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Comment by iseethroughbs | Hacker News Reader

So this article is about a silly meme among Chinese youth.

The urge to struggle is "young people are expected to work long hours, buy property, get married and have children". Unlike any other country.

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In China all four expectations are ramped up to the max though. Long hours means 9 AM to 9 PM 6 days a week ("996"), property prices are completely unaffordable, getting married is an ironclad social requirement and, thanks to the one-child policy, every young person has four grandparents and two parents breathing down their neck to produce offspring. And oh, your life is largely determined by your performance during the gaokao exam, so you've spent your entire childhood cramming for it.

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.

"property prices are completely unaffordable"

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.

> 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).

If your concern is sustainability then a fertility rate closer to 2.1 should be your goal. 1.3 is just collapse. Right now in the US we have 3 workers for every retired person. Imagine instead a world where every worker is supporting four retirees. It doesn't matter how you structure or fund your pensions, that just isn't going to work.

This is an interesting point, even if the retirees self-funded their retirement. There would need to be a nearly 4x increase in productivity per 30 years to avoid an inflation catastrophe as the workers products have increased demand relative to the maximum supply of workers/services/goods.

> 1.3 is just collapse

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.

The U.S. (and Spain and Italy) are desirable places to be so immigration can make up for fertility rates being below what's needed to maintain the population. As a bonus, you don't need to wait ~18 years for an adult immigrant to be a productive, tax-paying member of society.

The US has a long tradition of immigration and it will certainly make the collapse less painful as compared to places like China and Russia but I'm skeptical that immigration can make up for a FR as low as 1.3.

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?

Maybe the fundamental assumption that society needs to provide help to keep people alive as long as possible has to be revisited.

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.

A more realistic and positive solution is to just give parents the societal support they need to be productive and also raise children.

I also thought that, but given the birth rates I see in my social circles full of very high earners (and worldwide data), I have come to question the assumption that women would want to have sufficient children to be able to support our large proportions of old age people.

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.

And from here, it is a very small step (practically speaking) to The sixty of A Pebble in the Sky

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.

I would not characterize it as a very small step, although I do acknowledge the line of reasoning could lead to forcible euthanizing.

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.

There are not too many people. This is a horrible thing to say. Which ones are the extras?

We're just another animal on planet earth that consumes resources and takes up space. There is some saturation point where no more people can fit and/or no more people have the resources they need to survive. Ideally, the alarm is sounded before that saturation point. It may sound bad to say there are too many people, but it would be a lot worse if we got to the saturation point and billions of people suffered.

Why would there being too many of something imply that there are specific members which should be removed?

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".

This is such a moronic statement. If you really really want to limit population then limiting the number of children is a absolutely terrible and potentially catastrophic way of doing it.

Who is going to replace and look after that rapidly aging population? Or is complete collapse your goal?

Do you have a modest proposal for limiting population - that isn't contraception? Are you thinking soylent green, or more like logan's run?

Education of women is a strong predictor of low fertility rates.

Send the girls to school and they won't have to rely on a future husband to sustain themselves later on.

Fair, but how do educated women achieve those low fertility rates?

It's not abstention...

They get pressed into careers with the rest if us and have no time for kids

> there is no chance that it's being driven by some global factors and events, like avaliability of cheap credit

There is no chance indeed.

9AM to 9PM 6 days a week matches what the US went through during the Industrial revolution. The one child policy has been replaced with three children.

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?

loosening the one child policy to 3 doesn't change anything for couples today who are supporting 2 sets of parents - it's not making more brothers and sisters for them.

The article does mention censorship in social media.

From the article

> 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.

The hilarious part is how the Chinese Communist Party's official propagandists and elite Chinese academics are using their bully pulpits to explicitly shame anyone who contemplates giving up on the rat race.

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.

That happens. In fact, that exact genre of op-ed is so common it’s been made into a meme. Millennials and avocado toast etc.

It's my perception that those op-eds are very much in the contrarian minority, a far cry from being the central position of the media institution. They're roundly and immediately mocked, and the majority of coverage in mainstream newspapers is much more sympathetic to the antiwork extreme than the bootstraps one.

Yeah, if anything, US is the mirror image, where all prestige media is filled with complaints about how bad The System sucks and how it is the cause of every hapless individual's inevitable burnout and despair.

In Canada, the op-ed pages at the start of the pandemic were full of articles about how CERB (benefits for those laid off due to COVID) was being exploited by work-shy layabouts.

The us fed has an explicit goal of maximum employment too (along with low inflation, although I bet they are more flexible on inflation).

Very astute, the form of the struggle is the same therefore the degree of the struggle must be the same too. In the same way that a famine isn't a big deal because we've all got to figure out where our next meal is coming from.

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