How China Miscalculated Its Way to a Baby Bust | Hacker News Reader

How China Miscalculated Its Way to a Baby Bust

wsj.com

5 pointssam3457 comments

Population was in declining prior to the One Child policy, and the trend line is now broadly in alignment with other East Asian countries, none of whom had such policies. One child policy certainly a miscalculation but it might actually have been an ineffectual one.

Yes, when one looks at the chart of TFR vs time in China, the main effect of the one child policy seems to have been a slight decrease in the rate at which TFR declined, for about five years. (Unless that was a result of the "barefoot doctor" program[1] reducing infant mortality. The barefoot doctor program was started slightly earlier.)

China and other East Asian countries are textbook examples of what happens when credentialist societies gain effective birth control.

Credentialism being the culture of requiring long and intense investment in a child's education for there to be hope of the child landing a "good job", i.e., social status.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_doctor

very difficult to reverse. The link seems less about systems of governance or government policy and mainly about educating women, which is critical for economic development, but which in turn creates incompatibilities for generational replacement. No country has achieved economic development w/o getting women into the labour force, and no country has reversed population decline after doing so

>Following the data release, researchers from Victoria University in Australia and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences predicted that China will have just 525 million people by the end of the century. That’s down from their previous forecast of 597 million and a precipitous drop from 1.4 billion now.

Wow. That's very difficult to comprehend. Central management usually doesn't work particularly well especially if driven by models untested by the real world. Government is always tempted to control things that are best left alone.

Things are not better in the west. Fertility is below replacement in all developed countries and it is trending down in nearly all of them.

Sweden: https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...

Canada: https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...

USA: https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...

Note, in all three charts, but especially the last, the assumption of a future "floor" to fertility. Such a floor has not yet been found to exist anywhere.

Skimming the article - I see no mention of the profound economic and likely social problems that having an inverted population pyramid could cause.

No paywall: https://archive.is/JDmZN

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