A hall of 100 seats

From 95 seats to 23

Let’s seat every baby born in one year in a single hall. One dot is 10,000 babies, so the babies born in 1970 fill about 95 seats. Year by year, fewer babies take a seat. The babies born in 2023 fill only about 23.

Why?When fewer babies are born, 20 to 30 years later there are also fewer workers and fewer new parents.

Go furtherThe chart shows babies born that year; the dots in the hall are the people aged 0 on July 1 of that year, so the two can differ a little. Both are UN World Population Prospects 2024 estimates, which differ slightly from the births registered by Statistics Korea.