China's Population May Start To Shrink This Year, New Birth Data Suggest (science.org) 138
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science.org: After many decades of growth, China's population could begin to shrink this year, suggest data released yesterday by China's National Bureau of Statistics. The numbers show that in 2021, China's birth rate fell for the fifth year in a row, to a record low of 7.52 per 1000 people. Based on that number, demographers estimate the country's total fertility rate -- the number of children a person will bear over their lifetime -- is down to about 1.15, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 and one of the lowest in the world.
Young couples are deciding against having more children, "despite all the new initiatives and propaganda to promote childbearing," says Yong Cai, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "China's population decline will be rapid," he predicts. The shift from growth to decline has happened startlingly fast. Projections made just a few years ago suggested China's population would expand until around 2027. Last year, when it announced results from the 2020 census, the statistics bureau still pegged the total fertility rate at 1.3. The report also found that China is becoming ever more urbanized, "with nearly 65% of the population now living in urban areas, up 0.8 percentage points from 2020," reports Science.org. The crowded housing, high living costs, and exorbitant education expenses all "reduce people's willingness to have a second child, let alone a third child," says Wei Guo, a demographer at Nanjing University.
Young couples are deciding against having more children, "despite all the new initiatives and propaganda to promote childbearing," says Yong Cai, a demographer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "China's population decline will be rapid," he predicts. The shift from growth to decline has happened startlingly fast. Projections made just a few years ago suggested China's population would expand until around 2027. Last year, when it announced results from the 2020 census, the statistics bureau still pegged the total fertility rate at 1.3. The report also found that China is becoming ever more urbanized, "with nearly 65% of the population now living in urban areas, up 0.8 percentage points from 2020," reports Science.org. The crowded housing, high living costs, and exorbitant education expenses all "reduce people's willingness to have a second child, let alone a third child," says Wei Guo, a demographer at Nanjing University.
How poetic (Score:2)
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Re:How poetic (Score:4, Insightful)
and it shall be their intelligence that will lead them to create the tools towards their own regulated infertility that shall cause their ultimate extinction as they realize more and more that reproduction holds little advantage for the individual.
Evolution isn't strictly biological - it can also be cultural. Those individuals and cultures that want to have children will survive whilst those who don't will die without passing on their genes (and for cultures, ideals).
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This may be the dumbest thing I've read (Score:2)
Re: This may be the dumbest thing I've read (Score:2)
Re:How poetic (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoever can say with a square face that reproduction holds little advantage for the individual just has never seen it done right.
The amount of inner peace I have found in facing this world for someone else, the drive to find and tackle old daemons.
My children have made me a better man. I am truly sorry for anyone who has not had that privilege.
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It was their intelligence, that let men create tools that would have them triumph over all other life on earth, and it shall be their intelligence that will lead them to create the tools towards their own regulated infertility that shall cause their ultimate extinction as they realize more and more that reproduction holds little advantage for the individual.
So as soon as a country not in Population Growth Threatens The World mode, it's headed for 'ultimate extinction'?
What really happens is that the fastest childbearing rates are found in late agrarian societies, where lots of children are needed to help on the farm. As a country industrializes, its population growth always drops toward replacement rate. People love children, but they are also far more long-run rational than you apocalypse theorists believe.
Re:How poetic (Score:4, Insightful)
They've been trying to slow growth, but not to stop it entirely. China is edging towards finding itself in a much more magnified version of the problem the US currently has - an excess of older population looking to exit the workforce with not enough younger individuals to support the population that is no longer working.
Combine that with a culture that highly valued males and the one child per family policy that lead to many baby girls being killed and/or discarded, and you have a whole generation of young men who are expected to care for multiple older family members but with great difficulties in finding a mate, and there's the potential for a lot of social upheaval in the coming decades.
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Combine that with a culture that highly valued males and the one child per family policy that lead to many baby girls being killed and/or discarded, and you have a whole generation of young men who are expected to care for multiple older family members but with great difficulties in finding a mate, and there's the potential for a lot of social upheaval in the coming decades.
Namely, the gayest population ever.
Re:How poetic [but not Funny] (Score:2)
Not a bad FP branch, though the vacuous Subject and censor mods are annoying.
But I was looking for a Funny comment comparing population decline in China to a stock buyback by a corporation trying to jack up the price of its own stock. To make the humor insightful, the punchline has to be something about artificial consumption, but apparently the Special Theory of Relatively Funny Stuff has kicked in and I'm not special enough to see the joke.
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I always find it a mystery how many people find population decline so alarming, often citing retirement as a concern.
If human conomy rely on continued population growth, then it woud essentially be a pyramid scheme that as all such schemes is doomed to fail as eventually available space exhausts.
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Re: How poetic (Score:2)
How the f*ck is this comment trolling?
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Just in absolute value-free terms, the number of old people will eventually be much greater than the number of old people that the society can reasonably take care of because old people sometimes need a lot of care, and also, because they consume resources but do not contribute to the work needed to secure those resources.
How does this work exactly? Are we referring to literal life care (like full service nursing homes)? Is it some kind of broader concept involving general economics of worker productivity
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The older one gets, the more likely that person will need major assistance just getting by. Most people can live unassisted in their 60s, a lower portion in their 70s, and an even lower portion in their 80s. Minor injuries can become life-threatening if not addressed immediately. That care gets progressively more expensive, and surprising costs come into play. Someone wearing adult diapers can go through half a dozen or more a day. At 50 cents each in large quantities, that's $3 a day or about $1000 a year.
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We need outside the box thinking.
1) Single payer health care. Talking about our huge health care costs is a joke when we don't address the massive profiteering from a necessary service that 100% of people will need that as somehow been turned into a business sector for predatory capitalism. With this, also consider palliative care options for some conditions instead of complex procedures for people who get little benefit from them. Doing a hip or other joint replacement on a 70+ year old person probably
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Your first and third options just slow the onset of the problem. You still have a growing population needing increasing care, taking up more of the workforce on economically draining work. Taking care of relatives at home is a full-time job and then some, and most people cannot handle the time commitments even when they don't have a job. My wife's step-mother did this for my father-in-law, who was falling to Parkinson's, and I think it damn near killed her, but she's stubborn enough to have pushed through i
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There's a lot of home care situations are inappropriate or counter-productive because they're too demanding or complex, but there's a lot of people who are just too old or infirm to live independently but they don't have chronic, constant-care illnesses or conditions.
And there's nothing that says such people couldn't gain access to temporary in-home health care on a periodic basis.
My mom was stage 3 cancer. We already knew from the oncologist that her five year survival odds were like under 10%. But still
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Yes. This is the problem. Too many old people.
I agree with you. I am just pointing out that negative population growth puts a lot of stress on the abi
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I agree with you. I am just pointing out that negative population growth puts a lot of stress on the ability of a society to provide assistance and relief. There is a bit of a contradiction in place when a person says they want to shrink the world population and also provide good care for old people. Those two things work against each other. Don't shoot the messenger.
When a population grows rapidly it puts a lot of stress on the society as well. Children are draining the economy until they start on the labor market. In most developed countries that is on average somewhere in the (early) twenties. The average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 years (excluding college and many other costs) is around $272,000.
The problem with an aging population is really lack of savings. Most societies have been constructed so that the working population pays a large amount of mone
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The average cost of raising a child mentioned in my comment is in the US.
Re:How poetic (Score:4, Insightful)
Savings, per se, does not actually increase the ability of the economy to produce more and support a greater number of retirees from fewer workers. Saving more and spending it without increasing productivity will only add demand to the supply & demand curve and push up prices to the point the buying power is diluted as much as or more than the pay-as-you go scheme. So savings is not a solution to the underlying problem unless those savings are used to increase productivity. (I'm not arguing for more borrowing, though - that is an even worse "solution", and a short-term one at that.)
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Re:How poetic (Score:4, Insightful)
Only idiots and economists believe in infinite growth forever; but would-be retirees are correct in believing that the ratio of workers to retirees will affect their future comfort.
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The obvious solution is robots, automation, and productivity improvements. As nerds, it is up to us to solve the world's problems.
We need to continue to fix labor-intensive industries like retail and foodservice. Expect to see more self-checkouts and fewer sitdown restaurants. Self-driving taxis and trucks will also free workers for more important jobs.
Re:How poetic (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How poetic (Score:5, Interesting)
Robots that can take care of old people with dementia and incontinence, etc.
We should be spending a lot more to find a cure or prevention for dementia. If we can keep people productive for a few years more and reduce their end-of-life medical bills, that is a big part of the solution to the demographic problems.
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Robots that can take care of old people with dementia and incontinence, etc.
We should be spending a lot more to find a cure or prevention for dementia. If we can keep people productive for a few years more and reduce their end-of-life medical bills, that is a big part of the solution to the demographic problems.
Unpopular opinion... or stop trying to force people live that long.
I'd prefer to check out before I completely lose my faculties but most western countries make this highly illegal. I think it's better to be able to see my friends and family before I'm an unresponsive vegetable who can't remember them and have them remember me as someone who enjoyed a full life and wasn't scared that it came to a swift and painless conclusion, rather than the painful memories of me asking "who are you" every time I see t
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Even if old people don't have formal jobs, they can still contribute to the economy.
If granny can watch the kids after school and have dinner ready when the bread-earners come home, she is adding to the economic wellbeing of her family.
If she is in a nursing home, she is draining her family's finances.
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I would not be looking forward to getting old in a society that has few young people
Fewer kids to tell to get off my lawn. What's not to like?
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Robots that can take care of old people with dementia and incontinence, etc. I would not be looking forward to getting old in a society that has few young people and a shrinking population. Elder care robots are what are needed, I guess. I think Japan is actually trying to do this.
Japan doesn't have a choice. The Japanese population has been declining since 2010. They're ten years ahead of China in creating conditions so anti-human that people die faster than they're born. Japan did it with economic conditions. China tried to do it by government fiat, which sort of worked but not really. Eventually they really nailed it with economic conditions.
I am reminded of the bougainvillea plants kept by my grandmother and my mother as house plants. My grandmother was a dedicated gardener
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The whole scheme is already collapsing in the UK. People still working are now facing the highest tax bill since WW2, mostly to pay for those who have retired and the mistakes they made. Property is unaffordable too. Pensions for people working now are crap.
We have already reached the end of the line and nobody knows what to do now.
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The cost of property is a huge elephant in the room. It drives up the cost of production across the board and is a lot of why so much manufacturing has gone to less developed countries. When you see an area where all of the shops seem to be closed and abandoned, you can bet it started with landlords raising the rent.
Louis Rossmann has done several videos showing parts of NYC where rental properties have been vacant for YEARS yet landlords demand high rent claiming property is "in demand". After the real est
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China has been trying to reduce their population for years. The one child policy, which was aimed at this, was a disaster.
How was the one-child policy a disaster? It accomplished its objective.
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The economic implications of a shrinking population are problematic.
The economic implications of an excessively growing population are worse.
High taxes for pensions and healthcare are a much better problem to have than famine.
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It would have happened anyway (the decrease of family size) with the increase of the lifespan, income and a few other things and they would have been spared the social implications of millions of young men not able to find a mate (see the sex slave trade with North Korean women who escaped the regime into China for a little snippet of what such policy creates).
The trend is universal; ATM more than 90% of all societies on Earth are in the state of smaller family, high children survival rate, longer lives, hi
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The One Child Policy resulted in a lot of misery. Mothers who accidentally got pregnant were forced to have terminations, often quite late stage ones because they tried to hide the pregnancies from the police. It also caused a lot of baby girls to be orphaned, abandoned by their parents at birth, or aborted late on despite being healthy, in favour of boys. If people were going to have one child, they wanted it to be a boy because sexism is still massive in China, and boys earn a lot more and are better able
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Because of other social factors, girls were "aborted" (sometimes at birth) because boys would be better able to support them in old age. Now there aren't enough women for men to marry, further cementing the population decline now that they want it to level off. Also resulting in a bunch of young men with nothing better to do than make trouble.
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They have also been reducing their pop. recently with pollution. The numbers are staggering, over 1 million a year (taking a low count of the estimates). However, their pop. is so large that that number is commensurate with the size of the pop. Still, it is a nasty environment in which to raise kids, or grow old. Then there is the CCP mental pollution to which everyone there is subjected.
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"They have realized that it is possible to have too many people, something that other countries have not yet figured out."
Problem is, half the people have an IQ of under 100, 10% one under 83 nobody needs those, they ruin the lives of the rest.
Evolution at work (Score:2, Insightful)
Humanity of the future will be dominated by people who have more children for a combination of biological and cultural reasons. They may not be European or Chinese, but nature will find a way.
Re: Evolution at work (Score:2)
Civilization might not survive the evolutionary process.
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I believe East Europeans ( Hungary, Poland, Czeks, ... ) will florish too. Sadly, Germans will not.
Re:Evolution at work (Score:4, Informative)
Afraid not. Poland's birth rate is far below replacement already at only 1.4 births / couple. Germany is 1.5. Hungary is 1.49.
Replacement rate is around 2.2.
Birth rate in the USA is 1.7, 1.65 in the UK.
100 years of data shows a very clear trend - as societies become more affluent, the birth rate drops. And it happens more and more rapidly as the years go by.
The birth rate in the entire OECD has been below replacement for a very long time. All population growth is coming from immigration, from Africa and SE Asia. Now that SE Asia has passed the curve and is starting to decline, Africa is soon going to be the only population growth area left, and that too will stop soon.
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You’re missing the most obvious source of population growth in countries where fertility rates are falling (don’t feel bad; most people do): mortality rates are also falling; the population is ageing: the real effect is obvious but often missed: more people are living longer and making the population (live people) larger. The effect is even more marked in developing countries where life expectancy is growing faster. You can not predict population growth from reproduction rates alone.
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Probably not. This theory has been debunked as part of the "great replacement" stuff. Having more kids means what resources you have are spread more thinly, which tends to result in shorter lifespans and a lower quality of life for them. Over time, all developing societies trend towards lower birth rates.
The only real issue here is that we need to adjust our economies to cope with zero or negative population growth.
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The only real issue here is that we need to adjust our economies to cope with zero or negative population growth.
Yup. This is one of those somewhat rare times when your analysis and mine match up exactly.
I don't think anyone has come up with a solution thus far. Left, right, whatever side of the political spectrum you look at, the solution seems to be "import cheap labor from shitty parts of the world, get people who are willing to work hard at shitty jobs for low wages."
I hope I'm around for another 40-50 years. I don't expect these issues to be major within my lifespan, but my kids, and if they have kids...it's goin
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That's predicated on raw resource shortage vs shortage of labor to exploit raw resources. Not the whole world in Singapore even today, let alone in future if birth rates of some demographics stay low. If political obstacles were out of the way, most of Russia and abandoned American places like Detroit have all the resources and no people.
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By 2050, the Philippines may have more people than Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Philippines [wikipedia.org]
The Total Fertility Rate graph is at the bottom of the page. It's gone in just about linear fashion from 7.4+ in the 1950s to ~2.5 today and still dropping.
The Phillippines are basically where Japan was ~1960.
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Evolution is about survival to reproduction, not flourishing in terms of self actualization. If you can't manage even replacement rate of reproduction, you are evolutionary doomed. Long before that, you are going to lose in terms of democracy or even outright military conquest.
Treat people like shit, they'll make less people (Score:5, Interesting)
Want to raise your birthrate? Start treating families better. Give paid leave. Give economic security. Let middle class families know that if the make a minor mistake or, in the case of Americans, get unlucky and face a serious illness, that their 3rd child won't bankrupt them. I know well over 1000 engineers I've met in the last 10 years. Less than 10 have 3 kids or more. They like the lifestyle of economic security more than the prospect of having 3rd kid.
How much of the blame rests squarely on Jack Ma for championing the bullshit 996 model and businesses in Asia falling over themselves to adopt it? Yeah, if your husband is working 72h a week, you're basically a single mom. I can't imagine any woman with options eager to reproduce with a man who works those hours...both because he's literally not around to fuck and because any idiot who falls for that shit probably has a ton of other baggage as well.
So yeah, China's birthrate is low and I'll be surprised if it turns around any time soon. Sorry, you want women to voluntarily carry your babies? treat them better.
It's really a failure of modern capitalism. We want people to be educated and consume, consume, consume...and never feel fulfilled unless they're constantly consuming....driving the consumption economy. Well, do a good enough job selling all these gadgets and lifestyles, people will want to consume more than they want to build families. So modern governments have to spend big to actually make having children less painful or accept that their best and brightest will not want to reproduce very much and deal with the declining population.
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I'm sorry but you're ignoring the fact that China is simply catching up to the rest of the world. The entire OECD has been below replacement birthrate for a long time.
The only areas of the world where the population is still growing are Africa and SE Asia, and SE Asia is close to turning around to below replacement soon as well.
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The only areas of the world where the population is still growing are Africa and SE Asia, and SE Asia is close to turning around to below replacement soon as well.
GREAT article about India (and I have no doubt uch of the same will apply to South East Asian, the Middle East, etc.)
India has a People Problem [bloombergquint.com]
The average Indian woman is now likely to have only two children. That’s below the “replacement rate” of 2.1, at which the population would exactly replace itself over generations. A few decades ago, this would have been considered miraculous in a country dismissed as a Malthusian nightmare. ...
In urban India, the fertility rate is now 1.6, equivalent to the U.S.
China-watchers have long debated whether that country will grow old before it gets rich. India now has to answer that same question, with far fewer resources at its disposal.
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Want to raise your birthrate? Start treating families better. Give paid leave. Give economic security. Let middle class families know that if the make a minor mistake or, in the case of Americans, get unlucky and face a serious illness, that their 3rd child won't bankrupt them. I know well over 1000 engineers I've met in the last 10 years. Less than 10 have 3 kids or more. They like the lifestyle of economic security more than the prospect of having 3rd kid.
It's a nice theory, and I'm all for encouraging a healthy family life, but what exactly is your evidence that changing any of this will increase the number of kids?
Many of the countries with the most generous social welfare networks and policies have the lowest birth rates.
They introduced those to up the bithrate + chemo (Score:2)
Many of the countries with the most generous social welfare networks and policies have the lowest birth rates.
Those countries introduced those measures to deal with a declining birthrate. You're expressing what I call the "chemotherapy paradox."
"How can we say that chemotherapy stops cancer? Everyone I know on chemotherapy has cancer!" (logic famously spouted by Donald Trump in a 2012 tweet: "I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.")
You make raising a child scary and illogical, smart people will stop doing it. So yeah, your options are to rely on the poorer people to have kids...all of which a
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Those countries introduced those measures to deal with a declining birthrate. You're expressing what I call the "chemotherapy paradox."
"How can we say that chemotherapy stops cancer? Everyone I know on chemotherapy has cancer!" (logic famously spouted by Donald Trump in a 2012 tweet: "I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.")
I almost mentioned, but it's really not a paradox. It's just that there doesn't seem to be much correlation, one way or the other, between the factors you list and reproductive rate. Yes, some countries with low birth rates have tried those things, but it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. Other countries (like France) have a relatively high birthrate and relatively generous benefits.
I think Trump's right about diet coke, and there's some evidence that agrees.
You make raising a child scary and illogical, smart people will stop doing it. So yeah, your options are to rely on the poorer people to have kids...all of which are having declining birthrates in the developed world, or you rely on immigration to keep your population numbers up.
I don't know that any of that is true at
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Treat people like shit, they'll make less people
Completely ass backwards. When you treat people like shit they have more people. More people to work the fields, less giving a fuck about the rest of the world.
Frankly though China should be trying to reduce its population, not grow it. They have more people than they can feed properly already. And food insecurity is going to rise for the foreseeable future, and oh yeah China and the USA have been saber-rattling and a massive percentage of China's food comes from the USA.
educated people don't usually work the fields (Score:2)
Treat people like shit, they'll make less people
Completely ass backwards. When you treat people like shit they have more people. More people to work the fields, less giving a fuck about the rest of the world.
I specifically mentioned educated workers. :) Educated workers with options choose not to have families. They have too many other fun things competing for their attention.
It's a failure of capitalism. Make everyone compete to find fun things to do with your free time...eventually they'll succeed and make many things in life more fun than raising a family.
Yes, children used to be your retirement plan and welfare safety net, but that's not the case in the developed world, particularly among the educ
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China's got a growing educated population and a still sizable undereducated population.
If their technology is all they keep telling us it is then they can mitigate the problem in the same way the Japanese are planning to, lots of robots.
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I'm Not so sure about that (Score:2)
Everyone just assumes women will have as many babies as they can and nobody ever thinks about what it's actually like to squeeze one out. Yeah there are some women who are clown cars. I had a neighbor who would openly admit she would spend the rest of her li
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Want to raise your birthrate? Start treating families better. Give paid leave. Give economic security.
The empirical evidence is giving those things results in lower birthrates.
By your logic, chemo causes cancer (Score:2)
Want to raise your birthrate? Start treating families better. Give paid leave. Give economic security.
The empirical evidence is giving those things results in lower birthrates.
Those measures were introduced to combat declining birthrates. By your logic, all empirical evidence shows that chemotherapy causes cancer because everyone who takes it has cancer.
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Those measures were introduced to combat declining birthrates.
(Here comes the Godwin). By such regimes as Germany in 1930s after 1933, or the USSR around the same time. In other countries, e.g. the UK, such measures were partly introduced because it was hoped that they would result in lower birth rates. Even around 1900 the link was understood by governments with a grip on reality as many countries that had already industrialised and had become more prosperous were seeing a reduction in birth rates as people had more access to the things you mention, and they were fur
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I live somewhere in the
I work in a tech town, like most engineers :) (Score:2)
Less than 10 out of 1000 have 3+kids? You must work in a large city and not get beyond the city limits all that much.
I live where the jobs are, in one of the top tech cities in the USA. Yes, if you want to work for Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc, your options are pretty limited as to where to live. Want to work for a regional insurance chain? I am sure the economics are much different. However, even when you move an hour away from a tech center, the economics means that kid #3 is a HUGE hit on your lifestyle, even at an engineer's salary. That paycheck is high, but so is the mortgage.
I like it this way. I chose t
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In the past 100-200 years, that's changed. Most of the smartest people are saying "screw kids who needs that". The evolutionary consequences should be obvious to any of those 1-child smart people. Not full-blown idiocracy, but the intelligence
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So yeah, China's birthrate is low and I'll be surprised if it turns around any time soon.
China's birthrate is not low, it is close to normal.
It was low during the "period of one child policy". Which got canceled about a decade ago.
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Nigeria (Score:5, Insightful)
The special thing about Africa is its very lighly populated so it can hold another 2 billion and also its the only place the number of children per woman stays above 4 even when people become rich.
The future of humanity is neither European nor Asian, its African
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People say the birth dearth will never come to Africa.
But they said the same thing about Italy, India, Mexico, etc., where big families were a cultural expectation. But dramatic declines in birth rates happened very quickly in all those places.
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It's already there, just early days.
(Swiping what I just wrote in a different post):
Even in Nigeria, the Total Fertility Rate has fallen from ~6.5 in 1990 to ~5 today. Ethiopa, TFR of 7 in 1990 to 4.5 today. Zimbabwe, TFR of 7.3 in 1980 to 3.5 today. etc. The trends are there in most places, they have similar slopes as in Europe, East Asia, North America, etc. they're just earlier in the process. (All from Wikipedia "Demographic" articles)
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Meanwhile Nigeria is about to have a larger population than China by 2100.
According to a graph at https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org] Nigeria is expected to have some 733M people in 2100, way behind China (1060M) and India (1450M). Of course such predictions are full of uncertainties.
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The future of humanity is neither European nor Asian, its African
Interesting take.
In the year 1800, by many guesses, about HALF the entire population of the world lived in China and India.
Britain's population was a blip, yet over the next century Britain, France, heck, the freaking Dutch, dominated the globe, and still do to a notable degree.
For much of the last half century, people have been saying the future is Chinese or Indian. Now, suddenly, the narrative has changed.
Population numbers don't mean everything.
What will happen when the global population decline starts
Re: Nigeria (Score:2)
*COOKIE ABSENT* (Score:5, Informative)
Glad to see the editorial quality of Slashdot is the same as ever--
The link in the summary dead-ends, with a lovely "Cookie Absent" landing.
I dug, and I believe this is the appropriate URL.
https://www.science.org/conten... [science.org]
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Before the CCP (Score:2)
Reminds me of ... (Score:2)
.. a book by a guy named Kienzle, in a series about a mystery solving priest.
At one point a seminarian is reading off a list of "prayers for the faithful" for a class. Two went something like:
Lord hear our prayer.
Lord hear our prayer.
China is now living through the consequence of it's decades long, "one child policy",
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China is now living through the consequence of it's decades long, "one child policy"
That has almost certainly contributed, to some degree, to the rapidity of the decline China is now facing, but there is nothing else unique about China's incipient demographic collapse. See Korea and Japan for two neighbors, and the entire rest of the developed world (Europe, North America, Australia, etc). Same situation, just varying in degrees.
The evidence is pretty unambiguous. In the absense or decline of religious imperative, as societies become affluent, as men and and women become better educated, a
Good news (Score:2)
The global population is massively to large at this time anyways.
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The global population is massively to large at this time anyways.
I'm always interested to hear statements like. Too large by what standard? I'm not sure of any objective standards that exist to answer this question. Certainly the quality of life for pretty much everyone in the world is increasing. We are ripping through natural resources, but we don't know when that will end, and recycling of materials, renewable energy, etc., is bigger every year. There's no clear end in sight for what level of population the global ecosystem can support.
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Seriously? That is called denial.
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You disagree that the quality of life for pretty much everyone in the world is increasing? Barring active war zones, that's pretty much indisputable!
I find this sad. (Score:2)
I find this very sad.
I like people.
I especially like babies and small children, who are young enough not to have fully learned how to hate.
Yeah, I know, lots of folks will reply that I'm selfish because I like people and do not consider them "pollution" and do not think it is even lawful, much less wise, for a society to incentivize their nonexistence, much less to murder an awful lot of them before they are even born.
I hope at least some of those people will grow up and turn into responsible, balanced, and
What the US has as an ace in the hole (Score:2)
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I fully agree that the problems can be and will be mitigated by more immigration. However, I am not sure the English language focus is based on reality:
In 2019, while the USA had taken in 50 million migrants, Europe has taken 80 million, Germany alone 15 million. Germany has 25% of the population of the USA, so considerably more in comparison.
France and UK had about the same level of migration, each below 10 million.
Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Oh, I think it probably shrank a fair bit in the (Score:2)
last 2 years and just went unreported/misreported. [snopes.com]
The C.I.A. has been warning the White House since at least early February that China has vastly understated its coronavirus infections and that its count could not be relied upon as the United States compiles predictive models to fight the virus, according to current and former intelligence officials.
American intelligence agencies have concluded that the Chinese government itself does not know the extent of the virus and is as blind as the rest of the world. Midlevel bureaucrats in the city of Wuhan, where the virus originated, and elsewhere in China have been lying about infection rates, testing and death counts, fearful that if they report numbers that are too high they will be punished, lose their position or worse, current and former intelligence officials said.
and I almost forgot, you have to fuck for the CCP (Score:2)
They are banning vasectomies and CCP members are required to have 3 kids. There are timestamps in the description. [youtube.com]
Good. (Score:2)
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Gee, same id as on fark, same asshole.
"Wants"? You're saying this, on a computer/mobile/laptop with most parts built in China, maybe in front of a monitor built in China, on a chair built in China?
Maybe that's because the scum who pay you to post this crap moved the jobs to China so they wouldn't have to pay US wages, so their execs could be given millions of dollars more per year, y'know, ROI?