China's One Child Policy had its reasons. You need to go no further than reading about the later years in the Qing Empire. In the XIXth century there was explosive population growth, and there were lots of rebellions and famines all the frickin time.
China demographics thread.
- Thread starter gadgetcool5
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Yes, I think agriculture will continue to play a diminishing role in the workforce. However that is good as it will free up more people to do other things. It's only bad if you live in a capitalistic hellhole where your only contribution to society is economic and you've lost your job to a robot. More economic output from less people is good.
Maybe it'll lead to a situation where a single earner can sustain a household again.
Due to the diminishing need for labour in the 4th industrial revolution, I think that a change of the entire economic system is needed as a sizeable portion of the population wouldn't be working (in the traditional sense of 8hrs per day, 5/6 days per week).
Of course, the Western countries are totally unprepared and (most probably) unwilling for this to happen. On the other hand, China would be at the forefront on experimenting and eventually changing its economic system to better accommodate and reflect the realities of the new era
I dunno, western companies might not mind if they can produce more for a lower cost.
The problem is gonna be employment and what they are gonna do (or not gonna do) in comparison to China.
And in this I think China will come out ahead just due to their willigness to experiment as well as being communist, so they can actually do stuff to their companies.
Why do demographers talk about economics? They're complete illiterates on the subject. I've yet to see one of them understand the equation GDP = size of the labour force * productivity.
To them, GDP = number of people between 16 and 64.
I'm going to make a statement that's going to boggle the demographer's mind: China's labour force is expanding and will continue to do so for the next quarter century. I want to thank whoever posted that graph of Chinese agricultural labour because it illustrates my point perfectly. The people employed in agriculture above ~5% of the population are wasted, they don't even count. These are subsistence farmers, they contribute nothing to China's national economy beyond keeping themselves alive. That's a population of 280 million people whose contribution is zero.
That isn't part of the "labour force." The engineers at CASC working on Chinese rockets and missiles are part of the labour force. The engineers at Huawei working on 5G and 6G telecommunications technology are part of the labour force. You get the idea. Farmer Zhang hunching over all day in a rice paddy because he's too poor to afford machinery and China's agricultural sector is too backward isn't part of the labour force. If there's a machine out there that can do your job, you aren't contributing to the economy. You're just wasted effort.
Thankfully, every year around 14 million Chinese leave miserable existences like Farmer Zhang's and migrate to the cities. True, the jobs they get delivering food for Meituan suck, but they're contributing to the national economy. Much more importantly, their children (yes, they have them) are being properly educated and are going to get STEM jobs at companies like Huawei and CASC.
To them, GDP = number of people between 16 and 64.
I'm going to make a statement that's going to boggle the demographer's mind: China's labour force is expanding and will continue to do so for the next quarter century. I want to thank whoever posted that graph of Chinese agricultural labour because it illustrates my point perfectly. The people employed in agriculture above ~5% of the population are wasted, they don't even count. These are subsistence farmers, they contribute nothing to China's national economy beyond keeping themselves alive. That's a population of 280 million people whose contribution is zero.
That isn't part of the "labour force." The engineers at CASC working on Chinese rockets and missiles are part of the labour force. The engineers at Huawei working on 5G and 6G telecommunications technology are part of the labour force. You get the idea. Farmer Zhang hunching over all day in a rice paddy because he's too poor to afford machinery and China's agricultural sector is too backward isn't part of the labour force. If there's a machine out there that can do your job, you aren't contributing to the economy. You're just wasted effort.
Thankfully, every year around 14 million Chinese leave miserable existences like Farmer Zhang's and migrate to the cities. True, the jobs they get delivering food for Meituan suck, but they're contributing to the national economy. Much more importantly, their children (yes, they have them) are being properly educated and are going to get STEM jobs at companies like Huawei and CASC.
Yup, and there's many challenges in the future as well for a big population like scarcity of resources and worsening food shortages because of climate change. But they should still at least try to improve birth rates to not let the demographic problem get worse.
Low birth rate is a socio-economic problem and automation over the decades exacerbated it because it took away a lot of jobs and concentrated the wealth into a few. What leads to more birth rate is cheaper cost of living and abundance that was found back in the industrial revolution.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be insulting but this really got me. The abundance back in the Industrial Revolution? Read a Charles Dickens novel some time.
We are nowhere near maxing out available resources. Remember people have been using these exact arguments for centuries. When the world population was 1 billion people would have thought 2 billion was crazy.
Climate change - difficult to say what the impact will be but some projections say it could lead to increased food output. A lot of frozen regions in Russia for example become arable.
I think the big emergent techology will lab grown meat. If that matures to the point that herd farming is no longer necessary, it'll free up a massive amount of grain and water resources.
BTW, things were more expensive back in Victorian times than now. I guess you could argue the reduction in cost was cheaper than any other time in history.
The shift from agricultural to industrial employment isn't exactly unique to China, it happened in the USSR and before that in western countries during the industrial revolution. The problem with it is that it's a one off economic boost. Once the agricultural workforce is less than 5% then what?
Being dependent on that for economic growth is creating a problem for future generations.
Not sure if it was during the industrial revolution, or was it green revolution that gave the abundance. The point is that things like housing were a lot more affordable back then compared to now.
Don't forget that China currently also has 6.1% unemployment rate and there a millions of college students graduating being added to the workforce every year, there's still a lot of untapped labor potential that can be used, its a matter of industrial/economic policies and mobilization to use them to a full extent.
Not sure if those frozen lands being thawed will be able to offset the lost of agricultural lands in the other region from top soil degradation, unpredictable weather patterns and extreme temperatures, there's also predictions that those newly thawed lands aren't suited for agriculture as well because it'll become a bog but it might slowly breakdown and become usable.
But I agree with the emerging technologies becoming a big factor in the future on being able to sustain the current population and even grow it, and yes the reduction in cost for food and other necessities are cheaper now than any time in history, but things like housing, job availability and wages have become an big issue and is affecting the birth rate.