Archive for the ‘population’ Category
South Korea moves leftward, with problems
I’ve avoided the debacle of the US Presidency since their election, and I’m happy to continue doing so, though I note that United Staters are still not blaming their federal system for the mess, without noting that other democratic systems, such as here in Australia, in other Westminster-based systems, and in most Western European nations, aren’t going to be subjected to “I alone can fugg it” types, due to having more effective checks and balances, leading to more collective and open administrations.
The only other democratic country that is currently having US-style problems is South Korea, and we should all know why. The answer is screamingly obvious to me. I suppose it’s because I’m so smart. Having a system in which the people vote every few years for one potential Dear Leader against another is simply idiotic – especially when you have as big a rich-poor gap and as large a population of disillusioned, left-behind and superhero-loving types as the US. But in general it’s a political system that attracts ambitious libertarian wannabe heroes more than team players.
So I’d like to look at the South Korean situation, because – it’s not the USA, and I know very little about South Korean politics other than it was surely a political system guided by the US after the Korean war – and that straight away spells trouble, but at least it’s, for me, ‘exotic’ Korean trouble rather than stale old MAGA trouble.
So here’s what the Qatar embassy in Seoul (well, why not?) says about the Republic of Korea’s political system:
The System of government in Korea is a pluralistic, democratic and presidential system, the president is elected by popular vote every five years, for one term only. The President appoints the Prime Minister and has the right to release him [sic] from his duties.
The parliament consists of 299 members, about 80% of its members are elected directly, others are elected based on a proportional representation system. Despite the fact that the presidential system is prevailing now, yet there is a call to change it to a parliamentary system in order to reduce the absolute power of the president, and to grant the rights of appointing and removing of prime minister to the parliament.
So, before going into South Korea’s political system, I should briefly address all the doom and gloom stuff about South Korea and Japan’s negative population growth. These dire predictions are based on the future being the same as the past, which is never ever ever ever ever ever the case. Ever. These two countries will need to start worrying if and when their GDP starts heading south. That’s when boosting internal reproduction rates and opening these countries to more immigration will have to be a feature of their economic policies. End of story.
Anyway, note that South Korea, which became democratic only in 1987, has both a directly elected President, like the US system, but with 5-year terms and no possibility of re-election, and a Prime Minister, appointed by the President, which sounds something like the French system (described as ‘semi-presidential’). France also has a presidential term of 5 years, but she can be re-elected for a second term.
The presidential election system also differs from that of the US in that more than two people can stand, just as many people can stand for a local electorate in Australia, with the difference that it isn’t a preferential system. Had this been the case, it’s quite possible that the leftist candidate and new President, Lee Jae-myung, who won the race decisively on first preferences, would have lost or barely scraped in, as the next biggest vote-winners were from the political Right. Lee is also, to put it mildly, a controversial figure with a murky history. The Guardian puts it this way:
Lee, who headed the opposition-led campaign to oust Yoon, is a highly divisive figure in South Korean politics. He faces criminal trials including charges of bribery and alleged involvement in a property development scandal. Courts agreed to postpone further hearings of continuing trials until after the election, allowing him to contest the presidency while the cases remained unresolved. Lee denies all charges, describing them as politically motivated persecution.
Others have gone further in their accusations or insinuations, but it seems their video has been deleted! In any case, I suspect the drama around South Korean Presidents – Lee survived an assassination attempt quite recently – will continue for some time yet. This of course is a shame as South Korea faces many problems, with declining growth and having to accommodate two economic giants, China and the USA, both bullying in different ways. And then there’s those bribery charges, etc. The next few months will be interesting…
References
https://seoul.embassy.qa/en/republic-of-korea/political-system
childbirth, population, bonobos
A BBC pic from June 2021. This woman supposedly gave birth to ten, five by caesarian section, a new world record apparently. But it was all faked, it seems.
Given the craziness of that outlier nation of the WEIRD world, the USA, with its religious anti-intellectualism (in some states) and those states’ consequent ‘every sperm is sacred’ approach to abortion, I’m taken back to my childhood reading of the Guiness Book of Records, an extremely popular work published annually from 1955. My edition would’ve been from the 70s, but today’s internet may have rendered the collection virtually obsolete, methinks. Anyway, I recall being fascinated by the most grotesque facts, including – of course – the woman who gave birth to the most children. I don’t recall the number in my edition, but presumably this was the woman, and the number:
The greatest officially recorded number of children born to one mother is 69, to the wife of Feodor Vassilyev (b. 1707–c.1782), a peasant from Shuya, Russia. In 27 confinements she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets. Although this seems to be a statistically unlikely story, numerous contemporaneous sources exist which suggest that it is true. The case was reported to Moscow by the Monastery of Nikolsk on 27 February 1782, which had recorded every birth.
My heart goes out to this woman, especially considering that, after all this enormous suffering, she isn’t even given her own name. Perhaps they didn’t bother giving names to women in Russia in them days – though to be fair, Catherine II, aka the Great, was Empress at the time.
Anyway, I remain extremely skeptical that any woman (okay, her name was Valentina), never mind her children, would survive such trauma (are the dates given above those of Feodor or his victim? – it’s unclear), and as for the husband, who went on to have a second wife (at the same time??!!) who gave birth to 18 kids via 8 confinements, what can be said…?
Happy to be a skeptic. Anyway, such records, fact or fiction, are unlikely to be repeated, partly because no woman, even in the most ultra-patriarchal remnants of the world, would put up with being so put-upon. As for kids these days, we’re learning to put quality before quantity methinks. Remember The population bomb? Apparently, this and other doomsday tracts of the late 60s and early 70s led to significant pressure for men and women to be sterilised in India in the following decade or so, as well as China’s One Child policy. But Ehrlich’s doomsday scenario, which he later described as a warning rather than a prediction, never eventuated, though it may have had some small influence on humanity’s slowing growth rate. My own view, when I consider the negative population growth of South Korea and Japan, and Australia’s fairly stable population in recent times, is that this is hardly a bad thing. If countries want to boost their populations, there’s always immigration, which, IMHO, has been a massive boon here in Oz. If nations prefer to be insular, along with negative growth, that’s surely their problem. I’m sure they’ll manage.
In any case, in the WEIRD world, especially among the relatively well-off, we’re having fewer children. Contraception and other resources are helping us to plan our families, if we’re making them.
Anyway, let’s forget about humans for a mo, and focus on a much more interesting species – bonobos:
Females bear one infant every five years or so with a gestation period of around eight months. One fascinating and unique behaviour recorded in bonobos happens during birth: other females have been known to gather around the pregnant bonobo and assist in the birth, similar to human midwives.
Bonobos’ low birth-rate is one reason they’re struggling as a species, so breeding in captivity, or in enclosed spaces within their own native regions, has become important. Another reason they’re struggling, though, is the same reason their non-human primate relatives are struggling. The behaviour of humans. Bonobo numbers are very hard to calculate, but here’s how Wikipedia puts it:
Conservation status. The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List classifies bonobos as an endangered species, with conservative population estimates ranging from 29,500 to 50,000 individuals.
Let’s say 40,000 bonobos. The World Population Clock currently puts the human population at just under 8.2 billion. That means we outnumber bonobos by about 205,000 to one. We’re crowding out so many other primates, not to mention wild mammals in general, and even insects. But considering how excellent an example bonobos set, not only at childbirth, but during child-rearing, feeding time, the whole shebang of collective behaviour, all ultimately resulting from females taking power, we should be doing more than just safeguarding them, we should be taking note of this bonobo sisterhood at a time of unprecedented, and largely man-made, global crisis.
References
Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 1968
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/book-incited-worldwide-fear-overpopulation-180967499/