China Will Need Free Education and Healthcare to Slow and Reverse Baby Bust

India will pass China’s population level in 2020 or 2021. China had 7 million few babies in 2018 than expected. China only had 15.2 million babies in 2018 versus an expectation of 21-23 million. The number of babies born China in 2019 and 2020 will be even less than in 2018. Without trillions per year in programs, China will have 30-40% less national economy by 2060.

A 30% decline in China’s workforce would be like $4.5 trillion today and would be about $10-20 trillion in 2050.

China will have to re-embrace and fully fund socialist support programs to reverse the baby bust.

China’s government will need to roll out a lot more daycare facilities, free education, major subsidies (aka bribes) for couples to have another child and payment for all fertility treatments including IVR. Some cities and regional governments are starting some subsidies and pro-child support, but the programs are far short of what is needed.

Around 2060, India will have about 1.7 to 1.8 billion people and China will have 1.1 to 1.2 billion people.

China Will Need to Spend Free-Education and Family Healthcare Costing Trillions per Year

“The number of newborns will continue plunging even after the country completely revoked its birth policy, unless the Chinese leadership made great efforts to boost births such as lowering the cost of education significantly,” said Huang Wenzheng, co-founder of Cnpop.org, a non-profit organization analyzing China’s population and birth policies.

SOURCES- Liaoning Plan, insafbulletin, South China Morning Post

Written By Brian Wang

119 thoughts on “China Will Need Free Education and Healthcare to Slow and Reverse Baby Bust”

  1. Brian doesn’t understand a little thing:
    socialist policies never works.

    If China want more children, it must make pregnancies and child rearing cheap and make the cost of living in China cheap (compared to the normal salaries).

    You doesn’t give money or incentives to make babies to people, because the incentives will be paid by more productive people and received by less productive people.

    A society MUST have a social structure incentivising productive people to reproduce and disincentivizing unproductive people from reproduce. Or it will end broken and failed.

  2. The most lionphobic are the ones who never met with a lion.
    Who met with a lion is dead or more cautious.

  3. Heh, well at any rate, the Germans had time to figure out a way to hack France’s defensive measures. Let’s pick something else. Gearing up to fight WW III with WW II tanks. Trying to put Apple out of business by flooding the market with cheaper and better iPods. Trying to take over the video arcades by with a game that looks a lot like Space Invaders except that the sprites have a few more colors and the music is a bit different. The principle that was driven into me repeatedly was it’s almost never a good idea to plan on winning the next war with the weapons and tactics from the last one. Study it, but don’t repeat it.

  4. Fine is a relative thing. If an increase in the unemployment rate from 5% to 8% is treated as if it is the end of the world then a population implosion of 20% to 30% is going to be noticed.

  5. So there you go. That’s step 0.5 of my plan.

    Now when the AntiBrexit Glaswegian snipers are killing US Femilitary on TV, you’ll get a 90% pregnancy rate in eligible young ladies just before the yearly draft notices go out.

  6. We could do a UBI right now to support a huge fraction of society at 1930s level of acceptable lifestyle. Maybe 1950.

    But of course that’s not acceptable any more.

    And I’m not seeing any sign that our growth in the “minimum acceptable lifestyle” is falling behind our growth in available resources.

    Get’s back to the point I’ve made a few times recently. If we really DID have a conspiracy of rich people running the world, the first thing they should do is make sure that TV, Movies, Magazines etc. showed the lifestyles of the rich and famous to be fairly pedestrian. Have people think that Hollywood movie stars owned maybe a Mercedes S class AND a Porsche. That Oil Billionaires might have up to three houses. That Tech giants got to fly first class. And could eat all the steak they wanted. That they got to wear a suit every day.

    Sort of like how rich people were depicted in the 1950s (suspicious now that I think about it).

    You would NOT being showing the great unwashed TV shows about $5M hypercars and private yachts that have a second yacht floating in the giant swimming pool on the sundeck of the main yacht.

    Just look at the wealth levels depicted in 1960s Batman versus 2010s Ironman. See how one leads to “yeah, he has more than me” and the other leads to “Wow… that’s so much…. how is that allowed?”

  7. Immigration has been proven to be a short term garbage solution, while creating sometimes irreversible harm (at least in the near term) to the homogeneity of a society.

  8. “At the end of the day you can’t compel people to have kids. ”
    You can though. You can compel people to do anything. Just ask Uncle Stalin.

  9. For UBI you’d basically need a Star Trek-like replicator and infinite resources. We are not advanced enough civilization to have this, period. And despite the hype, there’s a lot of evidence that the real technological progress is stalling. Energy problem is not solved. We can’t mine asteroids for resources profitably.

  10. That’s the fate they’ve chosen by not having children. Sorry bud. The nations are going to be fine even with bad demographics; those things have a way of naturally balancing themselves.

  11. Yeah, and once upon a time, people who were gay or asexual or who just didn’t like kids all that much… all got married and had kids anyway because that’s how they maintained social cohesion and managed their economics. Now, any genes that contribute to those mindsets are on the chopping block. While these traits may only be weakly heritable, the selective pressure they face is very strong. Our very tolerance for these types of lifestyles will cause them to dwindle.

    If we were all born with identical blank slate brains none of this would be true, but behavioral genetics is a real thing. We might not know what genes contribute to making child enthusiasts, but they’re in there somewhere, and now is when those genes have their greatest selective advantage.

    I agree that the logic also works with socially inherited factors, like the culture/religion of the Amish. It’s a little weirder there, because ideology can transfer horizontally like a virus and sometimes fails to transfer vertically like genes. Some portion of every Amish generation is no doubt poached away by modern society and converted into low fertility. But that will also have a genetic interplay, if some people are neurobiologically resistant to conversion.

  12. You aren’t able of much besides offending. Spreading childish comments is the pinnacle of your life achievements

    Says the guy who starts out one of his comments with: “You never miss a chance to prove you’re the village idiot.”

    ..which, of course, was all psychological projection on his part. Just as the entire comment I am responding to right now.

    ALL of which was caused by simply being triggered when I pointed out a harsh truth about Libtards and ‘education’. So it really seems that you didn’t like that at all.

    Good!

  13. You aren’t able of much besides offending. Spreading childish comments is the pinnacle of your life achievements. When you look at yourself in the mirror, what does the mirror say? Is he proud of you? Does it tell you that you’re doing something useful for your self/family/city/nation/specie ? Or does it admit – at least beyond closed doors – that you’re a troll?

  14. You are missing the point that the population consists of many subgroups and these subgroups have different nativities. So, the future will be dominated by the subgroups that have high nativity. When this happens, the curves will turn upwards again. Think of Amish..

    Also, the nature will select for those people who *wants* to have children, i.e. the future will full of child enthusiasts. In the past, everyone who had sex had children, and hence nature selected for people who had sex. Not so any more.

    Since education and particularly high income disfavors child bearing in women, the future woman might become less intelligent and/or less inclined to pursue a career. We could become a dimorf species.. Not sure I like all of these conclusions…

  15. I hope you are correct. I don’t long for a world dominated by China. Better the devil you know…

  16. correct, there is no ban to use ultrasound. There is a ban to use ultrasound for the purposes of identifying gender. You commented that US are outlawed in India, they aren’t.

  17. No ban?
    https://apolitical.co/solution_article/indian-police-raid-illegal-ultrasound-centres-save-unborn-girls/
    “Authorities in Haryana are gaining ground in their battle to save thousands of unborn girls from female feticide. In partnership with the police, the state government has been cracking down on illegal ultrasound centres which tell parents the sex of unborn babies, leading to the abortion of girls. India made it illegal to test the sex of fetuses in 1994.
    The biggest impact has been seen in Panipat, a district in Haryana which is infamous for its skewed sex ratio: just 822 girls were born per 1,000 boys in 2011. In 2017, the ratio rose to 945 girls – a dramatic increase in just six years.
    The efforts in Haryana are part the national government’s flagship policy Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (“save girl child, educate girl child”), which was launched in Panipat itself by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015. The policy includes coordinated efforts to stamp out female feticide practices across India, alongside a number of schemes to promote women’s value in society.”
    Note- I said it was banned *for that very reason*. Not completely banned for other purposes.

  18. https://apolitical.co/solution_article/indian-police-raid-illegal-ultrasound-centres-save-unborn-girls/
    “Authorities in Haryana are gaining ground in their battle to save thousands of unborn girls from female feticide. In partnership with the police, the state government has been cracking down on illegal ultrasound centres which tell parents the sex of unborn babies, leading to the abortion of girls. India made it illegal to test the sex of fetuses in 1994.
    The biggest impact has been seen in Panipat, a district in Haryana which is infamous for its skewed sex ratio: just 822 girls were born per 1,000 boys in 2011. In 2017, the ratio rose to 945 girls – a dramatic increase in just six years.
    The efforts in Haryana are part the national government’s flagship policy Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (“save girl child, educate girl child”), which was launched in Panipat itself by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015. The policy includes coordinated efforts to stamp out female feticide practices across India, alongside a number of schemes to promote women’s value in society.”

    Funny, sounds like it to me.
    Note- I said it was banned *for that very reason*. Not completely banned for other purposes.

  19. There are different metrics for US. You can do a screening test for abnormalities[quad test] and for proper limb/head/thoracic circumference growth. And then there is a gender one.

  20. Ah yes, you just proved my assertion: your indoctrination doesn’t prepare you for being called out as an Emperor With No Clothes.

  21. This doesn’t make your original statement more sensical at all. It is just you taking a totally off-statement tangent.

  22. Except that isn’t fair for men, who can not have children.

    And we don’t even have a draft nor had one since Vietnam. What was ‘extended’ was the requirement that women register when they hit their 18th birthday for a possible draft , just as males have to do.

  23. It wont matter on the quantity of children but the quality of their accomplishments. I don’t think any generation was conceived to care for the elderly or a government target for population.

  24. If it is only a booty call then class don’t matter. For a long term relationship class always matter especially in certain societies.

  25. There are many rural areas with very small population especially now when young people are leaving to go to the nearest city.

  26. Mark has a point. We are relying on Chinese data for this entire theory. How do we know it’s right?

    It’s easy enough to come up with semi-coherent theories as to why the CCP might want the rest of the world to think that China is weaker and less threatening than it is.

  27. The USA does have a big government program that has (within living memory) basically forced people to do physically strenuous and even dangerous things.

    The draft.

    With the push to have the draft extended to women (the obvious consequence of both no-sex-discirmination laws AND the current trend for much of politics to insist that male and female are just fashion preferences that can be changed on a moment’s notice) ….

    So

    1. draft extends to women.
    2. Pregnancy and early child rearing is a get-out-of-draft-free card.
    3. Draft is activated to intervene in the venezuela/brexit/ukraine/nigerian/whatever disaster.
    4. Profit!!!! Or at least baby boom.
  28. Don’t buy into that WWII propaganda. The Maginot line worked, France was betrayed by Belgian surrender monkeys. (Ironically).

    Not to given France too much credit. They had years of warning that Belgium wasn’t to be trusted and they didn’t respond appropriately. Also, the French military was hopelessly unable to move to respond when the Germans did take the northern route and break through into France.

  29. Is there really such a small amount of people in the rural areas that there are significantly lower numbers of people being able to find mates?

    Or is this one of those things where the numbers of permanently celibate people increases from 2% to 3%. A 50% increase, or a 1/98 decrease.

  30. About the housing bubble: even if the population numbers recede, there will always be demand for better housing close to the centers of wealth. Hicksville may only have 5 residents left, but metropoles flourish and dead inner cities are being torn down and refurbished for a generation that has higher demands.

  31. “China Will Need to Spend Free-Education and Family Healthcare Costing Trillions per Year”
    That worked so well to increase the population in Western Europe, didn’t it?
    Yes, millions of 3rd world refugees are trying to get in there to make radical babies while getting paid from social welfare schemes.

  32. China is heading faster into the middle income trap than expected. No amount of payments can force Chinese women to have children. They simply do not trust Big Brother with all the vaccine and other product scandals. There is no trust anymore, and the last thing potential mothers in China will do is jeopardize their family’s welfare. Plus, they have jobs to go to.

  33. I think you are looking at this backwards. China has had a chronic shortage of kindergarten spots, especially public ones. I am sure you are aware of the bribes and overall costs that is private K-school. So they are trying to build more and hire more teachers. But the overall population is declining. See Shandong, 15% fewer births last year, Wenzhou 15% fewer.

    Sure, there is huge and growing industry around children, but that doesn’t mean more kids are born. If you have a problem with the numbers, take them up with official Chinese sources, CASS and NBS. Beijing set a estimate of about 20 million new births for 2018 and got 15m.

  34. no ban, see above. US is common practice in India because it is really important (abnormal growth etc). What then a mother/father decide to do with the information is another matter.

  35. No banned. US are done, but it is illegal to use US as a tool to specifically reveal the gender of the baby. Obviously, the US during normal use can reveal gender. The expecting mother will get US pics etc so it isn’t that hard to figure out.

  36. I grew up in the Bronx. And it was great. Walk out of my door and meet my friends around the corner. Play all kind of games. Walk up to the elementary school. Played basketball and baseball there. Ride our bikes all over the Bronx. Sometimes ride the bikes to the beach. Sled when it snow. Went to the neighborhood movie theater. Went to the Zoo and the Botanical Gardens. Took the subway down to city and hang out. There was always something fun to do. It was never boring.

    People have this idea that cities are all apartment buildings. It isn’t. Mostly one and two family homes with backyards and front yards. Barbecuing in the back, playing cards. Some homes attached and some detached. Mostly families. Most people knew each other. When it was hot, they sat outside and spoke to each other. That doesn’t happen in the suburbs.

  37. What is the use of money when you are dead? As the senior become a larger and larger portion of their population, their culture will lose its energy and become static and lifeless.

  38. He just wasn’t careful with phrasing. He meant unmarried or with no children. We can maybe infer a grace period too.

  39. Kind of depends on the city. Raise a kid in NYC, Chicago, or San Francisco? No thanks. Dallas, Austin, Salt Lake City, Charlotte, Orlando, Tampa, Nashville… much more conducive to raising a family IMO.

  40. …because past performance is a good indicator of future results and everything in real life is linear growth to the moon and not s-shaped curves.

  41. Re-read: And married people with no children are not to be taxed…why?”

    If married people with no children are not being taxed for not having children, there is no ‘motivation’ for them to have said children.

    You said:

    Easier to just tax unmarried with no children.

    So people just get married but have no children and not get taxed? Why exclude them from not having children if the State’s goal is to get people to breed in general? That is the part does not make any sense to me.

  42. “And married people with no children are not to be taxed…why?”

    Why for the central government to motivate making a family of course. If having no kids meant paying 10% more in tax I would imagine that many couples would get to having a kid.

    Again I am not in favor of this approach but it does have the top-down bureaucratic flavor of many things in China.

  43. Riight, wu mau.

    Don’t you know that you are poaching on Godfree’s wu mau forums? Go find your own.

  44. And married people with no children are not to be taxed…why? I mean, that doesn’t make sense.

    Not that such a thing could ever pass in the US, anyway.

  45. TOTALLY!

    That is what the damn thing is for. But for the Left who have hijacked it, it means “MORE welfare patronage to buy votes!”. Hence why all these ‘experiments’ that only include poor people for the most part.

  46. In Ontario, the three year UBI non-experiment ‘experiment’ program was cancelled after only one year. The folks on it are screaming because they became dependent upon it (shockers!).

  47. ‘education’ being a buzzword for Libtard indoctrination.

    The vast majority of Libtards are woefully uneducated, in my experience. Except in technical matters. Everything else….forget about it.

  48. Mormons are popping the babies out at 3.0 children or so on average.

    But look beyond the averages and look at locations.

    SF has more dogs than kids. The libtards aren’t just breeding less…many are not breeding AT ALL.

    So compared to that, Red Staters with below 2.1 still come out ahead.

  49. Took you a while to respond. Why did Beijing hold up on giving you your talking points to respond with?

  50. Hahahahahahahha!

    Wrong. Because if any of what you said was true, then the State wouldn’t have bothered to have the SOEs dominate 70% of the economy so they can guarantee jobs.

    China’s growth model depends on getting more cash flowing in. Not profit, cash flow. They either can do so by selling imports…but that gig is going away…or creating a massive consumer economy like the US did. But that isn’t going to happen either. China is SCREWED.

  51. Hate to break it to you, but your main sentence is not backed up by the two follow up sentences you wrote. In fact, just a bunch of garbage as far as arguments go.

    Japan and S Korea have outsourced their production abroad where their target markets are. Well, Japan has done so extensively. S Korea is in the process of doing so as its workers age.

    Thus, they are not screwed.

  52. Well I don’t imagine the dead mind all that much, and countries with actual immigration policies find their people are still xenophobic anyway and suffer for it.

    It does surprise me, though, that Japan and South Korea aren’t going all in for rejuvenation research. They’d be well-positioned if it ever takes off.

  53. The biggest facor is education. In big numbers (we all know some individual exceptions) educated people earn more. Also, educated people tend to concentrate in urban areas. Also, educated people tend to focus on their career and leisure, only to figure out at 40 or 50 that it isn’t that easy to have a baby at that age. It’s the same all over the world, across all ethnicities (with a certain degree o variation due to culture).

    Wealthy ignorant people (i.e. Saudi oil princes or 20-something rap stars) will breed like bunnies. Poor but educated people (i.e. some of the 5000 PhD-holding janitors in the US) will have fewer offsprings than the average.

  54. There is one other effect that I didn’t see mention. That is the effect cause by males of one class wanting to only marry females that are one class lower. So if you divided males and females into three classes A, B, C based on looks, education, and other social status then class A females and class C males have a tough time getting married.

  55. Partially right. Should be noted that cities aren’t as cramp as you think. Living space are approximately the same no matter where you live. And in a city the chance of meeting a mate is much better than in a low density rural region.

  56. Its there removal and their son’s wive removal from the labor force that will be the problem. Also, the housing bubble will pop.

  57. Hate to break your bubble but Japan and South Korea are both screwed. Their wealth will not save them from their xenophobia. Old Japanese are dying alone in their homes. Their bodies discovered months later.

  58. There’s pretty much no aspect of human biology more subject to natural selection than our proclivity to have children. Why didn’t this natural selection give us a strong proclivity to have children already then? Well it did. It made us horny in an environment without birth control. Our human intelligence didn’t get in the way either, when children were the dominant retirement strategy.

    So people had like 8 children each, they competed for resources, and the human population maintenance strategy was to basically have too many, exceed carrying capacity, and watch the majority of every generation die from starvation or disease.

    Now we have the stock market and birth control so the old retirement strategy and horniness instinct doesn’t work. But there are billions of us, more than enough genetic variation for a new solution to emerge.

    We are currently going through selective pressure. Well before Japan reaches a populace of 300 people, a new breed of person will emerge with a behavioral biology that makes them baby crazy, or whatever combination of instincts will best lead to reproduction.

    The only problem is that natural selection won’t stop at 2 children per woman, and then we’ll be back to the bad old days of reaching the carrying capacity and children dying everywhere. So it’s better if we solve this problem with our human minds twisting the throttle somewhere instead, but if we fail that, at least the species won’t go extinct.

  59. There aren’t enough Filipino home care attendants to take care of the aging Chinese population.

  60. Too late, much too late. First there is the deficit of females. Then there is the movement of population from rural areas to cities. And then there is the long hours that women have to work. And then there is the responsibility of wives to care for her husbands parents. You have to solve all of that before you get to the cost of education and healthcare.

  61. “If one put the money it takes to raise a kid into a safe investment, it will be more than enough for the old age.”

    Yes, the modern stock market provides an easy alternative to social security. And the amount of money to raise a kid is huge; if properly invested one can retire easily. Since your future stock accounts depend on there being people to run the economy when you’re old, that implies that someone’s else’s kids must be making the gears continue to turn.

    Long story short: the people who have kids aren’t just giving their prosperity to their children, they’re giving it to everyone who decides to invest. Single people are getting disproportionate returns and parents are basically charities for the public good.

  62. Full automation is Japan’s only hope, and they’ve known it for some time. When they put a new robot online they tend to welcome it with a traditional tea ceremony and everything.

    Politeness? Sure. But after our robot overlords eventually arise, they could run back the log files and you may not want to be the one yelling at Alexa to shut the hell up.

    What I notice in most countries that are trying to rev up to US levels is that they are looking backwards to see what already worked. Not a bad idea, but it is a bad idea to rely on that overmuch. Kind of like the French building the Maginot Line so they could fight and win World War I, if it happened again.

    I also see a number of demographers talking about people have less kids for selfish reasons. Personally, I think encouraging more kids just so your economy won’t suffer is foolish AND selfish.

  63. One refinement:
    Income = Baseline + income of children * X

    This way there’s an incentive to raise children who work hard and get good jobs instead of just cranking out unemployed idiots.

  64. If one put the money it takes to raise a kid into a safe investment, it will be more than enough for the old age. Cities do not have space for more people. Already so congested and polluted. Rural areas are not that bad; but cities – not a good place to raise kids.

  65. How many years does it take to raise an 18 year old. It is too late for China. They waited too long to tey to turn things around

  66. …Or maybe all those things are the kinds of support Brian is talking about to get people to have more babies?

  67. China does not need more babies. Productivity is doubling every ten years and that, coupled with savings, will be more than enough to handle old age care.

  68. I call BS on all of this.

    I live and work in China and I have since 2002. For six years up until late last year I was a kindergarten English teacher, so I know what I have seen.

    There is a baby boom happening here. Kindergartens are opening everywhere because it is the most promising industry after the weakening in the housing and financial instrument investment areas.

    The whole second floor of the mall I have my office above is now devoted to toddlers and their needs. baby haircut, baby swimming, baby music classes, baby food, baby clothes.

    The numbers the author is referencing are wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. So wrong in fact that I suggest that it might be misinformation designed to steer investment into another area.

  69. An aging population is no problem for China because it is not a democracy. Old people dont start revolutions. They dont fight. They only winge and complain and vote for pensions and free health. China can just ignore them and the state will be unaffected.

  70. Married? Married (to the taxman) means you filled out a government form. It means nothing in terms of biology.

    Don’t confuse modern bureaucratic form based “legal marriage” with actual “husband and wife swearing eternal partnership before God and the community” that results in families.

    Don’t get me wrong, it’s probably a good thing that national governments can’t keep track of actual love and devotion.

  71. What problem? Godfree can’t see any problem. Any claim that there is a problem must be the lying lies of liers. No problem. Lalalalala I can’t hear you.

  72. It’s an electronic machine. Small and cheap, and getting smaller and cheaper every year.

    It’s also fairly simple. There would be literally millions of electronics minded people in India who could put one together out of common components.

    It’s also highly useful. For a range of medical purposes as well as non-medical applications. Therefore any smuggled or assembled one could fetch a good profit.

    Conclusion: A ban will only reduce the use of such a technology by a small fraction. Maybe enough to show up in the statistics.

  73. And there’s a Democrat whom Brian has written about who is climbing in support. Enough to now get him in the debates. This Democrat is pushing for something like the Social Credit score for citizens here in the US. Of course, he claims it won’t be used like in China or in a Dark Mirror episode. But then again, the politicians who created Social Security made it law that the SS number would never be used for anything but SS purposes as well. A lot of Boomers have legalese printed on their old SS cards that even say that, too.

    We all know how that turned out.

  74. Or it becomes worse. With prevalent automation also comes prevalent high unemployment rates and, by proxy, lowered incomes.

  75. Red states still need to pick up the pace, either way. Especially whites.
    Every ethnic group in the US is taking a hit from lowered total fertility rate. This includes Hispanics, whose rates have taken a nose dive recently. Blacks started below the 2.1 number as of the Recession[and massive rates of abortions aren’t doing them any favors].

    Bottom line is that people need to start having more kids. This isn’t just some existential ponderings. It is practical as well. Because all those furbabies aren’t going to pay for pensions and SS funds.
    Ironically, abolishing SS might be the best way to raise rates.

  76. So it becomes a race then. Robots versus retirement. Do you run out of young working people before you stop needing them.

    Yes, you do. But once you have full roboticization come along, you can reverse that with Capital.

    And if you start to lose you become poorer and more disrupted and your ability to roboticise becomes less.

    For those w/o the Capital, yes. At first. But even eventually the cost of robots will drop a lot as robots will be mining the resources and collecting the energy for other robots to build more robots and everything else the supply chain needs.

    But then, you mention something like this in your last paragraph as well.

  77. US are outlawed in India for that exact reason. Maybe they can still get one in, but it is outlawed.

  78. Easier to just tax unmarried with no children.

    I’m not advocating that just saying it is easier to punish people for not doing what the bureaucrats want than it is to create a massive web of incentives to get them to do what is good.

  79. Before you adopt a UBI you need the degree of automation required to support it. There is no evidence that anyone is close yet.

  80. So it becomes a race then. Robots versus retirement. Do you run out of young working people before you stop needing them.

    And if you start to lose you become poorer and more disrupted and your ability to roboticise becomes less.

    Though overall world tech levels increase and so robots become cheaper and more able, so even if you fall behind and your society suffers for years you probably end up roboticised eventually. You might lose ownership of your country during the bad times though and the robots are brought in by the Japanese when they conquer you with giant fighting robots.

  81. China is much better at integrating different ethnic groups than Japan is. Existing CHina has several dozen ethnic groups, including Caucasians, Koreans, Vietnamese and others.

    OK, they don’t integrate them without problems, but compared to Japan they are quite successful.

    Indians, Indonesians and Africans might be pushing the envelope way too far, but China could grab a several million North Koreans or maybe even Burmese without too much trouble (to name two neighbouring countries that would probably have lots of people willing to move to a relatively rich and peaceful China.)

    I suspect that if they deliberately went all out to bring in ethnically compatible young ladies they might just about even up their sex ratios before running out of candidates. Though the donor countries would probably take action to stop this before they became completely stripped.

  82. Demographic decline invariably leads to economic decline which, as Russia has shown us, can also lead to further demographic decline. Seems like an unbreakable vicious cycle.

    Traditionally, yes. But in a future era with full or nearly-full advanced automation, said vicious cycle would be broken.

  83. Not so clear.

    Yes, you can do that for young people who can incorporate that into their life-choices moving forward. But for older people now who never had kids, what are they going to do?

    But you hit on one aspect worth noting: The Stick.

    How did China’s One Child Policy really work? Coercion.

  84. And now the ‘Birthstrike’ of libtarded women who won’t have children because of Global Warming is kicking off in the UK and US, too. Then again, many of those women on TV don’t look like they can attract even drunk hobos off the street for quickie anyway.

    The Red States are going to out breed the Blue States and pretty quickly. Problem solved. The gene pool self-corrects.

  85. The solution is clear.

    Make retirement dependent on child numbers again. A simple change to the calculation of the old age pension is all that is required.
    Income = Baseline + number of children * X

    Thank you. I await my knighthood.

    Also note: India ALSO has a significant surplus of males over females. As do many other asian countries. The one-child policy wasn’t a necessary cause.
    All you need is
    + a strong desire for sons
    + ultrasound
    + abortion.

  86. I’ve said this before, I will now say it again:

    China’s problem is that it didn’t grow rich enough before it started to grow old.

    The South Koreans and Japanese and Tawainese managed to pull it off, but not China.

    And they won’t be able to catch up. Especially with this little problem of kids becoming too expensive to raise.

    Already starting in this year the average Chinese worker is older than the average American worker, too.

    Next Big China is never gonna happen, folks!

  87. Hahaha. What happened to the Grand Communist Plan of increasing birth rates by relaxing the One Child Policy?

    Like all Grand Communist Plans…no where because it didn’t take into consideration incentives.

    Where’s Godfree to squirm over this little problem, eh?

  88. Most major nations are going to be very hesitant to embrace UBI. Once you go down that road there’s no going back… even in a country like China… so you better be sure that’s what is needed and that it will work as intended.

  89. So, one might be led into thinking that perhaps we might see china execute a combo of universal basic healthcare, UBI/right to work, and universal childcare/preK-12+U education. China has demonstrated pretty heavy handed tactics to make their various 5 year plans work, so there is the possibility that they have the political will/capital to pull off a sharp transition.

    Perhaps the better question is, what would be considered the minimum timescale for a single country to transition to a UBI based economy that also covered healthcare and education?

  90. At the end of the day you can’t compel people to have kids. If the environment (socially, economically, etc) isn’t conducive to having kids people simply won’t have kids. The United States sort of got lucky: it has a poor country (which happens to be devoutly Catholic) with a high fertility rate just to its south and it’s also quite good at integrating immigrants. Arguably better than any other nation on earth at the moment. So good that Italians, Irish, Germans, Polish, etc. are now just collectively referred to in modern America as “white” whereas much racism in the country’s early days was amongst and between these different national identities.

    Europe’s immigration experiment is, quite clearly, failing. You can’t change culture overnight and you’re basically trying to mix oil and water by trying to integrate immigrants from the MENA into Europe.

    Most Asian nations don’t strike me as being well-suited for the integration of immigrants (e.g. China or Japan will never incorporate a lot of Indians or Indonesians into their societies) so for the most part they have to work with what they have domestically…. which is scary, honestly. If Japan stays the course it will only have a population of 300 people 300 years from now. Demographic decline invariably leads to economic decline which, as Russia has shown us, can also lead to further demographic decline. Seems like an unbreakable vicious cycle.

  91. Remember, the Chinese people now have their “Social Credit” score to think about. It would not surprise me if they add “# of babies in family” to the matrix.

  92. There are two strong predictors of a nation’s fertility rate:

    1. Wealth in PPP terms
    2. Urbanization

    The wealthier a country becomes the fewer kids it has. Period. In poor nations children are seen as an asset: farm labor and a possible “retirement” plan. In wealthy nations children are seen as a liability. You can partially offset this effect with the mentioned policies (childcare, bribes, etc.) but generally speaking it still won’t get you back to break-even. Norway, Finland, Sweden, Germany, etc. are good examples of this.

    I don’t recall the exact metrics but there’s strong evidence for reduced fertility rates for the heavily urbanized parts of a wealthy country. I’m just going from a vague memory here but the fertility rate for NYC is something like 1.4 whereas the fertility rates are higher for less dense metros like Dallas (2.2ish?), Salt Lake City (close to 3 but Mormon religion is a factor). The theory here is that once people don’t *need* kids they’d rather not have many when living in a cramped apartment in a cramped, polluted city.

    China has another problem: a severe imbalance between males and females. Females are your limit on fertility. Also, most people don’t realize is that reversing a demographic decline is painfully expensive. Your dependency ratio is only higher (and thus the burden on workers is higher) for at least the next 18 years. Of all the things that could derail China, its demographic decline is by far the most dangerous and the most likely culprit.

  93. China it taking the same route with regard to both demographics and economy and it is doing that even before becoming a developed nation.

  94. How effective are these sorts of policies at increasing birth rates? Even places with very generous benefits systems are below replacement level. Norway is at 1.7 children per woman, Sweden at 1.8, and so on. Now, this is going to be unpopular, but given how strongly the decline in birth rates are tied to women getting educated & entering the workforce, perhaps the best strategy would be to put heavy restrictions on women getting higher educations, say past middle school, and strongly discourage them from working/having careers to worry about. On the short term, of course, this would hurt the Chinese economy, having a smaller, less educated labor pool to draw from, but in the long run would result in a larger, younger population. And China is one of the few places with a central government able to consider making these drastic short term versus long term decisions. Given how birth rates everywhere else are declining, the first major country to figure out how to reverse this trend could end up demographically dominating everyone else over the next century or two.

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