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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

And “India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country in 2023”

Demographic breakdown is a lot more important than a single number. China has screwed up theirs beyond measure with their attempts at population control, so this isn't really a reason to celebrate for them.

Good. A less populated China is a weaker China. And a weaker China is a good thing for the global prospects of liberal democracy. I don't want to see China becoming the most powerful country in the world, ever.

Even from that point of view this isn't as simple an equation as you might think, old people dying is probably a positive for the economy (not an economist, don't quote me on that), and less people being born may be a net positive for the economy in the short term too.

Regardless, China has a healthy amount of people turning eighteen every year at least until 2037, the demographic dip/collapse has only really been a thing for the last couple of years and may pass in time.

What exactly does China need to do that takes more than 1.4 billion people?

Pay the pensions of half a billion people

China is an authoritarian state so that will mostly be a problem for the pensioners, probably wont hurt the rest of the country a lot.

Authoritarian regimes come down pretty quick once people start to get hungry. So yes keeping their aging population content is going to be a big challenge for the government.

I could say the same of almost every single country.

>Demographic breakdown is a lot more important than a single number

Yes, and people fixate on the pyramid when they should be focusing on the talent pool (probably because of Zeihan), in which case PRC is only starting to exploit the largest educated / skilled worker demographics divident in human history. Basically what drove JP,SKR,TW to double/triple their GDP while their TFR crashed.

>single number

That single number of 1.4B relative to PRC geography is difficult to ecologically sustain. Roughly 600M are excess people, too old and uneducated to be properly integrated in modern economy. They're the first to age/die out, which will incrementally increase PRC strategic autonomy.

>attempts at population control

PRC family planning prevented estimated 200-300M of births, which would only add to net drain. Yeah present pyramid will make transitioning from 1.4B to 1B over next century painful, though not that painful given PRC high savings rate. There's both cause for concern and celebration. But the general trend points to PRC having some of the best demographics in recorded history for improving national power which =/= human flourishing.

Good analysis, I agree. Zeihan is good at creating confident-sounding narratives that seem reasonable on the surface, but often missing deeper, important considerations like this.

The main generator of innovation is how many clever people you have hacking and tinkering with new ideas and trying to reify them. It's primarily a weighted numbers game, with education, cultural work ethic, and poltical-economic system adding some weight to more favorable outcomes.

As you observe, much of the coming population culling in China will be people less able to contribute to that dynamic. What's left will be a smaller but still immense population of people, ~3x the US and ~2x Europe, a greater proportion of which are able to contribute as innovation generators.

when you compare China's demographic development to surrounding nations what becomes apparent is actually how remarkably little influence the one child policy overall had.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/101A2/production...

https://www.nippon.com/en/ncommon/contents/in-depth/364451/3...

>remarkably little

The graph suggest otherwise, seeing how much steeper/quicker PRC fertility dropped, which led to 200-300M of prevented birthds over a few decades. Family planning (started pre 1-child) has been extremely "effective", and many argue, maybe too effective.

It sounds bad for India, but isn't really because birth rates have been in free fall (only since independence, no thanks to Britain) and have recently dropped below replacement [1]. In 4 decades or less, the population will peak and start decreasing.

India can reap the benefits of the demographic dividend, but it remains to be seen if it actually will...

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$line$data$fi...

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