China demographics thread.

[manqiangrexue]

I suspect you are underestimating how utterly exhausting and all-consuming raising children is, because you do not have kids yourself.

And yes, having kids is really exhausting. And there's not much economies of scale with raising multiple kids.

Also you can't trick people into raising 3 or 4 all at once. People will have 1 or 2, and say this is enough, we can't handle more regardless of the subsidy, and stop.

Yet the only way to raise TFR to 2 is for people to have 3 or 4, because for every woman who doesn't have children, you need another one to have 4 or two to have 3. And it's way way easier to have no kids than to have 3 or 4 kids.

I don't think enough people will bite the bullet and have 3-4 kids for any sort of conceivably realistic subsidy to cancel out the increasing number of people who have no kids or only have 1 kid.

Also, this isn't taking into account what kind of kids would be produced by parents who are motivated by subsidies to have kids, and whether those kids would be a net positive.

AGI/amortality is the only realistic way out. (They are interchangable since the former would lead to the latter). Otherwise we'll go extinct like Calhoun's rats. I personally think this is the Great Filter. We will know in about 10-20 years whether humanity has made it out - potentially sooner depending on how spicy the AGI race between the US and China gets.

People say raising kids is exhausting but I think it's only as exhausting as you let it be. Coddling kids, tending to thier cries, it's all a waste of time. I have a daughter who acts like an absolute ass when I'm not around. Her mother and grandparents can't handle her when she cries. But when she sees me, I give one warning, "Don't cry and don't shout," and she pipes right down because I'm the only one who has punished her by locking her in a room and ignoring her for a long time before. Baby cries rattle people's hearts but do absolutely nothing to me; I will happily hear my sons cry so hard they can't breath for half a minute during their self-calming training. This shows exactly that kids will only be as much trouble as you let them be. To me, every kid is just some food and diaper changes, easy peezy. They learn by quietly watching you. Cause more trouble than that, get locked up to show you what happens to entitled little shits.

If Chinese people did this, the TFR would go up. But instead, Chinese people are the biggest baby coddlers in the world; when an ABC friend of mine said that she's doing sleep training with her baby and letting him cry it out at night, she got scolded by Chinese parents telling her that babies only need you so much for the first few precious years of their lives so how could she take that away from them just because you're too selfish to wake up in the middle of the night? That's when I realized that Chinese people don't do sleep training; they just let the baby torture them until it becomes a teenager!! LOL I'm like, her kid is gonna stuff your little snowflakes in lockers when they meet in high school if you keep raising them like wusses.

What lessons can be learned from Israel's TFR? Obviously there are many aspects of Israel that does not and will never apply to China, but with a TFR of 2.9 which is the highest for a developed nation, perhaps there are a few good takeaways.

Israel's useful scientific population also has a low TFR. The Jews with the high TFR are the ones that contribute nothing to the economy but take tax money to do bible studies all day. If you look at ghettos in the US, a lot of those people have lots of kids. There is so far no high tech population (with bimodal societies counting as separate and not 1 population) with a high TFR.

I think China has done too good a job at poverty eradication for this but one potential is to have a bimodal country where Chinese people in the countryside have 4, 5, 6, whatever, 9 babies like they did in my grandmother's days. Then, some of them stay in the countryside and keep that tradition while some get educated, go to the city, contribute to China's STEM, but slowly die out in 1-3 generations by having 0-1 babies each woman and just get replaced by the next wave of migrants from the countryside.

I think it would be a great experiment to see if we can create a society where parenting is limited or eliminated. The Spartans did some of this with the agoge where parents only raise a child to age 8 before he becomes a member of the state and is trained to first be a survivalist and then to be a soldier. Spartans are the exact opposite of the coddled and entitled shit babies that plague modern society and they have an excellent sense of community. In this model, the most critical need is for the creation of the artificial womb. Once this is done, 18-21 year olds may go to have their sperm/eggs extracted. The government takes these and creates embryos to be born out of artificial wombs. The babies are raised in communities and go through basic education (with patriotic education of course) with stress-free testing to see where each one is most talented, where they will go through specialized education in that direction. Babies raised like this will live very disciplined and structured lives. Many aspects indicate they could be stronger than traditionally-raised babies because their lives are essentially training regiments optimized by science rather than the frantic and irrational emotions of parents who love them but often don't know what to do. But will they lack something human because they never experienced parental love? I think maybe not because looking orphanages, the children who come out of there are often normal or better-mannered than normal with the most troublesome and angry ones usually inspired by their hatred for drawing the short stick and having less than most kids with parents, which is a factor that will not exist in this model. In other words, traditional parenting is likely overrated and superfluous.

 

[Moonscape]

Hence state fertility/child rearing system. Reward people (well women) for getting 1,2 kids out early, minimize career impact, maintain workforce size... because you're competing with other countries with high workforce particaption rates from both genders. State raises some % of kids... every 0.1 in TFR is about 5% of birth gap. Bring TFR to 1.5 and 1/3 of new bodies will be state raised. Or you can have 1/3 of pop increase from immigration. If modern material conditions and incentives naturally drives TFR below 2.1 even with fertility benefits, then there's no avoiding filling bodies to maintain pop setpoint some other way.

I can't believe you are serious about this. Human beings will not tolerate the state treating them literally as breeding stock and their children as livestock.

 

[manqiangrexue]

I can't believe you are serious about this. Human beings will not tolerate the state treating them literally as breeding stock and their children as livestock.

It's just a mentality shift from, "I'm such a special kid with love and warmth all around me! I'm the center of my parents' world!" to "Everyone is equal; we are in a community together. We must be mindful of others, treat them as we want them to treat us." I don't think this is worse than traditional parenting because this model gets rid of the most hate-inducing factor of any society and that is unfairness, the kids who don't have parents or fancy clothes or expensive toys and big houses, watching those kids who do. I think in many ways, this fosters a stronger sense of belonging and togetherness.

It's also wonderful for the parents. Parenting the traditional way sucks. It can suck and be exhausting, or it can just suck. But there's no contest; childless life is so much easier and full of freedom. Even having a well-behaved child severely limits the things you can enjoy. If someone told me I could be a father of 4, rest easy that they'll be given taken care of and provided equal chances to any other kid to succeed, and I could continue to live the single life, hell man. Sign me up. Triple my taxes; I don't care; I'm in! Back to my old self again! Gym nights, bar nights, ladies of the night!

 

[CMP]

It's just a mentality shift from, "I'm such a special kid with love and warmth all around me! I'm the center of my parents' world!" to "Everyone is equal; we are in a community together. We must be mindful of others, treat them as we want them to treat us." I don't think this is worse than traditional parenting because this model gets rid of the most hate-inducing factor of any society and that is unfairness, the kids who don't have parents or fancy clothes or expensive toys and big houses, watching those kids who do. I think in many ways, this fosters a stronger sense of belonging and togetherness.

It's also wonderful for the parents. Parenting the traditional way sucks. It can suck and be exhausting, or it can just suck. But there's no contest; childless life is so much easier and full of freedom. Even having a well-behaved child severely limits the things you can enjoy. If someone told me I could be a father of 4, rest easy that they'll be given taken care of and provided equal chances to any other kid to succeed, and I could continue to live the single life, hell man. Sign me up. Triple my taxes; I don't care. I'm in.

Agreed. Like it or not, the world's population is going to collapse over the next 100 years and the best way for China to come out ahead of everyone else on this is to think big. One child policy was revolutionary for its time, and we're not going to fix this issue without equally radical thinking. The state needs to recruit breeders and take legal parental responsibility, provide room & board, childcare, and education to make up for all those people who are unwilling to have any kids, or only less than 3.

 

[manqiangrexue]

Agreed. Like it or not, the world's population is going to collapse over the next 100 years and the best way for China to come out ahead of everyone else on this is to think big. One child policy was revolutionary for its time, and we're not going to fix this issue without equally radical thinking. The state needs to recruit breeders and take legal parental responsibility, provide room & board, childcare, and education to make up for all those people who are unwilling to have any kids, or only less than 3.

Yeah, revolutionary thinking is the cure but unfortunately, the CCP is so backwards thinking on this issue that even surrogacy is not legal...

 

[august1]

A return to a pro-natal society would require China to completely change its cultural and social landscape to what that I imagine has more in common with pre-reform era (1978) China than today's China. I wonder how that would square with the government's desire to boost consumption and increase urbanization? My personal observation since having kids in China is that anti-natalism is worse than ever here. For example, lots of shopping malls and even residential areas have put up barriers to ostensibly stop e-bikes but which also make it impossible for baby strollers to pass through. The next example is purely anecdotal and maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I feel like I literally see an expression bordering on disgust in the faces of young people when they see me pushing my one-year-old around in her stroller (rare sight where I live). Whenever I meet my childless cousin and mention my kids, he brings up his dog and talks about him like they're the same. I feel like even the concept of childbirth and babies is becoming completely alien to a lot of young people in China. There is no way the current iteration of Chinese society will get its TFR back to 1.5 let alone 2. A cultural shift that makes the Cultural Revolution look like a block party is going to be needed.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

In the past, everyone was a farmer except around 10-15% of the population who were scribes, craftsmen, etc. The jobs were very easy mentally, but tiring physically, so it was a high birth, high death situation.

During industrialization, the bulk of the population and the monetary investment of the state shifted towards industrial and office jobs which were mentally harder - but still within the grasp of most of the population - and the top 10-15% didn't have to be craftsmen/scribes (industrial and office workers) but could contribute to innovation. This is a high birth, low death situation - lots of births because people had the free mental and physical capacity to have kids, but low death because industrialization brought sanitation and medicine.

Now, the bulk of the population is still in industrial and office jobs - but the money isn't there. The bulk of the money is in high tech, finance, etc. jobs that are very hard to get. Because the money isn't where the bulk of the population is, the majority work low wage jobs in sunset industries that produce low profits, while those who work in the high paying, fast growing industries are overworked because the supply of labor in that band is small due to high educational requirements. That results in a low birth, low death situation - the majority can't have kids due to low wages, the high wage earners can't have kids due to overwork.

The only way to fix this - to achieve a high birth, low death situation again - is to align the majority of the population with where the money goes.

One way is downgrading back to a traditional industrial society, which is what Trump and Biden wants the US to do. Encouraging manufacturing jobs, banning abortion, promoting xenophobia - all well known ways to promote birth. Note how they both talk about manufacturing jobs and not manufacturing output. Why is the input more important than the output? Sounds crazy, until you realize that the whole point of expanding manufacturing jobs is not to actually produce anything but to re-create the social conditions of the 1950's and 1960's. The product output is secondary.

The other is to upgrade the majority to be able to be part of the high tech economy. That means either eugenics to boost IQ or neural-computer interfacing tools, kind of like today's AI on steroids built into your head. And since eugenics is considered abhorrent, neural interfacing it is.

 

[jshw31]

The lesson is most of birth in Israel are by highly religious population. Not something possible to replicate in China.

By the way is your name an anagram of j3w1sh?

Never noticed that. No, its completely unrelated.

 

[Moonscape]

Agreed. Like it or not, the world's population is going to collapse over the next 100 years and the best way for China to come out ahead of everyone else on this is to think big. One child policy was revolutionary for its time, and we're not going to fix this issue without equally radical thinking. The state needs to recruit breeders and take legal parental responsibility, provide room & board, childcare, and education to make up for all those people who are unwilling to have any kids, or only less than 3.

Every single person with the means to leave China (so the people China would want to keep) is going to leave China if China ever starts considering even a fraction of the incredibly coercive policies that people in this thread are proposing.

Including the officials who would be responsible for imposing these policies.

The only solution that has a chance of working is AGI, which China is already going all-in on, so we'll see if it works or not. None of these other ideas are implementable due to certain mass opposition.

 

[dirtyid]

I can't believe you are serious about this. Human beings will not tolerate the state treating them literally as breeding stock and their children as livestock.

You... serious about immortality. AKA not serious.

What is your model? Quantify it.

Here, I'll do some basic scenario / math for you. Assume immortality and death rate converge with that of accidents fatality per 100k, population will increase by 0.75% per year at TFR 1.1, aka by 2100, already resource constrained PRC would have ~2 Billion people with 1.1 TFR with minimal death rate (cause if you've got immortality, you've also cured all of the diseases). That's how fucking stupid / not viable your idea is based on 2nd/3rd order consequences. And net pop would only grow, because then natural desire for having kids even with SHIT TFR would rapidly outgrow aggregate deathrate. Then you have opposite problem, but at much worse magnitude, people stay in jobs forever, no prospect for upward mobility because social structure will be entrenched. Even modest increase to 150 year life span = 1.4B population by 2100, 2B by 2150 w 1.1 TFR. @1.5 TFR, that's 2B by 2100, 2.4B by 2150. Then what? Pregnancy licenses for population control? You going to pick a system to choose who to hunger game / purge system based on dwindling resources, or is part 2 of plan aka "draw rest of owl" to get fusion / abundance / dyson sphere? Is that totality of your solution? Speculative AGI magic hopium?

PRC / CCP has done family planning before. It's one political system that has done massive demographic engineering. Historically societies have had much more kids under much worse conditions (i.e. post famine, post war). Indoctorinating and building system around contributing births to state is not unfeasible under right incentive / indoctorination structure.

Mass opposition can be managed. Emmigration can be managed.

The problem with thinking if AGI will work or not is the OR NOT. Need to manage alternatives in case of NOT.

Regardless, LBH, fundmental to these proposals is the notion that PRC wants to stay dominant Han. It could just do massive, massive immigration + sinicization and deal with hot mixies.