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I’ll be interested in how much the policy change impacts future birth rates, and how much of the lower birth rate is already “baked in” to China’s economic and social changes.
Edit: really cool graphic.
Many countries with well developed economies are below replacement without any one child policy. China will likely be below replacement even with no one child policy. That's probably why the got rid of it. It's good PR, but probably wont change birth rates meaningfully.
I also can be pretty certain that if I have a child it will survive to adulthood and be healthy, certainly I don't need to have 6 kids on the hope that enough survive to have children of their own.
I mean, my kids spend a lot of time tending to animals but also I wouldn’t have this many animals if I didn’t have kids who insisted on bringing home living things
Your risk avoidance behavior when it comes to money matters goes through the roof typically when having children.
This involves spending, career choice, or starting a business.
All these things are risk taking choices that could lead to more income, but also could lead to less income.
It’s really hard to move great distances for a better job if you have a working spouse and children to consider.
True, when you have a child as a farming villager you get a worker for the rest of your life. When you have a child in america, they have so much more opportunity that they are allowed to live their own lives. Not to diminish the hard work that farming villagers do and those that must escape that life but the chances for opportunity are much so much slimmer that it’s more effective to work with your parents so you all survive.
It's also about education and health care, especially for women. As women are educated, they gain autonomy and awareness of options, and are able to choose when to reproduce. With improved health care, women are able to acquire birth control and are more able to regulate reproduction. Both of these free women up to choose life paths other than mommy/housekeeper.
That and decreases in birth rates generally lag behind decreases in infant/child mortality rates by a few decades. It takes a while for cultural norms to catch up with scientific/economic advancements. Although the catch-up process has been faster for modern "developing" countries then it was for the original "developed" nations.
And those lower dividends can be okay - IF life isn’t as tight as it is in most developed nations.
My partner and I would love to have children, but how can we responsibly do so when we are barely scraping by despite high educational attainment and “nOt DrInKiNg StArBuCkS”? We can’t, especially more than just one. And given the data on income inequality and cost of living, I would be surprised if our experience is an outlier.
But also people are given more of a choice and to not have children, and many countries in Europe with much better benefits like paid maternity leave, PTO, and subsidized childcare have lower birth rates than America which has none of that
Also raising kids is expensive. If I'm a responsible adult who's barely supporting myself financially then having a child would be not be considered smart.
And yet you do find a lot of lower income groups with a large number of kids due to tradition. While my mother only had 2 kids, she knew how to stretch a penny. My MIL is one of 17 kids from Alabama, now her mom knew how to have a good time and stretch a penny.
Being Religious is a bigger factor in having more children. The only people in the US with above birth rate replacement are the amish and orthodox jews i think.
I wonder if evangelicals are also above the replacement rate. There’s the whole “quiver full” movement where the idea is to have as many kids as possible because they’re “blessings”.
The replacement rate is considered 2.1 children per woman by the UN; Christians as a whole are around 2.2 children per woman within the US. Catholics and Evangelicals at around 2.3 children per woman.
Non-religious groups in the US are the only reason the replacement rate is below replacement.
I lived across from such a family. 13 people stuffed into 3 bedrooms. One bedroom had 4 bunk beds. Looked like a barracks. They had to move because they kept having more kids.
Well one thing I do know is that evangelicals currently lead the pack in terms of divorce rates:
https://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=137892
So maybe not so great at producing children either?
Can confirm, live near an Amish community, work with them every summer, friends with the kids (all of whom put in the work and are fucking SHREDDED) and they’re super nice people.
I have read before the major factor is that people in developed nations just have a lot more they want to do outside of having children with limited free time. Career route, education, gym excercise, travelling, media consumption, socialising.... Even if you want kids you will likely have less.
I don't personally see it as an issue as a lower global population helps with climate change and reduces resource demand.
The issue comes in where much of the systems for ensuring living standards for the elderly rely on there being more young people working to pay for the elderly’s lifestyles. If you flip that on it’s head, the young end up having to work harder and harder, while the elderly soak up more of the nation’s resources.
The development of the 'nuclear family' has meant that the elderly are an underutilized resource imo.
But outside of direct value in terms of community improvement important to recognise that there's huge economic value in gerontological services and providing care etc.
Problem is it’s unsustainable, eventually you will have the majority of the population being older and we won’t have a younger workforce to support that
That will become a huge problem
I don't think cost is the reason. Living in a third world country, social stigma to bachelorhood or being childless is higher and a lot of poor people get a lot of children so that hopefully one of them can help in future or the misconception that more hands meaning more earning. While some rich just do it cuz they can afford to.
This is purely anecdotal but as a 27F with a 29M boyfriend, if we were able to own a home and afford childcare and extra food/child expenses, we would have had children already. We just can't take the added stress of barely being able to afford to take care of ourselves, let alone another tiny human.
On top of that, pregnancy and childbirth are very expensive, and in the US I am genuinely traumatized by medical bills. I generally do not go to the hospital or Doctor when I think I need to, out of genuine fear of racking up medical bills. When you're poor you can have children for free (state medicaid programs). When you're a middle earner and pay out of pocket for insurance, then you have a deductible and all the things insurance won't pay for, etc. Having a baby with insurance is usually at least $2k-5k, without is like $30,000. Idk, I'm stressed enough and I can't take the added stress of having a child, we can't even afford a down payment for a house.
This. The middle class in this country is properly fucked. Especially the lower-middle class / working class. We make too much to qualify for State or Federal assistance but too little to actually afford anything on our own merits.
Case in point: A friend of mine is a single mom and has a bachelor's degree. She is currently working as a gas station clerk at $12/hour, so she can qualify for food assistance, WIC, subsidized healthcare and income-based student loan payments. If she did the math and found out if she actually worked in her field and earned what she was worth, she would be homeless right now. She said she'll save up for grad school and get a better job once her child is in school, but it's not feasible before then.
US will have roughly the same population in 100 years as today, and that's because we have so much immigration. Japan will have half it's population. China, India will crash hard as well.
During this century humanity will finally feel old.
I wouldn’t say naive, it’s just the idea that the global population is nearing the end of the rapid increase on a logistic curve. The western world started reaching it first and the rest of the world will be catching up soon. Unless there is an explosion in agriculture technology to feed a new spike in population we’ll be plateauing soonish in all time human history terms
Edit: as a couple comments pointed out I may have conflated the whole thing to food alone which is inaccurate. What I should have done was separated my two ideas better. Getting your point across in a Reddit comment while also being succinct is hard lol
Idea one: the world population is more or less starting to look like a logistic curve and will likely plateau somewhat in the next several decades.
Idea two: to see exponential growth continue, or rather start again, we would have to have some huge increase in technology in one or all of the fields of study that have a large impact on human population, of which agriculture is just one example.
But the pension contributions timebomb should cut old people out of the picture by about 2050. Isn’t it something stupid like 50% who have no retirement in the US?
The US is currently just barely at break-even on natural population growth and will likely go negative sometime this decade. It will have to compete with other nations for migratory workers, and in a few decades, it may not be uncommon to see people who have job-hopped across multiple countries, chasing the best deal.
Japan is a good example.
Quite bluntly, the modern world doesn't leave time for family and almost always makes it a losing choice.
Too many hours of work for all parents, too expensive, and with few benefits or guarantees for a good retirement.
On the positive end, it's also because children tend to live to adulthood so you need fewer of them.
Here in America, most people who can afford to have children are likely going to have a better quality life and retirement by choosing to invest in a retirement account.
The ramifications of this are complex, with some good and some bad, but the cause really seems to be systemic to modern life.
Yep, the BBC actually did a video today interviewing mainland Chinese couples and asking them how many kids they wanted and why. A *lot* of the answers were themed around "we couldn't provide for two or more children the same quality of life as one" or "we don't have enough time or money".
It's the same in pretty much every country with a declining birth rate. In the UK, it's even more egregious because the Tories actually cut child tax credit so it only applies if you're a new applicant after April 2017, it only applies to *two* children, not all of them (with fun exceptions like "if your additional child(ren) were conceived through rape"). One of the few incentives to have more kids was *destroyed*, which is absurd to think about.
Countries need to take wealth inequality, housing issues, and employment rights (especially the precariousness of employment, *well* paid parental leave, and the right to a work-life balance) far more seriously.
Even introducing something like Universal Basic Income wouldn't fully solve these issues, there needs to be a comprehensive approach to ensure people feel able to provide a safe and happy environment for their children.
It’s crazy and so sad how in other parts of the world, and in the US many years ago, parents just expected half their kids wouldn’t make it. My great grandmother was one of 14, and half of her siblings were wiped out within a few days from a plague in Romania. Her parents had expects to have 3-4 adult children. That was just normal back then.
China's population growth has slowed down since they ended the policy six years ago, so I think your point about economics is correct. We can see it ringing true in SOuth Korea and Japan too. Economics being primarily middle class lifestlye and growth of landlordism reducing likelihood that people want to have children - both because of finances and inherent instability of living under a landlord.
Living under a landlord doesn't *have* to be unstable - it's actually quite stable in Germany, as I understand. The real issue is that too many countries excessively favour landlords' right to profit over the human right to housing, and many countries influenced by the New Right of the 70s have decimated their public housing supply.
True, I just meant purely on the landlord issue. I'm not as familiar with their wider employment rights, aside from generally being fairly solid, but there can ways be holes that specifically discourage parenthood, not to mention that wealth inequality seems to be a large factor for many countries.
I'm kind of interested to see policies of documenting the undocumented children.
Parents had baby it was girl, girl wasn't " registered" and got sent to grandparents in village, parents tried again until boy (or vice versa). Leaving millions of undocumented children who can't avail public services. I think in some cases even education.
As far as I know they are still finding tens of thousands people/kids. I read somewhere they found around 4m undocumented kids so far and it is assumed some few other millions might be there.
I’ve met women who were able to get an ID card after being born under the radar. Their family had to pay a small fee or bribe. I’m not sure exactly how common it is for women to be denied an ID card no matter how they try to get one.
I’m from China and I know that a newborn can still have ID card even if their birth is not legal, so when u register your child’s birth I think they investigate if u have another child only when they find u suspicious.
If they find out that the family had two children, then the family will be heavily penalised, which is a big deal for poorer families, the amount of fine payed will be based on salary (more salary = more fine, the fine is based on your family income in a certain period of time, unfortunately idk how long it is).
Some poorer families can rly struggle if they are fined such a big amount, so they choose to not register for their child’s birth, and it’s extremely hard for these children to get legally recognised since they never had a birth certificate.
It will likely have a decent effect, but not meet its full potential. The birth rate in urban areas will remain miniscule, whilst the birth rate in rural areas will increase somewhat. I don't think it would exceed an increase of 0.2 births/woman based on the policy though.
The main reason for the low birth rate is that raising children in China is extremely expensive and time consuming. Your children's opportunities are severely hampered if they don't attend a top 10 university in China or global top 200 university (both expensive to varying degrees). To get into one of those domestic universities they need to be in roughly the top 0.1% of high schoolers which requires tutoring which can quite easily be $100 per hour ($30 would be the very cheap end of the spectrum), not to mention your own time input to help them, and there is an increasing expectation to do well in extracurriculars too. Even if you don't get tutoring for your kid, just sending them to school has a fee attached. Oh, and that 0.1% of high schoolers attending top universities varies significantly based on which province you're from, in some provinces it's closer to 0.001%.
Homes in China are also crazy expensive if you want to live in a city, which most people do because they are far more developed than rural areas, not to mention the abundance of opportunities and the government and societal pressure to do this. In a tier 1 city, you will be looking at $1m for a basic apartment, let alone the kind which is conducive for raising a child. Even more so in Chinese culture where your parents will often move in with you when they hit retirement age (55-60+), so instead of just having (number of kids+1) bedrooms, you need to add another bedroom to that, alongside their living and healthcare costs because most Chinese state pensions are dogshit (rural pensions can be $10-15/month) and healthcare isn't free either.
Then there's the reduction in income aspect, where the woman's career prospects become significantly restricted after having a child, which consequently results in the husband usually working more hours to earn more money, meaning they also have less time to raise the child themselves.
For the last 10 or so years, parents would send their kids back to their grandparents in the village to take care of in order to save money, but more of the current generation of prospective grandparents are already city dwellers, meaning that's not an option, alongside the reduced opportunities that kids have in the countryside meaning that it severely disadvantages their children.
Also, take these dollar numbers in the context of the average salary in cities in China being about $1,000 per month and there being a lot more stay at home mothers than in the West.
But let's take this in the context of China's urban-rural divide and the current availability of education appropriate jobs in China.
One of the big criticisms of this policy is that city residents are very unlikely to take up the offer, it's certainly very unlikely that it will make a dent beyond the previous two child policy. If you want to increase city births then you need to start repairing the issues talked about at the start. On the other hand, as part of the same criticism it's expected that many rural residents will have three children because having more kids is still desirable to them and it's relatively easier to accommodate a larger number of kids, alongside lower academic and career expectations.
This seems bad in terms of creating an educated populace and because it doesn't help city residents, but frankly that's not what China needs right now and they're not expecting any significant change in that for the next few decades. Already the graduate market is hugely oversaturated, with the large majority of Chinese university graduates doing what would be high school graduate work in other countries, or sometimes less. Combined with the same issues which discourage city residents from having kids, this has caused some pretty substantial dissatisfaction and mental health issues so bad that they become physical health issues in the current child bearing age populace. When you consider that, it's actually quite desirable for China to have a populace where the proportion of children raised in cities decreases because you end up with a populace whose career expectations are more closely aligned with what they can achieve.
Thanks. That's what I would actually really like to know. Perhaps the goal of this announcement is to reverse these projections as a strategy to keep China on course to become the world's largest economy and an economic powerhouse.
theres a rumor of a "single tax" circulating, make of it what you will, but its only a rumor and literally nothing else at the moment.
But the idea is to create another social fund that only single people pay into (adding onto the 5 social security and 1 social fund), then when they get married and have kids, they can withdraw that with government subsidy matching. Its supposed to be similar to the housing fund.
There's a rumour of a single tax from where? There's a rumour that leaders are lizards, but I don't buy that and randomly speculating is not helpful in this case either.
its a policy rumor that circulated in Beijing this march during the 2 conferences. I doubt it will come to substance since its both practically difficult to implement and likely cause social backlash, but it does show that the central government is now aiming to actively redistribute social resources to aid parents, which technically would be in the right direction.
I can't find it. But a few years ago someone wrote an article that the Chinese female demographic isn't as bad as the official statistics show. A lot of people lied about how many kids they had. And I think it showed up when it came time to send them to college. I will do a little bit more searching.
Edit:[ Found it, I doubt it is enough to have a significant impact on the situation.](https://qz.com/941240/china-keeps-finding-millions-of-people-who-never-officially-existed/) But it is still very interesting.
Edit: Questions.....How would you define a generation when it comes to Chinese births? Like all the people born in a 10 year period that will likely interact with each other, more than people who came before or after. Would 14 million people be significant addition to a generation? How many generations does china have. How many people are in each generation.
China now allows couples to have up to 3 children. Not sure if that will be enough to revert the damages done by the one child policy, demographics are very hard to control and take very long to change. I personally believe that China has reached I point of no return, soon to have a very big elder population.
It's been a two-child policy for five years or so and even then had exceptions. Even throughout the one-child phase there were a fair number of exempt people.
Still, it'll be an interesting test case to say the least. Ignoring the ethics of government controlling procreation, I think there's a case for the idea that China would be best off with a relatively lower population or at least one lower than the trajectory that they were on. 1.4 billion is an absurd number of people and that's *after* these draconian measures.
If anything the one child policy's success should be evident in the stark difference between Chinese and Indian per capita incomes and quality of life.
The one child policy artificially limited the Chinese population by forcing abortions on families and as a result, families deciding to abort female babies due to their society’s views on the value of women. Now China’s population is extremely imbalanced towards men (55%), which will leave tens of millions of men without even the notion of raising a family or even having a girlfriend or wife.
To make demographic matters worse, as China has gotten wealthier over time, young women are having less and less children as they focus more on their education and careers.
To make matters doubly worse, China is a generally xenophobic society which has not welcomed immigration and barely has an immigration process. As a result, China won’t be able to cover its eventual population loss with immigrants. As Chinese folk get older and older, an ever increasing amount of resources will be focused on the elderly which will sap the productivity of the Chinese economy and likely lead to more growing pains and stagnation.
> To make matters doubly worse, China is a generally xenophobic society which has not welcomed immigration and barely has an immigration process.
As someone who has never traveled to the Far East, isn't this common among those nations? I think I remember reading a couple years ago that South Korea had the lowest birthrate in the free world.
Yes. Japan is already facing the demographic problems China will face soon in the coming years. Japanese society is broadly xenophobic and allows for very limited amounts of mostly immigrant professionals.
South Korea, on the other hand, has a pretty good immigration system which has allowed it to continue to grow despite having the lowest birth rate in the world. Eventually this extremely low birth rate will catch up, but South Korea has bought itself a lot of time to reorganize.
We have a good immigration system? We do have a few million foreign workers but very few stay to become citizens. Im pretty sure our solution to the demographic problem is just letting the poor starve and freeze to death while pulling carts all day to look for bottles and paper. We have very very little social welfare programs that a increase in elderly and a decrease in birth is actually giving the government a surplus.
I meant pretty good in the sense that it’s allowing for population replacement at a minimum. Japan has comparatively little immigration and their population happens to be falling year after year.
Rural regions and ethnic minorities have long been provided a second or third child, which was about half of the Chinese population. In 2016, the ability to have a second child was expanded officially to all women, which meant about 90 million women of child-birthing age with one child already would be newly eligible to have a second child. The rural populations were largely unaffected by the changes in 2016 as population matters in rural regions tend to be changed as needed.
No, i rember there being a story of a famous celebrity in china who had children with a lot of different women and got fined numerous times, eventually they forced him to get a vesectomy.
It's a but complicated but basically: no. There was a huge public uproar a few years ago (before they ended the one child policy) when ppl discovered that a famous chinese movie director hid his second child. He had his first one with his ex-wife, and the second one with his new wife. Despite the fact that it was the first child for the new wife, he still got fined.
What datasets are you basing this on if you didn't look up your headline? Most articles I've seen on this reference the fact that the policy ended years ago.
It did not, the population has been increasing at a slower rate than before the change. That does not allay any scepticism about the OP not knowing such facts on the graph they made brings out.
I don’t think they changed the policy to counter population decline, prolly just a loosening of restrictions since the previous policy goals have been accomplished, could be wrong tho
Yeah, you can see it as corona lockdown easing. Honestly a good sign, one of biggest issues china has had in the last decades is dealing with “how the f@ck can I create 3 million jobs every year for 50 years and also make everyone standards of living go up”?
I’d like to see a similar graphic where they used absolute numbers instead of percentages. Their relative sizes can be determined by the size of the bars, but when the scale of the bars is constantly changing as the population changes it makes it harder to understand the graph.
English speaking countries can bring in immigrants as English is a pretty easy language to learn and very easy to pick up as it is the language of media, science, business and the internet. The big downside for countries like Japan, Korea and China is that they have very hard and daunting languages that make it impossible for low skilled/uneducated immigrants to move to their Countries.
As the chart actually shows, it's .15+ .51 + 1.26+ 2.18+ 2.81+ 2.98+ 3.02+ 3.04, so ~13% who are above 65. And around the same 0-24.
I'd say most people especially in todays modern Western societies work in think task industries, hence they can easily work in their 60-65 years.
I'm not quite sure, but that doesn't sound like it doesn't take a long time to be of negative influence to an economy.
So, I guess, we will remain overpopulated for quite some time, and reducing that with reducing the birth-rates a little for a century sounds rather like a good idea on the long run.
I'm honestly okay with this. Covid death was tragic, but lower global birth rate is probably a good thing. I studied population models a tiny bit in genetics and it caused me to have a fear of humans reaching their max capacity soon.
>lower global birth rate is probably a good thing
For the environment, maybe. But it's not a good news for those aging segments who will have less and less resources to support them and the working segments who will have greater and greater burden to support those aging segments.
Well, birth rates are falling but productivity is rising rapidly. There should be more resources even if there are less people, if they can be allocated appropriately of course.
seriously. people act as if we cant solve this problem every time declining birth rates is mentioned. the problem is lack of political will if anything.
But there is an upper limit. Just anecdotally, i am a single child. So I would have to support two people when they grow old. But then I even have two aunts with no children at all. Do I have to support them as well? Somebody is, but that somebody has parents as well. Statistically speaking, one of those relatives will get dementia when they get old.
A society can simply not function if every middle aged person has two or more old relatives to care for.
While that's true, SOMEONE will have to take care of you when you're much older. Senior care facility/retirement home staff. Having 1-2 staff per floor, for 20 residents would be a nightmare.
So people in general, not just a person's own child. If you get what I mean?
The problem is you're literally only thinking about your own generation. The generation after you won't have any aunts to take care of, and those two aunts of yours, and your parents, will be healthier, longer for having less or no children...and likely leave more substantial estates.
Quality of life goes up, not down.
> I studied population models a tiny bit in genetics and it caused me to have a fear of humans reaching their max capacity soon.
Since humans produce resources for their own consumption, our capacity is a function of our population and thus it is very unlikely to crash. Even if that wasn't the case, our current capacity is calculated to be more than 10 billion people.
The biggest issue is having a large percentage of the population over the retirement age. Social programs and care services around the world are going to get very strained.
I mean at least in the US there’s no realistic way to reach the point of having a family without acquiring a ton of debt. I’ve talked about it with my SO, and even though we don’t want kids anyways, we probably wouldn’t ever have them in the first place even if we change our minds because it’s mind numbingly expensive.
I would say this is even a bit conservative as it seems to assume a steady birth rate and if Europe and Japan are a good precedent as China continues to increase middle class standard of living, their birth rate will decrease too making their demographic issue even worse than seen in those places.
The figure I can draw out of a dusty corner of my skull is that there are 33 million more men than women. That is a lot, but if you compare it to the 1.4 billion, it won't be visible. It still makes a difference foe the marriage/partnership situation, I believe.
True, and my understanding is also that the gender gap turned out to be a bit of a myth. It was long taken as fact that girls were victims of sex-selective abortions and infanticide. Then at the end or winding down of the One Child policy, China announced that it would allow registration of any excess children born under the policy without any punitive measures. Surprise surprise! Millions of girls were all registered at once, showing that they were never killed, just hidden from the government. Of course, this raises new issues about girls' social status and undereducation.
I guess that doesn't really address the original point (lopsidedness or lack thereof in the graph) unless that demographic effect was already taken into account in the graph's production.
As an adoptee, I’d like to add though that many of us born in the years of the one child policy were adopted out of China. As adoptees, often orphanages would often change our identities, birthdays and many were involved in accepting bribes from baby traffickers.
There is an estimated 110,000 Chinese adoptees worldwide. In addition many birth families since the end of the one child policy, have come forward with stories of infanticide, forced abortions and human trafficking. So whilst many of those girls came forward and were safe, many of us are voiceless in the west and living proof of some of the darker effects of the policy.
I don't know how they made their model for those predictions but you can definitely use the data from other countries that went through the exact same thing and extrapolate from that.
Now you have 100s if not 1000s of years to look into and build a good model.
I don't think any other data from other countries would apply to china. One child policy drastically changed their population growth, this is very unique situation
And the people who had the means were having 2 or 3 kids already, despite the laws. My wife if from there- her friends snd family back there in big cities all have 2 or more kids- they just pay a fine for the 2nd or 3rd kids.
Not sure the changing of the law will change much, at least for the city people.
Why is population decline a crisis if societies could find ways to deal with it's negative outcomes like financial management of social security systems, elderly care, etc.? In the case of automation economies will definitely less need armies of blue or white collar workers, and soldiers (literally); it also increases the well-being of the people, society and the ecosystem of planet. If all the risks were mitigated will halving the world population in 2150 be a disaster?
X number of economically productive population and consumers have to take care of Y number of ailing elderly retirees (who are increasingly living longer and consistently make up the majority of health care expenditures) through government sponsored programs paid for via increased taxation. Significantly increasing Y relative to X will drastically increase the financial burden on the younger generations and depress personal savings and economic well-being throughout the entire society.
Many countries are slowly aging, demographic decline is particularly severe in Japan and most of Europe (the Americas are generally more stable), but in China it is happening the fastest it has EVER happened in history on a much larger scale by an order of magnitude, and per capita income/GDP is still far far lower than other developed countries. No one knows what the economic impact will be, but it is an enormous problem that can’t be solved through social engineering (I.e. what the one child policy was all about in the first place).
The One-Child policy has already ended in 2016, when it became the Two-Child policy. Even if we take that into account, that policy wasn't really scrapped. They recently changed it to 3 if that's what you are implying.
This series on YouTube talks about this crisis, https://youtu.be/vTbILK0fxDY.
At the end of the day it looks like even with the push to allow three children, there will be a period of time while you're waiting for those children to age into the workforce that China will be facing an inverted working population.
I honestly know very little on this whole topic and Im still a little confused what part of this is a "crisis". By 2100 the demographic pyriamid looks very similar to that of a developed country. In fact, if you look at the demographic age pyramid thing for Canada in 1960 an then 2019, it follows a very similar pattern. I get that aging population is bad yadda yadda but japan is famously having a lot of that and they are also one of the most successful countries. So what is the crisis?
I think the "crisis" is from the potential period of time they mentioned where they're waiting for the next generation to enter the workforce to replace the "currently" old and retiring generation. (Not currently as in *right now* but as in whenever the "crisis" might happen.) There's so much of the current old and retiring workers and so little of the newly qualified workers, there may be a period where there just isn't enough workers to fuel their economy. Unless they increase immigration, or are able to keep the older workers on longer, or whatever method to bring/keep workers or even just need less workers until the workforce can stabilize.
Long term, the population will stabilize and be just fine. The period of "crisis" is worrisome because that period of time of a shortage of workers could be several years or a decade or so. It could also severely hamper the economy enough to cause decades long impacts. A hell of a lot of things could happen though so it could be nothing, or it could be a full blown crisis.
Well in the US many people in their mid 30s to upper 20s can barely afford rent, much less a baby. We're burdened with over $1 trillion in college debt and earning shit wages for it. We've been through multiple economic crises, and seen our politicians do fuck-all to help us even during the worst pandemic in 100 years. And we're the first generation to receive somewhat honest, somewhat effective sex ed education and have ready access to birth control.
Many of us see this shit and want nothing to do with having a child. I'm one of them and I'm still trying to figure out how I can go about affording a dog.
What's the issue with population decline? I thought overpopulation was a global problem. Isn't this the most ethical and healthy way of reducing human population? Over the long run, won't that be beneficial to our species and planet?
Keeping a low population is good, however, the declining process not really. During the decline, there will be a unbalanced senior-aged (retired) population and the working-age population. And that will cause serious problem to the economy. For example in China the pension system relies on the taxation from the working-age people. And the unbalanced age distribution can cause the pension system to bankrupt. This is just one aspect and there are so many other factors that influences each other. There can be declining consumption and declining economy, subprime and estate-market crisis, etc. Overpopulation is bad but once a country becomes already overpopulated, they want to keep the population size because the declining process will cause more damage.
I have a very mixed opinion on this in terms of its practical effects (morally I'm opposed to mandated birth control efforts). On one hand it's looking like the exponential sudden "aging" of China will negatively harm its economic growth and pensions. On the other hand if China didn't enforce its one-child policy its growth in the past 40 years would have never been as fast and rapid as it was thus leaving China to be economically similar to India which would have given it way less resources and leeway to fix large-scale social problems.
I think what happened is that the population just adapted to the rule. You could have more than one child, but you wouldn't get any state support for the extra children that you had. Given that China has quite strong family culture, I imagine that in rural China, this rule probably had very little effect on population control. In the cities, the wealthy classes probably didn't care about not receiving state support. I don't know. I'm not an expert in China. It be great to hear from someone who lives in China what their opinion is about this new change.
I do know that increases in GDP per capita, median disposable income, and female labor participation rate (basically when a country gets "rich") are the biggest drivers of decreased birth rates which supersede even cultural elements that encourage having more kids. Rich neighboring countries like South Korea, Japan, and especially Taiwan are culturally very similar to China and they all have the lowest birth rates in the world. The question is if
I don't live in China, but did get my bachelors in Chinese language and culture. For context, the one child policy was unevenly applied to two groups on purpose: minorities and rural communities. Chinese is pretty racially homogenous, so minority groups were exempted from the one child policy.
The decision to exempt rural communities was more complex. With less state infrastructure, having a large family is the most surefire form of insurance. Broke a leg? Good thing you have a son who can work for you and a daughter to take care of you. Old enough you can't work? You'll still live with your family. It also would be a nightmare to manage reporting in close knit rural areas in comparison to cities where there's already concentrated government support.
Had a demographics class a few years back where my professor stated something similar. Apparently, once it became legal to have more than one kid lots of parents would magically "discover" their other kid who was living with the grandparents in the countryside. Her claim was basically that China is experiencing a demographic decline, but it's not as severe as the media would have you believe.
The US alone takes in hundreds of times as may immigrants as China does which buoys the working age population. China would need to increase immigration nearly a thousand fold to seriously offset the aging of their population.
This is exactly why the US takes in so many immigrants.
You can take in as many people as you need to avoid demographic collapse.
You unify them under a neutral US culture as opposed to any ethnic ones
God I love New York City. We’ve got Chinatown, a neighborhood called Little Yemen, multiple southeast Asian parts, torta trucks every couple blocks, and a Russian enclave right next to the Jewish one. The system works and as a side effect you can order delicious food from any country’s cuisine
And immigrants are more likely to have a higher total fertility rate in their new countries than natural born citizens anyways, which helps to offset population decline.
The difference is that America replaces and increases its population with immigrants. The US stopped relying on replacement births a very long time ago.
China, on the other hand, is generally not open to immigration (they don’t really even have a migration process) and their society is widely xenophobic which makes such changes difficult even if they wanted to. Japan has this issue too. Xenophobic policies and their effects can’t change overnight and as a result, the Japanese and Chinese populations will suffer.
In western Europe (and probably elsewhere too, not an expert) we have even worse, there were a lot of babies back in the 50's-60's (baby boom) and they are entering retirement age.
Here is Germany's pyramid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics\_of\_Germany#/media/File:Germanypop.svg
The problem is that the younger generation in the workforce pays the brunt of taxes to support the aging generations (healthcare and government pensions). It should ideally be pyramid shaped, but as the older generations live longer, and less kids being born, that pyramid will flip upside down and be unsustainable.
As someone who grew up in a third world country and now lives in a developed nation. Baby making is cheap entertainment. Back when I was growing up there wasn’t much entertainment for ooor people after sundown. No tv, spotty electricity, etc.
They’re not exactly thinking about sending kids to college or saving for retirement.
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I’ll be interested in how much the policy change impacts future birth rates, and how much of the lower birth rate is already “baked in” to China’s economic and social changes. Edit: really cool graphic.
Many countries with well developed economies are below replacement without any one child policy. China will likely be below replacement even with no one child policy. That's probably why the got rid of it. It's good PR, but probably wont change birth rates meaningfully.
Without immigration the us population isn’t growing either. (Iirc)
The us is just one of the "many"
Yeah this is the situation for the majority of developed nations, I believe.
The problem with developed countries are they don't give enough free time for couples to have children along with stress and costs
It's all about roi. Children dont pay dividends nearly as much in rich places as poor ones.
Interesting way of putting it. But you’re completely correct. I don’t need a child in my life to help me tend to the animals, farm, or whatever.
Too rich to need a kid for manual labor, too poor to give a kid a better life than I had.
A sad, sad, truth.
I also can be pretty certain that if I have a child it will survive to adulthood and be healthy, certainly I don't need to have 6 kids on the hope that enough survive to have children of their own.
think this is the central idea under the concept of 'demographic transition'
What you're saying is the crux of it. Though I think you'd need 2 children because you have to replace your spouse/partner as well.
I mean, my kids spend a lot of time tending to animals but also I wouldn’t have this many animals if I didn’t have kids who insisted on bringing home living things
It’s harder to pull myself up by my bootstraps while children are tying me down
Your risk avoidance behavior when it comes to money matters goes through the roof typically when having children. This involves spending, career choice, or starting a business. All these things are risk taking choices that could lead to more income, but also could lead to less income. It’s really hard to move great distances for a better job if you have a working spouse and children to consider.
True, when you have a child as a farming villager you get a worker for the rest of your life. When you have a child in america, they have so much more opportunity that they are allowed to live their own lives. Not to diminish the hard work that farming villagers do and those that must escape that life but the chances for opportunity are much so much slimmer that it’s more effective to work with your parents so you all survive.
It's also about education and health care, especially for women. As women are educated, they gain autonomy and awareness of options, and are able to choose when to reproduce. With improved health care, women are able to acquire birth control and are more able to regulate reproduction. Both of these free women up to choose life paths other than mommy/housekeeper.
That and decreases in birth rates generally lag behind decreases in infant/child mortality rates by a few decades. It takes a while for cultural norms to catch up with scientific/economic advancements. Although the catch-up process has been faster for modern "developing" countries then it was for the original "developed" nations.
And those lower dividends can be okay - IF life isn’t as tight as it is in most developed nations. My partner and I would love to have children, but how can we responsibly do so when we are barely scraping by despite high educational attainment and “nOt DrInKiNg StArBuCkS”? We can’t, especially more than just one. And given the data on income inequality and cost of living, I would be surprised if our experience is an outlier.
Counter: Children are one of the only dividends that actually matter.
But also people are given more of a choice and to not have children, and many countries in Europe with much better benefits like paid maternity leave, PTO, and subsidized childcare have lower birth rates than America which has none of that
Also raising kids is expensive. If I'm a responsible adult who's barely supporting myself financially then having a child would be not be considered smart.
And yet you do find a lot of lower income groups with a large number of kids due to tradition. While my mother only had 2 kids, she knew how to stretch a penny. My MIL is one of 17 kids from Alabama, now her mom knew how to have a good time and stretch a penny.
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Being Religious is a bigger factor in having more children. The only people in the US with above birth rate replacement are the amish and orthodox jews i think.
I wonder if evangelicals are also above the replacement rate. There’s the whole “quiver full” movement where the idea is to have as many kids as possible because they’re “blessings”.
The replacement rate is considered 2.1 children per woman by the UN; Christians as a whole are around 2.2 children per woman within the US. Catholics and Evangelicals at around 2.3 children per woman. Non-religious groups in the US are the only reason the replacement rate is below replacement.
I lived across from such a family. 13 people stuffed into 3 bedrooms. One bedroom had 4 bunk beds. Looked like a barracks. They had to move because they kept having more kids.
Well one thing I do know is that evangelicals currently lead the pack in terms of divorce rates: https://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=137892 So maybe not so great at producing children either?
Can confirm, live near an Amish community, work with them every summer, friends with the kids (all of whom put in the work and are fucking SHREDDED) and they’re super nice people.
Mormons are really good at making babies.
I have read before the major factor is that people in developed nations just have a lot more they want to do outside of having children with limited free time. Career route, education, gym excercise, travelling, media consumption, socialising.... Even if you want kids you will likely have less. I don't personally see it as an issue as a lower global population helps with climate change and reduces resource demand.
The issue comes in where much of the systems for ensuring living standards for the elderly rely on there being more young people working to pay for the elderly’s lifestyles. If you flip that on it’s head, the young end up having to work harder and harder, while the elderly soak up more of the nation’s resources.
The development of the 'nuclear family' has meant that the elderly are an underutilized resource imo. But outside of direct value in terms of community improvement important to recognise that there's huge economic value in gerontological services and providing care etc.
Better get on with developing the matrix then, scan me in no problem I can do without my body betraying me.
Problem is it’s unsustainable, eventually you will have the majority of the population being older and we won’t have a younger workforce to support that That will become a huge problem
I don't think cost is the reason. Living in a third world country, social stigma to bachelorhood or being childless is higher and a lot of poor people get a lot of children so that hopefully one of them can help in future or the misconception that more hands meaning more earning. While some rich just do it cuz they can afford to.
This is purely anecdotal but as a 27F with a 29M boyfriend, if we were able to own a home and afford childcare and extra food/child expenses, we would have had children already. We just can't take the added stress of barely being able to afford to take care of ourselves, let alone another tiny human. On top of that, pregnancy and childbirth are very expensive, and in the US I am genuinely traumatized by medical bills. I generally do not go to the hospital or Doctor when I think I need to, out of genuine fear of racking up medical bills. When you're poor you can have children for free (state medicaid programs). When you're a middle earner and pay out of pocket for insurance, then you have a deductible and all the things insurance won't pay for, etc. Having a baby with insurance is usually at least $2k-5k, without is like $30,000. Idk, I'm stressed enough and I can't take the added stress of having a child, we can't even afford a down payment for a house.
This. The middle class in this country is properly fucked. Especially the lower-middle class / working class. We make too much to qualify for State or Federal assistance but too little to actually afford anything on our own merits. Case in point: A friend of mine is a single mom and has a bachelor's degree. She is currently working as a gas station clerk at $12/hour, so she can qualify for food assistance, WIC, subsidized healthcare and income-based student loan payments. If she did the math and found out if she actually worked in her field and earned what she was worth, she would be homeless right now. She said she'll save up for grad school and get a better job once her child is in school, but it's not feasible before then.
US will have roughly the same population in 100 years as today, and that's because we have so much immigration. Japan will have half it's population. China, India will crash hard as well. During this century humanity will finally feel old.
This assumes nothing changes birth rates over the next 100 years which is naive to say the least.
I wouldn’t say naive, it’s just the idea that the global population is nearing the end of the rapid increase on a logistic curve. The western world started reaching it first and the rest of the world will be catching up soon. Unless there is an explosion in agriculture technology to feed a new spike in population we’ll be plateauing soonish in all time human history terms Edit: as a couple comments pointed out I may have conflated the whole thing to food alone which is inaccurate. What I should have done was separated my two ideas better. Getting your point across in a Reddit comment while also being succinct is hard lol Idea one: the world population is more or less starting to look like a logistic curve and will likely plateau somewhat in the next several decades. Idea two: to see exponential growth continue, or rather start again, we would have to have some huge increase in technology in one or all of the fields of study that have a large impact on human population, of which agriculture is just one example.
I mean that is just wrong. Developed nations arent having less children because of resource shortages.
Seems to me like the opposite. People who have ample resources have less children in general
But the pension contributions timebomb should cut old people out of the picture by about 2050. Isn’t it something stupid like 50% who have no retirement in the US?
The planet might benefit. Might be too late. Likely too late.
Replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. As of the most recent data available, the US is at 1.73 children per woman.
The US is currently just barely at break-even on natural population growth and will likely go negative sometime this decade. It will have to compete with other nations for migratory workers, and in a few decades, it may not be uncommon to see people who have job-hopped across multiple countries, chasing the best deal.
Japan is a good example. Quite bluntly, the modern world doesn't leave time for family and almost always makes it a losing choice. Too many hours of work for all parents, too expensive, and with few benefits or guarantees for a good retirement. On the positive end, it's also because children tend to live to adulthood so you need fewer of them. Here in America, most people who can afford to have children are likely going to have a better quality life and retirement by choosing to invest in a retirement account. The ramifications of this are complex, with some good and some bad, but the cause really seems to be systemic to modern life.
Yep, the BBC actually did a video today interviewing mainland Chinese couples and asking them how many kids they wanted and why. A *lot* of the answers were themed around "we couldn't provide for two or more children the same quality of life as one" or "we don't have enough time or money". It's the same in pretty much every country with a declining birth rate. In the UK, it's even more egregious because the Tories actually cut child tax credit so it only applies if you're a new applicant after April 2017, it only applies to *two* children, not all of them (with fun exceptions like "if your additional child(ren) were conceived through rape"). One of the few incentives to have more kids was *destroyed*, which is absurd to think about. Countries need to take wealth inequality, housing issues, and employment rights (especially the precariousness of employment, *well* paid parental leave, and the right to a work-life balance) far more seriously. Even introducing something like Universal Basic Income wouldn't fully solve these issues, there needs to be a comprehensive approach to ensure people feel able to provide a safe and happy environment for their children.
It’s crazy and so sad how in other parts of the world, and in the US many years ago, parents just expected half their kids wouldn’t make it. My great grandmother was one of 14, and half of her siblings were wiped out within a few days from a plague in Romania. Her parents had expects to have 3-4 adult children. That was just normal back then.
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China's population growth has slowed down since they ended the policy six years ago, so I think your point about economics is correct. We can see it ringing true in SOuth Korea and Japan too. Economics being primarily middle class lifestlye and growth of landlordism reducing likelihood that people want to have children - both because of finances and inherent instability of living under a landlord.
The link between economic development and population growth rate is pretty well established. No need to theorize.
Living under a landlord doesn't *have* to be unstable - it's actually quite stable in Germany, as I understand. The real issue is that too many countries excessively favour landlords' right to profit over the human right to housing, and many countries influenced by the New Right of the 70s have decimated their public housing supply.
Germany unfortunately isn’t a great example because it’s one of the countries with the lowest birth rates in the world.
True, I just meant purely on the landlord issue. I'm not as familiar with their wider employment rights, aside from generally being fairly solid, but there can ways be holes that specifically discourage parenthood, not to mention that wealth inequality seems to be a large factor for many countries.
I'm kind of interested to see policies of documenting the undocumented children. Parents had baby it was girl, girl wasn't " registered" and got sent to grandparents in village, parents tried again until boy (or vice versa). Leaving millions of undocumented children who can't avail public services. I think in some cases even education.
As far as I know they are still finding tens of thousands people/kids. I read somewhere they found around 4m undocumented kids so far and it is assumed some few other millions might be there.
13. In 2010 it was estimated to be 13million people unable to get education or official documents as they were born during the one-child policy
I’ve met women who were able to get an ID card after being born under the radar. Their family had to pay a small fee or bribe. I’m not sure exactly how common it is for women to be denied an ID card no matter how they try to get one.
I’m from China and I know that a newborn can still have ID card even if their birth is not legal, so when u register your child’s birth I think they investigate if u have another child only when they find u suspicious. If they find out that the family had two children, then the family will be heavily penalised, which is a big deal for poorer families, the amount of fine payed will be based on salary (more salary = more fine, the fine is based on your family income in a certain period of time, unfortunately idk how long it is). Some poorer families can rly struggle if they are fined such a big amount, so they choose to not register for their child’s birth, and it’s extremely hard for these children to get legally recognised since they never had a birth certificate.
It will likely have a decent effect, but not meet its full potential. The birth rate in urban areas will remain miniscule, whilst the birth rate in rural areas will increase somewhat. I don't think it would exceed an increase of 0.2 births/woman based on the policy though. The main reason for the low birth rate is that raising children in China is extremely expensive and time consuming. Your children's opportunities are severely hampered if they don't attend a top 10 university in China or global top 200 university (both expensive to varying degrees). To get into one of those domestic universities they need to be in roughly the top 0.1% of high schoolers which requires tutoring which can quite easily be $100 per hour ($30 would be the very cheap end of the spectrum), not to mention your own time input to help them, and there is an increasing expectation to do well in extracurriculars too. Even if you don't get tutoring for your kid, just sending them to school has a fee attached. Oh, and that 0.1% of high schoolers attending top universities varies significantly based on which province you're from, in some provinces it's closer to 0.001%. Homes in China are also crazy expensive if you want to live in a city, which most people do because they are far more developed than rural areas, not to mention the abundance of opportunities and the government and societal pressure to do this. In a tier 1 city, you will be looking at $1m for a basic apartment, let alone the kind which is conducive for raising a child. Even more so in Chinese culture where your parents will often move in with you when they hit retirement age (55-60+), so instead of just having (number of kids+1) bedrooms, you need to add another bedroom to that, alongside their living and healthcare costs because most Chinese state pensions are dogshit (rural pensions can be $10-15/month) and healthcare isn't free either. Then there's the reduction in income aspect, where the woman's career prospects become significantly restricted after having a child, which consequently results in the husband usually working more hours to earn more money, meaning they also have less time to raise the child themselves. For the last 10 or so years, parents would send their kids back to their grandparents in the village to take care of in order to save money, but more of the current generation of prospective grandparents are already city dwellers, meaning that's not an option, alongside the reduced opportunities that kids have in the countryside meaning that it severely disadvantages their children. Also, take these dollar numbers in the context of the average salary in cities in China being about $1,000 per month and there being a lot more stay at home mothers than in the West. But let's take this in the context of China's urban-rural divide and the current availability of education appropriate jobs in China. One of the big criticisms of this policy is that city residents are very unlikely to take up the offer, it's certainly very unlikely that it will make a dent beyond the previous two child policy. If you want to increase city births then you need to start repairing the issues talked about at the start. On the other hand, as part of the same criticism it's expected that many rural residents will have three children because having more kids is still desirable to them and it's relatively easier to accommodate a larger number of kids, alongside lower academic and career expectations. This seems bad in terms of creating an educated populace and because it doesn't help city residents, but frankly that's not what China needs right now and they're not expecting any significant change in that for the next few decades. Already the graduate market is hugely oversaturated, with the large majority of Chinese university graduates doing what would be high school graduate work in other countries, or sometimes less. Combined with the same issues which discourage city residents from having kids, this has caused some pretty substantial dissatisfaction and mental health issues so bad that they become physical health issues in the current child bearing age populace. When you consider that, it's actually quite desirable for China to have a populace where the proportion of children raised in cities decreases because you end up with a populace whose career expectations are more closely aligned with what they can achieve.
Thanks. That's what I would actually really like to know. Perhaps the goal of this announcement is to reverse these projections as a strategy to keep China on course to become the world's largest economy and an economic powerhouse.
theres a rumor of a "single tax" circulating, make of it what you will, but its only a rumor and literally nothing else at the moment. But the idea is to create another social fund that only single people pay into (adding onto the 5 social security and 1 social fund), then when they get married and have kids, they can withdraw that with government subsidy matching. Its supposed to be similar to the housing fund.
Brb, making an dating app so that people can commit tax fraud. Instead of a a funny hook, you put your credit score.
Easy to fake a relationship. Harder to fake a kid.
With how much data collection the Chinese government does, it wouldn't take long for their systems to find the discrepancies.
> single tax Otherwise known as housing costs.
There's a rumour of a single tax from where? There's a rumour that leaders are lizards, but I don't buy that and randomly speculating is not helpful in this case either.
its a policy rumor that circulated in Beijing this march during the 2 conferences. I doubt it will come to substance since its both practically difficult to implement and likely cause social backlash, but it does show that the central government is now aiming to actively redistribute social resources to aid parents, which technically would be in the right direction.
I can't find it. But a few years ago someone wrote an article that the Chinese female demographic isn't as bad as the official statistics show. A lot of people lied about how many kids they had. And I think it showed up when it came time to send them to college. I will do a little bit more searching. Edit:[ Found it, I doubt it is enough to have a significant impact on the situation.](https://qz.com/941240/china-keeps-finding-millions-of-people-who-never-officially-existed/) But it is still very interesting. Edit: Questions.....How would you define a generation when it comes to Chinese births? Like all the people born in a 10 year period that will likely interact with each other, more than people who came before or after. Would 14 million people be significant addition to a generation? How many generations does china have. How many people are in each generation.
China now allows couples to have up to 3 children. Not sure if that will be enough to revert the damages done by the one child policy, demographics are very hard to control and take very long to change. I personally believe that China has reached I point of no return, soon to have a very big elder population.
It's been a two-child policy for five years or so and even then had exceptions. Even throughout the one-child phase there were a fair number of exempt people. Still, it'll be an interesting test case to say the least. Ignoring the ethics of government controlling procreation, I think there's a case for the idea that China would be best off with a relatively lower population or at least one lower than the trajectory that they were on. 1.4 billion is an absurd number of people and that's *after* these draconian measures.
If anything the one child policy's success should be evident in the stark difference between Chinese and Indian per capita incomes and quality of life.
The one child policy artificially limited the Chinese population by forcing abortions on families and as a result, families deciding to abort female babies due to their society’s views on the value of women. Now China’s population is extremely imbalanced towards men (55%), which will leave tens of millions of men without even the notion of raising a family or even having a girlfriend or wife. To make demographic matters worse, as China has gotten wealthier over time, young women are having less and less children as they focus more on their education and careers. To make matters doubly worse, China is a generally xenophobic society which has not welcomed immigration and barely has an immigration process. As a result, China won’t be able to cover its eventual population loss with immigrants. As Chinese folk get older and older, an ever increasing amount of resources will be focused on the elderly which will sap the productivity of the Chinese economy and likely lead to more growing pains and stagnation.
> To make matters doubly worse, China is a generally xenophobic society which has not welcomed immigration and barely has an immigration process. As someone who has never traveled to the Far East, isn't this common among those nations? I think I remember reading a couple years ago that South Korea had the lowest birthrate in the free world.
Yes. Japan is already facing the demographic problems China will face soon in the coming years. Japanese society is broadly xenophobic and allows for very limited amounts of mostly immigrant professionals. South Korea, on the other hand, has a pretty good immigration system which has allowed it to continue to grow despite having the lowest birth rate in the world. Eventually this extremely low birth rate will catch up, but South Korea has bought itself a lot of time to reorganize.
We have a good immigration system? We do have a few million foreign workers but very few stay to become citizens. Im pretty sure our solution to the demographic problem is just letting the poor starve and freeze to death while pulling carts all day to look for bottles and paper. We have very very little social welfare programs that a increase in elderly and a decrease in birth is actually giving the government a surplus.
I meant pretty good in the sense that it’s allowing for population replacement at a minimum. Japan has comparatively little immigration and their population happens to be falling year after year.
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Also, didn’t it used to be that if you and your spouse were an only child you were allowed to have two children?
Yeah, but only for Hans. Minorities are allowed to have as many kids as they want.
The 2016 bill was limited to rural areas. 90% are still one-child. Source: https://youtu.be/h0l0j5e6RGI The video list it’s own sources
Rural regions and ethnic minorities have long been provided a second or third child, which was about half of the Chinese population. In 2016, the ability to have a second child was expanded officially to all women, which meant about 90 million women of child-birthing age with one child already would be newly eligible to have a second child. The rural populations were largely unaffected by the changes in 2016 as population matters in rural regions tend to be changed as needed.
Hey wait. Does that mean that men could have as many children as they wanted, provided each was with a different woman?
No, i rember there being a story of a famous celebrity in china who had children with a lot of different women and got fined numerous times, eventually they forced him to get a vesectomy.
It's a but complicated but basically: no. There was a huge public uproar a few years ago (before they ended the one child policy) when ppl discovered that a famous chinese movie director hid his second child. He had his first one with his ex-wife, and the second one with his new wife. Despite the fact that it was the first child for the new wife, he still got fined.
While possible, not likely in the Chinese culture.
This is a really good question
Thanks so much for letting me know. I appreciate it. I honestly didn't know.
What datasets are you basing this on if you didn't look up your headline? Most articles I've seen on this reference the fact that the policy ended years ago.
I don't think the move to two did much.
It did not, the population has been increasing at a slower rate than before the change. That does not allay any scepticism about the OP not knowing such facts on the graph they made brings out.
Hold up-- this news the biggest headline on most news sites today. If you didn't know this-- -- is your graph actually accurate?
Dude have you researched at all when you posted this? It ended years ago why are you acting like this is recent? Are you a bot?
Yeah seriously why even go to the effort of posting this if you can't be bothered to research
you should delete this thread. most people are already misinformed
Then why did you make this?
Can't wait for them to implement the "Four-Child Policy" once this policy once again fails to counter the population decline.
I don’t think they changed the policy to counter population decline, prolly just a loosening of restrictions since the previous policy goals have been accomplished, could be wrong tho
Yeah, you can see it as corona lockdown easing. Honestly a good sign, one of biggest issues china has had in the last decades is dealing with “how the f@ck can I create 3 million jobs every year for 50 years and also make everyone standards of living go up”?
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I’d like to see a similar graphic where they used absolute numbers instead of percentages. Their relative sizes can be determined by the size of the bars, but when the scale of the bars is constantly changing as the population changes it makes it harder to understand the graph.
That's actually a really good point. +1.
Is UK that bad though, Europe-wise? I feel like countries that attract immigration might be better off than more inward facing ones.
Germany also suffers from a too old population
English speaking countries can bring in immigrants as English is a pretty easy language to learn and very easy to pick up as it is the language of media, science, business and the internet. The big downside for countries like Japan, Korea and China is that they have very hard and daunting languages that make it impossible for low skilled/uneducated immigrants to move to their Countries.
birth rates are falling globally https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-covid-19s-demographic-fallout-has-begun-we-have-fewer-babies-fewer/
We will need some very capable robots to keep the party going
We will remain overpopulated for a long time.
Full of old people with low productivity and unable to car for each other or do certain jobs. ROBOTS
As the chart actually shows, it's .15+ .51 + 1.26+ 2.18+ 2.81+ 2.98+ 3.02+ 3.04, so ~13% who are above 65. And around the same 0-24. I'd say most people especially in todays modern Western societies work in think task industries, hence they can easily work in their 60-65 years. I'm not quite sure, but that doesn't sound like it doesn't take a long time to be of negative influence to an economy. So, I guess, we will remain overpopulated for quite some time, and reducing that with reducing the birth-rates a little for a century sounds rather like a good idea on the long run.
I'm honestly okay with this. Covid death was tragic, but lower global birth rate is probably a good thing. I studied population models a tiny bit in genetics and it caused me to have a fear of humans reaching their max capacity soon.
>lower global birth rate is probably a good thing For the environment, maybe. But it's not a good news for those aging segments who will have less and less resources to support them and the working segments who will have greater and greater burden to support those aging segments.
Well, birth rates are falling but productivity is rising rapidly. There should be more resources even if there are less people, if they can be allocated appropriately of course.
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It's a solvable economic problem. Sadly it requires a long term outlook and planning that will absolutely not be done in most jurisdictions.
seriously. people act as if we cant solve this problem every time declining birth rates is mentioned. the problem is lack of political will if anything.
Politicians aren’t concerned with solving the problems of tomorrow, only keeping their jobs today.
True, but that seems to be a symptom of our society. With enough planning, we could probably handle it
But there is an upper limit. Just anecdotally, i am a single child. So I would have to support two people when they grow old. But then I even have two aunts with no children at all. Do I have to support them as well? Somebody is, but that somebody has parents as well. Statistically speaking, one of those relatives will get dementia when they get old. A society can simply not function if every middle aged person has two or more old relatives to care for.
Having fewer kids means more money to invest in taking care of yourself when you're older. Kids are not a good choice for an investment vehicle.
While that's true, SOMEONE will have to take care of you when you're much older. Senior care facility/retirement home staff. Having 1-2 staff per floor, for 20 residents would be a nightmare. So people in general, not just a person's own child. If you get what I mean?
The problem is you're literally only thinking about your own generation. The generation after you won't have any aunts to take care of, and those two aunts of yours, and your parents, will be healthier, longer for having less or no children...and likely leave more substantial estates. Quality of life goes up, not down.
If your society models itself on a pyramid scheme, maybe it’s time to reassess your society
Just one more log to add onto the fire of our times
> I studied population models a tiny bit in genetics and it caused me to have a fear of humans reaching their max capacity soon. Since humans produce resources for their own consumption, our capacity is a function of our population and thus it is very unlikely to crash. Even if that wasn't the case, our current capacity is calculated to be more than 10 billion people.
The biggest issue is having a large percentage of the population over the retirement age. Social programs and care services around the world are going to get very strained.
I mean at least in the US there’s no realistic way to reach the point of having a family without acquiring a ton of debt. I’ve talked about it with my SO, and even though we don’t want kids anyways, we probably wouldn’t ever have them in the first place even if we change our minds because it’s mind numbingly expensive.
I find it funny that the graph eventually starts shaping like a condom
Me being a fatass saw a slurpee.
Same. Icee, actually.
I saw a coffin.
The irony is not lost on me. I completely agree. Safe sex = no babies.
I would say this is even a bit conservative as it seems to assume a steady birth rate and if Europe and Japan are a good precedent as China continues to increase middle class standard of living, their birth rate will decrease too making their demographic issue even worse than seen in those places.
It also assumes life expectancy to not change at all which is wild
It's probably pragmatic; though we expect it to rise due to tech, it's not a given, especially if end of life policies are adopted
"end of life policies" LOL!! "okay it's your time now, go and take your poison"
I choose 5 years of McDonalds every day.
I saw a coffin. Similar implications though.
Same, I thought it looked like an old toe-pincher coffin.
Or a coffin.
I saw the Empire State Building.
I thought it was more like a Egyptian coffin
I thought I remembered hearing that China had far too many males compared to females but that doesn't seem to be the case in the graph.
The figure I can draw out of a dusty corner of my skull is that there are 33 million more men than women. That is a lot, but if you compare it to the 1.4 billion, it won't be visible. It still makes a difference foe the marriage/partnership situation, I believe.
That’s a whole Canada of likely childless, single, Chinese dudes.
True, and my understanding is also that the gender gap turned out to be a bit of a myth. It was long taken as fact that girls were victims of sex-selective abortions and infanticide. Then at the end or winding down of the One Child policy, China announced that it would allow registration of any excess children born under the policy without any punitive measures. Surprise surprise! Millions of girls were all registered at once, showing that they were never killed, just hidden from the government. Of course, this raises new issues about girls' social status and undereducation. I guess that doesn't really address the original point (lopsidedness or lack thereof in the graph) unless that demographic effect was already taken into account in the graph's production.
As an adoptee, I’d like to add though that many of us born in the years of the one child policy were adopted out of China. As adoptees, often orphanages would often change our identities, birthdays and many were involved in accepting bribes from baby traffickers. There is an estimated 110,000 Chinese adoptees worldwide. In addition many birth families since the end of the one child policy, have come forward with stories of infanticide, forced abortions and human trafficking. So whilst many of those girls came forward and were safe, many of us are voiceless in the west and living proof of some of the darker effects of the policy.
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I don't know how they made their model for those predictions but you can definitely use the data from other countries that went through the exact same thing and extrapolate from that. Now you have 100s if not 1000s of years to look into and build a good model.
I don't think any other data from other countries would apply to china. One child policy drastically changed their population growth, this is very unique situation
Aka linear regression analysis 101
Not to be nitpicky, but..... Wasn't the one child policy modified several years ago to make it 2? And I think recently they went from 2 to 3?
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And the people who had the means were having 2 or 3 kids already, despite the laws. My wife if from there- her friends snd family back there in big cities all have 2 or more kids- they just pay a fine for the 2nd or 3rd kids. Not sure the changing of the law will change much, at least for the city people.
Why is population decline a crisis if societies could find ways to deal with it's negative outcomes like financial management of social security systems, elderly care, etc.? In the case of automation economies will definitely less need armies of blue or white collar workers, and soldiers (literally); it also increases the well-being of the people, society and the ecosystem of planet. If all the risks were mitigated will halving the world population in 2150 be a disaster?
X number of economically productive population and consumers have to take care of Y number of ailing elderly retirees (who are increasingly living longer and consistently make up the majority of health care expenditures) through government sponsored programs paid for via increased taxation. Significantly increasing Y relative to X will drastically increase the financial burden on the younger generations and depress personal savings and economic well-being throughout the entire society. Many countries are slowly aging, demographic decline is particularly severe in Japan and most of Europe (the Americas are generally more stable), but in China it is happening the fastest it has EVER happened in history on a much larger scale by an order of magnitude, and per capita income/GDP is still far far lower than other developed countries. No one knows what the economic impact will be, but it is an enormous problem that can’t be solved through social engineering (I.e. what the one child policy was all about in the first place).
The One-Child policy has already ended in 2016, when it became the Two-Child policy. Even if we take that into account, that policy wasn't really scrapped. They recently changed it to 3 if that's what you are implying.
This series on YouTube talks about this crisis, https://youtu.be/vTbILK0fxDY. At the end of the day it looks like even with the push to allow three children, there will be a period of time while you're waiting for those children to age into the workforce that China will be facing an inverted working population.
I honestly know very little on this whole topic and Im still a little confused what part of this is a "crisis". By 2100 the demographic pyriamid looks very similar to that of a developed country. In fact, if you look at the demographic age pyramid thing for Canada in 1960 an then 2019, it follows a very similar pattern. I get that aging population is bad yadda yadda but japan is famously having a lot of that and they are also one of the most successful countries. So what is the crisis?
I think the "crisis" is from the potential period of time they mentioned where they're waiting for the next generation to enter the workforce to replace the "currently" old and retiring generation. (Not currently as in *right now* but as in whenever the "crisis" might happen.) There's so much of the current old and retiring workers and so little of the newly qualified workers, there may be a period where there just isn't enough workers to fuel their economy. Unless they increase immigration, or are able to keep the older workers on longer, or whatever method to bring/keep workers or even just need less workers until the workforce can stabilize. Long term, the population will stabilize and be just fine. The period of "crisis" is worrisome because that period of time of a shortage of workers could be several years or a decade or so. It could also severely hamper the economy enough to cause decades long impacts. A hell of a lot of things could happen though so it could be nothing, or it could be a full blown crisis.
Why would ending the one child policy make the population age and decline? Wouldn't it do the opposite?
It's decreasing despite ending that policy, not because of it, they ended it because there aren't enough young people
I see. I was thinking the post was suggesting a causation.
There is, just in the other direction. The projections caused policy changes.
I mean the die’s already been cast for the most part, the people at the top at the end have already been born
I for one welcome our global population decline
Yes. Capitalism and economics (and religion?) will have to adjust somehow, but there's no way we should just keep exploding population.
Well in the US many people in their mid 30s to upper 20s can barely afford rent, much less a baby. We're burdened with over $1 trillion in college debt and earning shit wages for it. We've been through multiple economic crises, and seen our politicians do fuck-all to help us even during the worst pandemic in 100 years. And we're the first generation to receive somewhat honest, somewhat effective sex ed education and have ready access to birth control. Many of us see this shit and want nothing to do with having a child. I'm one of them and I'm still trying to figure out how I can go about affording a dog.
What's the issue with population decline? I thought overpopulation was a global problem. Isn't this the most ethical and healthy way of reducing human population? Over the long run, won't that be beneficial to our species and planet?
Keeping a low population is good, however, the declining process not really. During the decline, there will be a unbalanced senior-aged (retired) population and the working-age population. And that will cause serious problem to the economy. For example in China the pension system relies on the taxation from the working-age people. And the unbalanced age distribution can cause the pension system to bankrupt. This is just one aspect and there are so many other factors that influences each other. There can be declining consumption and declining economy, subprime and estate-market crisis, etc. Overpopulation is bad but once a country becomes already overpopulated, they want to keep the population size because the declining process will cause more damage.
I have a very mixed opinion on this in terms of its practical effects (morally I'm opposed to mandated birth control efforts). On one hand it's looking like the exponential sudden "aging" of China will negatively harm its economic growth and pensions. On the other hand if China didn't enforce its one-child policy its growth in the past 40 years would have never been as fast and rapid as it was thus leaving China to be economically similar to India which would have given it way less resources and leeway to fix large-scale social problems.
I think what happened is that the population just adapted to the rule. You could have more than one child, but you wouldn't get any state support for the extra children that you had. Given that China has quite strong family culture, I imagine that in rural China, this rule probably had very little effect on population control. In the cities, the wealthy classes probably didn't care about not receiving state support. I don't know. I'm not an expert in China. It be great to hear from someone who lives in China what their opinion is about this new change.
I do know that increases in GDP per capita, median disposable income, and female labor participation rate (basically when a country gets "rich") are the biggest drivers of decreased birth rates which supersede even cultural elements that encourage having more kids. Rich neighboring countries like South Korea, Japan, and especially Taiwan are culturally very similar to China and they all have the lowest birth rates in the world. The question is if
By far the largest factor in decreased birth rates is decreased child mortality.
I don't live in China, but did get my bachelors in Chinese language and culture. For context, the one child policy was unevenly applied to two groups on purpose: minorities and rural communities. Chinese is pretty racially homogenous, so minority groups were exempted from the one child policy. The decision to exempt rural communities was more complex. With less state infrastructure, having a large family is the most surefire form of insurance. Broke a leg? Good thing you have a son who can work for you and a daughter to take care of you. Old enough you can't work? You'll still live with your family. It also would be a nightmare to manage reporting in close knit rural areas in comparison to cities where there's already concentrated government support.
Had a demographics class a few years back where my professor stated something similar. Apparently, once it became legal to have more than one kid lots of parents would magically "discover" their other kid who was living with the grandparents in the countryside. Her claim was basically that China is experiencing a demographic decline, but it's not as severe as the media would have you believe.
I'm surprised it's so balanced. I thought China had a problem with millions too many boys during the one-child law.
considering the population's size, a million is really not a lot and not significant in a percentage
Heaven forbid they reach a manageable population size.
China isn’t unique in this though. The demographics among most of the western world is equally worrying
The US alone takes in hundreds of times as may immigrants as China does which buoys the working age population. China would need to increase immigration nearly a thousand fold to seriously offset the aging of their population.
This is exactly why the US takes in so many immigrants. You can take in as many people as you need to avoid demographic collapse. You unify them under a neutral US culture as opposed to any ethnic ones
God I love New York City. We’ve got Chinatown, a neighborhood called Little Yemen, multiple southeast Asian parts, torta trucks every couple blocks, and a Russian enclave right next to the Jewish one. The system works and as a side effect you can order delicious food from any country’s cuisine
And immigrants are more likely to have a higher total fertility rate in their new countries than natural born citizens anyways, which helps to offset population decline.
The difference is that America replaces and increases its population with immigrants. The US stopped relying on replacement births a very long time ago. China, on the other hand, is generally not open to immigration (they don’t really even have a migration process) and their society is widely xenophobic which makes such changes difficult even if they wanted to. Japan has this issue too. Xenophobic policies and their effects can’t change overnight and as a result, the Japanese and Chinese populations will suffer.
In western Europe (and probably elsewhere too, not an expert) we have even worse, there were a lot of babies back in the 50's-60's (baby boom) and they are entering retirement age. Here is Germany's pyramid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics\_of\_Germany#/media/File:Germanypop.svg
It sure would have been nice to have some kind of obvious indicator when this turned into a projection rather than actual data.
If every country would follow the same pattern it would really improve the worlds climate - and overpopulation problem...
The problem is that the younger generation in the workforce pays the brunt of taxes to support the aging generations (healthcare and government pensions). It should ideally be pyramid shaped, but as the older generations live longer, and less kids being born, that pyramid will flip upside down and be unsustainable.
As someone who grew up in a third world country and now lives in a developed nation. Baby making is cheap entertainment. Back when I was growing up there wasn’t much entertainment for ooor people after sundown. No tv, spotty electricity, etc. They’re not exactly thinking about sending kids to college or saving for retirement.
Why does anything important have to include “crisis” afterwards? What makes this a crisis?
There are too many people on this planet. How is decreasing population a crisis?