How China Miscalculated Its Way to a Baby Bust: A missile scientist used mathematical models to push the nation’s one-child policy. Its legacy is proving hard to shake.
How China Miscalculated Its Way to a Baby Bust: A missile scientist used mathematical models to push the nation’s one-child policy. Its legacy is proving hard to shake.
China’s baby bust is happening faster than many expected, raising fears of a demographic collapse. And coping with the fallout may now be complicated by miscalculations made more than 40 years ago.
The rapid shift under way today wasn’t projected by the architects of China’s one-child policy—one of the biggest social experiments in history, instituted in 1980. At the time, governments around the world feared overpopulation would hold back economic growth. A Moscow-trained missile scientist led the push for China’s policy, based on tables of calculations that applied mathematical models used to calculate rocket trajectories to population growth.
Four decades later, China is aging much earlier in its development than other major economies did. The shift to fewer births and more elderly citizens threatens to hold back economic growth. In a generation that grew up without siblings, young women are increasingly reluctant to have children—and there are fewer of them every year. Beijing is at a loss to change the mindset brought about by the policy.
Births in China fell by more than 500,000 last year, according to recent government data, accelerating a population drop that started in 2022. Officials cited a quickly shrinking number of women of childbearing age—more than three million fewer than a year earlier—and acknowledged “changes in people’s thinking about births, postponement of marriage and childbirth.”
Some researchers argue the government underestimates the problem, and the population began to shrink even earlier.
Fewer births is good news - a solution rather than a problem. There needs to be fewer humans if we're to avoid cooking ourselves and sending other species into extinction. We should all be so lucky as China to have this 'problem'.
Sure, but that’s an environmental solution to what they see as an economical problem.
We need to rethink how economies work in a population shrink.
Good news everyone! We all DO have this problem... It's just most obvious in China because they industrialized and urbanized more rapidly than anyone else AND had this stupid legal policy.
Industrialization, urbanization and improving healthcare also significantly drops births, to below the replacement rate of 2.1. The whole world is on this path, with China, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Russia leading the way.
The problem is the aging population.
Instead of dying at an appropriate age, they just keep aging. We need to stop spending so much on living longer. Maybe put more into making dying more comfortable so it's not as frightening. For instance COVID has killed off a lot of old people but it's a horrible way to go. Alzheimer's also, we can't cure it, so do we really want to prolong the agony?
Let's hope no one pulls a Thanos
An extinction even is just a voiceless, faceless, impersonal Thanos, one even Ant-Man couldn't beat...
based on tables of calculations that applied mathematical models used to calculate rocket trajectories to population growth.
TO THE MOOOOOON!!! 🚀🌝💎✊💎✊
I wonder where China would be right now population wise if it wasn't for the one child policy.
Look at the population growth rate of India for an example.
Yes and no.
As a nation industrializes and gains access better medicine, the survival rate infants and mothers go up. This leads to a birthrate increase.
That better medicine also includes effective birth control. As birth control becomes accepted, the birth rate naturally falls off.
The next thing that causes a birthrate fall off is the mood of the potential parents. If they think their children will have as good a life or better then they had, then those people will have children. If they think their children will have a worse life, they will not.
India is still in the process of industrialization. Birth control is not widely accepted, and parental optimism is high.
In China birth control is more accepted, and currently parental optimism is low.
The solution is clear. Invade other countries and take their women.
Conan, what is good in life?
Trade Russia 100k Uighur men for a tract of land containing women after you already sent all their husband's and young men to Ukraine. You get women and more territory. Russia gets men and more men to fight.
I genuinely wonder how differently this would have played out if China had managed to keep an equal m/f ratio.
Huh. I didn't have soylent green on my 2024 bingo card.
Generally I believe it isn't hard for a country to just 1. make an appeal to it's citizen to have more babies (e.g. Iran did this) and 2. massively incentivize childbirth. Couples can have tons of babies especially with modern healthcare, so if a Country really wanted to it could grow incredibly fast.
So this is really about... economics? And why is the wall street journal worried about this? Why should this be interesting to us? I think the article smells a bit but not sure what their agenda or bias would be. Maybe as a general put down of China, or maybe as a cautionary tale or something? Especially the bit about the "equations for rockets" smells. Have they never heard of exponential growth?
Also no contextualization to India's population growing from 1 billion to 1.4 billion since 2000.
Then there is this thought about how an aging population is a huge problem because who will pay for take care of elderly people. But this sounds like BS to me too, how much actual resources go into this? If you have efficient (non private) healthcare and high density housing, how many nursing staff do you really need? Healthcare can be incredibly cheap if you set it up right. So is this a serious problem? If this is an actual problem I'd love to see some actual numbers of the real strain.
And then forecasts to 2100 are also quite delusional really. Technology would be incredibly advanced by then. I think we'll have outright rejuvenation drugs or at least replacement organs grown in tanks or robots carrying elderly people around and virtual worlds and whatnot. We also know that with climate change there will be incredible upheaval and a flood of refugees and possibly wars and megadeaths. Prediction for 2100 mean very little.