I try to update the most interesting population pyramids for Wikipedia each year. South Korea certainly is one of my favorites.
Why would anyone be a surplus at 80!
Fun fact… I was born in the late 70s. When I went to middle school there, my grade alone had 14 homerooms with about 55 students each. The gender ratio was so unequal that one of those was all-boys.
Those poor bastards.
They got too many grannies bro 🤦 😭
They wish it was a pyramid…
It’s called an age structure diagram. And this is pretty crazy. It’s totally upside down.
Birth rate 0.72 (replacement is 2)
[deleted]
Those lucky ass 90 year old men
You can still see the effects of the Korean War in that steeps decline from 70+. Over a million South Koreans died
What would cause a male surplus in the younger ages? We know men die earlier but why would there be less women earlier?
So many damn male surplus in the 30s is pretty scary. The Korean government is actually paying them to find wives in foreign countries like South East Asia. You’d start to wonder whether the Kpop and Kdramas are a government’s attempt to try to attract foreign women for these surplus men.
You’re also seeing a huge gender divide and the increase of incels.
It’s a good thing birth rates are falling. AI is going to replace most of the jobs anyway and the planet can’t support 8 billion people.
Can you imagine being a South Korean kid? There are 51 million people there, but only about 3 million under the age of ten. In a couple of decades time when those kids are in the workforce, for every person working there might be 5 people needing aged care services, so there won’t be enough tax dollars to pay for it.
There are two possibilities:
* Encourage young people to immigrate to South Korea, so there are more taxpayers to pay for everything. This will have to come from the Third World, where the majority of the world’s young people will come from. Unfortunately, South Korea won’t get enough people to do this, so everyone will remain poor, except there will be massive racism due to the resentment.
* Don’t encourage young people to immigrate to South Korea, and just leave it up to the few working people left to pay for aged care. Hopefully there will be technological solutions to make this cheaper (it’s impossibly expensive now). But it will lead to massive resentment based on ageism.
Either way, we’re going to have huge amounts of politics of resentment. It usually leads to dictatorships.
And the worst part is that all OECD countries have a population pyramid that looks like this.
What causes the waves in the ages?
South korea has some of the lowest levels of immigration in the world.
So south Korea do you open your country up to more immigration or do you force women to have more children to the most awful men in the modern world or just completely collapse?
Not judging but there’s clearly a right answer and a wrong answer here.
Wow, that’s like 4 times as many 55 year olds as 1 year olds. That’s going to be nuts in ~20 years.
lmfao it rly is that bad huh
Even if they instantly go to the replacement rate of 2.1 tomorrow it’ll still be too late
Koreans seem to be wonderful and highly intelligent people. Within a lifespan of just one generation, they transformed their country from a third world quasi-feudal state into a flourishing global economy. In 1964 Korean GDP per capita was still lower than average for recently liberated African post colonial countries. Today they are almost 20 times richer. They had a longest double digit GDP growth ever recorded, almost 3 decades in a row.
So sad to see their society will soon face a total demographic collapse. World will lose so many bright minds, great ideas and scientific breakthroughs.
Probably somewhere along the way of their economic progress they forgot to establish institutions and social mechanisms friendly to mothers and families with kids. Focusing mainly on constant growth. China seems to face similar fate in next few years.
That’s, really not good, like really really not good.
![South Korea Population Pyramid 2024 [OC]](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/74i9wcxau5yf1-1920x1024.png)
21 comments
**Source:** [Statistics Korea](https://kosis.kr/statisticsList/statisticsListIndex.do?parentId=A.1&vwcd=MT_ZTITLE&menuId=M_01_01)
**Tool:** Excel
I try to update the most interesting population pyramids for Wikipedia each year. South Korea certainly is one of my favorites.
Why would anyone be a surplus at 80!
Fun fact… I was born in the late 70s. When I went to middle school there, my grade alone had 14 homerooms with about 55 students each. The gender ratio was so unequal that one of those was all-boys.
Those poor bastards.
They got too many grannies bro 🤦 😭
They wish it was a pyramid…
It’s called an age structure diagram. And this is pretty crazy. It’s totally upside down.
Birth rate 0.72 (replacement is 2)
[deleted]
Those lucky ass 90 year old men
You can still see the effects of the Korean War in that steeps decline from 70+. Over a million South Koreans died
What would cause a male surplus in the younger ages? We know men die earlier but why would there be less women earlier?
So many damn male surplus in the 30s is pretty scary. The Korean government is actually paying them to find wives in foreign countries like South East Asia. You’d start to wonder whether the Kpop and Kdramas are a government’s attempt to try to attract foreign women for these surplus men.
You’re also seeing a huge gender divide and the increase of incels.
It’s a good thing birth rates are falling. AI is going to replace most of the jobs anyway and the planet can’t support 8 billion people.
Can you imagine being a South Korean kid? There are 51 million people there, but only about 3 million under the age of ten. In a couple of decades time when those kids are in the workforce, for every person working there might be 5 people needing aged care services, so there won’t be enough tax dollars to pay for it.
There are two possibilities:
* Encourage young people to immigrate to South Korea, so there are more taxpayers to pay for everything. This will have to come from the Third World, where the majority of the world’s young people will come from. Unfortunately, South Korea won’t get enough people to do this, so everyone will remain poor, except there will be massive racism due to the resentment.
* Don’t encourage young people to immigrate to South Korea, and just leave it up to the few working people left to pay for aged care. Hopefully there will be technological solutions to make this cheaper (it’s impossibly expensive now). But it will lead to massive resentment based on ageism.
Either way, we’re going to have huge amounts of politics of resentment. It usually leads to dictatorships.
And the worst part is that all OECD countries have a population pyramid that looks like this.
What causes the waves in the ages?
South korea has some of the lowest levels of immigration in the world.
So south Korea do you open your country up to more immigration or do you force women to have more children to the most awful men in the modern world or just completely collapse?
Not judging but there’s clearly a right answer and a wrong answer here.
Wow, that’s like 4 times as many 55 year olds as 1 year olds. That’s going to be nuts in ~20 years.
lmfao it rly is that bad huh
Even if they instantly go to the replacement rate of 2.1 tomorrow it’ll still be too late
Koreans seem to be wonderful and highly intelligent people. Within a lifespan of just one generation, they transformed their country from a third world quasi-feudal state into a flourishing global economy. In 1964 Korean GDP per capita was still lower than average for recently liberated African post colonial countries. Today they are almost 20 times richer. They had a longest double digit GDP growth ever recorded, almost 3 decades in a row.
So sad to see their society will soon face a total demographic collapse. World will lose so many bright minds, great ideas and scientific breakthroughs.
Probably somewhere along the way of their economic progress they forgot to establish institutions and social mechanisms friendly to mothers and families with kids. Focusing mainly on constant growth. China seems to face similar fate in next few years.
That’s, really not good, like really really not good.
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