Demographers say the decline [in birthrate] was primarily caused by the decrease in the number of Chinese women of childbearing age and say that changes to the one-child policy had come too late.
In addition to allowing couples to have three children last year, China has been adopting policies aimed at reducing the financial burden of raising children, including banning for-profit after-school tuition, extending maternity leave and offering cash subsidies....
It is estimated that more than 40 million people in China have fertility problems, and the number is expected to rise as women are delaying their marriage and birth plans. According to a recent study by China’s leading fertility experts, the country’s infertility rate has risen to 18 per cent, up from 15 per cent in 2010....
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One of the best kept secrets around has been serious predictions that world population would peak sometime this century between 9 and 10 billion, and then begin to decline. Twenty years ago the time frame was around 2070 but I'm willing to bet with COVID the peak will probably occur sooner.
Another interesting note from googling around, the UN predicts that within about 30 years China will be displaced as the most populous nation by India. Again, it looks like that estimate is based on pre-COVID assumptions.
i'm So Old, that i remember back when people talked about The Population Explosion
what ever happened to That?
Now, the world's Big Prpblem is... Not Enough chinamen
Humans seem to self regulate their population. Not too many, not too few.
"Twenty years ago the time frame was around 2070 but I'm willing to bet with COVID the peak will probably occur sooner."
I had always read the peak would come in 2050, something the climate predictors have always ignored, now it looks like 2030, according to one story I read somewhere.
I guess it depends on whose models you believe, but it seems like an inflection in the growth curve is expected in 2030. Models are fine as long as nothing changes too much over a span of decades.
Wiki Graph
China's fertility rate is about 1.3, the same as Japan; Taiwan's is about 1.1 and S. Korea's is about .84.
Meanwhile Niger's is 6.8, Navajo Amerindians about 4 (was about 8 or 9 in the 1960s).
At that rate, in 800 years China will win about 0.000001947 Winter Olympic Gold Medals, and Niger will win 2.13*10^16 Silver Medals in the Summer Olympics.
gilbar said...i'm So Old, that i remember back when people talked about The Population Explosion what ever happened to That?
Same thing that happened to peak oil. Malthusians are always wrong. Always.
Don’t cry for China. China is asshoe.
That plan is as cute as a Chinese baby.
@Tim, agree. I've seen estimates that put the date within a generation or so but I'd also guess at least 3 out of 4 people would tell you that the world population will keep going up without stopping.
I think the big difference in the estimates is whether or not the modeler thinks the African population is going to keep rising at the rates that Fernandinande quoted, or if they are going to drop off as well.
It’s that damned Capitalism that keeps lifting people out of extreme poverty. Infant mortality has gone to Hell in a hand basket over the last 250 years, and I tell you, it’s the fault of the Capitalists!
Turns out that when people think that fewer of their kids will die, they don’t have so many; and as they get less poor, women manage to affect how many kids they have. Who knew?
This is a disaster for those hoping that a population explosion would justify global government. Almost as bad as if people figure out that nuclear power can replace fossil fuels without countries having to give up sovereignty.
China's problem is also the West's problem. We're all so sophisticated we're sophisticating ourselves right out of existence.
Currently in our country you get applause for denying your own gender, or declaring- as young people- you are in a non-sexual marriage. You get applause for abstaining from having a family to choose your career instead. You get applause for looking at marriage at all as a patriarchal construct.
But show up with three kids and tell someone you chose to become a mother instead of another lawyer and you're laughed at, looked down upon, and ignored.
In the meantime, the current generation of younger women professionals seem to me to be miserable, unfulfilled, and hanging out there, wondering what this is all about. Anecdotally, I've seen it among my own family and friends.
We're so damned sophisticated. It all seemed like a good path a few years ago. Now, as they get older....?
The absurdities of totalitarianism. Take two examples.
Hitler, a son of the left, sets out to conquer Europe and Russia. Millions are killed, millions and millions have their lives adversely impacted. Particular genocide attention is given to a grouping which is both productive and skilled, the Jews.
Post-war Germany suffers a labor shortage which the Germans in their blind foresight fill by bringing in the nonproductive and unskilled Turks who bring with them Islam, a crazy but cruel religion complete with its own political and legal system. 70 years on the predicable has happened.
The Chinese Communists believe their perceived overpopulation problem can best be solved by various hare-brained 5-year plans plus the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution by which millions are murdered or starved, followed by another hare-brained but cruel system of forced abortion.
The left, never out of ideas, all of them bad.
Sad.
Birthrates are inversely proportional to female education and sufferage.
An opportune moment to propose Catholic teaching on human sexuality as true. Contraception, abortion, ivf are proscribed not because the church wants to “keep women down,” but because human beings are intrinsically lousy at engineering life, not being God. Our horizon is limited to present exigencies, not the long March of history. Whatever social problem we engineer our way out of tends to present us with an unintended conundrum later on. When Pope Paul Vi wrote in Humana vitae (1968) that widespread contraception would lead to the sundering of sex from marriage, a rise in divorce and careless disregard for women, a rise in deviant sexuality, he was mocked by the entire world. He predicted the collapse of the family and its catastrophic effect on society 50 years ago.
IVF generates a consumer mentality toward childbearing, “discarding” those embryos that don’t “take” , and in most cases deliberately deprives children of knowing half of their biological heritage. (Check out the support website, “my daddy’s name is donor.”)
A child is a gift from God to be received, not a consumer good to be acquired.
I guess if they can't stop their population decline, the next best thing is producing abominations.
From the State's Choice to her Choice, China cannot realize a viable path to mitigate the progress of what they conceived.
It's almost as if central planning doesn't work so well.
We are in uncharted territory.
It has been within my lifetime that women's options for birth control have changed from very iffy to extremely reliable. Not infallible, obviously, but for the vast majority of women in 1st and 2nd world nations, they don't have to bear a child if they don't want to.
Also within my lifetime, risk of starvation has been supplanted by risk of obesity-related disorders as threat to life. Who had that on the bingo card in 1950?
The guy who invented the birth control pill (Gregory Pincus) was fired from Harvard. The guy who saved a billion people from starvation (Norman Borlaug) failed the entrance exam at the U. of Minnesota. So much for credentials.
Anyone who predicts the population, weather, or economy more than 48 hours into the future is at best making an educated guess.
Do what you think is best.
“Turns out that when people think that fewer of their kids will die, they don’t have so many; and as they get less poor, women manage to affect how many kids they have. Who knew?”
That, in a nutshell, explains our population problem. With wealth, there comes significantly better maternal and infant healthcare, which result in many more children living into adulthood, and, at least in the past, having families of their own. But with wealth comes the cost of raising kids. They turn from being an economic asset, to being a major cost. Ultimately, in most countries and ethnic groups, birth rates fall, as a result, almost as quickly as the population exploded from all the kids now living to adulthood. The problem is that the second trend lags the first, and that lag is what has caused various population explosions around the world. Once the second trend catches up to the first, the population boom in a country is effectively over. Because of their level of poverty, central Africa haven’t yet cut back their family sizes yet. And the Middle East is filled with rag headed 7th Century religious extremists, whose Prophet Had extolled his male adherents to bang anything that moves, and esp the daughters of infidels, but sheep and goats are fine too. But bestiality makes sense, when you remember that they practice polygamy, which guarantees that some men will not have wives.
It should be no surprise that the government plans of the ChiComs inevitably blow up. It’s the basic fallacy of central planning, which their political system is built on. Their basic problem though isn’t infertility, but rather are economic. The solution is to incentivize the behavior they want, and financially penalize that which they don’t want. For, me, that would mean taxing the childless to support tax credits or rebates from those who have kids. Then, if a couple wants kids, offer them IVF if they need it. The Chinese, being one of the more mercenary ethnic groups around, would likely respond to this sort of incentives.
Remember Oso Negro? Maybe he moved to China to provide his "services"
"Remember Oso Negro?" I do, and miss his trenchant observations.
The One Child Policy had loopholes. A neighbor is a mainland-born woman with two Chinese-born sisters.
How, you might ask? The culture was and is still profoundly Confucian (talk about yer Patriarchy) and if a guy was in good standing with the Party, he could have more than one chance to get it right.
What a world, when too-few Chinese and gun-shy Krauts are considered problems.
@Bruce Hayden: “Turns out that when people think that fewer of their kids will die, they don’t have so many; and as they get less poor, women manage to affect how many kids they have. Who knew?”
That, in a nutshell, explains our population problem.
There is something far more fundamental going on. Before the Pill, no female of any species has ever had any control over fertility. Women now not only have the means to do so, but the ability to form a decision.
Which is what's fundamental: given means and ability, how many children, on average, will women choose to have in order to satiate their maternal drive?
All the evidence on offer strongly suggests that number is, on average, less than two.
And that isn't restricted to just post industrial nations. Zimbabwe's 2019 total fertility rate (3.53) is half what it was sixty years ago; the other countries in the region have had similar trajectories. (Note, 2.1 is the replacement fertility rate for rich countries; for poor countries, it can be as high as 3.5.)
According to Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, "The great defining event of the twenty-first century will occur in three decades, give or take, when the global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end."
A wicked solution, an unforced error. They should never have normalized a religion that denies women and men's dignity and agency, and reduces human life to a negotiable commodity. They should never have exercised liberal license to indulge reproductive rites for social, redistributive, clinical, and fair weather causes.
But seriously folks, even if one were a thoroughgoing act utilitarian one might not be sure whether one’s objective function was better served by 14 billion people living at subsistence level or 7 billion who could eat filet mignon every now and then, and maybe know that real tigers and polar bears live in the wild.
If the planet never gets near its carrying capacity for humans, will that be so bad? (Compared to passing carrying capacity and then having to do something about it.)
As for predictions of never-ending population declines, that sounds as hubristic to me as the flip side (growth ending in mass extinction). I'm not saying it can't happen, but neither do I think it is inevitable.
Who knows what this cussed species might do next, much less in 2050 or 2080?
Tucker Carlson is attacked repeatedly for citing the "Grand Remplacement," the theory that nefarious people are plotting to get the American and European birthrates down low enough that their economies will positively demand importation of laborers from the Global South. But that is not a conspiracy theory at all; I've seen it many, many times in the NYT, the WaPo,, NPR, &c.
There are two prongs. First, population growth in these predominantly white regions (plus Australia, New Zealand, and "white-adjacent" -- hideous word -- places like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea) continues to be continuously and stridently attacked. I think that the US is the only one of the lot that is actually at around replacement level; everyone else on that list is below it.
Then the second prong: Hey, look! You need lots of workers, and you aren't producing them yourselves, and meanwhile everyone to your south is breeding up a storm and having more kids than they can support! So, why don't you let in a whole bunch of them, and both problems will be solved at once. Easy-peasy. That is, precisely, "Le Grand Remplacement." The only thing missing is the explicit suggestion that mostly-white and East Asian populations will be replaced by mostly-Black and brown ones. (Left as an exercise for the reader?) But it's all clear enough.
Now if ZPG and its like were to focus their efforts wholly on Africa and Central and South America, and leave the US and its kindred nations alone, I might believe them. But they don't. (Yes, there are organizations aiming at birth control in poorer countries, but they aren't, for the most part, of the Malthusian Nazi kind.)
“ I think that the US is the only one of the lot that is actually at around replacement level; everyone else on that list is below it.”
The US is at 1.72. Not as low as the others, but well below replacement.
“I'm not saying it can't happen, but neither do I think it is inevitable.”
Absent coercion, it is hard to think of what reverses a 60 year global trend.
I agree Hey Skipper, that it is hard to think of what reverses a 60 year global trend. But not impossible, I think.
What if a great pandemic carries off billions and the survivors go back to breeding like rabbits, with or without some new or repackaged spiritual awakening?
And Michelle, can you tell us what organizations aiming at birth control in poorer countries ARE of the Malthusian Nazi kind? Asking for a friend.
Narr said...
“I'm not saying [never-ending population declines] can't happen, but neither do I think it is inevitable.”
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Hey Skipper said...
Absent coercion, it is hard to think of what reverses a 60 year global trend.
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It gets reversed by this thing called “evolution.” Some people will be genetically inclined to have more children than average, and they will outbreed those who have fewer children than average.
You only need a constantly increasing population if you operate your economy as a pyramid scheme. That's why we keep importing the 3rd world into the US, to finance the benefits the boomers have voted for themselves.
China's problem is that they are trying to convert to a consumption based economy with increasing standard of living. But if their population halves, demand for their production also halves. They are essentially putting themselves out of business.
@Stephen St. Onge: It gets reversed by this thing called “evolution.” Some people will be genetically inclined to have more children than average, and they will outbreed those who have fewer children than average.
I think you are misunderstanding evolution. Until the invention of the Pill, no females of any species ever had any choice over their fertility. Therefore, there is no possibility of evolution having selected for, or against, an inclination to have children. That is why this is completely unprecedented.
The proof is in the undeniable reality: entire populations of women prefer fewer children than are required for replacement. Keeping in mind that the replacement fertility level is economic development dependent, almost the entire world is at, or below replacement.
I'll be dead long before the world runs out of people, so I'll wish everyone a nice vanishing
now.
Well, one nice outcome might be that when China is forced to stop abortions and criminalize birth control, perhaps the Left may come down hard against China, since that seems to be the only issue that they give a damn about.
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