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Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

Government control over reproduction leads to unintended consequences? Who would've seen that coming?

It's not automatically a bad thing.

China has done fantastically well economically, and in terms of health care, education etc. There are other countries which have had strict population control and have done well economically - such as Singapore, South Korea. I see nothing wrong with poorer countries keeping restrictions on population growth - so that they can increase the standard of living and make sure everyone gets education and healthcare.

A declining fertility rate doesn't just change change the population, but also the relative distribution of each age group. A fertility rate of "N" means the next generation will be "N/2" times as large as the one before it. Because of this you can easily model what a society, composed of successive generations of a fixed fertility rate, would look like. To keep things simple, imagine everybody gives birth to all their kids at 20. When they actually do doesn't matter, it would always converge on the same ratios:

----

Fertility Rate of 2 (average age = 40): 100 80-year-olds, 100 60-year-olds, 100 40-year-olds, 100 20-year-olds, 100 newborns.

Fertility Rate of 1 (average age = 63): 100 80-year-olds, 50 60-year-olds, 25 40-year-olds, 12 20-year-olds, 6 newborns

Fertility rate of 0.5 (average age = 74): 100 80-year-olds, 25 60-year-olds, 6 40-year-olds, 1 20-year-olds, 0 newborns

----

You can also estimate the ongoing population rate of change for each fertility group by removing the elderly generation, adding a newborn generation, and contrasting the new population sizes:

----

Fertility Rate of 2: 500->500 = 0% population change per 20 years

Fertility Rate of 1: 193->96 = 50% population decline per 20 years

Fertility Rate of 0.5: 132->32 = 76% population decline per 20 years

----

In the developed world most fertility rates plummeted around 1970. So, assuming nothing radically changes, we should start hitting our 'equilibrium point' about one life expectancy away, so sometime around 2050.

It may work in short term but then you run out of population in long term. And suddenly any gains from short term improvement is under a big question mark.

Why does China need 1.5 billion people?

China has a poor social security net. The one-child policy has resulted in a couple having to provide or care for 4 parents and 8 grandparents.

That's is in no way sustainable on an individual level and worse on a societal level when you have a small working population and a large number of people that require care.

Future generations have to pay off the debt generated by the current generation. Same as everywhere. You can either grow the population or make the economy more efficient, China still has the latter lever available to pull.

China has a gross savings rate of 45-50%. Current gen has saved for their future.

Money is an abstract representation of the labor of others. If there’s no one to labor for you then your currency is just paper.

I agree in theory with you. But you can 'bank' labour for later on. Building infrastructure (that will last) when you have a population bulge, means that the generations after can take advantage of that infrastructure, and have to do the lower amount of work, of maintaining it. This can go for things like education, investing in businesses, and generally any capital.

Of course you can also over build this capital that will never be used, but will need to be paid back (for example a local government pays to build a town that there are no people to fill it with) and the maintenance is too much, but you still have to look after the people who did the building.

You can't over-build things like old age care. We still don't have robots to feed and bath old people.

Currency might also just be bits on a server.

    strict population control

SG/KR has this? Tell me more.

Had.

This is a crisis happening everywhere in the developed world. A stable practical fertility rate is 2.1. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world, below 0.8, and there was no government meddling there. The US fertility rate is also plummeting and now down to below 1.7 and heavily biased by income. The birth rate for households earning < $10,000 is about 50% higher than those earning > $200,000 [1] with a near perfect linear relationship for incomes in between. And obviously there are way more poor households than 'rich.'

It's so odd to me that of the many issues people freak out about, this one ranks relatively low. We're looking at a non-speculative and entirely real demographic collapse of the entire developed world, in quite rapid order. For those who may not appreciate the impact, a total fertility rate of "N" means you will trend towards a system where the population of one older generation will be "2/N" times larger than the next younger generation.

So if you have a fertility rate of 2, each generation will be exactly the same. If you have a fertility rate of 1 then each older generation will be exactly twice as large as the next younger generation. So, for a simple model, imagine we all gave birth at 20. You'd trend towards a population distribution of 16 80-year-olds, 8 60-year-olds, 4 40-year-olds, 2 20-year-olds, 1 newborn. Systems of social security, healthcare, and the general economy will just collapse under that sort of pressure.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

> Systems of social security, healthcare, and the general economy will just collapse under that sort of pressure.

Maybe we could buttress them by all the 4x to 10x productivity gains that automation has brought us. [1] Maybe we could cut back on all the useless, extraneous, low-to-negative ROI shit we're doing. We have options, here, that don't require a population ponzi scheme.

(Also, you can't be blaming this situation in China on demographic collapse, when it allegedly has massive youth unemployment.)

[1] Remember, just a few decades, when somehow, a single working adult could comfortably provide for a whole family? Why can't he, anymore? What has changed? We are more productive per worker, we have more workers participating in the economy, but somehow, you think we can't provide for everyone.

Expectations of comfort are always changing. Humans are a competitive species.

If the expectation for quality of life for the vast majority is living off of 1 income household, then that is an acceptable quality of life. If that expectation for the vast majority changes to quality of life by living off of 2 income households, then a quality of life from a 1 income household is no longer sufficient.

Also, expectations of work itself change. It could be possible that a sufficiently large portion of the population is simply unwilling to change bedpans for a price close to what old people themselves can afford (even if the cost is implicit from getting services from a family member). In this case, it becomes a political issue of how to allocate labor, i.e. who to tax, how much to tax them, and who gets the benefits of government spending.

This [1] page shows changes in real average household incomes from 1965 to 2020, broken down by quintile. Keep in mind the sharp increase in the number of necessities in modern life as well as things like healthcare, education, and housing inflating in price way beyond the rate of nominal inflation. Economically, many people certainly had significantly better lives in the past. Of course that would also have been a life generally without mass computing, the internet, and other such things. And I did say "many people", as it seems the bare median has probably moved up just enough that they're probably better off, but it's really uncomfortably close when one thinks how much we 'ought' have improved.

[1] - https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/10/2...

> Remember, just a few decades, when somehow, a single working adult could comfortably provide for a whole family? Why can't he, anymore? What has changed? We are more productive per worker, we have more workers participating in the economy, but somehow, you think we can't provide for everyone.

In Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, he argues that the period you're talking about is an anomaly historically due to the postwar boom of an unscathed US, that many people take as the historical norm due to recency bias; no one alive today was alive in the 1800s or earlier to see just how unequal life among the poor and rich was. He argues that this inequality is the norm rather than the exception for what is happening today.

How does he respond to the 1971 [1] argument? That whole page is alluding to the ending of the Bretton Woods system. Until 1971 the USD was directly convertible to gold at a fixed rate. This was supposed to prevent bad economic behavior because if we weakened the dollar too much (by e.g. 'printing' money), then people/countries could 'bankrupt' the US by converting all their USD to gold. Of course we [shockingly] did print too much money, defaulted on our obligations, and gave the rest of the world a 4 finger salute. A famous quote from Nixon's treasury secretary at the time: "The dollar is our currency, but it is your problem."

I find the consumer price index 1775-2012 quite interesting. It's really easy to see how nearly everything listed there could be directly, and very likely causally, linked to giving the US government the power to start printing tens of trillions of dollars. Because that money invariably makes it to the most well off in society, even on the rare instance when it starts somewhat lower. If not one has to come up with an alternative explanation for what happened at that time, because it's like in 1971 that were just a button pressed saying, "start destroying socioeconomic stability."

[1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

One current presidential hopeful has a policy position of undoing that, by having the dollar become a stable unit of measurement against real commodities. It's an interesting idea, and perhaps one more realistic than going back to the gold standard.

I don't entirely understand the difference? As the USD has no inherent value, if you stabilize it against a measurement of various commodities you end up with the same thing where 1 'unit' of commodity groups = $x USD. Perhaps it's that the volume of commodities expands more regularly, so eases expansion of the monetary base more than e.g. gold where there is limited supply expansion?

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA

South Korea had huge government meddling to psyop the population into thinking kids are only a burden.

https://www.prb.org/resources/did-south-koreas-population-po...

Thanks. I'd never read nor heard about this. It seems similar to Iran - another country with a national birth control program [1], which worked far too well, and which very few people know about.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran

Usa does have immigration to supplement the birth rate.

It does, but on a global scale this only works as long as there are enough countries with high birth rates. And birth rates are going down basically everywhere.

They are up in "undeveloped" countries.

They are higher in less developed countries, but still falling.

Go to https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and select some regions, see for yourself. Africa as a whole has declining fertility rates. Even if you look a high-growth countries such as Niger or Democratic Republic of Congo, the fertility rate has been declining in the last 20-30 years, and you'll be hard-pressed to find a country where it has gone up.

Except it’s been loosened after decades, and suddenly the economy tanks?

The more likely explanation is Xi’s authoritarianism and crackdown on the private sector. Anyone with a brain in China is trying to get their money and themselves out of the country.

It has been loosened because of the inevitable damage it is causing. Look at china's demographic pyramid. Their widest demography is 45-60. Their birthrates are very low. As those people age and there are fewer workers entering the workforce it will lead to social problems (as it did in japan and currently is in the west)

That's not to say there isnt a big crackdown on just about everything right now. There is. Bankers forced to read xi jinping thought and write essays on it monthly etc.

One thing didn't cause the other but it needs to be considered when looking longterm. Its effect will have an impact on the economy for many decades.

Of course, demography is destiny, but the point is the sudden worsening of China's economic outlook did not coincide with tightening of the one-child policy, quite the opposite. The challenge for China is that it got old before it got rich like the European nations or Japan, and this transition will be much harder to navigate.

The bigger challenge is that the demigraphic shift is much more dramatic than either Europe or Japan.

The fertility rate was 6 in 1970, it dropped to a half within a decade and then kept dropping rapidly.

Fertility rate across the world is dropping even without government intervention. Who knew having a higher standard of living means you don't need as many kids to work the farm, and indeed, that people simply don't want to give up that lifestyle in order to have kids?

Yes, but the fertility rate drop is just too fast in China. There will be way too many old people requiring care for too few people in the productive age.

Smaller rich countries can solve this problem by importing young workers from poor countries. But on China's scale of 1.5B people that's not really feasible. (China also isn't really that rich on average, isn't attractive for immigrants and isn't culturally welcoming to immigrants)

China still has ~20% people in agriculture with automation that can be bought down to 5%. That should free enough resources.

Truth be told they didn't have much of a choice, as it prevented around 400mln births in a country that has been a net food importer for over 20 years:

https://www.cfr.org/article/china-increasingly-relies-import...

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