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Still, a stupid governmental policy cost them at least 100 million people compared to the expected spontaneous development. Probably more. That is the sort of p
by inglor_cz 6d ago
Still, a stupid governmental policy cost them at least 100 million people compared to the expected spontaneous development. Probably more. That is the sort of punishment that omnipotent governments sometimes visit upon their folk.
I don't believe that even the CCP itself, in hindsight, considers the one-child policy to have been a good decision. At the very least it should have been ended some 15 years earlier.
- reeredfdfdf 5d agoWell, I've been reading on The Economist how China is seriously struggling with youth unemployment right now. Lots of fresh university graduates are sitting unemployed, or doing manual labor. In my home country (Finland) we have had way below replacement birth rates for a long while now, yet youth unemployment is at all time high. The problem with low birth rates is assumed to be that there are less workers to take care of the pensioners. But right now it seems like even the few young workers available often aren't needed anymore, thanks to increasing automation of industries. I predict youth unemployment will be made even worse by AI soon enough. So, why do we need children, if capitalist economies don't need workers? Unemployed people do not pay much taxes to sustain the non-working age population. I believe low birth rates might become a blessing soon enough. It just means less people for governments to take care of when robots and AI take away most jobs.
- maxglute 5d agoNo, a remarkably farsighted policy that prevented PRC from having to deal with additional 200m-400m subsistent farmers. If anything it wasn't done sooner/aggressive enough. Like you can literally wipe away 200-400m from PRC button quantile and PRC would be net better off due to increase per capita resources and wealth. This hindsight will be historically obvious in 20-30 years when you see the outcome of India with 1.6B people with 1.2B poor, vs PRC with 1.4B people with 400m poor. The drag of having disproportionate, bluntly, worthless bodies is not linear for governance, and it's not because India hasn't tried aggressive family planning of their own, they simply failed unlike PRC. Who very much regards family planning as largely successful demographic management system that enabled proper allocation of resources away from generating peasants to building industry and the largest pool of high end human talent in recorded history, where frankly any tertiary dividend is worth 50 farmers in terms of productivity.