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Still, some key excerpts from the first of the two articles:
Quote:
Title: China Told Women to Have Babies, but Its Population Shrank Again
Faced with falling births, China’s efforts to stabilize a shrinking population and maintain economic growth are failing.
China’s ruling Communist Party is facing a national emergency. To fix it, the party wants more women to have more babies.
It has offered them sweeteners, like cheaper housing, tax benefits and cash. It has also invoked patriotism, calling on them to be “good wives and mothers.”
The efforts aren’t working. Chinese women have been shunning marriage and babies at such a rapid pace that China’s population in 2023 shrank for the second straight year, accelerating the government’s sense of crisis over the country’s rapidly aging population and its economic future.
China said on Wednesday that 9.02 million babies were born in 2023, down from 9.56 million in 2022 and the seventh year in a row that the number has fallen. Taken together with the number of people who died during the year — 11.1 million — China has more older people than anywhere else in the world, an amount that is rising rapidly. China’s total population was 1,409,670,000 at the end of 2023, a decline of two million people, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
EDIT TO ADD THIS COMMENT FROM A NY TIMES READER:
Quote:
In the late ‘80s I spent three months backpacking by myself through several provinces in China. It is a bleak, brutal place. You can see, if not feel, the oppressive government boot on every common citizen’s neck. Several times on the street, Chinese strangers approached, begging me to help them leave. Yes, a few might have been agents trying to entrap tourists. But I can't forget the look of abject desperation in their eyes. That is hard to fake. When I had had enough of dragons, Neo-brutalist architecture, and marred natural beauty, I took a ship from Shanghai to Hong Kong. I was never so happy to get out of a place, more of an escape than a travel departure.
I ventured on to India. Other Western travelers had warned that India solo travel was “hard.” Compared to China, India was a breeze and the difference in the general population’s demeanor was incredible, palpable. Although poverty was everywhere and they deal with the oppressive caste system, they didn't have the State on their backs and in their minds all day, every day. They had joy, compared to the always grim faces of the Chinese.
I'm not surprised Chinese young people don't want to bring people into their soul-crushing world.
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 01-17-2024 at 12:50 PM..
Still, some key excerpts from this second of the two articles; the graphics are not to be missed as they illustrate each example I highlight. I hope people read these articles:
Quote:
With 850,000 fewer births than deaths last year, at least according to the country’s official report, China joined an expanding set of nations with shrinking populations caused by years of falling fertility and often little or even negative net migration, a group that includes Italy, Greece and Russia, along with swaths of Eastern and Southern Europe and several Asian nations like South Korea and Japan.
“The good news is that the Chinese government is fully aware of the problem,” said Yong Cai, a sociologist at the University of NC, Chapel Hill, who specializes in Chinese demographics. “The bad news is, empirical speaking, that there is very little they can do about it.”
Vastly more young Chinese people are enrolling in higher education, marrying later and having children later. Raised in single-child households, some have come to see small families as normal. But the bigger impediment to having a second or third child is financial ... many parents cite the high cost of housing and education as the main obstacle to having more children. “People can’t afford to buy space for themselves, let alone for two kids,”
The U.S. rate fell below 2.1 in the 1970s, slowly rose back up to the replacement rate by 2007, then collapsed again after the Great Recession, to a current level just below 1.7.
NOTE: The Great Recession clobbered people's desire to risk having a family; people see no long-term stability which is a key to having the faith that one can raise a family over the long term. "Back in the day" people had long term security, I saw it in my father's lifetime job with a railroad. Others I know had long term stability in the steel industry, etc. They could afford homes and stay in them for decades, building their local communities. That's all gone now, gone with the wind.
At one point the article talks about Australia's 'baby bonus' program which had little effect, not even reaching the 2.1 rate of live births to achieve a stable population. Their TFR is now 1.6, lower even than when the program began.
Nations that have tried substantial support to family creation have failed to reach a TFR of 2.1.
Sweden has incredible benefits, like 1.6 YEARS of parental leave, but is still below a TFR of 2.1. Excerpt:
Quote:
Sweden’s birthrate fell through the ’90s. Over the last 50 years, its fertility rate has fluctuated significantly, rising roughly in tandem with economic booms.
NOTE: birthrates tend to rise in good economic times, fall during uncertain economic times.
Hungary embraced vigorous pro-natalist policies to little avail.
Governments need to recognize that lower TFRs are here to stay.
Here are a couple of reader comments from this article:
Quote:
Enough already with this one- sided presentation of population decline as a negative. There is NO scenario where more people are better for the planet. A shrinking population requires nothing more than a period of adjustment, no doubt buffered by technology.
Quote:
Population decline is a cause for celebration. A bad thing for various economic pyramid schemes, but good for humanity. The biggest environmental impact one can make is not to have kids.
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His view of what was then 50 years in the future was quite grim, though certain aspects of it were prophetic. The globe does indeed appear to be warming up, for whatever reason, and mass migration is starting to be a significant phenomenon.
However, what he didn't get right is the notion that national governments would break down. I don't see that happening now, and certainly won't happen within 15-20 years either, though a major war is definitely a possibility unless the major powers can get better leadership soon.
People have gotten better and better at rebuilding from disasters, they keep being less and less impactful to lives and the economy in terms of percentage impact to GDP due to forecasting and rebuilding ability. There really aren't climate migrants, and to look at the few there are is to ignore the MANY that have been able to kept in place due to implementing good tech. The textbook example is Egypt, which is literally building empires and farms and energy in the sand, housing a population magnitudes larger than it's ever had. If sea level rises, people move a couple miles down the road. Not that big of a deal until 2100s.
Where mass migration is coming from IS nations breaking down due to complete morons. If it wasn't for [mod cut] Venezuela, Cuba, and crime, there really wouldn't be migrants in massive numbers to the US. It's much more push to find some sort of life from a dystopian disaster than it is pull of being in the US. There's millions of refugees across the globe from conflict, hijacked Islamic death cults, and communist idiots. There's thousands from climate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ohio_peasant
Truly “crappy” nations are indeed thus bereft. There aren’t too many electrical engineers in Afghanistan. But there are next door in Pakistan. Why aren’t the collective “we” (the US and other prosperous countries) not falling all over ourselves, importing these worthies? Come to think of it, Mexico has several fine universities, including Monterrey Institute of Technology. Why isn’t there a concerted push to offer H1B visas to alumni of the Mexican MIT?
Thinking globally (is that taboo?), shouldn’t we be moving the most productive people to the most productive nations, to be globally the most productive? If we’re going to solve nuclear fusion as an energy source, explore other planets, build self-aware AI and figure out why falling open-faced sandwiches always land with the butter-side hitting the ground…. If we’re going to be hunting for more geniuses in a smaller aggregate population pool, because you know, the population is “shrinking” – then why isn’t there a concerted effort at massive, trans-national immigration?
Or am I, you know, being naïve?
Tech is only as impactful as it is able to be implemented. Clean tap water in Mexico isn't dependent on a tech solution, it's a implementation solution. We can have medical tech coming out the ears, but people aren't going to go to the doctor and get it if our medical system remains the complete cluster like it is right now. We'd get more gain out of making a medical system not equivalent to pulling teeth than we would out of any new tech.
What this means is the biggest bang for your buck is to make the average joe service worker 25% better at their job through a little more education or networking or support rather than chasing Elon musk type stuff, because that stuff takes a lot of bucks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays25
PS2, the US will need a heavy dose of immigration just to keep our worker/dependent balance from tanking like it has in many other places.
Let it tank. Wages for things like home health care are in the gutter and dependents are getting their life artificially cheap. Boomers own twice as many family sized homes as millennials for an indication of how out of wack we are. Retirement is not some god given gift. People's family have to fill some of the gap, and if a person didn't have a family, they saved out on a lot of expenses and if they didn't save that, that's their problem.
Last edited by Mike from back east; 01-18-2024 at 11:12 AM..
Reason: Language.
Still, some key excerpts from this second of the two articles; the graphics are not to be missed as they illustrate each example I highlight. I hope people read these articles:
NOTE: The Great Recession clobbered people's desire to risk having a family; people see no long-term stability which is a key to having the faith that one can raise a family over the long term. "Back in the day" people had long term security, I saw it in my father's lifetime job with a railroad. Others I know had long term stability in the steel industry, etc. They could afford homes and stay in them for decades, building their local communities. That's all gone now, gone with the wind.
At one point the article talks about Australia's 'baby bonus' program which had little effect, not even reaching the 2.1 rate of live births to achieve a stable population. Their TFR is now 1.6, lower even than when the program began.
Nations that have tried substantial support to family creation have failed to reach a TFR of 2.1.
Sweden has incredible benefits, like 1.6 YEARS of parental leave, but is still below a TFR of 2.1. Excerpt:
NOTE: birthrates tend to rise in good economic times, fall during uncertain economic times.
Hungary embraced vigorous pro-natalist policies to little avail.
Governments need to recognize that lower TFRs are here to stay.
Here are a couple of reader comments from this article:
There is a paragraph in your article that may help the "Population is still growing. How can there be a decline in the future?", crowd. Here it is:
Quote:
Even though China’s birthrate has fallen substantially over the last five decades, it was long a country with a relatively young population, which meant it could withstand those low rates for a long time before starting to see population losses. Like many developed countries, China’s older population is now swelling — a consequence of its earlier boom — leaving it in a position similar to that of many wealthy nations: in need of more young people.
The population growth we have seen in recent years was the echo-boom, left over as the large population of children of Baby Boomers had their children - the grandchildren of Baby Boomers.
This will not repeat itself. The grandchildren of Baby Boomers have chosen not - or have been ordered not - to have children of their own.
Environmentalists and ecologists see the population decline as a good thing, and it may well turn out to be. The path to a lower population will be uncomfortable, though.
There is a paragraph in your article that may help the "Population is still growing. How can there be a decline in the future?", crowd.
Perhaps I missed it, but I haven't seen any posts saying that "the population is still growing so how can there be a decline in the future?" The fact that the population is still growing means that it will take all the longer for the population simply to recede to the level that it is at now. Since we're talking about decades of time, population trends may also reverse. Nothing is set in stone. The over-riding fact is that the world is overpopulated which is stressing life-support systems on earth and lowering our quality of life. A world without birds and other wildlife would not be a pleasant place to live. We have already lost 80% of the population of many bird species in just the last 50 years.
Perhaps I missed it, but I haven't seen any posts saying that "the population is still growing so how can there be a decline in the future?" The fact that the population is still growing means that it will take all the longer for the population simply to recede to the level that it is at now. Since we're talking about decades of time, population trends may also reverse. Nothing is set in stone. The over-riding fact is that the world is overpopulated which is stressing life-support systems on earth and lowering our quality of life. A world without birds and other wildlife would not be a pleasant place to live. We have already lost 80% of the population of many bird species in just the last 50 years.
You missed it. Read 2mares' posts. But she's not that unusual. Lots of people simply don't believe it.
The fact that were are still growing shows there was once a baby boom, nothing more. Population trends will not reverse and go up. They can't. There are no longer enough girl babies being born to reverse it.
I first was exposed to demographic collapse some 10 years ago in an article titled "China's Demographic Time Bomb". It forecast a decline in China's population. People did not understand why it was inevitable and dismissed it. And China continued to grow. But here we are today, with China losing population.
I have no idea how old you are, but you very well could see a reversal in world population in your lifetime. And even if you do not, what difference could that make?.... Should we only be interested in the things which effect us, personally?
Your comments about overpopulation, birds, wildlife and so forth are, frankly, of little interest to me, and are not germane to this discussion.
...
I have no idea how old you are, but you very well could see a reversal in world population in your lifetime. And even if you do not, what difference could that make?.... Should we only be interested in the things which effect us, personally?
It's a sliding scale. It would be a tad selfish and narrow-minded to disregard might might happen 5 or 10 years after my presumptive death. But ought I to care one whiff about what happens say 1 billion years after my death? Somewhere between these extremes, is an intermediate point, where one might argue in either direction. The same goes for any aspect of social responsibility, of what we presently do, and how it affects the future. If this future is relatively soon, then it would be loutishly irresponsible to disregard it. If very distant, then it would be silly to curb ourselves in the present, or distant future's sake. Where is the middle ground?
It's a sliding scale................... Where is the middle ground?
In my mind the middle ground would be the one experienced by children born today as they approach middle age. Call it 50 years.
The working age (15 to 64) population of China today is 982M people. In 2050 it will be 767M - a decrease of 215M workers. And that's in less than 30 years! That's a serious decrease, and with surrounding countries all in the same boat, there is nowhere to get the extra bodies.
Maybe we're getting a peek at what it would be like by watching the utility failures in Russia, where so many of the working class people are just unavailable, while the infrastructure, still needed, falls apart. In one city a large fire could not be put out because the snow had not been removed all winter; all the workers had been called away.
When my Great Grandaughter Georgia, due on Planet Earth in April, turns 50, the world will be very, very different. And most importantly, it will still be changing.
A comment on China. We first went there in 1988 and have returned every few years, especially when my sister was living in Shanghai. We have seen incredible development there and noted that the women simply do not wish to have large families. I have also noticed that many Chinese immigrants here have chosen to just have one child.
A comment on Australia, when the baby bonus was brought in to try to encourage population growth, it was found that it was being exploited by a minority. There was even evidence that some men were exerting coercive control over their partners to have children and collect the lump sum, even though it was paid to the mother. It was rolled over into two weekly payments and then substantially changed when our paid parental leave was introduced (which is additional to leave paid by the employer) There are still targeted payments paid to lower income parents but again, most people simply do not wish to have large families.
I guess I'm flogging a dead horse, but got this tidbit today in my morning email from The NY Times:
Dragon Babies?
Quote:
China released a spate of bad news this week, but one data point stood out: The population declined for a second straight year, according to government statistics. The country’s demographic crisis isn’t getting any better. A rapidly aging population is already putting a strain on health care and pension systems, while making it much harder for President Xi Jinping to boost domestic consumption and reshape the economy. Fewer births of future workers also threaten medium- to long-term growth.
Some hope that the Chinese lunar calendar could offer some help. The year of the dragon, which begins next month and occurs every 12 years, has historically seen a spurt of so-called dragon babies. One reason is that some Chinese have traditionally believed that children born in a dragon year are luckier and more likely to be successful.
But experts warn there is a hitch: Women of childbearing age in China, who are having fewer babies than their parents, if any at all, are less likely to believe in the old superstitions. “In the past there have been higher births in auspicious zodiac years,” Wang Feng, an expert on Chinese demographics at the University of California, Irvine, told The Financial Times. “But given the pessimistic economic outlook and pessimism among young people, I doubt we will see a noticeable rebound this year.”
I hope we're all here next year when we should have some idea if births bump up for the Year of the Dragon, which begins on 10 FEB 2024.
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