House availability and price is a major factor in people starting a family or not.
China demographics thread.
- Thread starter gadgetcool5
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In the long term, the push will come from science and technology. Many young people refuse to have children because raising those children would consume much of their "prime years." If the human lifespan was doubled or working hours were halved due to advances in automation, then the birth rate would increase drastically.
In the short term, the amount of time that students spend in schools should be decreased by leveraging advances in communications and computing technologies. If necessary, school curriculums should be streamlined. Students should be encouraged to date, so that the jump to marriage and childbearing are not as daunting as they currently are.
Well the cost of living in mayor cities in SK and Japan are insane expensive and in mayor populations centers is where the good jobs are. I dont think is as cultural as many people think for example Italy and Spain have as low or even lower fertility rate as East Asian countries and these countries cultures usually favor big families.
Countries have not pushed the panic button yet, especially Western nations because current politics but if the survivar of nations are a stake and AI cannot solve the problem the reactions will be extremely not politically correct to say the least.
The places on earth with the highest rate of people starting families, are literally societies of people living in huts. The idea that this is due to economic deprivation just isn't the whole story when East Asia is one of the richest places on earth.
The idea that "it isnt cultural because Spain has a low birth rate and Spanish culture favors big families" is a self-contradiction. If Spanish culture favored big families, then they would have big families. There is nothing physically preventing them. It obviously doesn't. A culture that actually favors big families is Israeli orthodox culture, Amish culture, and conservative Islamic culture.
Rural populations typically have higher birthrates. As countries get more urbanized the birthrate typically drops.
In rural environments the children can help with economic activity. In cities they are basically a burden. And as more people get into ever increasingly higher grades of education, they get later into the work force. Which means they might go past optimum age of fertility. Especially for women.
In rural environments the children can help with economic activity. In cities they are basically a burden. And as more people get into ever increasingly higher grades of education, they get later into the work force. Which means they might go past optimum age of fertility. Especially for women.
More accurately it would be historically Latino (and Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Southern European, Middle Eastern, etc) cultures favored big extended families while northern cultures were more individualistic and had small nuclear families.
And I have to disagree with you about Islam. Turkey, Qatar, Iran, Azerbaijan and UAE are now all deep in the sub-2 zone. Of the big Islamic countries it's just Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi that are positive. Of those, Iraq and Egypt are very precarious.
This collapse in Turkey and Iran birthrates was mirrored in China and Chile despite huge differences in culture and being spread across the world. The only commonality was GDP per capita in the 10-20k range, manufacturing economy, and newly modernized.
| Country | 2019 Fertility | 2023 Fertility |
| Iran | 2.1 | 1.6 |
| Turkey | 2.1 | 1.9 |
| China | 1.7 | 1.2 |
| Chile | 1.6 | 1.2 |
IDK how to explain this but it is a correlation.
I personally don't believe that a declining population in China is a huge problem for this generation. I think all of us who've been to China know that it is overpopulated.
Nevertheless, it will eventually become a problem.
I believe that increasing fertility cannot simply use positive incentives and carrots. Positive incentives have failed for decades. Singapore has perhaps the world's most effective government, but the enormous positive incentives it offers for having children don't work.
Many may not like this, but I believe that punishments and sticks need to be used to increase fertility. Here I believe China's authoritarianism offers solutions other countries will have difficulty implementing.
For instance, the Soviet Union had a . In the future, China could do the same. The lower the birth rate, the higher the tax. Such a tax - or tax break - could be adjusted depending on the number of children. In addition, there should be no age limit at which it is removed.
The percent of health care covered by the CCP could also be based on family size. The childless could have 75% of costs covered, those with one child 80%, two children 85%, three children 90%, etc. (I assume a future China would have the CCP cover more health care costs than the current 70%.)
Those with multiple children, or maybe even just one child, could also get a hukou to anywhere.
Childless adults could be prohibited from joining the Communist Party or becoming civil servants. Having two children could be a prerequisite to getting promoted in the CCP.
This stuff should have no exceptions for infertility or poverty or being a Buddhist monk or being a veteran or winning an Olympic gold medal or whatever excuse people can think of. Sorry if you're poor or claim you're infertile or you're the Dalai Lama and you won a Nobel Peace Prize - life's unfair and you'll just have to take the hit.
There are many other possible sticks that one can conceive of. I don't believe these should be implemented now or in this decade. But eventually they may be necessary.
Nevertheless, it will eventually become a problem.
I believe that increasing fertility cannot simply use positive incentives and carrots. Positive incentives have failed for decades. Singapore has perhaps the world's most effective government, but the enormous positive incentives it offers for having children don't work.
Many may not like this, but I believe that punishments and sticks need to be used to increase fertility. Here I believe China's authoritarianism offers solutions other countries will have difficulty implementing.
For instance, the Soviet Union had a . In the future, China could do the same. The lower the birth rate, the higher the tax. Such a tax - or tax break - could be adjusted depending on the number of children. In addition, there should be no age limit at which it is removed.
The percent of health care covered by the CCP could also be based on family size. The childless could have 75% of costs covered, those with one child 80%, two children 85%, three children 90%, etc. (I assume a future China would have the CCP cover more health care costs than the current 70%.)
Those with multiple children, or maybe even just one child, could also get a hukou to anywhere.
Childless adults could be prohibited from joining the Communist Party or becoming civil servants. Having two children could be a prerequisite to getting promoted in the CCP.
This stuff should have no exceptions for infertility or poverty or being a Buddhist monk or being a veteran or winning an Olympic gold medal or whatever excuse people can think of. Sorry if you're poor or claim you're infertile or you're the Dalai Lama and you won a Nobel Peace Prize - life's unfair and you'll just have to take the hit.
There are many other possible sticks that one can conceive of. I don't believe these should be implemented now or in this decade. But eventually they may be necessary.
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So, right now China GDP per capita (nominal) is ~ 13,000 usd.
South Korea had a GDP per capita (nominal, current prices) of ~6.5 K usd in 1990 which is equivalent to (adjusting for inflation) ~ 15k usd in 2024. In 1990, SK's TFR was ~1.6 to 1.7
Hence, current Chinese TFR is way below South Korean TFR at similar levels of GDP per capita (nominal, current prices, normalized for inflation).
Few important points:
- AI and Automation are coming for the more skilled jobs, like coding, writing, painting etc. rather than for lower skilled jobs. This will just lead to increase in productivity of an average human, no displacement of humans as a whole, or redundancy of humans.
- AI is a big misnomer, these are just good curve fitting machines, even big systems like ChatGPT can't do basic maths well despite having being trained and fed on large parts of the internet.
- Even if say you were true, are you going to decrease the population (as a policy) or let it decrease, when it is your most important resource, simply on the assumption that AI/automation will save you later? What if you are wrong?
It is a collapse of child births, which will eventually lead to in a similar collapse in population, as the older generation dies.
Managing or even understanding the extent of population declines have been really hard for people because:
- Humans are not good at exponential thinking, so they never understand how severe an exponential decline of 1/3rd every generation really is! (As shown in my example before)
- Population has an inertia. Today's population, or population in the short term is impacted by decisions, and fertility rates sustained in the last 40 years. It is very hard for people to see the result of such humongous decline in the short term.
- Change is hard and yields no short term results. It's the classic frog being slowly boiled situation.
- People underestimate the difficulty of raising births when it goes down.
East Asia is not over populated by any means. Compared to North America, Russia and some other parts maybe, but population densities are lower than many other regions, on top of that East Asia has built the infrastructure for that.
At the end it is all about the infrastructure.
And the high population of East Asia also grants it one of the most important powers in the modern world: a huge domestic market.
TFR of 1.9 and 1.2 are extremely different to each other. 1.9 is very close to replacement, and more than 50% above 1.2
Let's see if that works, positive incentives have definitely not worked in South Korea/Japan etc. And they have tried incredible amounts of those. One other thing that can be done is to massively reduce child bearing pressure and costs. Today it has become almost a fashion to get your kid to enroll in super expensive classes, or take random expensive activities etc. Maybe all of these things can be banned altogether to reduce financial and social pressure on parents.
Okay, but in my personal opinion that point is way way far ahead. But maybe you're more optimistic.
This is definitely true to an extent, however it is not only the traditionally educated that are important. You need people for agriculture, fishing, etc. etc. In fact, the curious trend of modern AI/automation is that they are getting better at coding/creative-endeavors much faster than they are getting better at basic mechanical things.
However, I would agree with your characterization largely (with some caveats), quantity * quality. I believe however that you can't be very different to others in terms of quality. Every human is largely capable of the same stuff, obviously culture, values play some part, but every human can be trained to be of the same "quality." So quantity also matters a lot.
I agree, however my point was different. I am talking about predictions. There were many predictions all the way from 1990s to 2000s about limb replacement etc. but they have not come to fruition. Specially in biology it is very hard.
But let's agree to disagree. My question to you is that, obviously it's good and convenient if there are artificial wombs, and automation etc.. But what if you are wrong, and there are no artificial wombs, advanced automation, AI etc. And in the end number of humans do matter in the end still after 50 years for sustaining the economy, innovation, defence and having a large market?