China urges its people to struggle. Some say no
economist.com
economist.com
Now that you have to compete for a dwindling supply of the opposite sex just to have more responsibilities without any traditional patriarchal privileges it makes it less attractive.
New forms of entertainment and "socializing" eliminate the boredom.
We are seeing a sociological experiment in action across the globe.
Why is there a dwindling supply?
> traditional patriarchal privileges
What are these?
That's actually more than enough to explain the skewed ratio, even though selective abortions likely also have had a noticeable impact.
It doesn't matter what stopping criterion for your family composition you use, every child that gets put on the earth has a 50% chance of being a girl. Suppose you have children until you either get 5 or until you have a boy. The possible outcomes and their probabilities are:
B (1/2), GB (1/4), GGB (1/8), GGGB (1/16), GGGGB (1/32), GGGGG (1/32)
You can't explain the difference without selective murder, lack of childcare, abortion or some other selective filtering.
boys = 100000 girls 99350
boys = 100000 girls 100333
boys = 100000 girls 101195
In this process you will always get 1 boy, obviously. But you have a (1/2)^k * (1/2) chance of getting k girls before your first boy. Thus the expected number of girls is
Sum[k * (1/2)^k * (1/2), k, 0, inf]
Here are the results when the number of max births per family is dropped to 2:
boys = 74861 girls 75166
boys = 74752 girls 75464
boys = 75047 girls 74933Not everyone will continue until they get a boy. Another child is an option, not a requirement. This is where the skew (can) come from.
The question is how likely are parents with G/GG/GGG to stop or try again.
No it can not! It's just mathematically and biologically not true, and attempts to erase a crime against humanity. The human inception process does not give a shit about your decision whether or not to put another child on this earth to decide whether the infant will be a boy or a girl.
Each child put on this earth has a ~50% chance of being either sex. It does not matter whether the parents decide to have another afterwards or not, this future child also has a ~50% chance of being either sex. The *only* variable that matters for the amount of girls that get born (in the absence of selective filtering) is the total number of children born, not whatever strategy their parents were going for.
To try and prove it to you, consider this randomized Python function:
import numpy as np
from numba import njit
@njit
def bear_children(stop_on_girl_p, stop_on_boy_p, max_children):
num_girls = num_boys = 0
while num_girls + num_boys < max_children:
child_is_girl = np.random.random() < 0.5
num_girls += child_is_girl
num_boys += not child_is_girl
r = np.random.random()
if ( child_is_girl and r < stop_on_girl_p or
not child_is_girl and r < stop_on_boy_p):
break
return [num_girls, num_boys]
def sample(n, stop_on_girl_p, stop_on_boy_p, max_children):
children = [bear_children(stop_on_girl_p, stop_on_boy_p, max_children) for _ in range(n)]
girls, boys = np.sum(children, axis=0)
return girls / boys
for max_children in np.arange(2, 5):
for stop_on_girl_p in np.linspace(0, 1, 5):
for stop_on_boy_p in np.linspace(0, 1, 5):
ratio = sample(10**6, stop_on_girl_p, stop_on_boy_p, max_children)
print(f"m {max_children}, g {stop_on_girl_p:.2f}, b {stop_on_boy_p:.2f}: {ratio: .6f}")
m 2, g 0.00, b 0.00: 0.999922
m 2, g 0.00, b 0.25: 0.995816
m 2, g 0.00, b 0.50: 1.001230
m 2, g 0.00, b 0.75: 1.001087
m 2, g 0.00, b 1.00: 0.999463
m 2, g 0.25, b 0.00: 0.997941
m 2, g 0.25, b 0.25: 0.999697
m 2, g 0.25, b 0.50: 0.999899
m 2, g 0.25, b 0.75: 0.997890
m 2, g 0.25, b 1.00: 1.001904
m 2, g 0.50, b 0.00: 0.999417
m 2, g 0.50, b 0.25: 1.002257
m 2, g 0.50, b 0.50: 0.997706
m 2, g 0.50, b 0.75: 1.003743
m 2, g 0.50, b 1.00: 1.002836
m 2, g 0.75, b 0.00: 1.001780
m 2, g 0.75, b 0.25: 1.001771
m 2, g 0.75, b 0.50: 0.997113
m 2, g 0.75, b 0.75: 1.001912
m 2, g 0.75, b 1.00: 0.998633
m 2, g 1.00, b 0.00: 1.000313
m 2, g 1.00, b 0.25: 0.997060
m 2, g 1.00, b 0.50: 1.001314
m 2, g 1.00, b 0.75: 0.997819
m 2, g 1.00, b 1.00: 1.003839
m 3, g 0.00, b 0.00: 0.999760
m 3, g 0.00, b 0.25: 1.000058
m 3, g 0.00, b 0.50: 0.999769
m 3, g 0.00, b 0.75: 1.003119
m 3, g 0.00, b 1.00: 0.999096
m 3, g 0.25, b 0.00: 1.000912
m 3, g 0.25, b 0.25: 0.999597
m 3, g 0.25, b 0.50: 1.000687
m 3, g 0.25, b 0.75: 1.001384
m 3, g 0.25, b 1.00: 1.001542
m 3, g 0.50, b 0.00: 0.999007
m 3, g 0.50, b 0.25: 0.999736
m 3, g 0.50, b 0.50: 1.001971
m 3, g 0.50, b 0.75: 0.999555
m 3, g 0.50, b 1.00: 1.000360
m 3, g 0.75, b 0.00: 0.999272
m 3, g 0.75, b 0.25: 1.001740
m 3, g 0.75, b 0.50: 1.001187
m 3, g 0.75, b 0.75: 0.998134
m 3, g 0.75, b 1.00: 1.002759
m 3, g 1.00, b 0.00: 1.002063
m 3, g 1.00, b 0.25: 1.002451
m 3, g 1.00, b 0.50: 0.999767
m 3, g 1.00, b 0.75: 0.999704
m 3, g 1.00, b 1.00: 1.003851
m 4, g 0.00, b 0.00: 0.999863
m 4, g 0.00, b 0.25: 0.998141
m 4, g 0.00, b 0.50: 1.000851
m 4, g 0.00, b 0.75: 0.999944
m 4, g 0.00, b 1.00: 0.999089
m 4, g 0.25, b 0.00: 1.001894
m 4, g 0.25, b 0.25: 0.998684
m 4, g 0.25, b 0.50: 0.999523
m 4, g 0.25, b 0.75: 1.000608
m 4, g 0.25, b 1.00: 1.003503
m 4, g 0.50, b 0.00: 1.000178
m 4, g 0.50, b 0.25: 0.998415
m 4, g 0.50, b 0.50: 1.000846
m 4, g 0.50, b 0.75: 0.999193
m 4, g 0.50, b 1.00: 0.998043
m 4, g 0.75, b 0.00: 0.999524
m 4, g 0.75, b 0.25: 0.999053
m 4, g 0.75, b 0.50: 0.996726
m 4, g 0.75, b 0.75: 1.000306
m 4, g 0.75, b 1.00: 1.000998
m 4, g 1.00, b 0.00: 0.999759
m 4, g 1.00, b 0.25: 1.000097
m 4, g 1.00, b 0.50: 1.000577
m 4, g 1.00, b 0.75: 0.999687
m 4, g 1.00, b 1.00: 0.996829When a couple has G, what's the probability they'll want to go for GX? When the couple has GG, what's the probability they'll want to go for GGX?
It doesn't matter that X is 50% boy 50% girl - in fact, it being 50/50 is why the bias ends up towards more G.
Edit: Ah wait I think I have something backwards in my head, I need to come back to this later. But I do want to mention that the estimated at-birth ratio in humans is more like 51:49, not 50:50
> You can't explain the difference without selective murder, lack of childcare, abortion or some other selective filtering.
I'd like to add that natural birth favors boys, citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio#Natural_factor...
So the theme of the article was about the role good paying blue-collar jobs play on the social structure. When they exist, men who have them become desirable and this underpins a stability and family dynamic of sorts. When they don’t, women become more independent and the same structure of less stable.
To be clear, this isn’t an argument one way or the other, just observation. But it is interesting to see how the provider role plays out in society.
Plus, once there's an abundance of things (land, houses/apartments, etc.), numbers tend to move back up, or at least stabilize.
No, but it will mean they will go older, with less dynamic and more geriatric society, worse economic momentum, and so on.
Historically momentum (not absolute position, which depends on prior trajecory and other accidental factors) is tied to population.
When France ruled the world, it was the most populous nation in Europe (1/3 Europeans was French). When Europe in aggregate was the center of power (through colonialism, science, industry, etc), European countries were in the 10 most populous globally (along with China and India). The decline in influence of Britain, France, etc, followed their population decline - in 1950 still 4 of the top populated countries in the world were European (including Russia) and 8 of the top 20. In 2015 only Russia remains in the top 10, and soon there will be no European country in the top 20.
Similarly, when the US emerged and established itself in the international scene as a strong player and then a dominant one, it also got in the top list of most populous countries.
(Historically, China, with its huge population, was the strongest economy on the planet, until the "historical accident" of the New World in the 16th century. Now that the European momentum has stalled, it's getting back up there again).
There may possibly have been some confounding factors during the twentieth century though, like the hugely destructive war, the shift from empires being a benefit to a cost and their consequent dismantling, and numerous mass casualty and economic disruption events. Russia lost something in the region of sixteen million people to the war.
Also I think you need to be clear on absolute vs relative decline - the population of the UK hasn't declined in absolute numbers, nor has its economy, and whether you mean "size of economy" or "GDP per person".
He's talking relative. And it matters. For example stuff stops being sold/is never sold in relatively small markets. We're starting to see it with China-only products. There are many disadvantages to being a smaller economy, even if in per capita terms things are ok.
And almost all European countries, taken individually, are predicted to fall outside the top 10 by 2050 (moderate chance for 2050 and huge chance for 2100).
South Korea's fertility rate is below 1 and still dropping, for many decades. Many other countries are on a similar path. Has there been any precedent of a country recovering from such deeply negative trend once more land and houses freed up?
If you look at South Korea's population, it's still being going up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m...
(Edit: Actually in 2020 it went down for the first time in recorded history, it seems)
Give it a few more decades, when people actually start dying off en masse (because we haven't really found a way to reliably have masses of centenaries living), and then you'll should see the population dropping. Unless they increase immigration.
What I'm saying applies once the population actually drops by a large amount.
Oh but this is exactly what I'm trying to explore with the South Korea specific example. By 2100 they are predicted by the UN* to have 1/2 of their current population. This remaining bunch will be mostly very old people, the fertile/working age fraction will be like 20% supporting 80% people too old to work or reproduce. This is already a never seen before situation (in peaceful times, at least), which you describe as "numbers tend to move back up, or at least stabilize", like we've seen this many times before, but we've never seen anything like that. Also, I'm having a very difficult time imagining a half-a-century long, continuing freefall in fertility suddenly reversing in another 5-8 decades and them all of a sudden starting to breed like rabbits in 2100, after they lose half their population. Even just to stop the freefall they would have to double the current fertility rate just to not go completely extinct around year 2150.
* https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191010-south-koreas-p...
When your main home + a vacation home cost half of what your main home would have costed 3 decades ago, and you can afford them when you're 25, that's a huge relief right there.
The big question mark to that is that the entire economy doesn't collapse and also takes down salaries with it. But South Korea is quite export oriented so they're better positioned than some other countries.
If one was raised in a patriarchal setup, maybe. But some societies have already a third or even fifth generation that never knew this.
>We are seeing a sociological experiment in action across the globe.
The extinction of a world view in which gender equality is considered a "sociological experiment"?
Yes, exactly! We can already observe the effects through such metrics as marriage rate and birth rate in e.g. Germany or South Korea.
> The extinction of a world view in which gender equality is considered a "sociological experiment"?
I sense some negativity, could I have formulated it in a more neutral way? Any historically new social reform e.g. tax-payer-funded health care or tuition is in a way an experiment. Also I am not sure we will ever achieve true gender equality. For example in prison population to name one metric.
I once had a friend who slapped his wife in the face once. I was shocked when I learned about this. He was very ashamed and explained that he felt completely powerless, she was shaming him he is not a real man because he earns so little and one day he broken down and - not being able to defend himself verbally - he nervously slapped her. This whole event made me sad. It's not like I justify his action, it's clear what he did was wrong and he knew this well, but cases like these get into statistics and then people make up all kinds of uninformed conclusions.
I am missing the proof of causation here. One can equally assume that a good social safety net reduces demand to have children as providers in old age. Or that access to higher education for women lets them make a) more informed decisions or b) not rely on a male partner to provide for them.
> I sense some negativity, could I have formulated it in a more neutral way?
You could have shown that your causation is actually that, not just a correlation :)
That sounds distressingly redpilled to me...
I don't have demographics for China, but in the west there's no particular shortage of hardworking <demographic-other-than-socially-dominant-male>'s doing reasonably well in the market. And their representation in the "hardworking professional successful person" pool is growing over time. That's good, right?
Isn't maybe a better hypothesis that there's an identifiable population of MEN unwilling to work hard if they don't get essentially unfair access to success, and complaining about it? Seems like maybe that's where the solution needs to be addressed?
Do you think it might be useful information to consider that years of China's one-child policy and strong cultural preferences might have combined to create a serious skew in the gender ratio? India has a related issue. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/too-many-...
Again, you're absolutely correct that this sounds like an utterly repellent expression of privilege and sexism. It's just worth perhaps considering that demographic context might be considered by some to be relevant.
Now, I think there's a real discussion to be had there, sure. But the post above sounded a lot more like MRA whining.
It just might be worth considering that what is in one context baseless sexist whining might in another be an accurate observation of the effects of decades of policy and the suggestion of a control group. Some readers might take this as an opportunity to check their assumptions and refer to relevant data.
I recognize that this is a matter of opinion, and thus reasonable people might differ. Again, you are inconvertibly correct in every single moral and ethical dimension!
For my own part, I don't think you were guilty of what the other commenter accused you of. I think they over-aggressively pattern-matched some rhetoric you used and responded with something canned.
If we are talking a country of a billion people, we are talking a multi-hundred-million-person imbalance developing. When young men with poorly developed decision-making skills get it in their head that nothing they do along traditional paths matters because they will never woo a partner, they begin to take less “traditional” routes to fixing their personal problems, like war and crime.
Alternatively, and much less apocalyptically, a median hetero man in China will spend 17% less time in a committed relationship than one in the Germany (or wherever). Stated that way it doesn't really sound that bad.
I repeat AGAIN, that you're invoking what seems to me to be an incel fantasy, that some men are going to "win" and that those that don't will be "forever destined" to being alone. And no, the truth is that most people (everywhere!) spend a bunch of their lives lonely, but sometimes find relationships, and that love is hard work, finding happiness takes effort, and mopey excuse-making helps no one.
And in particular, the brand of mopey excuse-making I'm seeing here gets really toxic really fast.
"Hey, Guy from China, suck it up, you are only going to be 17% more lonely than the average German man. We have better things to mope about than your socioeconomic situation in a country that literally invades every aspect of your socioeconomic means of production."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/too-many-...
Seems totally reasonable to think that not have the potential to be a husband/father would affect how men view the payoff of gaining higher social status. You can't write that off as "Der der redpill!"
In fact the gender ratio among 15-24 year old chinese (the peak of the one child gender curve) is 1.17. That's not low, but it's hardly a strong effect either. In particular those 17% of citizens having trouble finding a mate seems like a rather smaller effect than the significantly larger increase in workforce participation among their more numerous female coworkers.
So China loses a few men who check out because they can't get a date, and gains women by the truckload (no, I don't have demographics) who are entering the workforce. I still don't see why this is a social problem.
So I look to other people trying to claim this is a social problem, and I'm sorry, I see a lot of "der der redpill" and not much else. If this is a serious economic argument, then please make it.
Gotta love the creative ways people will find to retrofit some artistic meanings to grow it into something stronger.
The people who wanted to just lay flat were not really trying to make a statement, but now it will inevitably be perceived as one. The whole article is a disservice to these folks, who'd be better left unknown.
I write code for fun and, incidentally, I get paid for it, but, for every one like me there is a dozen who are only doing that so they can afford to pay their rent. If I couldn’t get paid to write code and solve problems with that, I’d have to do something else, perhaps something I don’t enjoy at all, in order to provide for my family.
If you can completely avoid doing that, congratulations. You win.
He was a subversive figure, criticising and challenging everything: Plato, Alexander, Athenian nobles, sensibilities and social assumptions of his day. He was a famous troublemaker, and that's why we know of him today. I'm sure some Greek dude did really just want to be left alone.. we just don't know his name.
Obviously, I'm not justifying China's paranoid response to any kind of cultural subversions or provocation. Proverbial barrel dwellers are a necessary critique, IMO. The salience of their message can be an important important signal or backpressure.
You could make analogies to the US in the 60s, Japan in the 00s and I'm sure lots of others.
I think it is pretty clear that all of society is poorer for the existence of these people. Perhaps China’s ability to keep a lid on it is one small part of their relative economic competitiveness.
I'm skeptical. I feel like there's an instinctive lunge from "these people irritate me" to "this is detrimental to society." In any case, you'd be writing off a fringe that has yielded quite a lot of stuff that I do like... like rock n roll. There is a definite connection there to the old "tune in drop out" mentality. The Beatles were some friends basically rejecting the rat race of their time and day, punk rock and hence most of modern pop, etc. Artists have always been receptive to subversive, diogenes-like ideas.
A lot of hackers from the early microcomputer days were rat race rejectors too.
As you close in on examples, it gets harder to generalize. Dude might be comparing himself to Diogenes, but I'd wager their motivations and ways are pretty different.
Everyone row in the same direction is a bad analogy, IMO, for large societies. We need contrarians.
I would estimate that they themselves would probably identify with some of these tangping people.
Spending long hours hacking computer systems, dressed in ripped jeans listening to Pink Floyd only looks like work in retrospect. ATT, much of it probably looked like an overindulgent hobby. Same for hanging out and playing guitar.
Diogenes himself left quite a legacy. Pretty direct line from him to stoicism, for example.
Most bummy subcultures don't become the Homebrew Computer Club, Beatles or whatnot. Some do.
-Diogenes
The irony is that Singapore has loosened up a bit in the 40 years since, with the (actual) opposition Labour Party gaining a toehold in Parliament and various government campaigns to encourage arts and creativity (with varying levels of success), while in China the very concepts of political opposition or not being a busy worker bee are clearly anathema.
And yes, from ~1980-2020 we’ve gone from no opposition to over ten opposition MPs and multiple opposition GRCs(!) but it is also worth pointing out that from 1963-1980 parliament went from 37-13 (PAP-BS) to that. If one buys Thum Ping Tjin’s analysis, elections since the 1980s have become more unfair even as the opposition’s share of the core has increased.¹
> The first of the two turning points was in the 1950s, specifically 1954–57, when the increasing demands of the people of Singapore for self-determination meant that universal suffrage could no longer be denied by the colonial government. In response, the colonial government kept the vote generally fair but sought to limit voters’ choices of candidates through anti-democratic legislation and regulation, like detention without trial and the infamous “subversives’ clause” of the 1957 Constitutional Agreement, which prevented anyone arrested (but not necessarily convicted) for subversion from running in the next election. This policy was then continued and amplified by the People’s Action Party (PAP) government, using lawsuits, harassment, arrests, and other measures, until the 1980s, when the will of the people for wider representation and greater accountability in Parliament became inexorable.
> Up to that point, voter choice was restricted by limiting their choice of candidates. However, from around 1984–1991, a second shift took place, in which legal and regulatory changes made the elections less fair, and qualitative factors were introduced to discourage voting against the PAP. The elections were fundamentally redesigned to maximise electoral outcomes for the PAP. That is the situation which remains today.
1: https://newnaratif.com/a-brief-history-of-elections-in-singa...
60-80 hour week is common. The idea is, if employee a isnt going to work 80 hours for this job, fine, leave and there are 20 more willing to do just that because for them, this is better than nothing.
I easily work 80+ hours, partly because im the proprietor of my law office.
Employees, well they get 10-5-6 day so the rest its just me and other hardcore associates.
India has a huge problem of service industry being overworked and underpaid.
Educated, and talented, or simply already rich are leaving Asian countries, and go live for a vacation like employment somewhere in Dubai, or Singapore, while everybody else, but much more people already downtrodden have to stay.
People think this reduces the competition for people staying, but in reality its the opposite.
- In big companies, it means more people vying for prised promotions.
- It means less opportunities in service industry, as there is not much richer people to service.
- And there are less small businesses doing something worthy, as people who can do that, chose to do that in Dubai, or Singapore
- The really rich not only go to live abroad these days, but, more than ever before, take their moneys go to live somewhere else with them.
Interestingly, China and Hong Kong are having a crossover moment right now: HK has a downward trend, and China has an upward trend.
Is this actually still a non-negligible factor in tech hiring? I've never had anyone ask me this (and never shared my github), though I believe it existed in the past. But I can't imagine it's accurate to say that this is "expected" in a labor market as absurdly tight as tech is.
I think what's perhaps the case is that you're mistaking opportunity for expectation; for those with little experience and no credential, open source work is an open-to-all foothold to showing your ability. This is one of the _good_ things about tech hiring, that makes us less blindly credentialist: try getting a job in (eg) finance without a college degree by showing off participation in a non-professional project.
That's the model I have of open source's role in tech hiring. Am I missing something?
The FIRE movement is very popular, even in other developing countries like India. Very few people want to work a 9-5 for the majority of their lives.
The idea about this being defiancy in China is the only real difference, I guess. In other (not as authoritarian) countries, this is just a personal choice, not a political statement. Things like these getting banned from social media seems pretty absurd.
The urge to struggle is "young people are expected to work long hours, buy property, get married and have children". Unlike any other country.
Also, I doubt there's any other country aside from maybe North Korea where the sentiment "I want to be lazy!" is a censorable offence.
Also the article doesn't speak about any of it being censored. The fact a commenter in state media said "this is shameful" is not censorship. The fact it's hard to find T-shirts with the meme also isn't censorship, unless we have evidence of someone trying to sell such T-shirts and being censored.
What you say is a great example of how you can take some half-truths and spin them into a propaganda narrative. You just want to make sure China looks bad, for some reason. No shades of gray in this country with over a billion people. All fits into a simple narrative, doesn't it?
In the western world, young people often need two jobs just to survive. No they don't have houses either. Laying down and memeing online is often not even an option, censorship or not. Why do we need to villify China about a problem that's literally world-wide? Does it simply feel better to know someone is worse out there?
> But Douban, another social-media site, has banned several online groups promoting the concept.
It’s safe to assuming in China the social media is just an extension of the state.
Oh, such a unique problem, there is no chance that it's being driven by some global factors and events, like avaliability of cheap credit, right?
"getting married is an ironclad social requirement"
Typical in traditional / conservatice societies
Fertility rate in Spain and Italy is below 1.3 and we have no clue how to address it.
There are alredy too many people in this world... we don't live on farms anymore, so that we'd need many kids to help work on them... the only problem currently is, that our pension systems and some of the economic systems depend on more and more people producing and that we have yearly growth (instead of sustained business).
Who is going to replace and look after that rapidly aging population? Or is complete collapse your goal?
Send the girls to school and they won't have to rely on a future husband to sustain themselves later on.
It's not abstention...
I think
1. It's going to take a lot more immigration.
2. Significantly higher immigration is going to politically destabilizing for a variety of reasons.
Are we preparing for this? I really wish we had a functional government.
EDIT:
3. Pretty much everywhere except India, Afghanistan, and a few places in sub-sahara Africa have fertility rates below replacement. Immigration from anywhere but those places helps the destination country but makes the originating one worse. What effects is that going to have?
I think it well may be that the tradition of supporting elders forever either worked when they were not living as long in such large numbers, and persisted due to the outsize political and economic power they have (or had).
Once the younger people have power, they might choose that the best use of their resources is not supporting those 70+ year olds.
https://archive.org/details/pebbleinsky00asim/ https://archive.org/details/podcast_dimension-x_dimension-x-...
For those who haven't heard or read it, the 60 is a law on the Earth of the future that requires that on your sixtieth birthday you report to a medical center for euthanization. Those who refuse are tracked down and forcibly euthanized.
It takes orders of more resources to support people in the last weeks or days of their life. It is possible that such a huge portion of resources of society can go towards providing a very marginal benefit, that it is not worth it anymore.
I struggle to see why I should not take myself out when I will need to have constant attention from someone younger and more able. Obviously, the will to live is a powerful one and walking the walk is surely harder than just talk, but I would not want my kids to spend their time wiping my ass, and I certainly would not want a stranger to when they could be doing something else.
While lack of parental support and high volatility is a cause for not having children, I also think there might be a decent portion of women that given the financial freedom of not having to do anything they do not want to do, will choose to not have children at numbers previously seen.
I think it is playing out before us in real time, especially as ACA introduce cost free birth control, and technological advances such as IUDs introduced convenient birth control.
I often wonder if the explosive population (and resulting economic) growth of the post WW2 era would have happened if women had been financially independent and had access to the same birth control we have now.
Concerned about the fertility rate being 1.3? That’s too mild, no match against the godly number of 0.84 from South Korea!
Ah, our country’s really fucked.
If we allow the population to stop increasing we can _maybe_ find a way to live sustainably on this earth. No one existing person is "extra".
There is no chance indeed.
Imagine you go to nytimes.com one morning and the US government and Harvard professors have written op-eds scolding you, demanding that you work hard to "ensure a happy life" or you will be "unjust", "shameful", and "disappoint your parents and the taxpayers." You might get the vibe that they protest too much, and your well-being is actually the least of their concerns.
To be fair, the Chinese would probably find NYT op-eds from the Great Awokening era equally hilarious and self-undermining.
China's hippie moment finally happened.
If we solve this distribution issue, a lot of people will opt to do that. We’ll lose a lot of bank tellers, gas pump operators, and insurance sellers but, in return, we’ll get a lot more poets and dancers, dreamers and storytellers. And lots of people who won’t give us anything of importance besides being part of the human family.
I recall some shaggy bearded 19th century German philosopher who wrote a book on this.
Thought he was pretty popular with the Chinese government. I'm surprised to hear they're still having problems with distribution 100 years later.
Maybe it's just not feasible to effectively govern over a billion people. Even though I strongly disagree with it, I can understand why Mao wanted the Cultural Revolution; splitting up a country is far less desirable.
But one doesn't have to read much history to see that the prescribed methods offered for solving the problems laid out in The Communist Manifesto haven't been successful in any implementation tried in the 20th and 21st centuries.
At this point I consider any communist who doesn't admit the ideology's massive failures to be either ignorant, or disingenuous, because if someone actually wants to solve the problems with the capitalist system, they have to admit what has been tried and failed so far.
I do hope one day we'll find new solutions to the distribution problem that don't create other massive problems like we've seen, because the issues inherent in capitalism won't go away without acknowledging its failures either.
It was written about 170 years ago, so it'd make sense that the methods would no longer work now. Even if we count the inception of the Soviet Union as its first actual use, it was already pretty old to be relied upon as a manual.
The productivity gains I mentioned are a very important step in that direction. Capitalism and free markets work best on an economy saddled by scarcity, to the point many scarcities are engineered to extract labor from the scarcity gradients a bit like a Stirling engine extract mechanical work from a temperature gradient: you don't need an iPhone 12 (I know I don't) or a 64-core desktop (I could use one) and a lot of people will work so they can have the things they want, but not necessarily need. As the tangping prove, after you reach a certain level of abundance (a low one for them), capitalism ceases to be able to extract labor because the price of wanting more is too high for them.
These people who refuse to participate in this system are willing to live a materially constrained existence in exchange for more free time and a simpler life. I think we all could adopt a less radical position and still live with a little less and enjoy a life a little bit less complicated.
I've been saying for a while now that China is undergoing a Mccarthy era politically, and that their "summer of love" is less than two decades away, and they'll be radically tranformed by it.
Thanks for the metaphor with the Stirling engine, hasn't heard of that before. Interestingly I've always considered capitalism to only work in a system without scarcity of resources (land, minerals, ect.) as it's often the most efficient way to extract those resources and convert them into more useful products (by humans subjective standards). It's when raw resources are limited that the paradigm for endless extraction breaks down, as there's nothing more to extract, and quality of life starts diminishing as we extract beyond replacement level of natural resources.
But I think your point is about scare processed resources being the motivator for capitalism, and that once the gradient diminishes and the top is warmed enough, and the heat differential with the bottom is less, certain members will opt out of further extraction. This is why inadvertently a lot of conservstive lawmakers advocate reducing entitlements, to artificially "cool" the top plate, to keep the engine turning, even if they don't know for what purpose.
Still, communism even in it's converted versions has not worked (I'm sure you don't seriously consider China's economic system one that is concerned with equal distribution of wealth among the working class right?) and has brought many horrors to those living in states that claim to be using its doctrine, and those failures must be accepted and addressed before better alternative approaches can be considered.
Absolutely. Quite the contrary, BTW. China proves capitalism works a lot better when there is no democracy to hold it back.
And that is terrifying, because others, in a lot of places, are getting that very same idea.
The National Socialist German Workers Party wasn't always as unpopular as it is today, many thought they were doing a great job lifting Germans out of poverty who had experienced the devastation of the 1922-1924 inflation.
As an aside you may find the book "How Asia Works" illuminating. All the credit to China's relative success ought not be attributed exclusively to fascism, but many of the things that worked are sort of hybrid attempts at adapting to the global capitalist society with some land reforms (seizures) and protectionist measures mixed in.
There is a highly prized ad for a Brazilian newspaper pretty much about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PShbxd42JN8
What "productivity gains from automation" do you feel the richest pockets are holding back?
That's a pretty low bar for journalism.
But wait, "The post went viral."
What does "viral" mean in a nation of 1.3 billion people?
The article doesn't say. All it offers by way of quantitative data is:
"More than 60% of over 240,000 respondents to a poll on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, said tangping was their idea of the good life."
https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Distinguishin...
The Economist does 0 (and I mean zero) investigative work. They read the papers like everyone else, and will dig up bits from IMF/World Bank reports and think tanks to fill out the rest of the article.
Isn't this part of the overall understated minimalism movement?
Chop wood, carry water.
For instance, many other developed nations take twice as much time off (or more) compared to American workers and seem to be doing just fine.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/the-low-desire...
Dalai Lama was even cancelled by twitter users for that. He said that his successor, if a woman, must be beautiful (since she would be working with people and people care about looks). An appalled journalist asked: "but isn't the internal qualities all that matter". Dalai Lama mentioned the necessity of balance infuriating some of the viewers who then cancelled him.
Reason why your mentioned path is wrong it that along those lines one can arbitrary choose min and max limits of the function and choose the middle. So to give a very crud example "if murder is not ok, than acceptable number of murders is 0 and on the other end we have 8 billion people so middle is 4 billion?"
In same sense your version says that between slave and aristocrat there are many levels of gray, but in fact slaves are just a slaves and aristocrats are aristocrats, being in the game just helps aristocrats and prolongs the cycle of suffering.
Some people got angry at him? Did he lose his Twitter account? Did it cost him his job? Is he not the Dalai Lama anymore?
> Such ideas ("Tangping") are at odds with the Communist Party’s rhetoric. Its leader, Xi Jinping, likes the word “struggle”. In 2019 an official summary of a speech he gave to young officials included more than 50 mentions of it. Struggle is an art, he told them. “We must be good at struggle.”
What need is there for wasteful propaganda when struggle is baked right into economic policy?
That said, the US still has the illusion of being a democracy and its people having a will of their own, which isn't as much of a thing in China.
That said that said, "western" media does tend to make China into a uniform mass, while in reality it's much bigger, richer, more populous and more diverse than Europe and the US combined.
> will of their own
Do you think CCP still unilaterally assign jobs to the Chinese people along with weekly quota or something? I argue that these feeling of tiredness and hopelessness is less about CCP than long working time hours which also common in East Asia.
I've seen the same kind of simplistic extrapolation done by the NYT. Take some ephemeral trend, then make it sound like a huge social phenomenon that's making the CCP quake in its boots.
If foreign outlets wrote about Western countries like this, we'd be patting ourselves on the back for solving ALS by dumping a bucket of water on our heads.
Add that to the 996 work week (72 hours!) and I can understand why you wouldn't play ball.
I think the Economist is confusing China with the USA. This is how people in the USA feel, not people in China. China just eliminated extreme poverty and its people have continually been getting richer. Meanwhile people in the USA have been steadily getting poorer since the 1970s.
The Economist has been predicting China's failure for decades now and it hasn't happened yet. Maybe it never will. And maybe the publication that was originally founded in the 19th century to promote slavery in America and opium into China is just full of shit.