Day: February 6, 2024

The ever awesome Alice Evans shared a series of charts over on Twitter recently, and it is hard to not stare at them for hours on end with a vague sense of foreboding and disquiet:

Only 3% of South Koreans said that family was a major source of meaning.

No wonder their birth rate is so low!!

I think part of this is that over the 20th century they worked insanely long hours, in order to match western productivity, and this may have broken family bonds. pic.twitter.com/ZmWKFcKucF

— Alice Evans (@_alice_evans) February 6, 2024

3%?

I don’t want to share spoilers over here, that Twitter thread deserves to be read in its entirety, and please do take the time to do so.

1. You can’t help but think about this question as an Indian: what about India? Alas, it seems this report is for seventeen advanced economies, and India ain’t among ’em.
2. But still, what might the number look like for India?
3. What might it look like split by income? By education? By gender? By an urban rural split? By religion? What about the intersection sets of some or all of these categories?
4. Whatever these numbers look like at a point in time isn’t half as interesting as asking how these change over time for each of the “cuts” in Q.3
5. How can one not be worried looking at these numbers and then thinking about our future?

Here’s the report in full. Here is a nice little interactive tool. If you are a young undergraduate student wondering what to do in the summer this year…