South Korea is emblematic of East Asia’s well-documented coming demographic crisis. Not only has its birth rate been the world’s lowest for the past three years, it keeps getting worse. In 2021, its birth rate was a mere 0.81 child per woman—even lower than that of Japan, the world’s fastest-aging nation, where that same year the figure was 1.3 children per woman. By 2070, South Korea’s population of 52 million is projected to drop to 38 million.