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Comment by nneonneo

2 days ago

China no longer has a one-child policy and is now actively focusing policies and incentives on increasing childbirth. Although it’s not going to yield immediate results, the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.

> the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.

That would make them the first country to do so, I think. Others have tried and nothing has worked. But China will likely become rich before it gets old, so it may not matter.

  • Did you mean to say "But China will likely become old before it gets rich"?

    Their population is declining already and they have a very long way to go before being considered "rich", so I haven't seen many projections for what you said. If you meant it, I'd be curious to know why.

    • China's middle class is already larger than the entire US population, and growing fast. It won't be rich in the sense that say Switzerland or Norway are rich. But it seems safe to say they won't be barely scraping by.

      IMO, India likely won't make this transition. It's population is still growing but it's birth rate is sinking fast (like most everywhere else).

      1 reply →

lol, no. it will not even maintain its current extinction-tier TFR of 1.02, let alone maintain its current population.

like every other civilized people, the Chinese have largely realized that the game is rigged and the only winning move is not to play. the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do. even the current TFR of 1.0-1.5 in the civilized world is largely inertial, and it will continue to fall. South Korean 0.7 will seem mind-bogglingly high a hundred years from now,

and 1CP was such a predictably disastrous idea that I seriously doubt the forward-thinking you seem to believe the CCP to posses.

  • >the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do.

    They won't do it willingly. That just means it will happen without their input.

    • sure, they could, hypothetically, close the borders and begin a campaign of forced insemination, but those babies would have no fathers to provide for them, and the state - any state - really resents footing the bill for child rearing, going as far as forcing victims of infidelity, fraud, or rape to pay child support. the state - any state - wants to give you as little as possible and to take as much as possible from you, for the delta between giving and receiving is its lifeblood.

      the ideal family has two full-time working parents, paying a mortgage and car loans, consuming as many high-margin domestic products as possible, rearing as many children (future laborers and consumers) as possible, with little to no assistance from the state. and you simply can't have that by force. if you could, you might as well drop the pretense and openly treat your population as slaves.