At first I’ve misread it as number of ACs shipped to Europe.
Chinese Economics Thread
- Thread starter Norfolk
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Daron Acemoglu, the Nobel laureate who famously authored the China Shock paper (among many others), published his latest one this month describing how declining birth rates are strongly associated with higher GDP growth and higher wage growth. And yes, he already accounted for the obvious confounding factors. No doubt certain demographically-obsessed folks (both here and elsewhere) will be very upset at his findings. For the record, I've always laughed at such folks (both here and elsewhere) and will continue to do so.
housing price has become just so much more affordable for the 25 to 32 year olds in China that are likely thinking about starting family now.
What about price reductions on homes in tier one cities? Shanghai Shenzhen Beijing are still part of the most expensive cities in the world to buy homes after the bubble. They should find a more focused method to reduce home prices in high demand areas.
Dont wanna bring the demographics debate again, but lower housing prices is not going to cause Chinese young people to have more babies. The problem is cultural, structural. When a society values money making and career advancement more than having a family, lower birth rate is inevitable.
What China needs is massive government carrot and stick approach to change whole social dynamic, where not having a child is so bad for someone's social and professional standing that they inevitably bite bullet and have a few babies.
The problem with this mega cites is there are many high paying jobs.
Boosting birth rates doesn't seem to be a high priority or urgent task right now, otherwise you'd see it prominently in the 15th FYP with specific targets.
Governments really haven't been creative in experimenting new pro-natal policies. Most just try giving money or longer parental leave which have proven to not work at all. Giving money is probably the least effective policy, since the amount you need to give to change behavior is astronomical and infeasible.
Some ideas:
- Give extra points for the number of kids you have for the national service exam. Or better yet after a certain good enough threshold on the exam, just look at who have the most kids and give them the jobs. Most white collar office jobs can be done by anyone smart enough, so the competition to select who gets in become meaningless involution - might as well compete on giving birth.
- Enforce DEI / Bumiputera style policies on enterprises where the average kid per employee must be above a certain standard or get fined / pay higher taxes.
- Promote having kids as a core value for party members (replacement for pro-natal religious belief). Give preferences for joining the party and advancing up the ranks based on how many kids you have.
I really like the idea of more kids better gaokao bonus. And I say it as someone who hates DEI. Education in China has become a involuntionary practice, where people compete for score at cost of everything else, which encourages less children and concentrate resource into one. This alleviate this single child meta.
Having the poorer/less competent province getting bonus is disgusting, but giving bonus to family that pay enormous cost of raising more children is totally fair.
Unlike the West, the lowest TFR cohort in East Asia isn't a career women, but rather low-education men (0.3 TFR in Korea), who lost the status competition game. This is specifically an East Asian problem because the status tournament is single-ladder. The exam determines university, university determines career, career determines marriageability. Lose early and there's no alternative tournament and no one has kids outside of marriage.
In the past, rural areas had separate status hierarchies where a physically strong farmer could still marry. Urbanization collapsed those and now everyone competes in the same city game and the losers have no backup. The only mitigating factor is in richer countries, these men can marry overseas brides from poorer countries.
Fertility and demographic discussions have always focused on women and families (which only include educated men in East Asia), but this entire cohort is always marginalized/forgotten.
Here's an even crazier policy idea: state-subsidized looksmaxxing for low-education men. Free HGH for height, GLP-1s for weight, standardized govt-run gyms, skincare, grooming, hair centers. The only serious way to raise the fertility floor is to make these men marriageable. And the most direct path is making them physically attractive, because when you can't compete on income and status, looks are the remaining variable.
The obvious longer term solution is to "break the wheel" of these status tournaments, but East Asian Confucian society loves involution-style competition, so creating a secondary tournament of lookmaxxing for this cohort may be a good compromise.
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