China Told Women to Have Babies, but Its Population Shrank Again
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It is not pretty, at all.
There is force, and violence, and subjugation, and domination, biting, killing.
Reproduction is an ugly, ugly process.
A funny analogy with humans is Panda bears. Pandas are notoriously very hard to persuade to reproduce in captivity.
Now we are the panda bears.
We have put ourselves in captivity, built an entire society that drastically warps our behavior for several generations and now we are trying to sort of undo all that.
Those behaviors and those cultures took millennia to create. And we are going to sort of hit a light switch and toggle them back on?
Suspect the basics or love and romance have been completely forgotten. We have also actively denigrated male courtship rituals to the point that men have been discouraged from a wide range of behaviors we used to have.
Watching old James Bond movies. Wtf?
Men and women have to be trained and encouraged to reproduce and date.
We don’t necessarily naturally get along at all.
A big part of relationships used to come with external pressure. Men and women were poked and trained and prodded together by society.
Unless China plans to recreate all those missing societal pressures no idea how they will get men and women back together.
If you really want to do it, you basically just let everyone know directly and indirectly that you are all getting married at 20 and getting pregnant or you don’t get a house.
Something that extreme will be needed.
Suspect a single change like that: Literally, you cannot buy or own property without a baby or you get a significant substitute and the woman gets a dowry.
Humans are like panda bears: We do not mate in captivity the way we need to in order to create children.
China will have to bring all that back.
And if they want them to STAY married there will need to be a persistent social status imbalance where the man is higher social status or the woman won’t want anything to do with him.
How do you pull that off?