Comment by maxglute
2 days ago
Yes, some cohorts are more useful than others for nation building, that's just reality, especially if excess mouths are net drains relative to national resource available. Too much excess and not just useless but actively detrimental to development. It's not saying time to purge, but excess demographics can dilute development resources too thin, double bad if above domestic carry capacity, i.e. getting import dependant trapped.
PRC averted 200-300m birth who would have spread family resources into developing country trap. The family planning exchange is non-existing 400m low skilled workers / subsistent farmers that is net drain on national power vs having 100m tertiary to uplift into developed country. All PRC rising in the last 20 years is because PRC family planning aborted a fuckload of 2nd/3rd/4th+ siblings so families can concentrate resources to get 1st kid into STEM. They speedrun the high skill human capita game, compressing 100s of years of human capita accumulation in 50. There's downsides, but they come after the up.
What's better for development, a 1.8B country of 6 Nigeria's and 2 Japans or 1.4B country of 2 Nigerias and 6 Japans. The latter. And you would recognize the former, while all lives are special blah blah blah is absolute developing shitshow. Every Nigeria PRC avoids is 200m of less governance overhead, i.e. make work jobs. AKA see which way India trended. Look at new gen of PRC protein consumption and average height vs alternative, stunted growth from malnutrition that literally makes significant % of population too stupid to integrate into modern economy. That's what happens, you can literally fuck up your human capita stock so much by diffusing limited resources that 100s of million become too biologically stupid to do modern jobs i.e. even in PRC, 100s of millions from old times too stunted and innumerate to do even basic factory work. PRC didn't abort enough.
A wide range of countries got rich, while China's policies were unique, in addition to being abhorrent. Why should anyone believe that the only other option for China was "being Nigeria"?
The PRC is getting older faster than they are getting rich. As a graying middle income country, they are worse off than Japan or Taiwan or Korea, places that that actually managed to become broadly developed and wealthy before needing to navigate population aging.
Sure, China received some temporary benefits from having an artificially low dependency ratio. That is over, the demographic payday loan is coming due.
India's low dependency rate positions them well for the next 50 years, as China flails in a demographic crisis caused by the CCP.
Going to enjoy holidays after one effort post. Only 1 of 2 extremely large country has gotten reasonably developed while starting from same level, hint: it's not India. Nigeria useful measure, because Nigerian income level is comparable to the few 100m left behind in PRC, that's the human develop cost of not concentrating resources and being stuck in informal economy. In terms of actual development, PRC not unique, just generic competent authoritarian directed export led growth. It was fact the only viable modern growth model, for small/large countries, PRC simply had to execute much better because they don't have luxury of only mastering a few sectors but all of them due to scale, and even now mastering almost everything, PRC still has too many people than high skilled opportunities. There is no other proven/repeated development model for no resource states, well except more authoritarian colonial exploitation, which you know is worse.
>old before rich
PRC can inflate RMB a few % and instantly be high income AKA rich as defined by world bank, ultimately the old before rich is retarded single dimension analysis. PRC is young/rich, old/poor society, which is much better setup than JP/TW/SKR for the simple reason PRC old (who also has 95%+ home ownership and high savings) are disproportionately poor and therefore cheap to caretake by the increasingly affluent young. It's more optimized vs advanced economies where welfware costs is uniformly unsustainably expensive to maintain. For reference bottom 2/5 of PRC, i.e. 500m constitutes 5% of GDP, every new skilled worker with multiple times more productivity to take care of multiple subsistent farmers and informal workers who are fucking poor and have little expectation to begin with. Also helps that PRC is... actually incredibly rich, in terms of manufacturing abundance, aka material richness. PRC old/poor, young/rich is one of the greatest caretake arbitrage opportunities, they wouldn't have been double fucked if they were old/rich, young/rich. BTW old before rich projection, PRC demographers already anticipated it, hence the family planning and zerg rushing for mass manufacturing and high end industries. One more thing to consider, every old/poor that drags down per capita average that dies (and they die first) will move per capita towards young/rich, i.e. for PRC to be statistically rich per capita in a few years, all they have to do is nothing but wait for old/poor to die.
>coming due
After you and I are dead. Their payday loan is the greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history, with actual system to capitalize on talent. They're going to have roughly OCED combined in just STEM in next 20 years, that workforce going to stick around until 2060s/70s+, aka they have basically 50 years to build dominance, and 30-40 years to figure out demographics. And btw this reality is based off PRC having effective 800m pop (again 500m are functionally Nigeria useless), they can afford to shed 500m useless mouths and still maintain advantage. BTW PRC 2100 demographics is ~2nd largest country, i.e. they will still have have massive human capita advantages, assuming they don't fix TFR, which of all countries with proven family planning systems, they're most likely to succeed.
>India's low dependency
Low demographic dependency doesn't matter if young/poor can't handle old/poor. NVM Indian TFR in most developed regions also crashing below TFR. Remember that stat PRC, despite being magnitude more successful at development than India still left with 500m surplus poor people, i.e. 40% of population. India is going to have 1000m-1200m out of 1700m, if they're lucky - that 30% stunting, 20% wasting is going to toast a lot of workforce. Most likely they're even more fucked because they couldn't capitalize on mass manufacturing now that labour saving tech is proliferating and AI is eating service. So you're looking at country where future profile is 7 Nigeria's and 1 Japan. Forget old ate dependency ratio, their young is going to be poor, underemployed, and restless. AKA the exact scenario PRC family planning was trying to avoid on a very condensed timeline. Again it's not like Indian didn't try to cap population via own sterilization / family planning policy. They simply failed and now they're heading into PRC demographer doomsday scenario, old/poor and young/poor. That's India's position. There will still be pockets of Indian rich but when demographic payday comes due PRC will be mostly rich taking care of poor vs India mostly poor/old/young vs few rich. Having mostly poor will also fuck a lot of other development goals, i.e. don't expect India to fix their air pollution anytime soon. Just like PRC old/poor, young/rich was locked decades ago, Indian old/poor, young/poor is more or less locked in due to their development velocity (lack of) and tfr trends.
Meanwhile most of advanced economies will struggle to fund social welfare nets where young/rich eat shit in inverted social contract to caretake old/rich(er) at their expense, i.e. new gen will be materially worse off than old gen. Ultimately PRC can on paper afford to caretake for old/poor, vs advanced economies on paper cannot afford to caretake for old/rich. India crashing TFR is old/poor + young/poor double shit sandwich. Everyone be flailing but guess who'll flail least. The flailing China is going suffer is old poor retiring in abundance they never dreamed of while everyone else likely regress vs past.