7 ms·

Immigration is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to deflation. Just ask the Europeans or even more so - the immigration hostile Japanese (yes

Immigration is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to deflation. Just ask the Europeans or even more so - the immigration hostile Japanese (yes, I know Abe is turning things around, this is an oversimplification). It's amazing how it is basically impossible to influence birth rates, one way or the other, up or down. I am yet to find a convincing example of a concerted effort at increasing or suppressing birth rates by a centralised authority. Please share one if you know it, I find birth rates to be far more mysterious than any other commonly talked about "macro" rates, such as riskfree rates or various risk premiums.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> I am yet to find a convincing example of a concerted effort at increasing or suppressing birth rates by a centralised authority. China suppressed its birth rate with its one child policy.
- H8crilA 6y ago
  No it didn't, have you ever looked at the charts? They had the "Chinese Boomers" which were naturally followed by "Chinese Millennials". And then in 2015 the policy was abandoned but the birth rate has not bulged at all.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    Here is an article comparing China with India population growth. http://m.statisticstimes.com/demographics/china-vs-india-population.php http://m.statisticstimes.com/demographics/china-vs-india-pop... You can see that China bends the curve compared to India.
  - whycombagator 6y ago
    > No it didn't, have you ever looked at the charts? What charts?
    - H8crilA 6y ago
      Fertility/birth rates. A reminder - one child policy was introduced in 1979 and repelled in 2015, neither of those dates had any visible effect: Fertility rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINCHN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINCHN Birth rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNCBRTINCHN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNCBRTINCHN And it is not like the Chinese govt didn't try, they were serious about it. It's just that birth rates are mysterious. People will have kids when they want to, and will stop having kids when they want to, and they will listen to nobody. No authority.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  The policy existed but, after talking with some Chinese friends about this very topic, they said the system was corrupt. Anyone who want to get around the system just had to bribe a local official, and there were zero consequences. Take this as anecdotal, of course.
  - bilbo0s 6y ago
    It wasn't even a bribe, It was worse than that. It was literally, "You can only have one child unless you pay for each extra child you want." I mean, getting around the policy, was actually written into the policy. Which is kind of insane if the purpose was to control birth rates.
    - booleandilemma 6y ago
      But wouldn't even require paying for extra children discourage people from having children?
      - astronautjones 6y ago
        aren't you doing that by having children anywhere?
    - orwin 6y ago
      Wait, it's not that simple. Depending on where you were working and living, the policy was different. National-level, f you worked for the government (military, healthcare, PCC) you weren't allowed to have more than one child without loosing your job (if you were grunt-level) or paying and having your career path stilled (if you were CO-level). For other workers, it was more or less a "state-level" implementation with governors deciding how to enforce the rule. In most places, farmers had the right to have two children and could ask to have one more. City workers only one and had to pay different amount depending on the city and the governor for the second. Some governors were really, really hard on enforcement (forced abortion...) while other were more lax and made people pay acceptable amount for the second child. Still, even without hard enforcement, the illegal child have no paper, cannot join legal school and isn't present on the family register (and can't work/live anywhere legally). This is one of the 3 internal problem the Chinese government will have with the generation.
- Leary 6y ago
  https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/12063/production/_104772837_china_birthrate-nc.png https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/12063/production... China's birthrate did decline with the one child policy (1979). But it declined way more in the decade prior to the introduction of the one child policy. "晚、稀、少" : “late marriage, longer spacing, and fewer children” was a little known policy introduced in 1970 that encouraged late marriage and fewer births, and which had way bigger effects than the compulsory one child policy.
kiba 6y ago
We could increase population growth if we increase longevity and health of the population to compensate for lower birthrate, while saving money on medical expenses.
- pcurve 6y ago
  You can't cheat the math though. 2 people need to give birth to 2 kids to break even. (2.1 actually).
  - gpm 6y ago
    You can't, to be charitable I would assume that they are doing their math in kids/(person years) instead of kids/person.
- sir_bearington 6y ago
  This actually exacerbates the problem of lower birth rates. Longer life expectancy mean an even greater portion of the population is non-working and dependent on the shrinking share of working-age people. If people worked a greater portion of their lifespan that could compensate for lower birthrates but increasing retirement ages is extremely unpopular.
  - gpm 6y ago
    I would interpret "longevity and health" not just to mean increased life expectancy but to also mean increased time until you are infirm. This expands the percentage of your life that you produce more than you consume (i.e. 20 to when you become infirm for the average person), and decreases the percentage of your productivity that goes towards raising children (since you have more overall productivity but roughly the same amount goes to raising kids).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fairenough42 6y ago
Tangential question: why is deflation "jail"? As a follow on, is deflation caused by a declining population different from deflation caused by a sudden recession?
- vkou 6y ago
  Deflation is terrible for the economic system that we live in. In a deflationary economy, the value of money goes up, as time passes. This means that people with money have zero incentive to spend, or invest it. Hypothetically, you could adopt an economic system that would not be affected by deflation, but until you do, it's best to avoid tangling with it.
  - fairenough42 6y ago
    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Effects, it sounds like it would _increase_ the incentive to lend, but would decrease the incentive to _borrow_. Inflation, conversely, seems to decrease the incentive to lend (the inflation-adjusted return is less than the nominal rate). Naively, it's not clear to me why the latter is better for the economic system we live in (would that be free-market captialism? or something else?). Can you elaborate? Either way, both of these seem different from eliminating the incentive to loan or borrow. People know how to consider inflation-adjusted rates of return and invest accordingly. Soon these same lessons will be applied in negative interest rate scenarios, which I guess counts as deflation.
    - unishark 6y ago
      Well if the value of money is going down then the price of everything else goes up (land, stocks, precious metals). The incentive is to convert cash into these alternatives. Seems to me the same is true for borrowers. Borrowing money to buy land/stocks/etc is still a smart move as long as they keep trending upwards faster than the loan rates. Of course this requires sufficiently low interest rates be available, which is where the reference "our system" comes in I suppose, with a federal reserve maintaining artificially-low rates to drive this wealth transfer from savings to borrowers. This is just the sideshow of wealth moving around, of course. I don't really buy that that if this game ended it means the death of the entire economy. It's just the part that can be subjected to manipulation. Obviously the point of earning money in the first place is to spend it, not just save or transfer it from one medium to another. Money is just an exchange itself. In deflation, things get cheaper and supply-and-demand curves says more people will buy things.
47r7ruur 6y ago
This would seem more credible for evaluating the US if most states with high minority populations didn't give a disproportionate amount of support to minorities. If you make minimal effort to prevent immigration and you give most family support to minorities then of course minorities will be your main high growth population. Non-racially targeted support is made increasingly difficult by the environmentalist doom cult that believes growth is bad but which can't attack support for minorities because race trumps environmentalism in US politics. It's about as mysterious as a company with more investors growing faster than its competitors, sometimes the underdog wins but capital is usually king.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 6y ago
Hungary has managed to significantly move birth rates with incentives: https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-induced-baby-boom https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-....
- yread 6y ago
  There is some signal but I wouldn't call it significant and it's not sure whether it was caused by the incentives. Surely, if it was that clear cut they wouldn't have to write a 2000+ words article
amiga_500 6y ago
It quickly becomes a pyramid scheme based on ever looser credit to ramp ever scarcer housing, if no additional action is taken to address the need for ever more youth to prop up pension obligations. Which then further suppresses family formation.
msarvar 6y ago
China currently doing birth suppression on their Muslim minorities. https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c I don't know if this will be successful long term, but they're definitely trying and it seems to be working.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  What I've read about this news is that they are now applying to Uighurs the same birth restrictions policies that were already in place for every other group including Hans. Previously the minorities actually had exemptions. Not to condone any other behavior of the CCP but this news is being misrepresented a lot in headlines.
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    Birth restrictions aren't in place for Chinese people anymore iirc.
    - ehmish 6y ago
      I think it's been expanded to 2 children
jackcosgrove 6y ago
Usually when a government attempts to change birth rates in the way you are imagining it is pro-natalist because more people magnifies the power of a state and increases the revenue for a government. The big exception to this is China's one child policy. That had an ultimately minor effect as birth rates were already dropping and stayed low when the policy was lifted. One of the most infamous pro-natalist examples was Romania under Ceausescu. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ceausescus-forgotten-children-closing-last-romanias-communist-era-orphanages-1581371 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ceausescus-forgotten-children-clos... Another oppressive pro-natalist policy was pursued by the Islamic government of Iran in the 1980s. It ended in tears though as Iranian women did not see the sense in birthing children to be cannon fodder in the Iran-Iraq war. What followed was the steepest drop in birthrates ever recorded. So the government did influence the birthrate, but not in the intended direction. France and Hungary have had limited success with more humane pro-natalist policies. However, there is a proven and highly effective way for governments to reduce birthrates. Educate women. That is actually the main driver of falling birthrates worldwide.
mech422 6y ago
The most famous one I'm aware of is the 'one child policy'[0] Though there seems to be debate on how effective it was. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
alecco 6y ago
> It's amazing how it is basically impossible to influence birth rates, one way or the other, up or down. What are you talking about? Look at the differences in those countries/cultures and you'll find it. It's just that it's verboten for us in this contemporary Western culture. But perhaps the artificial womb will change things.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> I am yet to find a convincing example of a concerted effort at increasing or suppressing birth rates by a centralised authority. China suppressed its birth rate with its one child policy.

H8crilA 6y ago
No it didn't, have you ever looked at the charts? They had the "Chinese Boomers" which were naturally followed by "Chinese Millennials". And then in 2015 the policy was abandoned but the birth rate has not bulged at all.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  Here is an article comparing China with India population growth. http://m.statisticstimes.com/demographics/china-vs-india-population.php http://m.statisticstimes.com/demographics/china-vs-india-pop... You can see that China bends the curve compared to India.
- whycombagator 6y ago
  > No it didn't, have you ever looked at the charts? What charts?
  - H8crilA 6y ago
    Fertility/birth rates. A reminder - one child policy was introduced in 1979 and repelled in 2015, neither of those dates had any visible effect: Fertility rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINCHN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINCHN Birth rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNCBRTINCHN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNCBRTINCHN And it is not like the Chinese govt didn't try, they were serious about it. It's just that birth rates are mysterious. People will have kids when they want to, and will stop having kids when they want to, and they will listen to nobody. No authority.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
The policy existed but, after talking with some Chinese friends about this very topic, they said the system was corrupt. Anyone who want to get around the system just had to bribe a local official, and there were zero consequences. Take this as anecdotal, of course.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  It wasn't even a bribe, It was worse than that. It was literally, "You can only have one child unless you pay for each extra child you want." I mean, getting around the policy, was actually written into the policy. Which is kind of insane if the purpose was to control birth rates.
  - booleandilemma 6y ago
    But wouldn't even require paying for extra children discourage people from having children?
    - astronautjones 6y ago
      aren't you doing that by having children anywhere?
  - orwin 6y ago
    Wait, it's not that simple. Depending on where you were working and living, the policy was different. National-level, f you worked for the government (military, healthcare, PCC) you weren't allowed to have more than one child without loosing your job (if you were grunt-level) or paying and having your career path stilled (if you were CO-level). For other workers, it was more or less a "state-level" implementation with governors deciding how to enforce the rule. In most places, farmers had the right to have two children and could ask to have one more. City workers only one and had to pay different amount depending on the city and the governor for the second. Some governors were really, really hard on enforcement (forced abortion...) while other were more lax and made people pay acceptable amount for the second child. Still, even without hard enforcement, the illegal child have no paper, cannot join legal school and isn't present on the family register (and can't work/live anywhere legally). This is one of the 3 internal problem the Chinese government will have with the generation.
Leary 6y ago
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/12063/production/_104772837_china_birthrate-nc.png https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/12063/production... China's birthrate did decline with the one child policy (1979). But it declined way more in the decade prior to the introduction of the one child policy. "晚、稀、少" : “late marriage, longer spacing, and fewer children” was a little known policy introduced in 1970 that encouraged late marriage and fewer births, and which had way bigger effects than the compulsory one child policy.

kiba 6y ago

We could increase population growth if we increase longevity and health of the population to compensate for lower birthrate, while saving money on medical expenses.

pcurve 6y ago
You can't cheat the math though. 2 people need to give birth to 2 kids to break even. (2.1 actually).
- gpm 6y ago
  You can't, to be charitable I would assume that they are doing their math in kids/(person years) instead of kids/person.
sir_bearington 6y ago
This actually exacerbates the problem of lower birth rates. Longer life expectancy mean an even greater portion of the population is non-working and dependent on the shrinking share of working-age people. If people worked a greater portion of their lifespan that could compensate for lower birthrates but increasing retirement ages is extremely unpopular.
- gpm 6y ago
  I would interpret "longevity and health" not just to mean increased life expectancy but to also mean increased time until you are infirm. This expands the percentage of your life that you produce more than you consume (i.e. 20 to when you become infirm for the average person), and decreases the percentage of your productivity that goes towards raising children (since you have more overall productivity but roughly the same amount goes to raising kids).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fairenough42 6y ago

Tangential question: why is deflation "jail"? As a follow on, is deflation caused by a declining population different from deflation caused by a sudden recession?

vkou 6y ago
Deflation is terrible for the economic system that we live in. In a deflationary economy, the value of money goes up, as time passes. This means that people with money have zero incentive to spend, or invest it. Hypothetically, you could adopt an economic system that would not be affected by deflation, but until you do, it's best to avoid tangling with it.
- fairenough42 6y ago
  From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Effects, it sounds like it would _increase_ the incentive to lend, but would decrease the incentive to _borrow_. Inflation, conversely, seems to decrease the incentive to lend (the inflation-adjusted return is less than the nominal rate). Naively, it's not clear to me why the latter is better for the economic system we live in (would that be free-market captialism? or something else?). Can you elaborate? Either way, both of these seem different from eliminating the incentive to loan or borrow. People know how to consider inflation-adjusted rates of return and invest accordingly. Soon these same lessons will be applied in negative interest rate scenarios, which I guess counts as deflation.
  - unishark 6y ago
    Well if the value of money is going down then the price of everything else goes up (land, stocks, precious metals). The incentive is to convert cash into these alternatives. Seems to me the same is true for borrowers. Borrowing money to buy land/stocks/etc is still a smart move as long as they keep trending upwards faster than the loan rates. Of course this requires sufficiently low interest rates be available, which is where the reference "our system" comes in I suppose, with a federal reserve maintaining artificially-low rates to drive this wealth transfer from savings to borrowers. This is just the sideshow of wealth moving around, of course. I don't really buy that that if this game ended it means the death of the entire economy. It's just the part that can be subjected to manipulation. Obviously the point of earning money in the first place is to spend it, not just save or transfer it from one medium to another. Money is just an exchange itself. In deflation, things get cheaper and supply-and-demand curves says more people will buy things.

47r7ruur 6y ago

This would seem more credible for evaluating the US if most states with high minority populations didn't give a disproportionate amount of support to minorities. If you make minimal effort to prevent immigration and you give most family support to minorities then of course minorities will be your main high growth population. Non-racially targeted support is made increasingly difficult by the environmentalist doom cult that believes growth is bad but which can't attack support for minorities because race trumps environmentalism in US politics. It's about as mysterious as a company with more investors growing faster than its competitors, sometimes the underdog wins but capital is usually king.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 6y ago

Hungary has managed to significantly move birth rates with incentives: https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-induced-baby-boom https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-....

yread 6y ago
There is some signal but I wouldn't call it significant and it's not sure whether it was caused by the incentives. Surely, if it was that clear cut they wouldn't have to write a 2000+ words article

amiga_500 6y ago

It quickly becomes a pyramid scheme based on ever looser credit to ramp ever scarcer housing, if no additional action is taken to address the need for ever more youth to prop up pension obligations. Which then further suppresses family formation.

msarvar 6y ago

China currently doing birth suppression on their Muslim minorities. https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c I don't know if this will be successful long term, but they're definitely trying and it seems to be working.

jobigoud 6y ago
What I've read about this news is that they are now applying to Uighurs the same birth restrictions policies that were already in place for every other group including Hans. Previously the minorities actually had exemptions. Not to condone any other behavior of the CCP but this news is being misrepresented a lot in headlines.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  Birth restrictions aren't in place for Chinese people anymore iirc.
  - ehmish 6y ago
    I think it's been expanded to 2 children

jackcosgrove 6y ago

Usually when a government attempts to change birth rates in the way you are imagining it is pro-natalist because more people magnifies the power of a state and increases the revenue for a government. The big exception to this is China's one child policy. That had an ultimately minor effect as birth rates were already dropping and stayed low when the policy was lifted. One of the most infamous pro-natalist examples was Romania under Ceausescu. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ceausescus-forgotten-children-closing-last-romanias-communist-era-orphanages-1581371 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ceausescus-forgotten-children-clos... Another oppressive pro-natalist policy was pursued by the Islamic government of Iran in the 1980s. It ended in tears though as Iranian women did not see the sense in birthing children to be cannon fodder in the Iran-Iraq war. What followed was the steepest drop in birthrates ever recorded. So the government did influence the birthrate, but not in the intended direction. France and Hungary have had limited success with more humane pro-natalist policies. However, there is a proven and highly effective way for governments to reduce birthrates. Educate women. That is actually the main driver of falling birthrates worldwide.

mech422 6y ago

The most famous one I'm aware of is the 'one child policy'[0] Though there seems to be debate on how effective it was. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

alecco 6y ago

> It's amazing how it is basically impossible to influence birth rates, one way or the other, up or down. What are you talking about? Look at the differences in those countries/cultures and you'll find it. It's just that it's verboten for us in this contemporary Western culture. But perhaps the artificial womb will change things.