The Impact of Population Implosions on Your Choice of an Entrepreneurial Base in Asia

Since the 1990s, Asia has been where it's at for economic growth, and where much of the immigrant smart fraction that's driven US GDP growth over the last thirty plus years, whether Chinese or Indian, has originated. But frankly it's not an easy continent in which to settle if you happen to be a non-Asian and intend to seek citizenship, rather than just permanent residency. Nor is the language barrier of learning a tonal language like Vietnamese for example, as easy for an American who wasn't raised speaking the language to overcome as say, learning Spanish or Portuguese, the two Iberian sister tongues which can open up opportunities across an entire continent.

Above video is @Indian_Bronson speaking at the 2023 Natalism Conference in Austin, Texas, where Kevin Dolan, better known by his X handle Bennett's Phylactery @extradeadjcb said, "The entire global financial system, the value of your money, and every asset you might buy with money is defined by leverage, which means its value depends on growth...every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a level that makes growth impossible to maintain. Which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles."

[A Tucker Carlson documentary: The End of Men -- linked here by the Eds]

On his podcast, Dolan says he was first alerted to the problem of demographic collapse by a member of the EXIT Group, which claims to have 171 members. Dolan came up with the idea for NatalCon after watching “The End of Men,” Tucker Carlson’s documentary about “collapsing testosterone levels” in the West. The global drop in sperm concentrations has indeed puzzled scientists for decades and is believed to be one of the factors that has contributed to the global downturn in birth rates. But NatalCon’s organizers and attendees seem more interested in combating social institutions — like corporate employment and the educational system set up to support it — that, in Dolan’s words, have suppressed fertility by being “hostile to life.”

Some of the current restrictions on being able to obtain citizenship in the wealthiest Asian countries, of course, may be eased within the lifetimes of Millennials, and likely will by the time GenZ hit middle age. But how many of us really want to wait that long, while our lives and the most important decisions we ever make to marry and continue our lineage pass us by? To put it most acutely for our high achiever readers: does the model of moving to a high performance, high pressure city like London in Europe, New York, Los Angeles or Miami in the US, or Singapore and Hong Kong in Asia still work for achieving life goals? And what if the partner you find there doesn't want to step back to not just the American, but the global suburbs? We'll talk about what would be more 'suburban' countries for relocation in a moment, as there are more pricey and perhaps overregulated suburban nations, and other countries that are much less regulated and Anglosphere approved and hence, lower cost.

Singaporean Baby Bust Blues

When professionals in the residencies by investment industry look at a preferred destinations for HNWIs and high performers aiming to achieve wealth through a start up, after Dubai, both Singapore and Hong Kong are often near the top of the list. This is especially true as both city-states have modified their regulations to welcome DeFi entrepreneurs. In 2024, HK updated its regs to better compete with Singapore for Asia-based Bitcoin Exchange Traded Funds as well as Virtual Asset Trading Platforms (VATPs). But Singapore and HK, as some of the most densely populated places on Earth, are also extremely low fertility sinks. It's well known to biologists that birth rates for animals when compressed into confined spaces sharply decrease, and the same is true for humans. Even if the city you're in happens to be one of the safest or cleanest in the world, without the homelessness and crime rates of a New York City or San Francisco. Because even with no crime or urban squalor, there are other anti-natal pressures, particularly those felt by status conscious women, with which even high societal IQs combined with decently pro-family policies cannot collectively cope.

Despite generous family leave policies compared to the US, the low Singaporean birth rate can be explained in part, due to women feeling the pressure of Confucian filial piety toward high longevity grandparents as well as their parents while raising a child. Who is more often than not, an only child, even without any one-child policy. Mainland China ditched their infamous one child policy years ago, but one child is often the pattern in Greater China and overseas ethnically Chinese countries like Singapore. The New Yorker a liberal US magazine reports in its February 25, 2025 issue:

In 1960, the tiny country of Singapore had a fertility rate of almost six. By 1985, it had been brought down to 1.6—a rate that threatened to roughly halve its population in two generations. As the economist Nicholas Eberstadt told me, “For two decades, the leaders of Singapore said, ‘Oh, uncontrolled fertility has terribly dangerous consequences, so the rate has to come down,’ and then, after a semicolon, without even catching their breath, said, ‘Wait, I mean go up.’ ” The nation’s leaders launched a promotional campaign: “Have-Three-or-More (if you can afford it).” Singaporeans were known to be good national sports, but, despite the catchiness of the slogan, they proved noncompliant.

So how does this impact your choice of Singapore as a home base in Asia?

Few locations in the world other than Dubai can compete with the number of daily flights to Singapore, and Singapore Airlines has top notch business class service. And Singaporeans are famously polite, with outstanding English and Mandarin-language schools. The billionaire investor Jim Rogers chose to raise his warm September days-of-life daughters there for that reason, and it's an excellent choice. After all, ESW's CEO vaults gold for his clients there. In these times of bad governance by warmongering theater kids in Europe and a potential build up to the Big One kicking off between the US and China in the Pacific, it's hard to find a more stable place that's equally prosperous.

However, if you are younger and looking to start a family, neither Singapore nor Hong Kong may be the best fit for your longer haul. Because if you're in an environment where your friends and your wife's friends aren't having kids, than chances are you are less likely to procreate as well. If having kids is important to you, then East Asia may not be the longer term solution, unless you're prepared to move to a more affordable Mainland city, and buy a 3 bedroom apartment. Or for the couples of more modest means who aspire to more hippie lifestyles, joining that co op in Bali.

Feeling the Social Media Pressures in Chinese Cyberpunk Cities

The greatest birth control device in history may prove not to be the condom or the Pill, but the smartphone. Social media anxiety, the constant pressure to be online, to compare oneself to other women--even women one will never actually meet--as well as cyber-hypergamy. There are so many successful couples who appear to have it all--wealth, travel and social media validation. And why can't your husband be like those Instagram husbands who have nothing else to do in life but film their wives?

Everything can be perfect--except for kids. They crimp the social media influencer and wannabe influencer style.

This author has seen this trend up close in the USA and it isn't pretty.

And in the absence of countervailing extended families, it may prove even more intense in Asia, where 'everything apps' like WeChat are more prevalent than in North America or Europe. (This is before we even discuss electromagnetic waves, which humans are likely to be surrounded by in densely populated cities compared to rural areas, possibly being a factor in plummeting global sperm counts for males). On the other hand, Chinese grandparents revere their grandkids, and the Chinese government is continuing to come up with more incentives for Chinese women (and for some, their laowai husbands) to procreate, so perhaps we are too bearish on having that first kid in Singapore, and then going for 3 kids or bust close to the in-laws in say, Jinan.

The Japanese and South Korean Depopulation Bombs

Japan and South Korea (more on the Japanese in a future post) in particular are feeling the pressure to admit more immigrants. As a small city state, Singapore has to be choosy about whom it lets in, and the path to citizenship for the foreign-born permanent resident is not easy. But it's a truism that immigrants while often more fecund than the natives, do not age any slower than your own people. As Michael Yon told us in an interview several months back, Japan is slowly letting in non-East Asian immigrants, particularly Kurds, but this is not a solution to the birth dearth in the Land of the Rising Sun. To quote The New Yorker from February 25, 2025 issue again:

From one nation to the next, the nightmare of too many descendants turned into the nightmare of too few. In 2007, when Japan’s total fertility rate hit 1.3, a conservative government minister referred to women as “birth-giving machines.” This didn’t go over particularly well with anyone, including his wife.

South Korea has the world's second most populous nation and its previous cultural hegemon in China just across the Yellow Sea, and its old rival the DPRK across the heavily mined DMZ. But the North Koreans themselves may decide the pastures of the Russian Far East are greener for actually being able to afford land and having children (more on the topic of North Koreans as Russia's ideal non-European immigrants, in a future ESW post). Better to be a welcomed minority in the Vladivostok suburbs than a mistrusted one in a cramped apartment in Seoul?

The global population is projected to grow for about another half century. Then it will contract. This is unprecedented. Almost nothing else can be said with any certainty. Here and there, however, are harbingers of potential futures. South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is the lowest rate of any nation in the world. It may be the lowest in recorded history. If that trajectory holds, each successive generation will be a third the size of its predecessor. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren. The country is an outlier, but it may not be one for long. As the Korean political analyst John Lee told me, “We are the canary in the coal mine.”

In Seoul, an endless, futuristic sprawl of Samsung- and LG-fabricated high-rises, an imminent shortage of people seems preposterous. The capital city’s metropolitan area, home to twenty-six million citizens, or about half of all South Koreans, is perhaps the most densely settled region in the industrialized world. When I visited, in November, I was advised to withdraw my phone from my pocket on the metro platform, because it would be impossible to do so once on board the train. Fuchsia metro seats are reserved for pregnant women. Those who aren’t yet showing are awarded special medallions as proof of gestation. A looping instructional video reminded passengers of the proper etiquette. Even amid the rush-hour crush, these seats were often left vacant. They seemed to represent less a practical consideration than an act of unanchored faith—like a place for Elijah at a Seder table.

Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary. Every Korean has heard that their population will ineluctably approach zero.

Cho Youngtae, a celebrity demographer at Seoul National University, said to me, “Ask people on the street, ‘What is the Korean total fertility rate?’ and they will know!” They often know to two decimal places. They have a celebrity demographer.

Charlie Munger: “Don’t be surprised when you lose to people like this…”

Grindset Has Its Place, But It Should Not Become an Idol

In the Jewish and Christian traditions, God gave man six days a week to labor and one day of rest, the Sabbath. Orthodox Jews in particular are encouraged to have marital relations on Shabbos. Islam has its mandatory days of rest, including an often relaxed nocturnal culture when less pressed couples retire after the iftar meals this time of year during Ramadan, which more often than not, results in babies born nine months later. So it's ironic that the most Christianized nation in Asia, South Korea, has the lowest birth rate. And it's doubly ironic that Charlie Munger, the famous Republican partner to the Democrat Warren Buffet, idealizes the Korean grindset in the above quote, without marking the trade offs--all that grinding with tutors and flute practice leaves less time for the parents baby making. Maybe in the long run, your daughter would be better off with a surprise little sister Mom had at age 41 rather than with a higher SAT score toward admission to Harvard?

Reality of course, does not conform to stereotypes, and we wouldn't want the above to be misunderstood. The richest and most definitely the happiest Asian Americans we know didn't go to Yale. But if your longer term goal is a move to the suburbs, can you consider the suburbs of the world, including the ones that while nice, might be a bit on the globally remote or pricey side--Australia comes to mind? And let's not even discuss Canada and the real estate squeeze of joining the 85% of that country's population that lives within an hour and a half of the US border.

Think of Geoarbitrage How You Think When Choosing a Neighborhood to Raise Kids

One of the most successful arbitrages in history, is the one the settlers of America made, when they left the relative comfort and prestige of England and settled in a new land. They traded social prestige and in some more rare cases wealth for opportunity. High IQ achievers, particularly Asian-American doctors and non-contrarian lawyers, are often prone to accepting what their parents and society tells them, about what's "safe" and what isn't. Not so subtly, it's implied there's the high risk that if you move somewhere else, you will lose your existing friends and social networks, while failing to make new ones at your destination. No matter how sigma male or lean six sigma, a human being is still a social creature, created with a spark of the divine for fellowship in this life, as well as in the Heavenly Kingdom. And deep down, hardly anyone really likes disappointing their parents.

But before accepting the tried and seemingly true migration paths, and following the crowd to Spain or Canada because you want to get the hell away from the BadOrangeMan in the White House, it may be worth looking into countries that have not been socially esteemed across the Collective West. If you want to go well off the beaten path, think about Paraguay or even, the widely demonized Russian Federation, which in our opinion, is a few years away from postwar baby and building boom, especially across its Black Sea littoral and in the China (Blagoveshchensk) and Korea (Vladivostok) facing Russian Far East. If the goal remains to have more kids, but stick closer to the extended family by being not too far of a flight away, then look into Mexico. And we can help with that.

As old Bob Dylan sang:

And don't speak too soon

For the wheel's still in spin

And there's no tellin' who

That it's namin'

For the loser now

Will be later to win

For the times they are a-changin'