extinction level event is occurring right now in slow motion.
Perhaps superior technology and weapons systems will allow the south to maintain their independence for a while. Back when the sun never set on the British empire a Sudanese army was threatening the highly lucrative British colony in Egypt. For the good of the empire the British decided they needed to do something about these pesky natives.
In 1898 at the battle of Omdurman 25,000 combined British and Egyptian forces fought 52,000 native Sudanese. The British had machine guns, artillery pieces, and breech loading rifles. The Sudanese forces meanwhile had rudimentary muskets, spears, and swords.
The battle was a triumph of western technology and tactics over crude native methods. The Sudanese forces suffered 28,000 casualties: 10,000 dead, 13,000 wounded, and 5,000 prisoners. The British suffered a few hundred casualties and 40 deaths.
Hilaire Belloc later so succinctly quipped: “Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not.” The Maxim gun was the name for the British machine gun.
If the British had been outnumbered 100 to 1 at this battle I believe the outcome would have been different. Technology and tactics can go far in ensuring victory even when you are vastly outnumbered. But as Napoleon so famously said: “Quantity has a quality all it’s own.” Technology and tactics can only get you so far.
South Korea will find itself in this situation in a few short generations. North Korea has nukes while the South does not. The North invests heavily in their military. I have no doubt most of this money is squandered but when you outnumber the enemy 100 to 1 I’m betting on the Kim dynasty to prevail.
If we do not find a solution to collapsing birth rates in developed, democratic, and capitalist nations we will ultimately lose the fight. I had such great hope for enlightenment ideas and ways of living. The last few hundred years have been a momentous time for the freedom and rights of the individual. But if we cannot sustain our numbers in peacetime then something about our system is rotten to the core.
My fellow free market economists: we fought the good fight, we had a good run, it has been an honor serving beside you. But perhaps the rugged individualism that I so vociferously espouse has always been doomed to fail. Humans are social animals after all. Perhaps Marx was right all along.
