China Population Set for 51 Million Drop as Pro-Birth Moves Fail (bloomberg.com) 65
An anonymous reader shares a report: China's population is expected to shrink by 51 million -- more than the size of California -- over the next decade as policymakers struggle to reverse the country's falling birth rate, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. By 2035, the population is expected to drop to 1.36 billion, levels not seen since 2012, down from a peak of 1.41 billion in 2021, BI senior industry analyst Ada Li estimates.
There could be a temporary spike in births in 2024 as the Year of the Dragon is considered an auspicious time to have children. But past single-year surges in birth rates have been short-lived, and this year may be no exception, especially with marriage rates at an all-time low, Li said. China faces a looming population crisis, with the United Nations projecting it could shrink to half its current size by 2100.
There could be a temporary spike in births in 2024 as the Year of the Dragon is considered an auspicious time to have children. But past single-year surges in birth rates have been short-lived, and this year may be no exception, especially with marriage rates at an all-time low, Li said. China faces a looming population crisis, with the United Nations projecting it could shrink to half its current size by 2100.
Isn't that good news? (Score:5, Informative)
I feel the Earth is overpopulated. There will be more place for everyone. People will tell stories about how people of earlier times lived their lives to pay endless EMIs, all for a house. GDP might shrink, but quality of life will improve for everyone.
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Indeed. I wonder for whom exactly it'll become a self-proclaimed crisis.
As if we lived in a crisis 100 years or longer ago.
Re:Isn't that good news? (Score:4, Informative)
The crisis is not that the population is decreasing; the crisis is that the number of senior citizens is growing while the number of working age people (the ones who drive the economy) is shrinking. This problem is not unique to China either; most industrialized countries are either facing this problem or will soon.
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Indeed. Having potentially 4 seniors trying to live off the productivity of 1 citizen who is also trying to raise a kid is a bad thing. Especially if they don't have the kid to replace themselves because the seniors are sucking up all the excess already.
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Re: Isn't that good news? (Score:2)
Not much more you can ask people over 70 to do.
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In a way Thanos was right.
Housing crisis and high inflation for basic products is driven by population growth. This is basic supply and demand logic.
Even Canada is eating crow on trying to grow their population through immigration.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-new... [ndtv.com]
I believe in immigration, being a migrant pretty much my entire life, but I also believe in processes to control undesirable side effects.
Inflation is about money (Score:2)
[...] and high inflation for basic products is driven by population growth. This is basic supply and demand logic.
Supply and demand is one reason why prices of goods can rise, but that explanation comes with conditions.
To draw a math analogy, you can use linear regression to find the optimal slope and intercept of a line that best explains the data, but that only works when the underlying mechanism giving the data is itself linear. You should only use that method and that explanation if the original condition (the underlying mechanism is linear) is met.
Supply and demand is conditioned on there being only one product un
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Housing crisis and high inflation for basic products is driven by population growth. This is basic supply and demand logic.
Pure unadulterated bullshit. There is no housing crisis in the US or Europe. None. Nada. Zilch. The number of housing units per capita is at or near the historical highs. At no time in human history, we had more housing units per family. And the population growth has basically stopped, the US and Europe population is not declining (faster) only because of immigration.
What _is_ happening is the density crisis. Cities became a black hole of density, making more and more people to move into ever denser condi
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The removal of the need to take your car with you will make it physically possible to use a bus for a portion of a trip, so there is some chance it will actually help buses. IMHO that will only happen though if the bus is both faster and cheaper than using the self-driving taxi, and that seems unlikely without isolated lanes for the buses, and probably rails to handle the necessary speed and size and to negotiate narrow tunnels.
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Pretty much the only area where buses excel is transportation to/from hotspots, like sporting arenas, where just the raw throughput is the problem.
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Both Paris and London (and I suspect some others) are building extensive ring-layout subway systems for precisely the reason you state. Buses (unless they have isolated bus lanes) won't work because they will be stuck in traffic on the ring roads.
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What _is_ happening is the density crisis. Cities became a black hole of density, making more and more people to move into ever denser conditions via economic forces.
Maybe somewhere in the world, but in the US, no, cities are not growing.
Want to fix that? Promote suburbs and exurbs, via remote work and cap-and-trade for dense office space.
Suburbs and exurbs are in fact growing, exactly opposite to what you imply.
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Maybe somewhere in the world, but in the US, no, cities are not growing.
Look at the Seattle population ( https://www.macrotrends.net/gl... [macrotrends.net] ), NYC population ( https://www.macrotrends.net/gl... [macrotrends.net] ), Chicago population ( https://www.macrotrends.net/gl... [macrotrends.net] ). Most of large cities in the US are growing, at the expense of rural areas and small cities.
Suburbs and exurbs are in fact growing, exactly opposite to what you imply.
Exurbs started to grow after COVID, but this is not sustainable unless the dense office space is regulated. Suburbs have mostly been growing near larger cities.
I actually did an analysis of that using the Census data.
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Yes, but housing per capita increases aren't enough to offset the decreasing number of children and general aging of society. When you have two parents and four kids, one house is fine for six people. When family size is four and there's less children in general, you need more housing.
Re:Isn't that good news? (Score:4, Insightful)
For China, this is extremely bad. Several studies are suggesting China has overcounted it's population by 100-200 million people for a host of reasons. The issue here is that the most productive people in an economy, who generate the majority of tax receipts to the government as well as economic activity, are people in their late 20's to late 40's. Below age 20 (kids) they are a cost to society, and as people retire (over 50 and later) they become a cost due to various social safety net programs.
For China, because of their rapid industrialization and rapid rise in life expectancy, not to mention their one-child policies and such, the dropping population is with the wrong demographic: young people. It's speculated that China now has an even number of people over 50 as under, and the current generations of young people, whom will be working and paying into the system while people are drawing out, is just too small. If you have more people drawing benefits and fewer people paying into benefits, you have a very serious problem. This coupled with the fact that in China, there are not that many social safety nets; most people's retirement plan is "my kids will take care of me". This puts people in their 30's and 40's in a very sticky situation, where a couple without any siblings both most work to support 2-4 grandparents and possibly one child of their own, let alone not 2.
So this demographic issue could upend the Chinese economy in 10-20 years almost completely, which would be bad for everyone all around.
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Population growth is not slowing - It has completely stopped almost everywhere outside Africa.
Everywhere else, the population is already shrinking - the effects just aren't being seen yet.
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It's sort of good news. A gradual population decline is a good thing. A crash is not. It's rather like deflation, 2% a year is easily managed, 10% a year is not.
Five million a year out of 1.4 billion doesn't sound too serious to me. That's one third of 1%. If Gina is wound so tight that even that collapses them they were in bad shape anyway.
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The "bad" news I keep hearing is the growing elderly are going to want labor done for them. But last I checked there's already a way to buy people's labor, you trade your own crystalized labor (money) for it. I know I'll certainly be expected to.
If this is intended to be serious, and not irony: no, this merely shows that you don't understand what money is or how it works on a macroeconomic level.
The fact that you can buy labor with money does not mean that labor is money. Some person still has to perform the labor.
It's like saying that, if there's a drought, no problem, I will just trade my own crystalized water (money) for it.
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World overpopulation is overstated (Score:2)
The biggest reason you feel the Earth is overpopulated is probably because of a lifetime of Malthusian propaganda, where we should have all starved a couple centuries earlier. Technological development, which kind of requires a large population to generate the excess for the research and development, efficiency of scale, has negated that at every turn.
Still, we've also reached the point where pretty much every "developed" economy has negative population growth. Some, like South Korea, are looking at a cli
The birthrate worriers just want workers (Score:5, Insightful)
The "birth rate catastrophe" all over the world is not a real problem. The only people it's a problem for are the corporate business owners that are worried they won't have an endless steady stream of workers to chain to their machines. That's what this whole concern is about.
For the other 99% of the population, it's a good thing. It means less competition for jobs and housing and other necessities and luxuries for future generations.
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They *are* doing that.
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I suspect the competition for jobs will increase instead, because there will be fewer of them. Less need for housing, less need for products, even less need for storefronts beyond what amazon and other online retailers will cause to go out of business, less need for agricultural land, less need for government services, lower demands for healthcare... all leading to fewer jobs. Increased automation will reduce jobs producing fewer products further. And the jobs that exist will be higher end, leaving more of
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I suspect the competition for jobs will increase instead, because there will be fewer of them.
Nope. Fewer workers and proportionately fewer consumers would be a wash. What you would get would be some oversupply of factory capacity, as the output decreases,
However, what happens first is that have fewer workers but not fewer consumers (because old people leave the workforce but continue to consume). So you have a relative undersupply of workers, leading to decreased competition for jobs.
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Short term vs long term. Let's just say it will be bumpy.
But I do disagree about older folks. Older folks are consumers, but at a drastically lower level than younger people. I'm not retired yet, but my last purchase of anything consequential was around 2018 or so. I guess one TV since then, but again not expensive. Most things just last longer due to higher quality than they did in the past. But really, as far as the economy goes, older folks are just not a relevant part of it on the consumer side. Active
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You know that's where good stuff like your food and your clothing and your housing comes from, right?
"Less competition for jobs" is nice in your role as a job hunter. In your role as a consumer, it's a synonym for "inflation."
If you are young, the upcoming rapid population drop is going to make YOUR "golden years" quite difficult. (Absen
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In nations that live closer to the bone and having steeper population drop, it's worse - lifespan is going to plummet.
You probably end up like Japan - retirement isn't, can't, be a thing. As long as you can work, you have to work. Even if you're 90, if you're a homebuilder, you're still building homes.
I use homebuilding as an example because I remember seeing a special showing a bunch of geriatric Japanese workers putting a house up. Yes, they were very skilled at it.
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This - for all the talk about about tax receipts and stuff its not about that, its going to be about having enough bread.
Money is line on a ledger, those can get changes with some degree of violence ranging from none, to a lot. What you can't do is get a septuagenarian to harvest much grain, nor can you get them to roll around in the dirt and replace the transmission in the otherwise fully automated GPS controlled combine harvester for that matter. I have my doubts as to if you can send a full automated lif
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Fewer people is good in some cases, bad in others. If having fewer people were always better, the logical conclusion is that zero people is th
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It means less competition for jobs and housing and other necessities and luxuries for future generations.
On the contrary. The idea that there are a fixed number of jobs is the Lump of Labour Fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]. More people mean more people doing more things. It means more ideas, more discoveries, more books, more new music, all of that. As for ho
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The "birth rate catastrophe" all over the world is not a real problem. The only people it's a problem for are the corporate business owners that are worried they won't have an endless steady stream of workers to chain to their machines.
Manufacturing productivity is rising. No, corporate business owners don't need an "endless steady stream of workers to chain to their machines." Manufacturing is a very small part of the economy.
What does need workers is the service economy. Older people need services. When you have a large number of people needing services, and a smaller number of people providing services, that makes a problem.
However, it has an advantage: as the pool of workers shrinks, the wages increase. This effect was seen, for exa
There's little evidence of an issue either way. (Score:2)
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Usually when people talk about overpopulation they mean that there's not enough resources to go around. Space for all the people isn't the issue.
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Re:There's little evidence of an issue either way. (Score:4, Informative)
Try this - we are starting to experience severe negative consequences from the resource use required to support our desired standard of living.
If we halve the population, we immediately halve that issue. All those tourist sites getting locked down? Open again. CO2 emissions? Cut in half overnight. Water use? Enough for everyone!
Imagine if we dropped to 1/10th how much better we'd have it. We could increase our personal resource usage while still having much less net pollution, more personal space, etc.
So yes, we're over populated.
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Beat me to it. If I had mod points I wouldn't be commenting. :D
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There's a huge difference between making half the population disappear and deciding that a population decline that is already happening isn't a bad thing.
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Economics doesn't work like that. You have to address specific numbers in the context of material availability, not relative numbers compared to prior circumstances. Halving the population does not - repeat NOT - inherently benefit anyone unless you have by sheer chance been in a situation where there were twice as many people as the equilibrium condition.
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Fewer people means a reduction in our gross impact on a finite biosphere even if our per capital impact remains stable.
This is Fact with a capital F. To deny it is to deny reality.
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It has nothing to do with space and everything to do with energy usage per capita.
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That seems like fantastic wishful thinking. Forty thousand years ago, when the largest beasts all went extinct, stone age cultures were born that survived a lot longer than we have, with very little (by comparison) technology. That's a much more likely scenario than humans living off-Earth.
Welding people into their homes will do that (Score:2)
For all the sinophiles and CCP shills in the audience...y'all do realize that this is a country that literally laid seige to its own cities for almost a year straight? In what world is that a morale-building exercise that inspires the confidence and hope young adults usually need to feel in their lizard brains as a precondition of reproducing?
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Declining birthrates are happening in most first world countries. Pretty much just means that China is joining the club.
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Population growth there was way faster under a far *more* oppressive regime, so your explanation is wrong.
This is a problem for America too (Score:2)
Not unique to China (Score:2)
Every country outside Africa has a shrinking population.
What's more, demographers are *constantly* having to revise their trends downwards as they underestimate how quickly societies stop having kids as they progress. It is accelerating exponentially.
End the perpetual growth ideology (Score:2)
People really ought to be thinking about what a post growth economy looks like, because right now it looks an awful lot like war until the population decreases enough to start growing again.
Is that really what you want for your family?
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Yeah, it's always governments and economists that insist that endlessly growing the population is a good thing.
Maybe for tax collectors, and businesses....but not for society or the environment.
Maybe in China, but Russia ... (Score:3)
Russia bans 'child-free propaganda' to try to boost birth rate [reuters.com]
Russia's lower house of parliament voted unanimously on Tuesday to ban what authorities cast as pernicious propaganda for a child-free way of life, hoping to boost a faltering birth rate.
The law, expected to be swiftly approved by the upper house of parliament and Putin ...
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