Author Topic: Demographics  (Read 55625 times)

DougMacG

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Demographics, Dogs Outnumber Children in San Francisco...
« Reply #100 on: November 05, 2019, 07:19:39 AM »
https://airmail.news/issues/2019-11-2/marking-their-territory
A headline from Drudge.

Everyone says that future demographics favor Democrats, but Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders style Democrats aren't reproducing anymore.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #101 on: November 05, 2019, 07:25:58 AM »
Coincidentally I was ruminating this morning on how we could educate the new immigrants, illegal and legal, into understanding the genius of the American experiment . . .  Contrast the subversion of our youth by the Left beginning in the early 70s.

G M

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #102 on: November 05, 2019, 08:55:22 AM »
Coincidentally I was ruminating this morning on how we could educate the new immigrants, illegal and legal, into understanding the genius of the American experiment . . .  Contrast the subversion of our youth by the Left beginning in the early 70s.

"Where does your free sh*t come from?"

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #103 on: November 05, 2019, 09:08:20 AM »
Actually that is a fg brilliant bullet point response to free shit proposals.

G M

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #104 on: November 05, 2019, 09:16:35 AM »


"Excuse me, have you gentlemen read the Federalist Papers"?

DougMacG

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Re: Demographics, Maybe the tree will pay for it...
« Reply #105 on: November 05, 2019, 09:53:11 AM »
Actually that is a fg brilliant bullet point response to free shit proposals.

They are not ashamed to say aloud they want someone else to pay for your sh*t.

This argument that has been going on for a long time:

“Tax Everyone But Me” included an instance starting with “Congress! Congress! Don’t tax me”
   - March 1932 “Collier’s Weekly

Human nature being what it is, it is [also] true that pretty much everybody is inclined to join in the chorus: “Congress, congress, don’t tax me; tax that fellow behind the tree.”
1932 April 5, Morning World-Herald, Omaha, NE

'Don't tax you, don't tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.'
   - Russell B. Long, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, D-LA, July, 1973

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/04/tax-tree/




Crafty_Dog

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Stratfor: Russian Demographics
« Reply #109 on: January 23, 2020, 06:59:57 AM »
Stratfor Worldview


An Aging Workforce Dims Russia’s Economic Forecast
Sim Tack
Global Analyst , Stratfor

Jan 23, 2020 | 10:00 GMT

HIGHLIGHTS

By 2036, the number of young adults living in Russia is expected to rapidly decline just as the largest segment of its population approaches retirement.

Moscow's move to extend retirement ages will sustain the size of Russia's labor market in the short term, though it ultimately will make its workforce older, less efficient and less productive.

In the long term, Russia's aging labor force will severely restrict its potential for economic growth, which could compel Russia to seek out new economic relations, as well as exercise more constraint toward the West.

Russia's population has long been projected to shrink in the coming decades due to high emigration and low birth rates. But recent projections forecast an even faster reduction than previously anticipated, raising new concerns over the severity of the country's demographic decline and the potential impact on the Russian economy. For now, extended retirement ages and an upcoming boom of young workers will help Moscow temporarily manage the effects of its demographic decline — though that won't keep Russia from hemorrhaging the high-quality workers needed to keep its economy chugging in the meantime.

Indeed, substantially improving the country's population prospects will first require improving its economic prospects to the point where it either keeps Russians at home or attracts foreign workers. Otherwise, Russia will continue to edge ever closer to economic and political turmoil, as its deepening demographic crisis starts to significantly erode its labor force for potentially decades to come.

The Big Picture

A shrinking and aging population is just one of the many challenges Russia will face in the coming decades. But given the expected toll on its industrial capacity and labor force, it's one that could significantly impact Russia's long-term economic trajectory, as well as its foreign policy behavior.

Calm Before the Storm?

At the end of last year, Russia's national statistics office Rosstat released its latest population forecast. Overall, the report showed trendlines similar to the long-accepted realities of demographic decline in Russia. But the country's population also dropped for the first time in a decade last year. Deaths outpaced births at a record rate as well, marking Russia's highest natural population decline in 11 years. These downward trends were coupled with lower-than-anticipated migration inflows and higher-than-anticipated immigration outflows in 2019. The most negative of the three scenarios in the Rosstat forecast shows a potential population drop of 12 million by 2036, as opposed to the 8 million drop forecasted just two years ago.

This line chart shows Russia's population forecast to 2036.

Despite Russia's long-term projections of population decline, its labor force is actually expected to grow slightly, or at least remain at its current level, for the next 15 years. This counterintuitive growth will stem largely from Moscow's 2018 decision to gradually extend retirement ages over the next decade. The current retirement ages for Russian men and women are 61 and 56, respectively. By 2028, Moscow will increase these ages to 65 and 60, respectively. Extending the duration of its citizens' economic activity will help temporarily freeze Russia's dependency ratio, or the gap between those participating in the labor force (adults) and those who aren't (mostly children and seniors). It will also help reduce the strain on public spending by increasing the segment of the population from which it can derive income taxes while limiting the growth of those dependent on pensions.

These line charts show Russia's projected workforce to 2036 and the number of men of military recruitment age.

A growing number of young people is expected to enter the workforce starting in 2024, which will also help maintain the size of Russia's labor market in the coming years. In addition to the obvious economic benefits, this boost of youthful workers starting in around 2025 will limit the other effects of Russia's demographic decline as well, such as difficulties in military recruitment. Russians between the draft-eligible ages of 18 and 27 currently make up one of the smaller segments of the country's population, which has forced Moscow to downscale its ambitions for numbers for both conscripted and contracted military personnel in recent years. But by 2025, this age group is poised to start rising again as the next, larger generation of Russians reaches maturity.

The Cycle Continues

Yet while this influx of younger people may help support both military recruitment and sustenance of the labor force in the short term, it won't provide a permanent fix for Russia's aging workforce. The productivity of workers is generally assumed to peak at around 40 years old before their output and inclination toward innovation progressively decline with age. Currently, the bulk of the Russian population and workforce is either right at or on the cusp of that peak, falling between the ages of 30 and 40. But as this generation grows older and works longer under the extended retirement age, and as a larger wave of younger people enters the workforce, there will be growing concentrations of workers under the age of 30 and over the age of 45 between now and 2036. The number of the most experienced and motivated workers in the middle, meanwhile, will begin to decrease as part of Russia's returning 30-year cycle of expanding and contracting fertility rates following World War II.

Russia's projected population, by age bracket.

Russia's population contracted massively during and directly after the war due to a combination of low birth rates and the sheer loss of lives in battle. This contraction between 1938 and 1945 then contributed to another contraction in the 1970s once this war-time generation began having children, which is still visible in the smaller segment of the population between the ages of 45 and 54. The birth rates of this already small generation were then further suppressed by a 1998 financial and political crisis, which hit right as they were coming of age and starting families. As a result, their children — who are now between the ages of 15 and 24 — make up a particularly small segment of the Russian population. And once this generation reaches prime working age in 2035, it will thus shrink the most productive segment of the workforce.

Long-Term Repercussions

Given this reality, the Russian government could continue to push retirement ages back, though doing so would be wildly unpopular. Indeed, the latest hike sparked waves of protests after it was proposed in 2018, which led the Kremlin to limit the female retirement age to 60 instead of 63 as initially planned. But in addition to threatening political stability, such a move would also only further deteriorate the efficiency and quality of the Russian workforce by forcing older and less motivated Russians to remain employed for longer.

This graphic shows Russia's working population, by age.

Mitigating the actual severity of Russia's demographic decline will instead largely depend on the country's economic performance in the coming years. Significant growth could not only entice more nearby foreigners to seek out new job opportunities in Russia, but also encourage more Russians to have children. On the flip side, however, continued economic stagnation or a recession risks exacerbating the plummeting migration numbers and low birth rates chipping away at Russia's population. But given that neither demographic patterns nor other factors signal such an economic comeback in the coming decades, the latter scenario remains far more likely.

In the longer term, these demographic pressures will continue to build and impose extreme stress on the foundation of the Russian economy by severely restricting its potential for growth, as well as its resilience against other greater global threats and external shocks. Too weak to risk inviting more sanctions pressure or embargoes, Russia will find itself less able to sustain its adversarial posture toward the West. In the face of diminishing industrial capacity, the need to both insulate the Russian economy and build up financial reserves will also make collaborative economic relations — such as the one Moscow is currently developing with China — all the more crucial.

As Russia's economy worsens, it will propel even more of its younger, more capable workers as well as would-be immigrants to establish their lives elsewhere.

But perhaps most importantly is the fact that these greater economic repercussions risk exacerbating the very drivers contributing to its labor woes by making the notion of working or starting a family in Russia all the more undesirable. As Russia's economy worsens, it will propel even more of its younger, more capable workers — as well as would-be immigrants — to establish their lives elsewhere. Thus, barring an economic comeback that drastically changes its demographic fortunes, the spiraling population decline that has haunted Russia for decades will likely continue to haunt Russia for decades to come.


Crafty_Dog

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Japan Demographics
« Reply #111 on: May 04, 2020, 05:22:01 PM »


Crafty_Dog

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Ann Coulter
« Reply #113 on: June 24, 2020, 11:28:59 PM »

G M

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Re: Ann Coulter
« Reply #114 on: June 24, 2020, 11:32:50 PM »

DougMacG

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Re: Ann Coulter
« Reply #115 on: June 25, 2020, 10:03:20 AM »
Is this racist?
https://anncoulter.com/2020/06/10/why-you-no-longer-recognize-your-country/

Yes, we had lax border enforcement and sanctuary cities etc. people from south of the border came in.  These 'immigrants' voted majority Democrat and now we have one party rule, Leftism, cities on fire, debt, etc.  In Latin they call that logic, post hoc ergo propter hoc, after this, therefore, because of this, and it's partly true.  But that's not the only thing that was going on.

 One could also make the case that in this period of time we let our k-12 and all universities be taken over by indoctrinating Leftists.  Young people coming out of mostly federally funded college s are even more Leftist than Hispanic families working hard jobs, trying to make a living and raise a family.

One could also make the case that our welfare system and the so-called war on poverty perfectly overlap this time frame.  The underclass, black inner-city people in particular vote further Left than immigrants.

Instead, why not argue that the border should be controlled with a big beautiful, attended gate, and we get to decide who comes in - because that's what's what sovereign nations do.  We have an investment here we would like to protect.  We also have a debt here and would like those coming in to share in the financial responsibility.

Of course she is partly right but is her line of argument helpful?  Does it tell the whole story?  Does it win votes in the persuadable center?  More importantly I think, the politics of immigration exposes the motives of the powerful white liberal elite.  They want what they call blacks and browns for their votes and then they neglect them, destroy their families, their neighborhoods, tell them they need assistance not jobs and that private enterprise that lifted more people out of poverty than all other systems combined - sucks.  Destroy it.  All in pursuit of their own ugly political power, everyone else be damned.  We want people for their God-given potential, not identity groups.

Let's allow people in, in a planned, orderly manner and argue our constitutional principles to them as we go.

Open borders is wrong. Gangs control the border.  Huge numbers are getting raped as they come in.  Permitting this empowers and enriches organised crime on both sides of the border.  It's wrong.  We need sovereignty.  We need assimilation.  We need to know who is coming into our country.  We need to know why.  We need to control the numbers and the flow.  We need a balance of where people come from.  How does blaming everything on the people who did that help?  One might also argue that giving women the right to vote was the start of our budget problems.  I don't find that argument persuasive with that gender.

Our better message IMHO is: we need police, free enterprise, property rights, law and order, individual rights, due process, self defense, protections against mob majority rule,  not just the trendy rights.  And we need sovereignty.  We need citizens who understand and support our constitutional system.

Why can't we argue all our principles rather than make it sound like all problems are the fault of one group?  My two cents.
« Last Edit: June 25, 2020, 10:38:10 AM by DougMacG »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #116 on: June 25, 2020, 11:54:43 AM »
"Of course she is partly right but is her line of argument helpful?  Does it tell the whole story?  Does it win votes in the persuadable center?  More importantly I think, the politics of immigration exposes the motives of the powerful white liberal elite.  They want what they call blacks and browns for their votes and then they neglect them, destroy their families, their neighborhoods, tell them they need assistance not jobs and that private enterprise that lifted more people out of poverty than all other systems combined - sucks.  Destroy it.  All in pursuit of their own ugly political power, everyone else be damned.  We want people for their God-given potential, not identity groups.

"Let's allow people in, in a planned, orderly manner and argue our constitutional principles to them as we go."

THIS!

G M

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #117 on: June 25, 2020, 07:19:15 PM »
"Of course she is partly right but is her line of argument helpful?  Does it tell the whole story?  Does it win votes in the persuadable center?  More importantly I think, the politics of immigration exposes the motives of the powerful white liberal elite.  They want what they call blacks and browns for their votes and then they neglect them, destroy their families, their neighborhoods, tell them they need assistance not jobs and that private enterprise that lifted more people out of poverty than all other systems combined - sucks.  Destroy it.  All in pursuit of their own ugly political power, everyone else be damned.  We want people for their God-given potential, not identity groups.

"Let's allow people in, in a planned, orderly manner and argue our constitutional principles to them as we go."

THIS!

The lowest rate for homicide in the US is Americans of Japanese ancestry. Anyone surprised by that? Anyone think the Somali immigrants to the US share similar numbers?  No?

So, what percentage of Somali immigrants to Minnesota are interested in our constitutional principles? I bet the Federalist Papers are a big seller in Little Mogadishu!

DougMacG

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #118 on: June 25, 2020, 08:36:00 PM »
It wasn't Somalians who put Somalis in Mpls.  It was white, college educated suburbanites from the middle that we lost to the Left who empowered them to do that.

G M

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #119 on: June 25, 2020, 08:40:52 PM »
It wasn't Somalians who put Somalis in Mpls.  It was white, college educated suburbanites from the middle that we lost to the Left who empowered them to do that.

Yes. Virtue signalling just how wonderful and enlightened they are. I wonder how many were sure to live in those same areas so their children could go to school with the Somali children.


Crafty_Dog

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #121 on: July 25, 2020, 10:53:27 AM »
Global Population Projections
Expected demographic shifts could have major consequences for the global economy and balance of power.
By: Geopolitical Futures
 
(click to enlarge)

As a starting point, to get a sense of what the world might look like at the turn of the next century, it’s worth looking closely at demographic trends. The predictive power of demographic projections is often overstated. Nonetheless, if recent projections on population trends were to bear out, we would expect them to contribute to a number of potential major shifts in the global economy – and possibly even the global balance of power. For example, places like Western Europe, China and Japan that are already starting to feel the economic effects of aging and/or shrinking populations will see their demographic woes worsen. It's an open question to what extent technological advances will offset problems like rising health care and eldercare costs and allow them to sustain high levels of productivity. On the other end of the spectrum are those places where populations are expected to boom – India and Africa, in particular. Higher populations mean more mouths to feed and heavier strains on resources, of course, and thus higher potential for instability. But larger labor forces generally mean larger capacity for a country to begin amassing wealth and influence – as well as larger capacity to field a robust military.

And then there’s the U.S, which is expected to be home to another 100 million people by 2100. U.S. birth rates are declining in line with what is happening in most advanced economies, so the bulk of its increase would presumably have to come from immigration. Political volatility regarding immigration in the U.S. isn’t going away any time soon, of course, and thus immigration policy will likely remain chaotic and at times incoherent. But the reality is: The United States’ ability to attract the best and brightest from abroad, along with its ability to continually meet its low-cost labor needs with foreign workers, is a fundamental – and, per these projections, likely enduring – source of national strength.

G M

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #122 on: July 25, 2020, 01:39:28 PM »
Global Population Projections
Expected demographic shifts could have major consequences for the global economy and balance of power.
By: Geopolitical Futures
 
(click to enlarge)

As a starting point, to get a sense of what the world might look like at the turn of the next century, it’s worth looking closely at demographic trends. The predictive power of demographic projections is often overstated. Nonetheless, if recent projections on population trends were to bear out, we would expect them to contribute to a number of potential major shifts in the global economy – and possibly even the global balance of power. For example, places like Western Europe, China and Japan that are already starting to feel the economic effects of aging and/or shrinking populations will see their demographic woes worsen. It's an open question to what extent technological advances will offset problems like rising health care and eldercare costs and allow them to sustain high levels of productivity. On the other end of the spectrum are those places where populations are expected to boom – India and Africa, in particular. Higher populations mean more mouths to feed and heavier strains on resources, of course, and thus higher potential for instability. But larger labor forces generally mean larger capacity for a country to begin amassing wealth and influence – as well as larger capacity to field a robust military.

And then there’s the U.S, which is expected to be home to another 100 million people by 2100. U.S. birth rates are declining in line with what is happening in most advanced economies, so the bulk of its increase would presumably have to come from immigration. Political volatility regarding immigration in the U.S. isn’t going away any time soon, of course, and thus immigration policy will likely remain chaotic and at times incoherent. But the reality is: The United States’ ability to attract the best and brightest from abroad, along with its ability to continually meet its low-cost labor needs with foreign workers, is a fundamental – and, per these projections, likely enduring – source of national strength.

BS


DougMacG

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Re: Consequences of China's One Child Policy
« Reply #124 on: August 13, 2020, 08:01:06 AM »
https://www.aei.org/multimedia/why-chinas-one-child-policy-is-a-tragedy-like-no-other-documentary-deep-dive/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWW1Nd1pqUTRORGhpWWpKbCIsInQiOiJ0dWRta0Nhc3RCcjNVSk92amRqc2lreUluTE9lZU9qK2RONk1tWFNBbExiV3h2QnM0VWVBRjlibzZYVUp0VndNRXBqd3VkMnlpRHlWV1RKeVhIMFV3OUtrc0JWNTNZNit0b0Z1ZitEelpnZ2VVNXFnTFBHMlRZMjU2RVM2XC9iZ1cifQ%3D%3D

The only child aspect of this over generations is amazing.  Imagine everything in our lives that has to do with siblings.  Gone.  No aunts, no uncles. No cousins? Bizarre.  Imagine our social security system run with those demographics.  The rural aspect of that is devastating.
------------------------------------------------------
The percentage gender gap isn't as wide as the millions in numbers might suggest.
48.78 percent of China's population is female [Hard to find this broken down by age group and China's statistics are notoriously inaccurate.]
There were 33.59 million more men than women in China in 2016, according to figures from the country's National Bureau of Statistics that were issued last month, and 48.78 percent of China's 1.38 billion people are female, compared with a global average of 49.55 percent.
  - Feb 14, 2017 NYTimes (via google)
Population of China (2020)
1,439,323,776
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/china-demographics/
--------------------
Comparing with US:  2010 Census population, 157.0 million were female (50.8 percent) while 151.8 million were male (49.2 percent).

2016, US:  73.7 million women report voting.  63.8 million men report voting.
https://cawp.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/resources/genderdiff.pdf

2017:  57 percent of college students were female
https://nces.ed.gov/

We have our own imbalances.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2020, 08:33:30 AM by DougMacG »


Crafty_Dog

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GPF: Demographics and the labor force
« Reply #126 on: October 06, 2020, 05:49:46 PM »
Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)
By Eve Rodsky

I’m fascinated by the effects demographics have on the labor force. From longer life expectancies to lower birth rates and the introduction of artificial intelligence, it’s clear that dramatic changes in the labor market have been underway for a while. And now, the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing people to reexamine how they manage their work life, a challenge that’s perhaps best illustrated by the inopportune appearance of children and pets in Zoom calls as parents try to balance child care with working from home.

Though I have been less affected by the recent changes than most, I still find myself reflecting on the current situation. The economic shutdowns have affected people differently based on a number of factors, including their income bracket, location, age, sector, gender, etc. I’ve been thinking recently about how the pandemic affects men and women differently, as many of my friends have expressed their anxiety over balancing working from home with online schooling for their children. Just last week, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. published a report indicating that 1 in 4 women were contemplating downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce altogether due to challenges brought on by COVID-19. The U.S. Department of Labor also reported that, of the nearly 1.1 million people who left the workforce in September, three-quarters were women. Given that at least two-thirds of U.S. households rely on dual incomes, this could have a significant impact on household consumption and debt if the trend continues.

These issues reminded me of a book I read about a year ago. “Fair Play” presents a corporate approach to finding a work-life balance in dual-income households. Author Eve Rodsky starts by framing the household as a single entity with pooled resources and expenses measured in time (where money is time and time is money). Rodsky then identifies 100 household activities – some of which need to be completed daily and others at various intervals – that fall into five categories. She outlines how these activities can be managed by delegating, outsourcing and condensing.

The book was written for a niche audience that may not overlap with our own. But it’s still an interesting and important concept to consider. The idea of running one’s home life as a business struck me as very American. And the idea of efficiency was oddly appealing, though at the same time unrealistic, as it doesn’t take into account the emotions felt by every member of a household. I question how well this framework will hold up now that so many people have merged their work and home lives. In addition, I question the idea that household activities can be grouped into 100 items, and since the onset of the pandemic, I have been wondering which tasks have vanished completely, and how that’s impacted my personal perception of “having time” (though the thought that some activities have vanished for good is quite liberating).

Gender, of course, is just one angle through which we can think about demographics and labor. Another angle through which I hope to explore this topic further is age, and in particular, how people staying in the workforce longer will affect younger generations. I’ve heard that “Culture Shock” by Joanna Massey can shed some light on this topic, but I would welcome any other suggestions


Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: The Great Demographic Reversal
« Reply #128 on: December 09, 2020, 07:42:08 AM »
‘The Great Demographic Reversal’ Review: The Perils of Aging
As workers become fewer in number and global wages rise, we may see less inequality but more inflation and higher interest rates.

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
By William White
Dec. 7, 2020 5:47 pm ET




Mountains are thrown up by colliding tectonic plates, but the forces at work in their creation are hidden from view and were, for a time, ill-understood. In advanced societies in recent decades, we have seen striking changes in work, investment and income distribution, yet central bankers and ministers of finance, among others, have failed to grasp the underlying forces that brought them about. In “The Great Demographic Reversal,” Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan, both Britain-based economists, vividly document past demographic changes, along with their broad effects, and outline the strikingly different changes that, in their view, are soon to come. Not only is their book well argued, but it is bold as well. It defies the conventional wisdom that inflation will not be a problem in the near future.

The authors begin by focusing on a critical event: the opening up of an urbanizing China—as well of other, smaller countries, especially in Asia and Eastern Europe—and the insertion of many millions of low-paid workers into the global trading system. This increased workforce sharply increased the production of goods and services, which put downward pressure on global prices. But the wages of workers in advanced countries fell even more as employers moved production offshore or made credible threat to do so. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers bore the brunt of the wage shift, and income inequality rose accordingly.

The ramifications of this positive supply shock, as Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan show, were wide-ranging. With domestic wages flattened or lowered, and offshore investment beckoning, domestic investment in new plant and equipment stagnated, and income was distributed ever more unequally. The combination of rising global supply and falling domestic demand also had financial effects: With inflation suppressed, interest rates fell to historic lows. This is the world we see around us now. In the U.S., at the moment, the 10-year Treasury yield is less than 1%; the European Central Bank charges commercial banks for holding deposits with it; and there are now around $17 trillion of bonds world-wide offering a negative rate of return.

As convincing as their portrait of past trends may be, Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan, in “The Great Demographic Reversal,” are intent on arguing that things are going to change again. Indeed, they note that the new trends are already becoming evident. Urbanization in China is slowing, and its working-age population is shrinking. In advanced countries, the ratio of “dependents” to workers is rising sharply as baby boomers retire. Retirees are not only living longer but are increasingly prone to dementia at older ages. As the need for caregivers intensifies, there will be fewer workers available for other work.


PHOTO: WSJ
THE GREAT DEMOGRAPHIC REVERSAL
By Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Palgrave Macmillan, 260 pages, $29.99

A rising dependency ratio, Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan explain, is inherently inflationary, since “dependents” consume but do not produce. Meanwhile, workers are likely to consume more as a shortage of labor pushes up wages, and investment will rise in advanced countries as companies substitute capital for more expensive labor. In short, demand will rise even as supply potential falls. While new technology could increase productivity enough to offset the shortage of workers, the authors (quoting conflicting views by respected experts) refuse to assume that it will.


Extrapolating from these prospective developments, Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan foresee income inequality narrowing—and inflation and interest rates going up. To some, like poorer workers and soon-to-retire savers, these shifts will obviously be good news. But they could well cause severe problems for governments as well as for agents in the private sector that, under the influence of low interest rates, have taken on outsize debt. Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan ponder various approaches to a debt overhang without endorsing any one policy: e.g., debt restructuring and, for governments, higher or new taxes (e.g., taxes on land and carbon). It’s hard not to conclude that the authors expect inflation to be a significant part of the solution, since it is easier to pay back loans in dollars that are worth less.

Undoubtedly “The Great Demographic Reversal” identifies crucial if overlooked forces that may lead to an inflationary future and higher interest rates. But there are other forces at work to which the authors might have given more attention. A complementary narrative might emphasize, for instance, the role of central banks. They have helped to bring us to our current state, by an excessive reliance on monetary stimulus and debt expansion, and their future policies might yet lead us into a world quite different from the one that Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan project.

In recent years, central banks, instead of letting prices fall “naturally” in response to demographic shifts, have resisted such a price decline with ever more aggressive monetary expansion. Moreover, the resulting borrowing has gone toward consumption more than productive investments. Debt, both public and private, had hit record high levels even before the pandemic and had been recognized as a “headwind” constraining economic expansion. The economic effects of the pandemic had to be met with still more expansion, adding to the debt-overhang problem. Worse, easy money and easy access to credit can, over time, threaten the stability of the financial sector as the “search for yield” draws investors to riskier creditors. Should these conditions culminate in another financial crisis, a debt-deflation spiral might follow—not inflation.


Even if Messrs. Goodhart and Pradhan are right to predict an inflationary future, inflation might hit much higher levels than the authors suggest. Indeed, history shows that high inflation is a common outcome when large government deficits are increasingly financed—as they are now—by central banks. Still, “The Great Demographic Reversal” provides an instructive glimpse of a possible future and a reminder of the forces that have brought us to this point. No one can say we haven’t been warned.

Mr. White, a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto, was formerly the economic adviser at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland.

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China: Demographics
« Reply #129 on: February 09, 2021, 12:00:56 PM »
China’s population problem. The number of newborns formally registered in China’s household registration system, known as hukou, fell around 15 percent in 2020, from 11.79 million in 2019. The damage to China’s demographic outlook done by tight population controls has been immense – and it may take several generations for the country to recover.

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GPF: China Virus and Demographic Change
« Reply #130 on: March 15, 2021, 10:11:35 AM »
   
COVID-19 Expedites Demographic Change
The pandemic adds urgency to the rebalancing of education and work.
By: Antonia Colibasanu

Editor’s Note: The following was inspired by a presentation delivered by the author at a webinar for Scholas Occurrentes, an international scholastic organization founded by Pope Francis. The topic of the webinar was “Education and Development in (post) pandemic Times.”

In geopolitical analysis, we focus on the behavior of societies organized into complex, geographically defined systems – otherwise known as nation-states. The list of factors that shape a nation-state’s behavior is extensive and, as the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates, not always static. In trying to understand how the pandemic will affect geopolitics, we need to understand what COVID-19 means for demographics.

A country’s demographics dictate its socio-economic model, and through that affect its relationship to other countries in the global system. An older population translates into more retirees and fewer workers. When people retire, they typically consume less. As a larger share of the population transitions from work to retirement, the burden on society grows – there are relatively fewer workers contributing to pension systems, and labor is diverted to care for the elderly.

On a national scale, the shift in favor of retirees over workers means private consumption no longer drives economic growth, which means consumption-led economic growth must give way to either investment-led or export-led models of growth. Increases in private investment translate to higher national output, but if domestic consumption is declining – as it is in an aging society – then that added output must be exported.

2021 Demographics
(click to enlarge)

Germany is the perfect example. More than a quarter (28.6 percent) of the German population is over the age of 60. The less Germans consume, the more they must export, and the more money is available for investment. At the same time, a shrinking labor pool compels Germany to invest in the development of a European supply chain to support its industry. This model works as long as there are no major economic crises hitting its buyers (export markets) and as long as the demographics remain fairly stable. In other words, as long as the system remains balanced.

Preserving this balance has been a German obsession since the financial crisis hit in 2008. Defending its primary export market and production network – the European continent, united under the flag of the European Union – is an existential concern. With the U.S. market aging and thus shrinking, Germany sought alternatives in Asia, which meant improving its trade relations with Asia’s biggest market: China. Moreover, Berlin’s immigration policy has been friendly to those who are interested in working in the manufacturing sector, thereby supporting the country’s export power. When the refugee crisis hit in 2014-16, Germany’s view was that refugees could stay as long as they integrated into the country’s socio-economic model. Berlin designed educational programs intended to get them assimilated into society in an effort to solve its demographic problem.

Other countries, including China and Russia, face similar challenges. Though their economic problems are different in nature, they too have export-dependent economies and low birth rates.

Data on how the pandemic is affecting national demographics are still limited. Figures from the U.S. and some European countries, however, suggest life expectancy and birth rates have dropped. In the United States, life expectancy dropped by more than a year, while in France it fell by six months. Some of this is obviously caused by the disease itself, but other factors, like increased uncertainty and stress, are also at play. It’s unclear how long these effects will persist, just as it’s unclear how long the pandemic will last or how COVID-19 will affect survivors later in life. It seems likely, though, that national demographics will change.

Life Expectancy, 2019
(click to enlarge)

The world started to change rapidly after the crisis of 2008. Consumption decreased, and large markets like the United States became smaller. For a variety of reasons, protectionism slowly returned, posing another obstacle to export-led growth. The crisis highlighted the global imbalance between demand and supply, and a slow rebalancing began. Part of this manifested in the U.S.-China trade conflict. Another manifestation was social strife within countries, between social classes and between urban and rural communities. A prominent example is Brexit, where the division between the British urban and rural realities essentially caused the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU. But there are others, including Russia, where the realities of urban life differ dramatically from life in rural areas. An important feature of the rebalancing is that governments generally had fewer and fewer resources available for the less developed, usually non-urban parts of their countries.

Restructuring is a slow process, but something governments can do rather quickly is adjust educational models to support shifts to new economic models. For instance, in the United Kingdom, the need to reform the university system was apparent as talks around Brexit began. The problem was accessibility: It had become increasingly difficult for Brits to access British education. Discussions on reforming the U.S. higher education system to increase affordability have also increased since 2008.

The COVID-19 pandemic amplified these problems, increasing the urgency of the rebalancing. As the coronavirus spread, working and studying from home became the new normal for much of society. Not everyone could work from home, of course, but remote studying was simpler, at least from a technical perspective.

Last month, Gallup released a report on the learning experiences of high school students in Massachusetts during 2020. One of its findings was that technological barriers (connectivity and hardware-related problems) prevented lower-income students – who are among the most likely to be learning exclusively from home – from fully accessing learning at a high rate. Studies in Europe have found similar results. In France and Germany, technological access is dependent on household income. According to an April 2020 report by the European Commission, more than a fifth of children lack at least two of the basic resources for studying at home: their own room, reading opportunities, internet access and parental involvement (for children under 10 years old). The same is true of other countries.

Some issues with education existed before the pandemic and will still exist after it – namely, the apparent disconnect between the educational market and the needs of the labor market. Learning experiences and satisfaction depend on the teacher’s engagement and pedagogical method. But traditional teaching methods were criticized, both in the U.S. and Europe, even before the pandemic.

The disconnect between traditional pedagogical methods and the modern world is not surprising – changes in society have outpaced changes in teaching, and some divergence is natural given the generational disconnect between the young (students) and the old (teachers). But in light of the pandemic and its accelerating effect on all matters, this tension is greater now than it would have been under normal circumstances. We’re living through a time of unprecedented social change, including a high-speed restructuring of the educational models at national levels, triggered by changing economic models. We don’t know how China or Germany will change as the U.S. shifts away from its role as the global consumer. We don’t know how Russia will reshape its economy, or how the European Union will evolve. But all these changes will be triggered by demographic changes that are happening faster than ever before. The urgent reset that all societies are going through will likely mean an increase in inequalities, something that might raise the potential for conflict at both local and international levels.

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #131 on: April 28, 2021, 05:33:45 AM »
April 27, 2021
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What We're Reading: Babies and Bad Guys
Weekly reviews of what's on our bookshelves.
By: George Friedman and Ryan Bridges
Challenge of the World Population Explosion
U.S. Government Accountability Office

While browsing Amazon, I came across a literary wonder: a book published by a federal agency on challenges posed by the world population explosion. It brought me back to my youth. That was the time that the fear of the population explosion was real. Serious people, from the Rockefeller Foundation to the Club of Rome, were positing an imminent breaking point at which the food supply could no longer support the population and raw materials could not support the demand. The fear it generated was real. Something had to be done to stop the birth rate from rising. China adopted the one-child strategy. Serious discussions were had over issuing licenses for having children. The people saying this were no fools, but they couldn’t imagine being wrong.

The world did not end in 1970 as the Club of Rome predicted. What the club failed to predict was technological advancements such as birth control. It neglected to consider that children were no longer instruments of production or providers in old age. They had become, financially speaking, a net loss. The urge to reproduce is biological, of course, but for generations it was also economical. That no longer being the case in much of the world, the population explosion dissolved in industrialized countries. And now, seemingly everywhere, birth rates are falling dramatically.

I was therefore stunned and delighted to discover that as late as 2013, the government was issuing studies on the population explosion – quite a while after it had ended. Washington had genuine concerns about the disaster facing us. Meetings were held, papers were published, and demands were made. But now, everyone knows that the real thing that will kill all of us is … something else. Even so, there is clearly at least one person at the GAO warning us of the coming baby apocalypse.


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George Friedman: The Decline of Births
« Reply #133 on: May 07, 2021, 03:56:55 PM »
May 7, 2021
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The Decline of Births and the Transformation of All things
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

The U.S. birth rate fell by 4 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, resulting in the lowest number of babies born since 1979. The fertility rate now stands at 1.64 births per woman, calculated over child-bearing years, which is the lowest since the 1930s when record-keeping began. To maintain the population level, American women need to average 2.1 births. To some extent, the decline is due to COVID-19, of course, but the bulk of babies born in 2020 were conceived prior to March, when the fury of the pandemic struck the United States.

The decline is the continuation of a massive shift in reproduction patterns. It is not unique to the United States. Birth rates started falling in Europe and in China (thanks to the one-child policy), but it is now a global phenomenon. Global population has not yet begun to fall, but the data shows that the advanced industrial world’s population will begin contracting in the coming years, and population will stabilize in the poorer countries before declining.

I wrote about this in my book “The Next 100 Years,” published in 2009, where I labeled it as the most significant social process facing the world. I argued there that the birth rate was falling because prior to the Industrial Revolution, children were valuable in helping to produce wealth and in guaranteeing parents would be looked after in their old age. Six-year-olds could weed vegetable gardens and plant food and, many years later, feed their aging parents, who had a life expectancy much lower than our own now. Children have become fiendishly expensive. A middle-class family in the city with a large number of children faces economic challenges, especially if the children intend to go to college. Oftentimes, the impulse to reproduce is tempered by economic reality.

That impulse has been hardwired into the human spirit by the power of sexual desire. And yet, a series of technical innovations – namely, contraception – have severed sexual impulse from reproduction. Those innovations, particularly the birth control pill, have had a radical impact on women’s lives. My grandmother had 10 children. This wasn’t an unusual number in her day. The production can be explained by economics and a lack of birth control, but never forget that money and lust, coupled with medical improvements that lowered infant mortality rates, drove the population explosion.

The cost of children imposed a self-limiting factor on reproduction without forcing us to suspend our psyches. This affected women’s lives more than men’s since unintended pregnancies were something for which women bore the brunt of the burden. Further technical innovations such as reusable bottles and baby formula meant that the father could share at least somewhat in nurturing the infant. The birth rate fell. But as important, the distinction between men and women narrowed. Women alone can bear children, but she now has control over whether and when this will happen, and the feeding of the infant can be transferred to others.

The economic imprudence of having children was controlled by technology instead of ineffective rules of celibacy. The experience of having children shifted to a small but significant extent. As being a woman became less grueling, the pattern of female life began to track with a male’s. And this in turn created feminism, one of the most radical social shifts in human history. It took a relatively long time for reality to intrude on culture, but now the old role of women is seen as a form of discrimination imposed by men, instead of a necessity imposed by nature.

This is a vast experiment in the question of biological determinism. Women need not be turned into mothers by sexual desire. They do not have to engage in the intense nurturing of a newborn. The biological bond is broken. But does that change what Goethe called the eternal feminine and the eternal masculine? Can the transformation of a woman’s role change a woman’s psyche, or for that matter, does bearing the obligation of nurturing the child change not only the experience of a man but his psyche? With the birth rate plunging and gender norms converging, perhaps the greatest experiment in human history is taking place. The one thing a man can never do is become pregnant and experience what it means to give birth. Having been the helpless onlooker in such events, it does seem to transform life, but then the experience is no longer a byproduct of desire. For many, it’s separate and therefore elective.

Not nearly as fascinating but still of interest is how a contracting population affects humanity as a whole. The dynamic of political life will obviously change. With life expectancy increasing from the same medical innovations that have redefined relations between men and women, there will be in the next couple of decades more people over the age of 60 than under. If democracy lasts as long, they will define the national agenda, very likely in their own interests, creating taxes that cripple the younger citizens and benefit the older. Moreover, the old will be decreasingly productive due to the many diseases of old age, and the cost of keeping them alive will stagger society.

United States Demographics, 1979 and 2020
(click to enlarge)

At this point, there is an affection for the elderly, particularly from their children, but since the elderly divert time and money, there is increasingly a sense of frustration. With the tilt in birth rates, many elderly will be without children. It will be the price they pay for the pleasure of having been free from responsibility. Their emotional and financial needs will be met wholly by the government, which is not so good at financial help and laughable at emotional help. In almost all traditional societies, the elderly are revered. What seems more likely in the future is that the elderly will be resented.

Of course, just as technological change transformed the lives of women, it might redefine the lives of the elderly. We hear rumors of extraordinary strides in medicine and in artificial intelligence. One might cure the miseries of old age, the other might maintain production without the need for a mass society. And one might add that the fear of global warming might subside with a smaller population.

The range of transformative possibilities contained in the decline of the birth rate is staggering. So is the opportunity for economic, cultural and social chaos. We have begun to feel the very earliest breakers on this beach, but clearly they will intensify. To my thinking, the issue of a shrinking population is the center of any imagining of the future.

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China
« Reply #134 on: May 11, 2021, 01:29:28 PM »
A point I have been making here on this forum for years:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57067180

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More Chinese Demographics
« Reply #135 on: May 11, 2021, 07:56:48 PM »
Xi Jinping’s Achilles Heel
China’s birth dearth is becoming more acute as its population ages.
By The Editorial Board
May 11, 2021 6:31 pm ET


President Xi Jinping has made no secret of his ambition to make China the dominant global power of the 21st century. But the latest Chinese census reveals a major vulnerability: What if the Middle Kingdom doesn’t have enough young people?

After some delay China finally released its census results Tuesday. Though the population grew a little last year—to 1.412 billion in 2020 from 1.4 billion—the more salient fact is that its population continues to gray as Chinese women are having fewer babies. The proportion of people 60 or older increased to 18.7% of the population (from 13.3% in 2010), even as it recorded the lowest number of annual births (12 million) since 1961.

Beijing has seen this coming. In 2016 Chinese couples were allowed to have two children instead of one, reversing a policy in place for 35 years. Last month the People’s Bank of China recommended the government abandon its population control policies if it hopes to compete with America, but even that may be too late. Once fertility falls, the trend is hard to reverse no matter what incentives governments offer.


Many governments have tried, and some believe that Poland or Hungary (which now spends nearly 5% of its GDP to encourage its citizens to have more children) may have the answer. But generally these policies have either failed outright, or shown at best modest fertility gains.


The social and economic implications are enormous, involving everything from the dynamics of the Chinese family to the growing demands on China’s already stressed and underfunded health and pension programs. In March the government announced it will gradually raise the retirement age from 60 today, no doubt in expectation of these results. The retirement costs would be difficult in any country, but China hasn’t achieved broad prosperity beyond its coast and major cities.

Other nations also face graying populations and a declining total fertility rate, which is the average number of children per woman. The Japanese, Singaporeans and South Koreans are wealthier than the Chinese but have, respectively, total fertility rates of 1.36, 1.1 and 0.9. Europe’s overall is 1.522. The U.S. rate is 1.7, while China’s is 1.3.

The trend confirms that Beijing’s often brutal family planning interventions have left China with a demographic time bomb. We should also acknowledge that the ruling Communists were often encouraged by Westerners in the 1960s and 1970s who feared the world would soon be overpopulated.

Now the demographic bill is coming due. Mr. Xi may believe the U.S. is in decline. But he may learn that the greatest obstacle to his ambition to replace the U.S. as global leader doesn’t come from abroad. It is the aging Chinese population that is a legacy of his Communist Party predecessors.

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GPF: China's new three child policy
« Reply #136 on: June 01, 2021, 10:21:37 AM »
Three-body problem. Most Chinese couples will be able to have as many as three children following the approval of a major policy shift at a Politburo meeting chaired by Xi on Monday. This follows last month's release of China's latest census, which showed an acceleration of demographic trends that threaten to do all sorts of damage to China's economic trajectory.

=================================
MARC:  I have been making this point here for years.


By Phillip Orchard

The Chinese Communist Party may finally be getting out of the family planning business. Three years ago, the party scrapped its infamous one-child policy. Last week, Bloomberg reported that China’s State Council is mulling ending birth limits altogether. The damage to China’s demographic outlook done by tight population controls has been immense – and it may take several generations for the country to recover.

The Damage Done

When Deng Xiaoping’s government implemented the one-child policy in 1979, population control was all the rage across the globe. Amid booming population growth in the years following World War II, some demographers were warning that the human race was about to breed itself into extinction. Most famously, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller “The Population Bomb” warned that hundreds of millions of people, mostly in the developing world, would starve in the 1970s alone. This, of course, turned out to be wildly off the mark. Among other failures, it did not anticipate extraordinary advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization. The famines that did occur were primarily caused by age-old scourges like war, political instability and gross policy mismanagement.

But for China, the threat was all too easy to visualize. A decade earlier, between 23 million and 55 million people starved to death during the famine that resulted from Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, and collectivization had left the country’s agricultural sector in tatters. Meanwhile, China’s population was exploding, nearly doubling in the years since the Communist Party had won the Chinese civil war. To stave off another disaster, the party turned to its most tried and true policy response: tightened control over even the most intimate affairs of its people.

Today, China has become a victim of its own success. In 1980, Chinese population growth, measured as the crude birthrate minus the crude death rate, had reached 15 per 1,000 people. By 2015, when the one-child rule was lifted countrywide, this had dropped below 5.5 per 1,000 people. Fertility rates today are estimated to be around 1.7 children per adult female, well short of the 2.1 replacement rate. In fact, fertility rates have been below replacement levels since the early 1990s, bottoming out at just 1.18 in 2010.

This means that the average Chinese citizen is getting older, fast, and this trend is expected to pick up speed beginning around 2030. According to China’s National Development and Reform Commission, China’s working-age population (those aged 16 to 59) will fall more than 23 percent to around 830 million by 2030 and 700 million by 2050. By then, a full third of the Chinese population will have reached retirement age, compared to around 15 percent today.

Making matters worse, fertility rates haven’t increased substantially since Beijing decided to allow families to have a second child three years ago. In 2016, according to official figures, 18.46 million Chinese babies were born, nearly 2 million more than the previous year and the highest number since 2000. Nearly half were born to families that already had a child. But things came back to earth in 2017, with births plummeting some 3.5 percent to 17.23 million, nearly 3 million short of official forecasts.

The problem for China is that government policy hasn’t been the only thing keeping birthrates low. The one-child policy has, in many ways, become self-sustaining. In Chinese culture, people are generally expected to take care of their parents when they reach their golden years. This means average Chinese households will be expected to take care of four parents – and have no siblings to share this burden with – leaving less time and money to raise kids of their own. This, combined with factors like career pressures, changing social pressures, the lower birthrates that generally coincide with urbanization and so forth, means Chinese couples have become less inclined to have more kids even if allowed to. According to the Population Research Institute of Peking University, “fertility desire” – the number of children the average Chinese adult female wants (or believes she will be able to afford) – is between 1.6 and 1.8.

Drags on China’s Growth

A shrinking, aging population poses problems for any country; China’s size and position on the development curve simply make them more acute.

For one, it means a lot more retired people to take care of – and fewer working-age people to shoulder the burden of rising pension payouts, health care costs and so forth. In China, the dependency ratio (the number of people too young or old to work divided by the working population) is expected to surge to nearly 70 percent by 2050, compared to just more than 36 percent in 2016. In other words, there is expected to be 1.3 workers for every retired person by the middle of this century, down from nearly three today. Even if the end of the two-child policy compels Chinese couples to start having substantially more children, an immediate bump would actually make the dependency ratio worse for another 15-20 years (in other words, until those newborns enter the workforce).


(click to enlarge)

Magnifying this problem are macroeconomic challenges. For example, a shrinking population means declining consumer demand and output. Tighter labor markets drive up wages, making export-oriented industries less competitive – a major concern for a manufacturing-dependent country like China, whose economic rise is fueled by abundant low-cost workers.

To a degree, health care advances that enable people to live and work longer, combined with technological advances that enable the Chinese economy to sustain productivity with fewer workers, will help soften the blow. This, in part, explains Beijing’s hearty support for emerging technologies – such as self-driving cars, robotization and artificial intelligence – that will inevitably displace workers in the short term. Nonetheless, the demographic outlook is expected to be yet another drag on China’s continued economic rise.

Projections at this time-scale are bound to be inexact, but the International Monetary Fund forecasts that demographic pressures will reduce Chinese gross domestic product growth by 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent over the next three decades. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, demographics is a major contributor to what it expects will be a sharp decline in economic growth beginning in the not-too-distant future. Between 2030 and 2060 (the same period when the Chinese government expects to see the sharpest drop in the working-age population), the OECD forecasts just 2.3 percent annual growth, down from an estimated 6.8 percent last year.

Why It’s Worse For China

China isn’t alone in this challenge. South Korea, Japan and a number of Western countries have comparably low fertility rates and shrinking, aging populations. (Every day in Japan, the world’s oldest country, nearly a thousand more people die than are born.) But China is different in four main ways.

First, this trend is happening faster in China than elsewhere. The slice of the Chinese population made up of retirees will jump from less than 10 percent to a full quarter in just 25 years. In Western countries, this shift has taken place far more gradually, generally over a century or more. China will have far less time to adjust.

Second, it’s happening earlier on China’s development curve than any other major economy. In other words, China is growing old before it grows rich. When Japan reached the percentage of retirees China has now, per capita incomes were double those of China today. When South Korea crossed this threshold, incomes were nearly three times as high. This meant more money to sink into eldercare in aggregate, plus fewer one-child households left holding the bag. And even these countries are still struggling to cope with the rising social costs and economic stagnation tied to demographic decline.

Third, at least compared to Western countries, China has never been particularly receptive to immigration. The United States’ ability to attract and absorb immigrants is an enduring source of national strength, occasional political spasms over the issue notwithstanding. China has no tradition of attracting foreign immigrants; just 1,576 foreigners were granted permanent residency in China in 2016. And it’s unclear how the country’s rigid systems of social control would adapt to a major influx of outsiders.

Finally, China’s political-economic balance is far more precarious than that of more developed economies. The benefits of its economic rise have not been shared equally between the coasts and the interior. For a variety of other structural reasons, economic growth is already expected to gradually slow over the coming decades; demographics will make the challenge only more difficult to manage. Making matters worse, the one-child policy led to an explosion of gender-selective abortions, creating a sizable imbalance between the sexes. By 2014, there were 41 million more men than women in China – and this gap is widening. In other words, there will be tens of millions of males with poor chances of marrying and looking for an outlet to vent their frustrations. In fact, after it lifted the one-child policy in 2015, the government saw a wave of protests by couples demanding compensation for being denied the right to build a bigger family.

In a democratic country, mass social and economic dissatisfaction may lead to the fall of a particular government, but in democracies, governments come and go all the time. To the Communist Party, the threat of social unrest is existential. The public tolerates the party’s tight social controls so long as it continues to deliver on its pledge to make the whole country a modern, vibrant state. In this climate, even a modest economic slowdown could reverberate in ways that threaten to make the whole project come undone.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this report misstated the rate of China’s population growth in the country’s post-civil war years. The growth rate was around 2 percent. The error has been corrected on site.

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GPF: 2018 Chinese Demographics
« Reply #137 on: November 23, 2021, 09:43:57 AM »
By Phillip Orchard

The Chinese Communist Party may finally be getting out of the family planning business. Three years ago, the party scrapped its infamous one-child policy. Last week, Bloomberg reported that China’s State Council is mulling ending birth limits altogether. The damage to China’s demographic outlook done by tight population controls has been immense – and it may take several generations for the country to recover.

The Damage Done

When Deng Xiaoping’s government implemented the one-child policy in 1979, population control was all the rage across the globe. Amid booming population growth in the years following World War II, some demographers were warning that the human race was about to breed itself into extinction. Most famously, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller “The Population Bomb” warned that hundreds of millions of people, mostly in the developing world, would starve in the 1970s alone. This, of course, turned out to be wildly off the mark. Among other failures, it did not anticipate extraordinary advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization. The famines that did occur were primarily caused by age-old scourges like war, political instability and gross policy mismanagement.

But for China, the threat was all too easy to visualize. A decade earlier, between 23 million and 55 million people starved to death during the famine that resulted from Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, and collectivization had left the country’s agricultural sector in tatters. Meanwhile, China’s population was exploding, nearly doubling in the years since the Communist Party had won the Chinese civil war. To stave off another disaster, the party turned to its most tried and true policy response: tightened control over even the most intimate affairs of its people.

Today, China has become a victim of its own success. In 1980, Chinese population growth, measured as the crude birthrate minus the crude death rate, had reached 15 per 1,000 people. By 2015, when the one-child rule was lifted countrywide, this had dropped below 5.5 per 1,000 people. Fertility rates today are estimated to be around 1.7 children per adult female, well short of the 2.1 replacement rate. In fact, fertility rates have been below replacement levels since the early 1990s, bottoming out at just 1.18 in 2010.

This means that the average Chinese citizen is getting older, fast, and this trend is expected to pick up speed beginning around 2030. According to China’s National Development and Reform Commission, China’s working-age population (those aged 16 to 59) will fall more than 23 percent to around 830 million by 2030 and 700 million by 2050. By then, a full third of the Chinese population will have reached retirement age, compared to around 15 percent today.

Making matters worse, fertility rates haven’t increased substantially since Beijing decided to allow families to have a second child three years ago. In 2016, according to official figures, 18.46 million Chinese babies were born, nearly 2 million more than the previous year and the highest number since 2000. Nearly half were born to families that already had a child. But things came back to earth in 2017, with births plummeting some 3.5 percent to 17.23 million, nearly 3 million short of official forecasts.

The problem for China is that government policy hasn’t been the only thing keeping birthrates low. The one-child policy has, in many ways, become self-sustaining. In Chinese culture, people are generally expected to take care of their parents when they reach their golden years. This means average Chinese households will be expected to take care of four parents – and have no siblings to share this burden with – leaving less time and money to raise kids of their own. This, combined with factors like career pressures, changing social pressures, the lower birthrates that generally coincide with urbanization and so forth, means Chinese couples have become less inclined to have more kids even if allowed to. According to the Population Research Institute of Peking University, “fertility desire” – the number of children the average Chinese adult female wants (or believes she will be able to afford) – is between 1.6 and 1.8.

Drags on China’s Growth

A shrinking, aging population poses problems for any country; China’s size and position on the development curve simply make them more acute.

For one, it means a lot more retired people to take care of – and fewer working-age people to shoulder the burden of rising pension payouts, health care costs and so forth. In China, the dependency ratio (the number of people too young or old to work divided by the working population) is expected to surge to nearly 70 percent by 2050, compared to just more than 36 percent in 2016. In other words, there is expected to be 1.3 workers for every retired person by the middle of this century, down from nearly three today. Even if the end of the two-child policy compels Chinese couples to start having substantially more children, an immediate bump would actually make the dependency ratio worse for another 15-20 years (in other words, until those newborns enter the workforce).


(click to enlarge)

Magnifying this problem are macroeconomic challenges. For example, a shrinking population means declining consumer demand and output. Tighter labor markets drive up wages, making export-oriented industries less competitive – a major concern for a manufacturing-dependent country like China, whose economic rise is fueled by abundant low-cost workers.

To a degree, health care advances that enable people to live and work longer, combined with technological advances that enable the Chinese economy to sustain productivity with fewer workers, will help soften the blow. This, in part, explains Beijing’s hearty support for emerging technologies – such as self-driving cars, robotization and artificial intelligence – that will inevitably displace workers in the short term. Nonetheless, the demographic outlook is expected to be yet another drag on China’s continued economic rise.

Projections at this time-scale are bound to be inexact, but the International Monetary Fund forecasts that demographic pressures will reduce Chinese gross domestic product growth by 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent over the next three decades. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, demographics is a major contributor to what it expects will be a sharp decline in economic growth beginning in the not-too-distant future. Between 2030 and 2060 (the same period when the Chinese government expects to see the sharpest drop in the working-age population), the OECD forecasts just 2.3 percent annual growth, down from an estimated 6.8 percent last year.

Why It’s Worse For China

China isn’t alone in this challenge. South Korea, Japan and a number of Western countries have comparably low fertility rates and shrinking, aging populations. (Every day in Japan, the world’s oldest country, nearly a thousand more people die than are born.) But China is different in four main ways.

First, this trend is happening faster in China than elsewhere. The slice of the Chinese population made up of retirees will jump from less than 10 percent to a full quarter in just 25 years. In Western countries, this shift has taken place far more gradually, generally over a century or more. China will have far less time to adjust.

Second, it’s happening earlier on China’s development curve than any other major economy. In other words, China is growing old before it grows rich. When Japan reached the percentage of retirees China has now, per capita incomes were double those of China today. When South Korea crossed this threshold, incomes were nearly three times as high. This meant more money to sink into eldercare in aggregate, plus fewer one-child households left holding the bag. And even these countries are still struggling to cope with the rising social costs and economic stagnation tied to demographic decline.

Third, at least compared to Western countries, China has never been particularly receptive to immigration. The United States’ ability to attract and absorb immigrants is an enduring source of national strength, occasional political spasms over the issue notwithstanding. China has no tradition of attracting foreign immigrants; just 1,576 foreigners were granted permanent residency in China in 2016. And it’s unclear how the country’s rigid systems of social control would adapt to a major influx of outsiders.

Finally, China’s political-economic balance is far more precarious than that of more developed economies. The benefits of its economic rise have not been shared equally between the coasts and the interior. For a variety of other structural reasons, economic growth is already expected to gradually slow over the coming decades; demographics will make the challenge only more difficult to manage. Making matters worse, the one-child policy led to an explosion of gender-selective abortions, creating a sizable imbalance between the sexes. By 2014, there were 41 million more men than women in China – and this gap is widening. In other words, there will be tens of millions of males with poor chances of marrying and looking for an outlet to vent their frustrations. In fact, after it lifted the one-child policy in 2015, the government saw a wave of protests by couples demanding compensation for being denied the right to build a bigger family.

In a democratic country, mass social and economic dissatisfaction may lead to the fall of a particular government, but in democracies, governments come and go all the time. To the Communist Party, the threat of social unrest is existential. The public tolerates the party’s tight social controls so long as it continues to deliver on its pledge to make the whole country a modern, vibrant state. In this climate, even a modest economic slowdown could reverberate in ways that threaten to make the whole project come undone.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this report misstated the rate of China’s population growth in the country’s post-civil war years. The growth rate was around 2 percent. The error has been corrected on site.

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #138 on: November 23, 2021, 10:07:22 AM »
can't see w/o script

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Re: Demographics
« Reply #139 on: November 23, 2021, 10:17:33 AM »
How's this?

By Phillip Orchard

The Chinese Communist Party may finally be getting out of the family planning business. Three years ago, the party scrapped its infamous one-child policy. Last week, Bloomberg reported that China’s State Council is mulling ending birth limits altogether. The damage to China’s demographic outlook done by tight population controls has been immense – and it may take several generations for the country to recover.

The Damage Done

When Deng Xiaoping’s government implemented the one-child policy in 1979, population control was all the rage across the globe. Amid booming population growth in the years following World War II, some demographers were warning that the human race was about to breed itself into extinction. Most famously, Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller “The Population Bomb” warned that hundreds of millions of people, mostly in the developing world, would starve in the 1970s alone. This, of course, turned out to be wildly off the mark. Among other failures, it did not anticipate extraordinary advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization. The famines that did occur were primarily caused by age-old scourges like war, political instability and gross policy mismanagement.

But for China, the threat was all too easy to visualize. A decade earlier, between 23 million and 55 million people starved to death during the famine that resulted from Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, and collectivization had left the country’s agricultural sector in tatters. Meanwhile, China’s population was exploding, nearly doubling in the years since the Communist Party had won the Chinese civil war. To stave off another disaster, the party turned to its most tried and true policy response: tightened control over even the most intimate affairs of its people.

Today, China has become a victim of its own success. In 1980, Chinese population growth, measured as the crude birthrate minus the crude death rate, had reached 15 per 1,000 people. By 2015, when the one-child rule was lifted countrywide, this had dropped below 5.5 per 1,000 people. Fertility rates today are estimated to be around 1.7 children per adult female, well short of the 2.1 replacement rate. In fact, fertility rates have been below replacement levels since the early 1990s, bottoming out at just 1.18 in 2010.

This means that the average Chinese citizen is getting older, fast, and this trend is expected to pick up speed beginning around 2030. According to China’s National Development and Reform Commission, China’s working-age population (those aged 16 to 59) will fall more than 23 percent to around 830 million by 2030 and 700 million by 2050. By then, a full third of the Chinese population will have reached retirement age, compared to around 15 percent today.

Making matters worse, fertility rates haven’t increased substantially since Beijing decided to allow families to have a second child three years ago. In 2016, according to official figures, 18.46 million Chinese babies were born, nearly 2 million more than the previous year and the highest number since 2000. Nearly half were born to families that already had a child. But things came back to earth in 2017, with births plummeting some 3.5 percent to 17.23 million, nearly 3 million short of official forecasts.

The problem for China is that government policy hasn’t been the only thing keeping birthrates low. The one-child policy has, in many ways, become self-sustaining. In Chinese culture, people are generally expected to take care of their parents when they reach their golden years. This means average Chinese households will be expected to take care of four parents – and have no siblings to share this burden with – leaving less time and money to raise kids of their own. This, combined with factors like career pressures, changing social pressures, the lower birthrates that generally coincide with urbanization and so forth, means Chinese couples have become less inclined to have more kids even if allowed to. According to the Population Research Institute of Peking University, “fertility desire” – the number of children the average Chinese adult female wants (or believes she will be able to afford) – is between 1.6 and 1.8.

Drags on China’s Growth

A shrinking, aging population poses problems for any country; China’s size and position on the development curve simply make them more acute.

For one, it means a lot more retired people to take care of – and fewer working-age people to shoulder the burden of rising pension payouts, health care costs and so forth. In China, the dependency ratio (the number of people too young or old to work divided by the working population) is expected to surge to nearly 70 percent by 2050, compared to just more than 36 percent in 2016. In other words, there is expected to be 1.3 workers for every retired person by the middle of this century, down from nearly three today. Even if the end of the two-child policy compels Chinese couples to start having substantially more children, an immediate bump would actually make the dependency ratio worse for another 15-20 years (in other words, until those newborns enter the workforce).


(click to enlarge)

Magnifying this problem are macroeconomic challenges. For example, a shrinking population means declining consumer demand and output. Tighter labor markets drive up wages, making export-oriented industries less competitive – a major concern for a manufacturing-dependent country like China, whose economic rise is fueled by abundant low-cost workers.

To a degree, health care advances that enable people to live and work longer, combined with technological advances that enable the Chinese economy to sustain productivity with fewer workers, will help soften the blow. This, in part, explains Beijing’s hearty support for emerging technologies – such as self-driving cars, robotization and artificial intelligence – that will inevitably displace workers in the short term. Nonetheless, the demographic outlook is expected to be yet another drag on China’s continued economic rise.

Projections at this time-scale are bound to be inexact, but the International Monetary Fund forecasts that demographic pressures will reduce Chinese gross domestic product growth by 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent over the next three decades. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, demographics is a major contributor to what it expects will be a sharp decline in economic growth beginning in the not-too-distant future. Between 2030 and 2060 (the same period when the Chinese government expects to see the sharpest drop in the working-age population), the OECD forecasts just 2.3 percent annual growth, down from an estimated 6.8 percent last year.

Why It’s Worse For China

China isn’t alone in this challenge. South Korea, Japan and a number of Western countries have comparably low fertility rates and shrinking, aging populations. (Every day in Japan, the world’s oldest country, nearly a thousand more people die than are born.) But China is different in four main ways.

First, this trend is happening faster in China than elsewhere. The slice of the Chinese population made up of retirees will jump from less than 10 percent to a full quarter in just 25 years. In Western countries, this shift has taken place far more gradually, generally over a century or more. China will have far less time to adjust.

Second, it’s happening earlier on China’s development curve than any other major economy. In other words, China is growing old before it grows rich. When Japan reached the percentage of retirees China has now, per capita incomes were double those of China today. When South Korea crossed this threshold, incomes were nearly three times as high. This meant more money to sink into eldercare in aggregate, plus fewer one-child households left holding the bag. And even these countries are still struggling to cope with the rising social costs and economic stagnation tied to demographic decline.

Third, at least compared to Western countries, China has never been particularly receptive to immigration. The United States’ ability to attract and absorb immigrants is an enduring source of national strength, occasional political spasms over the issue notwithstanding. China has no tradition of attracting foreign immigrants; just 1,576 foreigners were granted permanent residency in China in 2016. And it’s unclear how the country’s rigid systems of social control would adapt to a major influx of outsiders.

Finally, China’s political-economic balance is far more precarious than that of more developed economies. The benefits of its economic rise have not been shared equally between the coasts and the interior. For a variety of other structural reasons, economic growth is already expected to gradually slow over the coming decades; demographics will make the challenge only more difficult to manage. Making matters worse, the one-child policy led to an explosion of gender-selective abortions, creating a sizable imbalance between the sexes. By 2014, there were 41 million more men than women in China – and this gap is widening. In other words, there will be tens of millions of males with poor chances of marrying and looking for an outlet to vent their frustrations. In fact, after it lifted the one-child policy in 2015, the government saw a wave of protests by couples demanding compensation for being denied the right to build a bigger family.

In a democratic country, mass social and economic dissatisfaction may lead to the fall of a particular government, but in democracies, governments come and go all the time. To the Communist Party, the threat of social unrest is existential. The public tolerates the party’s tight social controls so long as it continues to deliver on its pledge to make the whole country a modern, vibrant state. In this climate, even a modest economic slowdown could reverberate in ways that threaten to make the whole project come undone.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this report misstated the rate of China’s population growth in the country’s post-civil war years. The growth rate was around 2 percent. The error has been corrected on site.

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WSJ: China haunted by its one-child policy
« Reply #140 on: January 03, 2022, 06:58:30 PM »
China Is Haunted by Its One-Child Policy as It Tries to Encourage Couples to Conceive
The country expands fertility services as decades of birth restrictions mean fewer women of childbearing age and a younger generation less eager to start a family

The number of babies born in China is expected to have dropped steeply again in 2021. A newborn at a hospital in Danzhai, Guizhou province.
PHOTO: STR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By Liyan Qi
Jan. 3, 2022 5:30 am ET

When China put in place its one-child policy four decades ago, policy makers said they would simply switch gears if births dropped too much. That has turned out to be not so easy.

“In 30 years, the current problem of especially dreadful population growth may be alleviated and then [we can] adopt different population policies,” the Communist Party said in a 1980 open letter to members and young people.

With the number of births declining year after year, China is now racing in the opposite direction, closing abortion clinics and expanding services to help couples conceive. But a legacy of the one-child policy, scrapped in 2016, is a dwindling number of women of childbearing age as well as a generation of only children who are less eager to marry and start a family.

In addition, infertility appears to be a bigger problem in China than in many other countries. According to a survey by Peking University researchers, it affects about 18% of couples of reproductive age, compared with a global average of around 15%.

For years, the government called on women to postpone marriage to encourage smaller families. Researchers say the higher age at which Chinese women are trying to have children might partly account for its comparatively high infertility rate. And some researchers say a widespread use of abortions over the years to heed birth restrictions may also play a role.


Demographers say it will be hard for China to stop the decline in births without financial subsidies to help families afford children.
PHOTO: WU HONG/SHUTTERSTOCK
Multiple abortions impact women’s bodies and infertility is a possible consequence, said Ayo Wahlberg, an anthropologist at University of Copenhagen who has written a book about fertility research in China.

Decades of policies to keep births low have left not just deep wounds but also financial obligations for many local governments, which cut into what they can devote to encouraging births.

Shandong province is known in China for sometimes extreme enforcement of birth restrictions, including a 1991 campaign in parts of the city of Liaocheng dubbed “Hundred Days, No Child.” A 2012 documentary by Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television details how local officials, to make their birth data look better, forced women found to be pregnant to abortion centers, even if the baby was their first and allowed under the one-child policy.

“Almost everyone old enough here has heard something about what they did,” said a 45-year-old college teacher in Liaocheng, though he added, “It’s something you can never find anywhere in written history.”

Beijing years later banned birth-control enforcement deemed as too cruel, including imprisonment or beating of couples violating the one-child policy and destruction of their property. The National Health Commission didn’t reply to a request for comment. An official with the Shandong Provincial Health Commission declined to comment beyond saying that Shandong is revising its family-planning law to encourage births.

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Today, Shandong pays compensation or subsidies to millions of couples who lived by the rules, including retirees who now don’t have support because their only child died or became disabled or women who suffered injuries in connection with abortions or other birth-control methods. In 2019, such outlays totaled more than five billion yuan, equivalent to $780 million, according to the provincial health commission. That corresponds to more than one-fifth of that year’s biggest budget item, education spending.

The use of abortions hasn’t fallen off a cliff. In 1991, the year of the 100-day campaign in Shandong, around 14 million abortions were performed in China, according to National Health Commission data. The number was just below nine million in 2020. More striking is that the number of family-planning centers, primarily used for abortions, sterilizations and insertions of intrauterine devices, has dwindled to 2,810 across China in 2020, less than 10% of the number in 2014.

Meanwhile, rounds of in vitro fertilization, or IVF—each round being a multistep process over four to six weeks—have more than doubled, from about 485,000 in 2013 to more than one million in 2018. In the U.S., a little over 300,000 rounds were performed at 456 reporting clinics in 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“What is so mind-boggling for me is that after all of these years of [birth] restrictions maybe fertility clinics will become more important than abortion clinics,” Prof. Wahlberg said.

According to his research, assisted reproduction has a surprisingly long history in China. In March 1988, a decade after the world’s first test-tube baby was born in Britain, Zhang Lizhu, a Beijing gynecologist, delivered China’s first baby conceived through IVF. Another followed three months later in Changsha, under the guidance of Lu Guangxiu, a geneticist.

Both doctors had to conduct their research mostly in secret; with the one-child policy defining the demographic agenda, infertility services didn’t become legal until the early 2000s.



A woman in Wuhan, Hubei province, receives treatment for in vitro fertilization, which has grown in popularity in recent years.
PHOTO: ALY SONG/REUTERS
Now, the methods Drs. Zhang and Lu pioneered are among measures the government is counting on to shift the demographic trajectory.

The number of Chinese newborns fell 18% in 2020 from the year before, and data expected in January is likely to show another steep drop in 2021. China’s fertility rate—the number of children a woman has over her lifetime—already dropped below replacement levels in the early 1990s and in 2020 came in at 1.3, below even Japan’s 1.34. After dipping to a record low of 1.26 in 2005, Japan’s fertility rate, among the world’s lowest, began to recover with the help of support measures by the government, though in recent years, the rate has started falling again.

China currently has 536 infertility centers, according to the health commission, but most are clustered in wealthy metropolitan areas like Beijing and Shanghai, and vary widely in their quality. Major hospitals have added fertility services to family-planning clinics, and China is also trying to get such services to smaller cities.

The health commission has set a goal of at least one institution offering IVF for every 2.3 million to three million people by 2025. Nationwide, China isn’t far from the goal but less economically developed provinces say existing services can’t meet rising demand. There are only three fertility institutions in the western province of Gansu, all in Lanzhou, the provincial capital. Gansu aims to have seven by 2025.

Dr. Lu, one of the early IVF pioneers, in 2002 set up one of the world’s largest fertility hospitals in Changsha, the Reproductive and Genetic Hospital of Citic-Xiangya, which has delivered more than 180,000 babies since its inception, according to its website. The average cost of a treatment cycle at the hospital is about 40,000 yuan, equivalent to some $6,000.


To encourage births, some local governments in China have promised cash rewards and longer maternity leaves.
PHOTO: TANG KE/SIPA ASIA/ZUMA PRESS
After a miscarriage in 2018, an assistant professor at a Beijing university who gave only her last name, Wang, said she wasn’t sure she would be able to ever become a parent. But last year, she gave birth to a baby boy after IVF treatment.

Her treatment cost a little over 50,000 yuan. “I would have another one if I were a few years younger and if the whole process wasn’t so difficult,” said Ms. Wang, 36, who agonized over the possibility of another miscarriage.

Infertility-treatment costs aren’t covered by public insurance in China. In Japan, the government has proposed expanding public medical-insurance coverage for some infertility treatments.

But advancing infertility services only goes so far, said Prof. Wahlberg, the Copenhagen anthropologist. “Low births is a social issue, not simply a biological one,” he said.

Chinese people’s views about family and birth have been reshaped over the past few decades, and the government’s latest efforts can’t easily reverse that, said Yi Fuxian, a U.S.-based researcher who has long criticized the Chinese government’s population policies. Mr. Yi expects 2021 data may even show China’s population has started to shrink, years ahead of government forecasts.

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To encourage births, some local governments have promised cash rewards and longer maternity leaves. But some researchers question whether that is enough.

James Liang, a well-known businessman and a research professor of economics at Peking University who has long been an advocate for the lifting of China’s birth restrictions, says it will be hard for China to stop the decline in its birthrates without huge financial subsidies to help families afford more children.

“It all comes down to money,” Mr. Liang said. “You cannot change people’s mind or force upon them some kind of value system.”

He estimates that to raise the fertility rate to the replacement level, the government needs to subsidize families by an average of one million yuan, or around $160,000 per child in the form of cash, tax rebates and housing and daycare subsidies.

Wang Pei’an, a former family-planning official, who in 2017 said China would be unlikely to face a population shortage, “not in 100 years,” is now urging young people to be more responsible and have children.

“We should pay attention to the social value of births,” Mr. Wang, now a political adviser, told state media.

Beijing’s about-face—in six years going from harshly restricting how many children couples could have to now encouraging them to have more—makes little mention of the lingering effects of the one-child policy on demographics, nor its human cost.

“I really have a lot of thoughts and sympathy for women who grew up with that system, who now are listening to the state telling young women to have children,” Prof. Wahlberg said. “My heart breaks when I think about that situation.”

Jilin, one of the northeastern provinces with the country’s lowest fertility rate, said last month that local banks will offer a government-backed credit line of 200,000 yuan at lower interest rates for each married couple with children.

The provincial government also said it won’t pay back any fines meted out for “historical” birth violations, adding that officials need to explain to residents punished for having too many children that the situation has changed and now it needs to “stimulate birth potential.”


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policies:

https://www.westernjournal.com/dick-morris-something-happening-voters-turn-26-democrats-wont-able-stop/

but before 26 yo

free tuition free debt forgiveness free health care etc
sounds like a no brainer. 

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GPF: Demographics
« Reply #149 on: August 06, 2022, 01:48:25 PM »
August 5, 2022
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Population Growth Trends
The global population is expected to reach 8 billion later this year.
By: Geopolitical Futures
Global Population Review | 2022
(click to enlarge)

Over the long term, demographics affect geopolitical trends and state behavior. Population size has implications for public pension systems, economic growth, food demand and more.

In November, the global population is expected to reach 8 billion, before climbing to 9.7 billion in 2050. India will also soon surpass China as the most populous country. Global population growth, however, is slowing. Two-thirds of the population shows lifetime fertility below the 2.1 mark per woman needed to support population growth. That said, longer life spans are also a notable contributor to global population growth. There are roughly 771 million people over the age of 65, triple the number in 1980. This figure is expected to grow in the years ahead, particularly in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America.

It's also important to note differing trends around the world. The states of the Baltics and Balkans, as well as Japan, account for the 10 sharpest declines in population in coming years, ranging from 16 percent to 22 percent. Sub-Sahara Africa, on the other hand, will account for more than half the world’s anticipated population growth to 2050. The countries leading global growth include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania.