Baby Boom or Bust?

If you think about it this suggests a strong selective pressure for religious communities that consider birth control sinful.

Let's wait to see which country, between China and India, can fare better over the next 60 years of economic development. India might not have enough water now but the raw material for solving any problem is found in problem solvers, not the ground.

The effect of the one child policy was muted, since birthrates had already fallen in the years preceding the policy being enacted. And since the policy was relaxed, birthrates have not increased.

I'm not sure India is a proof China would have faced similar outcomes.

Given China is facing a demographics decline, not introducing that policy probably wouldn't have made much difference.

It was just immoral and one more reason for unnecessary female infanticide, which is responsible for the tremendous gender unbalance the country has.

> China's one-child policy was a success.

None of Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan or Hong Kong had forced abortions and they also have declining, aging populations after long periods of rapidly rising living standards. China got to very much the same place they would have anyway but with much more human suffering and barbarity.

> China's one-child policy was a success.

Tell that to lots of unmarried men with no prospects.

At the time it was enacted, the one-child’s policy’s goal was to conserve resources. It was also intended to prevent pollution and the spread of disease.

It was a direct response to overpopulation concerns (Club of Rome, Limits of Growth, etc).

Not only did it horribly failed, it did the exact opposite.

By encouraging industrialization, it resulted in more resource consumption, more pollution, and more disease.

It created an immense amount of wealth, and increased standards of living. But those weren’t the goals.

It was intended to avoid an apocalypse, not create a utopia.

If a time traveler went back in time and told Chinese leaders the effects of the their policy, they might very well outlaw contraception.

Edit: earlier family planning policies were focused on maternal health.

This is analogous to saying a car that crashed into a tree has successfully stopped.

> China's one-child policy was a success.

China's one-child policy was unnecessary. Fertility rates were already dropping for at least a decade before it went into effect:

> China’s controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinforma- tion. This essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed efforts to limit China’s population growth; that consequently China’s population continued to grow rapidly until after his death; that the launching of the one-child policy in 1980 led to a dramatic decline in China’s fertility rate; and that the imposition of the policy prevented 400 million births. Evidence is presented contradicting each of these claims. Mao Zedong at times forcefully advocated strict limits on births and presided over a major switch to coer- cive birth planning after 1970; as much as three-quarters of the decline in fertility since 1970 occurred before the launching of the one-child policy; fertility levels fluctuated in China after the policy was launched; and most of the further decline in fertility since 1980 can be attributed to economic development, not coercive enforcement of birth limits.

* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31431804/

* PDF: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinwhyte/files/challeng...

> There are two leading candidates for explaining the pre-1980 drop in fertility. First, family planning existed before the one-child policy became a part of it. Pressure was placed on Chinese men and women about the “appropriate” age at which to marry, about the number of children to have and about how rapidly. A 1994 paper by researchers Judith Banister and Christina Wu Harbaugh argued that these measures alone were effective enough to explain the pre-1980 decline, before the one-child limit.[1]

> Second, China was growing during the 1970s. It is therefore possible that it experienced the same declining trend in fertility caused by growth that all currently developed countries experienced at some point. This is typically referred to as the “demographic” transition.

* https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/october/china...

Both education and religion play a role, but at least in the US religion has a stronger correlation.

The reason why the effect of education in the US is weaker (compared to third world countries) is probably because we require 12 years for all students.

It depends on what you mean by “education.” In the US, the high school graduation rate of women has exceeded that of men since at least 1940. The 20th century fertility rate peak happened in 1965, which also coincided with peak religiosity. During the first part of the 20th century, fertility rates, high school graduation rates, and church attendance all went up at the same time.

I think the biggest predictor will be women’s financial independence, as well as cheap or free effective birth controls.

I suspect the vast majority of women in the past were “coerced” into having the number of children they did, to put it in most charitable terms. If they had the same freedom and access to birth control that women had today, I doubt we would have seen all the 3+ children families we did.

If you compare the total fertility rates in Canada and Europe (~1.5), even with their pro natalist policies, America still has a higher fertility rate (~1.7) with abysmal support for parents. Likely attributable to families that opt out of paid formal child care, and Medicaid picks up the slack for those below middle class means.

We pay for that dearly with lower wages and higher taxes.

It's not a good situation because they all require fairly large sacrifices, but there are alternatives to paid childcare. I work with a developer who's taking care of a 1 and 3-year-old during working hours because the pandemic caused his and many other daycares in in our area to close and there's simply no availability right now anywhere else. He's absent a lot during the day, but he makes it to all the important meetings and spends a significant amount of time working in the evening after his wife comes home from her job, so overall puts in the same amount of work as before. He has no life whatsoever outside of working and taking care of his kids, but no outside care involved.

They are looking really hard for available daycare.

It is definitely a heavy burden for low income families. But I don't think it is as expensive as some people make it out to be. I just checked at the daycare we send our kid to part time. And it looks like all day, 5 days a week, including breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack is $875/mo. And I live in an expensive California suburb.

Now, that will certainly get expensive if you have multiple kids under 5 all going at once. But it turned out to be a lot cheaper than I thought.

I think some of the parents complaining are the same ones that are "applying" to these fancy, artisanal day cares that will teach your toddler how to do algebra in French.

I’d argue that in a nuclear family culture, kids are also expensive in indirect ways which are hard to account for. You sacrifice a lot of personal time and often health when you need to be there for kids virtually constantly, and while daycare is very expensive in some places ($1200 CAD/month for us) I feel like it’s one of the more manageable costs.

During the pandemic, having no friends or family around to help and needing to work full time jobs is a lot harder to manage than money.

I’m not complaining at all. I just spent a great day with my kids at the ocean and I love having them around. It’s still a daily task to juggle them, work, and my well being without much in the way of outside help. I’m fairly sure my life is shortening considerably as a result of the stress, so like I said, daycare seems pretty cheap in comparison.

Just my take on it - I know some people seem to manage it expertly, and maybe more people do than I realize.

In any case, that cost is still very high these days since both parents typically need to work. Money becomes easier to find than time.

Well, that and health care (in the US). And housing. And those two don't go away until they're out of the house.

But yes, next to those three things most other expenses aren't that bad, or are avoidable with little down-side. Only other notable one's probably consumables (diapers, food, that sort of thing) which doesn't come close to any of the other three. Toys and clothes are practically free, if you're not picky. People get all kinds of expensive crap at baby showers, but very little of it's actually of much use, and most of the rest could have been had used for next to nothing.

Those programs don’t affect cost based decisions for people not eligible. WIC for instance can’t be had over 185% of poverty line, which is $49025 for a family of four. (That’s $185%, the poverty line is lower)

Formula?

These parents definitely have too much money to spend.

I don't know! The cost of living and high cost of raising children here are popular scape goats for why Canadians are having less children. There's already baby bonuses, nationalized child care (in QC) but they do not have enough effect? One thing that isn't addressed is housing. Couples aren't going to want to have kids when all they can afford in a major city is a shoebox condo.

We can say it's a win for Canada (gain people) and a win for the people coming (gain standard of living). But then, it's a loss for the place the people come from since that place loses the people that Canada gains.

Partial Sentence: Countries can increase their population through immigration without increasing domestic birth rates. Countries can decrease their domestic birth rates without decreasing immigration.

Global Sentence: Global Population = People born.

Once every country is pro immigration without being pro birth there will not be enough births to maintain the current population. The can is being kicked down the road.

The problem isn't the shrinking population though. It's the aging of the entire world. Someone has to take care of these people or they die alone with nobody to attend their funeral.

The truth is letting people die by the millions in a war tends to take care of problems like this.

You're not wrong, but the struggling countries may not have the infrastructure to fully take advantage of the skills and talents of the 'best and brightest'. By going to Canada (or wherever) they could be leveraged more effectively.

A lot of technology is making things easier in struggling countries, and if that technology can be made cheaper and commoditized it can improve more lives at more points of the income spectrum. The best and brightest may be helping to eliminate their own positions by making certain jobs easier to do in more places on the planet.

It's not only about gathering taxes. It's also about having someone to wipe your ass once you're too frail to do it yourself.

I agree, there is a limit to sustainability, even if technology is likely to improve I don't see why we should take the risk of pushing the limits.

If the population decline happen to be a seemingly unsurmountable problem 100 years down the road, we'll have more than enough time to react before risking extinction.

I think that the risk of civilization collapse has been highly overrated and is mostly bullshit prediction.

Just in case: to maintain the population we need about 2.3 kids per woman.

> So far, history has not been kind to those civilizations exhibiting declining populations over sustained multi-generational spans.

And yet Japan has some of the highest quality of life, a huge economy despite very few natural resources, some of the most innovative companies in the world and the longest lived people on the planet. It's been the poster-child for westerners as a failed economy with a lost decade and yet they keep on doing fine despite 30+ years of this narrative.

Try moving somewhere with rampant population growth and tell me it's great. The underlying general trend for the vast majority of people on Earth is to get the fuck away from other people and move to low density countries where the mineral and agricultural wealth is spread much thicker. GDP growth means nothing for the average person and most realise this.

Yes. I agree, birth rates have been lower in many places before the pandemic, probably in gradual decline over the last 60 years.

Perhaps I should've clarified that I fully expect that we'll be dealing with an ageing population in the future. The question here is whether or not the pandemic played any significant role. It's possible that it may have even slightly "helped" the problem of an ageing population.