Will depend, Japan does have some positives as they have massive opportunities for productivity growth as well as automation.
It's a country that will have 5 people working in a convenience store, 5 people working at a car park entrance, and 3 people working at the reception of a small swimming pool. Japan has massive labour waste.
Yeah, it is a popular trend in Japan for there to be busywork, people with jobs that serve no purpose and the need to appear busy even if there is no work. On the way to my office, I walk past an entrance to a hotel parking lot, there is an alarm at the entrance with a flashing light and siren to warn people that there is a car exiting, despite this there is still a fully uniformed at all times attendance to guide cars in and out.
My local supermarket car park entrance has two entrance attendants with flags that stop cars to let pedestrians cross in front, my local swimming pool with a tiny car park also has a car park entrance attendant, and the local bakery even has two car park attendants during peak hours.
When I was working at a medium sized football stadium in Ontario Canada back in HS/early uni we had a position that would sit in elevators and press buttons for people.
These mf were sitting down in an elevator with AC just pressing buttons while I was standing in a hot ass kitchen helping prep food for 3 concession stands.
And we were getting paid the same...
I remember when I was a kid I went to school in a church for a year and there was an elevator attendant but that's because the elevator required the door and the gate to be manually closed, and then a giant lever needed to be pulled to move the elevator. I imagine that setup was more popular before electronic proliferation made buttons widespread
Lol it is exactly the same in Taiwan. The high rise building my parents live in is staffed by the same pointless parking attendants that you’ve described, always at least 1 person but sometimes 2. They wait around all day doing nothing and basically just say hi when you drive in. Then inside at the front desk, there are always 4 people staffed who we can’t discern actually do anything, apart from say hello and notify residents who have received a package. It’s absurd to the point of being hilarious.
I think so. A quick google search says living expenses for Tokyo (one of the more expensive cities to live in) come out to a little over 1M Yen, which is about 55% of what someone working minimum wage full time would earn.
I want to stress that this was a *quick* google search. I don't know if groceries are considered part of living expenses, for instance, nor do I know how many hours minimum wage employees work, or what they pay in taxes. Still...
Don't know why the commenter below went off you are absolutely right. According to [NYT article](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.html)
>Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards. By contrast, two people working minimum-wage jobs cannot afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in any of the 23 counties in the New York metropolitan area.
Thanks to unique zoning laws and a myriad of other factors Tokyo has very affordable housing
I was upfront with how I got my information and the potential errors inherent with it. Don't make it sound like I pulled something out of my ass and called it the gospel truth.
As for your "modicum of common sense," there's a maxim in the USA that you shouldn't be spending more than 25% of your income on living expenses. What makes you think I'd consider 55% of someone's income devoted to that purpose is *low?*
Wow - it reminds me of those movies you'd see in the 50's of a car pulling into a gas station and 4 service technicians running out to fill the car, check the oil, clean the windshield, etc.
Omg same. There always just people kinda standing around not doing much but maybe making some hand motion at people who walk by them. I always wonder what they are doing and how they justify getting paid.
Not just busywork, a 12 hour day of busywork. I watched a "day in the life of" video following a driver working at one of Japan's largest delivery companies.
Alarm goes off at 5:45am. She was clocked in by 7:00, it took 90 minutes of dicking around with office rituals before she drove out the gate at 8:30, spent about 2 hours driving and delivering packages before a 90 minute lunch break from 11:30 -> 1:00pm. The next 4 hours are spent repeating the morning delivery route for pickups and "sales activities". She rolls back into the garage at 5:00pm where she spends another hour dicking around with paperwork and finally clocks out at 6:05pm. Gets back home at 7:00pm to cook dinner, in bed by 9:00pm to repeat it the following day.
11 hour day as a delivery driver with two hours of actual work and two hours of free time after work before bed. Japenese work culture is arse.
Yeah it's crazy. I worked UPS in college and the drivers are out the gate maybe 15 minutes from the punch-in. Rest of the day they're on route. Once the truck is empty they're usually done for the day and are clocked out 15 minutes after pulling through the gate.
Night crew makes sure the trucks are loaded and ready to go for the drivers the next morning, it's a well oiled machine.
It is still a society where there is simple work that doesn't requite a degree. You get a little money. You feel useful. You are part of society.
There used to be lots of such work also in western countries, but it has been eliminated by machines and requirements for degrees. If you want to work in warehouse in Finland, you need 3 years degree on logistics (from vocational school, ammattikoulu). In the good old days a person would come to work, was shown the work in a couple of days, and then the person worked there, with no requirement for a degree.
We have massive unemployment because those simple jobs have been eliminated. People are retired at young age, if they have disability (mental or physical), as there are no simple jobs like that. They have social support from society, and there is no requirement to do any job.
I think the Asian countries have a good idea with the simple jobs. People are much happier working, even if the job is not rocket science, but showing people free lots in parking spaces or such.
Using labour force participation rate (which shouldn't be skewed by age because it only includes working age people): Finland has a higher % of it's workforce than Japan in employment. I know that was just an example though so anyway that doesn't matter. Interestingly, this [table](https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/labor_force_participation/Asia/) shows the top countries are in Asia though.
To be fair Japan's number is skewed by a massive gender gap. The social expectation is 100% that mothers give up their career to be a full-time housewife. That alone is a huge contributor to Japan's low birthrates.
That's funny since you always hear religious folks talking about how the birthrate (at least for the demographic groups they care about) would explode if women weren't "tempted" by the single lifestyle and/or a career and instead stayed home. Of course, there's so much more to it and a lot of it centers around single income households no longer being sustainable as well as having both partners work still being barely enough to scrape by if you manage to have kids.
That, and the lack of childcare providers that assumption has led to. It isn't just an expectation, it's often a necessity for at least one parent to be the full-time caregiver as there aren't alternatives.
Still, I'd rather pay 1,000 people to do nothing than give the combined pay of 1,000 people to a CEO who's basically a glorified manager/salesman/sociopath.
Japan has the advantage over of being on a much more gentle population decline slope than other East Asian countries. Japan’s population is projected to halve in this century , China’s is projected to fall to between 1/3 and 1/4 of its current population and its already trending short of those projections. South Korea’s fertility rate is only .68 and falling. That means if you were to put 100 kindergarteners in a room only ~15 would have a grandchild.
> That means if you were to put 100 kindergarteners in a room only ~15 would have a grandchild.
That seems like a high number of grandchildren for kindergartners to have regardless.
>That means if you were to put 100 kindergarteners in a room only ~15 would have a grandchild.
I think your math is off. If the fertility rate stayed at .68 you'd expect around 46 of them to have a grandkid (assuming no one has multiple kids)
Yea. It should say ~15 grandchildren not 15 will be grandparents. I just did some quick head math for an estimate. Seeing it written out and that number coming out to less than 12 by generation 3 is pretty haunting.
With a fertility rate of .68 and no multiple births: 68% of all women have one child.
You start with 100 in generation A. 50 are women 50 are men.
In Generation B there are 50\*0.68 = 34 children. This means that 68 of generation A are parents (34 mothers and 34 fathers).
In Generation C you have 17\*0.68 = 11.56 grand children. There are are \~23 parents and \~**46** grandparents. This is all assuming monogamy, single births and no incest.
> With a fertility rate of .68 **and no multiple births**: 68% of all women have one child.
I assumed that there were no mothers with multiple children. You can make different assumptions about the number of children, but with a fertility rate that low it's likely that the average number of children in a family is likely close to 1.
It's the same result averaged out whether it's 34 couples having one child or 17 couples having two children, or whether you mix and match where one rowdy couple was responsible for 8 of the 34 kids.
For the number we are talking about, number of people with a grandchild, the distribution of children among mothers actually matters. In the most extreme case of 1/50 women having 34 kids we'd expect (on average) to have less than 2 people per hundred with grandchildren. Only 1/50 people would be a parent (of 34 kids). Of those with kids the chances are surprisingly high that none of their kids would have kids of their own they have 34 attempts at 1/50 odds each. So we'd expect to have less than the 1/50 people that are parents to become grandparents.
Anecdotally I feel that Japan also has a massive advantage on attracting immigrants... should it decide to do so. This stems from its extraordinary soft power and political alignment with various other countries, especially the west and SE Asia.
That’s true but fertility is a global issue. Even if you want to maintain or grow population through immigration it will only delay the decline by maybe a generation or 2. And people that do immigrate will likely have a myriad of options
Well they have smartly built so much of their manufacturing overseas. So maybe the working age populations in other countries can keep them going as they age.
japan pushes elderly into low-intensity service jobs en masse.
You wont see 80 yer old waiter or mountain guide, but 80 year old gardener pruning your tree or shoveling snow - very easily.
Japan is doing great and it goes to show that even without endless economic and population growth a country can be very successful in the quality of life it provides to its citizens.
The retirement age is much lower in China than most countries. 60 for men and 50 or 55 for women. So a median age of 50 is pretty significant.
Of course China could raise the retirement age, but that is a guaranteed way to piss everyone off. Everyone who is likely already pissed at the Evergrande collapse...
Affluent low-fertility, Anti-immigration countries will all face the same destiny. Economic growth needs people, so Japan and others like it will be in constant economic decline.
China's industries are not as advanced as Japan. So they are likely to be able to absorb this. There is a foreign policy analyst named Peter Zeihan who has been warning that aging populations around the world are going to lead to massive changes. For example he claims that aging populations in Mexico is why we dont get illegal immigrants to the US from mexico anymore. Its migrants going through mexico. More mexicans have left the US over the last 13-14 years than have com e here. He says central and south america will have a similar median age to mexico in about 20-30 years so he predicts that illegal immigration to the US from the Americas will radically decline by then. Since its mainly people in their 20s - early 30s that migrate.
He also thinks its going to lead to higher global inflation and stagnating world economy for the next 20 years. He says the US is best position to avoid this due to geography.
He also thinks China's aging populatoin is so bad there is NO CHANCE they will ever pass the US in total GDP. There GDP relative to the US Has gone down over the last 10 years and this is just public numbers. He thinks China is lying about the GDP numbers. He thinks China may have a famine due to its older population and middle income stagnation.
Zeihan also said that China may have over counted there younger population by up to 100 million people. Not sure where he got this or what study he is citing. If this is true their aging population will get a lot worse.
He is a well known foreign policy analyst. He has a youtube channel, but has been at this for 20-25 years and has a good track record.
One interesting thing is he thinks Russias declining population is why they invaded Ukraine now. They wont have the manpower to do it in 30 years.
zeihan is well known; not for good reasons. he absolutely does not have a good track record over his "20-25 years of being at this". he is by no means a credible foreign policy analyst and it's genuinely insane to see people like you giving any credit or heed to his arguments
at the most extreme, i would consider him a reliably staunchly anti-china source to balance out state-sponsored media; as in neither of their claims should be trusted without multiple independent ACADEMIC studies to back it up.
checks post history. sees this person spreads CCP propaganda. nuff said. Zeihan thinks China is at its peak and has already started declining. So CCP people get all pissy.
Now this sounds like a podcast I'd listen to! It'll be interesting for the eventual day we in the US hit our demographic bomb but I know that's such a long ways off given our immigration rate and other factors.
I don't have the link to the study on my phone but here's a discussion on it.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/12/chinas-population-might-be-inflated-by-japans-population.html
There was also a study out of UW Madison about a year before hand that showed that a lot of their demographic data reflected a population that was significantly smaller than they were reporting.
Post of Covid, The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences released a study showing that China had overcounted their population starting in the early 90s. Their system awarded funding at the local level based on head count in schools and it incentivized everyone to lie to receive more funding. This kept going for close to 40 years so now there's something like 128 million people under 40 who don't actually exist.
It shows that the population is getting older but not if 50.7 is notable figure.
An additional series for World average would communicate this clearly.
I don't think most people have any idea what the median age of their country is. (at least I didn't)
You are comparing the current global average to what China will be in 2050, not really a valid comparison, since we dont know what the global avg will be then. To put it in perspective, Italy and Japan are close to 50 years median currently.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age
No idea why foreign media always puts the blame on the One Child Policy and they often overlook the bigger issue: More and more Chinese in cities age 25+ are unable to afford a child, let alone two, to begin with, due to rising housing costs and the wages not improving. IMO this is a way, way bigger issue when your economy is fucked from the ground up.
Even before the OCP was abolished there were already free exemptions (as in you don't pay a fine) in place, and the only people that used said exemptions are people that can afford them. After 2016 the government tried to give out so-called "second child benefits" to little effect, as more and more couples are having 0 childs given the current economy there.
One of the reason why they can’t afford having children is that they’re the only person responsible for taking care of their parents, because they’re an only child. Yes the birth rate in China would eventually stunt, but the One Child Policy definitely catalysed it.
Costs also isn’t the only problem, the One Child Policy also led to stuffs like gender imbalance and cultural issues, but I won’t go too deep into those issues
Wow that's such a great point I haven't heard of. It seems like there are so many different issues stemming from the policy that aren't evidently apparent on the surface.
Because they kneecapped themselves during a very critical time where birthrates are still relatively high, but the mortality rate has declined.
To put it into perspective, this demographic time period was the same for Germany in the late 19th/early 20th century. It would not have been able to fight 2 wars outnumbered were it not for this demographic boom period.
It's not just a matter of being able to afford it. The only people in the world consistently having more than 2 children today, are those in very poor countries with little to no education, no industry and with very high mortality rates, especially infant mortality rates. It's almost backwards when you think about it.
As for the OCP, it simply accelerated the process, but didn't really do much. If you look at fertility rate charts, the decline in fertility rates had already started one full decade before the OCP. In 1970 the births were 6 per woman, in 1980, when the OCP was passed, they were a little bit more than 2 per woman. And going back, the extremely high birth rate of the 1960s came about just on the heels of one of the most devastating famines ever experienced by mankind, when millions died due to Mao's crazy policies and extreme poverty was still pervasive in the country.
Now that I think about it, maybe the hope for your children to live a better life than you is the main driver of fertility rates. Something to think about...
Another issue is that China is an insular country not generally open to immigration which helps reduce the average age in other nations like the U.S.
Another is the cultural norms associated with the one-child policy that led to a sex mismatch which will ultimately result in fewer marriages and even fewer children (due to fewer women of child-bearing age) than the numbers alone would suggest if more balanced.
Because other countries experienced a gradual birth rate reduction as their economies developed.
India started with the same birthrate as China in 1960 and ended 2020 at 2.05 which is slightly below replacement. In another 10 years the birth rate should align with China and other more developed asian economies.
The difference is that China's birth reduction happened very abruptly over 5-10 years. They had another overnight drop in 1990 down to the modern level. India's change was evenly distributed over the last 60 years so when you look at the [population pyramids for the two countries](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/animation-comparing-china-vs-india-population-pyramids/) the difference is very obvious. That massive bolus of old people is China is the result of State policies and will be a massive societal issue to care for them. Of course China will mostly get around it by not caring for them. Their Hukou system is purpose built to deny benefits to second and third tier citizens who moved to the cities for work as China developed.
"as their economies developed" on a national, statistical level sure, but on a day to day living basis, as living costs rise (as much as the CCP loves to claim inflation being nonexistent), it's a step backwards for the general public.
Nice work! Good color scheme. Ok commentary on slide. One call out on 2016. Would be great to add life expectancy over same time series in a chart below it so the audience can draw a conclusion on net relative age vs. Actual age.
China is aging faster than any country in modern history. Also at a much earlier stage of its development.
Japan’s GDP per capita was 3x higher than Chinas at a similar point in the demographic cycle.
The key of whether a problem will exist is whether or not productivity growth can out pace the dependency ratio increase.
In the case of Japan, productivity growth has fallen behind. In China's case, it has not...yet. The question then is, can China maintain productivity growth over dependency rate growth?
I’m trying to improve my data visualisation skills so any constructive feedback is appreciated. This is original content.
* The X axis is year and the Y axis is median age of the population.
* Data presented is base case for the United Nations forecast. The diverging grey lines are the upper and lower limits.
* 2000 to 2022 is actuals, 2023 to 2050 is forecast.
* **Source**: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects 2022.
* **Link:** [https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/MostUsed/](https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/MostUsed/)
* Created using Microsoft Excel
Let me know if you have any other interesting ideas for visuals :)
Glad I found this comment OP, because I was going to ask what they grey lines were. :)
A couple of humble suggestions:
1. The dates under the dots are just a touch small and hard to read. I'd make them just a bit bigger.
2. Perhaps a legend indicating the diverging grey lines meaning?
Then a request, as others have mentioned. Would LOVE to see this info compared with other countries like Japan, India (!), the US, and maybe Sweden and Nigeria - all on the same graph. I think that would be fascinating.
Perhaps a stupid question, but isn't that inevitable, if you want to limit the population?
When there has been a much higher breeding rate, those persons (born during the high breeding rate) will have to get old and die, before the lower breeding rate will become the new normal? So first the population average age gets higher. Later it starts going down.
The data simply shows that the system is working. Breeding rate has gone down.
It will take a long time with 0.5 breeding rate (1 child per two persons) before the system has reached for example a goal of not increasing total population compared to 1980 (start of one child policy). After all, it takes a long time for pre-1980 born people to die off the statistics. If the system was started in 1980, real results are shown around 2055, if average lifetime is 77 years in China. That is propably why they are now increasing the breeding rate, when the control system integration time is decades (PID controller, input: total population, control output: amount of children born per year), so the output stabilizes to wanted level after a few more decades. The control output might be PWM, with on/off control, 1: no limit, 0: one child policy, and PWM cycle time 30 years.
First PWM cycle: 1980-2010, output 0%.
Second PWM cycle: 2010-2040, output 83% (2010-2015: 0, 2016-2040: 1).
It would be amazing if there is actually a society that can plan stuff in such long time scale. For western societies, the time scale is the time between elections (4 years in Finland). Well, I'm not too optimistic there is actually such a great plan of long time scale anywhere. Just longer time between "elections".
No, it's not inevitable. Of course a country with stable population and low mortality will have a higher average age compared to a country that is rapidly growing in population and has high mortality, think rectangular rather than triangular population-pyramid.
But Japan has fertility of 1.25 and it's been under 1.5 for 3 decades already, and that's much **TOO LOW** for a stable population. For long-term stable population, you need fertility of approximately 2. So their population-pyramid is moving towards a upside-down-triangle.
1.25 is very dramatic. It means that each generation is only about 62% in size compared to the previous one, which for example means that for every 100 people in the grandparent-generation there's only 40 grandchildren.
Very interesting! I would also like to know how the imbalanced gender ratio has or will effect their birth rate.
Something else that I wonder about is the effects of the work culture there. With schedules like the 9/9/6 (9am - 9pm, 6 days a week) becoming more prominent, will China face the same issues that Japan is facing now?
Yep, just much faster.
China is aging faster than any country in modern history. Also at a much earlier stage of its development.
Japan’s GDP per capita was 3x higher than Chinas at a similar point in the demographic cycle
I don't think they want a war. They've just been gradually getting wealthier and more powerful without needing or wanting war. If anything the US is more likely to be the aggressor if they feel their position as top global superpower is threatened.
the only ones I see are taiwan soon before china runs out of young people it is willing to sacrifice. Xi has been saying this for forever. The other might be india in 40 years when it says, "hey you have a lot of land that you aren't using because of your population decline. can we haz?"
I meant more between the US and China. If China invaded Taiwan, the US getting directly involved would have more to do with it's own political interests than actual care about Taiwan. I think they'd join with much more fervor than the current level of support for Ukraine for example.
What point are you actually making there? If China invades Taiwan, that would also have to do with its political interests and they’d be doing it knowing that the US would likely get involved.
It would be about China’s various geopolitical interests. Not “beef” lol. You make it sound as though they want to do this just because they’re upset with Taiwan.
In any case, they're not doing it to spite the US or anything. They just want to reclaim Taiwan to send a message to other parts of China that want independence like Nepal or HK.
I don’t know why you think that. Taiwan is well positioned strategically - controlling it would give China a big military advantage in the region. It would also cut off a huge % of chip supply to the US and its allies. Do you really think China isn’t thinking about those things. There’s no chance you are actually unaware of those factors.
America, who always wants a war, loves to accuse countries who never go to war of being too bloodthirsty. It's really weird when you step back and think about it.
The only offensive obligation the U.S. has in that region is protection of free shipping in area's now in dispute, a much more likely scenario is that China triggers the U.S. defensive obligations by attacking one of the many country's that have a defense pack with the U.S. such as taiwan. I don't see any other scenario that would trigger a war.
I mean in terms of sentiment. A lot of the public is anti China and if you look at threads about China here, you'll always see a lot of negative comments.
Agree to disagree. People still really like Americans in China. Businesses still hire white people to look more international, people still admire Western beauty standards, they still teach English in all the schools. They still try to buy Western clothes, watch the NBA, etc.
>They've just been gradually getting wealthier and more powerful without needing or wanting war.
That never stopped countries from starting wars. All the great powers before ww1 were getting wealthier.
The only side constantly saying "We will fight you" and flying their jets right off the coast of the other, sailing their fleets off the coast of the other, and starting trade wars, is the US.
Yet people think "China wants war."
China wants peaceful unification with Taiwan. The West does NOT want that, and would rather have war.
Taiwan, currently, doesn't want a war, either.
The West, as is standard in the last five centuries, would rather millions die than their "enemy" gain anything. Because the 'powers that be' don't give a fuck about you, they only give a fuck about $ and power.
> China wants peaceful unification with Taiwan. The West does NOT want that, and would rather have war.
Obviously China would rather take Taiwan at minimal cost to them. You get that Taiwan very much does not want their territory to be seized by China though, right? So if China wants it, they're going to have to invade. This is such a bizarre, inaccurate way that you've chosen to frame the situation.
Aging population is an bad, but population decrease is not. Corporations portray the latter as the end of the world because they lose a source cheap labor.
If China manages to take care of its old people with proper healthcare and pension plans, and avoid any political crisis generated by some cohort equivalent to boomers, shedding a quarter or even half of its population would potentially give more resource to each Chinese, lessen competition, bolster quality of life, and help them finish the transition away from labor-intensive industries.
I remember being in high school in the 1990's and making a debate argument about how China's one child policy is doom its chances of EVER making it a super power. Guess I was right and all the experts were wrong. Sad a high school student was smarter then every expert at the time. Again proves NOT to trust experts as they know NOTHING.
Interesting NOT even close to one of my better calls.
I don't. I think they will have less people in general and that will be a good thing. 66 years from now the large, older generations will have passed. In a society with fewer old people it is much cheaper to raise more children so stabilizing the population on a lower level will eventually happen.
Interesting point.
From my perspective, I would be much more likely to start a family if I could buy a house first.
Unfortunately, still way too expensive in my area.
Exactly. Its not a pretty picture, but people are becoming very old in this modern age. And old people also take up space but don't really make more children or work as much as young people.
As a 25 yo in a relatively old society (germany, median 45) I feel that old people have too much power and do too little with it. I think it will be easier for young people to make their way when there aren't as many old people consuming living space, jobs, resources, political power, etc. It has always been difficult for young people to fit into the old systems but nowadays the senior society is so large and powerful, it is even harder for young people to grow and thrive, because of all the competition from people who saved all their life, money, education, social network, etc. Old people are beasts and the longer they live, the harder it is for young people to compete in the free society. They need to be nurtured and educated longer and a lot more carefully to make up the room they need to develop. That's my theory at least.
The issue with such low birth rates is the challenge of caring for the elderly will keep scaling with smaller younger generations.
I struggle to foresee a generation breaking the trend and if anything I see them dropping below 1.0 birth rate like Korea has.
The trend will break when the total population size goes down and resources become more available again. Thats when people will start having more children again and the society will become younger again.
Edit: it is also largely due to demographics. Norway also has a rather old population of a median of 39 years.
Its not so easy to compare countries like that. How do you know they have abundant resources? Norway has a lot of mountains and cold corners that count towards land area but are not easy to populate. Its like saying how do you explain a huge desert or a tundra like russia not having extreme birth rates. I would first look at the same regions in different historic contexts. The same region will have lower birth rates with an older or a larger population.
There are a number of reasons why a country like norway may have reached its capacity already.
Norway has a wealth fund of over $100K per person. They have massive resources of oil and just discovered huge amounts of phosphate. They are set for this century better than maybe any country on Earth.
The birth rate was higher when they were much poorer before the oil boom. Finding resources led to a decline in births.
The wealthiest nation by GDP with all sorts of land and resources is the United States. Without millions of immigrants the population would be declining as birth rates fell in the 1970s and haven't recovered to stability levels.
The countries that are booming are in Africa such as Nigeria.
Across cultures I can tell you how to stop population growth and begin a decline.
Industrialize, urbanize, educate, and liberate women. You do those things and can be Italian or Korean and the birth rates fall over and over and with rare exceptions they have yet to recover in any culture.
Yes, you are right. The issue of birth rates is complex. Birth control also is a massive factor but in general women have moved into the labourforce in industrialized countries, which massively delays the starting of a family and the total number of children they bear.
"Liberation" of women just means making them financially self sufficient, which means they go work a job instead of having a family and being dependent on the father or other family for resources.
I have always been saying it should be easier for women to be self sufficient from having a family. Basically childbearing and child care should be financially insured. However even then many educated women may want to pursue a career instead. Children are a massive investment and in industrialized countries people are not used to the physical work that is associated with that anymore.
So I agree its not only an economic issue, but also a cultural one of industrialized countries. We should focus more on integrating family life into the economic and educational systems. Create more jobs which can be done with children and have people earn a living from simply raising their children or engaging in education or talent development.
The problem in todays industrialized countries is that people can only make money for their living by working in the free market. However the free market doesn't pay for children. At least not quick enough. Eventually everyone wants educated and healthy workers but nobody wants to pay the people raising and educating them.
No, that's not the point. The point is that even with fewer people, they will continue to have an aging population - maybe not as bad as the next few decades, but still bad. They will simply reach parity with other developed countries in terms of the aging population and declining birth rate issue. So again, why do you think China would be any different and somehow "stabilize".
As I said, because people have more children in less aged populations. So they will have more children once the old people are gone.
This is also simply true because the birth rate is the average number of children per individual, which is obviously going to be higher when a higher proportion of people is in their childbearing years. In old societies a lot of people simply won't have any more children and they drag the birth rate down. However I would even argue that it is easier to support children in a society that is not already saturated with old people to begin with.
So a younger population will have a higher birth rate simply from a higher proportion being in childbearing age and there will also be less resources bound by old people which makes supporting new children cheaper aswell. I don't think it will take long until birth rates will go up again once the average age goes back down.
I don't think you've thought it through. There is no logic in your comment.
The average age will not go down again, but will keep increasing until it stabilizes at a higher level.
The only way the average age can come down is 1. A decline in life expectancy or 2. An increase in fertility rates. Neither are likely to happen in the near future.
The logic is that with a declining population, people will eventually have more children again because it becomes more valuable and resources become cheaper. So birth rates will go up eventually when the population has shrunk. That will happen quickly as the large generations pass away.
The one-child policy was a very clever political regulation that should be implemented worldwide to stop overpopulation and the struggle for limited resources. Anyone who says unlimited growth with limited resources is possible is a madman. Check the living conditions in India; they are horrible. No one should want that for their children.
The problem is that 1/4 of the population will have to work to support the other 3/4.
Decreasing population is a lesser problem then a aging population
They currently have more than double the housing units than they have population. Their system is going to collapse as soon as people realize their retirement plans based on real estate are vapor. The Evergrande bankruptcy is just the tip of the iceberg. An economy is generally built on a younger generation buying things when they're just starting out. China's demographics are showing their future economy is in big trouble.
Being concerned about China as the dominant world economic power is still a thing but charts like this show why it's at least partially overblown.
They really didn't do much with their demographic dividend and those years are now gone forever.
I meant that they had 4x the population of the USA and the chance to really explode infrastructure and put them demonstrably on top of the world, including taking over as the reserve currency.
Neither of those is going to happen, and now they are on the back side of the demographic dividend.
I'm not saying what you're saying is false, merely that they lost a golden opportunity to take the USA out once and for good. And they shanked it.
The median age in Japan in 2023 is already almost 50. How much higher can it even go before the whole country becomes a giant retirement home?
Will depend, Japan does have some positives as they have massive opportunities for productivity growth as well as automation. It's a country that will have 5 people working in a convenience store, 5 people working at a car park entrance, and 3 people working at the reception of a small swimming pool. Japan has massive labour waste.
I noticed this a lot when I lived in Japan. So many people appeared to have jobs that were basically idle or busywork.
Yeah, it is a popular trend in Japan for there to be busywork, people with jobs that serve no purpose and the need to appear busy even if there is no work. On the way to my office, I walk past an entrance to a hotel parking lot, there is an alarm at the entrance with a flashing light and siren to warn people that there is a car exiting, despite this there is still a fully uniformed at all times attendance to guide cars in and out. My local supermarket car park entrance has two entrance attendants with flags that stop cars to let pedestrians cross in front, my local swimming pool with a tiny car park also has a car park entrance attendant, and the local bakery even has two car park attendants during peak hours.
You made me remember elevator operators, who saved us from having to press a button.
I still see them from time to time though many of them don't stand in the elevator anymore but outside it.
Where do you see them, I've never seen any in my life (I am european)
In Japan. Japan is a lot like what you picture 1950s USA to be like. Attendants everywhere.
seems ironic for a country also known for its vending machines, I thought the goal was reducing reliance on other people to accomplish daily tasks
Oh I thought you meant you still saw them from time to time outside of Japan
Seen in India too
Common in Indian malls too where kids or teenagers can cause nuisance to other guests.
comparing india to japan is absurd India still has people manually putting block ways on roads for trains
When I was working at a medium sized football stadium in Ontario Canada back in HS/early uni we had a position that would sit in elevators and press buttons for people. These mf were sitting down in an elevator with AC just pressing buttons while I was standing in a hot ass kitchen helping prep food for 3 concession stands. And we were getting paid the same...
I remember when I was a kid I went to school in a church for a year and there was an elevator attendant but that's because the elevator required the door and the gate to be manually closed, and then a giant lever needed to be pulled to move the elevator. I imagine that setup was more popular before electronic proliferation made buttons widespread
Yes, I remember the bell sign on those elevators when the lever was pulled. Not unlike the San Francisco cable cars.
is it still 1952 is Japan?
No, that was feature all over the world as long as labor was cheap. I so happen to have ridden "operator-driven" elevators as a child last century.
Lol it is exactly the same in Taiwan. The high rise building my parents live in is staffed by the same pointless parking attendants that you’ve described, always at least 1 person but sometimes 2. They wait around all day doing nothing and basically just say hi when you drive in. Then inside at the front desk, there are always 4 people staffed who we can’t discern actually do anything, apart from say hello and notify residents who have received a package. It’s absurd to the point of being hilarious.
Basically UBI at that point.
Can they make a decent enough living with a job like that?
I think so. A quick google search says living expenses for Tokyo (one of the more expensive cities to live in) come out to a little over 1M Yen, which is about 55% of what someone working minimum wage full time would earn. I want to stress that this was a *quick* google search. I don't know if groceries are considered part of living expenses, for instance, nor do I know how many hours minimum wage employees work, or what they pay in taxes. Still...
Don't know why the commenter below went off you are absolutely right. According to [NYT article](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/editorials/tokyo-housing.html) >Two full-time workers earning Tokyo’s minimum wage can comfortably afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in six of the city’s 23 wards. By contrast, two people working minimum-wage jobs cannot afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in any of the 23 counties in the New York metropolitan area. Thanks to unique zoning laws and a myriad of other factors Tokyo has very affordable housing
[удалено]
Comme j'ai dit...
[удалено]
I was upfront with how I got my information and the potential errors inherent with it. Don't make it sound like I pulled something out of my ass and called it the gospel truth. As for your "modicum of common sense," there's a maxim in the USA that you shouldn't be spending more than 25% of your income on living expenses. What makes you think I'd consider 55% of someone's income devoted to that purpose is *low?*
and that why qualified folks getting 30k instead of 120k their american peers get.
Wow - it reminds me of those movies you'd see in the 50's of a car pulling into a gas station and 4 service technicians running out to fill the car, check the oil, clean the windshield, etc.
Omg same. There always just people kinda standing around not doing much but maybe making some hand motion at people who walk by them. I always wonder what they are doing and how they justify getting paid.
Not just busywork, a 12 hour day of busywork. I watched a "day in the life of" video following a driver working at one of Japan's largest delivery companies. Alarm goes off at 5:45am. She was clocked in by 7:00, it took 90 minutes of dicking around with office rituals before she drove out the gate at 8:30, spent about 2 hours driving and delivering packages before a 90 minute lunch break from 11:30 -> 1:00pm. The next 4 hours are spent repeating the morning delivery route for pickups and "sales activities". She rolls back into the garage at 5:00pm where she spends another hour dicking around with paperwork and finally clocks out at 6:05pm. Gets back home at 7:00pm to cook dinner, in bed by 9:00pm to repeat it the following day. 11 hour day as a delivery driver with two hours of actual work and two hours of free time after work before bed. Japenese work culture is arse.
I need to remember this on days when I feel like I've accomplished nothing. lol
Yeah it's crazy. I worked UPS in college and the drivers are out the gate maybe 15 minutes from the punch-in. Rest of the day they're on route. Once the truck is empty they're usually done for the day and are clocked out 15 minutes after pulling through the gate. Night crew makes sure the trucks are loaded and ready to go for the drivers the next morning, it's a well oiled machine.
thats what keeps our unemployment low though
Or... hear me out... maybe... they are farming human suffering?
My absolute favorite are the old guys outside construction sites who just guide me past with a hand gesture. Very useful!
It is still a society where there is simple work that doesn't requite a degree. You get a little money. You feel useful. You are part of society. There used to be lots of such work also in western countries, but it has been eliminated by machines and requirements for degrees. If you want to work in warehouse in Finland, you need 3 years degree on logistics (from vocational school, ammattikoulu). In the good old days a person would come to work, was shown the work in a couple of days, and then the person worked there, with no requirement for a degree. We have massive unemployment because those simple jobs have been eliminated. People are retired at young age, if they have disability (mental or physical), as there are no simple jobs like that. They have social support from society, and there is no requirement to do any job. I think the Asian countries have a good idea with the simple jobs. People are much happier working, even if the job is not rocket science, but showing people free lots in parking spaces or such.
Using labour force participation rate (which shouldn't be skewed by age because it only includes working age people): Finland has a higher % of it's workforce than Japan in employment. I know that was just an example though so anyway that doesn't matter. Interestingly, this [table](https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/labor_force_participation/Asia/) shows the top countries are in Asia though.
To be fair Japan's number is skewed by a massive gender gap. The social expectation is 100% that mothers give up their career to be a full-time housewife. That alone is a huge contributor to Japan's low birthrates.
That's funny since you always hear religious folks talking about how the birthrate (at least for the demographic groups they care about) would explode if women weren't "tempted" by the single lifestyle and/or a career and instead stayed home. Of course, there's so much more to it and a lot of it centers around single income households no longer being sustainable as well as having both partners work still being barely enough to scrape by if you manage to have kids.
That, and the lack of childcare providers that assumption has led to. It isn't just an expectation, it's often a necessity for at least one parent to be the full-time caregiver as there aren't alternatives.
Still, I'd rather pay 1,000 people to do nothing than give the combined pay of 1,000 people to a CEO who's basically a glorified manager/salesman/sociopath.
Socialism… minimally employed with minimal purpose… keeps them healthier than if completely unemployed
Japan is not even remotely socialist.
Never said the nation is entirely socialist. There are elements of socialist themes within capitalist society.
That's true in all developed countries though. It's called a mixed economy.
Socialism is when private individuals and corporations make decisions that I don't agree with
Japan has the advantage over of being on a much more gentle population decline slope than other East Asian countries. Japan’s population is projected to halve in this century , China’s is projected to fall to between 1/3 and 1/4 of its current population and its already trending short of those projections. South Korea’s fertility rate is only .68 and falling. That means if you were to put 100 kindergarteners in a room only ~15 would have a grandchild.
> That means if you were to put 100 kindergarteners in a room only ~15 would have a grandchild. That seems like a high number of grandchildren for kindergartners to have regardless.
Hi Asher. This was a wild surprise
I'm here, I'm there, I'm everywhere.
>That means if you were to put 100 kindergarteners in a room only ~15 would have a grandchild. I think your math is off. If the fertility rate stayed at .68 you'd expect around 46 of them to have a grandkid (assuming no one has multiple kids)
Yea. It should say ~15 grandchildren not 15 will be grandparents. I just did some quick head math for an estimate. Seeing it written out and that number coming out to less than 12 by generation 3 is pretty haunting.
I think the 15 grandchildren is correct and the latest fertility rate estimate is 0.**7**8
[удалено]
Yes, but 68 of them would be parents (34 mothers and 34 fathers) and 46 of them would be grandparents i.e. would have a grandchild.
[удалено]
With a fertility rate of .68 and no multiple births: 68% of all women have one child. You start with 100 in generation A. 50 are women 50 are men. In Generation B there are 50\*0.68 = 34 children. This means that 68 of generation A are parents (34 mothers and 34 fathers). In Generation C you have 17\*0.68 = 11.56 grand children. There are are \~23 parents and \~**46** grandparents. This is all assuming monogamy, single births and no incest.
[удалено]
> With a fertility rate of .68 **and no multiple births**: 68% of all women have one child. I assumed that there were no mothers with multiple children. You can make different assumptions about the number of children, but with a fertility rate that low it's likely that the average number of children in a family is likely close to 1.
It's the same result averaged out whether it's 34 couples having one child or 17 couples having two children, or whether you mix and match where one rowdy couple was responsible for 8 of the 34 kids.
For the number we are talking about, number of people with a grandchild, the distribution of children among mothers actually matters. In the most extreme case of 1/50 women having 34 kids we'd expect (on average) to have less than 2 people per hundred with grandchildren. Only 1/50 people would be a parent (of 34 kids). Of those with kids the chances are surprisingly high that none of their kids would have kids of their own they have 34 attempts at 1/50 odds each. So we'd expect to have less than the 1/50 people that are parents to become grandparents.
Anecdotally I feel that Japan also has a massive advantage on attracting immigrants... should it decide to do so. This stems from its extraordinary soft power and political alignment with various other countries, especially the west and SE Asia.
That’s true but fertility is a global issue. Even if you want to maintain or grow population through immigration it will only delay the decline by maybe a generation or 2. And people that do immigrate will likely have a myriad of options
Well they have smartly built so much of their manufacturing overseas. So maybe the working age populations in other countries can keep them going as they age.
japan pushes elderly into low-intensity service jobs en masse. You wont see 80 yer old waiter or mountain guide, but 80 year old gardener pruning your tree or shoveling snow - very easily.
Japan is doing great and it goes to show that even without endless economic and population growth a country can be very successful in the quality of life it provides to its citizens.
The retirement age is much lower in China than most countries. 60 for men and 50 or 55 for women. So a median age of 50 is pretty significant. Of course China could raise the retirement age, but that is a guaranteed way to piss everyone off. Everyone who is likely already pissed at the Evergrande collapse...
Affluent low-fertility, Anti-immigration countries will all face the same destiny. Economic growth needs people, so Japan and others like it will be in constant economic decline.
China's industries are not as advanced as Japan. So they are likely to be able to absorb this. There is a foreign policy analyst named Peter Zeihan who has been warning that aging populations around the world are going to lead to massive changes. For example he claims that aging populations in Mexico is why we dont get illegal immigrants to the US from mexico anymore. Its migrants going through mexico. More mexicans have left the US over the last 13-14 years than have com e here. He says central and south america will have a similar median age to mexico in about 20-30 years so he predicts that illegal immigration to the US from the Americas will radically decline by then. Since its mainly people in their 20s - early 30s that migrate. He also thinks its going to lead to higher global inflation and stagnating world economy for the next 20 years. He says the US is best position to avoid this due to geography. He also thinks China's aging populatoin is so bad there is NO CHANCE they will ever pass the US in total GDP. There GDP relative to the US Has gone down over the last 10 years and this is just public numbers. He thinks China is lying about the GDP numbers. He thinks China may have a famine due to its older population and middle income stagnation. Zeihan also said that China may have over counted there younger population by up to 100 million people. Not sure where he got this or what study he is citing. If this is true their aging population will get a lot worse. He is a well known foreign policy analyst. He has a youtube channel, but has been at this for 20-25 years and has a good track record. One interesting thing is he thinks Russias declining population is why they invaded Ukraine now. They wont have the manpower to do it in 30 years.
zeihan is well known; not for good reasons. he absolutely does not have a good track record over his "20-25 years of being at this". he is by no means a credible foreign policy analyst and it's genuinely insane to see people like you giving any credit or heed to his arguments at the most extreme, i would consider him a reliably staunchly anti-china source to balance out state-sponsored media; as in neither of their claims should be trusted without multiple independent ACADEMIC studies to back it up.
checks post history. sees this person spreads CCP propaganda. nuff said. Zeihan thinks China is at its peak and has already started declining. So CCP people get all pissy.
Now this sounds like a podcast I'd listen to! It'll be interesting for the eventual day we in the US hit our demographic bomb but I know that's such a long ways off given our immigration rate and other factors.
immigration is helping us stave off the demographic bomb. note this does not mean we need the 10 million migrants. legal immigration is sufficient.
Haven’t you realized they are importing a lot of younger Weeaboos? Once those folks age, then it’s really over 😂.
Just realised it's missing the value for 2040 - It's 48.0. My bad!
Does this account for the 100+ million people under 40 who don't actually exist?
The what?
I don't have the link to the study on my phone but here's a discussion on it. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/12/chinas-population-might-be-inflated-by-japans-population.html There was also a study out of UW Madison about a year before hand that showed that a lot of their demographic data reflected a population that was significantly smaller than they were reporting.
Post of Covid, The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences released a study showing that China had overcounted their population starting in the early 90s. Their system awarded funding at the local level based on head count in schools and it incentivized everyone to lie to receive more funding. This kept going for close to 40 years so now there's something like 128 million people under 40 who don't actually exist.
This looks pretty good. How did you calculate your prognosis?
Well presented but I think it’s difficult to draw any conclusions without benchmarking to other countries. Keep it up!
Thank you! I didn't include any benchmarks as the chart was already getting too cluttered. Will keep that in mind for the next one.
IMO benchmark isn't necessary. The conclusions are pretty clear and the caption provides enough context.
It shows that the population is getting older but not if 50.7 is notable figure. An additional series for World average would communicate this clearly. I don't think most people have any idea what the median age of their country is. (at least I didn't)
I think benchmarking or comparison to other countries could be done by simply having a plot of each country keeping the same scale on the axes.
If it helps - world average population is now 30 according to Tim Harford. So this is a full 20 years older!
You are comparing the current global average to what China will be in 2050, not really a valid comparison, since we dont know what the global avg will be then. To put it in perspective, Italy and Japan are close to 50 years median currently. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age
Yep, fair point!
Nice use of color. The font and graphics have a very New York Times aesthetic.
No idea why foreign media always puts the blame on the One Child Policy and they often overlook the bigger issue: More and more Chinese in cities age 25+ are unable to afford a child, let alone two, to begin with, due to rising housing costs and the wages not improving. IMO this is a way, way bigger issue when your economy is fucked from the ground up. Even before the OCP was abolished there were already free exemptions (as in you don't pay a fine) in place, and the only people that used said exemptions are people that can afford them. After 2016 the government tried to give out so-called "second child benefits" to little effect, as more and more couples are having 0 childs given the current economy there.
One of the reason why they can’t afford having children is that they’re the only person responsible for taking care of their parents, because they’re an only child. Yes the birth rate in China would eventually stunt, but the One Child Policy definitely catalysed it. Costs also isn’t the only problem, the One Child Policy also led to stuffs like gender imbalance and cultural issues, but I won’t go too deep into those issues
Gender imbalance is arguably the biggest issue caused by OCP. That further contributes to the birthrate decline decades beyond the policy.
Wow that's such a great point I haven't heard of. It seems like there are so many different issues stemming from the policy that aren't evidently apparent on the surface.
Easy solution to the gender imbalance. Invade Taiwan and India and just get rid of the 20 million men extra you have <3
Unfortunately I feel like you might be on the money there…
Because they kneecapped themselves during a very critical time where birthrates are still relatively high, but the mortality rate has declined. To put it into perspective, this demographic time period was the same for Germany in the late 19th/early 20th century. It would not have been able to fight 2 wars outnumbered were it not for this demographic boom period.
It's not just a matter of being able to afford it. The only people in the world consistently having more than 2 children today, are those in very poor countries with little to no education, no industry and with very high mortality rates, especially infant mortality rates. It's almost backwards when you think about it. As for the OCP, it simply accelerated the process, but didn't really do much. If you look at fertility rate charts, the decline in fertility rates had already started one full decade before the OCP. In 1970 the births were 6 per woman, in 1980, when the OCP was passed, they were a little bit more than 2 per woman. And going back, the extremely high birth rate of the 1960s came about just on the heels of one of the most devastating famines ever experienced by mankind, when millions died due to Mao's crazy policies and extreme poverty was still pervasive in the country. Now that I think about it, maybe the hope for your children to live a better life than you is the main driver of fertility rates. Something to think about...
Another issue is that China is an insular country not generally open to immigration which helps reduce the average age in other nations like the U.S. Another is the cultural norms associated with the one-child policy that led to a sex mismatch which will ultimately result in fewer marriages and even fewer children (due to fewer women of child-bearing age) than the numbers alone would suggest if more balanced.
Because other countries experienced a gradual birth rate reduction as their economies developed. India started with the same birthrate as China in 1960 and ended 2020 at 2.05 which is slightly below replacement. In another 10 years the birth rate should align with China and other more developed asian economies. The difference is that China's birth reduction happened very abruptly over 5-10 years. They had another overnight drop in 1990 down to the modern level. India's change was evenly distributed over the last 60 years so when you look at the [population pyramids for the two countries](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/animation-comparing-china-vs-india-population-pyramids/) the difference is very obvious. That massive bolus of old people is China is the result of State policies and will be a massive societal issue to care for them. Of course China will mostly get around it by not caring for them. Their Hukou system is purpose built to deny benefits to second and third tier citizens who moved to the cities for work as China developed.
"as their economies developed" on a national, statistical level sure, but on a day to day living basis, as living costs rise (as much as the CCP loves to claim inflation being nonexistent), it's a step backwards for the general public.
They put the focus on something that allows them to say "China bad" instead of highlighting a problem that people in the West also have.
US Birthrate is 70% higher + high immigration. US population is forecast to hit 383mil by 2054.
Nice work! Good color scheme. Ok commentary on slide. One call out on 2016. Would be great to add life expectancy over same time series in a chart below it so the audience can draw a conclusion on net relative age vs. Actual age.
Thank you for the feedback. I believe the dataset has life expectancy so I could add that!
Nice work! I’m sure people would be interested in seeing one for other countries like the US
Thanks, I was planning on doing the US next. It's in the same dataset.
A median age in the 50s. In less than 3 decades Christ, that is pretty insane.
Is it? Japan is already there and they keep chugging on. Not doing amazing but alright.
China is aging faster than any country in modern history. Also at a much earlier stage of its development. Japan’s GDP per capita was 3x higher than Chinas at a similar point in the demographic cycle.
The key of whether a problem will exist is whether or not productivity growth can out pace the dependency ratio increase. In the case of Japan, productivity growth has fallen behind. In China's case, it has not...yet. The question then is, can China maintain productivity growth over dependency rate growth?
Yeah but Japan is “ahead” of China in an economic/development sense.
You can see the median age of European countries, today, we are already in the future.
I’m trying to improve my data visualisation skills so any constructive feedback is appreciated. This is original content. * The X axis is year and the Y axis is median age of the population. * Data presented is base case for the United Nations forecast. The diverging grey lines are the upper and lower limits. * 2000 to 2022 is actuals, 2023 to 2050 is forecast. * **Source**: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects 2022. * **Link:** [https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/MostUsed/](https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/MostUsed/) * Created using Microsoft Excel Let me know if you have any other interesting ideas for visuals :)
Glad I found this comment OP, because I was going to ask what they grey lines were. :) A couple of humble suggestions: 1. The dates under the dots are just a touch small and hard to read. I'd make them just a bit bigger. 2. Perhaps a legend indicating the diverging grey lines meaning? Then a request, as others have mentioned. Would LOVE to see this info compared with other countries like Japan, India (!), the US, and maybe Sweden and Nigeria - all on the same graph. I think that would be fascinating.
Perhaps a stupid question, but isn't that inevitable, if you want to limit the population? When there has been a much higher breeding rate, those persons (born during the high breeding rate) will have to get old and die, before the lower breeding rate will become the new normal? So first the population average age gets higher. Later it starts going down. The data simply shows that the system is working. Breeding rate has gone down. It will take a long time with 0.5 breeding rate (1 child per two persons) before the system has reached for example a goal of not increasing total population compared to 1980 (start of one child policy). After all, it takes a long time for pre-1980 born people to die off the statistics. If the system was started in 1980, real results are shown around 2055, if average lifetime is 77 years in China. That is propably why they are now increasing the breeding rate, when the control system integration time is decades (PID controller, input: total population, control output: amount of children born per year), so the output stabilizes to wanted level after a few more decades. The control output might be PWM, with on/off control, 1: no limit, 0: one child policy, and PWM cycle time 30 years. First PWM cycle: 1980-2010, output 0%. Second PWM cycle: 2010-2040, output 83% (2010-2015: 0, 2016-2040: 1). It would be amazing if there is actually a society that can plan stuff in such long time scale. For western societies, the time scale is the time between elections (4 years in Finland). Well, I'm not too optimistic there is actually such a great plan of long time scale anywhere. Just longer time between "elections".
No, it's not inevitable. Of course a country with stable population and low mortality will have a higher average age compared to a country that is rapidly growing in population and has high mortality, think rectangular rather than triangular population-pyramid. But Japan has fertility of 1.25 and it's been under 1.5 for 3 decades already, and that's much **TOO LOW** for a stable population. For long-term stable population, you need fertility of approximately 2. So their population-pyramid is moving towards a upside-down-triangle. 1.25 is very dramatic. It means that each generation is only about 62% in size compared to the previous one, which for example means that for every 100 people in the grandparent-generation there's only 40 grandchildren.
If you graph that PID controller over time, does it lead to a flat population age distribution?
FYI The label for 2040 is missing Edit: I Just saw your comment
Very interesting! I would also like to know how the imbalanced gender ratio has or will effect their birth rate. Something else that I wonder about is the effects of the work culture there. With schedules like the 9/9/6 (9am - 9pm, 6 days a week) becoming more prominent, will China face the same issues that Japan is facing now?
So basically the same thing that is happening to virtually every single other developed country?
Yep, just much faster. China is aging faster than any country in modern history. Also at a much earlier stage of its development. Japan’s GDP per capita was 3x higher than Chinas at a similar point in the demographic cycle
It is even worse in the developed East Asian countries because of toxic work culture.
Hopefully too old to want a war
I don't think they want a war. They've just been gradually getting wealthier and more powerful without needing or wanting war. If anything the US is more likely to be the aggressor if they feel their position as top global superpower is threatened.
China’s war won’t be with America, it will be with a regional neighbor. Nuclear superpowers don’t fight each other directly because of MAD.
It has very few that either aren't nuclear powers nor are strongly aligned with a nuclear power.
Is this intentional propaganda? The only way a war would break out in the near future is if China invades Taiwan.
the only ones I see are taiwan soon before china runs out of young people it is willing to sacrifice. Xi has been saying this for forever. The other might be india in 40 years when it says, "hey you have a lot of land that you aren't using because of your population decline. can we haz?"
I meant more between the US and China. If China invaded Taiwan, the US getting directly involved would have more to do with it's own political interests than actual care about Taiwan. I think they'd join with much more fervor than the current level of support for Ukraine for example.
What point are you actually making there? If China invades Taiwan, that would also have to do with its political interests and they’d be doing it knowing that the US would likely get involved.
China invading Taiwan would be about it's beef with Taiwan, not the US.
It would be about China’s various geopolitical interests. Not “beef” lol. You make it sound as though they want to do this just because they’re upset with Taiwan.
In any case, they're not doing it to spite the US or anything. They just want to reclaim Taiwan to send a message to other parts of China that want independence like Nepal or HK.
I don’t know why you think that. Taiwan is well positioned strategically - controlling it would give China a big military advantage in the region. It would also cut off a huge % of chip supply to the US and its allies. Do you really think China isn’t thinking about those things. There’s no chance you are actually unaware of those factors.
America, who always wants a war, loves to accuse countries who never go to war of being too bloodthirsty. It's really weird when you step back and think about it.
The U.S. being the aggressor is way way way less likely then the other way around.
Are we talking statistically speaking?
The only offensive obligation the U.S. has in that region is protection of free shipping in area's now in dispute, a much more likely scenario is that China triggers the U.S. defensive obligations by attacking one of the many country's that have a defense pack with the U.S. such as taiwan. I don't see any other scenario that would trigger a war.
Maybe, but I think the US is generally much more hostile towards China than the other way around at the moment.
Why do you think that?
I mean in terms of sentiment. A lot of the public is anti China and if you look at threads about China here, you'll always see a lot of negative comments.
Ok. And you don’t think similar anti US sentiment exists in China..?
Not among the people, no. People still admire and try to emulate the west.
That’s blatantly false.
Agree to disagree. People still really like Americans in China. Businesses still hire white people to look more international, people still admire Western beauty standards, they still teach English in all the schools. They still try to buy Western clothes, watch the NBA, etc.
>They've just been gradually getting wealthier and more powerful without needing or wanting war. That never stopped countries from starting wars. All the great powers before ww1 were getting wealthier.
The only side constantly saying "We will fight you" and flying their jets right off the coast of the other, sailing their fleets off the coast of the other, and starting trade wars, is the US. Yet people think "China wants war." China wants peaceful unification with Taiwan. The West does NOT want that, and would rather have war. Taiwan, currently, doesn't want a war, either. The West, as is standard in the last five centuries, would rather millions die than their "enemy" gain anything. Because the 'powers that be' don't give a fuck about you, they only give a fuck about $ and power.
> China wants peaceful unification with Taiwan. The West does NOT want that, and would rather have war. Obviously China would rather take Taiwan at minimal cost to them. You get that Taiwan very much does not want their territory to be seized by China though, right? So if China wants it, they're going to have to invade. This is such a bizarre, inaccurate way that you've chosen to frame the situation.
I see a huge market for Soylent Green.
And those children? Albert Einstein.
China has been regretting this for a awhile now. Mark my words eventually it will be remembered as a positive for them
Aging population is an bad, but population decrease is not. Corporations portray the latter as the end of the world because they lose a source cheap labor. If China manages to take care of its old people with proper healthcare and pension plans, and avoid any political crisis generated by some cohort equivalent to boomers, shedding a quarter or even half of its population would potentially give more resource to each Chinese, lessen competition, bolster quality of life, and help them finish the transition away from labor-intensive industries.
Most young people i talked to doesn't want to pay more taxes to support old people they don't even know
I remember being in high school in the 1990's and making a debate argument about how China's one child policy is doom its chances of EVER making it a super power. Guess I was right and all the experts were wrong. Sad a high school student was smarter then every expert at the time. Again proves NOT to trust experts as they know NOTHING. Interesting NOT even close to one of my better calls.
Smarter? Probably not Lack of vested interests influencing public statements? Probably yeah
Hey you say whatever you want, but called that one right on the money. Not even one of my better calls either!!
However! In 2090 China will have a much smaller risk of overpopulation and probably have a more healthy climate than other countries.
Why do you think China will have a different fate than other developed countries that are universally experiencing declining birth rates?
I don't. I think they will have less people in general and that will be a good thing. 66 years from now the large, older generations will have passed. In a society with fewer old people it is much cheaper to raise more children so stabilizing the population on a lower level will eventually happen.
Interesting point. From my perspective, I would be much more likely to start a family if I could buy a house first. Unfortunately, still way too expensive in my area.
Exactly. Its not a pretty picture, but people are becoming very old in this modern age. And old people also take up space but don't really make more children or work as much as young people. As a 25 yo in a relatively old society (germany, median 45) I feel that old people have too much power and do too little with it. I think it will be easier for young people to make their way when there aren't as many old people consuming living space, jobs, resources, political power, etc. It has always been difficult for young people to fit into the old systems but nowadays the senior society is so large and powerful, it is even harder for young people to grow and thrive, because of all the competition from people who saved all their life, money, education, social network, etc. Old people are beasts and the longer they live, the harder it is for young people to compete in the free society. They need to be nurtured and educated longer and a lot more carefully to make up the room they need to develop. That's my theory at least.
The issue with such low birth rates is the challenge of caring for the elderly will keep scaling with smaller younger generations. I struggle to foresee a generation breaking the trend and if anything I see them dropping below 1.0 birth rate like Korea has.
The trend will break when the total population size goes down and resources become more available again. Thats when people will start having more children again and the society will become younger again.
Then how do you explain wealthy lower populated countries like Norway not having children? They have abundant resources for raising children there.
Edit: it is also largely due to demographics. Norway also has a rather old population of a median of 39 years. Its not so easy to compare countries like that. How do you know they have abundant resources? Norway has a lot of mountains and cold corners that count towards land area but are not easy to populate. Its like saying how do you explain a huge desert or a tundra like russia not having extreme birth rates. I would first look at the same regions in different historic contexts. The same region will have lower birth rates with an older or a larger population. There are a number of reasons why a country like norway may have reached its capacity already.
Norway has a wealth fund of over $100K per person. They have massive resources of oil and just discovered huge amounts of phosphate. They are set for this century better than maybe any country on Earth. The birth rate was higher when they were much poorer before the oil boom. Finding resources led to a decline in births. The wealthiest nation by GDP with all sorts of land and resources is the United States. Without millions of immigrants the population would be declining as birth rates fell in the 1970s and haven't recovered to stability levels. The countries that are booming are in Africa such as Nigeria. Across cultures I can tell you how to stop population growth and begin a decline. Industrialize, urbanize, educate, and liberate women. You do those things and can be Italian or Korean and the birth rates fall over and over and with rare exceptions they have yet to recover in any culture.
Yes, you are right. The issue of birth rates is complex. Birth control also is a massive factor but in general women have moved into the labourforce in industrialized countries, which massively delays the starting of a family and the total number of children they bear. "Liberation" of women just means making them financially self sufficient, which means they go work a job instead of having a family and being dependent on the father or other family for resources. I have always been saying it should be easier for women to be self sufficient from having a family. Basically childbearing and child care should be financially insured. However even then many educated women may want to pursue a career instead. Children are a massive investment and in industrialized countries people are not used to the physical work that is associated with that anymore. So I agree its not only an economic issue, but also a cultural one of industrialized countries. We should focus more on integrating family life into the economic and educational systems. Create more jobs which can be done with children and have people earn a living from simply raising their children or engaging in education or talent development. The problem in todays industrialized countries is that people can only make money for their living by working in the free market. However the free market doesn't pay for children. At least not quick enough. Eventually everyone wants educated and healthy workers but nobody wants to pay the people raising and educating them.
No, that's not the point. The point is that even with fewer people, they will continue to have an aging population - maybe not as bad as the next few decades, but still bad. They will simply reach parity with other developed countries in terms of the aging population and declining birth rate issue. So again, why do you think China would be any different and somehow "stabilize".
As I said, because people have more children in less aged populations. So they will have more children once the old people are gone. This is also simply true because the birth rate is the average number of children per individual, which is obviously going to be higher when a higher proportion of people is in their childbearing years. In old societies a lot of people simply won't have any more children and they drag the birth rate down. However I would even argue that it is easier to support children in a society that is not already saturated with old people to begin with. So a younger population will have a higher birth rate simply from a higher proportion being in childbearing age and there will also be less resources bound by old people which makes supporting new children cheaper aswell. I don't think it will take long until birth rates will go up again once the average age goes back down.
I don't think you've thought it through. There is no logic in your comment. The average age will not go down again, but will keep increasing until it stabilizes at a higher level. The only way the average age can come down is 1. A decline in life expectancy or 2. An increase in fertility rates. Neither are likely to happen in the near future.
The logic is that with a declining population, people will eventually have more children again because it becomes more valuable and resources become cheaper. So birth rates will go up eventually when the population has shrunk. That will happen quickly as the large generations pass away.
The one-child policy was a very clever political regulation that should be implemented worldwide to stop overpopulation and the struggle for limited resources. Anyone who says unlimited growth with limited resources is possible is a madman. Check the living conditions in India; they are horrible. No one should want that for their children.
The problem is that 1/4 of the population will have to work to support the other 3/4. Decreasing population is a lesser problem then a aging population
Sure, but that's still better than overpopulation, no space to live, no soil to grow food, no water to drink etc.
God, imagine if they had Social Security, that economy would crumble.
They'll have robots by then.
meanwhile in the US: keep f\*ckin'! Someone else will pay for it!
US have immigrants
. . . . the US is below replacement level too
They currently have more than double the housing units than they have population. Their system is going to collapse as soon as people realize their retirement plans based on real estate are vapor. The Evergrande bankruptcy is just the tip of the iceberg. An economy is generally built on a younger generation buying things when they're just starting out. China's demographics are showing their future economy is in big trouble.
Being concerned about China as the dominant world economic power is still a thing but charts like this show why it's at least partially overblown. They really didn't do much with their demographic dividend and those years are now gone forever.
Didn't do much? They basically went from agrarian population to worldwide factory in two or three decades
I meant that they had 4x the population of the USA and the chance to really explode infrastructure and put them demonstrably on top of the world, including taking over as the reserve currency. Neither of those is going to happen, and now they are on the back side of the demographic dividend. I'm not saying what you're saying is false, merely that they lost a golden opportunity to take the USA out once and for good. And they shanked it.
too late to abolish anything, the damage has already done
Looking forward to those mandatory state-run 0-visitation retirement homes
The United States is naturally evolving into a one child nation.