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Yes, the labor surplus was caused by China's family structure. In China women married as teens and started bearing children young. In Northwest Europe, women m
by tuatoru 2y ago
Yes, the labor surplus was caused by China's family structure. In China women married as teens and started bearing children young.
In Northwest Europe, women married when they and their prospective husbands had saved enough to form a new household, typically 24 to 27 years of age. That is several fewer children per woman.
It was also self-balancing. When population was high, wages decreased, so women married later, so population decreased in the next generation. And vice versa.
In China, childbearing was not regulated by economic conditions so the population was controlled via famine, which tends to bring riots, banditry and so on with it.
- charlysl 2y ago+ Chinese polygamy, as Marco Polo observed, allowing well-off men to parallelize reproduction
- card_zero 2y agoIt's ... a theory. Close inspection of European history may reveal a system of dowries and a lot of marrying young, large families, and famines (e.g. in Bohemia) even in the 18th century, but I'm quibbling.
- tuatoru 2y agoNorth-west Europe. The Seine Basin, the Low countries, and England primarily. Scandinavia and (iirc) Scotland had stem families. Ireland and most of the rest of Europe, including Bohemia, had something closer to the communitarian type, so famines there are unsurprising. If Emmanuel Todd is to be believed, on this, his primary area of expertise. Like Noam Chomsky he branched out into other topics later. Of course there were other regulators in China. Female infanticide was a primary one. Sex ratio imbalances also cause trouble though.
- goeiedaggoeie 2y agoDo you have a source you can point me to regarding sex imbalances in china historically. demographics, and its sibling, economic growth are super fascinating subjects.