Don't think I understood how dramatic China's demographic shift was until I saw this graph.
Let's take a look. Here's the chart Brad is talking about:
That is indeed pretty startling. Then again, here's the same chart for the United States:
This isn't quite as startling, but it's not wildly different from the Chinese chart except for one thing: the stunning drop in Chinese births starting in 2018. In 2016, China abandoned its one-child policy and there was an immediate uptick in births, followed by a small downtick the next year. But then things went off the rails.
Birth rates might have recovered after that, but apparently Chinese couples had a massive reaction to COVID-19 and just stopped having babies. Birth rates dropped in the US too, but only by a small amount.
The result is that between 2017 and today (through 2021), births dropped about 5% in the US but by more than a third in China. Perhaps that will turn around in 2024 after China emerges from its COVID year.
Perhaps. If it doesn't, the Chinese workforce is going is to suddenly implode starting around 2038. But who knows? Maybe it won't matter by then.
POSTSCRIPT: This was a stunningly difficult post to write. The CDC provides an absolute mass of statistics on every subtopic of births and deaths you can imagine, but it's nearly impossible to get a simple table of crude births and deaths. It's only because of my dedication to you, my loyal readers, that I persevered and eventually cobbled together the US data.
Start making more money weekly. This is valuable part time work for everyone. The best part ,work from the comfort of your house and get paid from $10k-$20k each week . Start today and have your first cash at the end of this week. Visit this article
for more details.. https://GetdreamJobs1.blogspot.com/
fr fr DM me your onlyfans no cap
Just like when liberals became YIMBY instead of NIMBY overnight last decade, I am experiencing a bit of whiplash on elite opinion going from we're going to overpopulate the planet to doing so will doom everyone. Even Matt Yglesias is a YIMBY who thinks scores of billions of humans is inevitable.
I'm still in the camp that thinks environmental impacts are inevitable from a human and that there is basically, in the long run, a proportional relationship between population size and environmental impact.
So maybe at least until we figure out how to give every human alive enough energy and calories to thrive without mortgaging the future of the planet we should not be freaking out about this?
People are freaked out because the quality of life of their retirement depends on a steady stream of "production" from the younger folk, and if there aren't enough younger folk, there goes retirement.
I agree with your points about population and the environment; the planet's ultimate carrying capacity is probably only 5-6 billion people.
Projected change in working age population, 2019-2050
https://collabfund.com/blog/what-else-matters/
US: +13%
China: -20.6%
World population is expected to plateau later this century just north of 10 billion (on average, older) humans. We need to transform our economy and how we take care of the planet but we don't need to get the population down to 6 billion. We can make room for everybody.
Which do you think more likely? An equitable transformation of a society that has evolved for centuries or mass death?
I doubt if the Earth's long term carrying capacity is that high; I would guess 2 billion at most.
The issue of the dependency ratio will go away as more and more work is automated. labor WILL become obsolete, the only question is whether it will take thirty years, or fifty, or a hundred. More than a hundred seems wildly unlikely.
The current population of the world is close to 8 billion. Getting down to 2 billion sounds like a pretty nasty event. And, what evidence is there that long term capacity is only 2 billion? I don't see it.
@sfbay1949
Good question. It also raises another question. If 2 billion were the right number, what do we do with the excess of 6 billion people? It's not like we can send them somewhere else. Short of massive war, mass famine, or genocide, we're all stuck on this same rock, like it or not.
Luckily, climate change will get rid of the excess population for us.
👍👍
I once calculated a decade-by-decade approximate human carrying capacity where EVERY (this is an important constraint) person on earth had the standard of living of the USA for that decade. Then I calculated a global carbon budget for that same decade, using the technology of that same decade. Granted, this may be a pessimistic solution, given that there have been improvements in efficiency, and improving "green" sources of energy. but offsetting that, we have to recognize that progressively modern expectations such as air conditioning simply require a lot of energy no matter how efficiently it is done. The approximate solution was about 1 to 2 billion people, using technology from 1900. While this is not a very precise calculation, the sustainable technology does not include air conditioning, automobiles or air travel, and sail-assisted ocean shipping may be favored. If we desire to sustain a higher technology civilization (e.g., 1910 or 1920) a major portion of the solution is to have a proportionally smaller global population size. Personally, I see 1 billion as a tentative upper limit. No doubt a better analysis can be done, but the implications are sobering--if every global citizen is given equal benefit.
but the implications are sobering--if every global citizen is given equal benefit.
They're not in the list bit "sobering" because said "implications" are something you dreamt up.
What's the evidence for 6 billion? We're guessing.
If we can achieve a population shrink rate of 1% per year, the population will halve every 70 years approximately which means 140 years to get down to 2 billion (the rule of 72 works for negative growth rates just as well as for positive ones. A slower shrink rate means longer to bring the population down. I am NOT suggesting genocide.
If we can achieve a population shrink rate of 1% per year,
Sounds really fast. Too lazy to look it up, but that's gotta be 5x or 6x faster than what Japan is experiencing these days...
I get their reasons, I just don't get the change in opinion when none of the facts have changed. Some, like the aforementioned Big Media Matt, have just decided to go with it, I guess.
Somehow, fixing social security pensions to match reality seems easier than you know preventing environmental collapse after it's too late.
There ought to be more of an uptick in Chinese deaths because of covid, I would think.
But, this isn't a bad thing, is it? We should focus more on increasing quality of life as an economic goal, rather than growth for it's own sake.
I've long thought that about the fundations of capitalism, the corporate creed that "If you aren't growing, you're DYING" nonsense. But it's absolute heresy to focus on quality over quantity, whether it's people's lives or numbers of cheap plastic widgets destined for the landfilll.
"apparently Chinese couples had a massive reaction to COVID-19 and just stopped having babies" - starting in 2018? Or even 2017? No, wait, the decision made by couples must have been at least nine months prior to that. So my bet is couples stopped making babies after China's successful launch of the world's first quantum satellite in 2016. No, I don't know what that is either. Sounds unsettling, though. Otherwise, maybe it was the Emperor Level Blizzard of January, 2016.
Btw an "immediate uptick" sounds weird too, but Wikipedia provides the answer as usual. The one-child policy was relaxed in 2014 and its abolishment announced in 2015. So yeah, one can imagine couples counting on the law being changed before the baby was born.
Which leads me to think: maybe the "uptick" was due to pent-up demand? And when that demand was satisfied, the line went down again.
One reason why birth rates dropped in China was that the people found it, in relative terms, too expensive to raise children and, especially, to move into bigger homes that larger families necessitated. Being socialistic and authoritarian, the government tried to remedy this sitiation by attacking income inequality. This is when a number of Chinese plutocrats were prosecuted (before covid demanded all of the government's attention).
Not to bitch, but if you're not presenting the crude rate of deaths/births, it's really hard to discern the true nature of the trends.
Maybe having a government watching your every move ruins the mood?
It's past time for Kevin - and many others - to decide whether they think there will be too few jobs in the future because of robots, or too few workers to do the jobs. Many economics writers for the newspapers and other media seem to go back and forth, depending on what the latest news is about robots or population growth.
For some rational discussion of the issue, see Dean Baker at the Beat the Press Blog. Actually if productivity continues to increase as it has done for centuries there will be no problem supporting an older, non-growing population. China in particular can be expected to vastly increase its productivity to bring the country up at least partially to US/European standards.
"Actually if productivity continues to increase as it has done for centuries there will be no problem supporting an older, non-growing population."
I would like to believe that. But, as Krugman points out in a recent NYT article, a declining population also means that there is also declining demand, especially for things like real estate and construction.
as Krugman points out in a recent NYT article, a declining population also means that there is also declining demand, especially for things like real estate and construction.
Declining demand also puts downward pressure on productivity growth, by reducing investment. When a society has very little need to expand productive capacity over the long term, a major source of equipment and machinery renewal is removed. In other words, the fact that a society is constantly and regularly adding more factories, roads, airports, warehouses, etc in order to accommodate more people means by its very nature that new physical capital is added.
Krugman has never heard of depreciation. Things break. Things wear out.
I thought the only reason the US population was increasing was immigration, but births > deaths doesn’t square with that.
If the population has recently been growing, the age distribution skews young. That means that a fertility rate below replacement will still produce more births than deaths, for a while, until the age distribution of the population shifts. That lag is the reason why it's taken so long for the one child per family policy to actually produce population decline.
Two numbers tell the tale; average life expectancy and death rate as a fraction of total population. Simply put, if average life expectancy is 80, a stable population with a steady state age distribution will see one-eightieth of the population die each year. If less than one-eightieth of the population dies, then age distribution hasn't yet reached steady state.
China's population apparently still skews young. One-seventieth of China's population is about twenty million and they're only seeing about half that many deaths.
China and US have virtually identical median ages per a quick google I just did: 38.4 vs. 38.5, respectively (China slightly younger). They're aging quite a bit more rapidly, though, and will pass the US any day now, if they haven't already. I listened to a talk by a Chinese demographics expert a few weeks back, and she talked about several surges in births in China in the post-war period. One starting in 1949 (end of war, arrival of stability); one in early 60s (bounce back after great famine); and one in the early 80s (economic reforms).
Awe Kevin, you never cease to amaze me. You are truly wonderful. We all thank you.
I went over to the CDC statistics site. Wow. They do make it hard to get a simple answer. The trick is to accept the defaults, but group by Year and request All Years.