two for thought

recommended brief articles with major implications

Today’s Wall Street Journal closes its first section with a pair of articles worth your time. The first, ‘China Pays Price for Its One-Child Policy’ is one of the clearest examples of actions creating consequences that one could find. I have mentioned this phenomenon in previous columns from different view points but the graphics in the article are so helpful for why this the effect of a policy promulgated forty-five years back is problematic.

A new United Nations forecast predicts the Middle Kingdom will have 639 million people seventy-five and a half years from now, a projected decrease of roughly half of the current population of 1.42 billion: quite a number. This results from the government imposing a strict one-child policy on Han (91% of the population) in the late 1970s to reduce drain on China’s overall resources while allowing the national economy to develop without such a stressful public demands on resources.

The decline of more than 700 million people in the next three quarters of a century results from natural causes (not reproducing offspring) rather than a cataclysmic event such as nuclear war or a natural disaster of epic proportions. A major conflict could undermine those numbers seriously as we are seeing at present in Russia, though I strenuously doubt this fact alone would deter Beijing from pursuing conflict if it believed such a response vital to the Party’s survival. Finding volunteers to fight instead of conscripted forces might be a different matter but that is not currently a problem we see playing out.

This is not merely a psychological ramification this downsizing that matters to a nation accustomed to its BIGNESS, whether in population, in land mass, in length of its civilizational history, or its role in the world. This demographic decline has real consequences now and into the foreseeable future.

Fewer workers are available as workers as we have discussed. The economic miracle of the Four Modernisations built upon internal migration from inefficient and underutilized rural populations into urban centers where they worked in factories, producing goods for export. China harnessed those workers to the nation’s benefit, a policy many consider mercantilistic, rather than merely for their own individual advancements.

The forty years of a One Child Policy means that more people have savored freedom so they have little interest in marriage, much less children. Women are preferring to keep their jobs rather than return home without independent incomes. Overall pessimism over the society’s future, for a range of reasons including demographics, political repression, and environmental decay, are discouraging efforts to alter this trajectory.

The most immediate issue, however, is that “a glut of more than 40 million {C W note: remember, that is better than 10% of our entire population} new retirees” over the period from 2020-2025 leave the workforce. This strains health care, housing, and particularly the overall socialisation for the elderly. China’s society traditionally relied on children to provide for their parents in multi-generational housing to assure the latters’ continued welfare. With the single child families, a woman marrying becomes part of her spouse’s family with a mind to protect and monitor his parents (assuming he has no siblings this is an obvious task). Who takes care of her folks?

The Journal article sum us up the many effects quite nicely.

Similarly, a companion piece indicates the United Nations Population Agency projects world population will peak forty years from now. The earth was home last year to 8.09 billion humans, but demographers predict the peak number of world residents will reach 10.29 billion or so in 2084, almost 700 million fewer than anticipated a decade ago.

This brief but worthwhile summary also includes graphics about where populations continue growing rapidly but less dramatically, with a global fertility rate now standing at 2.1%, than at the beginning of this century. Worthy of consideration is that North American, South Asia, and Africa remain the areas of more rapid population increase. The author, Danny Doughtery, shows us where population peaked already such as both Russia and China.

What do these articles say about future military contests? What about food and resource allocation? Will South Asia’s reckoning on the environment occur soon or take far longer as the government in Delhi responds to its still growing needs under a less wealthy population? Utterly fascinating questions directly associated with actions and consequences in a panoply of public policy decisions.

I welcome any and all thoughts. I consider demographics important but perhaps you don’t so send me your rebuttals. Thanks for considering this topic today. Feel free to circulate it. Thanks to those who subscribe as your financial support helps me continue reading the Journal, among many sources.

These gems were from earlier this week in Eastport.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Danny Dougherty, ‘Earth’s Population Should Peak Before Century Ends’, WallStreetJournal.com, 11 July 2024, retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/world/its-official-earths-population-should-peak-before-the-end-of-the-century-81bbd498

Liyan Qi and Ming Li, ‘China Pays Price for Its One-Child Policy’, WallStreetJournal.com, 11 July 2024, retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-population-slowing-economy-7ff938e5?mod=world_trendingnow_article_pos3