Comment by petesergeant
2 months ago
“Elderly Chinese people are different from elderly people elsewhere because they’re hardier” doesn’t feel like the extraordinary proof the earlier extraordinary claims required. Are they that different from people in other middle income countries like Thailand?
The point is that old people in US and specially Europe expect to maintain their life standards, which are quite high. That's difficult in the middle of a demographic downturn. But that's not the case for elderly people in China. Even if their numbers do increase over time, the productivity of younger generations is so large compared to them, that they can effectively be supported with little problems for the Chinese government. So in a sense China is lucky that their economic growth is occurring exactly at the point where the demographic change is starting to happen.
To be clear, which of the newly-industrialized countries classically described as being in the middle income trap do you think that's not true of? Like is China going to be different from Mexico here because abuelas are demanding a high-standard of living?
The word "middle class trap" only makes sense for China based on FX rate. Rich Chinese will continue to diversify if not outright emigrate while the middle class is trapped by necessity. Meanwhile the savings/investment rate is so high that the Chinese middle class will enjoy things that middle classes in few other countries have, once normalized for population density. Right now they already lead in industrial robots per worker (behind only South Korea and Singapore). They will lead in service robots per capita one day as well.
1 reply →