China population is shrinking but more important to population collapse is the number of girls 0-4 is half the number of women who are in 35-39 and aging out of fertility. The biggest problem with China have a fertility rate of 1.18 is that there are only 0.58 fertile daughters produced by the average women. The Fertile women population plummets far faster than overall population.
IF China still has a fertility rate of 1.18 from now to 2050, then its population will drop to 1.1 billion. They will lose the entire population of the USA. A drop of over 20% in overall population could halve the working age population. This will be a massive hit to China’s economy and the world economy.
The China haters can laugh and pretend it is only China’s problem but the global economy taking a ten trillion dollar hit will cause big global financial problems. Also, the 70% of the world is living in countries which are below replacement level birthrates. Dropping below replacement means you the country is about 40 years from shrinking populations. Almost 25% of the world is in countries with shrinking populations.
China’s capital Beijing will pay for IVF and “semen storage” in its latest move to tackle the country’s shrinking birth rate but some experts warn it won’t work. In January, the Chinese government announced that deaths had outnumbered births for the first time in sixty years – 9.56 million people were born in 2022, while 10.41 million people died.
As of July 1, 2023, 16 types of assisted reproduction technology will be available under Beijing’s health care system.
In-vitro fertilization (IVF), embryo transplantation, freezing and storing semen will now be included under basic insurance, said Du Xin, deputy director of Beijing’s Municipal Medical Insurance Bureau.
In 2016, China allowed two children instead of one and fro 2021 allow three children.
In August, 2022, China’s National Health Commission took further action, issuing guidance to local authorities on reforming policies to improve fertility rates. Incentives include cash handouts, tax cuts and even property concessions.
The city of Shenzhen announced that three-child families would be awarded with 37,500 yuan, equivalent to $5,550.
Parents remain discouraged from having children due to child-rearing costs, a lack of childcare support and the loss of work opportunities for women.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Will be compulsory soon for every female between 15 and 40 years of age. Hope I’m wrong.
Step 1 in the right direction – reproductive technologies and their availability.
Step 2 should be fundamental life extension strategy by aging research:
a) Reproductive health extension (for women 40+ but men as well)
b) Productive life extension (increasing the actual retirement/disability age by decades)
c) Absolute life extension (will be the consequence of the above gains made fundamentally)
Step 3 (actually at the same time as 2) should be increasing economic efficiency of the current – and upcoming – demographic reality (automation, robotics, evolution of work etc.). The goal is to learn to grow the economy without growing (and probably with shrinking for some time) population and with continuing increase of the average age. It’s hard but it’s not impossible, especially with disruptive technologies (but taking into account the techno-deflation they bring so it could be 1-2% in monetary dimension while transforming the way of life more than radically).
Step 4 also could be more radical human upgrade tech, used both do fix existing disabilities of people and to increase their abilities (cognitive first of all) beyond the current level of biology. I.e. building the transhumanist economy for long-lived people who get smarter and even “more than young” with age.
Step 5 could be expansion into space, where such people would probably have the motivation and ability to grow significantly in numbers without much competition for natural resources or time. That’s when the high numbers of economic growth will likely return (but it depends on the evolution of measurement – probably GDP as we know it will be replaced with something else).
Such a policy here probably would have resulted in my having more kids; I was sterilized by cancer surgery, and would have stored semen or used some really expensive procedure afterwards to have more children, if I could have afforded it.
But the marginal impact will be very minimal. It’s really to late for China to fix this by making having kids easier. They caused the problem in the first place mandating NOT having kids, I’m surprised they haven’t opted for a new mandate…
I wonder if personal robotic workers, cheaper 3D-printed houses, and cars manufactured with little human labor will allow parents to consider not delaying having children until after they establish a career.
45 years after the One Child Policy, China is not running out of children. China is running out of working adults. Labor rates have risen 1500% in the last 20 years.
“The city of Shenzhen announced that three-child families would be awarded with 37,500 yuan, equivalent to $5,550.”
The problem is, we(humanity) are still poor. Even the richest countries in the world can’t afford tp provide for families(on huge scale) amount of money which will really make a difference. This should be around few thousands of dollars per family/per month, at least $1500-2000 per child (at the same time prices for energy, housing, food, other goods need to stay in place or go down).
We need to increase our productivity/wealth generation capacity at least 2-3x additional times.
In purchasing power parity per capita, in my country, equivalent of few hundreds of dollars wouldn’t enourage me to have a kid, but $2000-3000 per month, probably will do the job.
We may be there(richest countries) during 2030’s. So, as long as technology is progressing exponeneitally, and our output is growing, there is hope, that even after decade or two of collapse, we will bounce off in near future.
The reason it costs so much is that we measure our wealth relative to others (and to what we see in media). So it costs too much by definition, and will continue to cost too much even if we are several fold more productive, because the amount it will take to motivate us will just grow in tandem.
If we reworked our media to only show people who are less rich and attractive than ourselves and our dating partners, than we would probably stop chasing higher status and have children.
I guess, with the way AI is developing in writing and making art, we could even get communities of people who coordinate their media to do that. Eventually they’ll be the only ones left.
Firstly, nothing is “free”. The money for these fertility treatments will come not from military budgets but from people who would otherwise be investing in activity that creates jobs (which families need before deciding to have kids) or from potential parents who are now going to wait longer to have kids because their economic situation is worse. That includes taking it from pensioners which makes them more reliant on their kids so they won’t have more kids. Nothing is free. The money always comes from somewhere.
Secondly, they are desperately trying to get people to have more kids but still put a 3 kid limit on those who actually want more kids? That’s what experts refer to as “dumb as a stump”.
Good start, every additional human life is priceless(not counting mass murderers and serial killers, because their activity is of course decreasing human population). But these are extremely rare.
Hopefully China will also increase aging reseach by throwing additional billions. US and EU also should do that. We can afford that.
We need to accelerate aging reseach
Advanced aliens? Are you there? If yes, please save us, uplift us, we need help