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It's not automatically a bad thing. China has done fantastically well economically, and in terms of health care, education etc. There are other countries which

• jskrablin 3y ago
  It may work in short term but then you run out of population in long term. And suddenly any gains from short term improvement is under a big question mark.
  • blackoil 3y ago
    Why does China need 1.5 billion people?
    • robjan 3y ago
      Future generations have to pay off the debt generated by the current generation. Same as everywhere. You can either grow the population or make the economy more efficient, China still has the latter lever available to pull.
      • blackoil 3y ago
        China has a gross savings rate of 45-50%. Current gen has saved for their future.
        • dougmwne 3y ago
          Money is an abstract representation of the labor of others. If there’s no one to labor for you then your currency is just paper.
          • lotsofpulp 3y ago
            Currency might also just be bits on a server.
          • Balero 3y ago
            I agree in theory with you. But you can 'bank' labour for later on. Building infrastructure (that will last) when you have a population bulge, means that the generations after can take advantage of that infrastructure, and have to do the lower amount of work, of maintaining it. This can go for things like education, investing in businesses, and generally any capital. Of course you can also over build this capital that will never be used, but will need to be paid back (for example a local government pays to build a town that there are no people to fill it with) and the maintenance is too much, but you still have to look after the people who did the building.
            • The_Colonel 3y ago
              You can't over-build things like old age care. We still don't have robots to feed and bath old people.
    • starfallg 3y ago
      China has a poor social security net. The one-child policy has resulted in a couple having to provide or care for 4 parents and 8 grandparents. That's is in no way sustainable on an individual level and worse on a societal level when you have a small working population and a large number of people that require care.
• throwaway2037 3y ago
  strict population control SG/KR has this? Tell me more.
  • jeswin 3y ago
    Had.
• somenameforme 3y ago
  A declining fertility rate doesn't just change change the population, but also the relative distribution of each age group. A fertility rate of "N" means the next generation will be "N/2" times as large as the one before it. Because of this you can easily model what a society, composed of successive generations of a fixed fertility rate, would look like. To keep things simple, imagine everybody gives birth to all their kids at 20. When they actually do doesn't matter, it would always converge on the same ratios: ---- Fertility Rate of 2 (average age = 40): 100 80-year-olds, 100 60-year-olds, 100 40-year-olds, 100 20-year-olds, 100 newborns. Fertility Rate of 1 (average age = 63): 100 80-year-olds, 50 60-year-olds, 25 40-year-olds, 12 20-year-olds, 6 newborns Fertility rate of 0.5 (average age = 74): 100 80-year-olds, 25 60-year-olds, 6 40-year-olds, 1 20-year-olds, 0 newborns ---- You can also estimate the ongoing population rate of change for each fertility group by removing the elderly generation, adding a newborn generation, and contrasting the new population sizes: ---- Fertility Rate of 2: 500->500 = 0% population change per 20 years Fertility Rate of 1: 193->96 = 50% population decline per 20 years Fertility Rate of 0.5: 132->32 = 76% population decline per 20 years ---- In the developed world most fertility rates plummeted around 1970. So, assuming nothing radically changes, we should start hitting our 'equilibrium point' about one life expectancy away, so sometime around 2050.