The impetus behind Pronatalist.org came when one of our founders, Malcolm Collins, was living in South Korea as the director of Strategy at the nation’s top-rated (by government survey) early-stage VC fund. He was tasked with charting the future of the country in order to plan investments for his firm, but no matter how he parsed the data, it only said one thing: the Korean people were teetering on extinction. When he brought this up, the team’s response was: “That is common knowledge here; so, what?” When he pressed what the nation was doing to address this problem, he was redirected to another topic.

 Everyone seemed familiar with the severity of the issue, yet nobody discussed potential solutions. It could be that this problem is so daunting and complex that it feels impossible to even begin to contemplate measures that might be taken to address it. At their current birth rate, there will be six great grandchildren for every hundred Koreans. This is tantamount to a disease wiping out 94% of the population over the next century.

This is not sufficient grounds for giving up entirely. While Korea presents an extremist case, demographic collapse is seen all over the world. Even China’s best efforts to boost its national birth rate have failed to bring the population up to a sustainable rate.