No. China did not transform because of our demographics; we did because of the quality of our people. There are many many countries in the world with excellent demographics and have had them for decades, but show absolutely no signs of improving into the first world. Those that do, immediately see their TFR drop.
Correction: not
just because of demographics. If China had a TFR of 1.08 in the 1960s, it would have failed.
Being big and being technologically advanced are different. India's actually one of the countries that are making progress, much slower progress than China, but still definitely more than most third world countries. And what happened? Their TFR is going straight down, went below replacement a few years back.
India's TFR is 2x that of China's, and its economy in GDP PPP is about 40% of China's. India has until 2040 before it has to realistically worry about demographic decline. I don't really care about India, except to predict that they will prove to be a strong threat for China in the coming years due to their emerging demographics dividend (a sentiment many here do not share; but again, all we have to do is wait).
Being big is an advantage and I love that China is big. But right now, it seems that no one is able to hold a high TFR while being independently technologically powerful, because the work culture required to do this is incompatible with a high TFR, especially when fighting a tech war. We can definitely trade some size for more technological investment because 50 million peasants with 5 kids each are just targets in a modern war compared to 100 elite scientists which countries like the US and Israel will go to all lengths to try to assassinate.
The vast majority of people in China are not engaged in the "tech. war." China has graduated an average of ~1.5 million STEM students per year since around 2000, and <500,000 before that. If we add up the entire STEM educated work force, it is just ~40-50 million people, which is ~5% of the population. There is no basis for saying that the "tech. war" is what is causing low TFR in China.
Like I said before, it's hard for me to understand because my mind can explore 50 different paths while your mind can only comprehend one. So while the "go" command might seem obvious to you, it is not a valid line of instruction to me.
You don't know a number and you don't know what you're asking for. Right now, we are as high as possible given the situation and the situation is that people are incredibly invested in their careers and have no time for kids. This is not a straw man; the straw is in between your ears.
Most people filter out the obviously invalid paths before posting about them.
Not true. You have very poor reading comprehension. I don't want to rewrite it so I'll just copy and paste:
It will not cost "everybody everything," because while lower TFR is global, it is not uniform. Dropping TFR amongst developed high tech nations is uniform. The only question is where they currently are. Western TFR is significantly higher than East Asian TFR, and never got as low. This is due...
www.sinodefenceforum.com
"When China is the unrivaled superpower who can control the global flow of technology like the US does now, the difficulty is much lower. By then, it will not be China vs the US and the whole technologically-capable world. It may be China and half the tech world vs US and the other half. Or it may be China vs the US with the tech world largely neutral. Or it may even be China and the tech world vs the US. By the time we get there, even the US could very well have thrown in the towel and opted for total cooperation accepting that China is a more powerful country in every way. By then, we can likely truly afford to keep a tech lead while spending time taking care of 2 or more kids."
If your only goal is to stay alive, humble, harvestable, and out of everyone's way. If you want to be the best, it's about the innovative quality of the people. It's about training brilliant scientists each of whom contribute more than a million peasants for the technological force multipliers they innovate.
This is another "educated guess" by a person uneducated on the topic, I suppose.
Is this an educated guess or a regular one? LOL Cus it's wrong as always. Evolutionary theory says that a population and species will change and adapt to the changing ecology. Which means that the Chinese nation is shifting from a large and poor population into a smaller but highly technological and individually excellent population due to the stresses of the modern world. Did you catch that when you (pretended) you took the class?
Ah... you must have googled this somewhere and now you think you can talk like an expert... LOL
to an expert. This theory was taught in high school biology; you recite the theory without knowing its limitations. This is why book smarts does not equal true intellect. We're not animals out in the fields. We are sentient creatures that are smart, can innovate, and most importantly, KILL each other with those innovations. A population a million imbeciles good for nothing but breeding will be killed by a population of 100K innovators; that's how 100 million Native Americans went from owning the North American continent to owning a handful of casinos on a segregated ranch done in by Englishmen on boats with guns.
Evolutionary theory isn't about every type of change and adaptation. It is about those changes and adaptations that affect reproductive success. If a change affects reproductive success in a negative way, then from the perspective of evolutionary theory, it is contrary to natural selection and will eventually be bred out. Modern East Asian culture constitutes such a change and that is why I am pessimistic on its survival.
Also, there were not 100 million Native Americans in North America. Best estimates today put them around ~7 (average estimate) million at the time of Columbus. More importantly, British TFR and Native American TFR were similar (both ~5-6), and so neither had a significant advantage over each other in reproductive potential. In a contest between equally fertile peoples, advanced technology and Old World diseases do indeed win out. But if British TFR in 1600 was 1.5 (as it is today), there would have been no way for them to displace Native Americans and North America would have remained in Native American hands, as the British colonists would've died off over several generations.
Which brings us to the question of if there is some sort of Faustian trade-off between demographics and technology/individual excellence. The answer is
no because, as an example, the British maintained a high TFR throughout the Industrial Revolution and their Age of Empires (when the UK was the most innovative, productive, and powerful country in the world), only for it to utterly crash right before the 20th century because of a values shift:
Which emphasizes, again, that it is
cultural values and not wealth, power, or innovation that causes a country's TFR to dive. East Asians have extremely low TFR today because they have copied the Western values shift (towards materialism & individualism, and away from family & fertility) down to the letter, and actually made it worse.
First of all, myself and many others have aready said that it's a cultural change for the TFR. Not your original idea. We've also went further to discuss how to change that culture and which factors would be helpful/antagonistic. Secondly, and now you've realized the evolution of the Chinese population and people. Given all that, that you know nobody will follow your course, what are you still chimping out about?
My primary goal in this thread is to stop the copium around how China will do just fine with a TFR of <1, because it is categorically harmful to the Chinese nation to harbor such delusions. The sooner people understand the urgency of the problem, the better equipped they will be to address it.
