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China to report first population drop in five decades

24 points by boyadjian 5y ago

ngcc_hk 5y ago
Having less people (other than the temporarily aging issue) is good for the country. You really do not need 1.4 billion people. Each couple should be free to make decision. And most developing countries has couple decided to do less birthing. The strange thing is a census need to be waited. Is it a fact or ...? China. Btw I am not thinking about the rumour there is usual amount of death as well. Can’t be ... can it?
- T-A 5y ago
  https://www.newsweek.com/china-u-s-economy-gdp-capital-economics-1570558 https://www.newsweek.com/china-u-s-economy-gdp-capital-econo...
- tbihl 5y ago
  Having fewer people is only good in the scenario where you cannot organize people and intermediate disputes effectively. Having more people leads to things like electricity, transportation technology, computers, modern medicine, and space travel. It also results in weapons development (see first sentence.) China has GDP per capita below Costa Rica[0], and yet can determine actions and statements made by enormous US organizations like NBA [1], and in knock-on effects, statements made by Disney-owned ESPN about statements made and subsequently disowned by NBA [2]. Multi-national organizations don't think twice about Costa Rica. Matthew Yglesias makes the case in a recent book that the US should embrace all the ways that the country is able to continue growing while China's, and many other countries', populations stagnate and decline.[3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/10/31/774985504/the-nba-and-hong-kong-protests https://www.npr.org/2019/10/31/774985504/the-nba-and-hong-ko... [2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/22/is-disney-relationship-china-bigger-risk-covid-19/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/22/is-disney-relation... [3] https://www.econlib.org/reflections-on-one-billion-americans/ https://www.econlib.org/reflections-on-one-billion-americans...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- TylerLives 5y ago
  Why is having less people good for the country?
  - hedora 5y ago
    Among other things, they’re facing imminent ecological collapse due to overpopulation. Only half the population has access to safe drinking water, and only 10% has access to household sewage treatment. 43% of the waterways are unfit for human contact, and 90% of the cities have poisoned their own water tables. The following article has pages of statistics like this. http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat10/sub66/item391.html http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat10/sub66/item391.html The air pollution is at least as bad. China is a large enough percentage of the earth’s surface area to make these global problems.
    - TylerLives 5y ago
      Do you think large populations are inherently bad for the environment, or is this problem specific to China and their laws? Also, do you think there are any benefits to having a larger population(with regards to technological progress and the future of humanity) and how should that be taken into account?
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Not sure why this has gotten so much backlash. Sure, growth is generally a good thing and plenty of places are badly underpopulated, notably all of North America. I don't think this is the case with China. Much of the country is the fairly uninhabitable Gobi Desert and Himalaya Mountins. They've got a very large number of people crowded into a fertile river valley and the coast and it isn't all that great ecologically. They're seemingly well past the point nationally where the tail chance of producing more Einsteins and Teslas is worth it, even if the entire world isn't. I don't see how Matt Yglesias arguments apply here. Matt is making that argument for the United States, which outside of I guess Australia is by far the least dense of all developed countries. He wants the US population in another 80 years to still be 2/3 of what China's population is right now and they're roughly equal in land mass.
fallingfrog 5y ago
Declines in population are not irreversible, you can always build the population back up. Before the industrial revolution most countries had periods where centuries passed and the population stayed mostly even. If we go back to steady state population or a slight decline for a while it’s not going to be the end of the world. We are accustomed to explosively exponential population growth, but in the grand sweep of history that has been a very special period in history.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  > Declines in population are not irreversible, you can always build the population back up. Before the industrial revolution most countries had periods where centuries passed and the population stayed mostly even. While it is possible to reverse the decline, China is now in a different demographic regime than in those centuries where the population stayed mostly even. The regime then was high fertility and high mortality. Now, it's low and low, and both the fertility and mortality declines have strong economic, institutional and cultural drivers. In geographic terms for example, people live very differently. Then, most people lived on farms with or near their extended family, surviving (often malnourished) by arduous work that mostly wore out joints and tendons by age 50. Now, most people are in nuclear families or single-adult households in cities, much better nourished and housed and expending fewer Calories per day. Economic progress has also given people more agency and more possibilities, and quite a few are choosing, for example, to maintain career momentum rather than take time out to have children. At the same time the costs (in both money and time) of raising children to be economically productive are rising rapidly and there are other large demands on Chinese families' income - housing, healthcare and saving for their own retirement,* for example. It's possible that some government policies might lift fertility (in particular, a universal pension, cheap universal healthcare, and laws about career momentum with children) but imho these policies will only be tried some decades after a one-child or no-child household has become firmly entrenched in the culture. That is, too late. * Nearly everyone wants to avoid a precipitous drop in standard of living on retirement. China has very low retirement ages: 55 for women and 60 for men, IIRC. And there is no socila security. With fewer income earning years, people have to save a bigger proportion of their income. Sidebar: in a low mortality regime, the key demographic statistic for long run population growth or decline is the reproduction ratio (RR), the number of daughters per woman. In the past demographers have used the easier-to-obtain Total Fertility Rate (TFR, lifetime number of children per woman if this year's number of babies per 100,000 population were to remain constant) or CCF50 (completed cohort fertility at age 50) which counts the number of children 50-year-old women have had. The assumption was that there is a fixed relationship between RR and TFR and/or CCF50. Now that fetal gender selection is being practised, the relationship is no longer so fixed. So things are worse for China than they might appear using simple whole-population numbers.
simonblack 5y ago
A decline in population is not necessarily bad. All population all over the world is far too high, it needs to be reduced to roughly a quarter of the current level. If you reduce the number of people, the GDP is spread over fewer people and the GDP per head is higher.

24 points by boyadjian 5y ago

Having less people (other than the temporarily aging issue) is good for the country. You really do not need 1.4 billion people. Each couple should be free to make decision. And most developing countries has couple decided to do less birthing. The strange thing is a census need to be waited. Is it a fact or ...? China. Btw I am not thinking about the rumour there is usual amount of death as well. Can’t be ... can it?

T-A 5y ago
https://www.newsweek.com/china-u-s-economy-gdp-capital-economics-1570558 https://www.newsweek.com/china-u-s-economy-gdp-capital-econo...
tbihl 5y ago
Having fewer people is only good in the scenario where you cannot organize people and intermediate disputes effectively. Having more people leads to things like electricity, transportation technology, computers, modern medicine, and space travel. It also results in weapons development (see first sentence.) China has GDP per capita below Costa Rica[0], and yet can determine actions and statements made by enormous US organizations like NBA [1], and in knock-on effects, statements made by Disney-owned ESPN about statements made and subsequently disowned by NBA [2]. Multi-national organizations don't think twice about Costa Rica. Matthew Yglesias makes the case in a recent book that the US should embrace all the ways that the country is able to continue growing while China's, and many other countries', populations stagnate and decline.[3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... [1] https://www.npr.org/2019/10/31/774985504/the-nba-and-hong-kong-protests https://www.npr.org/2019/10/31/774985504/the-nba-and-hong-ko... [2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/22/is-disney-relationship-china-bigger-risk-covid-19/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/10/22/is-disney-relation... [3] https://www.econlib.org/reflections-on-one-billion-americans/ https://www.econlib.org/reflections-on-one-billion-americans...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
TylerLives 5y ago
Why is having less people good for the country?
- hedora 5y ago
  Among other things, they’re facing imminent ecological collapse due to overpopulation. Only half the population has access to safe drinking water, and only 10% has access to household sewage treatment. 43% of the waterways are unfit for human contact, and 90% of the cities have poisoned their own water tables. The following article has pages of statistics like this. http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat10/sub66/item391.html http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat10/sub66/item391.html The air pollution is at least as bad. China is a large enough percentage of the earth’s surface area to make these global problems.
  - TylerLives 5y ago
    Do you think large populations are inherently bad for the environment, or is this problem specific to China and their laws? Also, do you think there are any benefits to having a larger population(with regards to technological progress and the future of humanity) and how should that be taken into account?
nonameiguess 5y ago
Not sure why this has gotten so much backlash. Sure, growth is generally a good thing and plenty of places are badly underpopulated, notably all of North America. I don't think this is the case with China. Much of the country is the fairly uninhabitable Gobi Desert and Himalaya Mountins. They've got a very large number of people crowded into a fertile river valley and the coast and it isn't all that great ecologically. They're seemingly well past the point nationally where the tail chance of producing more Einsteins and Teslas is worth it, even if the entire world isn't. I don't see how Matt Yglesias arguments apply here. Matt is making that argument for the United States, which outside of I guess Australia is by far the least dense of all developed countries. He wants the US population in another 80 years to still be 2/3 of what China's population is right now and they're roughly equal in land mass.

fallingfrog 5y ago

Declines in population are not irreversible, you can always build the population back up. Before the industrial revolution most countries had periods where centuries passed and the population stayed mostly even. If we go back to steady state population or a slight decline for a while it’s not going to be the end of the world. We are accustomed to explosively exponential population growth, but in the grand sweep of history that has been a very special period in history.

tuatoru 5y ago
> Declines in population are not irreversible, you can always build the population back up. Before the industrial revolution most countries had periods where centuries passed and the population stayed mostly even. While it is possible to reverse the decline, China is now in a different demographic regime than in those centuries where the population stayed mostly even. The regime then was high fertility and high mortality. Now, it's low and low, and both the fertility and mortality declines have strong economic, institutional and cultural drivers. In geographic terms for example, people live very differently. Then, most people lived on farms with or near their extended family, surviving (often malnourished) by arduous work that mostly wore out joints and tendons by age 50. Now, most people are in nuclear families or single-adult households in cities, much better nourished and housed and expending fewer Calories per day. Economic progress has also given people more agency and more possibilities, and quite a few are choosing, for example, to maintain career momentum rather than take time out to have children. At the same time the costs (in both money and time) of raising children to be economically productive are rising rapidly and there are other large demands on Chinese families' income - housing, healthcare and saving for their own retirement,* for example. It's possible that some government policies might lift fertility (in particular, a universal pension, cheap universal healthcare, and laws about career momentum with children) but imho these policies will only be tried some decades after a one-child or no-child household has become firmly entrenched in the culture. That is, too late. * Nearly everyone wants to avoid a precipitous drop in standard of living on retirement. China has very low retirement ages: 55 for women and 60 for men, IIRC. And there is no socila security. With fewer income earning years, people have to save a bigger proportion of their income. Sidebar: in a low mortality regime, the key demographic statistic for long run population growth or decline is the reproduction ratio (RR), the number of daughters per woman. In the past demographers have used the easier-to-obtain Total Fertility Rate (TFR, lifetime number of children per woman if this year's number of babies per 100,000 population were to remain constant) or CCF50 (completed cohort fertility at age 50) which counts the number of children 50-year-old women have had. The assumption was that there is a fixed relationship between RR and TFR and/or CCF50. Now that fetal gender selection is being practised, the relationship is no longer so fixed. So things are worse for China than they might appear using simple whole-population numbers.

simonblack 5y ago

A decline in population is not necessarily bad. All population all over the world is far too high, it needs to be reduced to roughly a quarter of the current level. If you reduce the number of people, the GDP is spread over fewer people and the GDP per head is higher.