China demographics thread.

[Staedler]

I have been lurking in the trend for a while now, and I just want to ask if someone can give a summary:

1 why is there a general low desire to have children in well developed economies?

Families tend to want their children to live in a similar or better position than themselves. In other words, for their children have sufficient skills to at least be competitive with their peers.

Undeveloped economies tend to lack the capital accumulation needed to invest in labor-saving machines as well the skills needed to make machines more cost-effective than unskilled labor. The resulting economies' focus on unskilled labor means the amount of education required for children to be competitive with their peers is minimal and so children both require much less investment and have significantly shorter payback periods. Even children not out of elementary school can be useful and profitable in an undeveloped economy.

In general, children take so much capital and take so long to start initial revenue in developed economies, that it's outside the scope of cognition for most people. Doing something that will turn a profit in 8-10 years is still in the realm of consideration for most people. Doing something that will turn a profit in 30-40 years is not.

2 following on is there any developed country in the world that has successfully counter acted this low desire and boosted indigenous population?

No country has moved in large enough steps to counteract the large costs involved in raising competitive children.

Let's take some US stats, runs some math, and look at the magnitudes we're talking about.
In 2017, USDA says a middle-income married couple may spend $233,610 ($284,570 with projected inflation) to raise a child born in 2015 to the age of 17. According to Community College Review, in-state public community colleges cost an average of $4,722 per year. So we're looking at 250-300k USD to raise a minimally-competitive child.

Median income for a middle-class two-person household is around 72k USD. Savings rates on disposable income in the USA averaged around 8% pre-pandemic (5.1% now). There should be approximate 7-8k in taxes from federal and state combined, so that's a savings of around 5.2k per year.

250k-300k to raise a child vs saving 5.2k per year - it's not possible without offloading that debt. US fertility rate is at 1.7 which isn't much better than China and is still declining.

Instead the US has relied on dual crutches of illegal immigration (foreign-born Hispanic mothers being the driver behind much of the growth in the last two decades) and regional segregation. Rural southerners are quite poor and have much higher birth rates for example. But look at the 1.7 TFR and declining trend, it's obviously not enough.



Take a look at the measure South Korea politician floated before getting shot down by their President. That was just a $26,800 LOAN and it was still too much for their government to contemplate. Governments are still just pussyfooting around these fertility problems.

US births per year is something like 3.6-3.7 million, so we're looking at something like 1-1.1 trillion dollars of eventual costs per year. That's 5% of the US's GDP. No one is spending even close to a fraction of a % of their GDP on solving these costs so of course no country has successfully dealt with the issue.

 

[Staedler]

3 what should China do to change this desire?

From my observation no country have successfully reversed population decline through paying extra child care benefits

To solve the fertility problem, we need to lower the cost of raising a minimally-competitive child. Some ways to achieve that:

1. Lower the cost of raising a child. Some of these costs are:

a. Cost to career​

b. Cost of childcare​

c. Cost of housing the child​

d. Cost of feeding the child​

e. Time cost of raising the child (doing activities together, etc.)​

2. Lower the standard of what is considered minimally-competitive

a. Mass immigration from high birthrate poor countries​

b. Enforce stronger regional segregation (preventing internal migration so standards stay low in poor regions)​

3. Adopt a framework that encourages/enforces birth

a. Use a religion (like Orthodox Judaism or Mormonism)​

b. Use a ideology (like Nazism)​

Obviously some of these possibilities are unacceptable and the rest aren't very attractive/low-cost either. We've seen some tentative steps towards the acceptable options (immigration and lowering costs) from countries, but they have all been minuscule steps. From the Polish experiment and some other estimates, governments' will likely need to cover at least half of the total cost of raising a child before we start making significant turnarounds in fertility rates. The alternative is radical solutions like transhumanism, artifical wombs, etc. which are not only unlikely with tons of potential consequences, but also decades away from technological practicality.


Some policies could be:

• Encouraging people to live in T3 and lower cities instead of T1/T2 cities to lower cost of housing. That could involve encouraging remote work for all sorts of things - even factories through 5/6G networks - to counteract the lack of job opportunities in smaller cities. There would still need to be a way to counteract the lack of networking important to career advancement that physical proximity allows. Also research into even higher speed transport like ultra-high-speed rail to lower transit times such that satellite cities become even more attractive.
• Encouraging domestic development of GMO crops and animals to reduce the cost of feeding children.
• Equalizing education qualities between school districts by shuffling high-performing teachers around. Also increase the number and quality of teachers in the pool.
• Encouraging better maternity benefits while ensuring the costs are publicly covered (otherwise companies might just not hire women)

In any case, for the US we're talking at least 100k USD per child worth of effort before we boost TFR from 1.7 to even just 2.1 (replacement rate). So China will likely need to spend similar rates of GDP (2% or more) before we see significant effects on TFR. Of course, just throwing money at it won't work - that money will need to be spent carefully and precisely to prevent corruption or unintended consequences from wasting it away.

 

[mzyw]

For developed countries, most families are dual-earner families. Due to women empowerment and financial independent, many women might feel it is more important to retain their standard of living and career advancement than having children. In addition, having children requires a lot of resources and investment, many families in developed countries just can't cope with such pressure and demands and responsibilities.

Most countries were not very successful in persuading women to have more children but many countries do see an uptick of births with more child care benefits. China doesn't need to drastic increase in births. It just needs to increase births in 1 to 2 millions per year for the next few decades. I am not too pessimistic as some members here as between allowing families to have more than 2 children, ending COVID and handing out more child care benefits, I would think the decline of births per year would be slow down and stop in the near term.

Thanks, Kyli do you think a change in education and emphasis on social media/and all media to reinforces traditional values (some not all) would be any benefit?

And thank you for your opinion Staedler and your comprehensive answer.

Obviously, the current policy in China (from reading and listing) is towards lower the cost of raising a child. Although it has only been a very short time since the 3rd child policy was put in place, however from reading and looking at the global experience I am pessimistic that it is going to work.
Therefore should there be an additional policy to ''punish''/discourage people who don't have children - I fully expect this is going to be hard to implement but it may eventually come to this,
e.g. like number of children you have with a retirement fund

Or am I just stating things that are already being implemented but worded differently?

 

[Stryker]

Thanks, Kyli do you think a change in education and emphasis on social media/and all media to reinforces traditional values (some not all) would be any benefit?

And thank you for your opinion Staedler and your comprehensive answer.

Obviously, the current policy in China (from reading and listing) is towards lower the cost of raising a child. Although it has only been a very short time since the 3rd child policy was put in place, however from reading and looking at the global experience I am pessimistic that it is going to work.
Therefore should there be an additional policy to ''punish''/discourage people who don't have children - I fully expect this is going to be hard to implement but it may eventually come to this,
e.g. like number of children you have with a retirement fund

Or am I just stating things that are already being implemented but worded differently?

Y'know what that's exactly what's needed. All the countries in the world so far have only dangled carrots, no country dares to show the stick. In my opinion, China is the only country that can show them the stick of cuts in pension/retirement funds if they don't have children. Of course the Western countries will make a huge hue and cry about it but who tf cares. Such a law if passed would definitely be a double edged sword though, it has the potential to literally lead to widespread social unrest if it is perceived as a direct attack on freedom of choice. But if the carrots don't work, stick it is.

 

[KYli]

Thanks, Kyli do you think a change in education and emphasis on social media/and all media to reinforces traditional values (some not all) would be any benefit?

And thank you for your opinion Staedler and your comprehensive answer.

Obviously, the current policy in China (from reading and listing) is towards lower the cost of raising a child. Although it has only been a very short time since the 3rd child policy was put in place, however from reading and looking at the global experience I am pessimistic that it is going to work.
Therefore should there be an additional policy to ''punish''/discourage people who don't have children - I fully expect this is going to be hard to implement but it may eventually come to this,
e.g. like number of children you have with a retirement fund

Or am I just stating things that are already being implemented but worded differently?

I think in some way the Chinese government has already started to emphasize more of traditional value in having more children but I don't think the Chinese government is ready to go down road of promoting too much traditional value. People need to understand there are a lot of pros and cons of traditional value. You don't want to bring back those bad practices.

In addition, I think it is the extreme feminism movement and LGBT that is a bigger threat to births than other things. This same group of people have been behind the A4 protests. China cracked down on them a year or two ago but it isn't enough to deter them from promoting extreme woke-ism and extreme feminism and princess mentality.

It is not wrong to say that it is hard to persuade women to have more children and addition child care benefits only do so much. However, I want to emphasize that most Western developed countries women still are giving 1.6 to 1.8 births which is still way more than many East Asian countries. China doesn't need to bring the birth rate to 2.1 replacement rate. It just needs to bring it up to 1.6 births per woman. So I would counter that people might have been too pessimistic.

I am strongly against punishing people from not having children. China one child policy is already an extreme policy that was taken due to unfortunate circumstance and had overstayed its usefulness before getting discard. Punishing people for not having children is absurd. Government can't make sure everyone is able to find a suitable husband or wife, many people have infertility issue, there are more women than men. It is a lazy way to solve a complex problem without thinking of the consequences.

For extreme policy, I think by giving 1 million yuan for every women that have the third children would be more effective. You just need to get 20% of women to take up such offer to get a pretty good birth rate in the whole population.

 

[Minm]

Y'know what that's exactly what's needed. All the countries in the world so far have only dangled carrots, no country dares to show the stick. In my opinion, China is the only country that can show them the stick of cuts in pension/retirement funds if they don't have children. Of course the Western countries will make a huge hue and cry about it but who tf cares. Such a law if passed would definitely be a double edged sword though, it has the potential to literally lead to widespread social unrest if it is perceived as a direct attack on freedom of choice. But if the carrots don't work, stick it is.

It doesn't need to be a stick. Pension is a very good incentive. Just pay women a state pension equivalent to 5 years of working per child, to compensate the work in the household. Or raise the retirement age for everyone by a couple of years and then offer families with 3 children early retirement

 

[Staedler]

For extreme policy, I think by giving 1 million yuan for every women that have the third children would be more effective. You just need to get 20% of women to take up such offer to get a pretty good birth rate in the whole population.

As far as I am aware, the Polish policies of simply giving money to heterosexual couples to have a child have worked. At the very least there has been a statistically significant increase in birth rates post-policy. Apparently they had spent PLN 21 billion in 2017, or about 0.9% of their GDP. Looking at the TFR, it does look like that has boosted rates by 0.1 since it was started in 2015 (~1.35 when started and ~1.45 now). If trends continue Polish TFR might settle somewhere around 1.7.

I've seen some argument that it was because of the near universality of the benefits that Poland's policy has made an impact whereas the loans and other financial tricks used by countries like Hungary have failed. I'm not too familiar with the exact details of the Polish 500+ policy, but it appears to apply to basically all 2nd and above child and across all income levels. If the household income level is low enough, it also applies to the 1st child. Of course, initial data also suggests the policy has lowered female labor force participation rates by 2.5-3% so it's not like there hasn't been any additional consequences.

So I agree in general, it does look like just giving a significant amount of money to every women having whatever-parity child would work.

 

[Eventine]

Because a lot of them, also the white Americans, are poor and still operate on the principle of "no need to get an education when I can just be a baby factory at home". Just look at how things look in the more rural areas in USA or in the ghettos.

Wealth inequality is completely different in USA than China. The top 1% own far more of their economy than it does for the Chinese.

The shittiest jobs in China, I.e. factory blue collar workers are about equivalent to the same counterparts in USA in terms of their spending power. Of course, that is not a compliment for China, but it could still be worse. In US you have even more shitty jobs that are bordering on slave labor.

If you look at an European country with similar profile as China such as Germany, you will see that birthrates are similarly low, even with massive immigration. This is a fairly natural course as the native population gain access to cheap education, good jobs and strong social net. The pressure to create a second generation reduces as people would rather live in the now rather than be bound by traditional expectations.

Germany has a TFR of 1.58. While immigrant fertility contributes, the percent of minorities in Germany is 25%, which less than that of the US's. Germany doesn't keep detailed ethnic birth rate statistics, but I would very much question the idea that Germany's >1.5 TFR isn't reflective of its ethnic German population.

By contrast, if we look at East Asia, we have South Korea at 0.8, Japan at 1.37, and China at 1.18 based on 2022 numbers.

These TFR figures are absolutely at a crisis level for East Asia. While Western propagandists like Zeihan love to talk about how China's demographics are uniquely catastrophic (while utterly ignoring the fact that South Korea and Taiwan have even lower birth rates), the fact that East Asian birth rates are the lowest in the world (along with Eastern European birth rates) cannot be ignored.

There are factors particularly wrong with East Asian contemporary cultures that are causing them to abandon fertility and traditional family values altogether.

If this is not fixed, East Asia will, without question, become a region of extremely aged societies, with all the attendant problems there of. Yes, they will be joined in this state by Eastern Europe, and much of Western Europe. But the transition in East Asia will be particularly acute, while for countries like Germany and the US, it will be more gradual, even if they were ahead to begin with.

East Asia is quickly catching up to how aged Europe is, but without the benefits of the European welfare state. This will be a serious wake up call for Asian governments, as countries like South Korea will reach "extremely aged" even before Europe if they cannot fix their birth rates.

 

[ZeEa5KPul]

I think in some way the Chinese government has already started to emphasize more of traditional value in having more children but I don't think the Chinese government is ready to go down road of promoting too much traditional value. People need to understand there are a lot of pros and cons of traditional value. You don't want to bring back those bad practices.

I'm sorry to use you as an unflattering example, but whenever someone brings up "traditional values" in this discussion I know that their understanding of the issue is shallow at best. There's a romanticized notion of the pre-modern family where children were valued and prized... bullshit.

People had children historically - in the good old days of "traditional values" - for two reasons:

1. There were no reliable contraceptives (not for lack of trying, some of the methods were exceedingly creative). They couldn't help but have children.
2. Children, especially male children, worked the fields. People were economically incentivized to have children because they were the retirement plan.

In addition, I think it is the extreme feminism movement and LGBT that is a bigger threat to births than other things. This same group of people have been behind the A4 protests. China cracked down on them a year or two ago but it isn't enough to deter them from promoting extreme woke-ism and extreme feminism and princess mentality.

One could maybe make that argument in America, and even there it would be very weak. But in China? Get real. This problem is difficult enough to solve without getting sidetracked chasing phantoms. Blaming it on "teh geys" is as silly and lazy as blaming it on a loss of "traditional values" and will guarantee that you have precisely zero solutions. Lose both ideas.

This is an economic problem. The TFR is low in China and East Asia generally because the economic incentives are misaligned and will need to be brought back into alignment by government action. Which brings me to...

I am strongly against punishing people from not having children. China one child policy is already an extreme policy that was taken due to unfortunate circumstance and had overstayed its usefulness before getting discard. Punishing people for not having children is absurd. Government can't make sure everyone is able to find a suitable husband or wife, many people have infertility issue, there are more women than men. It is a lazy way to solve a complex problem without thinking of the consequences.

If what you wrote before was misguided, this is dead wrong. The most effective way to change people's behaviour is with carrots and sticks, and if you pre-emptively put aside the stick then you've guaranteed your failure.

Nobody sane advocates throwing people in jail for not having children, but there are many more subtle and effective means of compulsion. For instance, consider the following simple two-step plan:

• Step 1: Property tax.
• Step 2: Got two kids? Property tax exemption.

Some might argue that this unjustly punishes people who have fewer than two children, and they'd be exactly right. But justice isn't a consideration, efficacy is. We have to accept that any effective solution to this problem is going to harm some people who shouldn't be harmed. Sad but true.

For extreme policy, I think by giving 1 million yuan for every women that have the third children would be more effective. You just need to get 20% of women to take up such offer to get a pretty good birth rate in the whole population.

That's nowhere near extreme. If you want to see what extreme looks like, give this a read:

China demographics thread.

2021 TFR in China by province

www.sinodefenceforum.com

 

[KYli]

I'm sorry to use you as an unflattering example, but whenever someone brings up "traditional values" in this discussion I know that their understanding of the issue is shallow at best. There's a romanticized notion of the pre-modern family where children were valued and prized... bullshit.

People had children historically - in the good old days of "traditional values" - for two reasons:

1. There were no reliable contraceptives (not for lack of trying, some of the methods were exceedingly creative). They couldn't help but have children.
2. Children, especially male children, worked the fields. People were economically incentivized to have children because they were the retirement plan.

My understanding of traditional values is that the Chinese society as an agriculture society value males and children due to many things such as they could work on a fields, the high mortality rate in ancient time and the need of males to fend off aggression to protect their lands.

Confucius understands this so it incorporates the ideology of big family, happy family, clans, and hierarchy system when the head of household is the elderly and having many sons, daughters, and grandchildren are a virtue.

In ancient time and even in a few decades ago, mortality among children are very high. That's why you don't want to have just one or two children. In addition, clans were still fighting for their lands and having more children are the biggest advantage of winning a clan war. So no, my understand of traditional values is much more profound than what you think and your thinking is actually too simplistic.

One could maybe make that argument in America, and even there it would be very weak. But in China? Get real. This problem is difficult enough to solve without getting sidetracked chasing phantoms. Blaming it on "teh geys" is as silly and lazy as blaming it on a loss of "traditional values" and will guarantee that you have precisely zero solutions. Lose both ideas.

I don't care much of traditional values but it could be useful for some families as the idea of big family and happy family is one way to persuade people to have more children such as conservative Jews and Christians tend to have more children out of conservatism. I am saying that the feminism movement has become a problem for China as more and more women have unrealistic expectation of marriage and their future husbands.

More and more women didn't get marriage. Without marriage, it is difficult to have more children. So you need to solve the problem of women not wanting to get marriage first before you can solve the problem of birth rate. Which bring back to the issue of extreme feminism movement in China and East Asia.

This is an economic problem. The TFR is low in China and East Asia generally because the economic incentives are misaligned and will need to be brought back into alignment by government action. Which brings me to...

If what you wrote before was misguided, this is dead wrong. The most effective way to change people's behaviour is with carrots and sticks, and if you pre-emptively put aside the stick then you've guaranteed your failure.

Nobody sane advocates throwing people in jail for not having children, but there are many more subtle and effective means of compulsion. For instance, consider the following simple two-step plan:

• Step 1: Property tax.
• Step 2: Got two kids? Property tax exemption.

No, I disagree. Unless you impose very aggressive actions to force people to have more children. Any half-hearten laws and actions would not do much and may have negative impact of the society cohesion.

Some might argue that this unjustly punishes people who have fewer than two children, and they'd be exactly right. But justice isn't a consideration, efficacy is. We have to accept that any effective solution to this problem is going to harm some people who shouldn't be harmed. Sad but true.

Without trying other methods and policies first, any attempt to go straight to punishment is crude and thoughtless. After imposing one child policy for so long and ask people to make the sacrifice, now the government turns around to impose another extreme method without trying other ways first. I don't think it is wise or just or logical.

That's nowhere near extreme. If you want to see what extreme looks like, give this a read:

China demographics thread.

2021 TFR in China by province

www.sinodefenceforum.com

I don't support eugenics. Although it is fine for me if it is just an attempt to fix some defects of babies. IVF would help but not that much. But tube produced babies can be pursued, if the government is willing and people are willing to have tube produced babies, I am all for it. I think many women are quite receptive of having babies without the need of giving births. And singles can have children without marriage which is fine with me too.