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Comment by YJfcboaDaJRDw | Hacker News Reader

Certainly but US policy changes every 4 years and China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed. I think it will with China somewhat similar how it was back in the day with the udssr where economists were predicting its economy would outgrow the economy of the USA by 1994 and then 1991 or so it died. Could imagine something similar might be awaiting china

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Despite China's fertility rate plummeting to 1.09, the country has a demographic cushion that will carry it through mid-century without serious economic consequences. China's "Alpha" generation (currently ages 6-16) is a large demographic echo of its massive Baby Boom, and will stabilize the workforce through the 2020s and keep the dependency ratio favorable until at least 2030. China's dependency ratio won't surpass America's until the mid-2040s. Two straightforward policy levers -- raising the retirement age from 50-60 to 65 and dramatically increasing college enrollment (already jumped from 26.5% to 60.2% since 2010) -- will offset all effects of gradual aging over the next 25 years. Real demographic strain won't materialize until post-2050 when the large Millennial generation retires without a comparable replacement cohort. The idea that demographics will erode China's competitive position in the next two decades is overblown.

If you want to talk demographics, there are a lot of places that are way worse off than China. Obviously there are the usual suspects, S.Korea and Japan, but also Germany, Italy, and Spain. (Europe's largest economies, France aside... and I'm not so sure about France!) All of them have demographic situations that are far worse than China's, unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.

>unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.

There are a lot of people who do subscribe to that, mainly people who are on the left side of the political spectrum. Heck, the entire Biden administration believed that.

China no longer has a one-child policy and is now actively focusing policies and incentives on increasing childbirth. Although it’s not going to yield immediate results, the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.

> the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.

That would make them the first country to do so, I think. Others have tried and nothing has worked. But China will likely become rich before it gets old, so it may not matter.

Did you mean to say "But China will likely become old before it gets rich"?

Their population is declining already and they have a very long way to go before being considered "rich", so I haven't seen many projections for what you said. If you meant it, I'd be curious to know why.

China's middle class is already larger than the entire US population, and growing fast. It won't be rich in the sense that say Switzerland or Norway are rich. But it seems safe to say they won't be barely scraping by.

IMO, India likely won't make this transition. It's population is still growing but it's birth rate is sinking fast (like most everywhere else).

And China's lower class is nearly double the size of the US population, making a median of $150 per month.

India's demographics don't look as bad as China's, so I'm not sure why you're less optimistic about them.

lol, no. it will not even maintain its current extinction-tier TFR of 1.02, let alone maintain its current population.

like every other civilized people, the Chinese have largely realized that the game is rigged and the only winning move is not to play. the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do. even the current TFR of 1.0-1.5 in the civilized world is largely inertial, and it will continue to fall. South Korean 0.7 will seem mind-bogglingly high a hundred years from now,

and 1CP was such a predictably disastrous idea that I seriously doubt the forward-thinking you seem to believe the CCP to posses.

>the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do.

They won't do it willingly. That just means it will happen without their input.

sure, they could, hypothetically, close the borders and begin a campaign of forced insemination, but those babies would have no fathers to provide for them, and the state - any state - really resents footing the bill for child rearing, going as far as forcing victims of infidelity, fraud, or rape to pay child support. the state - any state - wants to give you as little as possible and to take as much as possible from you, for the delta between giving and receiving is its lifeblood.

the ideal family has two full-time working parents, paying a mortgage and car loans, consuming as many high-margin domestic products as possible, rearing as many children (future laborers and consumers) as possible, with little to no assistance from the state. and you simply can't have that by force. if you could, you might as well drop the pretense and openly treat your population as slaves.

The USSR didn't have the advantage of getting all the manufacturing supply chains in its soil funded by customers of the products it produced.

If there's one thing China learnt from the USSR was on how to be part of the globalisation push, and get as an advantageous of a position as they possibly could, in that the CCP has been very successful.

We will see if the shift to more authoritarianism from Xi will unwind that but China's future, with all its issues, is starting to look brighter than whatever the USA has become. Perhaps limiting the influence of the finance industry has a much better long-term prospect, it's very much one of the major flaws of the American system leading from the 1980s.

>China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed

...the one that was changed a decade ago?

Unless you can retroactively birth children or import a shit ton of people (not practical in China, for all sorts of political and cultural reasons), the effects of a gigantic missing part of that age demographic can't be replaced. He's right, there's no way to fix that, other than wait long enough that those birth years would already be dead anyway.

He was commenting on the use of the present tense word "has".

Yes present tense. The policy has been reversed, but the issue can't be except in the very long run, except possibly through immigration.

He didn't say the policy can't be changed. It was. The issue, not so easily.

China has a population growth problem. They had a one child policy problem.

Children are not important. China has more than enough population to outdo the US in science. But also, the majority of US high end science is done by immigrants, not by people born in the US. Science is international, and the US has destroyed its trust and goodwill with the international community.

???

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